1637_The Volga Rules Read online

  But personal weapons were less than half the equation. There were also artillery and crew weapons that turned WWI into the monstrous killing ground that it was. What had yet to be tested on any significant scale was what happened when you had two forces, both of which had personal weapons with good range and rate of fire, but didn’t have that much artillery or machine guns. Tim and Ivan and the war games they played and tests they did, even the battle of Rzhev, all suggested to Tim that tactically the defense was much stronger. But defense didn’t win wars.

  Meanwhile, the ice on the Volga was still there. But it was thin enough so that attacking across it would be suicidal. Kazan was safe, but still surrounded by Birkin’s army. That meant that he couldn’t possibly go to the aid of Ufa. He could defend Kazan now with half the troops he had in the city or less. He just couldn’t get the rest past Birkin’s forces.

  Tim looked out at the Volga and muttered, “Melt, damn it, melt.”

  Moscow

  April 3, 1637

  News of the attack on Ufa by Kazakh warriors was met with public lamentation and private glee in the Moscow Kremlin. Director-General Sheremetev was still maintaining that Czar Mikhail was at best misguided, but more likely enspelled by up-timer magic. He publicly treated the attack as unfortunate, but probably God’s mighty hand at work.

  Then he sent orders—very private orders—to General Birkin to send a force to relieve Ufa, but to make sure that Mikhail didn’t survive the attack of the Kazakh.

  Boris Petrov took the message from Yuri and read it carefully. By this time the radio men were pretty circumspect about spreading the news, but also by now Boris had at least one radio man on every shift in his pay. So he was still getting the news, whether Sheremetev wanted him to or not. There weren’t a lot of details. It was known that the attackers were the Kazakh Khanate, but nothing much about numbers or armaments on either side.

  The next day, one of Boris’ sources in Sheremetev’s household reported that he had heard someone say something about Shuvalov when the radio message came in. It wasn’t much and the man, a kitchen slave, was in no position to ask for clarification.

  Goritsky Monastery

  April 3, 1637

  Only a week earlier, the sisters at the monastery had learned of the sack of Archangelsk.

  Sheremetev’s northern army had not besieged Archangelsk. It had destroyed the place. Most of the city had been burned to the ground. Half the population was dead or fled, and just about all the wealth in the warehouses that hadn’t been burned was on its way back to Moscow to fill Sheremetev’s coffers.

  The sack had filled the radio stations, only displaced four days ago by the news that the constitutional convention had started in Ufa. The two pieces of news had made a very clear counterpoint to each other, Sheremetev’s iron fist versus Mikhail’s negotiations.

  Now this. Ufa was under attack by Kazakh warriors. Most people assumed that Sheremetev was at least involved, but there was no proof. A lot of the upper-level players saw it as a clever move, indicating Mikhail’s weakness and Sheremetev’s effectiveness.

  “I don’t like him, either,” said Elena Cherakasky, “but he’s no fool. He managed to get the Kazakhs to attack Mikhail all the way out in Ufa. I don’t see how Mikhail can survive against such a man.”

  Sofia felt herself going white. She didn’t see how Czar Mikhail could survive, either. And Natasha was in Ufa. So was Vladimir now. And Vladimir’s child, the baby Sofia might never see. She was very much afraid that she was going to lose the last of her remaining family and her czar, all at the same time.

  “Yet,” Tatyana said, “we got the news of the attack from Ufa itself. Their radio is still up and they fought off the initial attack.” Suddenly, Tatyana laughed. “Never underestimate a peasant. They are a lot better at a lot of things than you would think.” Tatyana made no bones about her past and, nun or not, she kept a lover in the town. “Ufa is still there, and so is Kazan. I wouldn’t count them out yet.”

  Sofia felt the blood seeping back into her face at Tatyana’s words. And even more, as Tatyana reached out and grasped her hand.

  “The question we need to be asking is, what are the consequences?” Sofia said.

  “The consequences of what? The successful attack or the failed attack?” Elena asked.

