CHAPTER 15
Bypass Surgery
Tsaritsyn docks
November 4, 1637
There were four gunboats steaming down the river to Tsaritsyn and Tim wasn’t the only person on them. Czar Mikhail and Czarina Evdokia were there as well.
“It wasn’t my idea,” were the first words out of Tim’s mouth as he came down the gangplank.
“That’s right!” Czar Mikhail said gaily from behind him. “And consider yourselves lucky we didn’t bring the kids. They wanted to come, you know. Raised an unholy ruckus about the whole thing.”
“Congratulations on your success,” Bernie said, paused a beat, and added, “Czarina Evdokia.”
From behind Czar Mikhail, the czarina grinned.
“I do believe my royal self has been offered insult.”
“No, Your Majesty,” Natasha said. “Just knowledge of the inner workings of the royal household.”
“Even more dangerous,” Mikhail said, grabbing Bernie and giving him a bear hug. “Off with his head.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Mikhail. Someday, someone isn’t going to realize you’re joking.”
All this was happening on the Tsaritsyn docks in full sight of at least a hundred people, including Colonel Denisov, who commanded the Don Cossacks investing the city, and several of his captains. It was also in full view of the city walls, though far enough away so they probably couldn’t hear.
Mikhail looked around and said, “Let’s adjourn to the imperial steamboat. We have excellent maps, and a meal, and it’s warm.” He shivered rather theatrically. It was a cold day. Cloudy with ice on the ground, reminding them all that the Volga was going to turn into a sheet of ice over the next couple of months. It would be late December before it froze around Astrakhan, but here it would be unnavigable by steamboat by mid-December. They adjourned to the large and windowed dining hall on the czar’s steamboat in time to look out its windows and see a Scout circle over Tsaritsyn and land on the Volga. It tied up to the dock and they were shortly joined by the pilot and the scout.
While Czar Mikhail, Czarina Evdokia, Bernie, Natasha, General Tim, Colonel Denisov and his second-in-command, Major Simeon Platov, dined on sturgeon steaks with a dill sauce and tomatoes from the czar’s greenhouse, the pilot and the scout added details to the map of Tsaritsyn.
✧ ✧ ✧
Tim put down his napkin, looked over at the map table, and Czar Mikhail waved at him. “Go ahead, Tim. I know you won’t be happy till you’ve pored over the latest additions, not that they are going to change anything.”
“Probably not, Your Majesty,” Tim agreed. And he was almost certain that the czar was right. He’d been thinking about this problem for a week, but in a larger sense, he’d been thinking about this problem from the other side for more than a year. And he had the experience of fighting a siege just like this one for that year, from the besieged side. Of course, he’d had a better situation in most ways, but part of what General Birkin had done by accident was effective. That was why Birkin still technically had Kazan under siege. He’d effectively built his own city outside Kazan, just upriver from Kazan, between Kazan and Kruglaya Mountain. Birkin couldn’t successfully attack Kazan or Kruglaya Mountain, but Tim couldn’t take Birkin’s city either. Over the last year the men on both sides had started calling it Birkingrad, much to Birkin’s annoyance. Birkin was smart enough and politically savvy enough to realize that building a city named after himself when he was supposed to be conquering Kazan and moving on to Ufa wasn’t designed to make him popular with Sheremetev or Ivan Romanov.
At the table, it turned out that Czar Mikhail was right. The walls were mostly wooden stockades, but Colonel Greshnev, while not the greatest strategic thinker Tim had ever met, wasn’t a total idiot when it came to tactics. He had workers building a second wall behind the first and filling in the space between them with earth, making breaching the walls a lot more difficult. Tim could still mortar-bomb the city. Or, using one of the Heroes that were under construction in Ufa, literally bomb the city, killing hundreds of people. That was militarily possible. It wasn’t politically possible, not under Czar Mikhail. There was no way in hell that Mikhail would stand for carpet-bombing a city full of civilians.
Tim smiled slightly. People didn’t understand Czar Mikhail, which was probably a good thing. Czar Mikhail wasn’t in any sense a personal coward. But he was a man who saw the consequences of his actions perhaps a little too well, and was utterly unwilling to kill the innocent along with the guilty. He had enough trouble killing the guilty when they needed it. In that other world, he would have been standing right next to Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It made him a difficult monarch to work for, but at the same time, it made him more worthy of Tim’s loyalty than anyone Tim had ever known.
Along with his studies of the tactics and strategy of people like Rommel and Patton, Marshall and Eisenhower, Lee and Grant, Tim and his friend Ivan Maslov had also studied the battles, tactics, and strategy of this universe and this time, especially those of Gustav Adolf and Mike Stearns. And one thing had stuck out even though it hadn’t involved Stearns or any of the other major military figures. Just a bunch of Germans, leavened by a few up-timers, at a place called Forchheim. They hadn’t so much besieged Forchheim as they had bypassed it. Built a road that went around the place and otherwise just ignored it. Ivan had pointed out that the Forchheim bypass was about as close to the strategic offense/tactical defense doctrine they were trying for as anything they were likely to see.
