“You and me both,” Larry said with a fervor which surprised Eddie. Larry had always been up for the craziest, most risky stunts he or any of the other Four Musketeers had been able to come up with for dirt bikes or skateboards. And if Eddie wanted to be honest, the four of them had also occasionally stepped ever so slightly across the line from driving habits their parents would have been likely to approve. But there was no mistaking the sincere respect in his eyes when he gazed back at the Outlaw’s controls.
“Yeah, well,” Jack said, “the one other thing you’ve got to remember here is that people on the other side are gonna be shooting back at us. I know, I know!” He raised a hand as Eddie opened his mouth. “We’re gonna be a hard target to hit, especially with those damned smoothbores of theirs. But hard ain’t the same thing as impossible, and speed—even the speed this thing can crank out—ain’t the same thing as a cloak of invulnerability, either. You two just keep that in mind. And at the same time, you remember you can kill yourselves just as dead with this thing as the bad guys ever could.”
“Where are they?” Colonel Karberg muttered.
He’d thought his voice was too low to be overheard as he stood in Luebeck’s Teuffelsorth Bastion and gazed down the Trave River toward the Baltic, but the King of Sweden had surprisingly acute hearing.
“I presume you mean the Danes,” he observed, and Karberg flushed.
“Forgive me, Majesty,” he said quickly. “It was only an idle question, not—”
“Come, my good Colonel!” Gustavus chided. “It was not at all an idle question. It was, if I may be permitted, something of a burning question, in fact.”
Karberg’s flush darkened, and the king chuckled. Karberg looked up quickly to meet his blue eyes, and relaxed as he realized Gustavus had chosen to be amused rather than angered.
“Well, yes, Majesty,” the colonel acknowledged. “If I’m honest, I suppose I really must admit it preys upon my mind.”
“And mine, Colonel,” Gustavus assured him in a tone which was far less amused than it had been. “On the other hand, I’m not inclined to question God’s goodness in granting us this delay. This city is as close to prepared to withstand a siege as it could hope to be. In that regard, it’s most fortunate that we had made it one of our major supply magazines, because it is as well provisioned as any city awaiting a siege has ever been. And thanks to the advance warning the Americans’ radio was able to give us and Christian’s tardiness, our troops are ready here and General Aderkas is no more than a week’s march from Wismar.”
He smiled, and that smile was thin and cold.
“They’ve missed their best chance, Colonel. They may still strike in time to secure Wismar, unless the Americans truly are able to work a miracle to stop them. And we cannot, I fear, prevent an attack on Stockholm before winter closes the Baltic. But they will not take Luebeck, and so long as Axel Oxenstierna can draw breath, they will not take Stockholm, either. And when the Americans are ready, and their ironclads enter the Baltic behind Christian’s ships . . .”
The smile which had been thin and cold became a razor of ice.
As Jesse sized up the situation, there was a very good chance he would die today.
No, things are much worse that that, he berated himself. Odds are you’re going to kill yourself, three others, and the whole concept of an Air Force, all at one time.
He looked over at his copilot, Lieutenant Eugene Woodsill. Woody appeared to be having the time of his life. Right at the moment, he was making faces at Hans and Sharon, who were in the Belle II, just ten yards off Jesse’s right wing. He’d been doing it all flight, at first surreptitiously and then, as Jesse hadn’t seemed to care, more and more openly.
Ignorance is friggin’ bliss, Jesse thought, though he didn’t bother to make the young man stop. Time enough for him to be frightened later.