Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 14

River Fight


Ilya Muromets, Volga River

October 27, 1637

Captain Leonid Belyaed still liked his job. Not quite as much as when he was ferrying troops to Base One, but he still liked it. He still had hot, sweet black tea from China to sip as the Ilya Muromets steamed up the Volga.

They rounded the bend in the river and saw the “customs boat” right where the reports said it would be. It was a riverboat, converted from sail and human power to steam, and now with two brass cannons on platforms on the deck. Leonid looked through his binoculars and wanted to laugh. They were muzzleloaders. They had to have been made before Bernie Zeppi got to Russia in 1632.

Actually, looking at the things, he thought they’d probably been made at least ten years before Bernie got to Russia. On the other hand, the Ilya Muromets had four breech-loading four-pound guns with powder in bags and fired using percussion caps.

The Ilya Muromets also had a bull horn, and this was an excellent time to use it. He flipped a switch and spoke into the headset. “In the name of the United Sovereign States of Russia, I call on you to surrender your vessel.” Using the same amplifier that the ship’s radio used, his voice boomed out of the bull horn located on the prow and there was only a little feedback squeal.

The response was a blast of grape. Since the men were under cover, little actual damage was done, but some of the expensive glass was broken.

Leonid looked over at Bernie and Natasha, who’d joined him on the bridge for this, and said, “Permission to engage?” He didn’t really need it. He was in command, but he was very much aware that what he was about to do was technically an act of war, since Tsaritsyn wasn’t legally a state yet.

“In the name of the Czar, permission granted,” Natasha said.

“Take them out,” Bernie said.

“Right full rudder,” Leonid told the pilot. He flipped the switch that would send his orders to the port gun deck. “Fire as you bear.”

✧ ✧ ✧

The gunner watched through the periscope, less for safety than for accuracy. The periscope was designed to let him see just where the shot would go. It wasn’t perfect, but it was way better than looking at the cannon, then looking at the target, then holding your head next to the barrel, then standing back up and guessing.

He watched as the bow of the customs boat came into view, then as it moved out of sight until the cannon was pointing amidships at the customs boat. Then he pulled the lanyard and the hammer fell on the cap and the cannon went off. The customs boat wasn’t armored. The hull was moderately thick, but the cannonball didn’t even slow much. Not until it hit the support for the mast that still stood. It shattered the mast, but was deflected forward and down, so that it went through the hull well below the waterline and about five feet forward of the mast.

Not that that mattered. The second cannon’s shot hit the custom boat’s powder magazine.

✧ ✧ ✧

Back on the bridge, the whump and the geyser were quite impressive. At Bernie’s insistence, they stopped to pick up survivors. There weren’t that many. No one from the black gang had survived.

Then they went on. The next stop was the radio station closest to Astrakhan. The entire radio chain from Kazan to Astrakhan was placed along the river to make resupply easy.

It also meant they were easy to take. They were small settlements, a radio tower—which looked to Bernie like an up-time wooden oil rig tower with a long pole sticking out its top—a building to house the radio, the aqualator, the generator, and the batteries and usually a few other houses to house farmers or, in this case, fishermen.

The fishermen were staying out of it. There wasn’t a person on the street. Heck, there wasn’t so much as a cat on the street. The fishing boats were pulled up on shore, not tied up to the dock, leaving it clear for the Ilya Muromets. The radio tower was located about the length of a football field from shore, and it was pretty clear it was only that far back to avoid the spring floods. It did have a stockade around it, perhaps ten feet tall. It wasn’t on a hill for the simple reason that there weren’t any hills. The ground here wasn’t as flat as a tabletop, but flat as a pancake might well fit.

They pulled into dock and the crew put out the gangplank and then Royal Russian Marines went down the gangplank and formed up on the dock. They weren’t all that good at it. At least not to Bernie’s up-time movie-based notions of forming ranks. They milled about, found their place in formation, and when they started marching up the dock at least one in three was out of step.

Natasha squeezed Bernie’s arm and said, “Don’t they look professional.”

