1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “I still don’t see why you’re so concerned about speed.”

  “I’m concerned because once the sortie comes out of the gate we’ve got to start hitting them with mortar fire right away. Or they’ll overrun the small force we set up to bait them. And the problem there is that”—he nodded at the nearest mortar—“these things are not what you’d call precision weapons. It takes time to get them ranged in, and that’s time we won’t have. So we’re going to range them in today by firing”—he turned around and pointed in the opposite direction—“thataway, until each mortar has the right elevation set. Then we swivel the mortars back around facing the city, on a platform that’s level enough and with spikes to keep the mortars from shifting. Come tomorrow morning, we’ll still have some adjustments to make, but they should be pretty minor ones.”

  “Won’t the garrison hear you firing?” She now realized that issue hadn’t been brought up in the planning stage. Not that she could recall, anyway.

  “Oh, sure. But they won’t be able to see us.” He looked up at the sky. “And Eddie should start buzzing the city any time now. We figure that between having an airplane doing something that seems just weird to them and hearing a lot of cannon fire but not knowing where it’s happening and why it’s happening, by next morning that garrison is going to be edgy as hell.”

  “But what if they don’t sortie? It seems to me that sends your whole plan up in smoke.”

  Jeff shrugged. “I’m wedded to you, sweetheart, not the plan. If they don’t sortie, then what happens is that we continue the mortar bombardment until we’ve driven off any troops except the relatively small number who’ve been sheltered in the barbican. By then, the whole regiment will be in position and we’ll seize the gate with a frontal assault. After that, the garrison will probably surrender pretty quickly.”

  A droning sound came from somewhere above. Looking up and around, Gretchen spotted the plane. “And there’s Eddie.”

  “Right on schedule. There’s more than one reason we call that plane the Steady Girl.”

  Gretchen turned her head, looking to the southwest. “I wonder how Denise is doing.”

  “Once she gets to Vienna, she’ll do fine. From the stories I’ve heard, I’d take that girl in a tight spot over most anyone else. Not counting you, of course. But until they get there…”

  She made a face. “Yes, I know Denise. Nobody can be—what’s that expression you use?”

  “Pain in the ass.”

  “Yes, that one. Better than Denise can.”

  On the road to Pressburg

  A few miles north of Trnava

  “Are we there yet?”

  Noelle tightened her jaws. “Denise, if you ask that one more time, I swear I’ll strangle you. Well, no, you’d probably beat the tar out of me. I’d ask Lukasz to do it.”

  “I would accept,” said the big hussar. He flexed his hands, laced his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles. “Gladly.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, tough guy.”

  “I know you’re not. You’re not really afraid of many things. I’m amazed you’ve survived this long. Some things, Denise, are true whether you fear them or not. One of those things is that I can throttle you regardless of your state of mind. I am twice your size and even proportionate to the difference in weight, I am much stronger than you. I am stronger than most men I know, no matter how big they are.”

  “Yeah, sure. I know that. Just as long as you understand you don’t scare me. It’s the principle of the thing.” She looked out of the window of the cabin-atop-a-wagon which was laughably titled a “carriage.” The right front wheel heaved up again and they were all tossed about. Again.

  “Blasted potholes,” Noelle groused.

  “Potholes, my sweet little teenage ass. This stupid road has cauldron-holes. Are we—?”

  Denise gave the other two occupants of the cabin a sweet little teenage smile. “—having fun yet?”

  Chapter 21

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “We’ll wait until it has passed over the city and is clearly heading to the southeast,” said General Franz von Mercy, watching the aircraft that was flying over Kraków at an altitude he guessed to be perhaps half a mile. That was a very rough guess, as you’d expect coming from a man who’d had little experience with the American flying machines. He’d never been up in one himself, and hoped he never would. Von Mercy wasn’t exactly afraid of heights, but they did make him queasy.

  “That will distract the garrison and have them looking the other way when we begin the charge. We’ll start the charge when the airplane has gone a mile or so beyond the city limits. Give the signal then, Captain.”

  His adjutant, Captain Reitz Aechler, pursed his lips. Belatedly, von Mercy realized he’d given the order to a man who had no experience at all with aircraft. He’d never seen one until the day before yesterday. His ability to gauge distances would be tentative.

  So was von Mercy’s, but he probably had a better chance of getting it right. “Give it another minute,” he elaborated. “These machines move very quickly.”

  Aechler nodded and turned in his saddle. “Ready for my command!” he shouted to the small group of trumpeters sitting on their horses some twenty yards away. Unlike von Mercy and Aechler himself, the trumpeters were still within the line of trees. Von Mercy hadn’t wanted any more men than necessary to come out into the open until they began the charge. That meant him and one adjutant. He figured that even if an unusually keen-eyed and alert sentry on the walls of Kraków spotted them at this distance—it was at least half a mile—he wouldn’t call an alarm. At most, he might call them to the attention of his sergeant. But that delay would be all they needed. Once the charge started they’d be spotted quickly.

