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CHAPTER 10

Guns for Almaty


In the air, over Almaty

October 23, 1637

Almaty had a mountain range to its south, and not very far to its south, but the land right around the city was flat. The city was walled, and a hundred years before had been a large and prosperous place, a major stop on the Silk Road. The Esentai River, a bit more than a creek, but not much more, ran through Almaty, and on both sides of the city, parts of it were diverted for irrigation purposes. As Brandy and Salqam-Jangir Khan flew over the city, they could see a place on the river that was actually within the walls. It wasn’t large enough to let the Nicky land, but the Scout could fit. At least, Brandy was pretty sure that the Scout could fit.

On the other hand, the sun was getting low in the west. And it was clear that Almaty was under loose siege. There were camps of Zunghar just out of musket shot of the city. And it was rifled musket shot, not bow shot. Apparently there were snipers in Almaty.

“It’s a shame we don’t have a bomb,” Salqam-Jangir Khan said.

“Yes, it is,” Brandy said. Both of them were wearing headphones because the engine noise from the Scout would make conversation impossible without it. “How would you feel about doing something stupid?”

“What?”

“It’s just that I’m wondering how the Zunghar horses would respond to being buzzed.”

“Buzzed?” Salqam-Jangir Khan asked. “What does buzzed mean?”

Brandy grinned. “You want me to show you?”

There was silence for a moment, then Salqam-Jangir Khan said, “Yes, I do believe I do. Show me!”

The Scout was a light, low-speed aircraft. Its cruising speed was just seventy miles an hour, but that was cruising speed, not even the top speed in level flight. An airplane in a dive goes much faster. Suddenly, Salqam-Jangir Khan’s hands were locked onto the armrests of his seat.

The arrangement of the Scout was the navigator in front and below the pilot. So Salqam-Jangir Khan had an excellent view as the Scout heeled over and dropped into a dive. With the engine and gravity in accord, the aircraft accelerated to just under two hundred miles an hour before Brandy started a slow pull out at six hundred feet.

By the time they were in level flight again, they were barely twenty feet above the ground and traveling at just over one hundred twenty miles an hour. And the unmuffled radial engine was loud. It wasn’t as loud as a gunshot, but it was continuous, and it looked to the horses like the biggest eagle in the world was looking for a snack.

A big, angry, noisy eagle.

The horses, with no consideration of bridles, riders, or anything else decided to be elsewhere, just as fast as they could gallop.

Surprisingly, a number of the Zunghar warriors were cool-headed, and quick-witted enough to actually use their bows. Or, in one case, his prized rifled hunting musket. But they had never shot at something as fast as the Scout. Every shot missed.

After they’d passed over the camp Brandy pulled up and in seconds they were at five hundred feet and back down to sixty mph in a climb. At eight hundred feet, they leveled out, flew over Almaty and wiggled their wings at the town.

Then they headed back for Brandy’s Cove.


Almaty

October 23, 1637

Sultan Aidan Karimov, the mayor of Almaty, watched the thing fly over the town and reconsidered. At least some of the stories were true, after all. But what did that mean for Almaty and for his clan?

A hundred years ago, Almaty had been a thriving city and center of trade. Even fifty years ago it had been a good-sized town. Now, with so much of the trade from China going around the Cape of Good Hope, it was a sleepy little backwater surrounded by relatively rich farm and pasture lands, but no trade worth mentioning. His clan owned a lot of land around here, farms and ranches, mostly worked by tenants and slaves.

Normally worked by tenants and slaves. Now those tenants and slaves were crowded into town eating the city’s victuals while the ranches were emptied of stock and the farms burned.

The mechanical eagle was out of sight . . . no . . . heading south toward the mountains. Yesterday he’d been wondering if . . . 

“We should sortie.” His grandson Baurzhan interrupted his thoughts. “While Salqam-Jangir Khan’s jinn distracts the Zunghar.”

“No!” Sultan Karimov’s response was instant and certain. And he was tempted to leave it at that, but the young men of the village were getting restive. As young men often do when they didn’t know what to do, they wanted to fight someone. He looked at his grandson. The seventeen-year-old was looking back at him belligerently, and Aidan decided that he had to explain. Which meant that he had to figure out why he was opposed to a sortie.

“That”—he pointed in the direction that the mechanical eagle had gone—“was Salqam-Jangir Khan telling us he’s coming. Telling us not to lose hope. Not telling us to be idiots. Yes, he scattered one of the Zunghar camps, but there are two more. If we sortie against the one disrupted camp, we expose ourselves to the other two. Besides, that”—he pointed again—“will be coming back . . .  Soon. Perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps in a few days. And when they come back, what else are they going to bring?”

