1634: The Baltic War

Chapter 41

The mouth of the Elbe

"Here they come!"

Anatole du Bouvard looked up sharply at the lookout's shout, and his stomach tightened. Despite everything, he'd rather hoped this moment would never come. Of course, what he'd hoped and what he'd expected had been two quite different things.

He dumped the cup of hot broth he'd been drinking onto the ground beside the fire, tossed the cup to the cook, and headed for the lookout's position on the river bank.

"There," the lookout said, pointing upstream, and du Bouvard grimaced.

"I see them," he acknowledged.

He gazed at the oncoming shapes for several seconds, then inhaled deeply and looked over his shoulder.

"Get them ready, Leandre," he called gruffly.

Leandre Olier, du Bouvard's second-in-command, waved in acknowledgment and turned his attention to the two men who had "volunteered" for their part in this mission.

For several seconds, du Bouvard watched those volunteers donning the equipment from the future for which the cardinal's agents had paid so dearly. Then he turned back to the river and shook his head.

Madness, he thought. This entire idea is madness.

Not that he'd felt any particular inclination to point that out when he received his orders. The fact that they'd come directly from Richelieu himself had been more than sufficient to depress any foolish temptation in that direction. Still…

It wasn't the concept itself he objected to. That had an undeniable elegance, especially given what the Americans had done to the League of Ostend's fleet off Luebeck. And using equipment purchased from some of the arrogant "up-timers" themselves only added to the notion's appeal. But however du Bouvard might feel about that, there were certain practical objections which the cardinal appeared to have failed to consider.

More likely, he considered them and simply decided to go ahead, anyway. After all, what does he lose if we fail? The cardinal's calculations were seldom encumbered by any preoccupation with the survival of his tools. On the other hand, the rewards for those tools could be substantial when-and if-they succeeded.

He refocused his attention on his targets. The big ships, the "ironclads" and the "timberclads," moved steadily downstream towards him, following behind two much smaller vessels. Those would be the "motorboats" the spies had reported, and he frowned at the way they wove back and forth, sweeping their bigger consorts' line of advance. There were several musket-armed infantry (at least, he hoped they were musketeers and not equipped with some of the deadly up-time firearms) in each of them, and they appeared to be unpleasantly alert.

Well, there was nothing he could do about that, and he returned his attention to the rest of the American fleet.

The "ironclads" were impressive. They moved smoothly, without any fuss or bother, and despite their slab-sided appearance, they possessed a certain low-slung elegance. The three stubbier vessels following behind them-the "timberclads"-were another matter. They were much higher in proportion to their length, with massive superstructures dominating their after ends, and they looked undeniably clumsier.

That would be the "paddle wheels," he thought, looking at the high, straight-sided housings. The spies' reports had made it abundantly clear that the timberclads and ironclads had different means of movement. Personally, du Bouvard found it much easier to visualize how the "paddle wheels" must work. After all, he'd seen plenty of waterwheels in his time, and the principle was obviously the same, even if the mechanics were reversed. This notion of ships that moved by squirting water out of their asses, though… that he found difficult to wrap his mind around.

Also unlike the ironclads, the timberclads' tall smokestacks belched dense, black smoke that was visible for miles. It should have made them look even more threatening, like some sort of smoke- and fire-breathing dragons, but it didn't work that way. Instead, the very lack of any visible, dramatic signs of what made them move only made the ironclads more ominous by comparison.

Someone stepped up beside him, and he glanced to his right.

"Well?" he said.

"They're ready," Olier told him with a grunt. The taciturn Breton's eyes were on the oncoming vessels, and he shook his head. "Not that I think it's going to do much good," he added.

"Only one way to find out," du Bouvard replied.

"They're moving faster than we expected," Olier observed, and du Bouvard chuckled sourly.

"In that case, we'd better get them started," he said.

"I'll see to it."

Olier started back, and du Bouvard returned his attention to the river.

Leandre had a point, he thought. Those ships were moving at least twice as rapidly as they'd anticipated, which only made this entire operation even more problematical. As du Bouvard had attempted to point out to his superiors, when the Americans attacked the League fleet in the Trave River below Luebeck, its ships had been anchored, motionless. And they'd launched the attack under cover of night. And the Trave was a much smaller river than the Elbe.

