1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “You most certainly will not!” she said. Her voice was a bit shrill. “I am the Lady Protector of Silesia, my beloved but idiot husband. I am not the conqueror—conqueress, whatever—of Lesser Poland!”

  His grin seemed fixed in place. Apparently, he had gone mad. “You won’t have to worry about protecting Lower Silesia. When the time comes—it’s all been planned out already—Heinrich Schmidt will bring about half the SoTF’s National Guard into Silesia. Those are good troops. Not as good as the Hangman, but they’re as good as any provincial army in the USE. Plenty good enough to shield Lower Silesia, given that the Poles and Lithuanians will be preoccupied with Lesser Poland.”

  Utterly, completely mad. “So what?” Her voice was now definitely shrill. “Add all my forces to yours—we’re still talking about less than four thousand men. Even great magnates on their own can assemble an army twice that size.”

  “Three times, we figure. We’re expecting somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand men coming against us. In the spring, of course; they won’t be able to move that many men in the winter.”

  She stared at him. Kraków was a fortified city, true—but the fortifications dated back to medieval times. It was not protected by seventeenth-century trace italienne star forts designed to withstand artillery.

  Jeff’s grin now became a smile, and a rather gentle one. “Relax, hon. I’m not suicidal. We won’t be on our own. Morris Roth will join us, with his army. Which has the ridiculous title—brace yourself; Wallenstein came up with it—of the Grand Army of the Sunrise.”

  She kept staring at him. Her mind was now fluttering around. Morris Roth—he was a jeweler. Also the hero of the Battle of the Bridge, yes, but…Grand Army of the Sunrise?

  “How many men does he have?” she demanded.

  “A little over four thousand. The infantry hasn’t been tested yet, but the cavalry is very solid. His army is also well-armed and we’ve—the Hangman, I mean—got the new H&K rifle, the .406 caliber Model C. We’ve got mortars, too, good ones, which the Commonwealth troops won’t be very familiar with. We’ll be a lot better armed than they are, we figure.”

  Gretchen broke off her stare. For a moment, she looked out of the window. She had finally realized that this scheme was not something her idiot husband had cooked up on his own. Emperor Gustav Adolf had to have been part of the planning—it might even be his plan to begin with.

  Her mind had stopped fluttering and was now working as well as it usually did. The logic was coming into focus. Keep Torstensson and his two divisions pinning the Polish king’s army in the north, around Poznań. Move half of the SoTF National Guard into Silesia, to anchor it. They weren’t needed any longer to defend the Oberpfalz against Bavaria. Then form an alliance with the Bohemians to drive a spear into Lesser Poland. Take and hold Kraków. The Bohemians would get the corridor they needed to expand into Ruthenia and—

  “Have you talked with the Galicians yet? If you don’t have them with you serving as the official face of the occupation, taking Kraków will stir up all of Poland. You’ll be stirring things up even with them, because foreigners are involved.”

  Jeff shook his head. “Not yet. But Rebecca’s flying out there as soon as Red tells us they’ve got an airfield at Lviv. We’re pretty sure they’ll go in with us. They’d be crazy not to, since otherwise they’d have to face a magnate army on their own. We’re not sure how many men they could bring, but we figure it’d be at least two thousand. We’ll probably—no, almost certainly—still be outnumbered, but not by that much. And like I said, we’ll be a lot better armed.”

  And a lot less well-organized, she thought. Talk about a polyglot army! USE regulars, Vogtland guerrillas, Silesian amateurs, Slovene cavalrymen—professionals and veterans, yes; but there weren’t a lot of them—joined to a Czech army of good cavalry but inexperienced infantry commanded by a jeweler whose only combat experience was the very circumscribed engagement on the Stone Bridge in Prague—and for the final touch, a ragtag force of Galician rebels. True, many of them would be former hussars and some of them would be Cossacks. Fierce fighters and probably just as fiercely undisciplined.

  “You’re going to need me,” she said.

  “Sure are,” said Jeff. “Wearing that famous armor of yours. I can’t wait to see you in it.”

  She ignored that and looked down at her son. Larry was asleep again. He looked like a cherub.

