Eddie reached for the radio microphone and hit the transmit key.
“You’re supposed to tell me where you see them, Hans,” he said dryly. “Over.”
“Oh!” Hans chuckled just a bit nervously. “Sorry, Eddie,” he said. “I see them about eight to ten miles ahead of you, bearing roughly northwest and headed straight for Wismar.”
Eddie frowned, picturing the chart in his mind, then nodded. If Hans was right about the distance and bearing, it sounded like the Danes must be coming directly from Luebeck, swinging around the curving headland between Luebeck Bay and Wismar Bay. Actually, Wismar Bay was virtually an inlet on Luebeck Bay’s southeastern flank, and the oncoming enemy was about to enter it.
“It looks like there are half a dozen warships, and twice that many merchant ships,” Hans continued. “They’re not moving very fast, and there must be thirty or forty smaller ships and boats with them. I think they’re using the little ones to carry the infantry. Over.”
“Understood,” Eddie replied. “Let me think about this for a minute. Over.”
He gazed in the indicated direction, but although the morning sky had largely cleared, conditions remained too misty here at sea level for him to see anything of the enemy yet. So he lowered the glasses once more, and frowned in thought.
“What do you think, Larry?” he asked. “Think we should head further out to hit them, or let them come to us?”
“I’d just as soon get it over with, actually,” Larry admitted with a quick, nervous chuckle of his own. “And remember what Jack said. The further out we hit them, the more sea room I’m going to have to handle this brute in.”
“There is that,” Eddie agreed. He frowned for a few more moments, rubbing the tip of his nose in thought, then shrugged.
“Makes sense to me,” he said, and keyed the mike again. “Hans, we’re going to attack,” he said. “Head straight for them. We’ll use you to make sure we’re lined up properly. Over.”
“Understood,” Hans replied. “I’m changing course now. Over.”
Eddie and Larry both craned their necks, staring up as the airplane adjusted its flight path. Then Larry eased the wheel to port, slowly and carefully, without waiting for orders from Eddie.
He opened the throttles slightly, and the purring engines snarled a deeper, harsher song. The Outlaw dug in its stern and headed for the enemy with the other two speedboats forging along in its wake.
“Look! What’s that?”
Captain Tesdorf Vadgaard, commodore of the small squadron escorting the eight thousand men assigned to sweep up undefended Wismar, looked up irritably at the semi-coherent shout from his flagship’s lookout. The man at Christiania’s mainmast head was unaware that he had aroused his captain’s ire, and Vadgaard started to open his mouth to administer a scathing rebuke. But that rebuke died stillborn as someone else shouted the same question and the lookout pointed wildly to port.
Christiania and the rest of Vadgaard’s command were headed southeast, standing steadily into the mouth of Wismar Bay. The wind was on his ship’s port quarter, blowing almost directly out of the north, with gradually increasing strength. The waves were making up as the chill wind strengthened, and the mist which had clung to the surface of the water since dawn was breaking up and rolling away on the breeze. The day wasn’t going to be warm, but it was still a vast improvement over the last two days’ rain and fog. The growing patches of sky between the broken banks of charcoal-gray cloud were a bright autumn blue.
The lookout was pointing at one of those patches of blue, and Vadgaard felt his own eyes widening in astonishment.
The shape headed directly toward his ship was formed like a cross, or perhaps like some seabird, wings outstretched as it glided effortlessly across the heavens. But small though that shape might appear, he knew that was an illusion. Whatever it was, it was bigger than the greatest bird the world had ever known. It must be, for him to see it at all at its vast height.
“Glass!” he snapped to the deck officer beside the helmsman. The officer handed over his telescope promptly enough, but Vadgaard could tell he didn’t really want to. What he wanted to do was raise the glass to his own eye while he peered through it at the apparition. Vadgaard could understand that, but his sympathy for the other man was strictly limited by his own curiosity and instinctive dread.