Bernie just nodded. Partly that was politeness, but he could see what she was talking about. They were in uniform. And that was new. They had red coats, black pants, and white shirts. They each had a bandolier for AK4.7 chambers and most of them had chambers filling their bandoliers. They were all wearing the fur-lined brimmed hats that Bernie thought of as baseball caps. After General Tim adopted that sort of cap, it had become the standard for the whole army. And they were all wearing leather boots. Their AK4.7 carbines were at shoulder arms as they walked up the dock to the main road of the village.

Bernie and Natasha walked down the ramp and followed them up the dirt track that was the main and only road of the fishing village. It went from dock to stockade, and that was it.

The stockade gate was closed and barred. Major Ivan Kalashnikov got the men in formation, then looked to Natasha.

Natasha stepped forward and shouted, “In the name of Czar Mikhail of the United Sovereign States of Russia, I order you to open the gates.”

“You aren’t in the Sovereign States,” a shouted voice came back. “You’re in the free state of Tsaritsyn. You have no authority here.”

“That radio belongs to the United Sovereign States of Russia, and the people manning it are her citizens,” Natasha said. “As to the ‘free state’ of Tsaritsyn, I doubt it’s going to exist much longer. But even if Czar Mikhail decides to let Tsaritsyn remain independent, I guarantee he’s not going to let you cut off trade and communications down the Volga. And the radios are trade and communications. So open the gates, and let us talk to our people before things get ugly.”

“Or I could just shoot you!” the man shouted back, and someone stuck a rifle barrel up over the stockade and marine carbines started to shift.

Bernie shouted, “Attention!” and a heartbeat later he was echoed by Major Ivan Kalashnikov, who echoed the order, then gave Bernie a dirty look for ignoring the chain of command. The Marines came to attention.

After being told about the up-time confusion of ranks when a marine captain was onboard a ship with a navy captain, Czar Mikhail had solved the problem for the Russian Marine Corps by the simple expedient of eliminating the rank of captain from the RRMC, Royal Russian Marine Corps. Russian Marines had junior lieutenants, senior lieutenants, majors, junior colonels, and senior colonels, but no captains.

“Then I would die, and shortly after that you would die, and everyone with you would die as well,” Natasha said calmly, as calmly as you can shout something. “If you were to try it, the smartest thing your fellows could do is shoot you first. Because at that point, it wouldn’t matter at all who won in the end. None of your people would live out today. So, don’t be stupid if you want to live to see another sunrise.

“Now, I’m getting tired of standing out here, so open the damn gate!”

There was a silence, then the noise of a bar being removed, and the palisade gate opened. The radio team, at least this radio team, was bruised, but not seriously injured, so the garrison that Colonel Greshnev commanded were simply disarmed and sent on their merry way, after being questioned about what was going on in Tsaritsyn.

A platoon of Marines was detached as guards for the radio station under the command of Lieutenant Eduard Vetrov.

Lieutenant Eduard Vetrov was a junior lieutenant, one silver bar on his baseball cap. A senior lieutenant had railroad tracks, and a major an oak leaf. He also, to Bernie, looked like a kid in his shiny new uniform, with his shiny new brass zippers. Fortunately, there was a forty-year-old streltzi sergeant as his platoon sergeant. An old bruiser with a busted nose and several missing teeth, who was actually running the platoon while he taught his young gentleman how to be an officer.

Russia was modernizing just as fast as it could. Both Russias were. There wasn’t any choice. But it had only been six years since the Ring of Fire.

✧ ✧ ✧

The same thing happened at the next station and the one after that. Then they came to the city of Tsaritsyn. In that other timeline it would be renamed Stalingrad, then after the fall of the Communist party, Volgograd. This, to a great extent, was the bite that broke the Nazis’ teeth in World War II, or it would have become that anyway. Two and more centuries earlier, it made Grantville before the Ring of Fire look prosperous. There were six hundred soldiers in the garrison and perhaps two thousand citizens, most of whom worked as porters in normal times.

