by Eric Flint
"I imagine he is," Probst agreed with a slight smile. Then he looked around the boat and cleared his throat.
"I don't believe I recall suggesting that it was no longer necessary to keep an eye out," he remarked to the air in general, and his detachment's attention returned magically to scanning the riverbanks and the water around them.
"It's definitely the fitting, sir," Lieutenant Hafner, Commander Baumgartner's senior engineer, said as he climbed up the internal ladder to the timberclad's bridge. He shrugged in disgust. "We've got a crack clear through the casting."
"Damn," Baumgartner said, far more mildly than he felt. Then he shook his head. "And what about those burns?"
"Ugly," Hoffner said. "Gunther's arm, especially. Lothar is doing what he can, but-"
The lieutenant shrugged again, and Baumgartner nodded. They were lucky that Admiral Simpson had insisted that each of the navy's major combatants had to have at least one trained sick bay attendant from the up-timers' training classes aboard. Even though the SBAs like Chief Lothar Tummel weren't considered full-fledged "doctors" by their up-time instructors, they were so much better than most seventeenth-century physicians that it was almost miraculous. Still, there were limits in all things.
"Repairs?" Baumgartner asked, shifting mental gears once more as he watched his deck crew making fast the towline Achilles had passed across.
"Not out of our own resources," Haffner said grimly. "A steam pipe we probably could have fixed, but this is going to have to be torched off and replaced, and we don't have the gear aboard for that. It's going to have to be sent forward to us from Magdeburg."
"The admiral isn't going to want to hear that."
"Oh, I'm well aware of that, sir. Unfortunately-"
The lieutenant shrugged yet again, and Baumgartner snorted. Haffner's apparent insouciance undoubtedly owed a great deal to who was going to actually have to tell Admiral Simpson that thirty percent of his timberclads had just become nothing more than a floating battery on a raft. On the other hand, the admiral wasn't in the habit of blaming people for things that clearly weren't their fault.
Which was quite a bit more than Baumgartner could have said for other military officers he'd served under.
"All right, Crispus," he sighed, "I'll tell him. When you go back below, ask Nikolaus to come up here. He and I are going to have to discuss port security with Rudiger."
"Yes, Sir," Hoffner said. Nikolaus Schimmel was Achates' executive officer, and Lieutenant Rudiger Kirsch was the timberclad's gunnery officer.
The engineer saluted and disappeared back down the ladder, and Baumgartner turned to his bridge signalman.
"Message for the admiral," he said.
***
John Simpson grunted as he read the new message slip. It was a sound of unhappy confirmation, not surprise.
"What I was afraid of from the beginning," he said, looking up at Captain Halberstat. "It looks like we don't have any choice but to send them into this Ritsenbuttel. I'm half-tempted to detach one of the other timberclads to help keep an eye on her, too."
Halberstat looked surprised, and Simpson grimaced.
"I'm worried about those intelligence reports about the scuba rigs that may have… fallen into enemy hands, let's say. I don't like the thought of leaving one of our ships all alone when we don't know where that scuba gear is. Especially when the ship in question can't move under its own power."
Halberstat's surprise disappeared, and he nodded. But he also cocked his head to one side, one eyebrow arched.
"Would leaving a second timberclad really help that much, sir? Is there anything she could do for Achates' security that Baumgartner couldn't do by keeping a couple of his cutters rowing around the ship?"
"Probably not. That's why I'm only half-tempted. And why I'm not going to do it in the end."
"What's that?" one of Leberecht Probst's Marines said suddenly.
It wasn't the most militarily correct sighting report in even the USE Marine Corps' brief history, but it got the job done. Probst followed the pointing index finger, and his eyes narrowed. The Elbe was still flowing high, wide, and muddy with springtime runoff, and there was more than a little debris still drifting down it. But all of that debris was drifting down it. Probst couldn't think of the last time he'd seen something moving against the current.
"What is that?" Halvorsen said as his eyes found the same object.
