Chapter 11
Krakow
Capital of the FPLC
(Free Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth)
Denise Beasley walked slowly around Jeff Higgins, examining him up and down.
“I don’t see where this is going to work,” she said. “You’re not as fat as you were back up-time, but you’re hardly what anyone is going to call ‘svelte.’”
“Denise, has anyone ever told you that tact is not your strong suit?” That was what anyone would have called a rhetorical question, though, because Jeff wasn’t really irritated. He and Denise had known each other since they were children. There was about a seven-year gap in age between them, so they’d never been schoolmates. But Grantville had been a small town. Up-time, anyway. In the year 1637, six years after the Ring of Fire, it was more in the way of a big town—even a small city, by some reckoning.
Denise grinned. “There’s a rumor that some dimwit said that back in 1992, when I was five years old. I don’t believe it, though. Nobody is that dimwitted.”
The grin was replaced by a scowl. “Look, Jeff, I’m not trying to be rude. But facts are facts. Stubborn things, like somebody once said. Yogi Berra, maybe.”
Jeff managed not to smile. “Actually, it was President John Adams.”
Denise waved that away. So far as she was concerned, picayune historical details weren’t exactly facts themselves. “Whoever. The point is—” Once again, she looked him up and down. “What do you weigh? And don’t fudge, dammit. Our life and death could depend on it, and I am not exaggerating.”
She pointed at the small—very small—airplane parked on the runway a short distance off. “In case you hadn’t noticed, a Dvorak is not a Boeing 747.”
“I weigh a little over two hundred and sixty.”
“We’ll make that two hundred and seventy. Since I weigh right around one hundred and thirty, that gives us an even four hundred pounds’ worth of people that that poor little critter has to get up in the air.”
Jeff frowned. “What’s the problem? I thought you could lift five hundred pounds over and above the weight of the plane itself.”
“I can. But that includes the fuel, too. The weight of the fuel tanks is figured into the Dixie Chick’s curb weight, but not the fuel since we can vary that. Gasoline weighs about—”
“Six pounds to the gallon,” said Jeff, who’d now been doing military logistics for years. He did the calculations quickly. “Which means we can only carry about sixteen gallons.”
“Instead of the forty gallons I can carry if the tanks are full. The problem is now obvious.”
Jeff was still frowning. “Well, how many miles can you go on a gallon of gas?”
Denise shook her head. “This is a plane, not a car. You have to figure how many hours you can fly on a gallon of gas, not how many miles you can go. There are too many variables that affect mileage to make ‘miles per gallon’ mean anything. Wind speed and wind direction are the biggest ones, but even something like humidity can make a difference. When humidity goes up, air pressure goes down, figuring for the same volume of air. So, the wings have less air—technically, molecules of air—to move around, which means they have less lift.”
Denise was so good-looking and had such a flamboyant personality that it was easy to underestimate how smart the girl was. Jeff reminded himself not to forget that.
“Okay,” he said. “So how many hours can you fly on a gallon of gas?”
“Roughly, you’ve got to figure you need seven gallons of fuel to fly for an hour. That’s at a cruising speed of fifty-five to sixty miles per hour, but I always shrink that down to fifty miles to be on the safe side.”
By the time she’d finished, Jeff had already done the calculations again. “Figure two hours of flight time on sixteen gallons, in other words, allowing for a safety margin. Which would get us about one hundred miles.”
“Whereas the distance between here and Breslau is about one hundred and fifty miles.” With her hand, Denise made a gesture mimicking something plunging downward. “Boom. Our body parts are scattered all over the landscape somewhere in the vicinity of Opole.”
She planted that hand as well as the other on her hips. “Now, if you guys had done the smart thing and built airfields every fifty miles or so—with a stock of fuel kept on hand—we’d be looking at a different situation. But the way it is, big fella, if you want to get from here to Breslau, you’re going to need a horse.”
By the time she’d finished talking, a droning sound could be heard. She turned her head and squinted into the distance. “Or you’re going to need my boyfriend. What the hell is Eddie doing here?”
✧ ✧ ✧
“What I’m doing here is what I was ordered to do by our mutual boss, Francisco Nasi—provide any and all assistance needed for the success of what he’s currently calling ‘the Carpathian Caper.’ At the moment, that requires me to deliver a package to Morris and then do whatever he tells me to do. It’s all very mysterious. Need to know and I don’t, apparently.” An aggrieved look came to his face. “And what sort of cantankerous question is that coming from my own girlfriend, whom I haven’t seen in—”
“Less than forty-eight hours. We spent the night before last together in Prague and you got laid, remember?”