These weren’t normal times. The city was locked up tight. The houses beyond the walls were abandoned.

But it wasn’t because they were afraid of Natasha and the riverboat. No, it was the Cossack army on the landward side of the town that had them locked behind their walls.


Tsaritsyn docks

October 29, 1637

Bernie stood on the roof of the second floor of the riverboat and used his Russian-made binoculars to look at the city of Tsaritsyn and the Cossack camp on the far side of it. There were actual hills of a sort at this bend of the Volga. Not big hills, but big enough to make it an uphill slog through enemy fire to take the Tsaritsyn Kremlin. And Bernie knew that the garrison at Tsaritsyn was equipped with at least AK3s and probably at least half of them would have AK4s.

The guns on the Ilya Muromets were rifled breechloaders and the Kremlin walls were still mostly wood, but they were light guns and it would take them a while to punch breaches in the walls. And Tim’s insistence that the defense had gotten a lot stronger with the introduction of new weapons systems had just bitten the Sovereign States on the butt.

That was something that the Don Cossacks had found out the hard way, apparently in the last couple of days. There were still bodies outside the Kremlin walls. Meanwhile, though they hadn’t fired yet, the Ilya Muromets was within range of the muzzle-loading twelve-pounders located in the Tsaritsyn Kremlin.

“Gunboat diplomacy, you told Mikhail,” Bernie muttered to himself. “When are you going to learn to keep your big fat mouth shut?”

The Volga, this far downriver, was huge. Not quite Mississippi huge, but bigger than anything in West Virginia, that was for sure. It was perfectly possible to sail right by this bend in the river in relative safety. The smooth bore brass cannon in the Tsaritsyn Kremlin could reach the far side of the river, but if they hit anything at that range, it would be the next best thing to a miracle. And they only had four of the things with a rate of fire that meant they would still be reloading from the first salvo when the boat they were targeting steamed around the bend and was lost to sight.

On the other hand, Tsaritsyn could put boats on the river and interdict traffic that way. So they couldn’t take the Ilya Muromets home and just ignore Tsaritsyn. As long as Tsaritsyn was hostile, they were a threat.

Bernie was still examining the tactical situation when Natasha’s voice came over the bullhorn. “To the commander of the Cossacks, we’d like to talk.”

Bernie stood up and went down the ladder to join Natasha and see how things developed.

A few minutes later, what looked like a Polish hussar, complete to the wings on his horse, came riding out of the Cossack camp, rode around the outskirts of Tsaritsyn, keeping at least a hundred yards from the Kremlin walls, rode up to the dock, rode out on the dock, and up the gangplank.

He almost got shot for his trouble by the Marines on duty, but he was grinning through a graying blond beard when he dismounted. “I’m Gregori Denisov, registered Cossack and leader of that group of hearty fellows over on the other side of Tsaritsyn. Now, where is the beautiful woman who wants to talk to me?”

Natasha grinned. “Welcome, Gregori Denisov. I am Princess Natalia Petrovna Gorchakov. My friends call me Natasha.”

“Ah, Natasha. The famous princess who married an up-timer and can enchant any man with a glance. The woman who turned a mouse into an emperor, and pulls steam engines out of her sleeves.”

“It’s getting deep in here,” Bernie muttered, and Natasha elbowed him in the ribs.

“I said it in English,” he complained, still in that language.

“Then this must be the famous up-timer wizard who conquered the slow plague in Moscow and taught the Russians to fly. I saw the Czar Alexis before it had its unfortunate encounter with the rockets from Ufa.

“So, tell me, great wizards, what is your plan to school this traitorous officer?”

“Good question,” Bernie muttered. “Tim says that the defense, especially a well-fortified defense, has a ten-to-one advantage over offense.”

“Tim?” Gregori Denisov’s smile was gone. “Oh, your famous boy general. I wish he’d been here yesterday.” He shook his head. “I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. Five hundred dead, and we never even reached the Kremlin walls. How can an army of brave men be stopped by a bunch of garrison troops?”

