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Butterflies in the Kremlin, Part Six: The Polish Incident or The Wet Firecracker War

Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

 

 

Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich, Tim to his friends, was savoring the victory. Right up to the time he was called into the commandant's office. He had beaten Third Lieutenant Igor Milosevic in the Polish invasion scenario two weeks ago. And cleaned up on the deal. The betting had been five to one against him. Tim had been playing the Polish and he had won by ignoring Smolensk. After all, Poland already held Smolensk; They had held it since the Time of Troubles. And Poland, just like Russia, only had to worry about Smolensk if they didn't have it. Now he was trying to figure out what he had done wrong.

 

"The commandant will see you now, Lieutenant."

 

Tim put his shoulders back and tried not to gulp. He entered the commandant's office not looking left or right, stood at attention and saluted as smartly as he was able. The commandant returned the salute with a casual half wave. Then he asked him the last question he ever expected to hear. "So, Third Lieutenant Timrovich, tell me how you managed to defeat the entire Russian Army and take Moscow, in just ten weeks?"

 

"Sir?"

 

"Come now, Timrovich. It's all over the Kremlin. I understand the odds were five to one in favor of that baker's son, Igor Milosevic?"

 

"Sir? Are you talking about the Polish invasion scenario?" Tim was out of his depth. It wasn't one of the official war games.

 

"Yes, of course, Timrovich." The commandant pointed to a map on the left wall. The map showed part of Russia and part of Poland. "Show me how you did it."

 

So Tim did. "Russia is not Moscow; Russia is the Volga." He walked over to the map pointed where he placed his troops and how he moved them using the river Volga as the supply line. "In the Time of Troubles, Poland took Moscow but they couldn't keep it. But the Volga controls transport. . ." Just as Tim was getting into his description of what he'd done, he heard another voice.

 

"Would it interest you to know, Lieutenant Timrovich, that Polish troops took Rzhev three days ago? From the somewhat vague first reports we have, there are around ten thousand troops there now, a mixture of Slacha, mercenaries and Cossacks."

 

"What?" Tim spun and faced the new voice and recognized General Mikhail Borisovich Shein. Then, in a state of shock, he blurted out the first thing that come to mind. "But that's the wrong place."

 

"I'm relieved to hear it," General Shein said wryly.

 

Tim stood mute.

 

"Speak up, Timrovich," the commandant said. "Why do you think Rzhev is the wrong place?"

 

"It's too far up river, sir. The Volga is navigable at Rzhev but only barely. Tver would be a better choice, even if it is farther. You'd want to take Rzhev, too. Later. After the first strike. But if you take Rzhev first, you warn Tver and give them time to fort up and block any river traffic from going past."

 

General Shein looked at the commandant. "Very well. He'll do."

 

****

 

After that things moved quickly. Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich found himself suddenly assigned as aide de camp to General Artemi Vasilievich Izmailov, "Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich reporting as ordered."

 

"Who are you?"

 

"Sir, I'm to be your Cadet aide de camp."

 

"I asked for Milosevic! The baker's boy." General Izmailov was clearly not pleased.

 

"Igor?"

 

"You know him?"

 

"Yes, sir. We're friends at the Кадетский Корпус." Which was the semiofficial name of the still semiofficial officer training school that was growing in the Kremlin.

 

General Izmailov paused and give Tim's uniform a careful once over. "Let me guess. Your father is a Boyar or Duma man?"

 

Suddenly it clicked for Tim. "A great uncle, sir." The pride that Tim's voice usually had in that announcement was notably missing. The general had asked for the best student in the Cadet Corps, Igor Milosevic. Instead he had gotten . . . well not the highest in family rank. There were a lot of high family kids among the cadets. It was quite the fashion these days. No, what the general had received was a cadet of acceptable social rank and lesser skill. Even if Tim had beaten Igor once.

