1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  Mike shrugged. “That’s because Gustav Adolf stood his ground, used his artillery advantage—and seized Tilly’s artillery, to boot. None of which factors will come into play here. First—I don’t think you’ll disagree with me, General von Mercy—the top commander of the magnates’ army is not likely to be Gustav Adolf’s match. Speaking of which, who is their top commander? Do we know yet?”

  “No,” replied von Mercy. “It has to be one of three men, however—Mikołaj Potocki, Prince Stanisław Lubomirski, or the voivode of Kiev, Janusz Łohojski. Neither of the other two princes, Wiśniowiecki and Zasławski, are old enough and have enough experience. Of the three, I gauge Potocki to be the most capable. But not even he is the equal on a battlefield for Gustav Adolf. You spoke of two advantages. What is the other one?”

  “Our technology. We have two assets that the magnates not only don’t have but won’t be familiar with: Eddie Junker’s Dauntless and the APC. What I propose to do is use them as the knives to carve out one of the five magnate armies and crush it. Then, use that victory to start routing the others. Once the five armies start separating from each other, all of them are lost.”

  “All right,” said von Mercy. Then, remembering a quip in Amideutsch that was actually rather charming, he added. “But as always, the devil is in the details.”

  “Indeed so.” Mike leaned over the map and placed his finger on a small tributary of the Vistula west of the city. “This river—the Rudawa—?”

  “It’s more what you Americans call a ‘creek,’” said Krzysztof.

  Mike shook his head. “The size of the stream itself doesn’t matter. What are the banks like? Soggy? Solid? And if they’re solid, is there a road running alongside it?”

  Krzysztof and his brother glanced at each other.

  Lukasz provided the answer. “If I remember correctly—I was only there once—the ground is not soft and there’s…well, I wouldn’t call it a ‘road,’ exactly. Not what you Americans mean by the term.”

  “How wide is it?”

  Again, the Opalinski brothers glanced at each other. And, again, Lukasz provided the answer.

  Such as it was. “I don’t remember.”

  Mike studied the map for a moment. “All right. When is Eddie getting back from Prague?”

  The answer to that question was provided by Denise Beasley, who was sitting in a chair next to Minnie against one of the chamber’s walls. The two youngsters had parlayed their way into the meeting on the grounds that as Francisco Nasi’s agents they needed to be kept up to date on what was happening. Lest—this had been Denise’s contribution; she was always the more brazen of the two girls—Nasi decided he had better things to do with his airplane.

  “Eddie told me he’d be back sometime today. Pretty soon, I think.”

  “And we have radio contact with him, right?”

  Gretchen provided that answer. “Yes, we do. Why?”

  “Tell him to follow the Rudawa on his way in. We need to know how wide that road is—and whether there are any major obstructions on it.”

  “Why?” asked Gretchen.

  * * *

  After Mike explained his plan, Denise immediately raised an objection.

  “Hey! That’s my mom you’re talking about!”

  Mike shook his head. “Not exactly.” He turned to Gretchen again. “We also have radio contact with the APC, yes?”

  Near Kępno

  Poland

  Christin could only hear Jozef’s side of the radio conversation, but she heard enough to know that she was somehow involved. Her, and the kids.

  “What’s up?” she asked, once Jozef got off the radio.

  “Change of plans,” he said. “We’ll go to Breslau first, instead of heading directly for Kraków. We’ll let off all the children there, along with the women.”

  “Bullshit,” was her immediate reply. “No way am I getting off in Breslau. My daughter’s in Kraków, remember?”

  “Not you,” said Jozef, shaking his head.

  “Well, okay then. So long as I’m staying with the APC, we’re cool.”

  “Ah…not exactly.”

  Chapter 44

  Airstrip south of the Vistula

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “This is really such a not-good idea,” said Laura Goss, between tight lips. She didn’t quite have her teeth clenched, and she managed to keep her hands from clutching the wheel. If she ever needed a light touch as a pilot, this was the day.

  No, this was the evening.

