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committed to Germany. And scattered from the Rhine to Dresden, at that! Do you truly believe that with that advantage he will restrict himself to attacking only Luebeck and Wismar?'

Gyllenhjelm's expression stiffened. Clearly, he saw exactly where Gustavus' logic was headed and had no desire to go there.

'They will attack us at home, as well,' Gustavus said. 'Unless they're fools-and we dare not assume they are-then their objectives must be our German supply ports, to starve our army, and Stockholm, to crush our fleet and destroy its base. We do not have the strength to defend both of them on the water, Karl, and we can better afford to lose Luebeck and Wismar both than to lose Stockholm, if we're honest about it. So I won't argue this point with you further. You will take your ships to sea no later than the morning tide, and you will sail for Stockholm. And you, Axel,' he turned on Oxenstierna once more, 'will sail with him.'

Oxenstierna's head came up as he stiffened in instinctive protest, but Gustavus continued, rolling over any objection he might have voiced.

'You will return to my capital, Chancellor of Sweden,' he commanded, 'and you will hold that capital for me. I charge you with that duty upon your oath of fealty to me.'

Oxenstierna closed his mouth a second time, and bent his head in submission. He might argue with his king with all the stubbornness of Swedish iron, but in the end, he recognized the man he served. The only monarch in Europe truly worthy of the title 'King.' When that man commanded, Axel Oxenstierna would obey.

'Thank you,' Gustavus said, clapping him on the shoulder. 'And don't look so glum, Axel! I have no intention of leaving my bones in Luebeck! And, for that matter, I rather doubt the Americans have any intention of allowing me to.'

Chapter 35

Old-fashioned torches and modern spotlights threw a glare of illumination over the small convoy, and Frank Jackson stretched and yawned wearily. It had been a long day, and the commander in chief of the Army had no business doing grunt work. Unfortunately, Frank still found it easier to recognize the concept of delegation than to practice it. Or, if he wanted to be more accurate about it, he could delegate just fine… as long as he didn't have any choice about it.

He grinned at the thought and scratched the neatly trimmed beard he'd decided to grow since arriving in a Germany which had never heard of replaceable razor blades, much less disposable razors. Then he shook himself and headed out on one last walk-through inspection.

The flatbed tractor-trailer rig was ugly as sin-a single-axle tractor pulling a standard semitrailer whose walls and roof had been torched off and hauled away for salvage. The ability of the resulting visual abortion to handle outsized cargos had proved extraordinarily useful quite a few times, but it had never carried a load like the one chocked and strapped down on it tonight.

Three boat trailers, one behind each of the two coal trucks and another hitched firmly to the rear of the flatbed, each carried a power boat. Quite large power boats. Jack Clements' thirty-two-foot Century 3200 measured ten and a half feet across the beam, and Louie Tillman's twenty-eight-foot Chris Craft launch was very nearly as big. Neither of them really had any business in a place like Grantville, far from any coasts or large lakes or inland waterways except the Monongahela. But, in any town of several thousand people, a few of them are bound to buy something that everyone else considers ludicrous. At least Jack Clements could argue in self-defense that he'd bought his boat to take to Florida with him when he retired. And Louie Tillman had spent a lot of hot summer days on the Monongahela River in his Chris Craft before the Ring of Fire.

But the third boat, sitting in massive, lordly majesty atop the flatbed…

Frank shook his head. George Watson's Outlaw 33 was thirty-three feet long, with an eight-and-a-half-foot beam, and the damned thing weighed over three and a half tons. The weight, of course, was picayune for a tractor-trailer combination designed to haul well over twenty tons. But it was so big that it overhung the trailer front and back and a bit on the sides, braced in position by lumber and held down by nylon straps. It looked like some kind of high-tech, fiberglass torpedo sitting up there, gleaming with polished stainless-steel fittings and embellished with bright red lightning bolts down either side of the hull. Frank had no idea how much the thing had cost, and Watson had always refused to tell anyone-probably because he'd figured they'd all know he was insane, instead of just suspecting it, if he ever admitted how much he'd paid for it.

'I still say you've got no right to steal my fucking boat,' a voice grated, and Frank turned his head. George stood behind him, glaring up at his expropriated property, and Frank barked a laugh.

'Jesus, George! You've had the damned thing in the water-what? twice? three times?-in the entire time you've owned it! I can't begin to imagine what you thought you were doing when you bought it. Except maybe watching reruns of Miami Vice again!'

'If I want to buy a boat, it's my own frigging business,' Watson shot back belligerently. 'And you got no right to steal it from me. You or Mike Stearns!'

Frank didn't like George Watson, and he never had, even making allowances for the fact that George was a fellow member of the UMWA. Watson was the kind of sour, surly man who, almost fifty years old now, liked to brag that he was a lifelong bachelor-a brag which drew the invariable response that no woman in her right mind would have him.

So he saw no reason to be polite to him. With Watson, being polite was a waste of time anyway. 'We didn't 'steal' it,' he said forcefully, 'we nationalized it. And we're gonna use it to save your ass right along with the rest of us, so quit bitching about it.'

'I'll sue,' Watson threatened. 'You see if I don't!'

'You do whatever you want, George,' Frank said, shrugging. 'You'll get compensated for it by the government. Now, beat it. It's done. And I've got other things to worry about.'

Watson stalked off. Frank turned to another, older man whose hair gleamed like fresh snow under the lights.

'You sure about this, Jack?' he asked more quietly.

'Yeah, sure I am,' Clements replied cheerfully. 'Hell, you think I'm going to let anyone else drive my boat?'

