1636 The Kremlin Games (37 page)

Chapter 60

Sergeant John Hampstead looked over at his captain. “They’ll be coming, sir. Now that the balloon is gone.”

“I know.” The captain nodded. “But where?”

Hampstead shrugged. “Maybe on the left. There are some gaps on that side. Sure as hell, we can’t be everywhere.” Their unit had been left on the outer wall to stiffen the peasant levies which were unarmed, just there to make it look like the wall was manned. The peasants had sticks painted to look like rifles and muskets, because the Russian government wasn’t keen on arming peasants. Armed peasants tended to turn into Cossacks or bandits. Not that there was much difference between the two.

So Sergeant Hampstead and Captain Boyce had been assigned to go to wherever the Poles attacked and shoot so that it looked like the whole wall was manned by armed troops.

Captain Boyce nodded again. “It’s as good a place as any, John. Start shifting the men.” They could hear shooting from behind them. The Russians were in Rzhev and would be occupied for hours cleaning out the Polish troops in the town. If the outer wall was to hold, it would be them that held it.

*     *     *

“Form the men just inside the wall! We’re going to wait right there.”

“What about the firing ports, Captain?”

“I’m getting sneaky, John,” Captain Boyce told his sergeant. “As important as holding this part of the wall is, convincing the Poles that we are just one of the units manning them is just as important. We need to give them a reason why the other parts of the wall aren’t shooting.” Then he turned to the peasant levies. “Who’s in charge here?”

Having identified the man, Boyce explained what he wanted. “Tie ropes onto the
golay golrod.
When I give you the word I want you to pull these two sections apart. As quickly as you can. Then when I tell you, push them closed again.”

Then man nodded and started giving orders. It would give them a roughly twenty-foot front. “John, two ranks only and keep the pike men in reserve. Have the men fire as the
golay golrod
clear the breech. Then fall back as soon as they have fired. Reload and reform as the walls come back together.”

*     *     *

It didn’t go like clockwork. Unless you were talking about a clock with a busted arrester gear.

“Open!” The walls started coming back with dozens of men pulling each wall. The troops started firing.
Blam Blam, Blam Blam
, and the walls retreated. And they did a credible job at first of retreating behind the
golay golrod
but then things went awry. Some men kept going, others stopped too soon and the walls caught up and passed them, leaving them exposed to enemy fire. Almost no one had time to reload because they were too busy moving. Then there were the Polish troops—who had been taking sniper fire from those walls for weeks. As best Boyce could tell, no one gave the order but the Polish formation went into a charge as the walls opened. They took casualties, lots of them, since Boyce’s troops were firing from pointblank range. But the Poles saw the breech and ran right over their fallen to get to it.

Boyce ordered the wall to close before it was all the way opened. But it wasn’t soon enough. The walls didn’t close all the way; they were blocked by Polish troops.

Boyce on one side and Hampstead on the other, they struggled to reform the men and close the breech. They weren’t alone. The Russian peasants, armed with whatever was handy, were right there with them.

*     *     *

Ivan didn’t really know why he’d been assigned to this wall section, or even why he’d been pulled away from his farm. But one thing he did know was that Polish forces loose in Russia were a bad thing. He’d been hearing the stories all his life, how the Poles had decimated his village and killed his grandfather.

He didn’t have one of the fancy guns the soldiers had, but he did have an ax he used to cut wood for the walking wall. If nothing else, he and his peers could use their axes against the Poles. And they would, he knew. Nobody wanted the Poles in charge again. The boyars were bad enough.

So he stood in the shadow of the wall, waiting for the inevitable rush of men trying to get inside. Then he swung the ax, the blade flat because he didn’t want it to get stuck in bone or armor. The Pole dropped to the ground and Ivan swung at the next one. Misha was swinging just as frequently. Some of the Poles got past, of course. An ax doesn’t have much chance against a sword, a pike, or even a flintlock pistol.

Still, they kept swinging.

*     *     *

“Get a message to Izmailov,” Boyce shouted across the breech. “Send a man, now!”

