1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “Hey!”

  Christin held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “I’ve got to be unencumbered in case Eddie has a sudden heart attack and I have to take the controls. I’m also the co-pilot.”

  “Eddie’s not gonna have a heart attack. For Chrissake, he’s only twenty-four years old. And how are you the ‘copilot’ when you’ve never flown a plane once in your life?”

  “We have to rise to these challenges.”

  “Mom!”

  Chapter 45

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “Hobelar,” Jeff explained. “H-O-B-E-L-A-R.”

  “You made that up,” Mike Stearns said accusingly. “I’ve never heard of a ‘hobelar’—and I’m the major general here, remember? Not to mention that I’ve been reading up on military matters pretty much nonstop since Gustav Adolf made me a general.”

  Jeff grinned in a manner that had to be a gross violation of military protocol when bestowed upon a major general by a measly colonel.

  “I don’t doubt it, sir,” said Jeff. “But here’s what else I don’t doubt is true: You misspent your youth in prizefighting. I misspent mine playing Dungeons and Dragons. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons—and I was always the Dungeon Master. I practically had the Dungeon Master’s Manual memorized. It covers hobelars pretty early on; in the section on ‘Hirelings,’ if I remember right.”

  Mike shook his head. “So how is a ‘hobelar’ any different from a dragoon?”

  “Well…it’s admittedly a gray area. But dragoons are expected to be able to do some fighting on horseback, although they’re not as skilled that way as cavalrymen are. They carry sabers, for instance. A hobelar, on the other hand, is a pure and simple infantryman—except he knows how to ride a horse, and how to handle a packhorse. Even then, his horse normally just walks or trots. Occasionally, he might break into a canter. A full-out charge—a gallop—only happens if he screws up and loses control of the horse.”

  Mike took off his hat and used the back of his sleeve to wipe the sweat off his brow. As usual, the headquarters were kept too hot for his comfort by a huge fire in the fireplace.

  Thankfully, on this occasion the only people in the headquarters besides Jeff were a couple of soldiers standing guard at the entrance. They were low enough in the pecking order that Mike figured he could bend military protocol since he knew damn well Jeff didn’t care.

  “All right, I get it. The one and only point is to provide infantry with more mobility. But do we have enough horses for more than a handful of them?”

  “We’re in better shape than you might think,” Jeff answered. “These don’t need to be warhorses. Regular plain-vanilla draft horses will do well enough for the purpose.”

  “So how many of these hobblers—”

  “Hobelars,” Jeff said sternly. “Sir.”

  “—whatevers can we put together?”

  “I figure we can turn all our mortar crews into hobelars.”

  Mike’s interest immediately spiked. “All of them? What about the mortars themselves?”

  “Them, too, sir. Each mortar weighs about two hundred pounds, no more than a big man.”

  “Ammunition?”

  “Yes, sir. Not all of it, but at least half of what we’ve got. That’ll be enough for three hundred rounds, thereabouts.”

  “That wouldn’t leave us much if we get into an artillery duel with the siege guns,” Mike pointed out.

  Jeff shrugged. “We’re planning to hit them right off. If that succeeds, there won’t be an artillery duel because they won’t have any heavy artillery left. If it doesn’t—” He shrugged again. “Unless the enemy commanders are completely incompetent, there wouldn’t be a long artillery duel anyway. By now, they have to have gotten word from the troops who fled the city about what our mortars are capable of. So they’ll hold back when they come up and start to build siege works. Trenches, covered bunkers for their big guns, the whole nine yards. As you’ve kept pointing out, that’s a fight we’re bound to lose, sooner or later. If we had unlimited ammunition for the mortars…”

  Mike waved his hand. “Yeah, and if cows could fly we’d have the world’s most spectacular cavalry. You make do with what you’ve got. Okay, Jeff, we’ll go with your plan. If nothing else—”

  He broke off there. The jest he’d been about to make—if nothing else, you’ll have bragging rights with the D&D crowd—would have been tasteless to the point of cruelty. Jeff Higgins had been part of a small D&D group. Himself, Eddie Cantrell, Larry Wild and Jimmy Andersen—half of whom were now dead.

  Some of what he’d been about to say must have seeped through, since Jeff’s expression became a bit somber. “You haven’t heard any news about Eddie lately, have you?”

  Mike shook his head. “Nothing recent. He’s still in the Caribbean, doing…whatever he’s doing.”

  “Putting himself in harm’s way,” said Jeff. His face lightened up, then. “But what the hell, sir, so are you and so am I. Life is what it is.”

  Right bank of the Bialucha River

  About two miles north of Kraków

  “We’ll keep the siege guns half a mile from the walls, for a start,” said Janusz Łohojski. From the rise they were all standing on, perhaps a mile away, they could see the walls of Kraków as well as the tower of the town hall and the Cloth Hall. The voivode of Kiev pointed to another rise off to their right and about halfway between the city and where they were now standing. “There, I think.”

  Stanisław Lubomirski frowned. “Why so far away? The guns will reach into the city, certainly. But we want to bring down the walls. To do that we need to be within a quarter of a mile.”

