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"Your new regiment will fight alongside all the others in a battle," Mike continued. "But it has a special function as well whenever I call on it. You're the unit I'll be depending on to keep everyone else in line. Do you understand me, Colonel Higgins? I want no repetition of Świebodzin. Ever."

Jeff looked around. They were holding this private conversation in one of the rooms of the small village tavern Mike had taken for his field headquarters. "Taken" as in "expropriated," although no one had gotten hurt because the people who owned the tavern along with everyone in the village had fled before the division arrived.

You could hardly blame them. The news of Świebodzin had spread widely and rapidly. But the expropriation of the tavern itself illustrated the fundamental problem, which was practical at its very core.

It would be nice if atrocities resulted solely and simply from the wickedness of men. Were that true, they could be suppressed by the simple use of harsh discipline. Unfortunately, the world was more complicated—and if Mike Stearns didn't understand that, Jeff would have to explain it to him.

He hesitated, and took another deep breath.

To hell with it. If he shoots me, he shoots me.

And to hell with military protocol, too.

"Mike, this ain't gonna work. Sure, I can probably put a stop to crazy shit like what happened at Świebodzin. But that's just the tip of the iceberg—and you oughta know it. We have to get supplies. And how are we going to do that? We've already pretty much run out of what we brought with us from Berlin. That means foraging, and foraging means stealing, and the way Koniecpolski's been running us ragged there's no way to round up enough supplies except to send out lots and lots of foraging parties and there's no way in hell you or me or anybody can stay in control of that and before you know it some cavalry unit or some infantry squad is going to kill a farmer who squawks too much when they take his one of his pigs and then they're likely to rape his wife or daughter or likely both and kill the rest of the kids while they're at it. And what good is my shiny new regiment gonna be?"

Mike put a hand on Jeff's shoulder. "Relax. I know the realities of this kind of warfare and I'm going to start taking some steps to ameliorate it. I don't expect perfection, Jeff. I know there'll be incidents. And even if I come down on them as I hard as I did after Świebodzin—and you can bet your sweet ass I will—some of those crimes will go unpunished because there's no one left alive to report them except the culprits and they sure as hell won't. But that's still not the same thing as wholesale slaughter. That, we can control—with your new regiment."

Jeff took another deep breath, and slowly blew it out. "Okay, then. We'll need a name."

Somehow or other, the tradition had gotten started in the USE army of using names instead of numbers for the regiments. The names had no official existence, but nobody except idiot accountants used the regiments' numbers anymore.

"Call it the Death Watch," said Mike. "Better yet, call it the Hangman."

Jeff thought about it, for a few seconds. "The guys'll probably like that, actually. Well, the ones in the regiment, anyway. Don't know about the others."

"Yeah, I think you're right."

They were silent, for another few seconds. Then Jeff said, "Off the record, Mike, you know how fucked up that is?"

For the first time, a trace of humor crept into Mike's smile. "The Ring of Fire didn't cut us any slack, did it?"

After Mike finished explaining what he wanted, David Bartley frowned. The young financier-turned-army-lieutenant stared at the surface of the table he and Mike were sitting at, in the back room of the tavern that Mike was using for his headquarters. His eyes didn't seem quite in focus.

"Pretty tricky, sir," he said after perhaps a minute. "There's no chance of using TacRail like we did in the Luebeck campaign?"

Mike shook his head. "We're not fighting French and Danes here, Lieutenant Bartley. Leaving