1634: The Baltic War

Chapter 49

The Wietze oil fields A few miles northwest of Hannover

Like everyone at the Wietze oil facility since Quentin Underwood had arrived on an inspection tour three days earlier, the site manager was walking around on figurative tiptoes. Underwood was a hard taskmaster at any time. When he was in a bad mood because he felt production wasn't going as well as it should be, his treatment of subordinates was caustic and abrasive.

"What does he expect?" complained one of the refinery workers to the manager. "With the equipment we've got?"

The manager didn't bother to respond. By now, that was an old refrain whenever Underwood wasn't around to hear. There was no point saying it to him directly-again-because that would just elicit another hot-tempered tirade on the subject of "making do with what we've got." A tirade that was every bit as pointless, because the workers at the refinery were making do with what they had.

The manager straightened up from the schlaemmbock they'd been examining. The extraction pipe was so badly corroded there was no longer any point in repairing it. "We'll have to-"

A shout in the distance made him break off. Looking up, he saw that one of the soldiers in the nearest watch-tower on the guard perimeter was pointing at something in the distance. The manager couldn't tell what it what was, but the guard seemed quite agitated.

There was a separating pot nearby, much closer than the watch-tower. The manager hurried over and climbed up the metal rungs welded to the side of the pot. From the top, he'd have a good view.

Two seconds after he got that view, he started shouting himself.

"All right, all right, everybody calm down," said Quentin Underwood. "They're just cavalrymen. They can't possibly do more than harass us, armed with nothing more than lances and wheel-lock pistols. We've got five hundred men in the garrison here. Plenty to drive them off if they try anything really aggressive."

A babble rose in the refinery's operations center.

"Calm down, I said!" Underwood bellowed. "Friedrich, stop prattling about 'thousands of them.' That's bullshit. How would the Ostenders get thousands of men this far south of Luebeck? The air force maintains regular reconnaissance all around the area."

Actually, that wasn't true, but Underwood figured he had to settle everyone's nerves. The USE's air force had been concentrating lately on getting a new airfield in place near Hamburg, using the planes to shuttle equipment and supplies instead of doing what they should be doing, which was protecting the nation's assets. Not to Underwood's surprise, those in Mike Stearns' regime had proven to be every bit as shortsighted and reckless when it came to war as they were with regard to everything else.

That said, Quentin still didn't think there was any chance that a large enemy force could have gotten this far south of the Elbe. Even without aerial reconnaissance, there was simply too much traffic on the river for a major crossing to have gone unreported.

One of the refinery workers started babbling about the French.

"Just shut up, will you!" Quentin hollered. "That's got to be the stupidest thing I've heard anybody say yet. How the hell would the French get all the way over here?"

He waved his hand roughly, as if shoving something aside. "Just shut up! What we've got here is just a stray Spanish cavalry unit from the Netherlands. All of you, stop panicking!"

He glared at the site's manager. "Get out there and stiffen up the garrison's officers. I'll be out myself in a minute. First, I've got to get hold of Stearns on the radio and tell the asshole that his asshole policies just resulted in another fuck-up."

It took a while to reach Stearns, since it turned out the idiot had gone haring off to the mouth of the Elbe to look at a disabled timberclad. That was typical. Stearns knew as much about delegating authority as a chipmunk. Having a man like this running an entire country was simply insane. He'd have been stretching his abilities to run a high school softball league.

But, eventually, Stearns got on the radio. And-naturally-he immediately panicked also.

"Quentin, get out of there. Now. All of you. That's got to be a French force. It's not Spanish, I'm sure of that-and there's no way French cavalry would have come that far on a whim. They've got a real raid underway, and all you've got is a small garrison unit."

"Bullshit, Stearns! This facility is valuable. No way we're giving it up without a fight."

"Forget the goddam facility! It's so primitive they can't do all that much physical damage to it anyway. The real danger is that they'll kill or capture skilled workers."