None of those conditions, unfortunately, applied at the moment.

The odds of any swimmer, even one equipped with the Americans' "scuba gear," managing to place an explosive charge on a vessel moving through the water at a substantial rate of speed, in daylight, struck du Bouvard as remote, to say the very least. Adding in the frigid temperature of the water, and its inevitable effect on those same swimmers, didn't improve them. But the cavalry forces that had accompanied the American vessels as far as Hamburg had precluded any possibility of getting close enough to attempt an attack above the city. And now that the ironclads and timberclads were past Hamburg, it was extraordinarily unlikely that they were going to obligingly anchor anywhere else in the river. So, if du Bouvard was going to attempt this lunacy at all, this was the best chance he was going to be able to arrange.

Piss-poor as it might be.

Olier and the two divers made their way down to the river bank, and du Bouvard shook his head as he watched. The cardinal's agents had been unable to acquire one of the "wetsuits" the Americans apparently used. Du Bouvard wasn't entirely clear on exactly how a "wetsuit" worked, but he knew it was designed to protect a swimmer from the numbing effect of cold water. In the absence of whatever it was and however it worked, he and Olier had done their best by coating the swimmers' bodies thickly in insulating grease. He expected it to help; he didn't expect it to help enough.

The "volunteers," who-in the event of their survival-would find their sentences commuted, in addition to receiving a substantial monetary reward, pulled on their frogfootlike flippers and slipped gingerly into the water. They adjusted their equipment carefully, moving methodically through the series of checks du Bouvard and Olier had put together from their reading of the books acquired from the same source that had provided the scuba gear itself. They'd been able to make a handful of practice dives in warmer water, but the difficulty in recharging the scuba tanks had limited the amount of time they could spend actually underwater. And, while du Bouvard had chosen not to mention it to his swimmers, the books had made it clear that there were problems using normal air to fill the tanks.

They completed their adjustments, nodded to Olier, and disappeared into the Elbe.

Someone knocked on the cabin door, and John Simpson looked up from the sandwich and glass of beer of the lunch he'd been anticipating for the last couple of hours. Especially the beer. Good seventeenth-century German beer was among the best in the world, and one difference between the USE Navy and the U.S. Navy in which he'd once served was that there'd been no point at all in attempting to enforce Gideon Welles' ban on shipboard alcohol. Simpson couldn't really say he regretted that, but however he'd felt about it, no down-time German would have stood for it. So he'd settled for truly ferocious punishments for drunkenness, instead, although, to be fair, that seemed to be no worse a common problem among seventeenth-century Germans than it had been among twentieth-century Americans.

Whoever it was knocked again, and he shook his head.

"Enter!" he called, and one of Constitution's assistant signalmen opened the door and stepped into the cabin.

"Message from Achates, sir. I'm afraid it's marked 'Urgent.' "

"Very well." Simpson sighed, pushing the beer aside, and took the radio room message slip. He unfolded it and scanned the few, terse sentences, and his jaw tightened.

"Thank you," he told the messenger, and climbed out of his chair. He started for the compartment door, then paused, scooped up the sandwich, and continued on his way.

Captain Halberstat was waiting on the port bridge wing, gazing aft through a pair of up-time binoculars, when he arrived.

The bridge lookouts came to attention as Simpson stepped out of the conning tower door, still chewing on ham and cheese, but he waved them back to their duties as he moved up beside Halberstat.

Achates was dropping out of formation, emitting a thick plume of steam as she angled towards the river's southern bank. The rest of the squadron had slowed to stay in company with her, and Simpson grunted.

"I suppose we've done better than we had any right to expect to get this far without a significant engineering casualty," he said.

"I don't imagine Commander Baumgartner feels that way at the moment, Admiral," Halberstat replied, and Simpson chuckled harshly.

"No, I don't imagine he does," he agreed. Commander C.H. Baumgartner was a dour fellow even in his sunniest moments-which this certainly was not. Simpson himself was one of the few people who even knew what the initials stood for. Most of the sailors in the navy who'd dealt with the officer just used the monicker an up-timer had given him: "Clod Hopper." Not to his face, of course.