  “Either,” Tatyana said. “But let’s start with what it means if the Kazakh are fought off.”

  “If they are fought off, Sheremetev is a dead man,” Elena said with a fair bit of malice and satisfaction.

  But Sofia wasn’t so sure. “What if it turns into a siege of Ufa?”

  “That’s harder to say,” Elena said. “The longer the siege, the more powerful Sheremetev will become. Mikhail will be seen as treed. At the same time, the sack of Archangelsk is sitting there as proof of Sheremetev’s effectiveness. I don’t like it, but if the siege lasts long enough, it might not matter if they actually take Ufa or not. Just the siege could let Sheremetev win.”

  Tobolsk, Siberia

  General Shein again decided to stand pat. He had always been better on the defense than the attack, and the new weapons mix just reinforced that tendency.

  However, that hesitation to take action had crossed from the tactical to the strategic…where it was a fairly severe error.

  Ufa

  General Izmailov looked out at the bow-armed Kazakh warriors with their iron breastplates and conical helmets. They were good cavalry troops—or they had been. But they had just suffered a severe shock to their morale, and they had to still be reeling. They had taken that shock in their precipitous charge of the first day and it had been reinforced in the following two days. It took him a couple of days to look over the situation and be sure. In the course of those two days, there had been four more attacks, all of them fought off with much slaughter among the attackers and surprisingly few casualties among the defenders. Though, from what he was hearing, over a million rubles worth of damages to factories on the outskirts of Ufa was done.

  “We must attack, Your Majesty!” Izmailov said, turning back to Czar Mikhail. “We dare not give them time to recover from the damage your people have done them. With the AK4.7s prepared and plenty of chambers readied, we can sweep them from the field. I saw it at Rzhev when our own cavalry was decimated by the mercenaries hired by the Poles. Cavalry has no chance against massed pikes supported by rifle fire. And your people here were solid under factory workers. Under proper officers, they’ll be like iron.”

  Czar Mikhail looked at the man. This was the general who had stopped the Poles at Rzhev. If any general in Russia understood war in this new time, it was Izmailov.

  Stefan woke swinging. Luckily, all he hit was the wall. It bruised, but didn’t break his hand and he sucked on his knuckles as he came back from the dream. He had been having a nightmare. A flashback. He was back at the warehouses, grabbed by—what was his name—Ivan Petrovich Choglokov, a member of the service nobility from Novgorod who had moved out here to set up a leather works. From what he had heard since, Choglokov hadn’t been a bad man, aside from being arrogant.

  Stefan suspected that if the Kazakh army hadn’t been waiting just outside the hastily hacked together fortifications, the trial might have gone differently. And he was pretty sure that Sofia Choglokov wouldn’t be forgiving him any time soon. Well, he wouldn’t be forgiving himself any time soon either.

  Stefan wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and tried to get back to sleep. He’d been made a captain of militia, a member of the service nobility. So that there would be no future question of rank, he had also gotten a talking to from Czar Mikhail, who pointed out that if he disobeyed a lawful order given by a superior officer, there would be severe punishment.

  Stefan didn’t want to be a militia captain. He didn’t want to be a member of the service nobility. He just wanted to be left alone to do his work. But that wasn’t an option, not any more.

  He wasn’t getting back to sleep and, considering the dream, he was just as glad of
that. He got up and started to get dressed.

  “It’s not dawn yet,” Vera said drowsily. “Come back to bed.”

  “I have to get ready.” He pulled on his tunic and felt the silver railroad tracks that he had been given by Colonel Buturlin after the trial yesterday. His company was to be part of the colonel’s regiment.

  April 4, 1637

  Stefan and his company finished their time on the improvised walls, then spent two hours at drill. Then they went back to the new factory and made bayonets. General Izmailov wanted bayonets for every AK in Ufa, and long ones at that. The bayonet blades were fourteen inches long, based on something called a spike bayonet. No good for cutting, they were for poking. Added to the length of the AKs, they made a long weapon. Not as long as a pike, but moving in that direction. And that was what they practiced, marching like pike companies and forming lines. Having the first rank kneel and ground their rifles so that there was a line of points. It looked impressive. Stefan had to admit that because he had spent those drills inspecting the lines, not standing in them. Then, back to another stint at the barricades.