  “It was an even worse idea for you to come along, boss,” she added.

  Riding in the front passenger seat of the State Department’s Dragonfly, Rebecca Abrabanel seemed quite composed. Of course, she always did. “Relax, Captain. You are doing quite well, I think.”

  She looked at the horizon. The sun had set several minutes ago and the ground below them was now only dimly visible. Still not quite dark, though, and ahead of them…

  “Look,” she said, pointing. “They’ve lit—are lighting—the landing lamps. You can see the runway clearly.”

  Laura refrained from snarling what she would have snarled to anyone else but Rebecca. Those aren’t ‘landing lamps,’ you dimwit! They’re not ‘lamps’ at all. Lamps have volts and watts. These are the medieval—so, Stone Age—equivalent. Planes don’t fly by instruments in the year 1637. They fly by fucking campfires.

  It was true that the fires provided Laura with a clearly marked landing strip. What they didn’t do was actually light the strip itself and make it clearly visible. She could see where it was, in two dimensions—length and width—but she’d still have to gauge the third dimension using nothing better than twilight.

  That third dimension being height. That was to say, the difference between landing a plane and crashing it.

  She’d made exactly two night landings since she graduated from flight training. Both of them had been necessary because unexpected bad weather had forced her to detour before she could land—and neither landing was at the airfield she’d been headed toward.

  Luckily, the Magdeburg airport had been in range on one occasion and the field at Grantville for the other. Those were the two airfields—the only airfields—which had a powerful enough source of electricity to use real spotlights to illuminate the landing strips. And even those two landings had been on the hairy side.

  At least on those occasions she’d had the rationale of necessity. Today’s—no, tonight’s—exercise in daredevil folly was the result of so-called strategic planning on the part of the woman sitting next to her and her husband.

  “We need to get a lot of supplies from Prague to Kraków,” Rebecca had explained that morning, just after dawn. “And we need to get them there this evening.”

  Quickly, Laura had done the calculations. From Breslau to Prague and back was two hundred miles, thereabouts. Refuel in Breslau. Then, fly to Kraków, which was somewhere between one hundred and sixty and one hundred and seventy miles to the east.

  “Piece of cake,” she said. “We can be there by midafternoon.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “I am afraid not. Once we reach Prague we will need to take out the four rear seats—well, two of them, anyway—and load the plane up with the supplies.”

  Laura shrugged. “That can’t take more than two hours. So, late afternoon. As long as it’s daylight, we’re fine.”

  Rebecca kept shaking her head. “I did not make myself clear. I did not say we had to get to Kraków by evening. I said we had to get them there this evening. That is to say, after sundown.”

  Then came the three words Laura was learning to detest:

  “Matters of state. It is still imperative that no one be able to see us landing at Kraków. So it must happen in the evening.”

  * * *

  Laura had been a bit mollified when she saw the supplies being loaded onto the Dragonfly. She’d never made the stuff herself, or even seen it made, but she knew w
hat went into making the sort of low-grade napalm available in the here and now.

  That also explained why they’d had to fly to Prague. Supplies of that nature weren’t available at most cities serviced by an airfield. Not readily, at least. Given Wallenstein, he’d probably had the stuff already stockpiled. He wouldn’t have been able to stockpile styrofoam as the thickening gel, true. This many years after the Ring of Fire, there was very little left of the styrofoam that Grantville had brought with it. Styrofoam made down-time was coming onto the market, but there wasn’t much of it and so far as she knew none of it had made its way to Bohemia yet.

  But it didn’t matter for their purposes at the moment. Soap made a good enough substitute. And at least this way, if Laura died crashing the plane, she’d die for a better reason than matters of state.

  * * *

  In the event, the landing went smoothly. To her surprise, Laura found that the small bonfires that marked the perimeter of the landing strip did provide enough light for her to be able to gauge the height as they descended.

