1635: The Eastern Front (45 page)

Just to make sure, he questioned the scout concerning details of their appearance. It didn't take long at all before he was certain that these approaching forces were part of the USE army. For one thing, Koniecpolski knew of no other large army that inflicted such dull uniforms upon its soldier. Upon its officers, even!

Gray uniforms. Except for the odd stripe here and there, a bit of flair with the shoulder decorations, they were the sort of vestments that monks would wear.

Dull monks. Boring monks. The sort of monks who took vows of silence and kept them.

Koniecpolski's own full dress uniform was as uniforms should be. He was particularly fond of his leopard skins.

In the distance, he heard a bugle. Marching orders, clearly. Whichever of the three USE divisions this was, it would be here within an hour. After the casualties he'd suffered today, the numerical odds would be even at best. And his men were exhausted. True, the enemy's troops would be tired as well, after the sort of march they'd made. But nothing wears men down like battle. Nothing in the world.

Yes. It was time to go.

* * *

The one thing Mike hadn't expected when he finally met up with Gustav Adolf's army was that he
would turn out to be the highest ranked officer present.

Highest
conscious
rank, at any rate.

He turned away from the bed where the king of Sweden lay recuperating from his wounds. There was no point in staring at the man any longer. What Gustav Adolf needed was the best doctor who could be found.

That meant James Nichols. But it would probably be at least two days before planes could safely take to the skies again. The sky was clear at the moment—here, not in Magdeburg. It looked as if another storm might be on its way. If that proved true, they wouldn't be able to get Nichols here for a week or more. Assuming they could build a usable airfield, before this mucky soil finally dried out. Mike had his doubts.

"Not a flicker, you're saying?"

The man who served Gustav Adolf's troops as a doctor shook his head. "Nothing. Sometimes his eyes open, but there is nothing behind them."

Weather or not, they
had
to get Gustav Adolf out of here. Leaving aside his terrible head injuries, the lance wound in his side had penetrated the peritoneum. That meant he'd probably come down with peritonitis. If they didn't get him on antibiotics soon—there was a good chance he'd need surgery, too—that would likely kill him even if he recovered from the head trauma.

Mike had been told that the Jupiters, the new commercial aircraft, were equipped with air-cushioned landing gear that could land almost anywhere. If so, and if one of them were available, and if the weather held—that was a lot of ifs—maybe they could airlift the king.

But there was no way to count on that. With the weather as uncertain as it was, even if one of the planes were available they might not be able to use it.

Berlin.
It was the only option Mike could see. Gustav Adolf could be taken there on a covered litter carried by a team of horses and guarded by a powerful cavalry force. By the time he got there, Nichols could have gotten to Berlin even if the planes still weren't flying.

Magdeburg would be better, of course. But Magdeburg was just too far away. Berlin wasn't much of a city, but it did have a palace. The elector had even gotten some of the rooms fitted with modern plumbing.

They might be able to get him to Magdeburg anyway, Mike reminded himself. If the weather cleared and one of the ACLG-equipped planes was available—and the boasts about the capabilities of their peculiar landing gear were accurate—then a Jupiter could meet them on the way to Berlin and airlift Gustav Adolf to the capital instead.

Mike glanced around the room he was in now, the main room of what had probably been Zbąszyń's premier tavern. Or possibly its only tavern.

The floor didn't bear thinking about. The sewers of the town . . . didn't exist. There was a well here, but Mike thought he'd have to be really desperate before he drank any of that water without boiling it first.

Berlin. Yes.

Torstensson agreed, when Mike reached him on the radio. So, an hour later, did the chancellor of Sweden, Axel Oxenstierna. He was already in Berlin himself, as it happened, attending to the creation of an interim imperial administration for Brandenburg.

"And you must come to Berlin yourself, General Stearns," said Oxenstierna. "It is imperative that we have a council of our army commanders."