Quentin almost retorted "and good riddance," but the presence of the radio operator made him leave the sarcastic remark unspoken. "It'll never get that far. Nice talking to you, Stearns, even though it was the usual waste of my time. Just get somebody down here as soon as you can, huh? One of those fancy airplanes you waste resources on would be handy, right about now."

Hearing the sound of gunfire starting up, he realized he'd better get out on the guard perimeter. He just took enough time to snatch up his rifle, that he'd left leaning up in a corner of the operations center. Fortunately, he'd brought it with him on this trip. He normally didn't, on these inspection tours, figuring that his revolver was enough to deter any footpad. But with the war heating back up again and unsettling the situation, he'd decided that hauling the thing around was probably a wise idea.

No sooner had he taken a few steps out of the operations center, however, than he came to an abrupt halt. The garrison whose resolve he'd intended to stiffen was no longer at the perimeter to begin with. They were already in full retreat-rout, rather-pouring away from the earthen fieldworks that protected the oilfield site. Most of them were even throwing their guns away.

"Get back there, you fucking cowards!" Quentin brandished his rifle in the air, as if it were a clumsily made sword. Then, realizing that was a little foolish, aimed it instead at one of the retreating soldiers who was running toward him.

"I'll shoot you dead, you son of a bitch-so help me I will!"

The man paid him no attention. He raced right by Quentin without so much as a glance. He'd been in such a panic that Quentin didn't think he'd even heard him at all.

The threat was empty, anyway. Quentin hadn't even come close to pulling the trigger. Hadn't really even thought about it, since he'd assumed the threat would be enough.

What in God's name was happening? Even sorry-ass garrison soldiers should have had more fight in them than this.

But apparently it was just this section that had collapsed. From the continuing gunfire, somebody had to be putting up a resistance.

A pretty ferocious one, too, from the sound of it. Some unit of the garrison that Quentin couldn't see from his vantage point, with a cluster of buildings blocking his sight, was laying down one hell of a good rate of fire. There was simply no way that cavalrymen armed with wheel locks could be firing that often and that continuously.

He half-ran around the nearest maintenance shed, moving a bit clumsily due to his age and weight and silently vowing-as he had dozens of times before, to no avail-that when he got back home he'd listen to his wife and start using the exercise equipment in his basement. Underwood was one of those heavyset men who tended to run to fat, under the best of circumstances. In times past, the work of managing a coal mine had kept him on his feet a lot, but he'd become a lot richer since the Ring of Fire. Rich, he'd soon learned, usually meant sedentary also.

When he came around the corner of the shed, he stumbled to a halt, staring. A wave of soldiers-enemy ones, obviously-seemed to be pouring over the fieldworks a hundred yards away. No one was putting up any resistance at all. The few garrison soldiers still near the earthworks were already surrendering.

The gunfire he'd heard was coming entirely from the enemy. They weren't really even shooting at anybody, any longer. Most of them, from what Quentin could see, were just firing in the air from sheer exuberance.

How in God's name were they managing that? There was something odd-looking about their matchlocks, although Quentin couldn't really see them that well at the distance. His eyesight was starting to get worse, too.

But it was still good enough to aim a rifle, certainly at this distance. Underwood realized he had no choice any longer but to follow Stearns' advice and abandon the facility. No goddam way he was going to do it without firing at least two or three rounds in anger, though.

He took aim and fired. To his grim satisfaction, the soldier who'd been his target was knocked off his feet. Meet Lord.30-06, you bastard.

Quentin worked the bolt, jacking another round into the chamber, and took aim again.

This time, he missed. By now, at least half a dozen enemy soldiers were aiming their guns at him, but Quentin wasn't too worried about that. They were still almost a hundred yards distant, quite a ways beyond the effective range of matchlocks. He jacked another round into the chamber and started bringing the rifle back up to his shoulder.

