1635-The Tangled Web

by Virginia DeMarce

  "So you're really suggesting that we should just hand it over to Hoheneck and Brahe?"

  "Nope. It will give the Fulda Barracks Regiment—at least the ones I select out and detail to be part of the project—something constructive to do this winter, looking for where the Irishmen have gotten to by now. The others will think of the search party—I guess we can go ahead and call it a posse comitatus—as representing the rest of them. They're still a bit upset because we didn't let them squelch the elements of the Ram Rebellion that made their way into Fulda's jurisdiction, so letting them in on something sneaky that has a prospect of glory at the other end will be all to the good. And there's quite a bit of public opinion back home in Grantville, I think, that we should have done more than we have so far, on the general grounds that Schweinsberg, however improbably, was one of us, now. I'm sure my commanding officer would agree."

  Harlan Stull frowned. "Does Frank Jackson know about this?"

  Derek Utt shook his head. "I doubt it. Nobody's told me to bring him in on it. He's not in my chain of command, any more. Not in anyone's chain of command, other than his own guys in Magdeburg. He's a staff officer for Torstensson now."

  "Who is your commanding officer, then? Who am I supposed to talk to once I get to Grantville?"

  "Beyond—above—Scott Blackwell in Würzburg? Scott's my boss. Mine and Cliff Priest's boss, as far as military things are concerned. Just as Steve Salatto is the boss for civilian stuff, as far as Wes is—was—and Vince Marcantonio is concerned. Actually, I'm pretty sure that Scott answers directly to Ed Piazza now."

  "Ed's the president of the SoTF. He's not in the military at all, just sort of the same relationship as the governor of any state had to its National Guard up-time." Harlan frowned.

  "Lane Grooms, the MP colonel, is sort of 'acting' head of the military as far as Grantville—well, the whole Ring of Fire, West Virginia County now—is concerned, because his training cadre is there and he was the highest-ranked guy left after Frank moved to Magdeburg with his people. But I've found out, and this is crucial, Grooms's authority doesn't extend to the whole SoTF. It's just for West Virginia County defense—the Ring of Fire and the annexations since then. So if something involves domestic policy, Scott takes it to Steve Salatto and then through Steve to George Chehab. It stops with Chehab if it's purely internal SoTF, unless it's really important. Then it goes up to Ed Piazza. Chehab also takes it to Ed if it's got international implications. Scott doesn't actually run into a lot of purely military decisions. They almost all have civilian ramifications or, really, are civilian matters that need some military input."

  "Well, do you expect me to tell Lane Grooms about this while I'm in Grantville? Wait a minute. Who am I supposed to tell, anyway? Damn it, Derek. With all the ad-hoccing that's been going on . . ."

  "Technically, I'm in the SoTF forces, but we don't exactly have our own army and foreign policy any more. We're a state, not a country. Scott knows what I'm planning. For the USE, the closest general is Brahe in Mainz. We get along. He's just turned thirty; a couple of years younger than I am. Pretty flexible. Gustav thinks that after Torstensson, he's the best general he has. Which, I'm inclined to say, the way he conducted that swoop all the way over to the Rhine last spring after Bernhard pulled back, makes me think that the emperor is right."

  Harlan nodded. "Like this harebrained project you're asking me to approve."

  "More like, 'look the other way.' We'll do it—get it started, at least—while you're gone briefing Springer." Derek grinned. "I don't suppose I could talk you into not telling anybody?"

  First Harlan said, "No." Then—"We?"

  "I'm only going as far as Mainz, with Hoheneck. I'll take Sergeant Hartke and the men he's picked out, plus a couple of our own guys, and leave them there for a few weeks. I want someone to be in the city to take charge of the culprits when the posse brings them back, if it manages to catch them, which I hope it does. I'd rather not see them assassinated in some back alley. That's revenge, not justice. I want a trial, Harlan. I want to see them sitting there in the dock, with a lot of newspaper coverage."

  "What will Mary Kat say? Will the daughter of our honorable chief justice be thrilled to have her husband out scampering through the hills and valleys looking for kidnappers?"

