The Baltic War(230)

He was grateful for Justine's report, of course. For that matter, Captain Lacrosse was one of the few French captains he'd been able to stomach. The man not only had a brain, he was actually willing to use it, and he never gave Overgaard the impression that his nostrils had detected something that had been dead for several days when he arrived aboard Freja for a conference.



Of course, even Martignac is better than the damned English, Overgaard told himself. On the other hand, the English aren't the ones playing puppetmaster. In fact, judging from reports about their king's idiocy, they're even more inept puppets for Richelieu than we are! Which, he conceded, takes some doing.



He grimaced at the thought, then squared his shoulders and lowered his eyes to the smoke blurring the hard, blue horizon. The morning's mistiness had disappeared, for which he supposed he ought to be at least a little grateful. And he probably would have been, had he been less aware of how that improved visibility was going to help the Americans and—he spared a moment to glower up at the aircraft circling about his fleet—their damned flying spies.



What he really wanted to be doing was sailing in the opposite direction from that smoke just as quickly as he could go. In fact, if the king had paid any attention to Overgaard's advice, they would have withdrawn the blockading force from Luebeck Bay as soon as the reports that the "ironclads" were ready to depart from Magdeburg had been confirmed. Blockading the city—or trying to, at any rate—had made at least some sense, as long as the French army supposedly preparing to assail the city from the landward side was likely to do so before Gustav Adolf's half-tame Americans could sail to his relief, Overgaard supposed. Trying to maintain the blockade (such as it was, and what there was of it) made no sense at all, however, if his ships were even remotely as outclassed as he suspected they were.



Deep down inside somewhere, he shuddered as he remembered the merciless pattern of explosions marching through his anchored fleet when the American "scuba divers" managed to mine them from below. And the detachment that had been sent against Wismar had fared almost worse. In fact, its losses had been worse, as a proportion of its total strength, although it had also cost the Americans at least one of their airplanes and what had probably been their best speedboat. Despite what some people seemed to believe, Overgaard had come to the conclusion that the forces protecting Wismar had been hastily improvised out of whatever the Americans had been able to rush into the city quickly. If he'd had more naval strength available to him, he would have been tempted to press the attack on Wismar from the sea, if only to determine whether or not he was right about that.



But the important point at this particular moment was that whether the Wismar defense had been mounted by improvised forces or not, what was coming at Overgaard's command right now most definitely hadn't been improvised. It had been very carefully designed and built, and it was under the command of their Admiral Simpson. The name struck Overgaard's Swedish ear as outlandish, even after an entire winter spent with English captains and their subordinates flowing through his flagship. However peculiar it might sound, however, all of the reports he'd received, including those Richelieu's spies had deigned to share with him, agreed that Simpson was almost certainly the most competent of the up-timers as a military commander.



All of which helped to explain why Overgaard had no desire whatsoever to meet those ironclads in battle.



Unfortunately, his orders gave him very little choice.



Not, at least, until I've been able to determine that they represent a force too powerful for me to engage, he reminded himself, and his eyes moved from the horizon to the signal party waiting to run up his next command.



It was probably bad form for an admiral to sail into battle already prepared to hoist the signal ordering his command to scatter and run, but Aage Overgaard intended to get no more people killed than he had to. He would carry out his orders to test the combat capabilities of the new warships, and then—



And then, he thought grimly, I'll run like hell.





Chapter 52


Commander Rudolph Klein stood on his timberclad's bridge and watched the weather-stained topsails rising steadily above the southern horizon. There were a lot of them, he noted, like a forest of worn canvas and spars.



He stepped to the rear of the bridge and looked aft through one of the vision slits. Commander Mülbers' Ajax steamed steadily along in the wake of his own Achilles. The thumping and thrashing of Achilles' big paddle wheel in its heavily timbered well vibrated through the deck under his feet, but it was less jarring than it had been, thanks to the reduction in speed Admiral Simpson had ordered when he shifted formation. The tall, ungainly, structure protecting the paddle wheel was the ugliest and clumsiest part of Klein's entire unlovely vessel's construction. It was also thin enough to make him nervous upon occasion. The paddle wheel, like a sailing ship's masts, was the Achilles' heel (Klein grimaced at the metaphor) of her design. Without it, she was dead in the water, the helpless hostage of wind and wave, not to mention enemy action. And its sheer size meant that it couldn't be as heavily protected as her broadside weapons, which meant it was more vulnerable, as well.