1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 52

“Men coming in,” the scout said as he rode up to the general.

“That’ll be the mercenaries from Rzhev,” General Izmailov said, then looked at Tim. “Take word the column is to halt. Officer’s Call at the front.”

“Halt the column. Officer’s Call, sir, at the leading unit,” Tim told the commander of each unit as he rode down the line.

It was the third day of marching toward Rzhev. And this halt would probably cost them two miles. When he got back to the front, Tim saw that General Izmailov was speaking to the sergeant leading the mercenaries who had sent the riders to inform Moscow of the invasion.

“So tell me, Sergeant,” General Izmailov was asking, “why did you abandon your post?”

“What post, General? We were ordered to Rzhev to guard a supply depot. When we got there, there was no supply depot. No quarters and no pay. My people were living in tents outside Rzhev. You can’t guard what isn’t there, sir, and we were never assigned to guard Rzhev.” The sergeant pulled a set of orders out of his pack and handed them to General Izmailov.

General Izmailov looked over the orders and snorted. Then he handed them to Tim and went on to the next question. “Did you keep in contact with the invading force?”

The burly sergeant shook his head. “No. We didn’t see any more of them and I don’t have the men to spare.”

“Are the invaders coming this way? Heading to Tver? Did they even continue on past Rzhev, or did they stop there?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Sergeant Hampstead admitted.

Tim read over the orders and information in the packet, and stopped. Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev. Well, that explained why the foreign mercenaries had been sent off to guard a nonexistent supply depot. It was almost funny. The lesser Sheremetev’s greed had, for once, worked to Russia’s benefit. If the mercenaries hadn’t been in Rzhev, the Poles might have bypassed the place altogether and headed straight for Tver. With no warning to the Kremlin until they had already taken Tver.

General Izmailov turned to a discussion with the dirigible’s pilot. After discussing the dirigible and its capabilities for a few minutes, the pilot, “Nick” Ivanovich, said, “General, if we loose the tether, we can see more. I can usually get twenty miles an hour when I use the engines, assuming the engines work. And if the wind isn’t bad when I get up there.”

“When they work?” Izmailov looked dubious. “ When they work?”

“They do… mostly,” Nick said. “The engines aren’t really the problem. Sometimes there is considerable leakage in the steam lines. If the steam isn’t leaking too bad, I can stay up for ten hours or so. If everything goes right, I can get from here to Rzhev and back before dark.”

Izmailov thought for a few moments. “All right. We’ll try it. But at the least problem abort the mission and get back here.” He turned back to the mercenary. “Sergeant, your officers were delayed in Moscow but we expect them to be joining us in a day or so. You and your men are to fall in at the end of the column as we pass.”

Everything didn’t go right for Nick Ivanovich. The problem was the winds. They were southerly and fairly strong at five thousand feet. Weaker, but still southerly, at five hundred. Testbed didn’t have a compressor; it couldn’t lift the weight. So it couldn’t pump hydrogen out of the bladders and then get it back. Once the hydrogen was gone, it was gone. It did have a couple of hydrogen tanks so it could go up and down a little bit.

Nick ended up using more fuel than expected to keep on course. There was some steam leakage but it wasn’t too bad. All of which meant that he might have made it to Rzhev and back. Or, if he went all the way to Rzhev, he might run out of fuel or water before he could get back.

“I was forced to abort, General.” Nick shook his head. “Wind was awful and kept blowing me off course. But I did get a bit better than halfway and didn’t see the first sign of the Poles. No advancing troops, not in this direction.”

Izmailov turned to the mercenary sergeant. “Did your scouts see the entire army? This so-called ten-thousand-man army?”

“No,” Hampstead admitted. “My scouts saw the leading elements. About three thousand men. And that’s still more than my five hundred could face with any hope of victory.”

“How do you know it was the leading elements? Not the whole force?”

“The formation was spread out like a screening element. Why put a screening element out when there’s nothing to screen?”

The answer to that seemed obvious to Tim-to hide the fact that that was all you had. To bluff. Still, the sergeant’s point about the size of his force was well taken. Why bluff against a force of only five hundred men? Tim could think of two reasons. If the attacking force didn’t know how big the force in Rzhev was, they might try a bluff to get a force of a thousand or fifteen hundred to retreat and avoid a battle against an entrenched opponent. Two-to-one odds aren’t that great when the enemy is behind walls.

Or it could be that the bluff-if it was a bluff-was intended not for the sergeant but for… well, them. The relieving force. Tim looked over at the wagons holding Testbed and smiled.

General Izmailov was shaking his head. “There are a lot of reasons why you might arrange your troops in a pattern that will, at first sight, look like a screen…”

Though General Izmailov didn’t know it, the commander of the Polish invaders had not, in fact, formed his force into a screen. He had split his force into three columns of a thousand men to facilitate gleaning. The scout had spotted the center column and swung wide around it which had taken him right into the second column. He had assumed that the two columns were the ends of a large screening element but hadn’t checked.

There were four wagons in the dirigible contingent. One carried the dirigible while on the march-or served as a moving anchor for it, rather. The dirigible floated about fifteen feet above the wagon and was cranked down to ground level and tied down with spikes driven into the ground at night or in bad weather. That wagon also carried the pump that was used to compress hydrogen gas for the canisters. Another wagon carried equipment and materials for the production of hydrogen gas. A third carried equipment for field repairs and the fourth carried the repair crew. After the aborted trip, they spent two days worth of breaks on the march doing maintenance before they felt safe with the thing untethered again. General Izmailov was not pleased.

“I’m sorry, General,” Nick Ivanovich said. “But there is a reason we call the dirigible ‘ Testbed.’ It’s an experimental design to test concepts in aviation.” The term “aviation” was English but Izmailov was familiar with it by now. “To the best of our knowledge, nothing quite like it has ever existed in this or any other history. The engines are handmade by Russian craftsman, as are the lift bladders, the wings.”

Nick hid a grin. The designer would hate him calling the control surfaces “wings.” They weren’t designed to provide lift, but control. In fact, they provided a bit of both. The “wings” acted as elevators at the tail of the dirigible. More were located between the gondola and the motors. They didn’t provide much lift, but by pointing the dirigible’s nose up or down, he could gain or lose a little altitude without having to dump ballast or gas. Or use the emergency tanks to refill the lift bladders.

“They were well made, but by people who had no way to do more than guess about the stresses they would face. It’s steam powered and if they had steam powered dirigibles up-time, we haven’t heard about it. That’s why they built it-to see.”

“So why don’t we have an improved version or one of the airplanes that the up-timers have?” Izmailov sounded impatient and gruff.

“Engines, sir. Ours are both heavy and weak They wouldn’t get a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. There is one engine in Russia that might lift an airplane off the ground. That engine is in the car Bernie Zeppi brought to Russia.” This wasn’t entirely true, as Nick well knew. The engines they had built for the dirigible would get an airplane off the ground just fine. It was the added weight of the water, the boiler and the steam recovery that had so far made down-time-built steam-powered heavier-than-air craft impossible. Without the recovery system, a steam powered aircraft would work fine for a few minutes before the water was all used up. Water weighed a lot.

“So I will have the intelligence you can gather from your Testbed only when and if everything goes right? If nothing breaks on your toy and the weather is just right?” The general glared, then visibly shook himself. “All right, Captain. That’s all.”

The cavalry were equally unimpressed with the intelligence gathered by Nick. And more than a few of the cavalry were resentful. Scouting was a part of their function and, as far as they were concerned, the infantry was looking to take away the other part. They rode out almost gaily for the two days the dirigible was being repaired.

But, just like the dirigible, they found no traces of the enemy.