  "I'm not planning on doing any scampering myself—not unless something really unexpected comes up. I'll talk to Brahe in Mainz and then come back to Fulda and spend Christmas in Grantville. Anyway, unless you tell her, she won't find out until after it's all over. 'Need to know' and all that."

  There were times when Harlan sort of wondered about the relationship between Derek and Mary Kat. The truth of the matter was that if he were going to go out and get in peril, he'd warn Eden, whether he was supposed to or not.

  "If you have to tell anybody in Grantville, tell Ed Piazza. But not unless he asks."

  "Can he do that?" Andrea Hill asked. "Can he just decide to do that?"

  "I really don't know. It's way above my pay grade," Jeffie Garand pointed out. "It's more to the point that he's going to do it anyway, it looks like."

  "Who is Derek's boss, anyway?" Roy Copenhaver asked. "Aside from Wes, who's gone, and Mel Springer, who hasn't arrived, that is. They're his civilian superiors in any case. Who's his military commander?"

  Joel Matowski rubbed his forehead. "Well, when we came out here, we were NUS military with Frank Jackson in overall military command, Mike Stearns as president, and some loose obligation to GA as Captain Gars."

  "I'm with you."

  "Then in the fall of 1633, it changed. There's a SoTF now instead of a NUS, and it's a state in the USE. Since last spring, Frank's gone off to be a colonel on Torstensson's staff. He's a kind of aide-de-camp and isn't really commanding anybody, any more. The Grantville guys who are with him up in Magdeburg are sure part of the USE military, but nobody has told us that we're under Torstensson. Not directly."

  "My closest guess," Jeffie Garand said, "is that the Fulda Barracks Regiment didn't get transferred into the USE army. I think we're what they're calling SoTF forces, sort of a state militia."

  "But it's not that simple." Joel frowned.

  Harlan Stull waved a hand. "Nothing's ever simple. There are still the Swedes in Mainz, and the Swedes around Grantville. Most people don't seem to notice that the way Kagg set up the barracks, he popped his Swedes down right between the Ring of Fire and the Saxon border. At best, these guys are sort of hybrids between being the Swedish army and the USE army—they're not straight USE, even if most of the men in the regiments are Germans. Gustavus has three or four of his best Swedish commanders protecting us, really. They're protecting his interests, sure, but they're protecting us, too. That's above and beyond Torstensson and the regiments up north, not to mention Banér in the Upper Palatinate dealing with Duke Maximilian. He has Horn down in Swabia, running all round Baden and Württemberg, keeping Duke Bernhard pinned down and also dealing with Duke Maximilian."

  "I hadn't really thought of it that way," Joel admitted. "So Gustavus, all this time, has had Kagg and the Yellow Regiment right outside Grantville, really making sure that while he was tied up in the north himself, John George of Saxony didn't get any silly ideas about invading Thuringia, while he took a batch of way less experienced CoC regiments to deal with the League of Ostend. I guess nobody can say that he hasn't carried out what he promised when he agreed to the 'Captain General' bit."

  Jeffie looked at Andrea. "What Harlan says is right. But the real question you're asking, I think, is, what about us—the NUS Army guys who were already in Franconia and Fulda when they made the switchover? Mike's off being prime minister. I know that the military administrators have discussed it with each other—Scott Blackwell in Würzburg and Cliff Priest in Bamberg and Derek. As best they can figure, we're not subordinate to Kagg. At least, Kagg doesn't think so, and the way Anse Hatfield handled the mess in Suhl made that pretty clear."

  Joel interrupted him. "Like I said, nobody's had time to formalize
anything, but we think we're probably equivalent to a SoTF National Guard now—thinking in up-time terms—and we answer to Ed Piazza, who's the president. He'd be the governor if we were a state up-time, so . . . He's appointed Lane Grooms to command the SoTF forces formally, but Grooms is a nearly hundred percent administrative type and none of us ever knew him very well. He's sitting in Grantville, shuffling paper. Derek figures that he and Cliff Priest answer to Scott Blackwell. Scott can worry about Grooms. Who's above Grooms? Right now, just Ed Piazza, I guess. But like Harlan said, nothing's ever simple."

