1635: The Eastern Front Read online

  He might well have been able to do so, had God not intervened and blessed Poland with such a tremendous storm.

  But even this storm would not last for more than another day, possibly two. It was not the Deluge, after all. As slowly as his cavalry was moving, by the time Koniecpolski reached the USE First Division and could grapple with it in battle, it would have regrouped itself. Knyphausen was a competent general.

  Koniecpolski had no intention of attacking a USE infantry division with hussars alone, unless it was spread out. Which it would no longer be—and to make things still worse, the weather would probably have cleared by then.

  He had only two options left. Retreat back to Poznań—or try to find Gustav Adolf himself. His forces were more than a match for the Swedish units his opponent had at his immediate disposal. If he could fight a battle before the weather cleared . . .

  One of his adjutants came into the command tent. "We just got a radio report. Scouts have spotted the Swede. The king himself, that is. He's marching south and his units have gotten spread out a little."

  "How far away is he?" the grand hetman asked sharply.

  "Ten miles, maybe twelve."

  For the first time that day, Koniecpolski smiled. "Mobilize the men. Immediately. We're going to meet the bastard."

  After the aide left, Koniecpolski made a mental note to himself. As soon as the war was over, he'd see to it that his nephew was legitimized. No one had done as much to aid the cause of Poland as Jozef Wojtowicz. In addition to his weather reports that had guided the grand hetman's tactics, he'd been the one who obtained the radios for Koniecpolski's army, that had proven so invaluable in the campaign.

  Koniecpolski was unusual among hetman for the importance he attached to building an extensive espionage network. An army without such was half-blind, in his opinion. Once again, he'd been proven right.

  Wismar, Germany, on the Baltic coast

  "All good things come to an end," murmured Jozef Wojtowicz. He turned away from the window and quickly gave the room a final inspection to see if he was leaving anything incriminating behind. It was time to go.

  As he'd always done before meeting the American radio operator in the tavern, he'd arrived in the area two hours early and gone to the hotel room he'd rented for the purpose of observing the tavern before he entered. The room was on the third floor and its windows opened onto the same street where the tavern was located, a short distance away.

  He had no fear of arousing suspicion. Wismar now had a lot of transient traffic, which had inevitably produced the sort of hotel whose managers asked no questions—didn't even think of the questions, in fact—so long as the room was paid for. Since the Danish fleet had been repelled here two years earlier, Wismar had become a much larger town than it had been before. The air force base was no longer very active, but the navy had built a base of its own here. Wismar's harbor was deep enough to handle fairly large ships. The navy's main base on the Baltic remained at Luebeck, but they found Wismar convenient for many purposes. They'd improved the harbor, too, which had naturally drawn commercial enterprises to the port city as well.

  Jozef's German was almost without accent in the most common dialect spoken along the Baltic, but it hardly mattered since the lingua franca in Wismar was the recently arisen Amideutsch. That bastard language, basically German with stripped down English conjugations and a lot of borrowed English terms, was so new that it had no standard pronunciation and probably wouldn't for many years. No one "spoke it like a native," so Jozef didn't stand out at all.

  For that matter, even if he'd spoken Polish he probably would have gone unnoticed. Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century was still a place where nationalism was just beginning to develop. War was traditionally viewed as a matter between dynasties, not peoples. Trade went on between countries officially at war with hardly a pause or a stumble. Not more than two blocks from the tavern where Jozef got his weather reports from Sergeant Trevor Morton was a tavern that catered mostly to Polish fishermen. Two blocks from there, toward the west, was another tavern where Polish was also the only language normally spoken. That tavern was what the Americans called "high end," its clientele being mostly Polish grain dealers.

  Jozef had never been worried that he'd be spotted as a "hostile alien." Still, he'd learned early on in his career as Koniecpolski's chief espionage agent in the USE that caution was always a virtue for a spy. So, the day after he'd made his arrangement with the American sergeant, he'd rented this room so that he could reconnoiter the tavern before entering it. He rented the room on a monthly basis rather than a weekly or a daily one, but that was so common for this hotel that the managers thought nothing of it—so long as he paid the rent on time. But one of the advantages of being a spy for the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was that Stanislaw Koniecpolski was immensely wealthy and not given to stinginess.

  Jozef glanced out the window a last time. Two more uniformed policemen were just entering the tavern. As with the four who'd preceded them a few minutes earlier, these were USE Navy military police, not the city's constabulary. They were probably on loan to the air force, whose base here was too small to maintain its own police force.

  Too bad for Morton, of course. But the man was so stupid that the only thing that really surprised Wojtowicz was that he hadn't been caught sooner. Luckily for Poland, the American sergeant was a sullen sort of man. He had as few friends as he did brains, so he hadn't let anything slip sooner simply because he talked to few people about anything and didn't talk to them for very long.

  There was nothing in the room to worry about. There'd never been much anyway, because Jozef never slept here. For that purpose, he had a room in a private boarding house on the outskirts of the city. What little he had in the way of personal possessions was kept there.

