CHAPTER 24
Hotbox
Birkin’s army, 80 miles west of Perm
January 8, 1638
The only good news was that it was the middle of winter. General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin looked out at the snow-covered frozen ground. The sort of thick earthen walls that could be built in spring, summer, or fall using the fresno scrapers and steam tractors were virtually impossible to build in winter. The ground was frozen into rock and basically immoveable.
Unfortunately, that was the only good news. For a few days, General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin had thought the fact that the one and only steam train was stuck out in Kazakh—and not just Kazakh, but the far eastern edge of Kazakh—might save them. But he’d known better even then. The walking wall had been being used for just this purpose for a hundred years before the Ring of Fire.
The Ring of Fire had added wheels and thin metal sheeting to them. It took a bit longer than the train, but by now the army at Kazan had set up a ring of walking walls that went from the walls of Kazan all the way around Birkingrad to the river. Retreat back to Birkingrad, as humiliating as that would have been, was no longer an option. And his cousin, Iakov Petrovich Birkin, was in command of a force that could defend Birkingrad, but not have any hope of breaking out and opening a road for Ivan Vasilevich.
Ivan Vasilevich Birkin still had one hope. He kept the men moving east. His hope was the new dirigible. It was ready ahead of schedule and now named Patriarch Filaret in honor of Ivan’s brother and Mikhail’s father. It was proclaimed to be a defender of the true eastern Orthodox faith. And it carried bombs. Lots and lots of bombs. Birkin couldn’t storm the walls of Perm but he could drop enough bombs to kill enough people in the city so that they could no longer defend those walls.
It was an ugly sort of war but no uglier than a sack. At least that was Birkin’s guess. He’d never seen a bombed-out city. Of course, the Patriarch Filaret was going to have to stay pretty high so as to avoid rockets like the ones that had killed the Czar Alexis, but it could do that if it just had to drop bombs on a target that wasn’t moving.
Perm
January 11, 1638
General Tim and Anatoly Gregorovitch Stroganov stood atop the walls of Perm while General Birkin’s aide rode up and demanded the surrender of the city and, for that matter, Tim, for treason against Russia.
Tim shouted, “Tell Ivan Vasilevich that it would have been a good plan if he’d been able to get here before we reinforced the town. But now he’s in a hotbox.”
“A what?”
“Never mind,” Tim said. “We aren’t surrendering and you can’t take the city.” Tim wasn’t quite as confident as he made himself sound. What worried him was what was Ivan Vasilevich Birkin doing here? He had to know that this was hopeless as well as Tim did.
✧ ✧ ✧
Fifteen miles away and two miles above, Colonel Alexi Petrov readied the Patriarch Filaret for its first combat mission. The enemy rockets could reach two miles in height. What they were hoping for was that at two miles, especially going up, those rockets were inaccurate. A rocket fired at the Patriarch was as likely to land on Perm as it was to hit the dirigible.
✧ ✧ ✧
The dirigible was five miles out when it was spotted. Tim, on hearing, called Ufa. It went through channels and then it was noted that there were no Hero-class aircraft available. Two were in Kazakh providing air support and air transport for the siege of Almaliq. Another was by now headed to points east. And a fourth was taking Bernie and Natasha and a ton of gold to Grantville. A fifth was shipping fuel oil to air stations along the southeastern route. The brand-new sixth Hero-class airplane was going through its flight trials and there was a problem with its radio control system.
“Well, turn off its radio and get it here,” Tim demanded. “We have a dirigible approaching, and I’m pretty sure we are about to get bombed.”
Ufa airport
January 11, 1638
The Ufa airport was a real airport with a tower and everything. Yes, the airplanes landed on the frozen Ufa River, but that wasn’t a problem for the Heroes or the Scouts. At the moment, there were three Dacha-trained technicians lying on their backs in the cockpit of the Ivan Susanin, cursing the aqualators and the whole concept of aqualators and the idiot who introduced them into the world.
Vasilii was one of the angry techs and Miroslava was watching with amusement. She’d spent her life in a brothel, at least most of it, and she was familiar with men cursing when stuff didn’t work quite as it should. At least in this case, no one was going to hit her because they couldn’t get their equipment working. Besides, she thought she knew what the problem was and it wasn’t actually in the aqualator. It was in one of the connections between the aqualator and the aircraft electronics. The switch wasn’t switching because the aqualator was out of position.