  She was not bringing a cherub into a theater of war.

  “I will have to take Larry back to Dresden, so he can be cared for there,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured,” said Jeff. “But look at it this way. We already have a good governess for Wilhelm and Joe, and it won’t be hard to find a reliable wet nurse.”

  Idiot husband. “I will still need to do it quickly. A week or two, not two months or more. Which means—”

  She looked at him accusingly. “I will need to fly again.”

  Chapter 14

  Kelly Aviation Hanger

  Grantville International Airport, State of Thuringia-Franconia

  “Damn, that’s a beautiful plane, if I say so myself.” Looking up at the Kelly Wasp flying three thousand feet above them, Bob Kelly—the plane’s designer as well as the owner of the firm that had made it—was smiling widely.

  Standing next to him, also looking up, was one of Kelly Aviation’s employees, Keenan Murphy. Keenan was the company’s chief mechanic but he also handled whatever other jobs his boss came up with up—short of janitorial work, anyway, where he drew the line. Bob Kelly ran his company in what could charitably be called a haphazard manner and some critics might call a slapdash one. His chief up-time rival in the aircraft designing and manufacturing business, Hal Smith, once characterized Kelly’s management philosophy as chaos theory.

  Keenan was smiling also, but he wasn’t smiling widely and there was some strain to the smile.

  Keenan was worried. The test pilot who was flying the Wasp on its maiden flight was Lannie Yost. The two men had known each other since the first grade and had become good friends over the years. And like all of Lannie’s friends—not to mention family—Keenan was known to say, “Yeah, Lannie likes to knock ’em down.”

  As the years passed, though—it had gotten worse since the Ring of Fire—Keenan had eventually been forced to admit (to himself only) that his friend was an alcoholic. Not just a heavy drinker, but an outright alky. A juicer; a boozer; a lush. Keenan wouldn’t have gone so far as to call Lannie a wino, but that was just because Lannie didn’t like wine. His tastes ran to bourbon and beer.

  Lannie always knocked down a couple of drinks before a test flight. Keenan hadn’t worried about it in the past because the crowd he ran with were all pretty heavy drinkers—including him. West Virginia working class culture didn’t run toward touchy-feely psychology, so no one he knew spent a lot of time fretting over the mental problems discussed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. None of them had ever heard of the book, in fact.

  But Lannie’s drinking had gotten heavier and heavier. Keenan was pretty sure that was the pattern for alcoholics. He knew that this morning Lannie had knocked down three drinks instead of his usual two—and they hadn’t been two beers, either. He’d started with two shots of bourbon—no, two swigs of bourbon from a pint flask. Could have been three shots. With a beer chaser.

  You wouldn’t have known it from the way Lannie swaggered out to the plane and climbed into the cockpit, though. He hadn’t staggered; hadn’t shown any physical signs of inebriation. In times past, Keenan had been reassured by his friend’s steadiness even when drinking. He hadn’t hesitated to let Lannie drive him home after a night of carousing, before the Ring of Fire. Why should he? Lannie had only gotten into one car accident in his life and that had been a fender bender where the other driver was at fault.

  Keenan had been chewing on the problem all morning. Finally, he decided he had to say something.

  “Hey, boss, maybe we should cut t
he flight short this time.”

  “Why?” Kelly asked, without taking his eyes off the plane. The Wasp was now some distance to the west, starting to make a turn to come back toward the airfield. Kelly had told Yost not to fly too far off, and the pilot was following his instructions. Well… Maybe he was stretching them some. But you couldn’t really expect test pilots to be slavishly obedient. That was just not the nature of the breed.

  “Well. Lannie might be a little tipsy this morning.”

  Kelly puffed out his lips. He was well aware of Lannie’s drinking habits, but he’d always chosen to overlook them. Yeah, sure, the guy drank a lot of liquor. But he still functioned okay, didn’t he?

  Keenan wouldn’t let it go. “He had more than he usually does, Bob. I’m a little concerned.”

  Kelly sighed. “Look, let’s not worry about it now. I’ll talk to Lannie after he lands. For one thing, I don’t want to distract him with a radio call.”