Simpson looked at Halberstat. "Any more details on his problem?"

"He did send a follow-up message, sir." Halberstat extracted another folded message slip from the breast pocket of his uniform tunic and passed it across. "According to his engineer, it's a fractured steampipe. And he's got at least three badly injured men."

"Wonderful."

Simpson unfolded the second message and scanned it quickly. Actually, it wasn't a steampipe, he saw; it was the fitting where the steampipe in question joined the boiler itself, which made the injury reports understandable enough. Indeed, they were lucky the sailors in question appeared to have escaped with relatively minor burns, given the amount of live steam that must have escaped. He didn't feel especially lucky, however, and he suppressed a sudden temptation to swear out loud and turned to the signalman who had followed him out onto the bridge wing, instead.

"Message to Achilles, copied to Achates," he said. The signalman's pencil poised itself above his message pad, and he continued. "Stand by to assist Achates. Prepare to pass a tow, if required."

"Aye, sir." The signalman read back the message, and then headed for the radio room voice pipe when Simpson nodded.

"May I ask what you intend to do, sir?" Halberstat asked.

"Unless Commander Baumgartner's initial assessment is wrong, it's going to take at least thirty-six to forty-eight hours for him to make repairs-assuming he can make them out of shipboard resources," Simpson replied. "We can't afford to wait that long. The emperor is expecting us at Luebeck and General Torstensson's already moving. What's the closest town?"

"That would be Ritsenbuttel, I believe," Halberstat said, pointing downstream and to the southern bank.

"All right." Simpson nodded. "In that case, let's get a message sent back to Hamburg. We're going to need some sort of security force down here, if it turns out Baumgartner's estimate is overly optimistic. Until they can get here, I think his own Marines should be able to provide any base security he requires."

Du Bouvard swore inventively and with feeling as the Americans' steady approach suddenly slowed. He had no idea why it had happened. One of the timberclads was turning out of line, and as he watched, a second timberclad moved towards it, as if to render assistance. There was also a lot of white smoke-or possibly steam-streaming up.

Why the devil couldn't they have had whatever problem they're having fifteen minutes earlier? he demanded.

No one answered, and he shook his head in disgust. If he'd only known this was coming, he would never have put his swimmers into the water so soon! And if the Americans were having mechanical problems, it was entirely possible they would have no choice but to anchor somewhere after all while they made repairs. An anchored warship would have been far more vulnerable.

Lieutenant Leberecht Probst, USE Marine Corps, stood beside the bass boat's wheel and shaded his eyes with one hand as he looked philosophically back upriver.

Probst was better educated than the majority of his fellow Marines. Like Hans and Gretchen Richter, he was the son of a small printer. Unlike the Richters' father, however, Anton Probst was alive and well… and an enthusiastic supporter of the Committees of Correspondence whose political tracts had brought him so much business of late. Young Leberecht had read those same tracts while helping to set type, and one thing had led to another.

Now he watched the ironclads reducing their speed to little more than a crawl while Achilles went alongside Achates.

"What do you think, Leberecht?" Ensign Kjell Halvorsen asked, and he shrugged.

"I think somebody broke down. From the looks of things, it was Achates."

"Commander Baumgartner's going to be pissed," Halvorsen said with a certain satisfaction. The tall young Swede wasn't especially fond of Commander Baumgartner, since Commander Baumgartner's attractive younger daughter was quite fond of Ensign Halvorsen and the commander did not approve. Of course, Baumgartner didn't approve of much of anything.

"I imagine he is," Probst agreed with a slight smile. Then he looked around the boat and cleared his throat.

"I don't believe I recall suggesting that it was no longer necessary to keep an eye out," he remarked to the air in general, and his detachment's attention returned magically to scanning the riverbanks and the water around them.

"It's definitely the fitting, sir," Lieutenant Hafner, Commander Baumgartner's senior engineer, said as he climbed up the internal ladder to the timberclad's bridge. He shrugged in disgust. "We've got a crack clear through the casting."