She would have told them, but one of the techs was Vadim Ivanovich and Vadim had told her not to bother them. Vadim had never been comfortable with her. He was uncomfortable not because she’d been a whore, but because to Vadim she seemed weird.
So she kept her mouth shut, and then the runner arrived telling them to get the Ivan Susanin ready to fly.
“What’s going on?” Vasilii asked.
The note was passed over, and a moment later Vasilii said, “Vadim, go to the stores and collect up the dirigible bombs. Have them sent to the plane. Petrov, you’re going to be bombardier.”
“And have them send all the jerry cans of fuel that they have,” Miroslava added. Full tanks would take a Hero-class airplane about four hundred miles. Meaning that a full tank would get the Ivan Susanin to Perm and let it fight for about half an hour, but not let it get back. If they wanted to get back, they were going to have to carry extra cans of fuel. The cans the Sovereign States used were a copy of twenty-liter cans introduced by the Germans in World War II. Each can weighed a bit over forty pounds and carried a little more than five gallons. Each jerry can would up their flight time by about a quarter of an hour, or around twenty-five miles.
Vadim left and Petrov went to the passenger compartment of the plane to see about the racks. The Hero-class airplane had no bomb bay. To drop a bomb, someone had to step out onto the wing and walk to the back of the lower wing, then drop the bomb from there. Even at close to stall speed, that meant winds of sixty miles per hour or so, so aside from the bombs there were harnesses and lines that were locked into the side of the plane so that the wing walker wouldn’t be blown away. But they’d practiced this.
The timing was a surprise. The fact that they would be facing dirigibles wasn’t. And the way the first dirigible was brought down in that other timeline was well known. Someone had dropped a bomb onto it.
✧ ✧ ✧
As soon as the cockpit was clear, Miroslava lay down on the floor of the cockpit, took a screwdriver, and started adjusting the position of the aqualator. It took five minutes before the ready signal pinged.
It was over an hour later before the Ivan Susanin took off to protect Russia from invaders from the west one more time.
In the air, over Perm
January 11, 1638
The Patriarch was in position and ready to instruct the ungodly. No wing walking was necessary. The Patriarch had a bomb bay and it dropped its first bomb fifteen minutes after it had been spotted. It was holding position over Perm. The bomb dropped and the wind moved it as it fell. It landed twenty-five feet outside the walls of Perm. The bomb had a contact fuse that set it off when it hit the ground. It was a mix of a black-powder charge and fuel oil to produce an incendiary effect. It worked quite well, and a stretch of ice-covered ground just outside the walls of Perm burned merrily for a few minutes.
People along the walls of Perm laughed, but Tim wasn’t laughing. The aim would get better. He looked around. Aside from the walls, Perm was a city of wood. So much kindling, as soon as the bombs started falling inside the walls.
The next bomb fell and it landed inside the wall. Fortunately, it landed on a street and not on a roof, but some of the burning oil hit two buildings and people were way too busy with buckets to be laughing anymore.
Now that they had what they thought was the range, they dropped ten five-hundred-pound bombs, about half of which landed inside the town of Perm and half outside it. They did have the range. It was just that a bomb dropping through two miles of air isn’t a precision instrument. It goes where the wind takes it, even if it is heavy.
But Perm was a really big bonfire before the Ivan Susanin arrived.
Ivan Susanin over Perm
January 11, 1638
Petrov clipped his line to the side of the door and clipped the other end of the line to the back of his harness. Then he opened the door and, fighting the wind, stepped out onto the wing. The bomb he was carrying was considerably lighter than the five-hundred-pound bombs that the Filaret dropped on Perm. It weighed thirty-five pounds and it was pointed. In fact, its front end was specifically designed to cut through the doped fabric covering of a dirigible, then to rip open the goldbeater skin bags that held the hydrogen, and then to go off after it had done all that. It didn’t have a contact fuse. It had a thirty-second clockwork timer. Pull the cord, drop the bomb, thirty seconds later, boom.
It was a marvel of wartime engineering, which made it no easier to carry through a sixty-mile-per-hour gale. Carefully, Petrov let out the line until he was at the trailing edge of the wing and waited. He was wearing goggles and a flight suit, but it was still freezing cold with a wind chill that was frankly unbelievable. With his back to the wind, he watched the sky behind and below the Ivan Susanin .
