'No, of course I'm not sure. I wasn't expecting a battle to start in the middle of a fucking storm. That must have been your general's doing. He's insane, by the way. But now that he's gone and done it, we should take advantage of the opportunity.'
He leaned over the railing, pointing to the south-his arm angled downward. He was actually pointing at the enemy's siege lines, which couldn't be seen because of the snowfall.
'We should seize their own lines now, before they can retreat back into them.'
'If they retreat back into them,' said Friedrich, a bit dubiously. 'I thought the idea was to wait until we knew they were coming back.'
'Yes, it was.' Jozef was suddenly sure of himself. 'But they will, they will. If your blessed general was mad enough to attack them in the middle of a storm, he's mad enough to drive them back into their lines. So let's be there to deny it to them, shall we?'
Krenz and Friedrich looked at each other again.
'He's got a point,' said Eric.
'He's right about Mike Stearns, too,' said Gretchen. 'I won't tell you what to do. I'm not a soldier and don't pretend to be one. But I think Wojtowicz is right.'
'Okay, then,' said Nagel. 'Let's be about the mad business.'
If nothing else, the noisy labors of Denise and Minnie had expanded the hiding place in the root cellar enough for all three of them to fit into it.
Barely.
There would have been room to spare, though-that racket had gone on for days-if a third of the space hadn't been taken up with barrels.
'What…?'
Minnie pointed to the one Noelle's arm was lying across. 'That's got food in it. The two you're crammed against on the other side are water barrels. And these two'-she patted the two barrels stacked on her left-'and the two over there by Denise-'
Her friend brought up a…fuse?
'These are the gunpowder barrels,' Denise said cheerfully. 'If those fucks find us and want some excitement in their lives, they'll get it for sure. Pussy kaboom.'
Noelle made a face. 'That is so gross.'
'Not as gross as the alternative,' Minnie said phlegmatically.
'Well. No.' She stuck out her hand. 'But I keep the fuse. The two of you are too-too-too-'
The teenagers were grinning at her now.
'Too too-ish,' Noelle finished lamely.
Chapter 47
The Saxon plain, near Dresden Jeff finally caught up with the volley gun company just after they fired their fourth volley. By now, so far as he could tell-which was not much-they were mostly shooting at shadows. Whatever enemy they'd been facing seemed to be on the run.
'Next time, wait,' he growled at Thorsten.
Engler gave him a cold smile. 'Yes, sir. It's difficult, though, as slowly as the infantry moves.'
'Very witty, Captain. My better half is amused. My other half, though-that's the one in charge right now-is not. If I have to get official and make it an order, I'll do it. Next. Time. Wait. How's that?'
Engler nodded. 'Not a problem, sir. Honestly, we had no intention of getting separated. By the time we realized it…'
Jeff waved his hand. 'Yeah, I know. By then, you'd come upon the foe and, being volley gun maniacs, he was yours for the taking. Also for the official record, my congratulations. Whoever you were fighting, you obviously pounded them into dog food. Now let's see about moving forward. Do you have any idea where the rest of the division is, by the way?'
Not until Jeff spoke the last sentence did it occur to him that he might fairly be accused of the same fault for which he'd just criticized Engler. Just as the volley gun battery had done with its regiment, so the Hangman had gotten separated from the other regiments and…
Done what, exactly? Where the hell were they? Ahead of the division? Behind it? Off to the side? If so, which side? They couldn't very well be to the east of the division, because they'd been over by the left flank when the attack began.
He started chewing on his lip.
'If you'll permit me the indiscretion, sir…'
Jeff gave Engler a sour look. 'The formality'll kill me, just from shock. Spit it out, Thorsten.'
'I really don't think there's much chance we're anywhere except in front of the rest of the division, sir.'
Jeff had been coming to the same conclusion.
Fine. Now what?
Mike Stearns had been doing the same thing as Jeff-except he was searching for a whole regiment, not just a volley gun battery.
Jeff's regiment, damn his irresponsible geek heart. What had possessed him, to race ahead like that?
The radios were turning out to be almost useless. Mike could get in touch with his regiments, yes. But what good did that do when nobody knew where they were to begin with?
Christopher Long rode up. 'That way, I think, sir.' He was pointing a bit to the right, in the directions where Mike thought Dresden probably was.
What idiot had thought launching an attack in the middle of a snowstorm was a good idea?
By now, even Johan Baner had run out of curses. He could still manage one every two minutes or so, but the pleasure had entirely vanished from the exercise.
This was turning into a nightmare. He was still quite confident he could rout the rebels-if he could find his blasted army. More than bits and pieces of it, anyway.
The problem, insofar as Baner could reconstruct what had happened, was that one or another unit of the Third Division had punched a big hole in the middle of his line. 'Line,' at least, if you could dignify a string of camps set up to ride out the storm by the name.
The Ostergotland Horsemen had been at the center of that hole. Somehow they'd been routed, and in their confused retreat had precipitated panic among their neighboring units. That, in turn, has led to the whole center starting to unravel.
Whatever else, Baner had to put a stop to that. If he could stabilize the center, he was sure he'd win this bastard of a battle. By now, Stearns' soldiers had to be even more disorganized than his own.
They probably were, in point of fact, on the level of the division itself. But it didn't matter because all of the regiments had stayed intact, even if none of them were really quite sure where the rest of the army was.
So, it devolved into a brawl, a pure melee in the snow, USE army regiments matched against whatever Swedish units they stumbled across. It took a while, half an hour to an hour of savage struggle with heavy casualties on both sides, before the mercenaries began to yield.
But yield they did. They simply didn't have the stomach for this sort of fight. Drifting at first, and then moving faster and faster, they headed back toward the lines around Dresden.
In the middle of all this, Mike Stearns and his staff stumbled around trying to make sense out of senselessness.
They never succeeded. They never even came close.
Somehow, though, none of them died.
Quite.
Early on, Anthony Leebrick was struck in the leg by a stray bullet, just above the ankle. Although he didn't know it, then or ever, the ball had been fired by one of his division's own infantrymen and had struck him by sheer mischance. A lot of men were killed or wounded in that battle from friendly fire. Most of them were mercenaries working for the Swedes, since they were more confused and directionless than the oncoming USE troops, but by