  "Short form, though," Jeffie said. "If Scott doesn't veto it and Brahe goes along—yeah, I think Derek can just decide to do it. Somebody may yell at him afterwards if it doesn't work, but that would happen even if they approved everything first."

  Mainz, October 1634

  "You can see my point," Derek Utt said to Brahe. "You know more—a lot more—about what is going on along the Rhine than Lane Grooms does back home in Grantville or even Scott Blackwell in Würzburg, not to mention that Scott and Steve Salatto are still mopping up remnants of Franconian imperial knights who opposed the Ram Rebellion and negotiating with Ableidinger and his supporters to stabilize the position of the Ram party in Franconian government. Nobody doubts that Ableidinger will be elected to the USE parliament from Franconia in the next election . . ."

  Derek stopped and thought. His list of practical reasons for talking to Brahe at this much length went on for a page and a half. Really though . . . given the flair, élan, and dash that Brahe brought to grabbing what was now the USE's new Province of the Upper Rhine the previous May, it just seemed to him that Nils would be more sympathetic to the project than either Grooms or Blackwell. Partly—well, he wanted Nils to work with him on this because they had come to like each other. Brahe was the best friend he had made among the down-timers.

  "I feel like I have to do something. It's not just that all of us somehow feel that we let Schweinsberg down. We do, though. He had put his eggs in our basket and we didn't manage to keep them from spilling out. One of our allies died in a torture chamber at the behest of Maximilian of Bavaria's brother. I suspect it's one of the reasons that Wes Jenkins asked for his transfer back to Grantville. He feels like he was responsible and he didn't measure up. None of the other up-timers in Fulda is happy about it. The soldiers in the Fulda Barracks regiment are extremely unhappy about it, even if they did perform well in locating all the rest of our people that the Irishmen picked up and getting them back home—well, back to Fulda. Plus, it's been a PR nightmare in the papers, not so much here on the Rhine, but home in Grantville. It seems like every blowhard in town wants to send out a posse."

  His mind came back from its musing to hear Brahe saying that he thought it was a good idea to try to strike at the kidnappers, but . . . "Finding—simply locating—Butler and the other Irishmen will only be the start of it. In the nature of things, cavalry is mobile."

  "Oh, I know. Like Grandma used to say, 'First, catch your hare.' Before that, though, we have to catch sight of him."

  Nils Brahe kissed his wife as soon as she stepped off the gangplank of the barge, laughed at her wrinkled nose, and said, "Docks don't smell any better in the Germanies than they do in Finland, or in Sweden, for that matter."

  Anna Margareta Bielke kissed him back. "I've smelled worse. At least it's chilly here in Mainz. The awful odor is a lot more awful in mid-summer, I'm sure." She had arrived at the very end of the decent traveling season. She brought the children to see him. She brought his sister Kerstin for . . . other reasons.

  That evening, after supper and in bed—the only place they had a modicum of privacy, at least once they drew the hangings—she shook her head. One of the purposes of the trip was to find a husband for her sister-in-law, but she was not enthusiastic about Nils's idea of trying to match Kerstin with Hand.

  "Erik Haakansson is in the Oberpfalz; so he is not a convenient option for a match. He is not here to be persuaded. I do not believe that we can get him to agree to it at a distance. Just like most of his brothers, he is a very elusive bachelor."

  "It's getting to the point that we have to do something." Kerstin's frustrated older brother brushed his hair back from his forehead. "She's twenty-five, and it's not as if she has any desire to make a career as a scholar in some German Damenstift. She really expects us to find her a suitable husband and I've simply been too busy to worry about it. So have you."

  "What about the oldest of the Württemberg dukes—Eberhard. You've had a chance to observe him. She's older, of course, but not by that much—only six years. She's really in prime breeding age. Moreover, a duke is a duke. At the rate the world is being turned upside down, who's to say that he won't end up in control again in a few years. Think of that encyclopedia article you sent me about what happened to the changes that the little Corsican, Bonaparte his name was, made all over the map of Europe, and how the Congress of Vienna reversed them."

  "I'm not sure that she would be of equal birth under the Württemberg house laws."