Hampstead grabbed the nearest man and sent him inside Rzhev. “Tell the general we need more men. And we need them now, if he doesn’t want the Poles up his backside!”

In a sense, Boyce’s trick had worked.

*     *     *

To the Poles it did look like one more weird Russian maneuver using the
golay golrod
, but their commander thought that this one had backfired. It was clearly poorly planned and not drilled nearly enough. At least, not at the place the Polish force had attacked. It might work better at other points along the line, but that didn’t really matter. They had a breech and poured everything they could into it. The unsupported peasants at other places along the wall were not attacked. And the maneuvering to bring forces to the breech cost the Poles time.

*     *     *

“Back to the walls,” Izmailov roared. “These pigs are well stuck.”

Janusz Radziwiłł was dead, and most of his officers. The remaining force inside Rzhev were rounded up and under guard. “Back to the walls,” Izmailov roared again. Tim gathered the men he’d been leading and headed back to the breech in Rzhev’s walls.

*     *     *

“There’s nothing there but peasants and sticks,” Gosiewski shouted. “You’re not turning back from peasants, are you?”

The Polish forces pushed toward the breech again.

*     *     *

“Here they come!” Tim’s voice cracked on “come.”

But it didn’t matter that he was only seventeen. The men followed him readily. Nor were they the only group. Russian troops were turning over their prisoners to anyone handy and heading back to the walls. Unit cohesion ceased to exist. But by then most of the Poles in Rzhev were unarmed and most of the citizens of Rzhev weren’t.

Suddenly Tim stopped dead in his tracks. They had reached the outer wall but the Poles weren’t actually coming at them. They were nowhere near the breech. The Poles were crossing in front of them, not preparing to attack. He looked around trying to make sense out of the confusion and chaos that was battle.

Rzhev had been retaken. The volley guns and cannon that had been preventing resupply were no longer needed in that role. They hadn’t been moved in preparation for the battle because the general didn’t want the Poles across the Volga making a dash to reinforce Rzhev while the assault was still going on. But now, what purpose were the volley guns serving? He turned to find a man with an AK3 near him.

“Can you hold here with what you have?”

“I should be able to. Besides, more men are coming all the time. What you have in mind?

What Tim had in mind was far above his authority. “Never mind. You men! Stay here.” Then Tim ran. By going inside the inner wall, he shortened the distance he had to travel considerably. It still took him ten minutes to reach the volley guns. And considerable shouting to get them to pull away the wall section. “The general’s orders! Bring the volley guns and follow me.”

Of course, they weren’t the general’s orders; they were Tim’s orders. And if the general decided to make an issue of it, Tim was going to be in a great deal of trouble. But somewhere during the battle the career of Lieutenant Boris Lebedev had decreased in importance. What was vitally important was getting the volley guns where they were needed.

Tim stood on the volley gun platform, which was being pulled by two steppe ponies. It wasn’t a grand gesture; he needed the height to see over the wall to locate the breech. “That way!” He pointed. “Another hundred yards.”

Tim and the gun crew were inside the inner walking wall. Just on the other side of it was a mob scene, packed with Poles slowly pushing back. The Russian defenders were spread along the wooden trench made by the two walls. Carefully, they lined up the volley guns at points where wall sections met.

That was when Tim realized the flaw in his magnificent plan. The
golay golrod
were made up of wall sections that could be latched together. But the latches here and now were on the other side. They couldn’t open the walls. They knew where the latches were; there was one near the top one and near the bottom. Tim cursed himself for a fool. “We’ll have to move the volley guns to where we control the walls.” He climbed back up on the gun platform and looked over the wall again, almost getting shot for his trouble. “Over there.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “Three wall sections.”

When they got to a section that the Russians mostly controlled, Tim used the volley gun platform and scaled the wall. This time he almost got chopped up by a Russian peasant with a bloody ax and covered with gore. “Open the walls! Open the latches! Let the volley guns through!” And, surprisingly enough, that’s just what they did.