  Keenan didn’t—quite—roll his eyes. The Wasp was designed to be a fighter plane, which meant radio communication was considered an integral part of its activity. If a pilot couldn’t handle the “distraction” of a radio call while he was flying, what was he doing piloting the plane in the first place?

  He started to say something but Kelly held out his hand in a shushing gesture. “Not now, Keenan. He’s approaching his first dive and I need to concentrate.”

  Keenan looked back up at the plane. In truth, it was a beautiful aircraft. Bob Kelley had designed it after the British de Havilland Mosquito of World War II fame. Like the Mosquito, it was made almost entirely of wood. It was a shoulder-wing monoplane with two engines mounted on the wings. Below the pilot’s cockpit, mounted atop the fuselage, was a somewhat bulbous nose that in the original British plane would have a clear window and a bombardier’s seat. In Kelly’s smaller version, that nose had a machine gun mounted in it. The gunner would ride next to the pilot in a tandem seat arrangement and operate the weapon from that position. But, if the gun jammed, he could squeeze himself down into the nose to fix whatever the problem might be.

  The big problem Kelly had faced was crude and simple. The de Havilland Mosquito had been powered by 1200 horsepower engines—that was 1200 per engine—which gave the Mosquito a top speed of around four hundred miles per hour. The engines Kelly had been able to obtain had a tenth that much power. Together, the two engines gave him less than 250 horsepower. Because of the size of the aircraft, that had required very light construction and a large wing area. Even then, the Wasp’s top speed was only about one hundred miles per hour and its cruising speed was around eighty miles per hour.

  Yes, it was a beautiful plane. But it wasn’t the sturdiest plane you could imagine, either. That was why Bob had cautioned Lannie not to try any really fancy acrobatics until they had a better sense of how well the plane performed. This was a test flight, so they had the machine gun and its ammunition on board but not the gunner himself. Instead, they’d strapped one hundred and sixty pounds of sandbags in the gunner’s seat to provide the needed weight.

  Above, Lannie started his first dive. It was fairly shallow and he didn’t push the plane’s theoretical limits.

  “See?” Bob said. “He’s taking it easy, just like I told him.”

  Seeing that the worried expression was still on his mechanic’s face, Bob shook his head. “Look, Keenan, I know Lannie’s a borderline alcoholic.”

  Borderline, my ass. But Keenan didn’t say it out loud.

  “I read up about it,” Kelly continued. “There’s different kinds of alcoholics, Gammas and Betas. Your Gammas are the falling-down drunks. Betas are different. They drink too much, and they can eventually kill themselves from it—cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, whatever—but they’re what’s called ‘high functioning.’ In fact, this kind of alcoholic actually performs better when they’ve had a drink or two. Psychologists call it ‘maintenance drinking.’ It’s why guys like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle could knock down a couple of shots and still hit home runs like nobody’s business.”

  Keenan was skeptical, but he didn’t know enough about alcoholism to be able to argue the matter. Especially with his boss. All he knew was that Lannie was drinking more and more as time went on and maybe he was a “high functioning drunk” but dammit he was still a drunk.

  * * *

  Thousands of feet above them, Lannie Yost had pulled out of his dive and was about to do another.

  “Damn, this is one fine plane!” he exclaimed. “Bob, you done yourself proud.”

  Kelly’s understanding of alcoholism wasn’t wildly incorrect, but it was skewed. There were such people as high-functioning alcoholics and they did engage in maintenance drinking—and, indeed, their physical performance did actually improve after one or two drinks, which was not true of people who weren’t alcoholics.

  But that just spoke to their physical performance and reflexes. Yes, a great baseball player who was a high functioning alcoholic and had had a couple of drinks before going out to the plate could hit a home run. Just like a test pilot accustomed to flying aircraft still kept his physical skills after a couple of drinks.

  What he started losing, though, was his judgment. His reflexes and coordination might still have withstood the effects of the alcohol, but his mind hadn’t. He was, to use the vernacular, pickled.

  Up until now, the Wasp had performed splendidly. Bob Kelly was indeed a good aircraft designer. But he’d gotten the performance of his new airplane partly by cutting corners.