  Anna Margareta sniffed. "The German Hochadel has this insane passion for Ebenbürtigkeit. There's no doubt that Gustav would really have preferred to marry your cousin than the daughter of the Brandenburg elector. But, no, his mother, German that she is, didn't think a Brahe was of equal birth."

  "As far as Gustav's mother was concerned, only the daughter of a ruling prince of some kind was equal to any other ruling prince. That's the way the Germans do it. But it wouldn't hurt to take a look at the prospect of Eberhard. Don't set your heart on it, though. We ought to be looking at other possibilities this winter. Ulfsparre is only three years younger than Kerstin; the same is true for Stenbock. They're both younger sons, of course, and shouldn't really be thinking of marriage until their careers are better established . . ."

  "You are a younger son and you were only twenty-four when we married."

  Brahe paused in his meditations. "And at least they're Swedish."

  The posse left from Mainz. Hartke, from the Fulda Barracks Regiment, led them. Brahe based this on the theory that he both knew the up-timers and their concerns, and had been fighting across the Germanies for so long that he had a vague idea, at least, about most of the past campaigns. Not, of course, that most soldiers had a clear idea about the campaigns in which they had participated. Frequently, from one winter quarters to another, from one battle to the next, a private soldier had only the slightest idea where he was and how, if he had heard the name of the place, it might be spelled.

  Hartke, being a Pomeranian, picked Hertling to go with them, because the boy had a keen ear for the Swabian dialect and, since the spring campaign, could make a fair stab at understanding German from the southern Palatinate and northern Alsace. Hertling had objected, being of the opinion that his proper place was "with his young dukes," until Eberhard and Friedrich ordered him to do what Sergeant Hartke told him. He obeyed with reasonably good cheer until Hartke also picked Bauer and Heisel. Once upon a time, they admitted, probably about the time of the Danish battle nearly ten years before (a description interpreted by the officers to signify Lutter am Bärenberg, or some clash that took place near to it in time), they had known a soldier who served under Geraldin. Additionally, of course, they looked the part of veteran mercenary soldiers looking for a new place.

  Hartke's view was that Hertling's ensuing fit of the sulks only added to his plausibility in the role of a boy who had run from a company whose captain he disliked. Hertling took a radio, Eberhard and Friedrich having trained him in its use and taught him Morse code after the debacle at Weselberg the previous spring. As Eberhard had said, they didn't have much else to do while their injuries healed.

  Brahe's regiments provided eight men, four of them as young as Hertling; the other four hardened veterans. Of the four youngsters, three, all of them from the Magdeburg region, Caspar Zeyler, Andreas Wincke, and Peter Schild, were trained radio operators. The fourth, Jacob Stettin, was a medic. Brahe also provided the posse with
three of his precious tuna tin radio transmitters—precious because he only had a dozen or so to cover the entire Province of the Main and his temporary garrisons—still temporary, of course—at Merckweiler.

  Not a single officer went with the party. Officers—the problem was that they tended to act like officers. Officers didn't usually turn up out of the blue near anybody's encampment asking for work. They relied on networks of relatives, godparents, and friends to obtain a new position when the prior one vanished under more or less normal circumstances such as the death of the colonel or disbandment by the employer. However, Sergeant Hartke was seconded by Sergeant Lubbert Nadermann from von Manteufel's regiment. According to Captain Hohenbach, who was a friend of Erik Stenbock's, he had acquitted himself very well in the fighting outside Hagenau and had a good head on his shoulders. His other main qualification was that he came from a village named Vettelhofen, near Bonn, and knew the area, at least on the right bank of the Rhine, fairly well. He additionally claimed to have cousins named Schurtz who lived—or at least had lived before the start of the war—across the Rhine, somewhat north of Bonn, at Dollendorf.

  Brahe and Utt had debated at considerable length as to whether they should make a greater effort to locate someone from the region of Cologne itself to go along. Eventually, they decided that it was not worthwhile, if only because of the possibility that such a man in one of their regiments might have been planted by Ferdinand of Bavaria. Such suspiciousness might be interpreted as a lack of faith in the general goodness of mankind—Brahe admitted as much. It might, however, as Utt pointed out, contribute to the longevity of the other members of the posse.