"Captain von Dantz!" he shouted. "Lieutenant Horton! I am now in command here in Suhl, and I order you—"
"Get fucked, Hatfield!" John Horton hollered back. His beefy face was almost bright red, either from anger or the cold, or both. "You're nothing but a warrant officer! As the ranking American here—"
"There's no such thing as a `ranking American,' Horton," Anse snarled. Under the circumstances, he saw no point in maintaining military protocol. "All there is, is legal authority under the laws of the New United States. Which I have, and you don't. Ms. Murphy would have showed you the documents."
"Fuck her, too!" came the answering shout. "Some bullshit papers, supposedly from Stearns. For all I know, you forged them. Means nothing!"
Horton stepped forward, pushing past von Dantz. He had his rifle in his left hand, and was pointing his finger angrily at Anse.
"I'm warning you, Hatfield! We're here to arrest a traitor. Dead or alive, it don't matter to me at all. You've got ten seconds to get out of the way or—"
A shot was fired, by one of the garrison mercenaries. Anse never saw where it went. He didn't think it was even aimed at anything. Just someone too nervous, in a situation that was too tense.
Immediately, a fusillade of shots rang out from the shuttered gunmaker shops. Four of the garrison soldiers fell, and several others were sent reeling.
Horton started to bring his rifle up to his shoulder. A bullet caught him in the ribs. He half-spun, dropping the rifle. His face turned toward Anse.
"Hey, what—" he started to say. Another bullet struck him in the jaw. There wasn't much left of his face by the time it fell into a snowdrift.
But Anse wasn't paying attention to Horton, any longer. Von Dantz raised his pistol and fired at him. Astonishingly, the down-time weapon was accurate enough for the bullet to knock Anse's cap right off his head. Anse was sure he'd—literally—felt the bullet parting his hair.
That was frightening. Anse sprawled into the snow, hurriedly bringing up his rifle for a prone shot. Once he got von Dantz in the sights, he saw that the German captain had drawn out another pistol.
Von Dantz fired again. The bullet grazed the back of Anse's boot and tore off the heel.
Jesus! Given the kind of guns he was using, von Dantz was turning out to be a goddam John Wesley Harding.
Then again, Harding got killed. With a modern rifle, at a range of less than fifty yards, Anse couldn't possibly miss.
He fired.
He missed.
A garrison soldier standing just behind von Dantz stumbled backward, flinging aside his musket. He'd been struck in the shoulder by Anse's shot.
Von Dantz was pulling out another pistol. If he'd been using a revolver instead of wheel locks, Anse would have been dead already.
Settle down, you idiot!
He jacked another round into the chamber, and forced himself to draw a real bead instead of just jerking the trigger.
Von Dantz was bringing up the pistol. Anse fired.
This time, the bullet hit von Dantz squarely, right in the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground.
By now, the gunfire in the street was almost deafening. The garrison soldiers were grouped in the center, shooting back at the shops from whose windows they were being fired upon.
Anse glanced back at the still-open door to Blumroder's shop. He decided he'd be safer lying prone in several inches of snow than trying to crawl back into the shop. The mercenaries were paying no attention to him, since he wasn't moving and they were taking a murderous fire from the shops.
As inconspicuously as he could, he jacked another round into the chamber.
There was no lack of targets for him, of course. On the other hand . . .
Right now, the enemy was ignoring him. Most of them probably thought he was dead. If he fired, on the other hand, they would notice him—and lying in the open, right out on the street, he was a sitting duck. More precisely, a prone duck.
He didn't think they were going to last much longer, anyway. Somewhere around a dozen of them had already been killed or wounded. Von Dantz and Horton had been idiots, leading their men straight into the street the way they had. The gunmakers and their apprentices and Jaeger were shooting from behind shelter—good shelter, too; the thick, sturdy walls of seventeenth-century German manufacturing shops—and they had an open field of fire. As battles went, it was completely one-sided.
So . . .
True, it was inglorious. Even ignominious. On the other hand, youth and its excess of testosterone were several decades behind him.