The important thing here was that Tsaritsyn got most of its power and about all of its wealth through the fact that it controlled the portage from the Don River to the Volga River. Without control of the portage and the fees that went with it, Tsaritsyn didn’t matter at all.
Having looked at the map of Tsaritsyn for long enough to be sure that it would be idiotic to attack it, Tim covered that map with the map of the portage route from the Don River to the Volga.
There were tributaries that were nominally passable for light boats that went a good part of the distance, but the consensus of the road builders was that the simplest thing would be a good solid road with a rail down the center that went from the Volga to the Don. That was the best way to go. By now there were crews, Russian and Kazakh, that could put in a solid macadam road or even a tarmac road at a rate of something close to a mile a day. With good mapping and multiple teams working, they could build the forty-three-mile road they’d mapped out in not much more than a month.
Well, maybe two months, and with winter coming on there was a good chance that it wouldn’t be finished until after the spring thaw.
That was all right. He didn’t need it finished. He didn’t need it much more than started. The merchants and porters of Tsaritsyn would realize what it meant as soon as they started work on it.
About then Colonel Denisov and Major Platov came over to the table and looked at the map he was examining.
“That’s not Tsaritsyn?” Colonel Denisov asked, the question in his tone.
“No. Attempting to take Tsaritsyn would be a stupid way to get an army killed,” General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev said, then apparently realizing how impolite he was being, looked up, blushing. He didn’t, however, retract the statement. Instead he expanded on it. “With the improvements in weapons that the up-timers introduced, defense has become much stronger. That pendulum will swing back in a few years as armored steam trains and other mobile fortifications come into play. But even then it’s going to be a different and much more distant sort of warfare, which will be much more dependent on strategy than tactics. Every battle is a gamble. The trick is knowing when to bet and when to change the game.
“Against a well-fortified city with modern weapons, it’s a bad gamble. So we change the game.”
“How exactly?” asked Major Platov.
Tim explained, starting with the background. “The whole reason that Colonel Greshnev thought he could pull this off, was that he thought he could force Astrakhan to support him. Astrakhan needs the Volga trade. With it, Astrakhan is the doorway between the new industries in Russia and the Safavid Empire. But with Tsaritsyn cutting that off, they become just one more village on the Caspian Sea.
“Tsaritsyn also controls the portage between the Don and the Volga rivers. So if they control Astrakhan, they control the Don to Volga trade, through which most of the goods from western Europe reach the Safavid Empire. But without Astrakhan the caravan route from the Don to the Volga isn’t actually worth anything. Both upriver and down are controlled by the Sovereign States. So when Astrakhan joined the Sovereign States, Tsaritsyn lost all the trade that would flow along the portage route.
“With the Sovereign States controlling the Volga below and above Tsaritsyn, there isn’t anywhere for the goods portaged between the Don and the Volga to go. That means that simply by controlling the Volga River, we’ve won the war. All he can do is irritate us.”
“A little more than that,” Natasha disagreed. “The Don River provides us with access to goods from the Black Sea and points west. As well as goods shipped down the Don from central Russia.”
“Of course, Princess,” Tim agreed. “But without Astrakhan, we can hurt him a great deal more than he can hurt us.”
“Not without hurting the Don Cossacks almost as badly as you hurt Tsaritsyn,” Colonel Denisov said bitterly. “The portage fees charged by Tsaritsyn are why I have an AK2, not an AK4.7. If you cut off the trade entirely, well, we’re Cossacks. We’d survive. But it would not be easy. And a lot of my people would die.”
“This is going to avoid that problem,” Tim said, pointing at the map. “In 1633 the city of Forchheim in Germany decided that they were not going to allow voting rights. They also were sitting on a transport route. A road not a portage route but . . . ” Tim shrugged the difference away. “Rather than storm the walls, the State of Thuringia-Franconia simply built a new road that bypassed the fort at Forchheim. We’re going to do the same thing, but we’re going to do them one better. How long do you think Colonel Greshnev is going to survive once his people realize that we are building a tarmac road with a rail down the middle three miles upriver? One that will be able to send riverboats from the Volga to the Don and back in hours instead of weeks.”
“Hours?”
“Hours. Using a steam train, a small riverboat will travel at ten to fifteen miles per hour. It’s less than fifty miles if the road guys are right. They will be loading trains from the Volga in the morning and putting them in the water of the Don before the sun sets. And the same is true of cargo.”
Then Czar Mikhail arrived. “Is everyone up to speed?” he asked, and Colonel Denisov and Major Platov looked confused.
“It’s an up-timer-ism,” Bernie explained. “It means ‘has everyone caught up’ or ‘is everyone aware of what’s going on.’”
“If so, let’s go talk to the people of Tsaritsyn.”
Any radio more sophisticated than a spark gap radio has the ability to transmit sound as well as data. Granted, the radio network wasn’t used that way most of the time, but it could be, and there were crystal sets available. Homemade ones and factory-made ones. So if you had a radio transmitter and knew the standard broadcast frequencies, you could switch your radio to analog voice instead of digital data and just talk to anyone who had a crystal set. And most radio operators did for an hour or so a day, playing music or sharing the latest gossip from Ufa or Moscow, often enough announcing that so-and-so had a radio telegram waiting. It varied with the radio operator. Tsaritsyn’s station had been sending out promises of wealth and power ever since Colonel Greshnev had declared for “Czar Ivan Romanov.”