It never got there. Of the three.50 caliber bullets that hit him almost simultaneously, either one of two would have killed him. One wound, slowly and painfully, from the damage done to his intestines. Fortunately, the other one severed his aorta, sending a gout of blood everywhere. For all practical purposes, Quentin Underwood was dead before his body hit the ground.

"Quickly! Quickly!" Turenne waved his hand impatiently at the four soldiers ransacking the desks and cabinets in what seemed to be the oil facility's central headquarters. "We haven't much time."

He gave the stacks of documents they'd already piled up on the desks a brief examination, estimating their weight and bulk. Not too bad, in themselves-but they'd be getting added to a larger pile of what seemed to be critical small pieces of equipment.

The officer in command straightened up from the lowest drawer of a desk, with a pile of papers in his hands.

"I think we've already gotten everything critical, Marshal," he said. Since both his hands were occupied, he used his head to point to a big stack of documents on a desk near one of the windows. "The best stuff is over there. Including what looks to be diagrams of the entire facility."

Turenne gave the man an encouraging smile. Privately, he suspected the diagrams-all the documents, for that matter-wouldn't be half as useful as the few small parts from machines they'd be taking back to France. Now that he was here and could finally see these Wietze oil works, Turenne wasn't very impressed. Overall, the technology involved was nothing that France didn't have already, although it had never been used in quite this manner.

The trick, it turned out, was building the machines that could put the oil to use. Not so easy, that. But if France could do so, they'd have no trouble providing the machines with the fuel they needed, with what Turenne had learned from this raid. He was quite sure of that, now. Even if there turned out to be no oil fields in France suitable for the purpose, there were certainly some in the New World territories that the English king had sold to Richelieu. The raw product could be shipped across the Atlantic and refined in a French coastal city.

"Five more minutes," he said. "Then load what you have on the pack horses, and set fire to the building. Let the rest of the documents burn with it."

After he went outside, he headed toward the corpse of the man who'd been in possession of the up-time rifle.

"Have you figured out who he was?" he asked the subaltern he'd left in charge.

"Yes, Marshal." The officer held up one of those elaborate leather contraptions that American men were said to use instead of simple purses. Wallets, they were called, if Turenne remembered correctly.

Flipping open one of the small leather sheets, the officer showed Turenne a portrait. Not a painted one, but what the up-timers called a photograph. It filled perhaps one-third of the small document it was attached to, with the rest being a simple block of text.

The marshal looked from the photograph to the body lying on the ground. The corpse had fallen face up. By some peculiar quirk, very little of the blood that had painted half the wall of the shed behind the man had splattered onto his face, so the features were readily visible.

The photograph was that of the corpse, clearly enough. Turenne scanned the text alongside the photograph. The meaning of much of it wasn't clear, but one item sprang immediately to his attention.

The man's name. Quentin B. Underwood.

Turenne drew in a sharp breath, almost a hiss. He recognized the name, from intelligence reports that Richelieu's intendant Servien had provided. An American, and one of those who had become quite prominent in manufacturing and financial circles. Estranged from most of the Grantvilliards, lately, and now attached to Wilhelm Wettin's party.

There would be political repercussions from this killing, obviously. But Turenne simply had no idea what they might be. He still found the inner workings of the political affairs of the United States of Europe often puzzling.

Mentally, he shrugged. Whatever the repercussions, and however they might fall upon France, the man had been killed in the course of a military operation in which he'd been directly involved. He'd not been murdered; not been assassinated.

He looked now at the soldiers who were with the subaltern. One of them was holding an up-time rifle in his hands. The dead man's weapon, Turenne assumed.

"Were any of you directly involved?"

One of the soldiers lifted his chin. "Yes, Marshal. Me and"-a quick jab of the thumb at the man standing next to him-"Jules Lambert here, we shot him. Somebody else too, from the wounds, but I don't know who that was."

The soldier named Lambert was the one holding Underwood's rifle. He glared down at the corpse. "Fucking bastard killed Francois. We weren't even trying to shoot anybody any more, since they were all running away. Took us by surprise."