Legally, Oxenstierna was out of bounds. He was Sweden's chancellor, not the USE's, and had no formal authority over Mike. But the proposal—he'd see it as a command, but that was his problem—was sensible enough. Besides, Mike didn't have any doubt that if he got on his high horse about the matter, Oxenstierna would just get hold of Wettin and have the prime minister give him the order instead. Which would be an order he
did
have to obey.

He found Jeff Higgins in the little room in an abandoned house where they'd put the body of Anders Jönsson. Come to pay his last respects, obviously.

Mike wasn't surprised. He'd come for the same reason.

It was a little over three years since the great Croat cavalry raid on Grantville had been driven off. The main target of the raid had been the town's high school.

Jeff had been there, that day. So had Mike's wife Rebecca.

The only reason they were still alive was because of this man here, and the nearby king he'd served who was now very close to death himself. The two of them had led the charge that turned the tide in that battle. With his own sword, Gustav Adolf had struck down the Croat who'd been about to kill Jeff.

"I have to remind myself, sometimes," Mike said softly. "Whenever Gustav Adolf really pisses me off. The world is just sometimes a gray place, and that's all there is to it."

Part Six

November 1635

Green to the very door

Chapter 40

Dresden, capital of Saxony

Eddie crashed the plane.

The soil of the jury-rigged airfield outside of Dresden turned out to be soggier than Noelle or Denise had led him to believe. They'd underestimated the potential problem with landing on such doubtful ground. In Noelle's case, because she was too anxious to get back to Magdeburg; in Denise's, because she was looking forward to seeing Eddie and was by nature given to overconfidence.

Insouciance, too. The girl could have taken the motto of
Mad
magazine's Alfred E. Newman for her own: "What, me worry?"

The front landing gear dug in, the tail came up, the nose buried itself into the ground—so much for the propeller—and slowly, almost gracefully, the plane flipped over onto its back.

When the little crowd on the airfield reached the plane, they found Eddie and Gretchen Richter hanging upside down in the cabin, still held in their seats by their harnesses. Neither was hurt at all. A bit shaken, but otherwise in excellent condition.

Not so the aircraft itself, of course.

Eddie's first words upon emerging were recriminatory in nature. Unusually, for him, he was in a high temper.

"You told me the airfield was in good shape!"

Noelle, with the wisdom of her advanced years of life—she'd just celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday—was profusely apologetic. Denise, sadly, was still in her teenage years and thus ill-equipped for the task. Her own temperament didn't help, either.

So, she started with the sort of mumbled, oatmealish, altogether unsatisfactory sort of phrases like "well" and "hey, look" that wouldn't mollify a saint. Then, under a continued barrage of heated comments from Eddie, retreated into her natural belligerence.

"Hey, buddy, maybe you just fucked up the landing. Ever think of that, huh?"

Peace was not restored for some minutes. Not until Minnie Hugelmair forced Denise to utter the needed words: "Okay, it was my fault. I'm sorry."

Minnie didn't actually believe that herself. She thought the accident probably
had
been Eddie's fault. The soil wasn't
that
muddy. But unlike Denise, she understood that when the male mind was in formal and court-dress High Dudgeon there was nothing for it but that the woman had to take the blame or nobody would get anything to eat that day. Not in peace, anyway.

Gretchen Richter's comments, upon exiting the upended aircraft, were more philosophical in nature.

"That is the first time I have ever flown in an airplane. I believe it will be the last."

Eventually, amity was restored. A workable semblance of it, at least.

Eddie spent some time examining the wreckage, then, ruefully, scratched his head.

"The propeller's scrap. We'll have to get a replacement from Grantville. No way to get one made here that I'd trust flying with."

"What about the plane itself?" Noelle asked.

"The engine seems okay. If we can get the plane into the city, we can probably fix the rest of it. But don't ask me how we're going to manage that."

He, Noelle and everyone else present turned to gaze upon Dresden. The city was well-fortified; surrounded by walls, with a moat in front of those.

Tata, Joachim Kappel and Eric Krenz were present also, having come out to the airfield with Noelle and her party. Tata and Joachim were there because they were the CoC delegation welcoming Gretchen to the city. Krenz was there because Tata was there and she was less and less inclined to order him away. She would always remember Eberhard fondly, but the duke had been dead for half a year now.