  Von Mercy could easily see the royal castle on Wawel Hill, as well as the Basilica of St. Mary. However, what his attention was concentrated on was the tower in the center of the city that rose up from the town hall. Adjacent to that town hall was the Cloth Hall, which sat in the middle of Kraków’s famous Rynek Główny, the main square which was one of the largest in Europe.

  That was their destination, once they got through the gate and into the city. The main square was at the very center of Kraków, not just in terms of crude geography but because well-built streets went out from it to every part of the city. If all went as planned, the garrison would be dispersed and still further disorganized, which would allow von Mercy to strike anywhere.

  * * *

  Jeff didn’t wait until Eddie’s plane was past the city walls. As soon as the Steady Girl crossed the city’s walls on the northwest side, he gave the order.

  “Tell the forward battery to start firing.”

  The order was passed by radio immediately. Mike Stearns had been known to complain about the slowness with which down-time officers adopted radio techniques instead of the tried-and-true method of sending couriers to transmit orders. But that was not a problem in the Hangman Regiment. The Hangman’s radio chief before he got killed in the Bavarian campaign had been Jimmy Andersen, one of Jeff’s close friends. Between his instruction and his example, the Hangmen had been quick to adapt to radio.

  Within seconds, the six mortars stationed forward began firing. And, once again, Colonel Higgins had the unpleasant experience captured in the old dictum no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

  To add a bitter irony, in this instance the problem wasn’t caused by the enemy but his own mortar crews.

  The jerks were too accurate, right out of the gate! The very first salvo landed directly on the barbican of the gate they were aiming at. That was just blind luck. But then, to compound the problem, the mortar crews—who were in direct line of sight and could see how accurate their fire had been—kept it up. No doubt congratulating each other on their extraordinary skill.

  Jeff waved over one of his remaining radio operators. He’d send orders—stiff ones—telling the mor
tar crews to start moving their fire away from the barbican, toward the center of the city. How were the cavalry supposed to seize the gate if their own damn army was shelling them?

  Then, to his astonishment, the medieval construction started coming apart under the bombardment. How in hell was that happening? The bombs the mortars were throwing were just not that powerful; they were designed as anti-personnel weapons, not bunker-busters.

  But coming down they were. Watching, Jeff realized what must be happening. Kraków’s walls were quite impressive to the eye—two miles long, with no fewer than thirty-nine towers and eight gates. The main gate was known as the Brama Floriańska, but that was quite a distance from the gate where Jeff intended to breach the walls.

  However imposing they might appear to be, the walls had been erected in the thirteenth century. That was before cannons started being used in this part of Europe. Cannons were first developed in China in the twelfth century and spread westward over the course of the next hundred years, transmitted by the Arabs. Their first use in Europe was in the Iberian Peninsula. No one knew exactly when they started coming into use in eastern Europe.

  But whenever it was, the walls of Kraków had never been designed to withstand cannon fire. Even so, they should have held up under mortar fire. But Jeff had picked this gate precisely because it was not used as often as most others. What he hadn’t considered was that as the decades and then the centuries passed, it received only occasional maintenance—which was usually improvised and makeshift, to boot. The barbican had probably never been rebuilt, simply braced and shored up whenever it became too dilapidated. But the best that could be said for it was that it was ramshackle. If two or more bombs hit simultaneously on the same structure, that could set up shock waves that could rip or jolt the structure enough to start what amounted to a masonry avalanche.

  However it had happened, the fact was that it had. Under the impact of the high explosive bombs, the barbican was coming apart and pulling down the adjacent walls with it. But “coming apart” didn’t mean the stones they were made of disintegrated. No, as the barbican and walls collapsed the stones just started piling up.

  An incongruous thought passed through Jeff’s mind as he watched his plan of battle collapse like the walls of Kraków.

  O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

  He wished stones would do the same. Fat chance of that happening. The barbican came down completely, crushing the gates. How do you charge and open gates when the blasted things no longer exist? All there was now in that part of the walls was a pile of rubble.

  On the bright side, part of the rubble fell into the moat that surrounded the city. That moat, which had been constructed at the same time as the walls, was still a formidable obstacle in places. But elsewhere it had suffered the inevitable decline that the fortifications of a city that had rarely been attacked were prone to. Originally—and it still was in places—the moat had been more than fifty feet wide and twenty to twenty-five feet deep.

  Elsewhere…not so much. One of the other reasons Jeff and von Mercy had picked this gate to assault was because the moat here was no more than twenty feet across and seemed to be fairly shallow. Both of them were confident that it wouldn’t take long for the combat engineers to fill a length of the moat with fascines and lay an already prepared corduroy road across it.

  That task would now be easier. But then what?

  A change of plans was needed. Now.

  “This is why I get paid the big bucks,” Jeff muttered. He turned to one of the three radio operators standing just behind him. “Tell the rear battery to adjust their elevation. We need them to fire into the city itself—and tell them to err on the side of ‘too far in’ rather than ‘too close to the walls.’”

  As the radio operator started transmitting, it occurred to Jeff that he probably shouldn’t have used a hoity-toity verb like “err.” Hopefully the radio operator knew what it meant and if the man at the receiving end didn’t, he could explain it to them.