Baurzhan had to be content with that answer. For the time being.


Brandy’s Cove

October 23, 1637

They left it a little too late, failing to give proper consideration to the fact that there were mountains to the west of Brandy’s Cove. It was still dusk at a thousand feet, but at lake level it was full night. Brandy got on the radio. “Scout to Nicky. Over.”

Nicky to Scout. You’re late!” Vladimir didn’t sound particularly happy.

“It’s earlier on the other side of the mountain,” Brandy sent. “You want to put out a light?”

“I’ll start the torches.” The torches were placed in a line a specific distance apart, so that the plane could tell their angle by how far apart they were. If you came at them straight on, the closer to the ground you got, the closer together they were. The problem was that though both Brandy and Vladimir had completed ground school and knew the theory, neither one of them had ever actually made a night landing.

The good news, such as it was, was that the Scout would be landing on the lake. There was no way they were going to miss the runway. The bad news was the lights weren’t going to be on the lake, but on the shore.

Vladimir called out of the side of the plane, and Vasilii, Miroslava, and the two guards who accompanied Salqam-Jangir Khan, lit the torches soaked with fuel oil and wrapped with cloth, to create a row of fires thirty feet apart.

Then he got back on the radio. “Turn on your lights, Brandy.” Both the Scout and the Nicky had electrical systems. They needed them for the radios, and since they had the electrical systems anyway, they made wingtip lights. Those lights weren’t bright enough to light the Scout’s way, but they made it visible to Vladimir in the Nicky .

Brandy flipped a switch and a red light came on on the left wing, and a green light on the right wing. That was a standard from up-time and it was so that an observer could tell which wing was which, so which direction the airplane was moving in.

Once the lights were on, Vladimir could see them and direct them onto the glide path and tell them if they were high or low. It took about ten minutes and one aborted landing that ended in Brandy overflying the beach and circling around again. But they finally landed on the water about fifty yards from shore and taxied in.


Brandy’s Cove

October 24, 1637

The next morning at breakfast in the large yurt-style tent, Salqam-Jangir Khan broached the question. “Not today, but soon, I must learn to fly. I will need to be trained to fly both the scout and the larger Hero aircraft, the Nicky. Further, I will want an aircraft factory in Shavgar. Again, this is not urgent, but is necessary.” He looked from Vladimir to Vasilii and back.

“Certainly as a state in the Sovereign States, Kazakh can build airplane factories if it chooses to,” Vladimir said. “You can build them, your merchants can build them. It’s up to you. However, the design of the Hero-style aircraft was developed by the Ufa Dacha in large part from plans I either sent to the Moscow Dacha or bought in the Netherlands and brought with me. Those designs are the property of my family.”

Salqam-Jangir Khan smiled and nodded. “I would like to acquire a license to construct Hero-style aircraft and the technical expertise to put those plans into practice.” While not a wealthy nation by up-time or even down-time standards, the Kazakh Khanate had been a nation before it joined the Sovereign States, and the khan was, by any reasonable standard, quite rich. There was, at this point, no real difference between the national, now state, treasury of Kazakh and the private treasury of Salqam-Jangir Khan. “We can talk about it later, but not much later. In the meantime, we need to take the pistols to Almaty, and having done that, you will leave me and my guards there, and start shipping more supplies and fuel to Brandy’s Cove.”

Then he grinned. “Consider making Brandy’s Cove Brandy’s cove in fact, rather than in name. Part of the property of the Gorchakov House.”

✧ ✧ ✧

After breakfast, they loaded the Nicky with the crates of pistols and caps and with Salqam-Jangir Khan and his armsmen. Both planes set off over the mountain to Almaty.


In the air, over Almaty

October 24, 1637

Vladimir cruised over Almaty and realized that he wasn’t going to be able to land in the city. There were two problems. One was the Nicky’s wingspan. It was a hundred feet across, and would need triple that to land safely. In other words, its landing field needed to be as wide as a football field was long. With the Nicky’s props being able to be reversed, it could land in a short distance, but it still needed a fair distance to take off. So even if he’d been able to land inside the walls of Almaty, he couldn’t take off from the city. Vladimir got on the radio. “You were right, Brandy. I won’t be able to land in the city, but after a bit of work, you ought to be able to land and take off from inside Almaty.”

He looked over at the khan, who was standing in the cockpit, looking over Vasilii’s shoulder. “I wish you would reconsider. We can wait until we’ve established contact and gotten a field established in the city, then you can fly in, in relative safety. There is room for a small landing strip.”