 

General Izmailov was not usually placed in independent command. For the same reason . . . he didn't have enough social, family rank. In fact, he was officially second in command of the army they were raising right now, placed temporarily in command of the advance column.

 

General Izmailov shrugged and got down to business. "I'll be leading a reconnaissance in force and—if necessary—a delaying action while the reserves are called up. The reconnaissance force is made up in part from Musketeers Prince Cherkasski has loaned us from the Moscow Garrison." Prince Ivan Borisovich Cherkasski was the chief of the Strel'etsky prikaz,Musketeer Bureau. "They're under Colonel Usinov. We have small detachments from the Gun Shop and from the Dacha. And two regiments of cavalry under the command of Colonel Khilkov." General Izmailov gave Tim a look. "Usinov has more experience but Khilkov's family is of higher rank. We have peasant levies for labor battalions. About four thousand of them. We have four brand new cannons from the Gun Shop and the Musketeers we're getting have been equipped with the new AK3s. From the Dacha we're getting the Testbed, the flying machine. I am told it is to be used only for reconnaissance. And we're getting thirty of the scrapers. There won't be time to use them much on the march, but they should help a lot with fortifications when we find our spot."

 

Tim nodded his understanding. The assumption was that they would meet the advancing Polish forces somewhere between Rzhev and Moscow. Meanwhile Tim was assigned fourteen different jobs, some of them in direct conflict with the others. Or at least that's how it seemed. He was to coordinate with the labor battalions, the Musketeers, the Dacha contingent as well as the Gun Shop contingent, and make sure that all the various units were in the right marching order. Except that the people in charge hadn't actually decided the marching order yet. So he was given one order and then fifteen minutes later given a different order by someone else.

 

By noon Tim was considering the value of getting rid of the beards, as he'd read Peter the Great had done. But in his own mind, "the beards" were the idiots who kept harping on their noble rank, regardless of their true ability at war. At this rate we'll meet the Poles thirty miles out of Moscow.

 

***

 

On the first day Nikita—call me Nick—Ivanovich's dirigible contingent ended up at the back of the line of march, which meant that by the time they reached the campsite it was already getting dark. Tim watched as Testbed lifted into the night sky and disappeared. All Tim could see was the rope from the wagon, climbing into a bit of deeper blackness which hid the stars.

 

"Of course, it could be that there simply wasn't that much to see," Nick reported a half hour later. Tim could see that General Izmailov was less than pleased. But Nick didn't seem to be worried about it. Which Tim thought was very brave or very stupid. Then he looked over at the Testbed, which the crew was still tying down for the night. He remembered the Nikita Ivanovich had been the first person to climb into it and had flown it without ropes to keep the wind from carrying it away. Tim still wasn't sure whether it was brave or stupid, but the 'very' gained a whole new level of magnitude.

 

"Timrovich! The Testbed will be placed near the front in tomorrow's order of march," General Izmailov gritted. Tim knew that the general had seen the demonstration at the Dacha and had been planning to use the dirigible and pleased to get it. But how were they supposed to know that it didn't work at night? Granted it was pretty obvious when you thought about it. Dark is no time to observe things.

 

****

 

"I don't believe this," Tim muttered. "We'll never get there at this rate." The march had put them about twelve miles west of Moscow. Worse, they were trying to move fast and doing it over good roads. The scrapers had improved the roads around Moscow quite a bit.

 

His friend and fellow student at the Cadet Corps, Pavel, nodded in agreement. "Bad enough the delays because of the confusion. But Colonel Khilkov and the fit he threw when we were setting out and he discovered that we were ahead of him in the line of march was just plain stupid."

