'Okay, sir. What's next?'
'We're almost done. This is the final one. It's a transmission to General Baner.' To Johan Baner, general in command of the Swedish army besieging Dresden From Michael Stearns, major general in command of the USE Army Third Division Your assault on Dresden is illegal, immoral, treasonous, and ungodly.
Mike thought the 'ungodly' part was a nice touch. Being an agnostic himself, he had no idea how you'd parse the theology involved. But the Germanies were crawling with theologians. Within twenty-four hours of the transmission there'd probably be at least two competing and hostile schools of doctrine. Within forty-eight hours, charges of heresy were sure to be thrown about. You have forty-eight hours to remove your troops from the siege lines around Dresden. Seventy-two hours after that, your troops must have departed Saxony and returned to the Oberpfalz, where you can employ them to fight Bavarian invaders instead of murdering German civilians. I will expect an answer within twenty-four hours indicating your agreement to these conditions. Failing such an answer, I propose to move immediately upon your works.
The last clause was swiped from Ulysses Grant's terms at Fort Donelson, if he remembered his history properly. Mike thought the words had a nice ring to them.
The entire message was designed to make Baner blow his stack. There was no chance the Swedish general would agree to end the siege of Dresden, no matter how Mike put the matter. So he figured he might as well see if he could so enrage the man-Baner's temper was notorious-that he'd make some mistakes.
There was probably some term derived from Latin to describe the tactic in military parlance. Street kids playing a pick-up basketball game would call it 'trash talk.' Mike had used the same term in his boxing days.
You never knew. Sometimes it worked.
'Anything else, sir?' Jimmy asked.
'No,' he said. 'I think that will do.'
Chapter 39
Swedish army siege lines, outside Dresden 'I'll kill him!' Johan Baner roared. 'I'll kill him!'
The Swedish general had already torn the message to shreds. Now he picked up the stool he'd been sitting on when he was handed the message and smashed it down on the writing desk. If his adjutant hadn't been sensible enough to retreat as soon as he'd handed over the radio slip, his own skull would probably have been the stool's target.
Baner was not a particularly large man, but he was quite powerful. That blow and the ones that followed with the leg of the shattered stool that remained in his fist were enough to reduce the desk to firewood.
'I'll fucking kill him!'
Chapter 40
Dresden, capital of Saxony Eric and Tata found Gretchen Richter standing in the tallest tower of the Residenzschloss, looking out over the city walls toward the Swedish camp fires. They'd gone in search of her to discover what preparations she wanted made, now that they knew the Third Division was coming.
Night had fallen and it was quite dark in the tower, with only one small lamp to provide light. So it took them a while before they realized that Gretchen had been crying. No longer-but the tear-tracks were still quite visible.
Krenz was dumbfounded. He'd never once imagined Richter with tears in her eyes.
Tata went to her side. Gretchen was gripping the rail with both hands. Tata placed a hand over hers and gave it a little squeeze. 'It's nice when people don't disappoint you.'
'I wondered,' Eric heard Gretchen whisper. 'For years, I wondered.'
It took Krenz perhaps a minute before he figured it out. At which point he was even more dumbfounded.
She'd wondered about the general?
Dear God in Heaven.
One of the letters Eric had gotten from Thorsten Engler after he was wounded at Zwenkau described the execution of twenty soldiers who'd been caught committing atrocities after the Third Division took the Polish town of Swiebodzin. Thorsten's volley gun battery had been given that assignment.
Till the day I die, I'll never forget seeing those men tied to a fence being torn apart by a hail of bullets, Thorsten had written him. But that's not what I have nightmares about, Eric. It was the look on the general's face when he gave the order. A cold, pitiless rage that seemed to have no bottom at all.
Gretchen wiped her nose with a sleeve. 'Always I wondered,' she whispered again.
Eric looked out over the Swedish campfires.
Baner was dead. He was already fucking dead. He just didn't know it yet.
Chapter 41
Magdeburg, central Germany Capital of the United States of Europe Rebecca looked at the little stack of radio messages on her desk, wondering if she should read them again.
That was silly, though. By now, she practically had them memorized. Her desire to do so was just an emotional reflex.
Sepharad came into the room, with her brother Baruch in tow.
'Barry wants to know when Daddy's coming home.'
Despite the tension of the moment, Rebecca had to fight down a smile. For whatever subtle reasons lurked in a child's developing mind, Sepharad made it a point to pose as the detached and cool-headed one-quite unlike her emotional brother, full of needs and anxieties. If you didn't know any better, you'd think she was the one who'd written the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in the universe her father had come from.
'Soon, I think, children. Soon.'
The answer was accurate, as far as it went. Michael would come home soon. If he came home at all. But Rebecca saw no reason to inflict three-year-old children with that caveat.
Within an hour after dawn the next morning, the town house was filled with anxious and needy politicians. Most of them, in a way, wanting the answer to the same question. Except in their case the question was when will the boss be coming home? Michael had been such a dominant figure in their political movement that, at least in a crisis, most of them felt a bit lost without him.
Constantin Ableidinger was one of the exceptions, thankfully. Rebecca was finding his outsized presence a great help this morning.
'Of course he decided to march on Dresden, Albert!' the Franconian was booming at Hamburg's mayor. 'Did you think we could maintain this half-baked civil war forever? Everyone-on both sides; no, on all sides!-is starting to get exhausted. Let this go on for too long and the nation will wind up siding with the damn Swede by default. If you ask me, the general chose the perfect moment to make his move. Right on the heels of Kristina and Ulrik's arrival in the capital. He has the wind of legitimacy in his sails now!'
Rebecca thought that was a rather grotesque metaphor, but she agreed with Ableidinger's underlying point. The nation was starting to get frayed by the constant uncertainty.
And now, as he had so many times over the past few years, the Prince of Germany was taking the decisive steps to resolve the crisis. That decisiveness alone would pull millions of the nation's inhabitants toward him, regardless of what they might think of the specific merits of his political program.
In the royal palace not far away, another child was feeling anxious.
'What should we do, Ulrik?' asked Kristina. The girl was almost literally dancing up and down, with a sheaf