Jeff had to keep from smiling again. Denise had always been quite selective in her boyfriends and was not at all promiscuous, but she had the breezy attitude toward sex that you might expect from the child of bikers.
Eddie’s expression now had a smug tinge to it, on the other hand. “How could I forget?”
✧ ✧ ✧
Rebecca Abrabanel’s State Department plane arrived less than two hours later. The Dragonfly was a six-seater, and Thorsten Engler and Tata were passengers along with two of Rebecca’s aides.
Jeff wasn’t surprised by the presence of the aides, since Rebecca had turned her official aircraft into what amounted to a mobile office. But he hadn’t expected the other two people. Tata was the new governor of Lower Silesia and Thorsten was in command of the province’s military forces.
“Why are they here?” he asked.
Eddie shrugged. “Got no idea. Rebecca must have stopped in Breslau to pick them up. But look on the bright side. This saves us a trip to Breslau, at least.”
✧ ✧ ✧
“What I’m doing here,” Thorsten explained to Jeff once they were all seated at a conference table in a big meeting chamber on the second floor of the Cloth Hall, “is negotiating with you over a division of our military forces, since I have a new assignment which”—he held his hand up in a gesture of rigid warning—“I can’t talk about because it’s top secret. If you have a problem with that”—he lowered the hand and pointed an accusing finger at Rebecca—“take it up with the Secretary of State.”
Rebecca gave him a glance which, coming from a less serene person, would probably have been an exasperated roll of the eyes. “He’s going to another continent, never mind which one. We’ve finally decided to intervene in the slave trade. That’s hardly a secret since we’re in the process of assembling a very large fleet in Hamburg—and some other places—that we could hardly keep under cover. We just don’t want our enemies—that would be Spain and Portugal—to know exactly where we’re going.”
“I’m taking my whole brigade with me—the one I just got done training and was supposed to be bringing to defend Lower Silesia,” added Thorsten.
Tata had a very sour look on her face. “I just found that out myself—and I’m the governor. What I want to know is who’s going to replace Thorsten and his brigade in that assignment.”
“We haven’t settled that yet,” said Rebecca. “But we don’t think there’s any immediate threat to the province that the militia can’t handle.”
Jeff agreed with that assessment, but he wasn’t surprised to see that Tata’s expression didn’t lighten up any. If he was the governor of a now undefended province right on the border of Poland, instead of a somewhat detached observer, he wouldn’t be any happier than she was.
But he had his own problems to deal with, so he got immediately to the issue at hand. “Can you give me some of your volley gun companies?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager. Engler was the universally recognized master of volley gun tactics—and he’d been the one training the new companies.
“You can have all of them, including the veteran units. They won’t be any use where I’m going. But I’ll want something in exchange.”
Try as he might, Jeff couldn’t help but wince a little. He lusted after those volley gun batteries, which were murderous against the kind of cavalry forces he’d be encountering in Transylvania. But what Thorsten would want in exchange were mortar units that Jeff also doted on.
Perhaps…
“Light artillery?”
“Give me a break, Jeff. The reason I won’t be able to use volley guns is because I won’t have any horses. So, what good would ordnance do me that’s even heavier? A four-pounder cannon weighs about a ton. No, I want mortars and mortar crews. Infantry weapons.”
“Well… ”
“I suggest that the two of you take this subject up later,” said Rebecca. “Right now, with the people present at the table, we should discuss the use of the various aircraft we have available for the Transylvania campaign. You’re what we have in the way of experts on the subject of the Dvorak and its proper use, which”—here she gave Thorsten another glance—“will interest Brigadier Engler since he’s going to be taking two of the planes to—”
She waved her hand. “Where he’s going.”
Denise spoke up. “I figure I’m the expert we have on Dvoraks, since I’ve been flying them for a while now. While Eddie’s been flying for a lot longer than I have, he’s only flown a Dvorak a few times.”
She paused and looked at Eddie. There was perhaps a challenging glint in her eye. Wisely, Eddie just nodded and thrust his hand forward, inviting her to continue.
“So, here’s the thing,” Denise continued. “The Dvorak has some great pluses and some not as bad but still pretty lousy downsides. The pluses are that it flies great, it’s very maneuverable, and you can land and take off anywhere as long as it’s flat and there aren’t any rocks and big sticks in the way. A meadow will work just fine, you don’t need an actual airstrip—although that’s always handy, of course. Best of all, you don’t need much room to take off and land. You can be airborne in seconds. Landings, the same.”