The Russian version of the volley gun was an outgrowth of the same technology used in the AK3. The plates were loaded with AK3 firing chambers and were ignited by a quick fuse. They were slower firing than the ones in the west, but Russia was still having trouble with primers. They had twenty-four barrels arranged in three rows of eight. If all went well, the preparatory work was done on the chamber plates before the battle started, so all that was needed to reload was to pull a chamber plate and replace it with another before lighting the fuse. They were cranked, but only for traversing.

The last Russian slipped from in front of the volley gun. The gunner lit the fuse and started cranking.
Crack Crack Crack Crack
. . . twenty-four barrels in order. Then the gunner pulled the plate, inserted another and did it again. The gunners for the volley guns were big men. The plates weighed upwards of thirty pounds.

The volley guns wouldn’t have been enough by themselves, but they took the pressure off the Russian troops long enough for a semblance of organization to occur. Unarmed peasants retreated to be replaced by armed
Streltzi
carrying AK3’s, and the weight of fire shifted. The battle for Rzhev was effectively over.

Chapter 61

“Lieutenant, you are to report to the general’s quarters.”

Two weeks after the battle, things had stabilized. Rzhev was surrounded by three walls, one inside the other. The Rzhev wall that had been built in a somewhat haphazard manner by the Poles and the two layers of
golay golrod
together constituted a fairly formidable defensive network. Starving the victorious Russians out would take time. Meanwhile, the walls were bolstered by sand bags and firing platforms. Neither Tim nor General Izmailov had yet had occasion to mention Tim’s orders to the volley guns, given in the general’s name. Tim had been starting to hope—against his better judgment—that the general was going to let the whole thing pass.

“What am I going to do with you, Lieutenant?” General Izmailov sighed rather theatrically. “I have been reading a translation of an up-time book on a French general who had an elegant solution for this situation. He was dealing with a general, not a lieutenant, who acted on his own authority. At their base, the situations are quite similar. Bonaparte’s elegant solution was to give the general a medal to acknowledge his achievement.” There was a short pause but Tim knew he was far from out of the woods.

General Izmailov continued, “Then, to maintain good order and discipline in the army, he had the man shot for disobeying orders.” General Izmailov paused again and waited. Tim remained silent.

“What do you think of Bonaparte’s solution, Lieutenant? I could have you a medal by sunset.”

Tim hesitated, looking for the right words. “I can’t say it appeals to me, sir. But I grant that the solution has a certain, ah, symmetry.” He stopped. Tim really wanted, right then, to bring up the political consequences to the general should he find it necessary to execute a member of a family of such political prominence, even a minor member of a cadet branch. He didn’t, though, partly because it would sound like a threat—probably not a good tactics against someone like Izmailov—but mostly because Tim understood that while what he had done was the right thing for that battle, it was the wrong thing for the army. He had sat in
Testbed
and watched as Colonel Khilkov used his family position to destroy a couple of Russian cavalry regiments. He knew as well as General Izmailov that if word got out, his example would be used to justify every harebrained glory-hound for the next hundred years. Who knew how many people that would kill? Tim had known when he was doing it that it would cost him, but not how much.

“For political reasons I can’t use Bonaparte’s elegant symmetry. You will get neither the medal nor the firing squad. Those political reasons are only partly to do with your family.” General Izmailov gave Tim a sardonic smile. “I will take the credit for your brilliant move and it may save my life when I must explain to the
Boyar Duma
my acquiescence to Colonel Khilkov’s less-than-brilliant actions. We will say that it was a contingency plan. You will get a promotion, then you will receive the worst jobs I can come up with for some time to come. You will accept those jobs without complaint! Understand me, Lieutenant. You deserve the medal you will never get, but you also deserve the firing squad that you won’t face this time. Don’t make the same mistake again.”

*     *     *

Tim was still doing latrine duty when Moscow finally decided to send reinforcements. At that point the ranking Polish officer withdrew his army. The Lithuanian magnate’s campaign had not been sanctioned by either King Wladyslaw or the Sejm. Such private adventures by the great magnates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were not particularly unusual—and if successful, got after-the-fact backing. But if they failed disastrously, the magnate could face severe repercussions. If nothing else, he’d be in such a weakened state that other great magnates—they all maintained large private armies—would be tempted to attack him.