  But he had more pressing issues to worry about. Von Mercy’s cavalry would be arriving soon and they’d have absolutely nothing to do except mill around. Men on horseback were ill-suited to storming over a wall that had been turned into a pile of stones. And good luck getting the snooty bastards to get off their horses and use their own legs.

  He turned to the second operator. “Tell Eddie Junker we need him to provide us with reconnaissance. Specifically, I need to know if the garrison is still defending the gate—what’s left of the gate—or if they’ve retreated into the city.”

  If the garrison had fled already, his life just got a lot easier. If they hadn’t…

  The first rounds fired by the rear battery started passing overhead. Jeff waited a few seconds until they started landing and he could hear the explosions.

  “And tell Eddie we also need him to let us know where the bombs are landing. And—never mind.” He’d been about to add the caution that Eddie needed to stay high enough or far enough out not to get in the way of the incoming bombs, but that was just twitchiness on his part. Eddie Junker was not a fool.

  Now he turned to the third and last radio operator. “Order the Hangman Regiment—the whole regiment; make sure that’s understood—to come forward. On the double. We’re going to need them to get us over the wall, thanks to that bastard Murphy. No, skip that last clause.”

  Now what? he wondered. Oh, yeah. Von Mercy. He’d also had three couriers standing by, as a second string to his bow. He now summoned one of them to his side.

  Pointing in the direction where the cavalry would be coming from, he ordered: “Go meet von Mercy and explain what’s happened. Tell him to get close but then wait for my instructions.” After the courier galloped off, it occurred to Jeff that his authority over Bohemian cavalry amounted to zilch. He’d just have to hope that von Mercy would have enough sense in the middle of a battle to let protocol take a rest. He seemed like a sensible fellow.

  The forward battery was still firing at the barbican and the gate—or rather, the piles of rocks and shattered wooden planks that had once been a barbican and a gate.

  That was just a waste of ammunition now, and he wanted to save as many of the RDX warheads as he could. He was sure they’d need them come the spring, since the general strategic plan—

  He barked a sarcastic laugh. At the moment, so-called “plans” were a subject of scorn and ridicule, as far as he was concerned.

  The radio operator who’d gotten in contact with the airplane pilot came up to him. “He wants to talk to you, sir.”

  Jeff took the mike. “What is it, Eddie?”

  “It would help if you explained what you’re planning to do.”

  Quickly, Jeff sketched his new plan. Which came down to:

  Blow the hell out of everything in this vicinity of the city with the mortars, and too bad for the civilians who got caught in the fire. They had to drive the garrison away from the walls here.

  Storm the walls—pile of rubble—with the infantry. As soon as they could clear a way in for them, the cavalry could do the rest.

  “Gotcha.” Eddie’s American slang had gotten impeccable. One of the side effects of being Denise’s squeeze. “I can tell you already that the garrison isn’t trying to hold what’s left of the gate. So far as I can see, none of them are within fifty yards of the walls anymore. Out.”

  That was good news. Jeff handed the mike back to the operator. As he did so, he wondered if Eddie had gotten his radio training from Jimmy Andersen, who’d always been a stickler. Most people would have said “over and out” to indicate they’d ended their transmission, but that was not actually proper protocol since what it really meant was “I’m done talking and it’s your turn except I’m hanging up.”

  For one of the many, many times since his friend’s death, Jeff felt a pang of anguish. The worst of it—what he knew he’d never get over no matter how long he lived—was the sheer happenstance
of the death. A bullet from nowhere, fired by a man who couldn’t see Jimmy and had no idea he was there, had taken his life. It was as if God had chosen Jimmy Andersen to be a personal illustration of chaos theory.

  But there was no time for this. Another courier had brought his horse up, knowing what had to come next—as did Jeff himself. He’d have to lead the infantry charge personally, under these chaotic and mixed-up circumstances.

  In and of itself, that didn’t bother him. What did annoy him was that he’d have to do it on horseback, just to make himself visible to the troops. Which, of course, also meant being visible to the enemy. Still worse was that he’d have to ride a damn horse without being able to concentrate on his horsemanship—which was mediocre to begin with. He was more likely to break his neck falling off the beast than he was to get hit by enemy fire.

  Nothing for it, though. He clambered aboard his mount.

  Then, made sure his sword was loose in its scabbard. He’d have to wave the thing around, too, which always made him feel stupid. But his men would expect him to do it. For some incomprehensible reason buried in the ancient and near-mindless reptilian brainstem, that seemed to make a difference to people under fire.

  Jeff thought he could already hear the thrumming sound made by two thousand cavalrymen in a canter, but he wasn’t sure. The mortar fire was like a thunderstorm up close. The bombs were raining down onto Poland’s most prestigious city, which had been there for centuries. It was also the site of the Commonwealth’s world-famous (Europe-famous, anyway) center of scholarship and learning, Jagiellonian University.

  “If Melissa Mailey finds out about this, I’m dead meat,” he muttered. “The fuss she raised when Harry Lefferts burned down one lousy thatch-roofed theater!”