"Unless I'm mistaken," the Marine said, reaching for the up-time revolver he'd been issued when he was assigned to Constitution's Marine detachment, "it's a head."
Du Bouvard swore again, with more feeling than ever, as the sharp, distant pop of gunfire came to him. The American motor boats were too far away for him to see details very well, but he could clearly see one of the uniformed Marines firing at something in the water with one of the up-time pistols.
Laguia, he thought. During their practice dives, the Spaniard had demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to become disoriented and come to the surface and look around in order to check his bearings. But even Laguia should have known better than to poke his head up that close to one of the American patrol boats!
Be fair, Anatole, he told himself harshly as the Marine fired again and again. The poor bastard's got to be half-frozen, despite all the grease you could slather onto him. No wonder his brain isn't working very well.
Unlike quite a few of his contemporaries, Leberecht Probst had discovered that he was actually an excellent shot with a pistol. The revolver, a.38 Smith amp; Wesson Model 15 with a four-inch barrel, wasn't the most powerful of weapons to have come back through the Ring of Fire, but it was comfortable in his hand, and his target jerked up out of the water with the third shot.
It was definitely a human head, he noted, amazed by the steadiness of his own hand as the fact that he was shooting at another human being was confirmed. In fact, the head was attached to the rest of a human body, and he saw a sudden blossom of crimson on the side of the swimmer's neck as he fired a fourth time.
His target rolled over, and the glassy plate of the diver's swimming mask turned towards him like a Cyclops' accusing eye. Then the man he'd just shot submerged once again.
It didn't look like an intentional dive.
"Take us over there, Kjell," Probst heard his own preposterously calm voice saying to Halvorsen. "And report to the flagship that we've definitely sighted at least one scuba diver."
Du Bouvard's jaw tightened as the pistol fire stopped and the boat from which it had come swept around in a sharp turn. Whether it had been Laguia or not, the combination of no more shooting and purposeful movement suggested that something unpleasant had happened to the Marine's target. And the fact that one of his divers had been sighted had just reduced the other swimmer's already minute chances of success to virtually nothing.
"What do we do now?" Olier asked.
"There's damn-all we can do," du Bouvard replied flatly. "Except get the hell out of here before they get around to sending parties ashore to find out just where those divers came from."
"That sounds like an excellent idea to me," Olier said fervently, and started barking orders at the rest of their party.
"Is there any confirmation?" Simpson asked.
"No, sir." Halberstat shook his head. "If it was a diver, he either dove again or just sank, and the water's so muddy you can't see anything two feet below the surface. But young Probst's a reliable man. If he says he saw someone in the water, I believe him."
"So do I," Simpson admitted. "And Achates' problems may actually let the lunatics succeed. Mind you," he smiled thinly, "I wouldn't be willing to risk any money betting on the probability, but Murphy doesn't play favorites."
Halberstat nodded. Before joining the navy, he'd never heard of the "Murphy" so many of the up-timers invoked, but he'd been eminently familiar with the concept Murphy enshrined.
"What are your orders, sir?" he asked.
Simpson thought for a moment, gazing down from the bridge wing at one of the m
itrailleuses as the weapon poked out of its firing port and swung restlessly back and forth. He knew that some of the army's officers-like Frank Jackson-thought that his insistence on the more sophisticated and expensive mitrailleuses instead of the simpler Requa-style volley guns the army had adopted was simply one more example of his mania for "bells and whistles." And, he knew, they deeply resented the priority he'd gotten for allocations from the primers various up-time firearm reloaders had brought back with them.
But there were sound reasons for the successful, bitter campaign he'd waged in favor of the navy's mitrailleuses. The army's volley guns were an all-or-nothing proposition. Their cartridge cases had no individual primers, on touch holes, and were set off in a rapid-fire chain by a single powder train. In twentieth-century terms, they weren't "selective fire" weapons; when one shot was fired, every shot was fired. Even worse, in many ways, they were mounted as artillery pieces. The weapons were cumbersome, large, and impossible to traverse. When they fired, they delivered all of their rounds virtually simultaneously into a very small, relatively speaking, target area.