Czar Mikhail’s steamboat had an excellent high-powered radio system. He was, after all, the czar.
✧ ✧ ✧
A few minutes later, seated comfortably in his chair, Czar Mikhail began to speak into a microphone. “To the people of Tsaritsyn, this is Czar Mikhail Romanov of the United Sovereign States of Russia. Colonel Greshnev has seized equipment belonging to the federal government. I don’t really care all that much about that, but he’s also taken captive and ordered the execution of citizens of the Sovereign States. That is a much more serious crime and something I care deeply about. Through the wisdom of some of his subordinates, his orders to execute my people weren’t carried out. And, by the way, to the people who chose to disobey that order, you are forgiven for the theft of Russian property because you didn’t kill anyone, even though you were ordered to do so.”
Colonel Denisov listened to Czar Mikhail’s calm, almost mellow, voice and wondered how long Colonel Greshnev would let those men live if they were in Tsaritsyn. They probably weren’t, but it didn’t really matter. They didn’t really matter. Czar Mikhail had just made it clear that he wasn’t going to be looking for anyone’s blood unless they killed someone. And giving them a reason not to obey Colonel Greshnev’s orders to commit atrocities.
“I don’t know the condition of the radio men in Tsaritsyn,” Czar Mikhail continued, “but you need to be aware that your future well-being is very much dependent on their continued well-being.
“As to Colonel Greshnev’s declaring my Uncle Ivan czar, that is a piece of foolishness that even my Uncle Ivan has more sense than to claim. But it also moves Colonel Greshnev’s actions firmly into the category of treason.
“If the government of Tsaritsyn had declined to join the United Sovereign States of Russia, I probably would have let it stand as long as they didn’t attempt to impede trade along the Volga. But, thanks to Colonel Greshnev, that option is no longer available. Tsaritsyn must now either become fully part of the Sovereign States, or it must die.
“I am sure that Colonel Greshnev has been bragging to you all about the strength of Tsaritsyn and the range of the rifles the men guarding your walls carry. And he’s quite correct in that. General Lebedev has examined the defenses and confirms that any sort of frontal assault would do nothing but get our men killed and I accept his judgment. After their own recent experiences, so do General Birkin and anyone else with any sense.
“So here is what we’re going to do instead.” And now Czar Mikhail’s voice seemed happy as well as calm. “Three miles upriver from here, we are going to construct a fort, a port, and a railhead. And from that railhead, we are going to build a road with a rail line down its center, and that road is going to go from the Volga to the Don River. The cargos and boats that were once portaged from Tsaritsyn will now take that road. While the Sovereign States will undertake the entire cost of building that road, the part of it within the lands of the Don Cossacks will belong to them. And the fees received for transport of boats and other goods on the rail line will be divided between the Sovereign States and the Don Cossacks in a ratio still to be worked out.
“What is not in question is who owns the Don River. The Don Cossacks own it from the headwaters to the mouth.”
Which meant that Czar Mikhail had just given them a bunch of Russian territory currently controlled by Muscovy. Which wasn’t going to make Ivan Romanov happy, but was going to make the Don Cossacks very happy.
“In exchange for that”—the czar’s voice became grim—“Colonel Denisov, based in the new city, will continue the siege of Tsaritsyn until the city surrenders or starves.”
Czar Mikhail waved at the radio man and he flipped a couple of switches and the little light went off and music, the Russian national anthem, started playing over the radio.
The czar rotated around in his chair until he was looking at Colonel Denisov. “I know I may have overstated what you agreed to at dinner a little, but the details can be worked out over time. And I suspect that your army’s time in the siege lines will be brief. To get the support of the porters, Colonel Greshnev had to have promised them exclusive rights to handle the portaging of boats and supplies between the rivers. Now that they know he can’t deliver on that, they will be trying to find a way out and the most straightforward way out is to deliver him to my justice, or perhaps just to deliver his head.”
The czar stood up, and led them to a small but comfortable room on the steamboat. “You fellows think about it and decide what you want to do.” Then he left them there.
✧ ✧ ✧
Major Simeon Platov looked around the small room with its plush leather chairs and polished tables. Then he looked at the man who had been his friend and leader since they were boys. “Ivan, make whatever deal you can. Join the Sovereign States or don’t. I don’t care. But never, ever put us at odds with General Lebedev or Czar Mikhail. Because I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that we’ve already lost the war because Lebedev changed the game. And I’ll probably be the one who has to shoot you in the back of the head when Czar Mikhail lays down the law.”
Colonel Ivan Denisov looked over at his friend and nodded. Simeon was smarter than he was, but didn’t have the makings of a commander. They’d both known that since they were kids. But Simeon was a Cossack for all of that. He’d blow Ivan’s brains out if that was what it took to save the clan. Crying while he did it, but he’d do it. Better to make sure he didn’t think it was necessary.