Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette Volume 24

"Professional hunter," I said. "They usually use good rifled guns."

The area under the scars on the side of the powerplant was weedy, there was no hope of finding a bullet there, but standing under the scars on the side of the building and sighting back through the switchyard toward the refugee camp, it was obvious where the shots had come from.

"Want me to go with you?" Tom asked, as we stared at the building the shooter must have used.

"That would be nice. Back through the main gate?"

"Faster through the west gate," he said. "The railroad used to go out that way, before they pulled the track last summer. I have the key here."

When I'd first seen it, the refugee camp had been nothing but a few parallel rows of light sheds. Just about every time I'd visited, there'd been changes. What had been sheds had been closed in by winter, and with the coming of spring, the pace of construction had increased. The shooter's building had a new second story, and as we came up to it, a roofing crew was at work adding a good slate roof on top.

"Hey, who you," a German carpenter asked, as we stepped inside.

"I'm from the power plant," Tom said. "John is with the Grantville police. Who are you?"

"Johann Schneider."

While I tried to figure out what question to ask, I wrote down his name. "What happened here during the Croat raid?" was the best I could do.

"Well," the carpenter said, answering in German, "the news of the Croats came before we got to work. We decided to lock the old prison camp gates and move the women and children into the inner houses. I think we could have held off a cavalry attack for a long time."

I nodded, looking around. "You're probably right. Horses are no match for a woven wire fence with barbed wire on top. You had guns?"

"A few," he said. "Mostly matchlocks, but enough to keep an attacker from trying to cut his way through the fence, and three of us had American pistols."

"No rifles?"

"No," Schneider said. "Everyone who had a gun had it out. I didn't see any rifles."

"So what happened afterwards. When did you get back to work here?"

"When news came of the victory, we had a bit of a celebration. It was time for the noon meal, so it was afternoon when we got to work."

"Did you see anything in this house when you got back to work?"

"Like what?" he asked, and I was stumped. I didn't want to ask for evidence of someone shooting at the power plant. I'd learned from the Grantville police that it was bad to ask leading questions. "Well, any sign that something odd had happened here."

"Now that you mention it, there was something," he said, frowning. "That window was broken out, and there was a sort of sulfur stink in the air."

The window he pointed to had only a few fragments of greased paper around the edges. It faced the power plant, and someone had torn out the paper. When I walked over to the window, I could see powder burns on the sill. Someone had fired a black-powder rifle out the window from close by. "Tom? Take a look."

Fortune didn't smile on us when we asked around, nobody remembered hearing the shots fired. People told us that the power plant makes odd noises on occasion, and it seemed likely that the shooter had managed to muffle the noise of his gun by shooting from inside the house.

Around noon, Tom suggested we break for lunch and recommended a tavern out by the main road. The place had decent food, and they'd set up tables in the shade of a big tree. Halfway through our meal, when the serving maid came to ask if we wanted more beer, I thought to ask the same questions I'd been asking in the camp.

"Around the time of the Croat raid, did you happen to see anyone around here with a long rifle?"

She frowned. "There was a man here the night before who had a big flintlock rifle. He said he was visiting a friend in the camp."

"Can you describe him?"

"Weatherbeaten, thin, he had a brown horse with a white cross on its nose. By his accent, he was Franconian."

"Have you seen him before then, or since?" I asked.

She hadn't. I paused, puzzled, and then looked across the table at Tom. "A jager, it would seem, and from Franconia. How in creation would such a man know to shoot at your, what do you call them, insulators."

"It's an obvious way to attack a power plant," he said.

"Obvious to you," I said, "But you had to spend half the morning explaining things to me enough that I could understand what he'd done. Someone here, someone working in your plant, must have taken the time to explain the same things to that man, or more likely, to whoever hired him."

"You think we have a spy in the power plant?"

I nodded.

When I got back to the Grantville police station, Angela Baker asked what I'd found. When I told her, she immediately dialed the telephone and asked for Chief Frost. "Yes," I heard her say "I know he's at the wedding banquet, but he should hear this himself." There was a pause. "Yes, I suppose it's poor form to walk out on the king, but if I can't get Chief Frost, then I need to speak with Mackay immediately."

She looked up at me with a grin. "I still can't believe we have a king here in…" Someone on the other end of the telephone must have spoken, because she stopped suddenly and then handed me the phone.

"John Leslie here," I said, using my best telephone manners. It was Chief Frost.

I went on to tell what I'd seen at the power plant, leading up to my guess that there was a spy in the plant to teach a German huntsman what exactly he needed to shoot at.

"Good Job," the Chief Frost said. "And thanks for helping cover for us when we're stretched thin. I'll mention your work to Colonel Mackay, and please, write up a proper report, or have Angela help you write it up. I'll forward a copy to Rebecca."

I didn't expect Chief Frost to say he'd forward a copy to Rebecca Abrabanel. To hear Grantville's policemen talk, you'd think nobody ever reads their reports. Now, my report was going to be read, not by some clerk, but by one of the most important people in Grantville.

Angela was a big help with the report, but we took frequent breaks when the telephone rang or a garbled burst of static on the radio needed action.

On one of the telephone calls, Angela put her hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "Power plant again," she said to me, and then uncovered the mouthpiece. "I think you should speak to Sergeant Leslie, he's the one who figured it out this morning."

When I took the receiver, the man on the other end introduced himself as Scott Hilton. "I'm the steam engine project shift supervisor for the power plant. Tell me why you think there's a spy in the plant," he said.

When I finished answering his question, he sighed. "I hate to say it, but I don't think this is our first attack. When I heard there might be a spy here, I didn't want to believe it, but at the same time

…" He stopped, and there was an uncomfortable pause. "Well, I wanted to hear it from you before I go off half cocked."

I had to grin at the American expression comparing a man to a half-cocked pistol. "So are you fully cocked now?" I asked.

"I suppose so," he said, with a chuckle. "As I said, I think there were other attacks on the plant."

"Why?"

"We've had accidents," he said. "We expected some accidents, but there've been some odd ones. We're trying to build machines none of us are really prepared to build, you know."

I didn't know, but I didn't interrupt him.

"When you've got enough plain ordinary accidents, it's easy to think that everything that goes wrong is an accident. Now that we know someone's trying to attack us, I'm pretty sure that some of those accidents weren't so accidental. I just talked it over with Landon, my boss, and he agrees. There are two that we're pretty sure of, a main bearing failure and a cylinder head that burst."