Ring of Fire III(9)

Then, it took another two or three minutes to get Hank into the wheelbarrow and positioned in such a way that he wouldn’t fall out—entirely, anyway; at least a third of him wasn’t actually in the wheelbarrow—and enough of his weight was distributed properly so that they could pick up the handles.

At that, it would take two of them, one on each handle, to move him. The third woman would rotate so they’d each get some rest.

They’d need it, too. Bonnie didn’t know exactly how much Hank weighed. She’d have said two hundred pounds or so. Now, straining at one of the handles as they trundled toward the gate that led out of the town in the direction of the airfield, she revised her estimate upward.

“Like. I. Said.” Amanda was on the other handle while Dina led the way ahead of them. “Fat. Asshole.”





Chapter 4





As he got close to the barracks, Tom was relieved to find that his artillery unit was apparently still intact and, judging from the noise, fighting back with considerable spirit. The unit was officially a company—a “battery,” in the artillery’s parlance—but it was way oversized because the men assigned to Ingolstadt’s defensive guns had been incorporated into it. Instead of two hundred men, Tom had almost four hundred under his command. That was more than a third of the total strength of the Danube Regiment.

Not all of them would have been at the barracks when the fighting broke out. But he probably still had close to three hundred soldiers available in his artillery unit, and he’d picked up a couple of infantry companies on his way to the barracks. The companies belonged to the 2nd Battalion, whose commanding officer had been murdered in his sleep also. The two captains in charge of them had no idea where the rest of the battalion was, nor what had happened to the 1st Battalion.

Tom didn’t know the answer to that question either. But he was pretty sure the 1st Battalion had defected to the Bavarians. That would explain how the enemy had managed to pour into Ingolstadt the way they had. Units from that battalion had been in charge of several of the city’s gates. They would have let in assassination teams first, to target the regiment’s still-loyal officers, and then opened the gates for the Bavarian forces who were camped nearby.

Tom and Colonel Engels had both been worried about the reliability of the soldiers in that battalion, but there hadn’t been much they could do about it given the political situation. Reliable units in the regular army—meaning volunteers, in this context, not mercenaries—were now mostly in Poland or Bohemia. And with a new prime minister, the few such units which were still stationed in the USE itself were not likely to be assigned to the Danube Regiment.

The officers and enlisted men in the 1st Battalion were Italian mercenaries, almost to a man. Italy provided a large percentage of Europe’s professional soldiers. They were valued for their courage and skills—nobody made wisecracks about Italian armies in the seventeenth century—but were notoriously prone to switching sides if presented with the right inducement.

Tom stopped while still just out of sight of the barracks. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of a hundred and fifty men coming to a ragged halt. More ragged than usual. The companies were missing at least a fourth of their men and officers.

The two company commanders came up to join him. “What do you want to do, sir?” asked Captain Conrad Fischer.

Tom had been pondering the problem. With a firefight going on, they couldn’t go directly to the barracks. Even with a moon out, the visibility wasn’t good enough for the men in the barracks to distinguish easily between friend and foe at a distance. In this dim lighting, the field-gray uniforms of the USE regulars would be hard to tell apart from the more nondescript clothing and gear worn by the Bavarians—even leaving aside the problem that, if Tom was right, a fair number of the enemy were USE defectors wearing the same uniform.

If the artillerymen saw a mass of soldiers charging toward them, they’d assume they were enemies and open fire. And that fire would be pretty devastating. By now, forted up in their barracks and the arsenal which directly adjoined it, the regiment’s artillery units would have their cannons in position and loaded with canister. The somewhat desultory gunfire Tom could hear was not the noise produced by a frontal charge. The Bavarians would have tried that once, been driven off, and were now settling down to what amounted to a siege.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. Eventually, they’d bring up their own artillery. But at least until dawn, the Bavarians were stymied.

“Nothing for it,” he muttered.

“What was that, sir?” asked Erhard Geipel, the other captain.