Third, he was the meanest son of a bitch among the merchant captains currently residing in the city.
Hamers resisted the notion, for a few minutes. First, he tried to claim he couldn't understand Mike's German, and his English was worse. No problem. Mike switched to Spanish. He'd studied the language in college and, better still, had gotten a thorough seventeenth century brush-up from his wife and father-in-law; for whom, as was true of most Sephardim, it was their native tongue.
Hamers then fell back on being a mean son of a bitch. But Mike's mean son-of-a-bitch routine was way better than his—especially with half a dozen armed CoC members to back him up.
"Okay! Okay!" Hamers exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "I do it. But I make no promises about the horses. They die like flies, on boats."
The rest went smoothly. Having been thwarted by Mike in the mean-son-of-a-bitch department, Hamers proceeded to restore his reputation by bullying several other merchant captains in the city's portside taverns. In this case, with him having the advantage of half a dozen armed CoC members at his side—who did a pretty good mean-sons-of-bitches act themselves.
That left the curlicues, where Mike was on more familiar ground. The first thing he did, seeing as how they'd already provided yeoman service, was impress the half dozen CoC members who'd been serving as his enforcers. They'd come along on the expedition also, to see to the necessary political tasks.
Those same tasks, however, required a printing press and experienced printers, which none of them were.
Not a problem. If there was one single trade in Europe that the CoCs had penetrated thoroughly, it was that of the printers—already notorious in the seventeenth century for being a radical lot, even before the Ring of Fire.
Soon enough, the printers arrived. Dismantling the printing equipment and getting it loaded on one of the timberclads took more time than anything. Mostly because the work itself was time consuming, but partly because Commodore Henderson put up a fuss. The ink would spill and ruin his deck, he claimed.
There being no feasible way to just bully a commodore in the USE Navy, Mike assured him the government would finance whatever repairs might be needed—and what did he care, anyway, seeing as how it was the government's ship, not his?
It took half an hour to bring Henderson around to an understanding of that point, proving to Mike's satisfaction as well as that of his CoC sidekicks that Henderson, at least, was a genuine Scotsman.
They left Hamburg the next morning. A flotilla of five timberclads and seven merchant ships, carrying a full regiment of foot soldiers and one company each of cavalry and dragoons. Mike had even corralled a battery of four guns; only six-pounders, but every little bit helped.
At the last minute, remembering an overlooked detail, Mike ordered the flotilla to remain at the docks until he and his sidekicks rounded up whatever soldiers in the garrison could play a musical instrument. That didn't take too long, since it was still before dawn and the troops were mostly asleep. Finding the instruments themselves took quite a bit longer.
So, after stressing the imperative necessity to sail at first light, Mike delayed the whole expedition until ten o'clock in the morning. Thereby proving to both the real Scots captain and the phony one that he was a confirmed lunatic.
Most of the soldiers probably thought the same, although they were more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The CoC members accompanying the expedition, however, were sure that this was just another example of the prince of Germany's canny ways.
Exactly how, they had no idea. Mike wasn't talking. Partly because he thought silence helped keep what few scraps of dignity he still had left; but, mostly, because he wasn't sure himself if he was a lunatic or not.
Jesse Wood kicked a loose clod into the dirt-filled hole and stomped on it. He looked across the field at the teams of farmers from the village still filling similar holes and depressions in the new airfield at Ochsen Werder, an island between the Elbe and one of its tributaries just southeast of Hamburg. By dint of back-breaking effort with their farm tools and wagons, the men, women, and children of the village were smoothing the ground of what had been a field of winter wheat only weeks before. The field had been hurriedly prepared by the army for their first flight over Hamburg. It was now approaching something close to an installation suitable for real flying operations and was already being called, inevitably, "The Ox."
Normally, this time of year, the farmers would have been right in the middle of the spring planting. But Jesse had promised relatively lavish wages for all and sundry, including the kids, to work on the airfield. He didn't mind the expense—in his experience, the mission came first—and it wasn't his money, anyhow. He even felt a slight guilty pleasure; half gratitude at having what amounted to an unlimited budget and half satisfaction at the thought of giving Stearns the tab for this. He imagined Mike would have a hell of a fight on some future supplemental military appropriations bill, but that wasn't his problem.