"Damn," Baumgartner said, far more mildly than he felt. Then he shook his head. "And what about those burns?"

"Ugly," Hoffner said. "Gunther's arm, especially. Lothar is doing what he can, but-"

The lieutenant shrugged again, and Baumgartner nodded. They were lucky that Admiral Simpson had insisted that each of the navy's major combatants had to have at least one trained sick bay attendant from the up-timers' training classes aboard. Even though the SBAs like Chief Lothar Tummel weren't considered full-fledged "doctors" by their up-time instructors, they were so much better than most seventeenth-century physicians that it was almost miraculous. Still, there were limits in all things.

"Repairs?" Baumgartner asked, shifting mental gears once more as he watched his deck crew making fast the towline Achilles had passed across.

"Not out of our own resources," Haffner said grimly. "A steam pipe we probably could have fixed, but this is going to have to be torched off and replaced, and we don't have the gear aboard for that. It's going to have to be sent forward to us from Magdeburg."

"The admiral isn't going to want to hear that."

"Oh, I'm well aware of that, sir. Unfortunately-"

The lieutenant shrugged yet again, and Baumgartner snorted. Haffner's apparent insouciance undoubtedly owed a great deal to who was going to actually have to tell Admiral Simpson that thirty percent of his timberclads had just become nothing more than a floating battery on a raft. On the other hand, the admiral wasn't in the habit of blaming people for things that clearly weren't their fault.

Which was quite a bit more than Baumgartner could have said for other military officers he'd served under.

"All right, Crispus," he sighed, "I'll tell him. When you go back below, ask Nikolaus to come up here. He and I are going to have to discuss port security with Rudiger."

"Yes, Sir," Hoffner said. Nikolaus Schimmel was Achates' executive officer, and Lieutenant Rudiger Kirsch was the timberclad's gunnery officer.

The engineer saluted and disappeared back down the ladder, and Baumgartner turned to his bridge signalman.

"Message for the admiral," he said.

John Simpson grunted as he read the new message slip. It was a sound of unhappy confirmation, not surprise.

"What I was afraid of from the beginning," he said, looking up at Captain Halberstat. "It looks like we don't have any choice but to send them into this Ritsenbuttel. I'm half-tempted to detach one of the other timberclads to help keep an eye on her, too."

Halberstat looked surprised, and Simpson grimaced.

"I'm worried about those intelligence reports about the scuba rigs that may have… fallen into enemy hands, let's say. I don't like the thought of leaving one of our ships all alone when we don't know where that scuba gear is. Especially when the ship in question can't move under its own power."

Halberstat's surprise disappeared, and he nodded. But he also cocked his head to one side, one eyebrow arched.

"Would leaving a second timberclad really help that much, sir? Is there anything she could do for Achates' security that Baumgartner couldn't do by keeping a couple of his cutters rowing around the ship?"

"Probably not. That's why I'm only half-tempted. And why I'm not going to do it in the end."

"What's that?" one of Leberecht Probst's Marines said suddenly.

It wasn't the most militarily correct sighting report in even the USE Marine Corps' brief history, but it got the job done. Probst followed the pointing index finger, and his eyes narrowed. The Elbe was still flowing high, wide, and muddy with springtime runoff, and there was more than a little debris still drifting down it. But all of that debris was drifting down it. Probst couldn't think of the last time he'd seen something moving against the current.

"What is that?" Halvorsen said as his eyes found the same object.

"Unless I'm mistaken," the Marine said, reaching for the up-time revolver he'd been issued when he was assigned to Constitution's Marine detachment, "it's a head."

Du Bouvard swore again, with more feeling than ever, as the sharp, distant pop of gunfire came to him. The American motor boats were too far away for him to see details very well, but he could clearly see one of the uniformed Marines firing at something in the water with one of the up-time pistols.

Laguia, he thought. During their practice dives, the Spaniard had demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to become disoriented and come to the surface and look around in order to check his bearings. But even Laguia should have known better than to poke his head up that close to one of the American patrol boats!

Be fair, Anatole, he told himself harshly as the Marine fired again and again. The poor bastard's got to be half-frozen, despite all the grease you could slather onto him. No wonder his brain isn't working very well.

