The Saxon Uprising(134)

“You’re planning to take the whole army, then.”

“Beyond a regiment I’ll leave here to maintain order, yes. There’s nothing in Magdeburg you could call a real army, and they’ve been negligent when it comes to fortifying the city. Still, they have a lot of industry and they’ll have their backs to the wall. And they’re fanatics to begin with. So I don’t expect taking the city will be that easy.”

The chancellor’s face was stiff and cold. Wunsch didn’t have any doubt what Oxenstierna planned, once he took Magdeburg. The sack that followed would put Tilly’s in the shade. Wunsch wouldn’t be surprised if the chancellor ordered the ground to be sown with salt.

Some of the Americans in the city would survive, if they identified themselves quickly enough. Oxenstierna had already passed orders to his commanders to avoid unnecessary killings of up-timers, if possible. But most of them wouldn’t. It was simply not possible to control a sack once it began, especially if the orders came from above in the first place. The soldiery would run amok, most of them drunk.

No one else would stay alive, unless they took refuge inside the royal palace. Oxenstierna would make sure that the palace was protected, given that the headstrong girl had chosen to put herself in it. No one wanted to see the dynasty go up in smoke along with the city itself, of course.

But that only required Kristina’s survival. Wunsch wasn’t privy to such things, but he also wouldn’t be surprised if Oxenstierna saw to it that the Danish prince died in the chaos. Ulrik had quite outworn his welcome with the Swedish chancellor. The heir to the throne was only nine years old. There was still plenty of time to find a more suitable consort.

Wismar, Germany, on the Baltic coast

“It looks like there’s a storm coming, sir,” said the radio operator, as soon as he entered the headquarters of Wismar’s air force base. “Headquarters,” in this instance, being a fancy term for a one-room officers’ lounge on the ground floor of the airfield’s control tower.

There was only one officer present, as usual. Wismar was a military backwater, these days. The main purpose of the air base was monitoring the weather in the Baltic and the North Sea. In Europe, as in North America, the weather basically moved from west to east. Getting a day or two’s warning of a coming storm front was useful, for the military in time of war even more than civilians.

Lt. Gottfried Riemann levered himself out of the arm chair where he’d been reading a training manual. He was an ambitious young man, and had no intention of remaining a ground crew officer consigned to a wretched post like Wismar. He took the radio message slip from the operator, read it quickly, and then handed it back.

“Well, what are you waiting for? You know the Colonel’s orders. Get this off right away.”

On his way back up to the radio in the control tower, Corporal Grauman pondered the same problem he’d been pondering for weeks.

Was there any way to poison a man and remain undetected?

The lieutenant was the sort of obnoxious officer who insisted that nothing be done without his approval—and then criticized his subordinates for lack of initiative. Not too uncommon a type, of course, but Riemann was an extreme version of it. So extreme that it had only taken him a month to become thoroughly detested by every airman assigned to the base.

Naturally, he was also good at brown-nosing, so his superiors were oblivious to his true nature.

The problem with using arsenic or cyanide was that they were too well known. There was some deadly poison the up-timers knew about called “strychnine.” If you could get your hands on some of the stuff…

He wasn’t even thinking about the message when he sent it. That was old habit by now, something he could almost do in his sleep. He certainly gave no thought to the message’s potential ramifications.

Maybe an accident of some kind. The problem was that the lieutenant almost never got out of that damned arm chair. “Studying,” he called it. The shithead was lazy, too. The only time he exerted himself was to criticize a subordinate for not working hard enough.

The corporal’s thoughts circled back to poisons. Maybe…





Chapter 44


Dresden, capital of Saxony

Blessedly, Denise and Minnie had found a new enthusiasm. If they’d kept hammering away in the basement, expanding and improving the hidey-hole, Noelle would have had to start thinking seriously about poisons instead of just idly fancying them. Had she been as full of boundless enthusiasm and inexhaustible energy at that age? Surely not.

However, all bad things come to an end. The day after Eddie left, they got a radio message from their employer in Prague.