  April fourth was a very long day for everyone in Ufa.

  Stefan had more nightmares that night, with Ivan Petrovich Choglokov ordering him to right face and march into an oncoming army of Kazakhs, and Stefan doing it. Then he would be ordered to left face and his bayonet would plunge into Choglokov’s belly.

  Outside Kazan

  General Birkin looked at his maps. They were good maps, much better than anything he had before the Ring of Fire. There had been plenty of time to plant a forest of measuring stakes around Kazan, and with the equipment and knowledge of the up-timers, he had mapped the area to a faretheewell. Why not? It wasn’t like he had anything else to do but try to sneak a few troops away from Kruglaya Mountain.

  Ivan Vasilevich Birkin realized that defense had gotten stronger, but he had no yardstick for how much stronger. Especially, he had no way of knowing how strong even improvised field defenses can make a position. He had field works in place around Kruglaya Mountain. Before the advent of the AKs, his works would have required the whole of his army and preferably another twenty thousand men to man them lest General Boris Timofeyevich Lebedev sally forth, break through his works at a weak point and roll up his entire force from the flanks. Now he felt fairly confident that the men manning his works were more than were needed. But he had no idea how much more.

  Birkin looked at the counters on his maps again. He had, almost from the beginning, been sneaking troops out of the siege of Kruglaya Mountain. But he couldn’t sneak many, because every time he pulled a company out, those damn Maslov rockets came falling out of the sky, reminding him that the baker’s boy could see every move he made and warning him that if he moved too many, Colonel Ivan Maslov would follow the next rocket barrage with a massed assault and sweep his besiegers away. Then he would proceed to bugger his army while it was facing General Tim, who Birkin was beginning to think might be the second coming of Alexander the Great after all. How else could a nineteen-year-old—well, twenty now—general hold off the armies of Russia with a scratch force?

  That last bought a grimace to the general’s face, though there was no one there to see it. Little Timmy’s twentieth birthday had been after Kazan was besieged and the whole city had made a celebration of it. That had been, as much as anything, to rub the noses of the whole besieging army in the youth of their general. They might not be fully convinced of the good will of Czar Mikhail, but the potentates of Kazan, Muslim and Christian alike, were in real danger of idolatry where General Tim was concerned.

  Birkin’s eyes fell on the radio message. It had been decoded. By now both sides knew to encode their radio traffic. That at least kept the radio operators from gossiping about the orders to the army. The message was an order from Director-General Sheremetev and the boyar duma to take—not send, take—a force to relieve Ufa, and an even more secret order to make sure that Mikhail died in the fighting. Birkin didn’t like those orders, but he had a company of the duma’s hounds in his army in case he should consider ignoring them. So the only real issue was how large a force he could detach. Word was that the Kazakh army numbered something like thirty thousand. In theory, Birkin’s army was fifty thousand, but he still had seven thousand around Kruglaya Mountain. He’d lost over three thousand in assaults against Kazan, one on little Timmy’s birthday. Most of the casualties were wounded, not dead—although many of them would eventually die of their injuries. But, if anything, a badly wounded man who needed care and attention was more of a drain on his forces than one who’d been struck dead.

  That left less than forty thousand and he would have to leave at least fifteen thousand here. So he was supposed to relieve Ufa against thirty thousand Kazakh warriors with less than twenty-five thousand troops, who would be marching through the spring mud to get there.

  The good news was that the Kazakhs had gotten bloodied but good. And Izmailov was in command over there, so they were probably going to get bloodied some more.

  Ufa

  April 5, 1637

  March. Work. March.