  He was tempted to retrieve those few belongings but that would be foolish. It was unlikely that any suspicion had been aroused at the boarding house. The owner was an elderly woman so hard of hearing she was almost deaf, and so nearsighted she carried a magnifying glass with her at all times. Whether as a result of those ailments or her innate nature, she was also one of the most incurious people Jozef had ever met. Which made her a perfect landlady for his purposes, of course.

  No, Wojtowicz was almost certain that the USE authorities had been alerted by some misstep on the part of Morton, not Jozef himself. And they could torture the sergeant for eternity without learning where Jozef was living, because he'd never told him.

  Still, he might be missing something. It was best simply to leave Wismar immediately, abandoning the possessions he had at the boarding room. Nothing there had any sentimental value; it was just practical stuff.

  Jozef passed through the door and locked it behind him. He'd leave the key with the concierge on the way out of the hotel, as he always did. Excessive caution led merely to annoyance. Too little caution could lead to far worse places.

  Such as the one Sergeant Morton was probably going to inhabit for the rest of his life. Assuming that life didn't end shortly at the end of a hangman's noose or in front of a firing squad.

  Jozef's guess, though, was that the USE authorities would be satisfied with a life sentence. They might even be satisfied with the minimum sentence under USE law of twenty years for treason. Anyone who interrogated the sergeant would soon realize the man was every bit as dumb as he seemed. Jozef was quite certain that at no time during his dealings with Morton had it even occurred to the radio operator that the information he was passing on was for any purpose except the one he'd been told—improving the odds for grain speculators.

  Sadly for Morton, so far as Jozef knew, the laws of the USE did not allow for a plea of innocent on account of imbecility. The laws of Poland certainly didn't, despite the astonishing concentration of imbeciles in its government.

  Wojtowicz had never wished any personal ill on the American sergeant, but he'd always thought this day would probably come. So be it. His nation had not invaded the USE, af
ter all. Poland was rather the victim of foreign aggression. If one of the aggressor's minor minions wound up dangling at the end of a rope, the nephew of the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania would lose no sleep over the matter.

  Chapter 35

  Southwest of the Wolsztynr

  Mike Stearns was irritated but trying not to show it. The last few days had put everyone's nerves on edge. As the crow flies, the distance from Zielona Góra to the town of Wolsztyn was about twenty-five miles. In good weather and with decent roads, an army could march that distance in a day and a half, two days at the outside. But they weren't crows, and the few roads had been in terrible condition. It had taken them three days to get to the town. Mike had pushed the last day's march into the evening, so they'd be able to get a couple of miles north of Wolsztyn. But from here, they still had maybe ten miles to go before they reached Gustav Adolf and his Swedish forces. Mike was going to try to cover that distance by late afternoon, but it was more likely that they wouldn't make until the following day.

  At that, they were doing better than the First or Second Divisions, even though they'd had to come a longer way. Knyphausen and the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg had discovered—too late to do anything about it—that the area west of the Obra river in their vicinity had been turned into what almost amounted to a swamp. They were lucky if they moved their divisions four miles in a day.

  They weren't going to be able to help Gustav Adolf in his coming battle. None of the USE divisions were. The way things looked now, the Third Division would be the first to arrive, but unless Koniecpolski decided not to launch an attack—and Mike could see no reason he would do so—they wouldn't get to Lake Bledno until after the battle was over.

  According to the radio reports Mike had gotten, the king of Sweden had taken positions just south of the town of Zbąszyń, on the northeast shore of Lake Bledno. The weather had finally cleared and the planes had been back in the sky for the last two days, so they'd known where Koniecpolski's forces were. They'd arrived in Zbąszyń the night before and would surely be attacking the Swedes right about . . .

  Now, Mike figured.

  It was amazing how rapidly the grand hetman had gotten to Zbąszyń. Apparently, Koniecpolski had left his infantry and heavy artillery in Poznań and come south with just his hussars and light artillery. But that still gave him a third again as many men as the king of Sweden had with him. Maybe half again as many. Troop counts made from aircraft were only approximations.

  True, all of the Swedish troops were now armed with SRG rifled muskets firing Minié balls. Some of their units, in fact, had copies of the French Cardinal breechloader that USE armories were now making. (It seemed fair enough to swipe the French design, seeing that they'd swiped it from the up-time Sharps rifle.)

  The problem was that the officers and noncoms of Gustav Adolf's Swedish army were mostly old school veterans, set in their ways and slow to adjust to the new realities produced by the SRGs. That was quite unlike the situation in the USE Army, which had been created almost from scratch over the past two years. Some of the officers were hidebound, yes; but almost all of the sergeants were young men who'd recently volunteered. They didn't have any bad habits to get rid of.

  The fact that Jeff Higgins had taken it upon himself to pester the division's commanding general with a trivial issue he should have taken up with the quartermasters was making Mike even more irritated. Captain David Blodger, the up-time quartermaster who handled technical supplies and material, could have done Jeff a lot more good than Mike.

  But since he was still feeling a little guilty over the way he'd handled Jeff at Zielona Góra, Mike did his best not to let his aggravation show. They were taking a brief halt in the march anyway, to let the units in the rear close up the column, so he didn't really have anything pressing at the moment. A "forced march" didn't actually mean soldiers were constantly marching, despite the term itself.