'Actually, I'm thinking we'll probably need you worse for Watson's Folly, here,' Frank told the man who had once served in the U.S. Coast Guard before coming home to the West Virginia mountains, and jerked a thumb at the massive boat on the flatbed. 'You've got the most boat-handling experience of anyone we've got, and that thing's gonna be a real handful for whoever gets behind the wheel.'

'Maybe,' Clements said in an unconvinced voice, and Frank chuckled.

'Hell, you're in the Naaaaavy now, Mr. Volunteer Lieutenant Clements, sir!' He waved in something which could, with a sufficient stretch of the imagination, have been called a salute. 'Admiral Simpson's gonna have his own ideas about how to use you best. And much's I hate to say it, the prick seems to know what he's doing, so you listen to him, hear?'

'You say so, Frank,' Clements agreed dubiously, and Frank chuckled again. Then he turned back to his inspection.

Clements', Watson's, and Tillman's were the three boats Eddie had specifically requested. After that, the Grantville boating selection ran down through smaller ski boats to bass boats and simple dories, but Frank had picked out one more as a backup for Eddie's requests: a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler which had belonged to Harry Rousseau before Harry and his family went to visit his mother in Duluth the day before the Ring of Fire struck. It was on the small size for what they had in mind, but it was the next biggest boat in Grantville, and he wished fervently that he had an entire fleet to send with the four of them.

Hell, while I'm wishing, I might's well wish for a frigging destroyer-or even an aircraft carrier! he told himself sourly.

He started tugging on the tie-down straps and checking the hull chocks, but left off when he spotted Jerry Yost glaring at him. The truck driver, clearly enough, did not appreciate the interference of an amateur, 'General of the Army' or not. Frank gave Yost a half-apologetic smile and moved down the line of trucks. The coal trucks, he decided, would provide him with a safer avenue for venting his overseer reflexes. They were, after all, officially the property of the U.S. Army.

He glanced into the back of the first coal truck. At the moment, it was loaded with additional fuel drums and cans, two deflated rubber Zodiac boats that belonged to Sam and Al Morton, and the odd case of dynamite. The second coal truck, also towing Rousseau's Boston Whaler on its trailer, would be leaving Grantville for Halle early next morning with its own load of supplies too bulky to be transported by the speedboats themselves-including several hundred rockets and the modified launch frames the machine shops were working frantically to complete even as Frank stood in the dark and worried.

He still had his doubts about the entire operation, whether he was prepared to admit them to anyone else-besides Mike, of course-or not. But if the defense of Wismar failed, it wasn't going to be because Frank Jackson hadn't done everything he could to prevent it.

He reached the end of his inspection trip and grunted in satisfaction, then looked at his own addition to the relief force.

James Nichols and Frank's niece Julie had personally overseen the training of the Thuringian Rifles, the first company of true long-range snipers in history. Most of them, American and German alike, had been experienced hunters before the Ring of Fire. The Germans were mostly youngsters who hadn't picked up any bad habits when it came to firing a gun from serving in arquebus-wielding mercenary units, and had been eager to learn. The up-time Americans among them, on the other hand- about a fourth of the unit-had already thought they understood the finer points of marksmanship. Julie and Dr. Nichols had shown them otherwise, and on any one-for-one basis, the forty-two men and three women of the understrength 'company' were undoubtedly the most dangerous marksmen in the world. Aside from their official commanding officer, Julie Mackay, that was. In fact, they were too dangerous for Frank to justify committing all of them to Wismar, but he'd decided that he could reinforce that city with their first squad, at least. Second Squad would be leaving for Luebeck with the second coal truck.

He didn't think he'd need to send more than that, anyway. Mustered up not far away from the Thuringian Rifles, their horses already saddled, was a larger body of men. Thirty-four of them, all with the long beards they favored, and all wearing their special blue uniforms and distinctive 'montero' headgear. The montero was an odd- looking hat, which the Germans sometimes called an 'English foghat.' In cold weather, the beak of the hat could be pulled down, serving much the same function as a balaclava.

They were all Swedish woodsmen and gameshooters, under the command of Nils Krak. Gustav Adolf had ordered the unit's formation early in 1632. Unlike most other soldiers of the time, these men used small-bore rifled hunting muskets and the unit had been designed for sniping and skirmishing, not volley fire in the line. Once the alliance with the Americans had been made, Gustav had sent Krak's Shooters down to Thuringia. Krak and his men had all been issued brand-new flintlocks with longer barrels and a tighter rifling twist, and they had now trained for months alongside the Thuringian Rifles. The two units got along well, and were accustomed to joint operations. True, the Swedish sharpshooters did not have the range of their U.S. counterparts, but their weapons had been fitted with aperture sights which made them very nearly as accurate over the range they had. Compared to any other body of 17 th -century soldiers, they were a unit of elite riflemen. Some of the best shots among them had actually been issued telescopic sights from the carefully hoarded store of them which had come back from the 21 st century, and to compensate for the technical inferiority of their equipment, almost all of them had a lot more in the way of actual combat experience than most of the U.S. soldiers did.

They were also trained as dragoons, so they would make the trip on horseback. On the crude roads ahead of them, especially with the unwieldy trucks setting the pace, they would have no trouble at all keeping up. The ten members of First Squad, along with their carefully packed 21 st -century weapons and ammunition, were now loading into a pair of pickup trucks at the end of the procession. These trucks, unlike most of the ones in service, still ran on gasoline rather than natural gas. The one big drawback to natural gas engines for military operations, even leaving aside the danger inherent in the more flammable fuel, was that gasoline engines had more range for