  Stefan forced the food down at lunch and the orders came to form up again. Stefan had a hundred men under his command, in four groups of twenty-four each, with a Streltzi sergeant for each group. He hadn’t met any of the sergeants before yesterday, and none of them seemed impressed by him. At least not as a military commander. Not that any of them were going to fight him. Word of the “one blow murder” had circulated widely in Ufa.

  Stefan stood at the front of his company and called, “Company, right face. Forward, march.” Then they walked down Zeppi Lane, and at Irina Way the barricades were moved aside and they marched out, Company B of the Second Regiment, to face the Kazakh in the open field.

  Which, to Stefan, seemed a very bad idea. But he had had the chain of command made very clear, and he had already been on trial for his life once this week.

  CHAPTER 27

  Battles

  New Ruzuka

  Father Yulian looked out at the advancing patrol. He had never seen one, but from his reading these were from one of the successor states of the Golden Horde. There were several, the Zunghar Khanate, Kazakh Khanate, Bukhara Khanate, and more. He turned to the young man who had reported the attack on Ufa. “Are these the same people?”

  “I think so. They’re dressed the same.”

  There were perhaps a hundred of them. A patrol, not an army, but the army was close enough, should it be needed. Back in old Ruzuka, Father Yulian would have given them whatever they wanted and the villagers would have done the same to a man. New Ruzuka wasn’t like that. New Ruzuka was their land. Owned by the New Ruzuka Company, with each of them holding shares. Nor were they the beaten down serfs of old Ruzuka. They were free people, protecting their homes.

  The smart play was still to let the patrol have what they wanted, but he wasn’t at all sure that he could convince the citizens of New Ruzuka to see that. He wasn’t even totally sure that he could convince himself to see that. Still, best to see what they wanted and maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. “Get me a flag of truce. I’m going out to see what they want.”

  It didn’t take long, and Father Yulian went out the gate carrying his flag of truce.

  Abul-Fath noticed the flag, but also the black robes of a Christian priest. He might have respected the flag, but he despised the robe. As well, he was a captain of warriors and had no respect at all for peasants, and this seemed a peasant village, if a large one. He was offended by their wall, as though a stack of logs was going to keep his men out. And he hadn’t been involved in the fighting. He was disgusted that the Kazakh army had been thrown back and wanted to prove it was a fluke. So he wasn’t in a good mood to start with, and the guns that were sticking out of cracks between the logs seemed more an offense than a threat at a hundred yards.

  Abul-Fath wasn’t unfamiliar with rifles. He had two of them that he sometimes used for hunting. But his familiarity told him tha
t rifles were a hunting weapon, not a military weapon. So he knew that the guns sticking out from between the cracks were smoothbore muzzle loaders. Knew it with the same certainty that he knew a man couldn’t fly.

  The priest reached them and held up his hand. Using two fingers, he made occult symbols toward Abul-Fath and his troops. Abul-Fath heard the Russian words, but didn’t understand them.

  Nor did he care. He drew his sword and cut down the offense to Allah.

  On the wall, Makar watched. He wasn’t the greatest fan of Father Yulian, but the man was a good priest—allowing for his peculiarities—and was as responsible as anyone for getting them here and keeping them together. So he watched with his AK4.7 long rifle braced on the wall. Everyone was nervous as Father Yulian reached out and blessed the Tatar. Then the Tatar, without even a by your leave, pulled his sword and cut Father Yulian down.

  Nothing happened for a second, maybe two. Then, suddenly, any resentment that Makar had ever had toward Father Yulian was gone. Those bastards out there had murdered a priest! New Ruzuka’s priest. Makar aimed his rifle and fired. So did at least half the men on the wall. Most of them aiming at the same man. There was no telling which of the hundred or so shots hit the Tatar captain, but they later got a count. Fifteen holes, most of them through and through.

  The shots that followed almost immediately were more widely dispersed. But there were almost as many men on the walls as there were soldiers in the patrol. And the men on the walls were firing from cover, with perhaps eight square inches showing per man. Between men and horses, the patrol had almost as many feet showing. And the AK4.7 rifles laid down a devastating fire.