1636: The Ottoman Onslaught Read online

  Table of Contents

  PART I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  PART II Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PART III Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART IV Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  PART V Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  PART VI Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Note on the transliteration of Ottoman Turkish Words

  1636: THE OTTOMAN ONSLAUGHT – eARC

  Eric Flint

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen

  Book #21 in the multiple New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series. The uptimers and their allies take on the Ottoman Empire at its height of power.

  The modern West Virginia town of Grantville has been displaced in time to continental Europe in 1632. Now four years have passed. The long-feared attack on Austria by the Ottoman Empire has begun. Armed with new weapons inspired by the time-displaced Americans of Grantville, the Turks are determined to do what they were unable to do in the universe the Americans came from: capture Vienna.

  The Ottomans have the advantage of being able to study the failings and errors of their own campaigns in a future they can now avoid. They are led by the young, dynamic, and ruthless Murad IV, the most capable emperor the Ottomans have produced in a century. They are equipped with weapons that would have seemed fantastical to the Turks of that other universe: airships, breech-loading rifles, rockets—even primitive tanks.

  And this time they won’t have to face massive reinforcements from Austria’s allies. In fact, the only force Emperor Gustav Adolf can think of sending to Austria is the United States of Europe Third Division under the command of Mike Stearns. It’s an army currently engaged in a desperate struggle for Bavaria.

  The emperors of the USE and Austria share the same problem. They have one too many enemies, one too few allies, and only one general to cover the gaps. Fortunately, that general is Mike Stearns, also known as the Prince of Germany.

  ERIC FLINT’S BEST-SELLING

  RING OF FIRE SERIES

  1632 by Eric Flint

  1633 with David Weber

  1634: The Baltic War with David Weber

  1634: The Galileo Affair with Andrew Dennis

  1634: The Bavarian Crisis with Virginia DeMarce

  1634: The Ram Rebellion with Virginia DeMarce et al

  1635: The Cannon Law with Andrew Dennis

  1635: The Dreeson Incident with Virginia DeMarce

  1635: The Eastern Front

  1635: The Papal Stakes with Charles E. Gannon

  1636: The Saxon Uprising

  1636: The Kremlin Games with Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  1636: The Devil’s Opera with David Carrico

  1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies with Charles E. Gannon

  1636: The Viennese Waltz with Gorg Huff & Paula Goodlett

  1636: The Cardinal Virtues with Walter Hunt

  1635: A Parcel of Rogues with Andrew Dennis

  1636: The Ottoman Onslaught by Eric Flint

  1635: The Tangled Web by Virginia DeMarce

  1635: The Wars for the Rhine by Anette Pedersen

  1636: Seas of Fortune by Iver P. Cooper

  1636: The Chronicles of Doctor Gribbleflotz by

  Kerryn Offord & Rick Boatright

  Time Spike with Marilyn Kosmatka

  Grantville Gazette I–V, ed. Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette VI–VII, ed. Eric Flint & Paula Goodlett

  Ring of Fire I–IV, ed. Eric Flint

  For a complete list of Eric Flint books,

  please go to www.baen.com.

  1636: The Ottoman Onslaught

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Eric Flint

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8184-6

  Cover art by Tom Kidd

  Maps by Michael Knopp

  First printing, January 2017

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  t/k

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  DEDICATION

  To those I stood with:

  Pearl and Morris Chertov

  Fred Halstead

  Steve Kindred

  Ken Miliner

  Linda May O’Brien

  Jerry O’Connell

  Claudia Roberson

  Kathy Shields

  Ken Shilman

  Gone but not forgotten

  PART I

  April, 1636

  Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,

  Or what's a heaven for?

  Chapter 1

  Regensburg, Upper Palatinate

  The march from Regensburg was supposed to have begun at dawn—and so it did, in a manner of speaking. The cavalry patrols had actually passed through the city’s gates before sunrise. Right on schedule.

  But now that he’d been a general for almost a year, Mike Stearns had learned that military time schedules bore precious little resemblance to what he’d considered “punctuality” in those innocent days when he’d been a civilian. In this, as in so many things, Carl von Clausewitz’s old dictum applied. Perhaps better to say, the future dictum, since the man wouldn’t even be born for another century and a half, and then in a different universe.

  By now, Mike had memorized the damn thing: Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.

