But they were still hauling gun carriages and wagons around—and even a light gun carriage drawn by only two horses is an awkward way to conduct forward reconnaissance. Not to mention that if they ran into an enemy cavalry unit without some warning they’d still be trying to set up their guns when the enemy started sabering them down.

  So Thorsten wanted cavalrymen—defined as: one man on one horse with at least one weapon he could bring immediately to hand—to be scouting ahead of him. Well ahead of him. Half a mile, a mile—better yet, two miles.

  * * *

  And then, as it turned out, they could have dispensed with the cavalry screen altogether. By sundown they’d found the second ford they needed right where Captain Finck had said it would be, about seven miles upstream on the Isar. Roughly halfway between Moosburg and Freising.

  They hadn’t encountered a single Bavarian soldier along the way. Not one. Not a sign of one. It was by then obvious that General Stearns’ counter-move was something the Bavarian commander Piccolomini had simply never considered. As so many commanders before him had done in the long history of war, Piccolomini had assumed that his opponent would do the same thing he would do.

  Engler hadn’t discussed the general’s plans with him, but by now he’d come to know Mike Stearns fairly well. One of the things he recalled was Stearns telling him that mercenaries usually had predictable faults.

  “They’re too conservative by nature,” he’d said. “Or let’s say they’re too conservative because of their economic position. War is a trade for them, not something they do because of ideals—or because of hatreds and bigotries, for that matter. I don’t think they’re even conscious of it, most of the time, but they’re always guided one way or another by a consideration of profit or loss. What do we gain or lose—not for our cause, but for us? And if the answer is, not enough for the potential loss we might suffer, they simply won’t do it. And what’s even more important, I think, is that they’ll assume—also without even thinking about it—that their enemy won’t do it either.”

  The ineffable grin had come, then. “Whereas I damn well might.”

  Thorsten didn’t have enough experience yet himself to decide if Stearns was right or wrong in general. But today, at least, he’d been right.

  * * *

  As an added bonus, soon after they began setting up their positions, Captain Finck himself and his Marine unit appeared. Materialized, as it were, out of nowhere.

  “We saw you coming,” Finck explained to Engler and Mackay. He pointed to a small wood perhaps four hundred yards away. “We weren’t sure who you were at first, so we hid out there.”

  Mackay and Engler looked at the grove, then looked at Finck, then looked at the western horizon where the sun had just disappeared, then at each other.

  “We’ve been here setting up our camp for at least two hours,” mused Mackay. “Two hours of hard, unrelenting labor.”

  “While you, expert scouts—‘special forces’ they call you, if I am not mistaken,” Thorsten pondered, “couldn’t manage to determine who we were and cross a few hundred yards—that’s what? a quarter of a mile? don’t you have to prove you can run to the moon and back in fifteen minutes to qualify for your unit?—until the sun was setting and we have to retire for the night.”

  Finck smiled at them. “We just got orders on the radio from General Stearns. At the crack of dawn—no, even before then—we have to be heading upriver again. He wants us to scout Freising to see how quickly and easily Piccolomini might be able to fortify it. So we’ll have to retire early—now, in fact. Good luck, gentlemen.”

  He nodded toward the northwest, where the sound of occasional gunfire could still be heard.

  “For what it’s worth,” Finck said, “the fighting mostly died away by mid-afternoon. We couldn’t actually see anything, since at this point the Amper’s at least two miles north of where we are. But all the indications are that Piccolomi and von Taupadel are squared off against each other, with von Taupadel anchored in Moosburg. This is just a guess, of course, but I’d say that right about now the Bavarian commander is a grumpy man.”

  Bavaria, village of Haag an der Amper

  Captain Finck was wrong. Ottavio Piccolomini wasn’t grumpy, he was worried. Everything today had gone the way he’d planned, for the most part. The resistance of the enemy had been more ferocious that he’d hoped for, but he wasn’t thrown off his stride by it. He’d already known from the reports he’d read and interviews he’d done of men who’d fought the Third Division that whatever else Michael Stearns might be as a military commander, he was certainly tenacious.

