The Baltic War(228)

"What's this all about, Jerome?" Captain Alain Lacrosse demanded testily as he stepped on to Justine's poop deck. The fifty-four-gun ship, one of only four French vessels still attached to the allied fleet off Luebeck, now that Railleuse had finally been allowed to escape, had been stationed quite a bit farther to leeward than the main body of that fleet. She was there specifically to maintain a lookout for likely threats, and Lacrosse's own standing order to his officers was that he was to be informed whenever such a threat might have been detected, but that made him no happier about the interruption of his lunch.



"I'm not certain, Captain," Jerome Bouvier, his first lieutenant, replied. Then he pointed toward the north. "The lookouts spotted that about five minutes ago, sir."



Lacrosse followed Bouvier's pointing finger, and his eyebrows furrowed as he saw the dark smear on the horizon. For a moment, he thought it was cloud. But only for a moment.



"Smoke, you think, Jerome?"



"Yes, sir," Bouvier said rather grimly, and Lacrosse pursed his lips.



"Well," he said after a moment, "I doubt there are very many houses out there to catch fire."



"The same thought had occurred to me, sir."



"In that case, I suppose we should inform the captain admiral. See to it, please."



"At once, sir."



Lacrosse watched as Bouvier began giving orders to the signal party. That was a new innovation, the handiwork of King Christian—and an innovation that had caused Lacrosse, unlike some of his fellow Frenchmen, to reconsider the notion that the king of Denmark was simply one more drunken sot.



So far as Lacrosse knew, no one outside the so-called "United States of Europe" actually had any real idea of how the mysterious up-timer "radio" worked. What they did know was that it had afforded the Americans and their allies an enormous advantage, time and again . . . and that it was an advantage they couldn't duplicate yet. King Christian, on the other hand, had decided to see what he might be able to come up with instead of radio, and one of his better investments had been in a book—a history book, even if much of the "history" it recounted had not yet happened—about the development of pre-radio means of communication. It had contained the details of something called "telegraphs" and "Morse code," and also a copy of the "international signal flags" and a technique for sending messages using "semaphore flags."



Several of Lacrosse's fellow French captains had dismissed the notion's practicality—and value—with the disdain properly accorded to anything Christian might have suggested. Captain Admiral Overgaard, on the other hand, had not, and he had not only issued complete sets of the appropriate flags to all of the ships under his command but also insisted that those ships train in their use.



Which was why it was possible for Captain Alain Lacrosse to inform his commanding officer that he had spotted funnel smoke on the northern horizon much more quickly than anyone on the other side had anticipated that he might.





"Recon One, this is Navy One."



"Navy One, Recon One," a voice replied from the speaker in Constitution's radio room.



"We're ready for your situation report, Recon One."



"Understood, Admiral Simpson," said Lieutenant Ernst Weissenbach, the aircraft's pilot. "I make it thirty-one—repeat, three-one—warships," he continued. "There are several smaller vessels around, too. Another half-dozen, but I think most of them are supply or support ships. They aren't in formation with the others, at any rate."



"In formation?" Simpson repeated in a rather sharper tone. "What sort of formation?"



"They're forming into what looks like it's supposed to be a column," Weissenbach replied. "They're about fifteen miles south of you, four miles north of the estuary, course about two-eight-three true."



"You say they're forming into a column?"



"Yes, sir."



"And how long have they been doing so?"



"They started shifting formation probably ten or fifteen minutes ago, Admiral."



"I see." Simpson frowned and rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. "Wait one, Recon One," he said, and looked at Captain Halberstat.



"I think something new has been added, Franz," he said. Halberstat cocked his head to one side, clearly not seeing exactly where his admiral was headed, and Simpson snorted.



"Assuming Lieutenant Weissenbach has his time interval right, then they started shifting formation just about the time one of them might have seen the timberclads' smoke if he'd been maintaining a particularly sharp lookout. Which raises the interesting question of exactly how whoever might have spotted the smoke got the word to Overgaard—and Overgaard got his orders back to everyone else—fast enough for them already to be altering formation in response to our arrival."