  “Damn, I’m good,” she murmured, as she started taxiing to what she would have called a “hangar” except it was obviously too small for an airplane to fit inside—any airplane, much less a Dragonfly. Except for the Jupiters being made in the Netherlands, the Dragonfly was the biggest fixed-wing aircraft in the world.

  “So when are we leaving, boss? Just before the crack of dawn, I’m assuming, so we can get off without anyone seeing us.” She wasn’t worried about taking off in poor lighting. The nice thing about heading for the sky instead of coming down from it was that there was nothing up there to run into except an occasional bird. And they weren’t much of a risk because the airplanes in this day and age were so slow that any competent bird could get out of the way before they got hit.

  “No, we will be staying here indefinitely. I have decided to wait out the siege with Michael. If need be, we will both evacuate using the Dragonfly.”

  “So how do we keep out of sight? No way is this plane going to fit—”

  She broke off, seeing men approaching with nets in their hands. Obviously, they were planning to drape the nets over the plane and then disguise it with tree branches.

  “Oh, that is so cool. Just like in the movies.”

  Breslau (Wrocław), capital of Lower Silesia

  By the time they got to Breslau, Jozef had been behind the wheel most of the way; long enough that he was confident he could drive the APC. He’d developed “the hang of it,” to use the idiom favored by his instructor, Mark Ellis.

  Never mind that in the course of bringing the huge vehicle to a stop in the central square he almost knocked down the pillory positioned there. The thing was a medieval relic, anyway. He was quite sure no one would have missed it. Criminals, not at all; law-abiding citizens…maybe a little.

  After setting the parking brake, he turned to the man sitting next to him in the cab. That was Mark Ellis, who’d been coaching him on the ways and means of driving a big coal truck. “So, Mark, here you are. In Breslau, not Kraków—which is as close to your home as I can get you.”

  “And I thank you for that, believe me that I do. Now…what are the chances I can catch a plane ride back to the USE?”

  Jozef got a crooked little grin on his face. “Unless I badly miss my guess, this is now part of the USE. Or will be pretty soon. I gauge the chances that Gustav Adolf will relinquish Lower Silesia to be the same as the snowball in hell referred to in one of your American quips. I just hope the Swedish bastard leaves it at that and doesn’t gobble up still more Polish territory.”

  “You’re probably right. But I need to get to Grantville.”

  “There’s no way of knowing when a plane might be free—and if there’d be an empty seat on it, even if it were. What I recommend you do is wheedle your way into one of the merchant caravans that are now going back and forth to Dresden. Getting from there to Grantville should be easy.”

  “By seventeenth-century standards of ‘easy,’” Ellis muttered. “We’re not talking Greyhound bus here.”

  That idiom was not familiar to Jozef, but the meaning seemed clear enough. “Good luck,” he said. He and Ellis climbed down from the cab.

  “You left the keys in the ignition,” Mark chided him.

  “Yes, I know. And the chances that someone here will steal the APC for a joyride are…”

  “Okay, okay. Snowball’s chance in hell, I admit. Still, you shouldn’t get in the habit of it.”

  By then, Christin had emerged from the interior of the APC, with Tekla and Pawel in tow. The other children had also come out, along with the mother of three of them.

  Fiedor and Hriniec, the fathers of the four children, were gathered there also. They were just there to say farewell, since it had already been decided that the two hussars would be staying with the APC for the coming battle. There were no practical matters to discuss, since Jozef had already gotten lodgings at one of the city’s taverns for Fiedor’s wife and the children she was caring for.

  But Jozef didn’t pay much attention to them. He had his own family problem to deal with.

  “They insist,” Christin said. “They won’t stay here with the other children. One or the other of us has to take care of them. I vote for you.”

  Jozef looked down at the two children he’d come to informally adopt, both of whom were now looking up at him imploringly.

  “Tekla’s scared, Papa,” said Pawel. After a moment, he added: “I am, too.”

  “I’m going into a battle,” protested Jozef.

  “So am I,” said Christin.

  “Yes, but it’s different.” He pointed to the sky. “You’ll be up there, where they can’t shoot you.”

