The Baltic War(270)

"We're going to change formation," Simpson decided. "Have Ajax take the lead, then Achilles. The ironclads will follow behind them, and the squadron will assume Formation Charlie on a heading of zero-niner-five."



"Aye, aye, sir."



Halberstat disappeared back into the conning tower, and Simpson heard him calling down the interior ladder to the radio room. At almost the same instant, Constitution and her sister ships slowed, reducing speed to allow the timberclads to steam past them.



Simpson watched Achilles coming up to port, while Ajax steamed past to starboard and wondered what their crews were thinking. He wasn't sending them ahead because they were more expendable, although he supposed that was exactly what they were, in cold-blooded terms. But the main reason for sending them ahead was their heavier close-range firepower. They'd be much more capable of taking care of themselves in the sort of knife fight galleys with spar torpedoes would be seeking.



"Well, sir," Halberstat's voice observed at his elbow, "at least we can be fairly certain we're not sailing directly into one of those minefields of theirs. Not if their own galleys are crossing through it, at any rate."



"Probably," Simpson replied, but his own tone was more thoughtful, less assured, and Halberstat's eyebrows rose. Simpson turned his head in time to see the flag captain's expression, and he chuckled mirthlessly.



"First, those galleys probably don't draw much more water than the ironclads do when their ballast tanks are empty. They could be sailing right across the top of a minefield, if they were ballsy enough. Second, they could be deliberately showing themselves to us figuring that we'd charge right in to attack them, at which point we'd discover that there was a minefield between us and them."



"Do you seriously think there is one, sir?"



"No, not really," Simpson acknowledged. "Mining this channel would have closed Copenhagen's harbor completely, which obviously hasn't been the case. Not unless they somehow managed to work out a way to detonate mines from the shore after all, and I don't believe they could have. Even contact mines built with the tech currently available to them are going to be pretty damned problematical. Most of the mines employed prior to the 1900s had a very high failure rate, and I'd guess that anything they could cobble up on such relatively short notice would be . . . less than fully reliable, let's say.



"On the other hand, only one of them would have to work to put any one of our ships on the bottom. And the same is true for those spar torpedoes of theirs. Which is why we're going to Formation Charlie."



"Yes, sir."





The main problem with smoke screens, Ulrik discovered (not to his surprise, particularly) was that neither side could see through them. He knew approximately where the American warships had been when the reeking, choking, thoroughly filthy wall of smoke rolled down across the galleys. Unfortunately, he couldn't be certain they were still there. For that matter, it was all but impossible to be confident about his own vessels' heading. Fortunately, the breeze was strong enough and the smoke rolling along on it was thick enough to keep his sense of direction from becoming totally confused.



"Shouldn't we have made contact by now, Your Highness?" his galley's second-in-command asked. He sounded more than a little nervous, and Ulrik commanded himself to wait long enough to draw a deep breath and be positive he was in control of his own voice before he responded.



"We haven't gone as far as you think we have since we lost sight of them, Sven," he said then. "And if you were in command on the other side, would you have continued charging straight ahead after you'd sighted us coming? Especially if you'd noticed the spar torpedoes, first?"



"Probably not, Your Highness," the other man acknowledged after a moment. "I wish we did know where they are, though."



"Well, so do I!" Ulrik assured him with a laugh. "On the other hand, blind as we may be, they have to be equally blind. And just between the two of us, that suits me just fine."





Commander Wolfgang Mülbers muttered another oath as the front edge of the smoke bank enveloped Ajax. Mülbers' timberclad had turned hard to starboard, with Achilles astern of her. Their new heading was at right angles to their earlier course, and they had reduced speed to no more than six or seven knots. He didn't like moving so slowly when he might have to maneuver hard to avoid those dammed spar torpedoes, but Formation Charlie was essentially a defensive one. Admiral Simpson had worked it out as one of the Navy's standard deployments specifically designed to deal with the threat of torpedo attack in poor visibility and narrow waters. In open water, or with better visibility, they would almost certainly have gone to Formation Delta. Delta called for all units to maneuver at high speed, giving them the best opportunity to evade, but that wouldn't have been very practical here in the approaches to Copenhagen. And at least the slow speed of Formation Charlie should give them stable gun platforms.