“And the downsides?” asked Jeff.
“The biggest one is range. It’s a really small plane and can’t lift much more than five hundred pounds over and above its own weight. That doesn’t leave you with much in the way of fuel capacity unless you’re flying solo—and for reconnaissance it’s a lot better to be carrying an observer as well as a pilot. Plus, it’s a small engine so it’s got a low cruising speed; it takes you a while to get anywhere—and while the top speed is somewhere around eighty miles an hour, you’re just going to burn more fuel so you don’t get any benefit in terms of range.”
She took a deep breath, while thinking. “And…oh, yeah. When I said it flew great, that’s only true if the weather’s good. The Dvorak really doesn’t handle poor weather well. As in, you may as well not even bother to get off the ground because you’ll be coming right back. If you haven’t crashed in the meantime.”
Jeff nodded. “Which limits the reconnaissance capability. A lot, in this part of the world.”
Stoutly, Eddie rose to the defense. “Jeff, bad weather makes for lousy reconnaissance even if you have a plane like my Dauntless. It’ll handle the weather a lot better, but you still can’t see much of anything.”
“Yeah, I understand. I wasn’t criticizing, just making an observation. The main lesson I take from this, though, is that we need to figure out ways to create a lot of small landing strips spaced not more than fifty miles apart.”
“You really don’t need much, Jeff,” said Denise. “I meant it when I said a meadow works fine. Just make sure any sizable rocks or other obstructions have been removed, and any holes have been filled in.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the problem, Denise. It doesn’t do you any good to have a small airstrip where you can refuel if there isn’t any fuel there. Which means the strips have to be maintained, resupplied—and most of all, guarded. And unless you have enough troops to station an actual garrison—which we won’t, outside of major towns and maybe a few big villages—then you’re vulnerable to cavalry raids.”
He gnawed on his lip for a few seconds. “Let me think about it. We should be able to figure something out.”
He now looked at Eddie. “And what about the Dauntless? Will we have it available whenever we need it?”
“Pretty much. It’s not impossible that Nasi might call me back, but it’s not likely and even if he does, he should be able to give us a fair amount of warning. But it really isn’t likely he would. He supports what we’re doing and there are enough commercial planes now that if he needs one, he should be able to just rent or lease it, with a pilot.”
“Speaking of renting or leasing,” said Jeff, “does anyone know what the chances are we could get the services of a Jupiter or Saturn from the Netherlands for a few weeks? Better still, for the duration of the campaign. I have a feeling we’ll find having an airlift supply capability will be worth its weight in gold. The Dvoraks are useless for that and even the Dauntless won’t be much use.”
“I could carry a few hundred pounds of cargo,” said Eddie, “but that’s about it, even if I’m flying solo.” He leaned forward to look down the table at Rebecca, who was seated on his side of it. “Jeff’s right about this. If nothing else, unless we can start hauling hundreds of pounds of fuel for the planes into forward locations, we’ll be caught in something of a logistics loop.”
“I don’t have an answer to that question, but I’ll see what I can find out.”
Jeff had to bite his tongue, figuratively speaking, to keep from snarling that he and other military commanders had continually carped and complained to the civilian authorities that they spent too much of their time worrying about weapons and not enough worrying about the humdrum needs of military supply. Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics. It was simply inexcusable that the USE still hadn’t produced its own version of the big Dutch cargo planes. Yeah, they were pretty slow and they weren’t in the least bit sexy. So what? They could carry a lot of cargo way faster than any horse or mule—and with their air cushion landing gear they could even handle rough terrain.
Being fair about it, the problem with getting a big cargo plane for the Grand Army of the Sunrise wasn’t due to pigheadedness on the part of Morris Roth or General von Mercy. Both of them understood how valuable such an aircraft would be to their efforts. The problem, insofar as Jeff had been able to determine—Morris was being very close-mouthed about it—was that obtaining one of the planes built by Markgraf & Smith Aeronautics could sometimes be politically tricky. Theoretically, Markgraf & Smith was just a private company, but in the real world, King Fernando had a great deal of influence over who could and who couldn’t get one of the big planes. Jeff couldn’t see where selling a Jupiter or Saturn to a Bohemian army that was marching to war almost halfway across the continent of Europe, against an enemy that was no friend of the Netherlands, would pose a problem for King Fernando. But…who knew?
He reminded himself of what was probably the human race’s oldest military saw, going back to the Paleolithic: You fight a war with the army you got, not the one you wished you had.
“What the hell,” he murmured under his breath, “we’re still probably in better shape than the guys on the other side.”
I hope.