The Scout wasn’t an ultralight, but neither was it a Cessna. It was a small, relatively short-ranged, and very light plane that required three hundred feet to land and half that to take off. Part of the short landing requirement was accomplished by feeding less air to the air cushion. Less air meant more drag.

For its size and weight, the Nicky had the same advantages, but it weighed a lot more. In fact, it weighed almost a thousand pounds more than the Jupiter Five. It needed eight hundred feet to take off, and its lack of power meant that it didn’t have a lot of lift after takeoff, so if there was a wall in the way, it needed even more takeoff space.

They’d talked about all that before they took off this morning, and Salqam-Jangir Khan had known it all before that. But Vladimir still tried one last time to get his royal stubbornness to reconsider.

Salqam-Jangir Khan smiled and reached for the radio’s mike. “We’re about to land at the north gate, Brandy. Be ready to cover our dash.”

It was, Vladimir thought, a stupid plan. But as the khan went back to his seat in the passenger compartment, he brought the plane around to the desired heading, west to east, just north of the city. Then, starting at two thousand feet, he put the Nicky into a shallow dive that brought their airspeed up to one hundred forty mph, and much more gradually than Brandy had the day before. He flattened out to fly east at a height of less than thirty feet for the better part of half a mile. By the time they were getting close to the north gate, they were down to sixty-three mph. That was when Vlad reversed the thrust on the engines and the speed dropped to thirty-four as the plane dropped onto the air cushion, which was running flat out. The Nicky bounced on a cushion of air and Vlad let it skim until they were just in front of the north gate. He reversed the fans to the air cushion landing gear.

Then he grunted as the Nicky went from twenty mph to zero in less than a second. He wasn’t the only one. He could hear grunts from all over the plane as the seatbelts kept people from flying out of their chairs at the cost of bruised bellies.

It was only a couple of seconds later that Salqam-Jangir Khan was up and at the door, followed swiftly by his guards and Sultan Togym.

Each of them grabbed a backpack full of pistols, shot molds, and caps, shrugged them on, and headed for the door. They flung open the door, ran out onto the lower wing and jumped down onto the field about eighty feet from the north gate of Almaty.

Vasilii had gotten up as they were running out and closed the door as the last of them exited. “They’re out,” he shouted. “Hit it!”

Vladimir hit it. He slammed the lever over to feed full power to the fans that inflated the ACLG, and then put the engine back to full. It took about fifteen seconds for the ACLG to inflate enough for them to start losing traction and begin to move. Then he reversed the left-side engines to spin the Nicky to the left, set them back forward, and started the Nicky straight toward a hastily assembled troop of Zunghar horsemen. The upper wing of the Nicky when at full stop was fourteen feet above the ground. With the ACLG inflated, it was fifteen feet above the ground. Even on horseback, the Zunghars would have to reach up to hit the wing, and might not make it.

The forty-foot lower wing was another matter. While on ACLG, it was a foot and a half above the ground, but it was also pretty solid. What really concerned Vladimir were the struts from the outer edges of the lower wing. Two struts extended outward to two points about thirty-five feet out from the centerline of the plane. If a horse or rider hit that hard enough, he might well break one of those struts. And without those struts, there was a very good chance that the Nicky’s upper wing would come loose.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t do the horse and rider a lot of good either.

In any case, the horses more than the riders saw the Nicky coming at them and decided that anywhere other than in front of it was where they wanted to be. They scattered. Except for three unfortunates whose horses had decided to run directly away from the Nicky, convinced that they could outrun it. Which they could at first. In the first few seconds, they were galloping at thirty to thirty-five miles per hour, and the Nicky was accelerating from a dead stop. But within seconds the Nicky had sped up to forty-five miles per hour and Vlad pulled up the nose, the lower wing changed angle and went from air cushion to ground effect, and they were flying. Not very high, but by the time they clipped a horseman, the lower wing was six feet off the ground and traveling at sixty miles an hour.

The bag of the ACLG cushioned him a little, but that didn’t matter, because the impact caused his horse to fall and roll over him.

Then they were up and away. Vlad turned the Nicky to try and see what was going on with Salqam-Jangir Khan.

✧ ✧ ✧

“Open the gate for Salqam-Jangir Khan!” shouted one of his guards.

“Shout a little louder, Dilnur!” Togym shouted. “I don’t think all the Zunghars heard you the first time.”

Salqam-Jangir Khan laughed out loud. “You really think they’ll leave us alone if they don’t know who I am?” He watched the Nicky hit the galloping Zunghar and fly away, then he looked around.

The Zunghar were nicely disrupted, and even as he watched, Brandy flew the Scout down to buzz a group of horsemen who were trying to get organized, but there were a lot of groups of horsemen. And one of them was heading right for them, eight men with sabers out riding-hell-for leather.

