The Baltic War(221)

The gunfire he'd heard was coming entirely from the enemy. They weren't really even shooting at anybody, any longer. Most of them, from what Quentin could see, were just firing in the air from sheer exuberance.



How in God's name were they managing that? There was something odd-looking about their matchlocks, although Quentin couldn't really see them that well at the distance. His eyesight was starting to get worse, too.



But it was still good enough to aim a rifle, certainly at this distance. Underwood realized he had no choice any longer but to follow Stearns' advice and abandon the facility. No goddam way he was going to do it without firing at least two or three rounds in anger, though.



He took aim and fired. To his grim satisfaction, the soldier who'd been his target was knocked off his feet. Meet Lord .30-06, you bastard.



Quentin worked the bolt, jacking another round into the chamber, and took aim again.



This time, he missed. By now, at least half a dozen enemy soldiers were aiming their guns at him, but Quentin wasn't too worried about that. They were still almost a hundred yards distant, quite a ways beyond the effective range of matchlocks. He jacked another round into the chamber and started bringing the rifle back up to his shoulder.



It never got there. Of the three .50 caliber bullets that hit him almost simultaneously, either one of two would have killed him. One wound, slowly and painfully, from the damage done to his intestines. Fortunately, the other one severed his aorta, sending a gout of blood everywhere. For all practical purposes, Quentin Underwood was dead before his body hit the ground.





"Quickly! Quickly!" Turenne waved his hand impatiently at the four soldiers ransacking the desks and cabinets in what seemed to be the oil facility's central headquarters. "We haven't much time."



He gave the stacks of documents they'd already piled up on the desks a brief examination, estimating their weight and bulk. Not too bad, in themselves—but they'd be getting added to a larger pile of what seemed to be critical small pieces of equipment.



The officer in command straightened up from the lowest drawer of a desk, with a pile of papers in his hands.



"I think we've already gotten everything critical, Marshal," he said. Since both his hands were occupied, he used his head to point to a big stack of documents on a desk near one of the windows. "The best stuff is over there. Including what looks to be diagrams of the entire facility."



Turenne gave the man an encouraging smile. Privately, he suspected the diagrams—all the documents, for that matter—wouldn't be half as useful as the few small parts from machines they'd be taking back to France. Now that he was here and could finally see these Wietze oil works, Turenne wasn't very impressed. Overall, the technology involved was nothing that France didn't have already, although it had never been used in quite this manner.



The trick, it turned out, was building the machines that could put the oil to use. Not so easy, that. But if France could do so, they'd have no trouble providing the machines with the fuel they needed, with what Turenne had learned from this raid. He was quite sure of that, now. Even if there turned out to be no oil fields in France suitable for the purpose, there were certainly some in the New World territories that the English king had sold to Richelieu. The raw product could be shipped across the Atlantic and refined in a French coastal city.



"Five more minutes," he said. "Then load what you have on the pack horses, and set fire to the building. Let the rest of the documents burn with it."



After he went outside, he headed toward the corpse of the man who'd been in possession of the up-time rifle.



"Have you figured out who he was?" he asked the subaltern he'd left in charge.



"Yes, Marshal." The officer held up one of those elaborate leather contraptions that American men were said to use instead of simple purses. Wallets, they were called, if Turenne remembered correctly.



Flipping open one of the small leather sheets, the officer showed Turenne a portrait. Not a painted one, but what the up-timers called a photograph. It filled perhaps one-third of the small document it was attached to, with the rest being a simple block of text.



The marshal looked from the photograph to the body lying on the ground. The corpse had fallen face up. By some peculiar quirk, very little of the blood that had painted half the wall of the shed behind the man had splattered onto his face, so the features were readily visible.



The photograph was that of the corpse, clearly enough. Turenne scanned the text alongside the photograph. The meaning of much of it wasn't clear, but one item sprang immediately to his attention.



The man's name. Quentin B. Underwood.