 

Tim figured the flare up was at least half Usinov's fault with all the gloating he was doing. But he didn't say so. Pavel was Colonel Usinov's cadet aide de camp, and thought quite highly of him. "Just wait till he hears that General Izmailov is going to put the Testbed near the front of the line tomorrow." Tim threw his arms up and pretended to be having a fit. "Never let it be said that mere military necessity should trump social position in the Russian army. 'My cousin is of higher rank than your uncle, so of course my company must be ahead of yours in the order of march.'" Tim spat on the ground. "Idiots. We're all idiots. If we go on like this we'll be defending Moscow from another Polish invasion and we'll be doing it right here. You can bet that the Poles aren’t sitting on their asses in Rzhev arguing about who should be first in the line of march."

 

****

 

 

Pavel could have bet that, but he would have lost. Because sitting on his ass arguing was precisely what Janusz Radziwiłł, the commander of the Polish forces, was doing. Not about the order of march, but what they should do now. Janusz, in his early twenties. was already the Court Chamberlain of Lithuania. That was a high post in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which he had gotten because of the influence of his cousin Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania. Janusz was sitting with his two main subordinates discussing the lack of the arms depot that they had been expecting. It was a rerun of several discussions they had since they had gotten to Rzhev and discovered that the Russian invasion Janusz' spy had informed him of was not nearly so near as they had expected.

 

"Ivan Repninov has confirmed everything?" Janusz insisted again.

 

Mikhail Millerov, commander of his Cossacks snorted. "You can't depend on anything that rat faced little bureau man says. I've questioned many men and his sort is the hardest to get the truth out of. Not because he's a strong man, but because he's weak. He'll tell you anything you want to hear and change his story five times in as many minutes."

 

"Yet what he said makes sense and fits with what the agent reported," Eliasz Stravinsky, the commander of the western mercenaries disagreed. "Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev is as crooked as a dog's hind leg."

 

"Yes!" Janusz exclaimed. "That by itself explains the situation to anyone familiar with Russia. Ivan Petrovich commits graft as other people breathe, with very little thought and continuously. And as the nephew of Prince Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev, the third power behind Cherkasski and the patriarch.

 

"Fourth, if you count the czar." Mikhail Millerov corrected.

 

"I don't," Janusz insisted "Mikhail Romanov is his father's puppet and everyone knows it. In any case, Ivan Petrovich has ample opportunity for that corruption. He got the contract for the depot and pocketed the money."

 

Millerov nodded a little doubtfully, and Janusz continued. "My agent in the Muscovite Treasury Bureau spent considerable time putting together the pieces. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was clearly in charge of making the arrangements. And naturally shifted contracts to where they would do his family the most good. Corrupt, every last one of them." It didn't occur to Janusz to wonder what someone on the outside might think of the Polish nobility.

 

"Possibly . . . or possibly your man misinterpreted a scam of the Sheremetev family and the only place the depots were ever intended to be was in the pockets of the Sheremetevs." Millerov shrugged. "At this point we'll likely never know for sure and it doesn't matter anyway, because we are sitting here in Muscovite territory. They aren’t going to apologize. They're going to deny and the depot isn't here. They'll demand reparations. Granted, the Truce of Deulino expired in July of 1633. His Majesty has refused to give up his claim on the Russian throne and Russia hasn't given up its claim to Czernihów or Smolensk. So legally Poland is at war with Muscovy, but up to now it's been a pretty phony war. Little fighting and even less talking. The war is going to get a lot more real now, one way or the other. So it would be best to win it. Yes?"

 

Eliasz Stravinsky nodded. "If we go back now, we'll look like idiots. Not real good for the career, that."

 

Janusz Radziwiłł nodded almost against his will. He was still convinced that the reports had been accurate. The Muscovites were planning to take Smolensk and much of Lithuania, just like they had tried in that other history. But probably—as had happened before—corruption in their ranks had interfered. Still, the Cossack was right. It didn't really matter now.

 

****

 

"Men coming in," the scout said as he rode up to the general.

 

"That'll be the mercenaries from Rzhev," General Izmailov said, then looked at Tim. "Take word the column is to halt. Officers Call at the front."

 

"Halt the column. Officers Call, sir, at the leading unit," Tim told the commander of each unit as he rode down the line.