The navy's mitrailleuses were based on the Reffye, the most successful of the mitrailleuses used by the French during the Franco-Prussian War. They used individually primed cartridge cases, constructed very much like shotgun shells, fired in succession by turning a side-mounted crank. Each round was expensive, but they could be collected, reloaded, and reused. More importantly, the man on the crank could fire all of them as quickly as he could turn the crank, or only a few rounds at a time, or even single shots, and he could vary the rate of fire to suit a specific tactical need instead of blazing through the entire magazine in a single eruption.
Simpson's mitrailleuse consisted of twenty barrels arranged in five rows of four, mounted in a cylindrical sleeve, which was actually five fewer barrels than the Reffye had had, but it produced a lighter weapon with a slimmer profile, better suited to pivot mounts aboard the navy's warships. It was a.50-caliber weapon, with a crew of five, three of whom were responsible solely for clearing expended cartridge cases from the removable steel breechblocks and replacing them with fresh rounds. Each gun came with four breechblocks and a special extractor. When the block was pressed down onto the extractor, its fingers removed the empty cases while one of the other loaders opened a specially prepackaged twenty-round box that worked like a huge speed loader. A well-trained crew (and all of Simpson's crews were well trained) could sustain a rate of fire of sixty aimed rounds per minute, and reach up to a hundred rounds per minute in emergencies. That was more than sufficient to turn any small craft into a splintered colander, and a single hit from one of its enormous rounds could be counted upon to stop any human-sized target dead.
If any other divers were foolish enough to show themselves anywhere in the field of fire of one of those mitrailleuses, he would never be a problem again. Unfortunately, Simpson couldn't count on their doing anything of the sort.
"The ironclads and Ajax will increase speed and continue downriver to clear the threat zone," he said. "Achilles will tow Achates clear. I want at least one of the bass boats running a perimeter around them. And instruct all units to begin dropping anti-diver charges."
"Yes, sir!" Halberstat saluted sharply and turned to begin issuing the necessary orders.
The first underwater explosions kicked up clouds of spray and dead fish less than four minutes later. The "anti-diver charges" were nothing more than somewhat heavier hand grenades, designed to be used as mini-depth charges. They were light enough that they could be used fairly close to a vessel's hull without threat of damage, but heavy enough to kill or at least incapacitate any diver in the vicinity.
Simpson listened to the muffled explosions and watched the brown river water heave up, then watched the rings of foam drift away. He grimaced. It reminded him of accounts he'd read of depth charge attacks from both world wars. Half the time, the people dropping those charges hadn't known whether there was really a submarine in the vicinity, or not-just as he didn't know whether or not there were really scuba divers stalking his gunboats. But, like those long-ago (or far in the future) escort ship commanders, he had no choice but to make certain.
And in the process, he thought glumly, give anyone on the other side who's watching a quick course in the best way to deal with our scuba divers in the future.
He hadn't wanted to do that… but he wanted even less to discover that someone had actually managed to successfully attach an explosive charge to one of his precious ships.
Anatole du Bouvard listened to the explosions coming from the river as he climbed up into his horse's saddle. There was no sign of any American landing parties coming after his shore party, but he had no intention of waiting around until they changed their mind about that.
He watched the ironclads accelerating, obviously to move clear of this stretch of river, and shrugged philosophically. He'd never really expected anything to come of the attempt, after all, and he'd clearly given it his best effort. Surely the cardinal would understand that, especially if du Bouvard and Olier showed a certain… constructive creativity in their reports.
Besides, he thought, pressing with his heels and urging his horse to a trot, we have something new to offer him, as well. I suppose we should have realized that the Americans would have worked out their own ways to deal with divers before they ever used them against us.