It was a serious question, with a lot of anger behind it. Gregori Denisov’s bluff good humor was an act that he was maintaining with difficulty after the drubbing his army had taken. Behind that mask was a man who’d lost friends and allies and whose anger was just barely held in check. Bernie could see a carbine, a flintlock carbine, on the saddle of Gregori Denisov’s horse. It was an AK3 . . . no, it was an AK2.

The AK rifles, like buggy software up-time, had gone through generations. The AK1 through AK1.9 were basically experimental guns. The AK2s were the first to go into production but they hadn’t been in production long. By 1634, no one was making them anymore. They’d been replaced by the AK3s, which had lighter chambers, a lever action to pop a used chamber from the gun and make it ready to take a new chamber. The AK4s made the change from flintlock to caplock and a sealed system that could be fired in the rain.

This was a registered Cossack, which meant he was a leader. What the hell was he doing with an AK2?

Bernie looked over at Major Kalashnikov, who’d joined them. “Major, please let Colonel Denisov examine one of your men’s AK4.7s.”

“Vetrov, front and center,” Major Kalashnikov ordered.

Vetrov, a short, broad man with a thick black beard starting to go gray and two rockers under the three chevrons on his hat and sleeves, stepped forward smartly and brought his AK4.7C to present arms. It had a walnut stock polished to a high sheen with a thick leather butt, and you could see the chamber clip sticking out the side. The pump was also walnut and highly polished.

Major Kalashnikov took the presented carbine and showed it to Colonel Denisov, pointing out the salient points. “The AK4.7C—the C is for carbine—is the Marine’s issue weapon.”

Bernie knew that the major was bragging. Even with the factories running full tilt, which they were, less than half the Royal Russian Marines had actually been issued AK4.7Cs, but this was a diplomatic mission, so all their Marines had them.

“It is a light weapon, easily maneuverable on shipboard. And the tight rifling and high spin give its rounds an accuracy greater than longer guns with looser rifling.”

That part was true, and Sergeant Vetrov was the best shot in the company.

Holding the carbine up, he pulled the pump and the first chamber was pulled back and to the left. Then he pushed it forward and the second chamber was slotted into place, while the first stuck out to the left of the carbine, still unfired. He repeated the action six more times, catching the clip of chambers as it fell out the right side of the carbine at the end. Then, pulling the pump, he slotted the clip back in the left side.

“These are still black-powder weapons though the eggheads at the Dacha keep insisting that they are only a few months away from large-scale smokeless powder production,” Major Kalashnikov said. “Fortunately, the chambers are enough heavier to absorb the added force, so we will probably continue to use the same design when we get smokeless powder. Perhaps with a longer, heavier bullet.”

Bernie snorted at that. The bullets they were using now weren’t light. The AK4.7, carbine or not, had a .45 caliber bullet and the present black-powder charge would punch that bullet right through a steel breastplate at a hundred yards.

“If you would care to pick a target,” Major Kalashnikov finished, “we can have Sergeant Vetrov demonstrate rapid aimed fire for you.”

Colonel Denisov looked at the carbine, then he looked at the AK2 still riding in the holster on his horse’s flank. His eyes had gotten big as he saw the chambers automatically moving from the right side of the carbine to the left as Sergeant Vetrov pumped the carbine. After a moment he nodded and looked around for a target. There were some trees about sixty yards away, just the far side of one of the fishermen’s cottages that lined the river bank.

“One of those trees?” Colonel Denisov pointed. “Or you could just shoot up the fisherman’s shack. This side of them.”

“Let’s not damage anyone’s property unnecessarily,” Bernie said.

“Not much of a challenge,” muttered Sergeant Vetrov in a voice that Bernie knew was meant to be heard. Pavel Vetrov was an excellent shot, a good sergeant, and about as arrogant a man as Bernie had ever met. He was also right. Bernie knew the man could put a seven-round clip into a five-inch circle at one hundred fifty yards.

