1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 59

“General, the Poles are moving,” Tim said as he entered the tent.

“What?” the general had been taking a nap. He sat up on his cot. “Their cannon?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Very well. Give me ten minutes.”

By the time General Izmailov got to the walls, the Russian corridor was acting like a disturbed ant bed. Izmailov didn’t rush. He strolled. Exhibiting no hurry, he listened to reports as he went, stopped and greeted people. And, to an extent, the ant bed calmed. Actions became less frantic and more purposeful. When it was reported that the Polish cannon were moving into position, he quickened his pace and started giving orders.

“Get those guns in place!” The small rifled cannon of the Russians were moved into position, set up and loaded behind sections of wall. Ropes were attached to those wall sections so that they could be quickly moved out of the way.

“We’ll give it to them now, boys,” General Izmailov shouted. “Before they realize what hits them.”

The order was given while the Polish cannon were still out of effective range. Their effective range-not the effective range of the rifled breech-loading Russian guns.

The men on the ropes strained and the walls moved out of the way.

“Aim them! Don’t just point them randomly!”

The gunners took a moment to refine their aim.

“Fire!”

Boomcrack! Boomcrack! Boomcrack!

The small cannons sounded like they couldn’t make up their mind whether they were cannon or rifles. The rounds they fired were small, just under an inch across and three inches long. But they exited the Russian guns in a flat trajectory and hit very close to where their gunners aimed them. Two rounds struck the outer wagon of the Polish gun train. The third missed, but hit a wagon wheel which it shattered. Pointlessly, though, since the exploding powder wagons would have destroyed it a tenth of a second later anyway.

A Polish gunner lay on the ground, blown off his feet but otherwise uninjured, shaking his head less to clear it than in confusion. The Russian guns were half again out of a cannon’s effective range. But even as he lay there, he heard another boomcrack and the gun carriage of one of the six Polish nine-pound sakers was struck and damaged by another Russian round. The gunner, after due consideration, decided that where he was, was a rather good place to be. Much better than standing up next to the guns.

Aleksander Korwin Gosiewski was not so sanguine. In the midst of disaster, he saw what he wanted to see. The Russians had opened a breech in their wall to allow their cannons to fire. He decided that if he moved fast enough he could exploit the breech. He rapped out orders to Colonel Bortnowski and sent off the messenger. “Attack now. Go for the breech. Charge, curse you! Charge!”

Much against his better judgment, Colonel Bortnowski charged. In a manner of speaking, the charge of a pike unit is rather akin to the charge of a turtle. Slow and steady. Which may win the race and may even win a battle when it’s charging another pike unit. But when charging a wall two hundred fifty yards away and when that wall is manned by troops with rifled chamber-loading AK3’s that can be fired, have the chamber switched, then fired again several times, the charge of a pike unit becomes an organized form of suicide. Eventually, of course, the pikes broke. But not nearly soon enough. Their casualties were much worse than the casualties the Russian cavalry units had suffered just weeks before. Colonel Bortnowski was among the dead. They really should have used the Cossack cavalry, but it was in the wrong place.

The Polish force withdrew, but it was only temporary, as General Izmailov knew quite well.

“Gentlemen, our situation is untenable as it stands,” General Izmailov said. “We must take Rzhev and soon. Tim, I want you to coordinate with the unit commanders, start tightening the collar again. Get us salients as close to the to the walls of Rzhev as you can…”

The general described what he wanted and work began again. The plan was to get several points right up against the walls of Rzhev. That would still leave the problem of defending against a potential attack by the Polish relief force while using most of his force to breech the defenses of Rzhev. To attack effectively-and just as important, quickly-they would need overwhelming force against the troops occupying the town. To get that, they were going to have to virtually strip the outer golay golrod of fighting men. And like any fortification, no matter how temporary or permanent, the walking walls needed to be manned be effective.

Two weeks later they were in position and as ready as they were going to get. At the closest point the inner golay golrod was only twenty feet from the makeshift walls around Rzhev and there were five points where they were within fifty feet.

Nick gave a bit more steam to the right side engine to turn Testbed left. The winds were gusty. He had gotten word a week before that they would be making the attack on Rzhev today. His job was especially vital because to make it look real they had to know where the Polish forces were attacking long before it happened. He looked out and noted the position of a Polish cavalry unit.