  Bavarian casualties had been higher than he’d wanted, but not ruinous. The enemy’s had certainly been worse. The ground that Piccolomini and his soldiers had crossed as they drove the invaders back into Moosburg had been littered with corpses, mostly enemy corpses. There’d been so many of them in some places that he’d ordered his soldiers to pile them up in stacks. They’d have to bury them in mass graves once the fighting was over.

  Yes, everything had gone well this day. Not as well as he’d hoped, certainly; not even as well as he’d planned. But Piccolomini was too experienced a soldier to be surprised by that. War was what it was: at bottom, chaos and ruin. You could hardly expect it to fall into neat lines and rows.

  Seated at the same table in the same tavern that he was all but certain his counterpart had occupied earlier that day, Piccolomini looked around. He finally realized what was worrying him.

  The place was too neat. There was almost no litter. The door to the tavern had been smashed aside at one point, probably by an impatient officer who’d gotten jammed in the doorway when the door closed on him unexpectedly. But someone had taken the time to repair it before they evacuated the place.

  Not much of a repair; just a piece of leather nailed in place. But why bother at all?

  “Do you have any further orders, General?” asked one of his adjutants.

  Piccolomini gazed at the repaired door for another second or two. “No,” he said. “Just be ready to move out tomorrow morning. Early. I want to launch our first assault on Moosburg as soon as the sun’s up.”

  Chapter 21

  Moosburg

  Six miles east of Zolling

  For Jeff Higgins and his Hangman regiment, the second day of the Battle of Zolling started off well and kept going that way—as of eleven o’clock in the morning, at any rate. The 1st Brigade’s commander, von Taupadel, had ordered the Hangman to take positions well inside the town itself and fortify them. If von Taupadel’s three regiments found themselves forced to retreat from their positions on the western outskirts of Moosburg, he wanted them to be able to retreat to the east of the town while being covered by the entrenched Hangman.

  Moosburg hadn’t been badly hit by cannon fire, so the Hangman had to build the fortifications partly by tearing down otherwise-undamaged buildings. Jeff felt a bit of guilt over that, but not much. Bavarian troops—more precisely, troops employed by the duke of Bavaria; most of them weren’t Bavarian themselves—had conducted themselves in such a foul manner for years that none of their opponents had any empathy for them or the realm that paid them. Jeff Higgins and most of the soldiers in his regiment understood on some abstract level that the average inhabitant of Bavaria had no control over the actions of Duke Maximilian or the forces he put in the field. That understanding was probably enough to restrain them from committing atrocities against civilians they encountered—of whom there had been a few, including one entire family hiding in a cellar, whom they’d escorted safely out of town. But they would have had to possess a superhuman level of restraint to extend that same mercy to buildings as well. And if that meant that eventually the residents of Moosburg would return and discover that their homes and businesses had been partially or fully wrecked, so be it. Better that, than a righteous and upstanding soldier in the righteous and upstanding army of the righteous and upstanding United States of Europe should have his brains spilled by a musk
et ball because he hadn’t possessed sufficiently adequate cover when the foul minions of the still-fouler duke of Bavaria launched their assault.

  Which they did, right at sunup. But—so far, at least; it was still short of noon—the 1st Brigade was standing its ground. So, the worst that the Hangman faced was some hard labor and suffering some minor casualties: one man’s helmet dented and his senses sent reeling by a canister ball; one man’s cheek sliced open by a piece of splintered stone sent flying by an errant cannon ball; and one man’s leg broken by the collapse of part of a wall that the same cannon ball struck and from which the splinter derived—but it was just his fibula, and a clean break at that.