  "I don't understand why you brought this problem to me, Colonel Higgins." Mike leaned over in his saddle and looked down at the object in Jeff's hand, a radio transmitter and receiver that had obviously seen better days. At a guess, a horse had stepped on it. "Captain Blodger can get your regiment a replacement radio, I'm sure."

  Jeff shook his head. "I guess I didn't make myself clear, sir. This isn't one of the regiment's radios."

  Mike was finding it harder and harder not to snarl at Higgins. What was he? A major general doubling as the division's lost and found department?

  "Not that I see why you care, but if you're that concerned about it—again, see Blodger. He can find out which regiment lost the damn thing and get—"

  "Sir! Excuse me, sir, I'm still not making myself clear. This radio doesn't belong to anybody in this division. Anybody in the whole USE Army, in fact."

  Mike stared at the radio again. It looked like one of the division's radios.

  Well . . . ​sort of. In a way. The same way any such radio looks about the same as its equivalent to someone who doesn't know much about radios and doesn't really care about the differences anyway so long as the thing works.

  In short, someone like Mike Stearns.

  "It's not?"

  "No, sir. I didn't think I recognized it, but just to be sure I checked with Jimmy Andersen. He says this is a knock-off made in Hamburg of one of the models that the army uses. He says we've never used this brand because the manufacturer had fly-by-night financing and went bankrupt after making not more than a few dozen of them. Jimmy says the whole lot was bought at an auction in Hamburg by somebody in Amsterdam. Well, by an agent for somebody in Amsterdam who was probably serving as an agent for somebody else. You know how it is."

  Mike felt his face stiffen. He was probably going pale, too. "Where did you find this?" he asked.

  "I just spotted it this morning, by accident, when I was passing by one of the soldiers who had it stuck in his pack. When I asked him, he said he'd found it in an alley behind one of the houses in Zielona Góra. He figures a horse stepped on it and broke it. But he liked it as a war souvenir. It's different."

  "Oh, Jesus," Mike whispered. "It's a Polish radio. It's got to be."

  Jeff nodded. "That's what I'm thinking. And it's why I brought it to you. I got to thinking about it and it occurred to me I've never heard anyone mention anything about the Poles having radios."

  "That's because we didn't know they did—and, like idiots, blithely assumed they couldn't. Being dumb Polacks, like they are."

  Jeff chuckled. West Virginia had enough people with Polish ancestry to have a slew of Polack jokes. Nothing like Chicago or Milwaukee, of course.

  "How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb?" he said.

  "It's not funny, Colonel. It really isn't."

  Jeff stared at him. Then, his face got stiff too. "Oh, hell. You mean we really never considered that they might have radio communication?"

  "No, Colonel, we didn't. It goes a long way toward explaining how and why Koniecpolski's been able to maneuver his forces so well, doesn't it?"

  Mike dismounted. As they always did whenever a halt was called, Jimmy Andersen and his three assistants had quickly set up a little tent for the radio so he could get whatever might be the latest reports or instructions. Mike walked over, opened the flap of the tent and passed through.

  Jeff dismounted and came after him, still carrying the radio. He didn't really have a good reason to do so, since the tent was so small there wouldn't be room for him anyway. He just liked to get off a horse any excuse he got.

  A minute later, Mike came out.

  As the march was about to resume, Jimmy Andersen came out of the tent and approached the division's commanding general. Behind him, his assistants began taking down the tent and packing away the radio equipment. Colonel Higgins had already left to rejoin his regiment.

  Andersen looked up at Mike, back in his saddle. "Bad news, sir. I just got a weather report. It looks like there's another storm coming. It'll probably hit us around noon today."

/>   Mike stared down at him, then stared off to the west. Huge storm clouds covered the sky and were obviously headed their way.

  He felt like saying No shit, Sherlock. But that would probably be beneath the dignity of a major general and it would certainly hurt Andersen's feelings.

  You always had to make allowances for tech people. Their skills were so useful that you just had to accept the fact that if someone like Jimmy Andersen got struck by lightning, the first thing he'd do if he survived was get on the radio to find out if there were thunderstorms in the area. In those halcyon days before the Ring of Fire, of course, he would have gone online to find out.

  Schwerin, capital of Mecklenburg Province

  United States of Europe

  Jozef Wojtowicz had set up a safe house for himself in Schwerin before he'd gone to Wismar. He thought he could lie in hiding here until whatever manhunt was launched for him exhausted its energies.

  He assumed that the military police who interrogated Morton would deduce soon enough that the agent who'd suborned him was either Polish or working for Poland. Who else would have taken the risk? Any person familiar with the Baltic grain trade would know that the pretext he'd used was preposterous. If there were no USE interrogators with that knowledge in Wismar, all they had to do was walk over to Wieczorek's tavern and ask the Polish grain dealers who habituated the place.

  Where would they look for this Polish agent, then?

  Magdeburg, of course—but they really wouldn't expect him to hide there. The capital city's CoC was too pervasive, too well organized. A stranger, especially a foreigner, ran a greater risk of being noticed there than anywhere else.