Rrrrriiiipppppp!

Nick looked up and swore.

The gas bladders on Testbed were made of goldbeater skin. Those were made from the outer membranes of the intestines of large animals, usually though not always calves. Goldsmiths used them to beat out gold leaf. For goldbeater skin, the intestines were cut open and glued together a couple of layers thick. The sheets of goldbeater skin were mostly self-adhesive and formed into short, fat sausage shapes rather than round balloons. It had never occurred to anyone to wonder what would happen if you applied steam.

Granted, by the time the steam reached the steam bladder it had cooled quite a bit. On the other hand, the steam bladder on Testbed had by now been slow-cooking for several weeks. A little bit of extra steam pressure was all it took. Of course, it gave along the seams. As soon as the rip happened, the steam spread out still further and turned into mist, then started condensing onto the other gas bags in Testbed, where it did comparatively little harm. But the steam cell was gone; its lift was gone.

The gondola lurched. Nick swore again and reached for a lever to angle the thrust that remained to him.

The steam bladder, when filled and functioning properly, provided about five hundred pounds of lift to Testbed. The semi-rigid airship had just gone from neutral buoyancy to five hundred pounds negative buoyancy. Which didn’t mean it dropped like a five-hundred-pound lead weight. It was more like a five-hundred-pound feather. The steam bladder was located three-quarters of the way to the front of Testbed, just above the gondola, so naturally it nosed down. Which meant that the engines were pushing down as well. Airships dive like they do every other maneuver. Slowly. A similar disaster in an airplane would have given the pilot less than two minutes to fix the problem, as the plane nosed over and accelerated to over a hundred miles an hour straight down. Nick had a good five minutes before he would hit the ground.

First, reverse thrust on the steam engines. Nick shifted a couple of levers. Then, angling the thrust-he shifted more levers as he continued to lose altitude. Shift the trim weight. More work. He had to crank it back to the tail of Testbed. In doing these things, Nick lost about two thousand feet of altitude.

“It’s coming right at us!” one man screamed.

The big balloon looked to the Polish troops on the ground like it was making a slow-motion dive-bombing run-not that they had ever seen a dive-bombing run of any sort. The nose of Testbed was pointing straight at them and it was billowing white smoke. Steam, actually, but they didn’t know that.

“Fire, you bastards! Fire!”

Chaos reigned for minutes. Some of the men decided to be elsewhere, but a surprising number stood their ground and started shooting.

Testbed was still out of what could reasonably be considered effective range of a seventeenth-century musket. At that range a seventeenth-century musket couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. But Testbed was significantly bigger than the broad side of a barn. Even a big barn. Inevitably, it got hit several times. Bladders filled with hydrogen were struck by musket balls. And nothing much happened. To get hydrogen to explode takes three things, hydrogen, oxygen and a spark. The hydrogen and oxygen need to be mixed together fairly well to get any kind of significant flame. But the crucial issue here was the lack of a spark. The lead shot back from the muskets was indeed still quite hot, but not that hot. Besides, there was all that steam condensation on the bladders and the skin of Testbed.

“Nothing’s happening! It’s still coming!”

By the time Nick had Testbed leveled out, it had a couple of dozen holes poked in the skin and three of its four hydrogen bladders had been punctured. But it took a long time for the hydrogen to leak out of a balloon forty feet across. Testbed continued on, as best anyone on the ground could tell, totally unaffected by the shots fired at it.

As best anyone on the ground could tell.

“Stupid fools,” Nick said. Testbed was losing lifting gas and was already negatively buoyant. Further, it was not recovering any of the steam it was using to run the engines. So while Nick had hours of fuel left, he had five or ten minutes of water and when that ran out, he would lose power. Nick headed for base.

He didn’t make it. He literally ran out of steam just over halfway there. Absent the engines that had been holding him up, he started to sink, fairly slowly, to the ground. Nose first.

Back at the battle, Gosiewski saw his opportunity but had some difficulty exploiting it. After the disastrous attack of the first day there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for frontal attacks on the golay golrod. It took a while to get things organized.