Gyllenhjelm’s expression stiffened. Clearly, he saw exactly where Gustavus’ logic was headed and had no desire to go there.
“They will attack us at home, as well,” Gustavus said. “Unless they’re fools—and we dare not assume they are—then their objectives must be our German supply ports, to starve our army, and Stockholm, to crush our fleet and destroy its base. We do not have the strength to defend both of them on the water, Karl, and we can better afford to lose Luebeck and Wismar both than to lose Stockholm, if we’re honest about it. So I won’t argue this point with you further. You will take your ships to sea no later than the morning tide, and you will sail for Stockholm. And you, Axel,” he turned on Oxenstierna once more, “will sail with him.”
Oxenstierna’s head came up as he stiffened in instinctive protest, but Gustavus continued, rolling over any objection he might have voiced.
“You will return to my capital, Chancellor of Sweden,” he commanded, “and you will hold that capital for me. I charge you with that duty upon your oath of fealty to me.”
Oxenstierna closed his mouth a second time, and bent his head in submission. He might argue with his king with all the stubbornness of Swedish iron, but in the end, he recognized the man he served. The only monarch in Europe truly worthy of the title “King.” When that man commanded, Axel Oxenstierna would obey.
“Thank you,” Gustavus said, clapping him on the shoulder. “And don’t look so glum, Axel! I have no intention of leaving my bones in Luebeck! And, for that matter, I rather doubt the Americans have any intention of allowing me to.”
Chapter 35
Old-fashioned torches and modern spotlights threw a glare of illumination over the small convoy, and Frank Jackson stretched and yawned wearily. It had been a long day, and the commander in chief of the Army had no business doing grunt work. Unfortunately, Frank still found it easier to recognize the concept of delegation than to practice it. Or, if he wanted to be more accurate about it, he could delegate just fine . . . as long as he didn’t have any choice about it.
He grinned at the thought and scratched the neatly trimmed beard he’d decided to grow since arriving in a Germany which had never heard of replaceable razor blades, much less disposable razors. Then he shook himself and headed out on one last walk-through inspection.
The flatbed tractor-trailer rig was ugly as sin—a single-axle tractor pulling a standard semitrailer whose walls and roof had been torched off and hauled away for salvage. The ability of the resulting visual abortion to handle outsized cargos had proved extraordinarily useful quite a few times, but it had never carried a load like the one chocked and strapped down on it tonight.
Three boat trailers, one behind each of the two coal trucks and another hitched firmly to the rear of the flatbed, each carried a power boat. Quite large power boats. Jack Clements’ thirty-two-foot Century 3200 measured ten and a half feet across the beam, and Louie Tillman’s twenty-eight-foot Chris Craft launch was very nearly as big. Neither of them really had any business in a place like Grantville, far from any coasts or large lakes or inland waterways except the Monongahela. But, in any town of several thousand people, a few of them are bound to buy something that everyone else considers ludicrous. At least Jack Clements could argue in self-defense that he’d bought his boat to take to Florida with him when he retired. And Louie Tillman had spent a lot of hot summer days on the Monongahela River in his Chris Craft before the Ring of Fire.
But the third boat, sitting in massive, lordly majesty atop the flatbed . . .
Frank shook his head. George Watson’s Outlaw 33 was thirty-three feet long, with an eight-and-a-half-foot beam, and the damned thing weighed over three and a half tons. The weight, of course, was picayune for a tractor-trailer combination designed to haul well over twenty tons. But it was so big that it overhung the trailer front and back and a bit on the sides, braced in position by lumber and held down by nylon straps. It looked like some kind of high-tech, fiberglass torpedo sitting up there, gleaming with polished stainless-steel fittings and embellished with bright red lightning bolts down either side of the hull. Frank had no idea how much the thing had cost, and Watson had always refused to tell anyone—probably because he’d figured they’d all know he was insane, instead of just suspecting it, if he ever admitted how much he’d paid for it.