In practice, Baldur had told the prince, the act of yanking the cord itself would set off the mine one time in six. That could produce a dangerous situation for the mine-laying ship, of course. But it was not nearly as dangerous as taking the risk of fuses that were too sensitive.
"Don't blame you," said Ulrik. He would have added-for perhaps the thousandth time-my father and his damned enthusiasms, but in this instance that wouldn't have been fair. The king of Denmark had allowed his son to determine how to detonate the devices, since he wasn't very partial to them anyway. Ulrik had been the one to finally order this method, since it was the only one feasible in the time they had.
A pity, that. Ulrik had wanted to use the sort of manually controlled detonations by wire that Baldur had found in one of the copies of up-time texts. The Oresund was narrow enough here between Helsingor and Helsingborg-only three miles-that that had seemed feasible. But…
There just hadn't been enough time. By now, Baldur's artisans understood the basic methods for generating electricity, well enough. Getting a good enough current to pass through a long wire immersed in salt water, however, had proven to be a lot more difficult than they'd anticipated.
So, in the end, Ulrik had opted for the contact fuses. With the new percussion caps supplied to them by the French, those had been workable. Tricky-not to mention risky-but workable.
The men handling the mine slid it into the water. Ulrik straightened up and looked across the sound at Helsingborg, on the Scandinavian mainland. The town and its fortress belonged to Denmark in this era, as it had for a very long time. At some point in the middle of this century, however, it was "scheduled" to be taken by Sweden. The prince's father was determined to see that wouldn't happen, but as time passed Ulrik himself was becoming increasingly gloomier. He wouldn't be surprised if the Swedes held it by the end of the year.
Or the end of the summer. The young Danish prince knew that his father had been both foolish and reckless to throw his lot in with the League of Ostend. Richelieu and his assurances, bah!
There was simply not enough time. At best, even at the relentless pace Baldur and his men had been working, they'd only have perhaps a third of this narrowest part of the Oresund protected by mines before the ironclads arrived.
If they arrived at all, that is. Christian IV's courtiers were still assuring the king of Denmark that the foolhardy American admiral would come to ruin long before he could even reach the Skagerrak. That was possible, of course, but Ulrik had his doubts. He thought Simpson would come-but might very well avoid the mines altogether. The American admiral certainly had to be aware of the possible danger, and he'd also have figured out that the Oresund was the only one of the straits that his enemy could possibly have laid with mines. All he had to do was simply approach Copenhagen through the Great Belt. That would add many miles to his voyage, true enough-but what would that matter, if he could make the much longer voyage from the mouth of the Elbe through the North Sea, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat?
At which point, of course, he might ignore Copenhagen altogether. At least initially. Once he exited the Great Belt, he would be closer to Luebeck than to the Danish capital. He'd probably go after the Danish fleet in the bay outside the besieged city before he came to threaten the Danish capital.
But come he would, sooner or later; of that Ulrik had become almost certain. And if he came from the south, all the labor of planting these mines would have been useless. In the end, all they'd have would be the spar torpedoes.
Ulrik saw that Baldur seemed satisfied with the placement of the mine. The Norwegian planted a foot on the gunwale and took a tighter grip on the arming cord.
"Brace yourselves!" he hollered. "This is the joyous moment, boys."
Seeing the Danish sailors around him flexing their knees-the "minelayer's stance," they called it-and grasping whatever supports stood nearby, Ulrik did the same.
After glancing around to see that everyone was ready, Baldur gave the cord a heroic yank.
The prince held his breath. There was…
Nothing. Not a trace of the water column Baldur had warned him about, that could snap a ship caught by it right in half and break the legs of a man if he was standing stiffly. The fuses had been armed without being detonated.
"And wasn't that fun?" said Baldur cheerily, coiling the lanyard as he reeled it out of the water.
"We'd best return," said Ulrik. "My father insists that I attend the diving demonstration."
"Another joyous occasion," said Baldur. "I wouldn't miss it for all the world."
Ulrik could have said those sentences dripped sarcasm, but that would be inaccurate. They were saturated with sarcasm. Oozed it from every pore.
"Yes," said Ulrik. "Not for all the world."
He could have added my father and his enthusiasms, but there was no point. By now, as closely as they had worked together for the past few months, Ulrik and Baldur had exhausted all possible variations on that theme.
The man being fitted into the diving suit had very pale skin to begin with, so it was hard to tell if his pallor was due in any part to fear. If that had been Eddie himself, he was sure he'd have been as white as a ghost.
"You look very pale," Anne Cathrine said. "Are you ill again?"
Damn the girl, Eddie would have thought, except he was long past the point where he could bring himself to curse this particular female, even to himself. How in the name of God had a sensible-well, within reason-twenty-year-old naval officer developed a crush on a fifteen-year-old? The worst crush he'd ever had in his life, to boot, even worse than the one he'd had when he was her age for Casey Stevenson, the head cheerleader at the high school.
Maybe he just had an attraction for unobtainable women, he thought gloomily. Casey had been three years older than he, which, in the social context of a rural high school, made her no less out of his league than the princess standing next to him.
Fine. "King's daughter." What was the difference, in this day and age? Even leaving aside the fact that she was the offspring of his sworn enemy?
"Are you ill?" Anne Cathrine repeated, this time with more concern in her voice. "You are still weak, Eddie. And you are a bit frail to begin with."
Oh, swell. Frail to begin with. Any moment now, Eddie, you'll be sweeping her off her feet.
"No, I'm fine," he muttered.
Actually, he was, relatively speaking. His stump didn't ache much anymore, he'd gotten fairly accustomed to the wooden pegleg, and he'd recovered from the illness he'd come down with for a week in February, whatever it had been. Eddie just labeled it "the medieval crud" and left it at that. If he were the king of Denmark, he'd be throwing every spare coin he had at the plumbing industry, not wasting it on a dozen grandiose military schemes-at least half of which had no serious application to warfare anyway. Not for a decade, at least.
Like this one. Leaving aside the incredible risk to the men involved, what in God's name did Christian IV think he could do against Simpson's ironclads with a man in an old-fashioned diving suit?
Scuba equipped divers, now, that might be a different story. Eddie knew that the French had somehow managed to get their hands on some of that equipment. The king had let that slip in one of his drunken confidences-along with his bitter resentment that the French refused to let him have any of it.
Eddie and Ulrik had once teamed up to try to talk the king out of the diving suit nonsense. Eddie had felt a little guilty about that, since from a cold-blooded Agent 007 standpoint, he should probably have been encouraging Christian to continue with the foolish business. But…
The problem there was that, over the months of his captivity, he'd come to be almost as fond of Ulrik as he was of the prince's half-sister Anne Cathrine. And, as bold as the prince was, Eddie was worried he might test the crazy diving suit himself.