✧ ✧ ✧
Meanwhile, in the cockpit Vasilii watched as the Filaret turned northwest and made for Bor, rising just as fast as it could.
The Ivan Susanin was faster than the Filaret, which had a top speed of seventy miles per hour. In level flight, the Ivan Susanin cruised at ninety-seven miles per hour. But that didn’t include the fact that they were climbing to keep up with the rising Filaret and that they had a man out on the wing with a bomb in his hands. Of course, the Filaret was climbing too, and that was costing it a considerable amount of speed.
Vasilii pushed the engine levers to their stops and the Ivan Susanin picked up speed and rose higher.
✧ ✧ ✧
On the wing, the shift caused Petrov to stumble and in catching himself, he dropped the bomb which fell to the ground and shattered without ever going off. Meanwhile, Petrov climbed back to the door, and went back into the cabin. Part of that was because he was climbing uphill against an eighty-mile-per-hour gale, but part of it was because they were now passing thirteen thousand feet and at that height, the atmosphere doesn’t have quite enough air to keep one going. You don’t suffocate. It’s more like being a third of the way up the side of Mount Everest. Energetic activity is not recommended.
He breathed deeply for a few minutes trying to get enough oxygen into his system so that the spots would leave his eyes. Then, he got another bomb.
✧ ✧ ✧
On the Patriarch Filaret things weren’t any better. That damned airplane was gaining on them. By now an internal combustion engine would be stuttering and getting ready to fail, but steam was different. It was getting hard to breathe and the hydrogen bags were full and venting. That was potentially dangerous. But the captain had no choice. They too knew the history of how the first dirigible was taken down. Their only safety was getting high enough so that the airplane couldn’t get above them.
It worked. They hit fifteen thousand feet and the damned airplane turned away, but they were venting hydrogen. Venting hydrogen at need was something that these dirigibles were designed to do, especially after what had happened to the Czarina Evdokia over Germany. But the Patriarch Filaret had been rushed into service before its trials and one of the vents was stuck. Some worker had put the parts together without waiting long enough for the lacquer to dry, so what should have opened and closed, as the pressure in hydrogen sack one changed, just stayed closed. The pressure wasn’t relieved. Worse, the thin cord that was supposed to open the vent instead put extra stress on a particular point on the goldbeater’s skin bladder. The pressure built up. Hydrogen sack one ripped open, venting the hydrogen into the body of the Patriarch Filaret. The Patriarch Filaret had little chimneys on the top of the outer skin, so that even if ice coated the skin, the hydrogen could still vent out the top. This didn’t eliminate, but did diminish, the risk of fire.
It worked quite well.
However, in about five minutes, hydrogen sack one went from full and providing lift to empty, and just adding to the weight of the dirigible. By that time, they’d hit seventeen thousand feet, well above their safe sealing, and the crew were more than a little woozy from lack of oxygen. Their reactions were slow, and worse, the other hydrogen sacks were working just fine, venting hydrogen until the pressure was released and leaving the Patriarch Filaret with not quite enough hydrogen to stay aloft. Not at ten thousand feet or lower.
The thing about a balloon, whether it holds hydrogen or air, is the higher it goes, the less gas it requires to stay inflated. And the lower it goes, the more gas it needs, because the outside pressure is greater at lower altitude.
They had enough hydrogen in the three remaining hydrogen sacks to maintain altitude at seventeen thousand feet, even at fifteen thousand feet, but by the time they noticed the problem and put together what it was, they were at seven thousand feet and pointing nose down at about 20 degrees.
They used the engines to try and get their nose up, while at the same time venting even more hydrogen from the rearmost hydrogen sack to balance the lift.
None of this happened fast, and it all happened while they were running toward Bor. Bor is four hundred and sixty-four miles west-northwest of Perm, as the crow flies, give or take. And from the moment that the Ivan Susanin had appeared on the scene, they’d been running for Bor and the hangar that was their home. The wind, which at seventeen thousand feet was strong and from the northeast, had been pushing them southwest. Just a little south of the direction they wanted to go. In the confusion, no one had noticed the southerly drift to their course. So the report they sent to Bor and Birkin just before they “landed” was about thirty miles off, showing them both farther east and farther north than they actually were.
