"Maybe," Clements said in an unconvinced voice, and Frank chuckled.
"Hell, you're in the Naaaaavy now, Mr. Volunteer Lieutenant Clements, sir!" He waved in something which could, with a sufficient stretch of the imagination, have been called a salute. "Admiral Simpson's gonna have his own ideas about how to use you best. And much's I hate to say it, the prick seems to know what he's doing, so you listen to him, hear?"
"You say so, Frank," Clements agreed dubiously, and Frank chuckled again. Then he turned back to his inspection.
Clements', Watson's, and Tillman's were the three boats Eddie had specifically requested. After that, the Grantville boating selection ran down through smaller ski boats to bass boats and simple dories, but Frank had picked out one more as a backup for Eddie's requests: a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler which had belonged to Harry Rousseau before Harry and his family went to visit his mother in Duluth the day before the Ring of Fire struck. It was on the small size for what they had in mind, but it was the next biggest boat in Grantville, and he wished fervently that he had an entire fleet to send with the four of them.
Hell, while I'm wishing, I might's well wish for a frigging destroyer-or even an aircraft carrier! he told himself sourly.
He started tugging on the tie-down straps and checking the hull chocks, but left off when he spotted Jerry Yost glaring at him. The truck driver, clearly enough, did not appreciate the interference of an amateur, "General of the Army" or not. Frank gave Yost a half-apologetic smile and moved down the line of trucks. The coal trucks, he decided, would provide him with a safer avenue for venting his overseer reflexes. They were, after all, officially the property of the U.S. Army.
He glanced into the back of the first coal truck. At the moment, it was loaded with additional fuel drums and cans, two deflated rubber Zodiac boats that belonged to Sam and Al Morton, and the odd case of dynamite. The second coal truck, also towing Rousseau's Boston Whaler on its trailer, would be leaving Grantville for Halle early next morning with its own load of supplies too bulky to be transported by the speedboats themselves-including several hundred rockets and the modified launch frames the machine shops were working frantically to complete even as Frank stood in the dark and worried.
He still had his doubts about the entire operation, whether he was prepared to admit them to anyone else-besides Mike, of course-or not. But if the defense of Wismar failed, it wasn't going to be because Frank Jackson hadn't done everything he could to prevent it.
He reached the end of his inspection trip and grunted in satisfaction, then looked at his own addition to the relief force.
James Nichols and Frank's niece Julie had personally overseen the training of the Thuringian Rifles, the first company of true long-range snipers in history. Most of them, American and German alike, had been experienced hunters before the Ring of Fire. The Germans were mostly youngsters who hadn't picked up any bad habits when it came to firing a gun from serving in arquebus-wielding mercenary units, and had been eager to learn. The up-time Americans among them, on the other hand-about a fourth of the unit-had already thought they understood the finer points of marksmanship. Julie and Dr. Nichols had shown them otherwise, and on any one-for-one basis, the forty-two men and three women of the understrength "company" were undoubtedly the most dangerous marksmen in the world. Aside from their official commanding officer, Julie Mackay, that was. In fact, they were too dangerous for Frank to justify committing all of them to Wismar, but he'd decided that he could reinforce that city with their first squad, at least. Second Squad would be leaving for Luebeck with the second coal truck.
He didn't think he'd need to send more than that, anyway. Mustered up not far away from the Thuringian Rifles, their horses already saddled, was a larger body of men. Thirty-four of them, all with the long beards they favored, and all wearing their special blue uniforms and distinctive "montero" headgear. The montero was an odd-looking hat, which the Germans sometimes called an "English foghat." In cold weather, the beak of the hat could be pulled down, serving much the same function as a balaclava.
They were all Swedish woodsmen and gameshooters, under the command of Nils Krak. Gustav Adolf had ordered the unit's formation early in 1632. Unlike most other soldiers of the time, these men used small-bore rifled hunting muskets and the unit had been designed for sniping and skirmishing, not volley fire in the line. Once the alliance with the Americans had been made, Gustav had sent Krak's Shooters down to Thuringia. Krak and his men had all been issued brand-new flintlocks with longer barrels and a tighter rifling twist, and they had now trained for months alongside the Thuringian Rifles. The two units got along well, and were accustomed to joint operations. True, the Swedish sharpshooters did not have the range of their U.S. counterparts, but their weapons had been fitted with aperture sights which made them very nearly as accurate over the range they had. Compared to any other body of 17 th -century soldiers, they were a unit of elite riflemen. Some of the best shots among them had actually been issued telescopic sights from the carefully hoarded store of them which had come back from the 21 st century, and to compensate for the technical inferiority of their equipment, almost all of them had a lot more in the way of actual combat experience than most of the U.S. soldiers did.
They were also trained as dragoons, so they would make the trip on horseback. On the crude roads ahead of them, especially with the unwieldy trucks setting the pace, they would have no trouble at all keeping up. The ten members of First Squad, along with their carefully packed 21 st -century weapons and ammunition, were now loading into a pair of pickup trucks at the end of the procession. These trucks, unlike most of the ones in service, still ran on gasoline rather than natural gas. The one big drawback to natural gas engines for military operations, even leaving aside the danger inherent in the more flammable fuel, was that gasoline engines had more range for the same weight and bulk of fuel.
Frank nodded to Stan Wilson, their sergeant.
"Ready to go, Stan?" he asked, through the rumble of waiting engines.
"Ready as we're going to be, anyway, I reckon," Stan drawled back.
"Well, then," Frank said, reaching in through the truck window to pat him on the shoulder. "You watch your ass-all of you! I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd remember we don't want any dead heroes around here."
"Oh, I think you can count on us to remember that," Stan assured him with a slow smile.
"Bet your ass," Frank agreed, and slapped him on the shoulder again. Then he stepped back and twirled one hand over his head in a "wind-them-up" gesture. Stan's pickup truck honked its horn in response, and the lead tractor-trailer moved forward in a grumbling snort of diesel exhaust. The snort had a vaguely derisive sound to it, as if Frank Yost was still miffed that Frank-friggin' coal miner, what does he know?-had had the presumption and gall to double-check his expert tie-down.
Frank Jackson stood there, watching them head off down the dirt roads of southern Thuringia until their tail lights vanished into the blackness.
When he returned to the executive branch building in downtown Grantville, Frank found Mike sitting at the desk in his office. He'd expected to find him there, since he'd known Mike would wait to hear his report.
What he hadn't expected to see was the cheerful smile on his face.