Unlike quite a few of his contemporaries, Leberecht Probst had discovered that he was actually an excellent shot with a pistol. The revolver, a.38 Smith amp; Wesson Model 15 with a four-inch barrel, wasn't the most powerful of weapons to have come back through the Ring of Fire, but it was comfortable in his hand, and his target jerked up out of the water with the third shot.

It was definitely a human head, he noted, amazed by the steadiness of his own hand as the fact that he was shooting at another human being was confirmed. In fact, the head was attached to the rest of a human body, and he saw a sudden blossom of crimson on the side of the swimmer's neck as he fired a fourth time.

His target rolled over, and the glassy plate of the diver's swimming mask turned towards him like a Cyclops' accusing eye. Then the man he'd just shot submerged once again.

It didn't look like an intentional dive.

"Take us over there, Kjell," Probst heard his own preposterously calm voice saying to Halvorsen. "And report to the flagship that we've definitely sighted at least one scuba diver."

Du Bouvard's jaw tightened as the pistol fire stopped and the boat from which it had come swept around in a sharp turn. Whether it had been Laguia or not, the combination of no more shooting and purposeful movement suggested that something unpleasant had happened to the Marine's target. And the fact that one of his divers had been sighted had just reduced the other swimmer's already minute chances of success to virtually nothing.

"What do we do now?" Olier asked.

"There's damn-all we can do," du Bouvard replied flatly. "Except get the hell out of here before they get around to sending parties ashore to find out just where those divers came from."

"That sounds like an excellent idea to me," Olier said fervently, and started barking orders at the rest of their party.

"Is there any confirmation?" Simpson asked.

"No, sir." Halberstat shook his head. "If it was a diver, he either dove again or just sank, and the water's so muddy you can't see anything two feet below the surface. But young Probst's a reliable man. If he says he saw someone in the water, I believe him."

"So do I," Simpson admitted. "And Achates' problems may actually let the lunatics succeed. Mind you," he smiled thinly, "I wouldn't be willing to risk any money betting on the probability, but Murphy doesn't play favorites."

Halberstat nodded. Before joining the navy, he'd never heard of the "Murphy" so many of the up-timers invoked, but he'd been eminently familiar with the concept Murphy enshrined.

"What are your orders, sir?" he asked.

Simpson thought for a moment, gazing down from the bridge wing at one of the mitrailleuses as the weapon poked out of its firing port and swung restlessly back and forth. He knew that some of the army's officers-like Frank Jackson-thought that his insistence on the more sophisticated and expensive mitrailleuses instead of the simpler Requa-style volley guns the army had adopted was simply one more example of his mania for "bells and whistles." And, he knew, they deeply resented the priority he'd gotten for allocations from the primers various up-time firearm reloaders had brought back with them.

But there were sound reasons for the successful, bitter campaign he'd waged in favor of the navy's mitrailleuses. The army's volley guns were an all-or-nothing proposition. Their cartridge cases had no individual primers, on touch holes, and were set off in a rapid-fire chain by a single powder train. In twentieth-century terms, they weren't "selective fire" weapons; when one shot was fired, every shot was fired. Even worse, in many ways, they were mounted as artillery pieces. The weapons were cumbersome, large, and impossible to traverse. When they fired, they delivered all of their rounds virtually simultaneously into a very small, relatively speaking, target area.

The navy's mitrailleuses were based on the Reffye, the most successful of the mitrailleuses used by the French during the Franco-Prussian War. They used individually primed cartridge cases, constructed very much like shotgun shells, fired in succession by turning a side-mounted crank. Each round was expensive, but they could be collected, reloaded, and reused. More importantly, the man on the crank could fire all of them as quickly as he could turn the crank, or only a few rounds at a time, or even single shots, and he could vary the rate of fire to suit a specific tactical need instead of blazing through the entire magazine in a single eruption.