  Łohojski started to scowl, but managed to keep the expression off his face. It was a given that all his fellow magnates except (hopefully) young Prince Zasławski would quarrel with him. Łohojski had known that from the moment he agreed to be the top commander of their assembled forces. Still, he found Lubomirski particularly annoying. The voivode of Ruthenia argued about everything, it seemed.

  He managed not to snarl the answer. “Until I—we—have some experience with them ourselves, I think we need to be wary of the capabilities of the rebels’ mortars—which are probably being employed by USE forces who are surreptitiously aiding the traitors.”

  “Mortars!” jibed Lubomirski. “The stupid things are as inaccurate as they are hard to move.”

  Łohojski would have agreed with him, if they were dealing with the sort of mortars they were accustomed to. But whether or not the astonishing rate of fire reported by the soldiers who had escaped the seizure of Kraków was accurate—Łohojski was skeptical, himself; defeated troops always exaggerated the capabilities of the enemy—the one thing that seemed clearly established was that they were firing explosive shells. If the reports on their rate of fire were even half-true, that could make them effective against exposed troops, which was not true of the traditional type of mortars he and his fellows were familiar with.

  They were also, as Lubomirski said, heavy bastards. Łohojski had muscled them around himself, in his youth.

  “There’s no reason not to be cautious,” he said. “Time is on our side, not the rebels. That so-called konfederacja of theirs is more ramshackle than usual, according to all accounts. At least half of them seem to be made up of foreign units—Czechs as well as Germans, mixed in with Poles and Cossacks. They’ll lose whatever support they have each day the siege goes on. Whereas we…”

  Prince Wiśniowiecki finished the thought for him. The young man didn’t have much military experience but he was an acute politician.

  “Whereas for us,” he said, “every day the siege goes on will garner us more support in the Sejm. Of course, we can’t let anyone think we’re deliberately stalling.”

  “We’re not going to be deliberately stalling,” said Łohojski. Again, he fought to keep a snarl out of his voice. He sometimes found Wiśniowiecki as annoying as Lubomirski. “I am not e
xposing our troops to possible danger when there’s no need for it.”

  He pointed to the rise in the distance. “We will start there, and then expand our siege works as needed.”

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  Standing by the door inside the kitchen in the Cloth Hall that Denise Beasley had turned into a bomb-making facility, Christin George had her arms crossed over her chest and was contemplating her daughter at work. Denise was leaning over a cauldron, stirring the diesel fuel and soap with a ladle. As she worked, she began chanting a tune of sorts.

  “Double, double toil and trouble;

  Fire burn and caldron bubble.”

  “Sometimes, my kid’s a little scary,” Christin said to Laura Goss. The pilot was standing next to her, a little further away from the door.

  Laura chuckled. “C’mon, Christin. Kids always like to play with chemicals. Hell, me and my brother Kevin once blew up our bathroom. Well, the sink, anyway.”

  “Fillet of a fenny snake,

  In the caldron boil and bake;”

  “Doing what?” asked Christin.

  “Kevin said we were making rocket fuel. I didn’t know if he was right or not—still don’t—on account of I was nine years old at the time. The only thing I remember about it except boom! was racing out of the bathroom and that sugar was one of the ingredients.”

  “Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat and tongue of dog,”

  Christin and Laura had been friends for some time now, despite a ten-year spread in age and having nothing in common except both being lapsed Catholics. The friendship had developed because Hal Smith had employed Buster Beasley once, when he needed some welding done at his aircraft facility. Having nothing else to do that day, Christin had accompanied him. Getting bored after a while, she wandered into the front office where she found Laura pecking away at a typewriter. Hal had hired her not long after the Ring of Fire as his office manager and gofer. Mostly as a gofer, since her secretarial skills were minimal.

  “You type even worse than I do,” Christin had commented, after watching Laura for a minute or so.

  Without looking up, Laura had grinned and replied: “So far as I know, I type worse than anybody. I’m thinking of taking a shot at a Guinness world record.”

  So had their friendship begun. Since marrying Buster, Christin had stopped her former partying habits, but she appreciated Laura’s skill at the pastime and Laura enjoyed having a connoisseur to listen to her bragging.

  “Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,

  Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,”

  “Hey, Eddie!” Denise called out, without looking up from the cauldron. “I need more soap.”

  “For a charm of powerful trouble,

  Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.”

  Half a minute later, Eddie came into the kitchen and handed Denise a little sack full of what Christin assumed was soap of some kind. Her daughter started pouring it slowly into the mix.

  “Double, double toil and trouble;

  Fire burn and caldron bubble.”

  His chore done, Eddie came over to Christin and Laura.

  “How soon, do you figure?” asked Christin.

  “More like what Mike figures, even if he keeps insisting he’s not calling the shots.”

  Laura snorted. “Mike Stearns will stop calling shots when pigs fly.”

  “Which is what we were just speaking about,” said Christin. “Flying, I mean, not pigs. How soon?” she repeated.