 

It was the third day of marching toward Rzhev. And this halt would probably cost them two miles. When he got back to the front, Tim saw that General Izmailov was speaking to the sergeant leading the mercenaries who had sent the riders to inform Moscow of the invasion.

 

"So tell me, Sergeant," General Izmailov was asking, "why did you abandon your post?"

 

"What post, General? We were ordered to Rzhev to guard a supply depot. When we got there, there was no supply depot. No quarters and no pay. My people were living in tents outside Rzhev. You can't guard what isn't there, sir, and we were never assigned to guard Rzhev." The sergeant pulled a set of orders out of his pack and handed them to General Izmailov.

 

General Izmailov looked over the orders and snorted. Then he handed them to Tim and went on to the next question. "Did you keep in contact with the invading force?"

 

The burly sergeant shook his head. "No. We didn't see any more of them and I don't have the men to spare."

 

"Are the invaders coming this way? Heading to Tver? Did they even continue on past Rzhev, or did they stop there?"

 

"I don't know, sir," Sergeant Hampstead admitted.

 

Tim read over the orders and information in the packet, and stopped . Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev. Well, that explained why the foreign mercenaries had had been sent off to guard a nonexistent supply depot. It was almost funny. Sheremetev's greed had, for once, worked to Russia's benefit. If the mercenaries hadn't been in Rzhev the Poles might have bypassed the place altogether and headed straight for Tver. With no warning to the Kremlin until they had already taken Tver.

 

General Izmailov turned to a discussion with the dirigible's pilot. After discussing the dirigible and its capabilities for a few minutes, the pilot, Nick Ivanovich, said, "General, if we loose the tether, we can see more. I can usually get twenty miles an hour when I use the engines, assuming the engines work. And if the wind isn't bad when I get up there."

 

"When they work?" Izmailov looked dubious. "When they work?"

 

"They do . . . mostly," Nick said. "The engines aren't really the problem. Sometimes there is considerable leakage in the steam lines. If the steam isn't leaking too bad, I can stay up for ten hours or so. If everything goes right, I can get from here to Rzhev and back before dark."

 

Izmailov thought for a few moments. "All right. We'll try it. But at the least problem abort the mission and get back here." He turned back to the mercenary. "Sergeant, your officers were delayed in Moscow but we expect them to be joining us in a day or so. You and your men are to fall in at the end of the column as we pass."

 

****

 

Everything didn't go right for Nick Ivanovich. It was the winds. They were southerly and fairly strong at five thousand feet. Weaker, but still southerly, at five hundred. The Testbed didn't have a compressor; it couldn't lift the weight. So it couldn't pump hydrogen out of the bladders then get it back. Once the hydrogen was gone, it was gone. It did have a couple of hydrogen tanks so it could go up and down a little bit.

 

Nick ended up using more fuel than expected to keep on course. There was some steam leakage but it wasn't too bad. All of which meant that he might have made it to Rzhevand back. Or, if he went all the way to Rzhev,he might run out of fuel or water before he could get back.

 

****

 

"I was forced to abort, General." Nick shook his head. "Wind was awful and kept blowing me off course. But I did get a bit better than halfway and didn't see the first sign of the Poles. No advancing troops, not in this direction."

 

Izmailov turned to the mercenary sergeant. "Did your scouts see the entire army. This so-called ten thousand man army?"

 

"No," Hampstead admitted. "My scouts saw the leading elements. About three thousand men. And that's still more than my five hundred could face with any hope of victory."

 

"How do you know it was the leading elements? Not the whole force?"

 

"The formation was spread out like a screening element. Why put a screening element out when there's nothing to screen?"

 

The answer to that seemed obvious to Tim . . . to hide the fact that that was all you had. To bluff. Still, the sergeant's point about the size of his force was well taken. Why bluff against a force of only five hundred men? Tim could think of two reasons. If the attacking force didn't know how big the force in Rzhevwas, they might try a bluff to get a force of a thousand or fifteen hundred to retreat and avoid a battle against an entrenched opponent. Two to one odds aren't that great when the enemy is behind walls.