  He knew Clausewitz’s axiom as well as he knew Murphy’s Law—which applied to military matters even more stringently than it did to the affairs of civilians.

  Civilians. Those happy-go-lucky, carefree, insouciant folk in whose ranks Mike could vaguely remember himself being counted once. Back in those halcyon day
s when he’d been a coal miner worried about nothing more substantial than methane explosions and roof falls. Or the prime minister of a nation, whose frets over issues of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, and the schemes and plots of traitors and malcontents had never troubled what he remembered as blissful sleep.

  Pfah. Tell a cabinet member to do something, be it never so problematic and ticklish, and the task would get done—started upon, at least—within the hour.

  Tell an army to do something as simple and straightforward as walk out of a town—just walk, no running required—and move on down the road—fifteen miles, maybe twenty; no more—and you’d be lucky if the ass end of the army made it through the gates by noon. The camp followers coming behind wouldn’t manage the feat until mid-afternoon.

  He could also remember a time when he’d intended to eradicate the pernicious seventeenth century military custom of having camp followers in the first place. He’d been brought up as a stout American lad, watching John Wayne movies. You never saw a mob of camp followers trailing after John Wayne, did you? Sands of Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, The Fighting Seabees—not a camp follower anywhere in sight. Not even in his civil war movie, The Horse Soldiers. For that matter, not even in the movie where he’d portrayed the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan, The Conqueror, although Mike wasn’t entirely sure about that. The film had been such a turkey that he’d stopped watching it halfway through. It was possible that a stray camp follower might have wandered across the stage toward the end.

  Not likely, though. And it wasn’t just the movies. Mike had served a three-year stint in the United States Army. That would be the army of the United States of America, long before the Ring of Fire happened.

  Did the U.S. Army have camp followers? Not unless you counted the families living on a military base—but that wasn’t really the same thing at all. When American soldiers went on campaign back up-time, their families stayed behind. They sure as hell didn’t trail after the soldiers like a gigantic caravan.

  Caravan? It was more like a circus train without rails. All that was missing were elephants and a carousel.

  “I’d think you’d have become accustomed to this by now, General.”

  Turning in the saddle, Mike saw that his aide Christopher Long had come up behind him and was now almost alongside.

  “I think a grin like that on an adjutant’s face when addressing his commanding officer is probably a court-martial offense,” Mike said. He wondered if he sounded as sour as he felt. “I still have the occasional daydream about a lightning offensive. We even had a name for it where and when I came from: Blitzkrieg.”

  His other aide, Ulbrecht Duerr, had ridden up in time to hear his last sentence.

  “’Blitzkrieg,’ is it? Lightning war. Ha! No wonder those stupid German descendants of ours lost most of their wars. Went charging out without proper consideration of what it takes to keep the supplies coming.”

  He now looked at Long. “Have you noticed, Christopher, that our commander is always disgruntled at the beginning of a campaign?”

  Long smiled. “Oh, yes. I’ve come to expect it.”

  Mike was about to make some retort but…

  Was it true? Was he really that predictable?

  He thought back on previous campaigns.

  Well, maybe. After the first one, anyway. Well. After the first day of the first one.

  “Remind me again why I don’t ban all camp followers,” he said.

  “First, because the men would probably mutiny,” said Duerr. The cheery tone in which he said that was surely a court-martial offense. Court-martialable? Mike wasn’t sure of the proper usage—which just went to show he was still a civilian at heart. Carefree, happy-go-lucky…

  “We’d have to hope they’d mutiny,” added Long, “because if they didn’t, they’d soon enough start dying of hunger or exhaustion or disease—or any combination thereof.”

  “On account of there’d be no one to feed them or keep their clothing reasonably clean,” Duerr continued, still sounding cheery.

  “Or tuck them in at night and sing them lullabies,” Mike grumbled.

  “This sort of bitterness really doesn’t suit a man as young as you are, General. Look at me! Much older than you, I am—not to mention properly scarred in a soldierly manner.”

  He held up a crooked forefinger, which hadn’t healed quite properly after being broken at the Battle of Ostra outside Dresden. Duerr had several scars on his body which were actually more impressive, but they were covered by his uniform—and besides, he was inordinately proud of this one. He’d defeated an enemy cavalryman in hand-to-hand combat even though his injury had forced him to fight left-handed.