He led the rest of his men rapidly away from the river bank, still listening to the explosions, and considered how best to make that point in his report. He didn't give the least bit of thought to what might have happened to the second diver. Just a convict, after all, and not one of his men.
It was only later that day that it occurred to him that Cardinal Richelieu might want to know what had happened to the second diver's equipment-which, after all, had cost the French crown a fair sum of money to obtain.
What to do? Du Bouvard was certainly not about to return. In the end, after pondering the problem for a while, he decided he'd include in the report that they'd thought the diver was slain by one of those grenades the enemy flotilla had tossed in the water. Alas, under the circumstances, his body-and the equipment-had not been recoverable.
Awkward, of course, if the diver ever showed up anywhere. But du Bouvard was willing to take that chance. It was a slim one, anyway. The last thing a convict was likely to do was report back to the same authorities who had essentially forced him into that insanely dangerous position in the first place. Especially when there was still a death sentence on his head.
In the event, du Bouvard's concern was quite unnecessary. One of the grenades had killed the second diver. Or rather, had stunned him unconscious and blown the mask off his face. He'd drowned within minutes, and his corpse-with the equipment still attached-was slowly settling into the mud in the Elbe's estuary. Within two years, at most, the silt brought down the river would bury it completely.
Chapter 42
Duesseldorf Duchy of Berg
"It's definite, then?" Turenne asked as soon as he came into the tavern in Duesseldorf that his cavalry officers had established as their unofficial headquarters in the city.
Brigadier Jean de Gassion rose from a table just by the door. "Yes, Marshal. We've been maintaining couriers all along the lower Elbe. The first of them arrived last night. Admiral Simpson and his ironclads passed through Hamburg four days ago. Well, five days, now."
Turenne grunted. "Good couriers. Make sure they get a bonus. And Torstensson?"
"That's still not clear," Gassion replied. He took the map on the table and turned it around, facing Turenne, then pointed with his forefinger. "From what we can tell, he's massing an army here, just east of Hamburg. He brought eight regiments with him, but there are indications that more are coming. Hard to know, though-at least in time to do us any good."
After studying the map for a moment, Turenne shook his head. "We'll simply have to make our best guess. The most sensible thing for the Swedes to do is mass the largest possible army at Hamb
urg and then march straight north. They'll be looking to trap our army and the Danes besieging Luebeck."
Gassion pursed his lips. "That seems… a bit dubious to me, sir. By now, our army up there has very well developed lines of contravallation around Luebeck. Even if Torstensson brings the entire USE army stationed at Magdeburg, he won't have more than twenty thousand men. They'd be trying to attack a superior force protected behind defensive lines."
"It won't matter, Jean. The Swede's strategy keys off the naval force Simpson is taking into the Baltic. I'm sure of it, and damn those stupid generals in Paris. Once he gets there, he'll destroy the blockading fleet-and you can be sure there'll be more troops coming from Stockholm, to reinforce Gustav Adolf in Luebeck. Our army will be trapped, with no means of getting supplied. Torstensson won't go after them directly. He'll sweep around to the west and march into Schleswig and Holstein, cutting them off completely. That will force de Valois to bring the army out of the trenches to meet him on the open field."
One of the other cavalry officers spoke up. Francois Lefebvre, one of Gassion's lieutenants. "You're assuming that Simpson will succeed."
"Yes, I am. I think any other assumption is foolish." The young marshal cocked an eye at Gassion. "Did the courier say how long it took Simpson to get through Hamburg's defenses?"
The cavalry brigadier got a sardonic expression on his face. "About as long as it takes a knife to go through cheese. He's got some incredibly ferocious guns on those ironclads, firing some sort of explosive shells."
"What I figured. No, gentlemen, it's time for us to accept reality, even if the king's advisers won't. The USE wouldn't have spent so many months getting those ironclads ready if they weren't confident they could manage the task. Given what they've already accomplished with their American airplanes and speedboats, I think it would be pure foolishness on our part to assume they won't do the same again."