The Patriarch Filaret came down in a large stretch of forest. The trees poked holes in the bottom of the dirigible, but not in the remaining hydrogen bags. Those were half deflated at ground level anyway. The sudden stop cracked spars, ripped loose wires and threw crew to the floor. Three members of the crew had broken bones and one unfortunate, working on a nacelle, was thrown loose and fell thirty feet to break his neck on a tree trunk. Electronics were screwed and the radio lost its triode tube, making it unusable until the tube was replaced. Steam pipes came loose, releasing steam and causing even more damage. They would be days fixing all the problems, and cutting away tree limbs so they could get out of the forest.
Patriarch Filaret had crashed, but not crash-landed. It was still in the trees, held up partly by the trees and partly by the hydrogen in its three remaining hydrogen sacks, which did more damage. It was going to take time to fix.
But the idea of abandoning it never even crossed the crew’s mind. Dirigibles are expensive. They aren’t airplane expensive, they are space shuttle expensive. They are huge for the amount of useful load they carry. The materials they are made from have to be light and strong, so they involve huge amounts of very expensive materials plus the labor of hundreds of highly skilled laborers working for months. Sheremetev, then Ivan Romanov, had spent a considerable portion of the military budget of Muscovite Russia on the Patriarch Filaret.
Now there was a fortune in the form of an almost but not quite fully functional airship sitting in the forest around halfway between Kazan and Perm.
✧ ✧ ✧
Vasilii, seeing spots in front of his eyes, turned the nose down and then did a slow bank left to go back to Perm and see how things were going. By the time they got back to Perm, they were down around eight thousand feet, and if the air was still a little thin for real comfort, it was thick enough to breathe. Also, Vasilii had gotten enough oxygen back in his brain so that he realized that there wasn’t anything that he could do for Perm. The town was still burning, though it looked like they were getting the fires under control. He put in a call to the city. Birkin had made an attack on the north wall while the city was burning, but it was repulsed and it was unlikely he would try again, not without the Filaret to support them.
So General Tim’s orders were to track the Filaret and destroy it.
“I can’t, Tim. Don’t have enough fuel to get back to Ufa. I’ll be on residual steam by the time I land at Letyaga.”
“Do what you can.”
✧ ✧ ✧
Vasilii landed at Letyaga, a small village just upriver of the convergence of the Belaya and the Kama Rivers. It was part of the radio grid and it had a fuel depot. They landed, refilled their tanks and the jerry cans, then took off again, which took them the better part of an hour. Then they had to find the Filaret. That was the big advantage of airships over airplanes. Range. The Filaret could go for a thousand miles without refueling. On the other hand, from what Vasilii had seen, the only place it wanted to go was back to Bor.
By the time they got the Filaret in sight again the situation was more complicated. The dirigible was way too low. It was at less than a thousand feet and losing altitude slowly.
Petrov wanted to go out on the wing and drop a bomb on the sucker, but Vasilii refused. He kept the Filaret in sight but didn’t approach it. It continued to lose altitude and continued to travel east-southeast getting closer and closer to Kazan and farther and farther from Birkin’s army outside Perm. Since that was exactly what Vasilii wanted, he let it keep going. Vasilii knew approximately how much the Filaret was worth and he knew how much its parts were worth too. The hydrogen sacks, the electrical hydrogen separator, the steam engines, the boiler, the condensers . . . there was a fortune in salvage and Vasilii wanted that fortune as close to Kazan as he could get it.
By the time they watched the Filaret crash, they were getting low on fuel again, but they were also closer to Kazan than to Letyaga, so they went there.
The Volga south of Kazan was Sovereign States territory. They landed on the Volga and taxied to Kazan.
Headquarters, Kazan
January 11, 1638
They reported to Ivan Maslov, who was running this end of the hotbox.
“Yes, General, I know your game plan,” Vasilii said, “but a new player entered the game and you may not know how much it’s worth.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Filaret is down in the woods and basically intact. And we need to take it intact.”
“Why?” Ivan asked. “I think de-emphasizing the dirigibles was an excellent move on the part of Czar Mikhail, however much the czarina loved the things.”
“I agree, but do you know why that decision was made?”
“Cost and time. It doesn’t take nearly as long to build an airplane as it does to build a dirigible.”
“It costs as much to make one Czarina-class dirigible as it does to make fifty Hero-class airplanes,” Vasilii clarified. “But in the case of the Filaret that money has already been spent, and by Moscow, not us. If we can seize it, repair it, send it to Hidden Valley or use it to deliver fuel to air stations out east or any number of noncombat roles, that’s a lot of money added to the Czar’s treasury.”