Turenne nodded. "Can either of you write?"

Both men looked dubious.

"Never mind, then. Just give your testimony to the subaltern here." To him, Turenne said, "Make up a report. It'll be something we can show the Americans, if need be, so keep it simple and factual. No rhetoric, you understand."

"Yes, Marshal. And what do you want done with the man's rifle?" The subaltern pointed to the up-time weapon in Lambert's hands.

There was a time when that rifle would have been almost invaluable. But that time was at least a year back, by now. Thibault and du Barry already had more than a dozen American guns in the workshop in Amiens. They didn't need another one, especially since this rifle looked to be a simple hunting weapon, and an old one at that.

"Was it your shot that killed him?" he asked Lambert. The soldier started to say something, then hesitated and looked at his mate. "Ah… hard to say, Marshal. Could have been either me or Edouard."

"The rifle's yours, then. I'll leave the two of you to decide how to divide it up." He gave them a smile. "I wouldn't advise sawing it in half, though. But you could certainly sell it and divide the money."

The two men looked at each other. Then Lambert hefted the rifle and studied it. "Better gun even than a Cardinal," he muttered. "Hate to sell it."

"Don't be foolish, Jules," said the other soldier. He stooped and plucked a small brass cylinder from the ground, lying not far from the corpse. "You have to have these to shoot the gun. Here, let me show you."

Edouard took the up-time rifle from his mate Lambert and operated the bolt, then showed him something that Turenne couldn't see from his vantage point. "See that?" the soldier demanded. "There's less than a handful left. Better to stick with a Cardinal. We'll sell it to some nobleman. Make a bundle."

Still smiling, Turenne walked off. Both soldiers were from rural areas, from their accents. The shrewd avarice of French country folk was a byword.

Shrewd in other ways than money, too. Turenne wondered by what happenstance a simple French cavalryman had become so familiar with up-time weapons. For a moment, he was tempted to go back and ask him.

But, he didn't. He knew the explanation would be perfectly innocent-and incredibly tortuous. Three years had passed since the Ring of Fire. By now, knowledge of all sorts of things American had spread across Europe, following an untold number of pathways. That part of Europe, at least, that was west of the Vistula and north of the Pyrenees and the Balkans.

Turenne knew from Servien that part of the reason Richelieu had developed such a deep if grudging respect for the USE's prime minister was that Michael Stearns had never made any attempt to keep that American knowledge a secret, beyond a few specific items. It was a policy that looked foolish at first glance, but actually wasn't foolish at all.

First, because keeping it all a secret would have been impossible anyway. Leaving aside spying and outright theft, the prices people were often willing to pay for such knowledge and items were enormous. There were a lot of coffers in Europe, and many of them were very large-and Americans were no more saintly than anyone else.

And, second-the truly cunning aspect-was that Stearns understood something that Europe's rulers were only beginning to grasp. This part of what Servien had told Turenne, he'd said quite ruefully. Just as was true in many legends and folk tales, supping from a demon's broth was a dangerous business. Much of that American knowledge came with consequences attached. There was a political, social and economic reality lying beneath those alluring devices. It was impossible, often enough, to simply take the device and leave the reality behind. Willy-nilly, using those same untold number of pathways, Stearns was steadily forcing his opponents to cede ground. Not physical terrain, but the more insubstantial terrain of law and custom that was the ultimate battlefield.

It would be interesting to see how it all turned out. Turenne was still a very young man, so he'd have decades to observe the process-assuming, of course, he didn't get killed in one of the wars that were sure to accompany it. The truth was, although he generally kept it to himself, he didn't really care much any longer exactly what might result, so long as France was still there at the end.

Hearing a peculiar noise, he looked up. As the sound grew louder, his eyes looked for the source and soon found it.

He'd never seen one before, but it was what he'd been expecting. Had feared most, in fact, until the final moments when they launched the attack on the oil field.