enough

and Tillman's were the three boats Eddie had specifically requested. After that, the Grantville boating selection ran down through smaller ski boats to bass boats and simple dories, but Frank had picked out one more as a backup for Eddie's requests: a sixteen-foot Boston Whaler which had belonged to Harry Rousseau before Harry and his family went to visit his mother in Duluth the day before the Ring of Fire struck. It was on the small size for what they had in mind, but it was the next biggest boat in Grantville, and he wished fervently that he had an entire fleet to send with the four of them.
Hell, while I'm wishing, I might's well wish for a frigging destroyer—or even an aircraft carrier! he told himself sourly.
He started tugging on the tie-down straps and checking the hull chocks, but left off when he spotted Jerry Yost glaring at him. The truck driver, clearly enough, did not appreciate the interference of an amateur, "General of the Army" or not. Frank gave Yost a half-apologetic smile and moved down the line of trucks. The coal trucks, he decided, would provide him with a safer avenue for venting his overseer reflexes. They were, after all, officially the property of the U.S. Army.
He glanced into the back of the first coal truck. At the moment, it was loaded with additional fuel drums and cans, two deflated rubber Zodiac boats that belonged to Sam and Al Morton, and the odd case of dynamite. The second coal truck, also towing Rousseau's Boston Whaler on its trailer, would be leaving Grantville for Halle early next morning with its own load of supplies too bulky to be transported by the speedboats themselves—including several hundred rockets and the modified launch frames the machine shops were working frantically to complete even as Frank stood in the dark and worried.
He still had his doubts about the entire operation, whether he was prepared to admit them to anyone else—besides Mike, of course—or not. But if the defense of Wismar failed, it wasn't going to be because Frank Jackson hadn't done everything he could to prevent it.
He reached the