“Birkin has to know that,” Ivan said consideringly. “But is he going to think about it when he has an army stuck in the open?”
“If he doesn’t, Ivan Romanov will,” Miroslava said. The greed of the Czar’s uncle was famous throughout Russia.
“And Ivan Romanov is going to want them to fix it and fly it back to Bor,” Ivan Maslov agreed.
“We need to get to it and seize it before that happens,” Vasilii said.
“Well you’ve got a plane,” Ivan said “I can—”
“No place to land. Not within ten miles of the crash site.”
“Valeriya Zakharovna,” Ivan said.
“Where is she?” Vasilii asked. They all knew about her. She was the first Russian to make a parachute jump and had trained the rest of the Russian paratroopers.
“Hidden Valley. She’s on the crew of the Princess Anna,” Ivan said. The Princess Anna was the small mail carrier dirigible that had been made out of parts of the Czar Alexis after it had crashed. Before Czar Mikhail had been forced to de-emphasize airships as a cost-saving measure. It was still in operation and spent most of its time either in mapmaking or in carrying small loads of this or that between secure bases. It was kept far away from anything approaching combat. And it wasn’t flown unless the weather was good and expected to remain that way. Even the smallest of Russia’s airships was too expensive to risk. That was the reason that it hadn’t been sent east. Yes, it could make the trip, but bad weather was expected. In bad weather a Hero could land and be fairly safe. The Princess Anna wasn’t safe unless it was in a hangar at Hidden Valley.
“Well, considering she knows a lot about dirigibles she’s probably who we need.”
“She isn’t trained in combat but some of the other paratroopers are,” Ivan agreed. Then he asked, “By the way, what happened with that business with the spy in the Embassy bureau?”
“That’s need to know, General, and I’m afraid you don’t,” Vasilii said.
“You shouldn’t have been told why you and General Lebedev were making that scouting mission yourselves,” Miroslava added.
Miroslava by now knew precisely who the spies were. One of them was one of Simeon Budanov’s top aides, and another was a member of the Streltzi Bureau. They were working together. And, for now, Ivan Borisovich Petrov and Czar Mikhail had decided to leave them right where they were and feed them bad information. But there would be a reckoning sooner or later.
Hidden Valley
January 12, 1638
Valeriya Zakharovna, in the uniform of a chief petty officer, saluted as they exited the Hero-class airplane in Hidden Valley. They’d landed on a small pond that was produced by a dam on the creek that ran through Hidden Valley.
Beside it was a dirigible hangar suitable for a much larger dirigible than the Princess Anna. It was also only about half finished. The dirigible part of the air force had been left to muddle on with a very limited budget. They had also based their uniforms and ranks on the navy, whereas the heavier-than-air air force had gone with army-style ranks. It was a confusing mess and one that Czar Mikhail wasn’t going near, since his wife was still very much an airship fan.
“Can your people jump out of an airplane?” Vasilii asked without preamble. He wasn’t wearing any uniform. He was dressed in civilian clothes in the fashion of Ufa, which was a blend of pre–Ring of Fire Russian dress and civilian dress of late twentieth-century America. It was winter so he was wearing a greatcoat and one of the fur-lined baseball caps with earflaps.
“We can, but the Princess Anna is better.”
“It might be at that, but we need to drop as large a force as we can,” Vasilii said. “And let’s go somewhere warmer.”
There was very little wind. That was the main reason for the location of Hidden Valley. It was surrounded by hills and once you got below the height of the hills, you might get snowed on or rained on, but high winds were unlikely. Still, it was about 5 degrees below freezing and Vasilii wanted to be comfortable as they planned this out.
✧ ✧ ✧
In an office located next to the main hangar, Vasilii pulled out his maps and described the location of the dirigible and the area around it. “Forest, with a few clearings. There’s a stream to the east about a mile, but it’s not big enough to land a Scout, much less a Hero. And we need to have people in there before they make repairs and fly away home.”
“What’s the crew?” Dimitry Ivanov asked.
“You should know better than I,” Vasilii said. Miroslava was being quiet and Vasilii realized it was because Valeriya Zakharovna was nervous about her. Many of the more common attributes of Miroslava’s condition had been beaten out of her, but that wasn’t all that made people uncomfortable around her. She was also beautiful, and that in itself made some women uncomfortable around her. Valeriya Zakharovna was a large, rawboned woman. It wasn’t the first time either of them had seen the phenomenon, and Miroslava preferred to have him do the talking anyway.