  Bavaria, on the Isar river between Moosburg and Freising

  Thorsten Engler had found the night that had just passed rather nerve-wracking, and the following morning had been even worse. He’d decided to have his flying artillery squadron use the ford to cross over the river and establish themselves on the north bank. They’d had no time before sundown to erect fieldworks, however, and he hadn’t wanted to risk doing so thereafter. The moon was almost full but the visibility still wasn’t good enough for soldiers to work.

  Besides, Thorsten didn’t want a lot of noise, and there was no quiet way to cut down enough trees to build a bridge big enough for thousands of infantrymen and artillery units to cross over. There had been no sign as yet that they’d been spotted by any Bavarian forces and he wanted to keep things that way. So, once the squadron crossed the river and took positions he had sentries posted and ordered the rest of the men to get some sleep.

  They started work just before sunrise, as soon as there was enough daylight to see what they were doing. They were still be making noise, of course, but hopefully the sounds of the battle on the Amper would drown it out. While they worked, Mackay and his cavalrymen maintained patrols that would warn them of any approaching enemies.

  There were none, thankfully. Without an infantry shield, Engler and his volley gunners were at a terrible risk. Flying artillery had tremendous offensive power, especially against cavalry. But if they had to go on defense they were more vulnerable than just about any military force. They lacked the ability of infantry to hunker down in defensive positions. A man can fit into a foxhole or a trench or hide behind a tree or even a fencepost; a volley gun and its crew can’t. And they didn’t have the ability of cavalry to just ride away from danger. Volley gun carriages were too clumsy to make good getaway vehicles, and while the horses could be detached and ridden, they had no saddles. There were precious few gunners who could stay on a galloping horse which he was trying to ride bareback.

  So, the volley gunners worked like demons until the fieldworks were finally erected, a little after eight o’clock in the morning. Thereafter, they could relax a bit—physically, at least, if not mentally. With the rate of fire experienced volley gun crews could maintain, and fighting behind shelter, they would be extraordinarily hard to overrun unless they ran out of ammunition—and that wouldn’t happen for hours.

  By then, of course, the enemy could move up their own light artillery units and once they began firing the squadron would be forced back across the river. Even three-inch guns and six-pounders would quickly reduce the fieldworks they’d been able to erect.

  But by then, the bridge would be finished. Unless the 1st Brigade and the Hangman at Moosburg collapsed entirely, forcing Stearns to bring back the other two brigades, the lead infantry regiments from the 2nd and 3rd brigades would have made it to the ford and begun crossing the Isar as well. Thorsten and his engineers had designed the flying artillery’s fieldworks so that some infantry units could take places immediately while other units expanded the fieldworks down either side of the riverbank. By nightfall of that second day of the battle, they’d have a well-nigh impregnable position on the north side of the Isar.

  Bavaria, the Isar river

  About two miles northeast of Moosburg

  Mike Stearns was feeling fairly nerve-wracked himself, a sensation he found particularly aggravating because he was so unaccustomed to it. As a rule, he didn’t worry overmuch. He didn’t have the fabled temperament of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman—What, me worry?—but he had been blessed with very steady nerves and a sanguine disposition. Since he’d been a boy, his operating assumption as he went about his life’s affairs was that things were generally going to work out well, if for no other reason than that he’d damn well see to it that they did.

  Perhaps for that reason, he’d never spent much time gambling. He enjoyed an occasional night of low-stakes poker, but simply because of the social interaction. Before the Ring of Fire, he’d been to Las Vegas twice, on his way to Los Angeles and on his way back. He’d fiddled with the slot machines for a while, on his first trip, more out of mild curiosity than anything else. On his second and final visit, he’d spent about an hour at a blackjack table, despite the fact that he found that particular card game quite boring. He’d done it from a vague sense of obligation that since he’d taken the time to pass through Las Vegas he owed it to someone—maybe himself, maybe the goddess of luck, who could say?—to do some Real Gambling.

  So, gamble he had, losing about fifteen dollars in the process. When he walked away from the table he didn’t mind having lost the money but he did mildly regret the waste of his time.