Colonel Denisov looked at the sergeant, then at the grove of trees. “See that pine there on the side? The one with the single limb lower than the others. Think you can put one of your bullets into that particular tree trunk?”

The trunk was about a foot wide, maybe a bit less.

“Kneeling, aimed rapid fire, Sergeant,” Major Kalashnikov said. “Whenever you’re ready, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Vetrov took two quick steps to the railing, knelt, put the carbine against his shoulder, and proceeded to put all seven rounds into the trunk, right next to the low-hanging limb.

Colonel Denisov sighed.

“The men behind Tsaritsyn’s wall mostly have AK3s, but some of them have AK4s,” Bernie said. “I don’t actually know how many of them have AK4s. The gun shops in Ufa, Kazan, and in Muscovy-controlled Russia are, for the most part, privately owned, and Tsaritsyn’s right on the Volga. Buying an AK4 there is simply a matter of having enough money.”

“And if we’d had those AK4.7C like that?”

“It would have made very little difference,” Major Kalashnikov said grimly. “They were behind walls. Not great walls, but walls, with ninety percent of their bodies hidden from view and protected from shot. While your men were charging forward en masse in the open, where someone with much less skill than the sergeant there would have hit the man next to his target or the man behind his target, even if he missed the man he was aiming at.”

“Then what are we going to do?” Colonel Denisov demanded. “My men are Cossacks, not siege engineers.”

“For right now, I think a siege is what we should be doing. At least until I can get back in radio communication with Ufa and Tim in Kazakh. He may have some idea what to do about this thorn in both our sides.”

It took a bit more negotiation, but he got Colonel Denisov to agree to keep his men camped just out of rifle range of Tsaritsyn, while the Ilya Muromets retook the radio stations upriver.


Dubovka radio station

October 30, 1637

The radio station was trashed. The oil-rig-style tower was burned. So was the radio building. The radio itself, along with the aqualator, the teletype machine, and the batteries, as well as the generator were all gone.

The radio team was still there, as were the four fishing families that had set up around the radio station.

“At least they didn’t kill you guys,” Bernie said.

“They were going to, at least the radio operators. Those were the orders they got from Tsaritsyn,” the head radio guy said. “But I pointed out that the villagers were witnesses, and even if they killed them, who was assigned here was a matter of record and they knew it in Ufa.” He grinned. “I told him I’d radioed the whole unit roster to Ufa the day we set up.”

“Had you?”

“Nope, but I figured ‘what do I have to lose?’”

“Well, in the future, that’s going to be standard policy,” Bernie said. “And we’ll get you a new radio out here within a couple of days.”

The next station upriver was close to the border between Tsaritsyn and Saratov, and the troops there decided that they were going to switch to the Saratov militia. The radio stations down the Volga from Kazan were joint endeavors between Czar Mikhail and the locals. The czar provided the radios and the radio operators, while the locals provided the guard force and the farmers and fisherfolk who set up villages around the radio stations to supply them. It worked other ways in other places, but that was how it worked here.

The Tsaritsyn garrison here had obeyed the orders of Colonel Greshnev. But the Tsaritsyn garrison farther upriver had gone the other way. They’d figured that Colonel Greshnev was going to lose, so when they got the orders to kill the crew and steal the radio, they decided to turn their coats. The decision might have been influenced by the fact that the sergeant of that group was walking out with one of the radio techs, a woman of thirty-five who had a nice smile and liked bawdy jokes.

So the radio station at Kamyshin was now in the state of Samara, which was about fifty square miles bigger, while the state of Tsaritsyn was smaller by an equal amount. Actually, when this all played out, the state of Tsaritsyn was probably going to end up two thirds to half the size it had been at the beginning of the process.

“Czar Mikhail has been informed of what’s been happening out here, and another Scout plane is being sent out,” Bernie continued. “Also, we’ve called in the big guns. General Tim is on his way.”

The radio tech looked more relieved after hearing that than he had all morning.


Back | Next
Framed