“Idiots!” Dilnur complained. “They should be standing off and peppering us with arrows.”

“Dilnur!” Togym almost whined in frustration. “Do you have to tell the enemy how to fight better?”

“He can’t help himself?” Miras said. “Man told his momma she was doing it wrong when she birthed him.”

“Well!” Dilnur said. “She was.”

Salqam-Jangir Khan laughed at the oft repeated joke, then took aim at the approaching cavalry. They were about sixty feet away now, not really within range for someone with Salqam-Jangir Khan’s limited experience, but he had nine shots before he had to change the clip and two spare clips. He started shooting and beside him the two guards opened up with their black-powder revolvers. They fired bullets down a rifled barrel, so the limitation on accuracy was primarily the accuracy of the shooter, not the gun.

And they were experienced men, so like Salqam-Jangir Khan and Sultan Togym, they shot at the horses, not the men.

One horse went down, then another, a third, then a fourth, all while the Zunghars were getting closer. But getting closer to men carrying accurate pistols is not a good thing. Two more horses went down, and one peeled off, leaving the last of them leaning over his pommel and lifting his sword. Four bullets ripped into him and he went off the back of the horse, which ran by them riderless.

Salqam-Jangir Khan turned back to the gate. “Would you get a move on in there?” he shouted. “It’s getting hot out here.”

And it was too. Someone was following Dilnur’s excellent advice about how to kill pistol-armed men caught in the open.

Arrows were starting to come in from long range. The thing about arrows at long range is they are an area-effect weapon. Each individual arrow has a poor chance of hitting, at least in combat. Hunting was another matter.

However, there were only four of them standing out here in the open. And there was some distance between them. Also, there were only a few archers firing at them so far.

The north gate started to open and the four men ran inside.

✧ ✧ ✧

Sultan Aidan Karimov had been called as soon as the guards on the walls saw the airplanes, and after yesterday the guards had been looking for airplanes. But the north gate lacked a sally port, and was heavily barred. It took them no more than a minute to get it opened, but Sultan Karimov knew from experience just how long a minute was in the middle of a battle. Besides, the main gates were the east and west gates, not the north gate. And that was where most of Almaty’s remaining cavalry was located, waiting for the opportunity to sally after the mechanical eagle disrupted the troops and Sultan Karimov had been with them. So he was just getting to the north gate as it opened and four men came in.

He didn’t recognize them. He’d never been to court and was a sultan mostly by courtesy, since he was the mayor of Almaty. He was a Kazakh, but his family had been townspeople for the last three generations.

The youngest of the four men looked around, saw him, and walked over. “I am Salqam-Jangir Khan and I’m here to help.”

Sultan Karimov noted that there were just the four of them, then he remembered the mechanical eagles, and bowed as a sultan should bow to a khan. “We are ready to sally,” he said, standing back up.

“Don’t. At least not yet. We need to get your men armed first. Do you have black powder? Do you have lead?”

“A little. There is excellent hunting in the mountains and many of our young men use rifled muskets to hunt. They have been hunting other game from the walls since the siege started.”

“We’re going to need more than a little.” Salqam-Jangir Khan pulled his backpack off and opened it. He pulled out a thing from the pack and handed it to the sultan. “This is a pistol.”

“What’s that?” Sultan Karimov had been riding from the east gate to the north gate while Salqam-Jangir Khan and his companions had fought outside the gate. Chinese muskets were as tall as a man. This wasn’t a musket.

His grandson, Baurzhan, Karimov had put on the north gate to keep him out of trouble, had seen the skirmish. He’d been in the gate house. “How do they shoot without reloading?”

“Baurzhan! Wait until the khan asks you a question. Don’t interrupt.”

The khan handed Baurzhan a pistol. “See the rotating cylinder? Now, you have to half cock the hammer to rotate it. I’ll show you.” He took the “pistol” back, moved a lever and spun an iron container that had several holes. Suddenly Karimov looked down at the thing in his hand, not at all sure if it were a pound of gold or a spitting viper. He realized what those holes were for. You loaded them like you loaded a musket by pouring the powder in the hole, then putting the bullet in on top of it. He counted the holes in the cylinder. Six times. You could load it six times, then fire it six times.

It was almost more than the mechanical eagles had been.

“No. We use percussion caps to ignite the powder. Loading a pan for a slow match would defeat the purpose of the revolver,” Salqam-Jangir Khan was saying.

“Will you let me shoot it?” Baurzhan asked.

“Baurzhan!” Karimov almost shouted at his grandson and Salqam-Jangir Khan laughed.

