1636:The Kremlin games

Chapter 82

From Murom to the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers is about a hundred and thirty miles. They had left Murom at about eight in the morning as the sun was coming up. They had stopped for an hour at the telegraph station. However, they were going downriver, which gave them an extra two miles per hour. So they reached Nizhny Novgorod just before sunset.

The riverboat-more of a barge actually-was flat-bottomed and most of the time carried cargo. It carried quite a bit of cargo now and Czar Mikhail stood on top of the boxes for freight and waved to the people of Nizhny Novgorod as they went by.

Not knowing what else to do, the guards on the walls waved back. There was no question of shooting. The czar’s face was on every ruble note in Russia and there were a lot of notes. There were also a fair number of telescopes by now, and some of them were owned by the citizens of Nizhny Novgorod. The man standing on a box of freight and waving at them was indeed Czar Mikhail and many of the guards on the wall bowed.

The barge and the one following it rounded the bend into the Volga, turning east, and kept going, with the czar of all Russia continuing to wave. The ship was drifting to the north side of the river as it reached the tributary that led to Bor, only a mile or so away. Casually, it turned into that tributary and the czar kept waving. Now he waved to the workmen from the dirigible station. The men and women who had built the dirigible Czarina Evdoka now got to see the real thing, for the czarina had climbed up onto the box beside her husband in full royal regalia and was waving as well. There were even a few cheers.

Whatever silly thing they were doing, it wasn’t attacking. You don’t attack a place by standing in the open in plain sight and waving like a silly idiot. But sometimes you might divert attention from an attack by standing on a box and waving… if the circumstances are just right.

The barge the czar was on went right on by the dock at Bor, but the barge behind it didn’t. It hit the dock a little hard and the troops aboard it were almost jarred off their feet. They would have but for the captain’s warning at the last minute.

“ Move! ” came the very carrying squeak of young Lieutenant-now General-Lebedev.

Ivan had heard that squeak before. His friend’s voice tended toward the falsetto when he was excited. And suddenly he knew. He knew that the czar was here to take the dirigible, that Tim for whatever reason was on the czar’s side. And he knew. Knew for a certainty that he could stop him if he moved now.

And he froze.

Ivan had the vice of his virtues. General Sherman’s vice. The vice of a very smart man who, when taken unaware, will tend to overthink the problem rather than act when action is what is needed. It was why, in another universe, Sherman would be Grant’s subordinate, not the other way around. And that-not any silliness about good blood or bad blood, not even the accident of fate that had put Tim in the right place-was what made Tim, not Ivan, the czar’s general. Whose side was Ivan supposed to be on? Tim was on the czar’s, but Tim’s family was on the boyars’. Ivan could see in his mind what he had to do to stop Tim’s attack and what he could do to aid it and did neither. Not because he lacked courage or even moral courage. But because he needed time to think things through when they hit him out of the blue.

Captain Ruslan Andreyivich Shuvalov didn’t have that flaw, but he didn’t understand what was going on either.

“What the devil is he doing?” Ruslan wondered. The czar was sailing by, waving at everyone, and most of Ruslan’s people were watching him do it.

There was some minor disturbance down at the docks, but what did Czar Mikhail think he was doing?

It took Ruslan minutes he didn’t have to realize… “Oh my God. He’s the decoy! The czar of all Russia has let himself be used as a decoy!” And the decoy had succeeded. He’d locked Ruslan’s attention away from where it was needed.

At that point, Ruslan raised his rifle and sighted on Czar Mikhail. Then he stopped. It wasn’t because his target was the czar. At least not mostly. It was respect for the czar all right, but for the czar as a man. A man he had always thought of as good, but never until that moment thought of as brave.

Instead, finally, minutes too late, Ruslan turned to try to save his command. Grabbing a dozen men who happened to be standing near him watching the czar and the czarina wave from their barge, he shouted “Follow me!” and ran for the attackers.

“On me!” Ruslan shouted, blinking into the setting sun’s glare. “Push them back onto their boat!”

And he fired into the crowd of soldiers quick-marching up the street from the dock.

“Keep moving,” Ruslan heard a high, squeaking voice shout as he pulled the chamber from his AK4 and stuck it in his pocket. He pulled another chamber out, and looked up as he inserted it into the rifle. “Fire, fire!” he shouted. And his men did, all twelve of them.

Some of their rounds hit, for he saw men fall. But then that high, squeaking voice came again.

“Column halt! First rank, kneel! First and second rank, ready your weapons.” And the first and second ranks, at least thirty men, leveled their rifles at his scratch troop.

“Aim!”

And Ruslan heard his men turn and start to run. Ruslan looked back, looked at the troops across the street, then followed his men. Then the high, squeaking voice again. “Fire!”

That was the last he knew.

It was the ricochet that brought Ivan out of his frozen state. He couldn’t change sides this fast. He just couldn’t. But he also couldn’t fight his friend Tim and the Czar of Holy Mother Rus. So what can I do? he wondered. I can get Nick. Nick had been a friend since Ivan arrived, even though Ruslan had taken command on their arrival. Nick hadn’t held that against Ivan. He hadn’t even held it against Ruslan. And Nick was someone Ivan could talk to, so it was to Nick, not Ruslan, that Ivan went.

With ninety percent of the inhabitants of Bor still gawking at the czar and his family, mopping up took much less time than Tim had thought it would. Even with one of his men dead and three wounded, he was able to get the column moving quickly, by leaving the wounded under the command of Filip, who had a flesh wound of his own.

Once they reached the hangar, his men came to a halt without orders. Tim had heard how big the Czarina Evdokia was, but hearing and seeing were not the same. He spent several minutes assigning guards and trying to figure out where to assign guards. While he was still in the process of this, he saw Ivan and Nick approaching.