  Christin snorted derisively. “The hell they can’t. It’s called antiaircraft fire. ‘Ack-ack,’ if you’re a Brit.”

  Jozef glowered at her. “Allow me to clarify. The chances that they will hit you are almost nonexistent. As you know perfectly well. Whereas I—” He pointed to the APC they were standing next to “—will be in that great fat target. Which will be on the ground.”

  Christin was not impressed. “You need to clarify that statement as well. That great fat heavily armored target, is what I’m sure you meant to say.”

  She spread her hands. “Look, Jozef, the best I can do is fly them to Kraków. I’m pretty sure, as small as they are, that both Pawel and Tekla can fit into the Dauntless’ back seat. But then what? God only knows how long Eddie and I will be buzzing around up in the sky—or where we’re going to land at any given point in time, given what the weather’s like this time of year.” She pointed at the two children, who were now looking at her anxiously. “Which means I’d have to leave them with somebody.”

  The children’s response was predictable—and immediate. “Noooooo—!”

  Jozef threw up his hands with exasperation. Then, reconciled himself to the inevitable. Pawel and Tekla had been so traumatized by the murder of their family and the destruction of their village by mercenaries that they had a completely irrational but understandable need to stay in close proximity to either Jozef or Christin. Or “Papa” and “Mama,” as they now called them.

  “Fine,” he said. “But!” He leaned over and wagged his finger in front of the children’s faces. “You do exactly as I say. Is that understood?”

  Two little heads nodded with vigor. “Yes, Papa!” they said in unison.

  The relief in their faces was almost too much to bear. Jozef looked away before he started tearing up.

  Away—and then, at Christin. In some mysterious way, in some indefinable fashion, he knew that a decision had been made in that instant. Made by him, at least. He wasn’t sure yet about Christin. But the wry little smile on her face seemed promising.

  * * *

  After he and the two children climbed into the interior of the APC, Jozef took a moment to glare around at the dozen men gathered there.

  “Tekla and Pawel are staying with us,” he said. Pointing to th
e padded box in the middle of the interior, he added. “They’ll be in there. During the battle also.”

  He was braced for an argument, but the soldiers just grinned.

  “They’re good luck for us,” said one of them.

  “Better than any charm,” added another.

  * * *

  It didn’t take more than an hour to refuel the APC. Tata, who was running the city in Gretchen’s absence, was nothing if not well organized. The moment she discovered the APC had broken out of Poznań she’d gotten on the radio and made sure that a supply of diesel was airlifted from Dresden. There wasn’t a big stockpile of the fuel in that city—most of it was either in Magdeburg or at the Wietze oil fields—but Dresden was closer. Tata didn’t figure they would need that much, anyway. The coming battle at Kraków would either be won quickly or they’d have a lot worse problems than a shortage of diesel fuel.

  How had she done it, when all military planes except the one Belle in Poznań were supposed to be in Linz? Jozef had no idea. Knowing Tata, she’d probably bullied the emperor into approving it.

  He and Christin enjoyed a long and lingering kiss before he climbed into the cab and drove off. That kiss seemed to have a lot of promise in it as well.

  “You seem quite taken by that woman,” commented Walenty Tarnowski, tactless as always.

  You have no idea, Jozef thought. But he didn’t say it out loud, of course.

  * * *

  Eddie flew into Breslau the next morning. Christin was waiting for him, holding a small valise with the few belongings she still had on her person.

  To her surprise—and joy—Denise had come with him.

  She hadn’t seen her daughter in months. After she and Denise finished hugging each other, Denise announced that she was the plane’s bombardier.

  “Fat chance, honey,” was Christin’s response. “That’s my job. If you want to be part of the mission, that’s fine. But you ride in back and you get to pull the switch. Levers, rather. I’ll call the shots.”

  “That’s not fair,” complained Denise.

  Christin smiled and shoved the valise into her daughter’s arms. “Oh, it gets worse. You have to hold this thing in your lap until we land in Kraków.”