“Dilnur, take Baurzhan up on the wall and show him how to load and shoot the revolvers while Sultan Karimov, Sultan Togym, and I have a talk.”

✧ ✧ ✧

The talk took place in Sultan Aidan Karimov’s home, and took the better part of an hour. It was only the first talk, but Salqam-Jangir Khan needed to get started as quickly as possible to clear the ground to let the Scout land in and take off from Almaty.

Almaty in 1637 was a walled city with a small river running through the center of town. The walls were mud brick, about twenty feet high, and had been built when the city was more prosperous. Since the siege had started, they had been working frantically to strengthen the somewhat decayed walls.

They were quite effective against the siege. There were three camps of Zunghars in armor, equipped with bows and swords, who patrolled around outside the city. And with the Kazakhs all the way over to the Aral Sea, that was all they figured they needed, since the main goal was to draw the Kazakhs out into the open so that they could be met in the field and crushed.

Almaty was the better part of a mile long, but less than half that wide, and the creek was shallow and about thirty feet wide. It had also been straightened by human labor at some point in the past. The walls were banked so that the creek narrowed as the water level lowered. Just at the moment, the creek was fairly close to full from the fall rains. There were streets on either side of it, and shops on the streets. Some of those shops would have to come down to provide room for the Scout to land, but other than that it was an excellent place to land. And once it landed, people, at least a few people, would be able to move in and out of Almaty at will.

Sultan Aidan Karimov, after looking at the map, said he would have it done in a couple of days. “What about the big one?” he asked. “We can take down more buildings here and here.” He pointed.

Salqam-Jangir Khan shook his head. “The Nicky has less power for its weight than the Scout. That means it can’t climb as fast. Yes, if you removed those buildings, it could get off the ground, but it couldn’t get above the walls in the range you have available.”

✧ ✧ ✧

On the wall, standing behind the outer curtain, Dilnur opened his pack and pulled out several pistols. Then he pulled out a mold. It had two sides and when you put those two sides together, it had six bullet-shaped holes and channels for the lead to get to them. He showed the kid, Baurzhan, the mold and a pouch full of lead bullets. He also showed the kid the powder horn and the caps. Then he handed the kid an empty pistol.

Baurzhan took the pistol and lifted it.

“Stop!”

“What?” Baurzhan looked at him and without thinking, pointed the pistol in the direction he was looking.

Dilnur reached out and jerked the pistol out of Baurzhan’s hand and as he did, the hammer fell.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing!” Baurzhan demanded.

Dilnur pulled his own pistol and pointed it at the kid. “Two things, boy. Learn them now and learn them well. The next time you take a gun, any gun, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances, and fail to check and see if it’s loaded, I will shoot you myself. And if you ever point a gun at me again, it had better be loaded and you’d better shoot to kill, because if you don’t, I’m going to take it away from you and beat you to death with it.”

There was a small group of soldiers who had gathered around to watch the demonstration, and there was some angry muttering, then someone shouted, “Silence!” and there was silence.

A grizzled old sergeant—the man must have been sixty—looked around the small group. “When a man is teaching you how to deal with an angry cobra, listen to him!” He looked around to make sure he had everyone’s attention, then looked at Dilnur. “Two things! Always check to see if it’s loaded, and never point it at someone you don’t want to kill. Got it. Next?”

Dilnur still had Baurzhan’s pistol. He handed it to the old sergeant.

“How do I check to see if it’s loaded?” the sergeant asked, pointing the pistol at the floor.

Dilnur explained and added calmly, “It’s better to point it up if it’s a stone or brick floor. The bullets will ricochet and can still kill you.”

The lesson continued. Baurzhan and the sergeant got to dry-fire their pistols. Dilnur gave Baurzhan another one, and finally Dilnur walked them through loading the pistols, saving putting the caps on for last.

The parapet of the city wall rose about four feet above the wall. So, standing and facing out, the parapet covered them to chest height.

Dilnur pointed out at the closest enemy camp, which was the better part of a mile from the wall, and fired, saying, “It would take a miracle to hit anything at this range, but the bullets will go that far and still be deadly when they get there.” He showed them the proper firing stance for firing from a wall. One hand holding the pistol out at arm’s length, and the other hand supporting the first. It was something Brandy had told him about from police shows. Whatever those were.

Then he showed them how you used the pistol in a cavalry battle, firing it with one hand. “It’s not as accurate this way, but it works. And you’ll probably be a lot closer.”

Aside from the pistols for Baurzhan and the sergeant, he didn’t give out any more, though he did let most of the guards fire a pistol at least once. By the time they got done, the sun was starting to set and workmen were tearing down buildings near the creek.

It was a good start.


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