  The problem with gambling, from Mike’s point of view, was that a person was voluntarily placing himself at the vagaries of chance. That just seemed monumentally stupid to him. No one except a hermit could get through life without at one point or another—usually more than once—giving up hostages to fortune. But it was one thing to have your destiny kidnapped by forces beyond your control, it was another thing entirely to go looking for the bastards so you could hand yourself over to them.

  He felt firmly—had felt firmly—that there were only two circumstances when a person should do anything that rash: when you got married, and when you had children. Even then, the degree to which your fortunes were no longer in your own hands was restricted. You did, after all, get to pick your spouse, so if the marriage turned out sour it was mostly your own screw-up. And you did, after all, occupy the parent half of the parent-child equation, so if your kids wound up being dysfunctional, you were probably the main culprit involved.

  And now, on May 15 of the year 1636, Mike Stearns was realizing that he’d just made the biggest gamble of his life. True, he’d thought and still did that the odds were in the Third Division’s favor. Pretty heavily in the division’s favor, in fact. Nevertheless…

  There was a chance that the 1st Brigade might collapse under the pressure of the Bavarian assault that had been going on since the day before. Yes, the brigade was a good one, full of veterans of the Saxon campaign, some of whom had been at Ahrensbök as well. True also, they were fighting on the defensive behind solid fieldworks and could always retreat into Moosburg if necessary. True as well, they had the Hangman regiment—probably the division’s best—in reserve.

  They were still heavily outnumbered, and facing an army that was also largely made up of veterans and with an experienced and capable commander. So it was a gamble.

  If the 1st Brigade collapsed, Mike’s whole battle plan went up in smoke. He’d have no choice but to bring the rest of his division back across the Isar in the hope that he could keep von Taupadel and Higgins and their men from being slaughtered. Whether he could do that in time…

  Was another gamble, and one with fairly long odds against success. That was the reason he’d decided to stay at the ford on the Isar just downstream of Moosburg, while he sent the 3rd Brigade and most of the 2nd Brigade up the river to find the ford that Colonel Engler was holding for them. Mike was keeping the Gray Adder regiment with him, to provide cover for the 1st Brigade if they needed to retreat from Moosburg and cross over the Isar.

  That would leave the entire Third Division strung out for miles along the banks of the Isar, from the ford below Moosburg to the ford between Moosburg and Freising. Strategically t
hat would leave him with a mess, since he’d be on the wrong side of the river for an assault on Munich. But if the 1st Brigade was broken at Moosburg he’d have a much more pressing tactical mess on his hands, and the fact that most of his forces would now be across the river from Piccolomini’s army would put them in a good defensive position. With Heinrich Schmidt coming south with the SoTF National Guard, Mike was sure that Piccolomini wouldn’t risk making an assault on the Third Division across the river. He’d just withdraw up the north bank of the Isar and take up defensive positions at Freising or somewhere south of there.

  So Mike wasn’t likely to face a disaster no matter what happened. But if his plans failed, he’d have led his army into a pointless and brutal killing field due to his own over-confidence. Jimmy Andersen and hundreds of other soldiers would wind up in graves whose headstones might as well read Here lies a good man, killed because his commanding general was a cocksure jackass.

  Maybe the worst of it was that Mike might kill hundreds more of his men because he was still gambling like a cocksure jackass.

  He’d know by nightfall, one way or the other.

  Bavaria, on the Isar river between Moosburg and Freising

  Thorsten Engler didn’t think he’d ever in his life felt quite as much relief as he did while watching Colonel Amsel’s Dietrich Regiment coming across the bridge onto the north bank of the Isar. Within minutes, the infantrymen were taking positions behind the fieldworks that the flying artillery had hurriedly set up.

  And, naturally, complaining bitterly that the fieldworks were just the sort of ramshackle crap that you’d expect lazy and pampered artillerymen to set up, while the infantry set about correcting all that was wrong, subtracting all that was useless, and adding almost everything that would actually do any good if it came to a real fight.