  “Mike says the battle will start the day after tomorrow.” Eddie nodded toward Denise. “She’ll have enough bombs ready by then. Crack of dawn, Mike says. As soon as I can see well enough to get the plane off the ground and you can see the ground well enough to tell Little Miss Hellfire when to pull the levers and drop the bombs.”

  All three of them now turned back to contemplate Little Miss Hellfire at her work.

  “You know what the scariest thing is?” Christin mused. “Denise had that whole chant memorized—every line of it—by the time she was eight years old. She got so interested she even read the rest of the play.”

  Laura’s eyes widened. “She read Shakespeare’s Macbeth when she was eight?”

  Christin nodded.

  “Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

  Then the charm is firm and good.”

  “Jesus!” exclaimed Laura. “That’s downright terrifying.”

  The confluence of the Danube and the Traun

  A few miles southeast of Linz

  Hoping he might be willing to share some news, Julie Sims took her daughter out to visit Gustav Adolf at his forward headquarters on the triangle of land formed by the confluence of the Traun and Danube rivers. That was a gross violation of political and military protocol, looked at from most people’s perspective. But Julie had her own view of the matter, at least when it involved the king of Sweden.

  By now, she had the emperor’s aides and adjutants reconciled to reality—or just browbeaten—so they made no objection when she came up onto the observation platform that Gustav Adolf had had built next to the two ten-inch naval rifles that guarded the confluence.

  It probably helped that she had Alexi in tow. The girl had recently celebrated her fourth birthday and was of an age when children were irresistibly appealing to almost everybody. Some of the adjutants even smiled.

  As did Gustav Adolf, when he saw Julie coming. The smile widened when his gaze moved down to look at Alexi.

  “It’s such a joy to watch them grow,” he commented, when mother and daughter reached his side.

  Julie just nodded. The only verbal response she could think to make would have been…undiplomatic. How would you know, o mighty king? You probably spent as much time with Kristina when she was this age as Royal Custom requires. Maybe one day a month. Tops.

  “Any news from Kraków?” she asked.

  The emperor shook his head. “Nothing beyond a veiled hint that the battle will begin the day after tomorrow.”

  Julie had to pull Alexi back a bit. The child had been reaching to play with the sword Gustav Adolf had scabbarded at his hip. “My husband’s grousing that you should have assigned him to serve the Hangman Regiment as its cavalry force. He says those Slovenians they’ve got won’t know one end of a horse from the other.”

  Gustav Adolf grinned. “Spoken like a true Scotsman. He’s just bored with siege duty. Which, I will grant you, is as boring as watching paint dry, for a cavalryman.”

  He looked down at her. “And you?”

  She knew what he meant. “I wish I were there, too.” She lifted Alexi’s little hand a few inches. “But I’ve got her to think about.”

  “You had her to think about when you flew up to meet the Turks in aerial combat. You still went.”

  Julie shook her head. “That was different. I wasn’t exactly indispensable, but I was the best person for the job. At Kraków, I’d just be a civilian in the way.”

  They fell silent for a moment. Then, Gustav Adolf smiled again. “What was that so-very-appropriate remark by that up-time general of yours? The one with the peculiar middle name.”

  “William Tecumseh Sherman. ‘War is hell,’ he said. Boy, did he have that right.”

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “You don’t have to go, Jakub,” said Judy Wendell. “You’re not a soldier. Nobody thinks you are and nobody expects you to be.”

  His response was as predictable as the sunrise.

  “No, I do. I cannot help lead a revolution if I am not prepared to share the risks.”

  “You said yourself you’re the worst shot in the world.”

  Jakub lifted himself to a sitting position in the bed. “However, I am told by knowledgeable people that I would be bested by Secretary Abrabanel. I, at least, can hit the side of a barn.”

  Judy couldn’t help but smile a little. “Better’n Becky
can do, by all accounts.”

  She looked up at him for a few seconds. “Please come back to me,” she said, knowing just how pointless it was to put that wish into words.

  “We still have a full day before it becomes an issue,” said Jakub.

  Judy’s smile this time was a wide one. “So let’s not waste it, then.”

  Chapter 46

  Airstrip south of the Vistula

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “And here we go,” said Eddie, as the Dauntless lifted from the ground, heading east.

  From the rear seat, Denise said: “This has got to be either the weirdest or the coolest family outing ever.” She paused a moment, and added: “I’m using the term ‘family’ with what you call poetic license, you understand.”

  In the front passenger seat, Christin smiled but didn’t say anything. The stronger Denise’s attachment became to Eddie, the more resistant and prickly she got to any suggestion that marriage might be in the offing. Her mother found it quite amusing, because she recognized the pattern. That was exactly how Christin herself had reacted when her relationship with Buster started getting really serious.

  Thankfully, Eddie was handling the situation exactly the way Buster had—calmly, and with no effort to pressure or cajole the young woman involved.

  Eddie reached the cruising altitude he’d decided upon—which was quite low; not more than five hundred feet off the ground—and leveled off. Meanwhile, Christin pondered the way she was now reacting to Jozef. Was she following the same pattern again?

  She didn’t think so. Jozef was the one who seemed nervous and twitchy. She was just…