The Baltic War(269)

"I suppose it's time to go a-viking," he said, as lightly as he could.



"It is that," Norddahl agreed. The pirate was closer to the surface than Ulrik had ever seen it, and the burly Norwegian radiated a fierce readiness, an eagerness, which abruptly made even the most outrageous of his tales very believable.



To Ulrik's surprise, some of that same fierceness seemed to leap across the space between him and the older man, like sparks flying from a piece of rubbed amber.



"Then let's get started," he said, and oars thumped, then groaned in the oarlocks, as the crews ran out the sweeps and threw their weight on to them.



The shallow-draft, fifty-foot galleys—basically outsized open rowboats with three men on each sweep—gathered speed through the two-foot swell. Fifteen of them still carried their original eighteen-pounder cannon mounted in their bows, but the other ten had traded in their artillery for spar torpedoes, raised so that they looked like strange masts stepped all the way forward, swelling into ungainly pods at the business ends.



Half of the galleys towed rafts in addition to their weapons, and Ulrik jerked his head in their direction, then nodded to Norddahl.



"Whenever you think best, Baldur," he said.



Norddahl glanced at the water, obviously considering the state of the tide and wind. He waited a few more moments, then picked up the signal flag and waved it around his head with a quick, circling motion.



The galleys towing the rafts slowed briefly. Just long enough for the men carrying the lit oil lanterns to toss them into the carefully prepared rafts. Oil splashed over the piled combustibles. Flame followed, and the first tendrils of dense smoke began to rise.





"Smoke bearing three-five-five!"



Simpson raised his binoculars and peered in the indicated direction. At first, there wasn't a great deal to see, but the first smudge the sharp-eyed lookout had done remarkably well to spot grew quickly into something far denser and darker. The moderately stiff breeze blowing out of the north played with it, rolling it along on its breath, and he frowned as his binoculars picked out the first of several low-slung galleys.



"Ships bearing three-five-five!" the same lookout announced at almost exactly the same moment Simpson spotted them. "Many ships—galleys!"



Simpson's mouth tightened. His intelligence reports had warned him the Danes were assembling a fleet of oar-powered gunboats to defend Copenhagen. Even without those reports, he would have anticipated exactly the same thing. Galley fleets had lasted longer in the Baltic and the Black Sea than anywhere else, given the normal sailing conditions. They were also small enough that they could be turned out quickly in relatively large numbers, and they had frequently been manned by hastily impressed soldiers, rather than the trained seamen sailing ships required.



Set against that, they'd seldom proved very effective against larger warships. They were simply too fragile, and the best most of them could hope to mount was a single heavy gun in the bows, which could normally fire only straight ahead. True, some of the larger ones mounted a single gun aft, as well, but none of them were stable enough for broadside fire, which meant they could never bring more than one gun to bear at a time. As long as a sailing ship had enough wind to turn and keep its broadside directed at the oncoming galleys, they'd been able to accomplish very little. Against the tough hides of Simpson's ironclads and timberclads, galley gunboats—especially with seventeenth-century artillery—were going to be totally ineffectual.



Several of these galleys, however, carried what were obviously spar torpedoes, and those actually could damage or even sink any of his ships . . . if they managed to get close enough.



Which is exactly what that damned smokescreen of theirs is designed to bring about, he thought grimly. Damn. Why couldn't they be stupid, as well as stubborn?



Even as he watched, the steadily thickening pall of smoke was rolling down across the leading galleys, blotting them from sight like a dense, artificial fog bank.



He lowered the binoculars, eyes narrow as he contemplated his options. The probability of any one of those torpedo-armed galleys getting close enough, even under the protection of their smokescreen, wasn't very great. But he'd seen at least six or seven of them, and the odds of at least one of them getting through were substantially higher. What he needed to fend them off were lighter escorts of his own, but he didn't have those. Certainly the one undamaged bass boat he still had available would be useless floundering around out there in the smoke.



"Captain Halberstat!"



"Yes, sir?" the flag captain replied almost instantly.