After Vasilii had described the location, Valeriya and Dimitry described what they had.
“Five of our paratroop scouts are out right now,” Valeriya said. “We only have twenty-five paratroops and the five pilots that know the basics.”
“We can carry eight on the Hero,” Vasilii said.
“And the Princess Anna can carry ten, at need.”
“That’s eighteen in two drops. If we coordinate our timing, they can both land within hours of each other.”
“Paratroopers aren’t . . . ” Valeriya hesitated. “ . . . normal soldiers. They don’t march around with guns on their shoulders or do volley fire.”
“What are they?” Miroslava asked. Curiosity, as it usually did, overrode her reticence.
“Scouts and trackers. Their job is usually to land, hook up with someone trying to escape to the Sovereign States, and lead them out of Muscovy, or sometimes Lithuania. They can fight and are as brave as anyone in the czar’s army, but their training and skills are different.”
“I understand, but until Ivan can get some cavalry there, they are going to be all we’ve got. Besides, they are going to be facing an airship crew,” Vasilii said. And, seeing the expression on Dimitry Ivanov and Valeriya Zakharovna’s faces, added, “Again, brave people without doubt, but not stand in line and shoot soldiers. What we need your paratroopers to do is to make sure that the Filaret doesn’t fly home to Bor. If they can bring it back to Hidden Valley, great. But if not that, at least hold it there until the cavalry arrives.
“Understand this. I have my orders from the czar. If it looks like the Filaret is going to escape back to Bor, I will drop a bomb on it.”
In the air, over crash site
January 12, 1638
Valeriya Zakharovna stood on the bottom wing of the Hero-class airplane as the sixty-mile-an-hour wind whipped by her. They were at ten thousand feet. She wanted plenty of time to stabilize before she pulled her rip cord. She was wearing goggles and she looked at the window where Miroslava Holmes was seated. There was a sheet of red-painted board against the window. Then it was removed and a green-painted piece of wood was held up.
Valeriya let go of the handhold, took a step, and was falling. She did a couple of flips caused by the turbulence off the back of the wing, then she was in smooth air. She put her arms and legs out, not exactly straight but out, and stabilized her fall until she was falling facing down. She pulled her rip cord and the drag chute came loose. The wind caught it and pulled the main. It started to open, but was slowed by the drag canopy, just as it was supposed to be. The drag canopy was a small cloth device that was attached to the risers to keep the main parafoil from opening too fast and jerking the paratrooper too hard. Going from terminal velocity to close to a dead stop in one jerk could be terminal for the trooper or rip the chute because of the sudden stress. So the drag canopy slowed the opening of the main just a little so that it only felt like you were stopped in a sudden jerk.
Then she was flying under a parawing. She looked around. The rest of the team were out with chutes opened. And they were dropping. She could see the Filaret to the west and the creek below her. She headed toward where the clearing ought to be and then saw it and started circling in. The parawings were blue gray to blend with the sky, so that the troopers would be harder to spot. She wouldn’t know if that worked until they got to the airship.
As she reached the ground, Valeriya jerked both controls down and the wing tilted into a stall just as she landed, but she still did her roll just as she was supposed to. Then she started gathering up her chute, while the rest of the team landed and did the same. It was five minutes later, while they were still collecting their chutes, that the second team arrived, jumping from the Princess Anna .
✧ ✧ ✧
An hour later, the sun was down and they approached the dirigible in the dark, while the paratroopers complained about the noise she was making. Valeriya was skilled at jumping out of aircraft. She was also an excellent rigger and knew perfectly well how to repair all sorts of things in a dirigible. She wasn’t a wood-wise scout, and it seemed like a stick or a piece of ice broke with every step she took.
No one in the dirigible seemed to notice, though.
It was hard to tell in the dark, but it seemed like the bottom of the dirigible was suspended about ten feet off the ground by four trees. Those same trees had poked holes in the bottom of the dirigible body. One of those trees had pulled the port-side engine nacelle loose, and it was hanging by one of its struts. How much damage that had done, they couldn’t see, in spite of the fact that the dirigible had its lights on.
