"Yes, I do, and the answer is no."
Norddahl sighed. I wish I could say that surprised me."
"I feel the same way," Ulrik agreed. "On the other hand," his smile was thin, "unlike Overgaard, we're not going to be trying to batter our way through their armor, are we?"
Chapter 60
"I'm sorry, sir," Franz-Leo Chomse said. "His Majesty seemed disinclined to listen to reason."
"Not too surprising, sir," Captain Halberstat pointed out.
"Not surprising at all, actually," Simpson replied. He stood on the bridge wing once again, gazing up the body of water usually known in English as the Sound. He'd been here before the Ring of Fire, right after the Oresund suspension bridge's construction had finally been authorized. He would have liked to have seen the bridge completed, he thought.
There are a lot of things I would have liked to have done, come to that. And there are some things I'm not going to enjoy doing at all. Not that Christian's left me a lot of choice.
He considered delaying the attack until the turn of the tide. The channel between the island of Amager to the west and the shoal fringing the low-lying island of Saltholm to the east wasn't all that wide. Indeed, when Nelson attacked Copenhagen, several of his ships had gone aground on that shoal, Simpson recalled. The seaman in him was tempted to allow the incoming flood tide to give him the greatest depth of water possible over the shoal, but the admiral in him suspected that the temptation was simply one more subconscious effort to avoid the inevitable. Yes, some of Nelson's ships had grounded. But those ships had been wind-powered, far less maneuverable than any of his. And Nelson's ships had been deeper-draft than his, as well. Not to mention the fact that his ships boasted fathometers.
Stop delaying, John, he told himself sternly. You have enough water for what you've got to do. And the more promptly you move in, the deeper the psychological impact is going to be. Maybe even deep enough to make an impression on Christian IV.
"All right." He turned back to Halberstat. "If he won't listen to reason, then we're just going to have to convince him to reconsider his position, aren't we?"
"They're moving!"
Ulrik glanced up from his conversation with Norddahl. The man assigned to watch the dockyard signal flag mast was pointing at the mast, and the prince looked over his own shoulder. The agreed upon signal flag had been raised, and he felt his belly muscles tighten.
"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 slender, shallow-draft galleys-basically long, narrow rowboats, really-gathered speed through the two-foot swell. They were just over thirty-five feet long. Fifteen of them had an eighteen-pounder cannon mounted in their bows, while ten more carried spar torpedoes, raised so that they looked like strange masts stepped all the way forward, swelling into ungainly pods at the business end.
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 they could hope to mount was a single heavy gun in the bows, which could normally fire only straight ahead. 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.
"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."