“George?” Jackson looked up quickly and laughed when Mike nodded. “Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” the general said with a nasty grin. “You mean to tell me that idiot’s fancy toy is going to be useful for something after all?”
“Looks like it,” Mike agreed. “Assuming we can get it to Wismar.”
“You only want two of the coal trucks?” asked Ed Piazza.
“Of course only two of them,” Underwood growled. “If we’re going to do this at all, it only makes sense to send the rest of Simpson’s damned shopping list overland to Magdeburg. The speedboats can’t haul all that crap downriver; we’ll have to send it to Simpson and let him barge it down. And at least we ought to be able to get all of it into one of the coal trucks. Probably.” He shrugged. “If we can’t, we can always hang an extra trailer off the back. We’ve got several of them. Sending it cross country will get it to Simpson faster than stacking it on barges from Halle down the Saale to Magdeburg. He can probably get it all cross loaded onto his own barges before even the power boats could get that far following the river. It’ll sure as hell get it there sooner than barging it from Halle would!”
“Exactly,” Mike said.
Underwood was still gloomy. “The worst of it’s going to be the wear and tire on the truck tires. Fortunately, boats are a lot lighter load than what those tires were designed for. Still and all . . . we’ve got plenty of car tires, what with all the cars sitting around unused. But there’s hardly any spares for the trucks. Once those tires are gone . . .”
“Then they’re gone, and that’s that,” said Mike forcefully, hoping to cut Quentin off before they got tied up in another pointless wrangle. Underwood had turned a cabinet meeting some months earlier into a brawl, by insisting that developing a rubber industry should be a top priority. Exactly how that was to be done, when the world’s existing rubber supply didn’t exist in the first place, and the natural resources were halfway around the world under the political control of other nations—leaving aside the fact that even the CPE, much less the U.S., was effectively almost landlocked—was not Underwood’s concern. He wanted what he wanted. Period.
“That’s a problem for another day, Quentin. This is a problem for now.”
“But we’re not ready to be shipping weapons off,” Ferrara said, more than a little anxiously. “We’re still at least a month or so from putting the heavy rockets Simpson wants into production.” He grimaced. “My fault, I suppose. The last time Eddie and I talked, I thought the schedule was going to look a lot better than this. And then I got pulled off onto the chemical plant design—what I’d give for just one heavy stainless-steel pressure tank—”
He shook his head. There was no point in dwelling endlessly on the fact that, while Grantville had quite a bit of stainless steel lying around in one form of another, almost all of it was in the form of thin sheet. And they were still a long ways off from being able to make stainless steel from scratch.
“That doesn’t really matter right now,” he continued. “What matters is that I can’t give you what I don’t have, and what I don’t have is a standoff rocket.”
“What’s the matter with the ones we’ve got?” Underwood asked. “They worked just fine before.”
“Sure they did,” Frank agreed, his tone a bit sarcastic. “Of course, we were using ’em from nice, steady land-based launchers at fairly short range. And against targets the size and speed of Spanish tercios. Oh, and on thinking about it, we fired lots of them at once, so that when half of ’em missed, we’d still get enough hits to do the job.” He shook his head. “I know the rocket Simpson and Eddie are talking about. It’s a hell of a lot heavier than anything we’ve used in the field, Quentin. And it’s got two or three times the range.”
“And better accuracy, and a heavier warhead,” Ferrara added.