  Mike had had his own adventures in that battle, and quite splendid ones at that. He’d had two horses shot out from under him. Not one—two. But he’d come out of it quite unscarred, at least bodily.

  Whether he’d come out of it unscarred mentally as well…

  Too soon to know, he thought. He didn’t think he’d developed PTSD so far, if “developed” was the proper term to use. He’d have to ask Maureen Grady the next time he saw her. She ran the Department of Social Services and was probably—no, almost certainly—the best psychologist in the world.

  Having settled that issue to his momentary satisfaction, he went back to grousing about what really bothered him on this sunny day in April of 1636.

  “Is it really too much to expect an army to move faster than an old lady with a walker?”

  “Is a ‘walker’ something like a cane?” asked Christopher Long. “If so, the answer is ‘yes.’ A competent crone can out-hobble any army in the world.”

  “Taken as a whole,” Duerr qualified. “A detached cavalry unit could certainly run her down. Flying artillery also.”

  * * *

  Had he cross-checked that last assertion with the commander of the Third Division’s flying artillery, Duerr would have gotten an argument. Lieutenant Colonel Thorsten Engler, normally a calm and phlegmatic officer, was having as close to an apoplectic fit as such a man could manage. He was even swearing a little. At least, by Thorsten Engler values of swearing.

  Only under his breath, though. The actual swearing was being done by a lieutenant whom Thorsten was observing, since it would have been inappropriate for the commanding officer to deal with the problem directly.

  “You—you miserable cruds.” Angrily, the young lieutenant pointed at the wagon’s undercarriage. “What in the name of—of—whatever—is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the axle is broken? If you keep forcing the horses you’ll lame one of them. You have to lift the dam—blasted thing out of the ditch.”

  The lieutenant was being a bit unfair—and certainly too harsh. It was true that the crew of the volley gun which was the focus of his displeasure had somehow managed to run their gun carriage into a ditch and had then broken the axle while trying to get it out. But they were almost brand new recruits, not one of Engler’s experienced crews. Judging from the way they were handling the poor horses, all of them were town youngsters to boot.

  Thorsten’s rank was brand spanking new and he was still trying to adjust to his new status and position. General Stearns had only informed him three days before the march began that he’d succeeded in persuading the Powers-That-Be in the army’s headquarters in Magdeburg—translation: he’d done an end run around the brass and gotten the emperor’s ear directly—to assign the newest flying artillery company—just graduated from training camp, oh joy—to Stearns’ Third Division instead of sending it to Torstensson’s forces outside Poznań. (What possible use is flying artillery in a siege, after all?)

  In his wisdom, Stearns had then decided to detach Engler’s flying artillery company from the Hangman regiment and put Engler in charge of all the Third Division’s flying artillery units. That being one very experienced veteran company—his—and the newly arrived pack of mewling infants who seemed to have trouble telling one end of a volley gun from the other and one end of a horse from the
other.

  Where had they trained them? On fishing boats?

  There was one—minor—positive note. Thorsten had given all the new officers a lecture on the subject of avoiding undue coarseness in dealing with enlisted men. He was pleased to see that the lieutenant was doing his best to follow the guidelines.

  “Yes, you heard me, you—you—soldiers and I use the term broadly. Lift the carriage out of the ditch. No, no, no—after you unload the volley gun, you—you—”

  The words trailed off, partly from exhaustion—not physical but mental. Spiritual, almost.

  To make things perfect, Stearns had decided to call the new formation a “squadron”—the only squadron in the USE Army—and had promoted Engler to the rank of lieutenant colonel. The promotion was itself problematic. In part because he’d been leapfrogged over a number of majors at least some of whom were bound to be resentful. More importantly—Thorsten didn’t really care what envious thoughts might be infecting the odd officer here and there—because the rank of lieutenant colonel did not officially exist in the USE Army.

  True, Jeff Higgins, the commanding officer of the Hangman regiment, held the rank as well.

  That made two of them. In the entire army. Marvelous. Should the military hierarchy—translation: pack of wretched bureaucrats who’d put the most hidebound theologian to shame when it came to dogmatic enforcement of regulations—eventually decide to disqualify Thorsten’s service on the grounds that he held no recognized rank, then should he be discharged due to injuries received he’d have neither a pension nor a valid disability claim.