"Not a problem," said Tata.

Eddie looked at her. Then, at Kappel and Krenz.

Kappel shrugged. "Can probably be done."

Tata sniffed.

"Not a problem," agreed Krenz. "Tata has a flair for getting her way."

Tata sniffed again.

Two days later, it was possible to estimate the expenses involved with reasonable confidence. Tata had indeed gotten her way again. The city had winches and cranes used for construction, did it not? Lots of manpower in the form of soldiers idling about claiming their injuries were much worse than they were, did it not? The plane was designed to be as light as possible, was it not?

So, the plane came over the moat and the walls. Soon enough, it was sitting in a small city square with a shelter already being built around it. By now, the city's artisans had gotten intrigued in the project—assuming that pay would be forthcoming, of course—and the CoC had decided that having an airfield inside the city itself was a matter of civic pride.

Eddie had no idea how they'd manage that, but he had more immediate concerns.

"Don Francisco is going to fire me," he predicted gloomily. "Leaving aside the cost of repairing his aircraft, he has four of his employees doing him no good at all. We're supposed to be in Prague by now."

Denise was more optimistic. "No, he won't. He's a pretty good guy, actually."

Coming from her, that was high praise. But it turned out to be justified. Francisco Nasi's radio message surprised Junker. It surprised Noelle even more.

NOT A PROBLEM. STOP. SPARE NO EXPENSE FIX PLANE. STOP. DRESDEN GOOD PLACE TO BE NOW. STOP. THINGS WILL GET INTERESTING. STOP.

"That's a Chinese curse, isn't it?" mused Minnie. "I read it somewhere."

Poznań

"Torture me as much as you want," the American said, his shoulders squared, his expression resolute. "I said it before, I'll say it again. I won't tell you anything."

Lukasz stared at him. Then, turned his head to stare at the two hussars and two Cossacks who were also gathered around the APC outside of Poznań's main gate. The city's walls were packed with people, eager to gaze upon the enormous war machine that Opalinski had captured.

As soon as the grand hetman learned of Lukasz's exploit over the radio, he'd instructed the officers he'd left in charge of the soldiers still in Poznań to do whatever was necessary to bring the APC into the city itself. Or, should that prove impossible, to extend the city's walls to enclose the war machine.

Either project would be massive, especially since the work had to be done before the worst of winter came. They still hadn't decided which one to adopt.

But that wasn't Opalinski's concern. His instructions from the grand hetman had been to concentrate on the technical aspect of the problem. Could the APC be put in Polish service? If so, how soon? If not—better still, in addition—could the APC be used as the model for the construction of Polish war machines?

Hence his interrogation of Mark Johnson Ellis, the only up-timer they'd found among the APC's crew when they captured it. All he'd told them initially was his name, his rank—that was well-nigh incomprehensible; what sort of preposterous rank was a "Speck"?—and what he called his "serial number." That was a string of digits that Lukasz had set aside for later study. Perhaps it was a code of some sort.

Under further questioning by Lukasz as they made their slow oxen-hauled way to the east, the young American had become a bit more expansive, although not on military subjects. He claimed he was not a regular soldier but what he called a "reservist hauled back to duty for another stupid fucking war." He seemed quite aggrieved over the matter, perhaps because he'd recently been married.

He also claimed—this might be subterfuge, of course—that he was what he called a "civil engineer," not a "grease monkey." He said the only reason he'd been assigned as the APC's "mechanic" was because he was the only one in the crew who knew a "crescent wrench" from a "phillips screwdriver."

He seemed aggrieved over that issue also.

Still, despite Ellis' very apparent disgruntlement with the foreign policies of the USE's political leadership—"how many fucking times do we have to refight the Vietnam War in another fucking universe?"—he insisted he was a patriot and would therefore provide Lukasz with no information that might harm his nation.

As he had just done again. Since they'd been speaking in German, the two Cossacks did not understand what the up-timer had said. Had they understood it, they would have burst into riotous laughter.