Simpson's mitrailleuse consisted of twenty barrels arranged in five rows of four, mounted in a cylindrical sleeve, which was actually five fewer barrels than the Reffye had had, but it produced a lighter weapon with a slimmer profile, better suited to pivot mounts aboard the navy's warships. It was a.50-caliber weapon, with a crew of five, three of whom were responsible solely for clearing expended cartridge cases from the removable steel breechblocks and replacing them with fresh rounds. Each gun came with four breechblocks and a special extractor. When the block was pressed down onto the extractor, its fingers removed the empty cases while one of the other loaders opened a specially prepackaged twenty-round box that worked like a huge speed loader. A well-trained crew (and all of Simpson's crews were well trained) could sustain a rate of fire of sixty aimed rounds per minute, and reach up to a hundred rounds per minute in emergencies. That was more than sufficient to turn any small craft into a splintered colander, and a single hit from one of its enormous rounds could be counted upon to stop any human-sized target dead.

If any other divers were foolish enough to show themselves anywhere in the field of fire of one of those mitrailleuses, he would never be a problem again. Unfortunately, Simpson couldn't count on their doing anything of the sort.

"The ironclads and Ajax will increase speed and continue downriver to clear the threat zone," he said. "Achilles will tow Achates clear. I want at least one of the bass boats running a perimeter around them. And instruct all units to begin dropping anti-diver charges."

"Yes, sir!" Halberstat saluted sharply and turned to begin issuing the necessary orders.

The first underwater explosions kicked up clouds of spray and dead fish less than four minutes later. The "anti-diver charges" were nothing more than somewhat heavier hand grenades, designed to be used as mini-depth charges. They were light enough that they could be used fairly close to a vessel's hull without threat of damage, but heavy enough to kill or at least incapacitate any diver in the vicinity.

Simpson listened to the muffled explosions and watched the brown river water heave up, then watched the rings of foam drift away. He grimaced. It reminded him of accounts he'd read of depth charge attacks from both world wars. Half the time, the people dropping those charges hadn't known whether there was really a submarine in the vicinity, or not-just as he didn't know whether or not there were really scuba divers stalking his gunboats. But, like those long-ago (or far in the future) escort ship commanders, he had no choice but to make certain.

And in the process, he thought glumly, give anyone on the other side who's watching a quick course in the best way to deal with our scuba divers in the future.

He hadn't wanted to do that… but he wanted even less to discover that someone had actually managed to successfully attach an explosive charge to one of his precious ships.

Anatole du Bouvard listened to the explosions coming from the river as he climbed up into his horse's saddle. There was no sign of any American landing parties coming after his shore party, but he had no intention of waiting around until they changed their mind about that.

He watched the ironclads accelerating, obviously to move clear of this stretch of river, and shrugged philosophically. He'd never really expected anything to come of the attempt, after all, and he'd clearly given it his best effort. Surely the cardinal would understand that, especially if du Bouvard and Olier showed a certain… constructive creativity in their reports.

Besides, he thought, pressing with his heels and urging his horse to a trot, we have something new to offer him, as well. I suppose we should have realized that the Americans would have worked out their own ways to deal with divers before they ever used them against us.

He led the rest of his men rapidly away from the river bank, still listening to the explosions, and considered how best to make that point in his report. He didn't give the least bit of thought to what might have happened to the second diver. Just a convict, after all, and not one of his men.

It was only later that day that it occurred to him that Cardinal Richelieu might want to know what had happened to the second diver's equipment-which, after all, had cost the French crown a fair sum of money to obtain.

What to do? Du Bouvard was certainly not about to return. In the end, after pondering the problem for a while, he decided he'd include in the report that they'd thought the diver was slain by one of those grenades the enemy flotilla had tossed in the water. Alas, under the circumstances, his body-and the equipment-had not been recoverable.

Awkward, of course, if the diver ever showed up anywhere. But du Bouvard was willing to take that chance. It was a slim one, anyway. The last thing a convict was likely to do was report back to the same authorities who had essentially forced him into that insanely dangerous position in the first place. Especially when there was still a death sentence on his head.

In the event, du Bouvard's concern was quite unnecessary. One of the grenades had killed the second diver. Or rather, had stunned him unconscious and blown the mask off his face. He'd drowned within minutes, and his corpse-with the equipment still attached-was slowly settling into the mud in the Elbe's estuary. Within two years, at most, the silt brought down the river would bury it completely.