 

Or it could be that the bluff—if it was a bluff—was intended not for the sergeant but for . . . well, them. The relieving force. Tim looked over at the wagons holding the deflated Testbed and smiled.

 

General Izmailov was shaking his head. "There are a lot of reasons why you might arrange your troops in a pattern that will, at first sight, look like a screen . . ."

 

The commander of the Polish invaders had not, in fact, formed his force into a screen. He had split his force into three columns of a thousand men to facilitate gleaning. The scout had spotted the center column and swung wide around it which had taken him right into the second column. He had assumed that the two columns were the ends of a large screening element but hadn't checked.

 

****

 

There were four wagons in the dirigible contingent. One carried the dirigible, sort of. The wagon acted as an anchor for the dirigible while on the march. The dirigible floated about fifteen feet above it, and was cranked down to ground level and tied down with spikes driven into the ground at night or in bad weather. That wagon also carried a pump which weighed just under two tons. The pump was used to compress hydrogen gas for the canisters. Another wagon carried equipment and materials for the production of hydrogen gas. A third carried equipment for field repairs and the fourth carried the repair crew. After the aborted trip, they spent two days worth of breaks on the march doing maintenance before they felt safe with the thing untethered again. General Izmailov was not pleased.

 

"I'm sorry, General," Nick Ivanovich said. "But there is a reason we call the dirigible 'Testbed.' It's an experiment designed to test concepts in aviation. To the best of our knowledge, nothing quite like it has ever existed in this or any other history. The engines are handmade by Russian craftsman, as are the lift bladders, the wings." Nick hid a grin.

 

The designer would hate him calling the control surfaces "wings." They weren't designed to provide lift, but control. In fact, they provided a bit of both. The "wings" acted as elevators at the tail of the dirigible. More were located between the gondola and the motors. They didn't provide much lift, but by pointing the dirigible's nose up or down, he could gain or lose a little altitude without having to dump ballast or gas. Or use the emergency tanks to refill the lift bladders.

 

"They were well made, but by people who had no way to do more than guess about the stresses they would face. It's steam powered and if they had steam powered dirigibles up-time, we haven't heard about it. That's why they built it—to see."

 

"So why don't we have an improved version or one of the airplanes that the up-timers have?" Izmailov sounded impatient and gruff.

 

"Engines, sir. Ours are both heavy and weak They wouldn't get a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. There is one engine in Russia that might lift an airplane off the ground. That engine is in the car Bernie Zeppi brought to Russia." This wasn't entirely true, as Nick well knew. The engines they had built for the dirigible would get an airplane off the ground just fine. It was the added weight of the water, the boiler and the steam recovery that had so far made down-time-built steam-powered heavier-than-air craft imposable. Without the recovery system, a steam powered aircraft would work fine for a few minutes before the water was all used up. Water weighed a lot.

 

"So I will have the intelligence you can gather from your Testbed only when and if everything goes right? If nothing breaks on your toy and the weather is just right?" The general glared, then visibly shook himself. "All right, Captain. That's all."

 

****

 

The cavalry were equally unimpressed with the intelligence gathered by Nick. And more than a few of the cavalry were resentful. Scouting was a part of their function and, as far as they were concerned, the infantry was looking to take away the other part. They rode out almost gaily for the two days the dirigible was being repaired.

 

But, just like the dirigible, they found no traces of the enemy.

 

****

 

Sixty miles as the crow flies from Moscow, Nick was ready to try again. Mostly because they were launching from closer to Rzhev, but also because it was, luckily, a still, calm day. Nick made it to within five miles of Rzhev. At five thousand feet, he feathered the engines so he would have a stable platform, pulled out his telescope and started counting outhouses and camp fires.