  Lannie was exuberant, now. His next dive was steep and he wasn’t going pull up until the last minute. This was a warplane, no? You don’t pamper a fighting aircraft.

  Down he went. Down and down.

  On the ground below, Keenan hissed. Bob’s jaws tightened. “Damnation,” he muttered through tight lips.

  * * *

  Lannie broke off the dive and starting pulling up. But he was now putting more g-force on the wings than they could handle. A wire support on the frame pulled loose, screw and all. That threw six times as much weight on the other wire and it broke loose as well.

  The Wasp’s right wing started coming apart. The flaps on that side ripped loose. The crippled wing itself stayed attached to the fuselage but it was no longer functioning as a wing. It was just flapping aimlessly as the plane began plunging toward the ground.

  The wing no longer provided any lift, but because it stayed attached to the fuselage it did provide drag—and even in a dive the Wasp hadn’t been traveling all that fast. As it headed for the inevitable crash landing, the plane never achieved terminal velocity.

  Never came close, really. It was probably not doing more than sixty miles per hour on impact.

  A crash at sixty miles per hour is plenty good enough to kill someone, of course. But alcoholics have a patron saint of their own, a Dubliner by the name of Matt Talbot, and apparently he was on the job that day. Instead of smacking into the ground, Lannie’s plane struck an oak tree.

  No small oak, either. This was an old, mature, really big tree.

  A Quercus robur, to be precise, a type of white oak. It had a circumference of thirty feet, stood eighty feel tall and had a crown about the same diameter. It had been alive more than four centuries before the Ring of Fire.

  The aircraft never made it to the ground. It was pretty much torn to shreds as it passed through the branches, of course, as lightly constructed as it was. Pieces of the plane’s wings that were too big for birds to use for their nests stayed in the canopy for the rest of the tree’s lifespan.

  Lannie Yost didn’t make it to the ground, either. He and his seat finally came to a stop in a branch fork about fifteen feet up. He was still in one piece, although you couldn’t exactly say he was intact. He had four broken bones and a lot of lacerations.

  It took a while to get him out of the tree. They had to call in the Grantville Fire Department for help.

  West Virginia firemen—and the down-timers on the crew weren’t any different—d
o not have what you’d call a delicate sense of humor. So by the time they finally got Lannie out of the tree, he’d been subjected to a lot of ribaldry, quite of bit of which focused on his drinking habits. Hey, Lannie, most guys don’t wrap a plane around a tree when they go on a bender, was a fair specimen of the jokes.

  * * *

  Bob’s wife Kay was furious, needless to say. Fury came naturally to the woman.

  That goddam drunk Yost cost us a fortune! It’s not just the cost of replacing the materials, either. We’ve got penalties in the contract if we don’t deliver on schedule.

  Bob’s view was less stringent. We can salvage the engines, which are what’s really expensive, and those so-called penalties have a lot of loopholes in them—thanks to you, since you negotiated them. It specifically exempts any time lost due to accidents during testing.

  That hadn’t slowed Kay down at all. Not many things did.

  Still! What’s important is that we get back on schedule!

  No, Kay. What’s important is that Lannie didn’t get killed.

  * * *

  Whether they got hit by penalties or not, the fact remained that Kelly Aviation wasn’t going to be able to deliver the Wasp on schedule to the forces guarding Linz. It would be up to Hal Smith and his company to get the planes they had under contract to the front lines in time to meet the Ottoman onslaught that would resume in the spring.

  Kay was irate about that, too.

  That bastard’ll get all the next contracts. You watch!

  Bob’s view was less pessimistic. Relax, darling. He hasn’t got that much capacity.

  He will if this goes on! And why haven’t you fired Yost yet?

  * * *

  Kelly didn’t fire Lannie, although at Kay’s insistence he did make him sign a last chance agreement. So, Lannie started attending AA meetings. By now, as big as the population of Grantville had become since the Ring of Fire, there were at least a half dozen AA groups in the town. Down-timers joined readily, when their pastors cracked the whip—which seventeenth-century pastors were not shy about doing.