The Baltic War(182)

"They're moving faster than we expected," Olier observed, and du Bouvard chuckled sourly.



"In that case, we'd better get them started," he said.



"I'll see to it."



Olier started back, and du Bouvard returned his attention to the river.



Léandre had a point, he thought. Those ships were moving at least twice as rapidly as they'd anticipated, which only made this entire operation even more problematical. As du Bouvard had attempted to point out to his superiors, when the Americans attacked the League fleet in the Trave River below Luebeck, its ships had been anchored, motionless. And they'd launched the attack under cover of night. And the Trave was a much smaller river than the Elbe.



None of those conditions, unfortunately, applied at the moment.



The odds of any swimmer, even one equipped with the Americans' "scuba gear," managing to place an explosive charge on a vessel moving through the water at a substantial rate of speed, in daylight, struck du Bouvard as remote, to say the very least. Adding in the frigid temperature of the water, and its inevitable effect on those same swimmers, didn't improve them. But the cavalry forces that had accompanied the American vessels as far as Hamburg had precluded any possibility of getting close enough to attempt an attack above the city. And now that the ironclads and timberclads were past Hamburg, it was extraordinarily unlikely that they were going to obligingly anchor anywhere else in the river. So, if du Bouvard was going to attempt this lunacy at all, this was the best chance he was going to be able to arrange.



Piss-poor as it might be.



Olier and the two divers made their way down to the river bank, and du Bouvard shook his head as he watched. The cardinal's agents had been unable to acquire one of the "wetsuits" the Americans apparently used. Du Bouvard wasn't entirely clear on exactly how a "wetsuit" worked, but he knew it was designed to protect a swimmer from the numbing effect of cold water. In the absence of whatever it was and however it worked, he and Olier had done their best by coating the swimmers' bodies thickly in insulating grease. He expected it to help; he didn't expect it to help enough.



The "volunteers," who—in the event of their survival—would find their sentences commuted, in addition to receiving a substantial monetary reward, pulled on their frogfootlike flippers and slipped gingerly into the water. They adjusted their equipment carefully, moving methodically through the series of checks du Bouvard and Olier had put together from their reading of the books acquired from the same source that had provided the scuba gear itself. They'd been able to make a handful of practice dives in warmer water, but the difficulty in recharging the scuba tanks had limited the amount of time they could spend actually underwater. And, while du Bouvard had chosen not to mention it to his swimmers, the books had made it clear that there were problems using normal air to fill the tanks.



They completed their adjustments, nodded to Olier, and disappeared into the Elbe.



Someone knocked on the cabin door, and John Simpson looked up from the sandwich and glass of beer of the lunch he'd been anticipating for the last couple of hours. Especially the beer. Good seventeenth-century German beer was among the best in the world, and one difference between the USE Navy and the U.S. Navy in which he'd once served was that there'd been no point at all in attempting to enforce Gideon Welles' ban on shipboard alcohol. Simpson couldn't really say he regretted that, but however he'd felt about it, no down-time German would have stood for it. So he'd settled for truly ferocious punishments for drunkenness, instead, although, to be fair, that seemed to be no worse a common problem among seventeenth-century Germans than it had been among twentieth-century Americans.



Whoever it was knocked again, and he shook his head.



"Enter!" he called, and one of Constitution's assistant signalmen opened the door and stepped into the cabin.



"Message from Achates, sir. I'm afraid it's marked 'Urgent.' "



"Very well." Simpson sighed, pushing the beer aside, and took the radio room message slip. He unfolded it and scanned the few, terse sentences, and his jaw tightened.



"Thank you," he told the messenger, and climbed out of his chair. He started for the compartment door, then paused, scooped up the sandwich, and continued on his way.



Captain Halberstat was waiting on the port bridge wing, gazing aft through a pair of up-time binoculars, when he arrived.



The bridge lookouts came to attention as Simpson stepped out of the conning tower door, still chewing on ham and cheese, but he waved them back to their duties as he moved up beside Halberstat.