"Couldn't have even known it was happening," Baldur said, "it had to have been so quick. Judging from the results."
The king's daughter's eyes were wide. She didn't look fifteen-going-on-thirty, any more. She looked fifteen-and-no-kitten-is-more-curious.
"What happened?"
Ulrik grimaced and held up his hands, as if holding a big globe. "Most of his body was in the helmet. All mashed up like you wouldn't believe. Every bone in pieces, all crushed together with flesh and blood. You couldn't really recognize most of the organs."
"Never seen anything like it," Baldur repeated. "The first fifteen feet of the hose attached to the helmet were full of him, too. Like a bloody meat paste."
The king's daughter clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh! That's horrible!"
Norddahl shrugged. "He died a lot quicker than he would have, a week from now, in the executioner's hands. But it was the most gruesome thing I've ever seen."
Ulrik was peering at Eddie. "Can you explain what happened?"
Since Eddie's attempt to shield the girl was now pointless, he heaved a little sigh. "Yeah. There was probably something like twelve tons of pressure on his body, that all caved in at once. Like a giant squeezing a toothpaste tube. His body had nowhere to go except into the helmet and the hose. I think they call it 'excarnation.' "
He had to say the last word in English, of course. But what everyone really wanted was an explanation of the other American term. And once he explained what a toothpaste tube was, even Norddahl grimaced.
"Oh, that's icky!" said Anne Cathrine. She frowned at her half-brother. "Ulrik, you have to promise you won't try that yourself. You either, Baldur."
"No fear of that!" Ulrik exclaimed. "Even our sainted father is now persuaded that it's a hopeless way to wage war."
The Norwegian wasn't looking as cheerful, though. "He'll still want me to keep working on it. Not much, of course, since I've already provided him with what he needs."
Eddie squinted at him. "Huh? I thought you said-"
"Hopeless for war," explained Ulrik. "On the other hand, it struck my father that it would make a splendid form of execution. Too expensive, of course, for common crimes. But for high treason-gross outrages against the monarchy-that sort of thing-the king thinks it would serve nicely."
That sort of thing. Eddie wondered if necking with the king's daughter fell into that category. It might. You never really knew until it was too late. Fucking goddam seventeenth century.
Anne Cathrine's hand slid into his and seemed bound and determined to stay there. Her half-brother gave the clasp a glance, then smiled slightly, but said nothing.
On the other hand, you really didn't know. It might all work out very nicely, too.
Who the hell ordered this, anyway? I'm just a West Virginia country boy.
Chapter 36
Magdeburg
"But no bombing?" Jesse asked.
Mike Stearns shook his head. "No. John's got his ironclads parked-moored, anchored, whatever the right term is for boats on a river-not more than three miles from Hamburg. If he has to make the run, he tells me that any bombs you could drop would just be a drop in the bucket." Mike grinned. "He also added that you shouldn't take offense at any implied sneer coming from a squid."
Jesse sniffed. "Give it a few more years and let's hear him say that." But he didn't argue the point. Right now-probably for a fair number of years-the destruction Simpson could bring down on Hamburg with four ironclads and their ten-inch main guns simply dwarfed anything Jesse could do with two airplanes. Even the Gustavs were still small warcraft. While they could carry far more weight than a Belle, they weren't exactly B-17s. They were armed with a mixture of rockets and bombs, though the rockets were still inaccurate and the few bombs no more than one-hundred-pounders.
Not that they didn't pack a punch. Unlike the Belle, the Gustav had been designed from the start with hardpoints under its low wings and fuselage and had the power to lift a solid war load. Up to eight twenty-five-pound rockets could be carried under the wings, plus either two fifty-pound bombs or one hundred-pounder under the fuselage. At need, two rockets could be replaced with an additional fifty-pounder on each wing.
But the bombs were black powder packed into aerodynamic wooden casings. An inner lining of rifle balls made them deadly against soft targets, but they couldn't penetrate squat all. Hal Smith was working on an incendiary version, but they hadn't tested it, yet.
"Besides," Mike continued, "I want to avoid that anyway. I know you don't want to hear this from a politician covered in muck, but the fact is that I want to avoid as much as possible anything that neither you nor I likes to call 'collateral damage' but there it is. Meaning no offense, again, but you're also a long ways away from what anyone would call precision bombing. And you don't have a so-called 'smart bomb' to your name."
Jesse sniffed again. "I always thought those terms were oxymorons, anyway. A bomb's only as smart as the person aiming it. War's war. People get killed, and plenty of them are noncombatants. Way it is."
He gave the prime minister a skeptical look. "Although why you think that Simpson's guns are going to do any better is a mystery to me. Dive-bombing, I can pretty much promise a circular error probable of one hundred feet. That can't be any worse than his ten-inch guns will do, firing into Hamburg from the river."
Mike shrugged. "They won't do any better. At least some of those shells are bound to miss the fortifications and go sailing into the city. But down-timers are plenty familiar with cannons and what they do and don't do. If John misses, people will assume he missed. If you missed, who knows that they'll think?"
Jesse thought about it and decided Mike was probably right. Whether he was or not, however, he was certainly the boss so that was that. And Jesse didn't really care anyway. For all the back-and-forth ribbing and needling between him and Simpson, there wasn't any real heat to it. The few genuine arguments they got into at least involved genuine issues. Thankfully, they were also a long ways from being in a situation where they had to squabble over contracts for the sake of guarding budgetary turf. If Jesse was lucky, he'd be dead before that became a problem.
"And they'll have an airfield ready?"
Mike nodded. "John already has his army escort working on it. Doesn't take much, he said, since they found a nice field close to the river. It's actually on a big island formed by the confluence of the Elbe and one of its tributaries, so it's well protected even if it's not a huge area. Meaning no offense from a squid, he added, suggesting that your splendid fighting machines didn't exactly require a landing field suitable for a B-52."
"Guy's a smart-ass, Mike, beneath that oh-so-proper upper crust exterior. But I'll take his word for it. How soon?"
"He said you could land by tomorrow, midafternoon. Then do the overflights the next day. He needs that time anyway to do maintenance on the boats and get their fuel tanks topped off. If the Hamburg establishment doesn't come to their senses, he'll do the run the following morning."
"He'll do it in daylight?"
"That's his plan-unless you spot something that requires him to rethink it."
"Like what?"
"Who knows?" Mike said, shrugging. "A fourteen-inch gun that might actually threaten his armor, instead of the cannons he's pretty sure they have. Failing that, he'd rather have the advantage of daylight."
"If the Hamburgers were smart they'd have a big chain across the river-and a mine field. I might spot the chain, but I'm not likely to spot any mines unless they're badly placed."
"They've got a chain, all right. But no mines."
"You're sure about that?"
Mike smiled coolly. "Oh, yes. There are advantages, you know, to being a disreputable rabble-rouser."
"Don't tell me. Gretchen's got people in Hamburg."
"Be better to say the CoC does. They've become quite powerful there, in fact, But I don't think Gretchen herself had anything to do with it. That she-devil reputation she's gotten-all across Europe, seems like-is more than a little inflated."