 

****

 

"Three thousand men, General, more or less. They haven't burned the town, but it's not big enough to hold them all. They have built a camp next to it. No walls, not much in the way of defensive fortifications."

 

"Did they see you?"

 

Nick shrugged. "I can't say for sure. The Testbed is big and quite visible, but I was five miles away and a mile in the air. It depends on where they were looking. No one took a shot at me and they didn't seem disturbed when I looked at the town."

 

"Three thousand? Is that all?" Colonel Ivan Khilkov said. "Hell, General, we've got almost that many cavalry. Send us ahead; we'll ride them into the ground." The colonel was not a fan of the new innovations in warfare provided either by Western Europe or the up-timers.

 

General Izmailov hesitated and Nick knew why. Ivan Khilkov was young, but from a very old family. A very well-connected family, since one of his relatives was Patriarch Filaret's chamberlain. The general could deny him once or twice, but if he did it too many times, Izmailov would find himself relieved of command, and his career ended. Nick prudently kept his mouth shut.

 

***

 

Four days later, General Izmailov could no longer say no. Colonel Khilkov had sent mounted scouts directly to Rzhev.

 

"They are fortifying the town, albeit slowly. By the time the full column reaches Rzhev, the town will be fully fortified," Khilkov said. Then he sniffed. "Send us, General. We can get there quicker than this—" Khilkov waved an arm at the wagons. "—torturous mess. The cavalry can get there in two days. By the time you can get all this there, we'll have taken the town."

 

There was no way to avoid it, Izmailov knew. Against his better judgment—and with a tiny bit of worry for his future—he agreed. He might very well be sunk either way it went. If Khilkov won, he'd look bad. If Khilkov lost, his angry relatives would blame Izmailov.

 

****

 

"Khilkov and his forces are about ten miles from Rzhev, sir," Nick Ivanovich reported.

 

"Very well," Izmailov said. "Do whatever it is you need to do with your . . . Testbed. If he's that close, you should see the battle tomorrow." The general paused. "Take Lieutenant Timrovich with you." When Nikita started to object, General Izmailov held up his hand. "There's no choice in this. He is from a good family. If things go well tomorrow, it won't matter—but if they don't, you and I will need his report."

 

By this time, the main column was only about forty miles from Rzhev by air. Which, unfortunately, meant quite a few more miles on foot. Fortunately, it was short-hop range for the Testbed. Nick spent the rest of the day doing maintenance and preparing for the overloaded trip to Rzhev. The general consensus was that tomorrow he would have a ringside seat for a glorious feat of victory by Russian cavalry. General Izmailov clearly wasn't so sure, and Nick shared his doubt. There were probably a few others who were less than sanguine about the outcome. Sergeant Hampstead was one of them; his commanding officer, Captain Boyce, who had joined them on the march was another.

 

****

 

"I'm told I'm going with you."

 

Nick Ivanovich looked over at the young lieutenant. "Yes, so General Izmailov told me. That's why I'm pulling two of the four hydrogen tanks. We'll also be taking less ballast water and less fuel." Nick wasn't happy with the situation but he rather liked Tim, one of the more innovative young officers in the Russian army. And young was the word. Tim might be seventeen, but he looked closer to fourteen. "Bernie Zeppi said once that the glamour of flying would get to almost anybody. But it's bloody dangerous up there. A dirigible is a balancing act. Look there . . ." He pointed. "Those are the lift bladders. They pull the dirigible up but not by a constant amount. The higher you go, the thinner the air; as the air thins the bladders expand. As the bladders expand, they provide more lift."

 

"So the higher we go, the more lift?"

 

"Right. And that's part of the problem. Because the goal is to go up a certain distance, then stop going up. We can't add weight once we take off, so once we get to the height we want—actually before we get that high—I start releasing hydrogen from the bladders. Now what do you think happens when we start coming back down?"

 

"We get heavier."

