1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 57

August 1634

To supplement their rations, the Streltzi with their new AK3’s went hunting between villages. Russia was sparsely populated compared to the rest of Europe and there was quite a bit of game. Captain Boyce and his sergeant were impressed with the guns. When they asked Tim about it, he called on one of the Streltzi to do a show-and-tell.

Daniil Kinski set the butt of the AK3 on the ground and the tip of its barrel came not quite to his shoulder and Daniil Kinski was a short man. If any of them had been familiar with the up-time weaponry, they would have thought of the AK3 as the illegitimate child of a Kentucky long-rifle and a Winchester 73. Like the long-rifle, the AK3 was a flintlock, and like the Winchester it had a lever action. But the AK3 had a removable firing chamber. Daniil lifted the AK3 and showed them how the chamber was removed. He opened the lever action chamber lock and pulled out the chamber.

“The chamber, as you can see, is a steel case, two and a half inches long including the quarter inch lip that inserts into the bore of the barrel. Behind the lip, the front of the chamber is flat and supposed to fit flush to the bottom of the barrel. It doesn’t always fit as flush as we’d like, so we made some leather gaskets.” He pulled the gasket off the chamber and showed them. “We still have the flash from the pan and the touch hole, but that’s no worse than any flintlock.”

Daniil stuck the gasket back on the chamber, then opened the frizzen and tapped the touch hole of the chamber on the pan to prime it. He closed the frizzen, inserted the chamber in the rifle, then he pulled the lever up flush with the stock which pushed the back block forward, forcing the lip of the chamber into the barrel. Finally, he cocked, aimed, and fired.

Crack!

Then he opened the chamber lock, pulled the chamber out, stuck it in his pouch, primed the pan with a loaded chamber, inserted the loaded chamber with a gasket already on it into the AK3, closed the lock, aimed, and fired again.

Crack!

Relative to muzzle-loading a musket it was very fast. Plus, since both shots had been aimed, they had both hit the tree that was his target… some eighty yards away from where they were standing.

Daniil pulled the second chamber from the AK3, then leaned the rifle against a tree while he showed them how to reload the chambers. Daniil filled the chamber with a measured amount of black powder then pulled out a lead cylinder. “It doesn’t use a round ball, it uses a Krackoff ball.” Which, an up-time observer would note, had a certain resemblance to a Minie ball, in that it was a cylinder with one flat end and the other rounded. But it fit snugly into the chamber.

“Push down till the Krackoff ball is flush with or a little below the lip of the chamber,” Daniil said. The chamber had an oddly-shaped back end and Daniil showed them how it fit into the back block of the chamber lock. It was designed to fit into the AK3 only in such a way that the touch hole lined up with the flint lock on the side of the rifle. “It can be inserted into the rifle with your eyes closed and the touch hole will still line up,” Daniil told them. It was an impressive demonstration.

A week later, while Tim and his crew were still collecting boats on the Volga, the Russian force surrounded Rzhev. In a way, General Izmailov was surprised. His force seriously outnumbered the forces in Rzhev and he had half-expected the commander of the Polish mercenary force to realize that and withdraw.

Janusz Radziwill had considered doing just exactly that. His officers had suggested it. However, Janusz was a young man who had already thrown the dice. If he retired from the game now, things could get really difficult at home. Besides, the ease with which they had dispatched the cavalry suggested that they could hold and break the Russians against their recently built ramparts. So he allowed General Izmailov to reach the town, hoping to bait him into to another rash attack.

General Izmailov didn’t take the bait. Instead, he surrounded the Polish encampment and started fortifying, using the golay golrod, the walking walls. Now it came down to a question of who would be reinforced first.

“What are those things and what good are they?” Tim looked up at the badly accented Russian. It was the sergeant from the mercenaries. Ivan-no, John was the English form-John Charles Hampstead. He must not have been near Moscow during the testing. The army had been encamped around Rzhev for about five days when they arrived.

The mercenaries of Captain Boyce’s company had done a decent, if not spectacular job. “ Golay golrod. Walking walls, you might say, or walking forts.”

Hampstead said, “Fine. That’s what they are. What good are they?”

A group of peasant draftees were pushing one of the golay golrod into position. Tim pointed at them. “They are made of heavy plywood. They let us build fortifications very quickly. In winter we can even put them on skis for ease of movement. Right now, of course, they’re on wheels…” Tim’s voice trailed off. He thought a moment.

It was heavy plywood. The panels were a good three inches thick. The wheels could even be turned a little bit. And that’s what the workers were doing now. They were pushing the wall back and forth to maneuver it into a gap in the wall. Since the walls were a lot more likely to stop a bullet if it hit them at an angle, they were being set up at an angle to the city wall around Rzhev. Since the workers were filling in a gap in the wall, they were quite prudently staying behind the wall they were moving. Even if they had been in effective range of the Polish muskets-which they weren’t-all the Poles would be able to see was the wall. Not that the workers seemed convinced of that. They were peasants, not soldiers of any sort. They weren’t armed and weren’t expected to fight, but were here to carry supplies, set up camp, and other support roles.

Tim realized that the workers were right. If they had been on the other side of the golay golrod, they would have been shot at and, if unlucky, hit. But the way they were doing it they were, if not perfectly safe, close to it. There was a narrow gap, less than half a foot, between the bottom of the wall and the ground. But to hit a target that size with the kind of muskets Hampstead and his men had, would take a lucky shot at ten yards.

That’s when the plan began to come together. Not all at once, but in pieces. Tim could see the walls being shoved, one in front of the other… making a partial wall between their present position and Rzhev. But how would they get back? More walls. It came together in his mind. A slowly shrinking siege wall. A tightening noose around Rzhev. As the noose got tighter, the dead zone between the siege walls and the city walls would get smaller. He forgot, almost, that this was real, not a war game played at the Kremlin. Forgot, almost, that he was the most junior of aides to the general. Almost… but not quite. So it was with great humility and trepidation that he approached General Izmailov.

The general listened. Why not? It was a siege and he had nothing else to do at the moment except for smoothing over disputes of precedence or paperwork that his secretary could do better. After due consideration, he decided that it was the beginnings of a possibly very good plan. They would have to take into account that the golay golrod were less than completely effective when hit face-on by enemy fire. So rather than a tightening noose, it would be more like a spiked collar with the spikes on the inside.

Back in Moscow, things were not going well. The same people who would have wanted General Izmailov’s head for denying Colonel Khilhov the opportunity to rid Russia of the Polish invaders now wanted his head for “ordering” it. Calls for his removal were brought up in both the Zemsky Sobor and the Boyar Duma. Others were afraid of offending the Poles and bringing about a repeat of the events of the up-time Smolensk War by squandering resources. Still others pointed out that the size of the invasion had been grossly overestimated. The close to ten thousand men that General Izmailov had should be plenty. Between the three factions, they blocked any attempt to send reinforcements. And almost blocked resupply.