The Filaret had a crew of twelve: captain, first officer, chief engineer, electrician, two nacelle engineers, and the rest riggers. The captain and first officer shared responsibility for navigation, and the electrician doubled as the radio and weatherman.
One of the scouts motioned Valeriya to stillness and started climbing a tree to reach the starboard nacelle.
It was unoccupied and the steam engine was cold. He dropped a rope ladder and the rest of the team climbed into the nacelle. From the nacelle, it was a walk along the catwalk to the main body of the Filaret and they were inside. The Filaret creaked as they moved. They reached the crew quarters and found everyone asleep, including the guard.
By the time the first of the crew woke, they each had a scout with a loaded revolver next to them.
Valeriya learned that the radio was busted. The tubes used had been shattered by the crash. And she learned that they were at least three days away from being able to lift the ship. Then she spent the next two hours consulting with the captured captain of the Filaret, who was cooperative. She made a list of what they needed to get the Filaret flight ready and then she sent one of the scouts off to the rendezvous, the closest place to the crash site that the Hero could land.
Birkin’s army, outside Perm
January 13, 1638
The radio operator brought General Ivan Vasilevich Birkin the message.
The Filaret down in forest near Kazan.
Must be secured with all haste.
“And how exactly am I supposed to do that?” Ivan Vasilevich muttered under his breath. He looked across at the walls of Perm. They’d gotten here too late thanks to the airplanes that Tim had and he didn’t. Russia had created five airships. The Testbed, the Czarina Evdokia, the Czar Alexis, the Princess Anna, and the Patriarch Filaret. Of the five, only the Princess Anna was still in operation. And it was only in operation because it was small and used with extreme caution. There were six Hero-class airplanes and three Scout-class airplanes in operation now. There had been one crash of a Scout plane and one crash of a Hero. The Hero had been put back in operation. Granted, it wasn’t a large sample, but the evidence seemed overwhelming. Heavier-than-air craft was the way of the future. And he really needed an excuse to get out of the trap that Tim had put him in by getting here first with enough troops to hold the walls.
He went to his writing desk and wrote out his return message. The desk was a foldable table in his command tent, made of lightweight, thin pine with leather fastenings. The tent was double-walled with a camp stove and chimney.
He wrote:
Urgent. The switch from airships to airplanes cannot be delayed any longer.
Sending a large enough force to secure the Filaret would mean abandoning the attack on Perm.
Instructions?
Birkin sent the message off to Moscow with a twinge of guilt, but only a twinge. The Perm mission was a disaster. And he desperately needed a way out that wouldn’t be blamed on him. The Filaret might well be that way out.
He started giving preparation orders to abandon the siege of Perm and head west.
✧ ✧ ✧
It wasn’t until the next day that he got orders from the capital. Part of that was the time it took for the radio chain to transmit the messages across the two dozen or so radios between here and Moscow, but only part of it. Clearly Moscow had spent some time debating the question.
Abandon siege of Perm.
Defend the Filaret .
Birkin put his army in motion.
Filaret
January 14, 1638
Chief Petty Officer Valeriya Zakharovna was overseeing two men with saws as they cut branches off the limbs that were keeping the Filaret stable. More soldiers had arrived by airplane, ferried to the river about sixteen miles away, and from there they skied with packs on their backs carrying spare tubes, parts, and equipment, as well as their AK4.7s and ammunition. There were now some eighty men at arms surrounding the dirigible and those of the crew that hadn’t switched sides were under guard, marching back to the river.
Among those walking in was the Filaret’s new captain, Dimitry Ivanov. He was exhausted. A sixteen-mile cross-country ski trip will do that to you, even if you’re trained, and Dimitry Ivanov wasn’t.
“Ignat Berezin says he has the radio working and has sent an encrypted message to Ufa by way of Kazan detailing the damage and ongoing repairs,” Kirill Veselov shouted.
Kirill had been the engineer before they’d arrived, and had switched sides with every show of enthusiasm. Ignat had marched in last night because the radio man was in a position to tell Moscow precisely where they were. And in these circumstances, defectors were less trusted than those who came in on their own. So the Filaret’s previous radio man was skiing back to the frozen river, where he would be picked up and taken to Kazan. From there he would be able to decide whether to switch sides or be interned long enough for the Filaret to get airborne, which was looking like it was going to take another two, perhaps three, days.
Valeriya waved acknowledgment and got back to work.