 

"Right. But I've already thrown away the hydrogen that started in the bags. So to counteract that getting heavier, I add hydrogen from these tanks . . ." Nick pointed at the tanks in the gondola. ". . . if I've got enough. Or, I can turn this valve which releases water from a tank. But that water is the same water we use in the steam engines, so I can't dump it all or we run out of power. What happens if we start coming down and I'm out of hydrogen and water?"

 

"We crash."

 

"Right. Also the Testbed here has as much surface area as a three-masted schooner has sails." Well not really, Nick admitted silently, but it doesn't have a hull in the water holding it in place either. "So a sudden change in the wind and we can be a hundred yards away from where we want to be before I can even start to compensate. If we are facing into the wind, or close to it, the engines are enough to move us through the air. But if the wind is from the sides, the wind wins. If it rains on this thing, the weight of the water means even with all the ballast overboard and the bladders at capacity, we don't have enough lift. We had to drop the radiator more than once in tests at the Dacha and the aerodrome where they are working on the big one. We haven't had to drop the engines or the boiler yet but it's rigged to be able to."

 

Nick went on to explain about the various controls. The fifty pound weight that didn't seem like that much till you realized that it could be moved from the tip to the tail of the Testbed to adjust its balance and angle of attack. That not only the wings, but the engines at their ends rotated as much as thirty degrees, to provide last minute thrust up or down for takeoff and landing. Especially landing. The steam engines could reverse thrust with the turning of a lever, so the Testbed didn't need variable pitch propellers.

 

****

 

"It is a beautiful sight," Tim said. "Banners flying . . ." He paused a moment, then sighed. "A beautiful sight, noble and glorious. But at the Kremlin in the war games they treated pike units as fortified. Not easy to overrun. Colonel Khilkov didn't think much of the war games." In a way this was like one of those war games, an eagle's eye view. Tim had played a lot of them, and suddenly, as he watched, he could see the little model units on the field below. He remembered one of the games—an unofficial game—when one of his fellow students had had a bit too much to drink. And ordered cavalry to attack undispersed pike units. You were supposed to hit them with cannon first, to break up their formation. And he remembered those cavalry pieces being removed from the board. Igor had stood, held up one arm, wobbled a bit, lifted the arm again and proclaimed "But, I died bravely!" They had all laughed. Suddenly it didn't seem funny at all. "Colonel Khilkov thinks the Poles will break when faced with a cavalry charge . . . and General Izmailov didn't seem to agree."

 

"You're sounding a bit, ah, concerned there, Tim." Nick peered though his telescope toward the Polish forces.

 

Tim nodded. "Colonel Khilkov is . . . a bit difficult."

 

The Polish forces didn't flee. Three thousand Russian cavalry faced a wall of about two thousand Polish infantry, armed with pikes and muskets, as well as the Polish cavalry. The infantry stood in ranks and waited. Then they lowered their pikes and the Russian cavalry charge ran headlong into a porcupine made of men. Then the Poles fired. It was unlikely that the volley killed many men, but it was enough to shatter the Russian formation.

 

Then it was the Polish cavalry's turn. They were outnumbered but they were fighting a scattered unit. Colonel Khilkov tried to rally his men and almost managed it. But the Polish infantry had slowly—as infantry must—advanced while the Polish cavalry had been cutting its way through the Russians. Once their own cavalry was mostly clear, the Polish infantry opened fire again.

 

"It's all over, mostly," Nick said. There was, it seemed to Tim, a coldness in Nick's voice he had not noticed before. "We'd better head back to General Izmailov and tell him."

 

Tim nodded, tears blurring his sight. He kept seeing little cavalry units being picked up off a playing board while he looked at the clumps of bodies on the field. It was too far to tell but he knew many of the men in those cavalry units. He knew some of men whose bodies made up those clumps. "The general's not going to be happy."

 

The little boyars with their fine horses had left the field, those that still could. Routed by soldiers who worked for pay, not glory. Nikita restarted the engines and headed to the column.