Ivan had run to the hangar because that was where Nick was being held, only to find David Sikorski, the Oprichniki assigned to this force, already there, getting ready to shoot Nick on the basis of “we’re in trouble and the only thing to do with prisoners is to kill them.” This was only one of the many obnoxious things the little man had said over the months they’d been assigned here.

Ivan talked him out of killing Nick by pulling his own pistol-a gift from Tim as it happened-and pointing it at David’s head. “I find I disagree with your position on killing prisoners when in dire circumstances.”

“I have my orders,” David said.

“I have my gun,” Ivan pointed out.

Nick started to laugh. “I think gun trumps orders.” Before David could move, Nick had pulled the pistol out of his hands.

David looked at Nick, then looked at Ivan, then ran. Ivan considered shooting him, fairly seriously, but he just couldn’t bring himself to shoot an unarmed man in the back. And, apparently, neither could Nick.

“So, Ivan,” Nick said, “what’s been happening?”

“Czar Mikhail has arrived,” Ivan said. “Sort of. He’s out in the middle of the channel.”

“This I have to see.”

“Ivan, Nick, come over here.” Tim couldn’t help smiling as he recognized his friends.

“Have you heard anything about Princess Natalia?” Nick asked. “I’ve been worried ever since they arrested me.”

“She’s on the barge with Czar Mikhail,” Tim said. “They’ll land as soon as we’re secure here.”

“And then what?” Ivan asked.

“That depends, Ivan. What’s the status of the Czarina Evdokia?”

“Mostly ready to fly. Certainly it can be made ready to fly by morning.”

“Very good, then. Czar Mikhail and Czarina Evdokia are going to take possession of their dirigible,” Tim said. “Nick will be placed in command and you can be my assistant.”

And that’s how Ivan came to defect, albeit accidentally.

It took a few more minutes to settle things, and Ivan got another shock when someone referred to Tim as “General.”

“That’s the signal,” Czar Mikhail said. The captain of the boat nodded and waved. There was a change in the sounds of the engines and the barge started backing up. It took a few more minutes and another change in direction to get the cargo barge docked.

The crowd followed the barge, and Czar Mikhail and Czarinia Evdokia continued to wave to them. As the crowd poured onto the docks, Bernie got a bit nervous. The czar was the czar, after all, and a crowd like that could have assassins sprinkled though it. Or just the random nutcase. Even if it didn’t, crowds were notorious for changing moods when they didn’t get precisely what they wanted. They should have had the docks guarded before they called the barge in. More poor planning. It came, Bernie knew, from lack of real experience. Unfortunately, most of the real experience was on the other side.

But the czar carried it off. He waved, he shook hands, patted people on the back, and these weren’t pushy fans at a rock concert. They were working Joes, seeing their monarch mostly for the first or maybe second time in their lives. They didn’t want to hurt him or the czarina. Just being noticed was a big deal. They got through the crowd and the people followed them as they walked up the dock to the shore and then up the street toward the hanger complex where the big dirigibles were built. It was a massive building, a cathedral of the air.

Impressive, but not pretty. An example of brute force and the massive investment of labor filling in the gaps of knowledge. But it stood, and it held a massive airship and the parts to make another. Finally, when they reached the hangar, the czar’s forces noticed and stopped the crowd, politely but firmly explaining that the czar and czarina needed to talk to their advisers.

In the massive hangar where Czarina Evdokia met her namesake, there was quiet. Tim, Nick, Tim’s friend Ivan, Filip Pavlovich, and a grizzled old Streltzi who had effectively become Tim’s sergeant major, were standing around talking quietly. They looked over at the new arrivals and started in their direction.

That was apparently when Anya noticed that Filip had been wounded because suddenly she was gone, moving like lightning to Filip’s side.

When Bernie got there, Nick and Tim were watching the scene, while Anya, oblivious to them all, fussed over the slightly wounded Filip, who was eating it up.

“I’m an astronaut or the closest thing Russia has in this century,” Nick said, in a tone of profound disgust. “And a war hero.”

“I’m a war hero too, and the youngest general in the history of Russia,” Tim agreed. “Even if the czar only gave me the rank because he didn’t have an army to give me.”

“And who gets the girl?”

“The nerd!” they said together in a harmony of disgust.

“What is the world coming to?” Bernie agreed, amused.

A few hours later, with Anya still fussing over Filip, they got down to business.

“Somebody tell me, please,” Nick whined, “why we’re going to Ufa. It’s the back of beyond.”

“Because we need a place that’s far enough out that it will be difficult for Sheremetev to just roll over it.”

“Ufa is on a river,” Ivan pointed out. “Doesn’t sound safe to me.”

“You’re right,” Tim said. “But who says we’re going to stay in Ufa? It’s just a… staging area. Well, not just a staging area. Ivan the Terrible built a fort there, you know. And it’s about as far upriver as you can go in one of the steam barges. You can get a little past it, yes, but it’s the last fortified position out that way. If we were to stop, say, at Nizhny Novgorod, one, Sheremetev would have to come after us. And two, it would be real easy for him to get here.”

Ivan nodded. “That’s true. So what you want to do is use Ufa as your border with Old Russia.”

“Exactly,” Czar Mikhail said. “Meanwhile, we will find a place that is difficult to reach save by dirigible and build a safe haven there. So what we want to do is ship as much to Ufa as possible by boat and barge, and then from Ufa we’ll take what we have to on to.. whatever place we find. That’s the basic outline. The details will have to be filled in as we go along. That will be Tim’s job. And yours.”