 

****

 

By the time they got back to the column, it was crossing the Volga at Staritsa and Tim had himself well under control. He made his report and the general discussed the way the battle had gone. Whoever had commanded the Poles had kept his Cossacks in reserve. Which was a bit of a surprise; probably the greatest Russian weakness was in tactical mobility. Of course, a Russian army that was mostly cavalry was unusual, too.

 

"I am concerned about the loss of the cavalry," General Izmailov echoed Tim's thoughts. "The cavalry units were most of what tactical mobility we had. We can't afford to be caught away from the Volga. We'll need it for supply. It's a hundred miles along the Volga from Tver to Rzhev. I am going to take the main force straight to Rzhev. But I am sending Captain Boyce and his people along the river to grab up every boat they can find. You're going with them, Tim. I don't really think they'll bug out again, but better safe than sorry."

 

"Yes, sir. What do I do if they do bug out?"

 

"They won't. That's why you're going. I'm sending a squad of musketeers with you, but they are just to keep you safe. Captain Boyce knows that if his company fails in its mission, you'll take the musketeers and come tell me about it. Then he and his people won't get paid."

 

****

 

To supplement their rations, the Musketeers with their new AK3s went hunting between villages. Russia was sparsely populated compared to the rest of Europe and there was quite a bit of game. Captain Boyce and his sergeant were impressed with the guns. When they asked Tim about it, he called on one of the musketeers to do a show and tell.

 

Daniil Kinski set the butt of the AK3 on the ground and the tip of its barrel came not quite to his nose. If any of them had been familiar with the up-time weaponry, they would have noticed a marked similarity to a Kentucky long rifle. But that similarity was not complete. Like the long rifle, the AK3 was a flintlock with a long, rifled barrel. It was forty inches long, if you didn't include the chamber, which was four inches long. Daniil then lifted the AK3 and showed them how the chamber was removed. "The chamber, as you can see, is a steel case, not including the quarter inch lip that inserts into the bore of the barrel. Behind the lip, the front of the chamber is flat and supposed to fit flush to the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't always fit as flush as we'd like, so we made some leather gaskets." He pulled the gasket off the chamber and showed them. "We still have the flash from the pan and the touch hole, but that's no worse than any flintlock."

 

Daniil stuck the gasket back on the chamber and the chamber back in the rifle primed the pan, cocked, aimed, and fired.

 

Crack!

 

Then he pulled the chamber out, stuck it in his pouch, inserted a loaded chamber with a gasket already on it into the AK3, primed the pan, aimed, and fired again.

 

Crack!

 

Relative to muzzle loading a musket it was very fast. Plus, since both shots had been aimed, they had both hit the tree that was his target . . . some eighty yards away from where they were standing.

 

Daniil pulled the second chamber from the AK3 then leaned the rifle against a tree while he showed them how to reload the chambers. Daniil filled the chamber with a measured amount of black powder then pulled out a lead cylinder "It doesn't use a round ball, it uses a Krackoff ball." Which an up-time observer would note had a certain resemblance to a Minié ball, in that it was a cylinder with one flat end and the other rounded. But it fit snugly into the chamber. "Push down till the Krackoff ball is flush with or a little below the lip of the chamber," Daniil said. The chamber wasn't cylindrical on the outside. Instead it was designed to fit into the AK3 only in such a way that the touch hole lined up with the flint lock on the side of the rifle.

 

****

 

A week later, while Tim and his crew were still collecting boats on the Volga, the Russian force surrounded Rzhev. In a way, General Izmailov was surprised. His force seriously outnumbered the forces in Rzhev and he had half-expected the commander of the Polish mercenary force to realize that and withdraw.

 

Janusz Radziwiłł had considered doing just exactly that. His officers had suggested it. However, Janusz was a young man who had already thrown the dice. If he retired from the game now, things ...