Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 13

Narva hovered in a wide clearing between two stands of pine and was slowly retracting the cargo basket after delivering the last of Troyak’s Marines. Captain Selikov had taken a risk to get the men closer to their objective, particularly when they saw the zeppelin duel to the south was slowly migrating north of Ilanskiy. He swung the airship a bit east, away from that action, and then turned south to approach Ilanskiy from the northeast, getting to within about 20 kilometers before Orlov, who was monitoring the Oko radar panel, reported that an airship had taken notice of them and was now heading in their direction.

“Then up we go,” said Selikov. “And we must be quick about it. We’re twenty men light, so that’s a lot of weight gone. We should be able to get up beyond 2000 meters in no time, but I would expect that contact is much higher.”

“I make it 4500 meters,” said Orlov.

“Then we go up as well. I can’t take the chance that they will get elevation on me. We’ve a lot of lift now, and I don’t think they can match us if it comes to a reach for altitude. Fifteen degree up-bubble and all engines ahead full. God speed to your Marines, Orlov. I don’t like the looks of this situation.”

“Nor do I,” said Orlov.

They made a rapid ascent, passing through 4000 meters in just ten minutes and still climbing. The other airship they had been monitoring was circling now, and Orlov wondered if they might also have them on some form of rudimentary radar. It can’t be seeing anything very well with this interference, he thought. My Oko panel is still only able to give me 50 kilometers coverage-very strange. That’s a third of its range and it is very resistant to jamming. What could be jamming us here in any case? Certainly nothing from this era.

Down on the ground Troyak called in on the radio. His voice was cloudy, but their modern equipment had the power to push through the static and maintain contact at this close range. The Marines were assembled and already moving out to the south. They had set down near a small logging hamlet, then skirted a high tree line that screened that place and started off, soon coming to a thin wagon trail, which they followed south.

The terrain was not bad, and there was a lot of open ground that had firmed up over the cold nights, which made for easy walking. Troyak took in the smell of the land, the trees and fauna, and was reminded of home. All the men felt it as well. They had finally set foot on Mother Russia again, after what seemed like an eternity aboard the ship. It gave them an eager feeling of completion, though the thought that they might be marching into a combat situation was somewhat distressing. They were no strangers to combat, veterans all, but these were not Germans like they had fought in the Caspian. They were their fellow Russians.

They made an easy six kilometers per hour and were coming up on another small settlement noted as Tamara on Troyak’s map. It was then that they heard the distant sound of small arms fire, and the mood of the men suddenly shifted to the purpose of their mission. Their senses keened up. Marines hefted their weapons, and Troyak moved from line of march to a two up, one back, deployment of his three squads. Zykov was on his left as he led the detachment forward into thick woods just south of the settlement.

This is good ground, he thought. We’ll easily skirt that hamlet and move through these woods like fish in water. An hour later the woods began to thin and break up into wide clearings, and the sound of a ground battle was more evident. Troyak saw that the trees thickened east of Ilanskiy where the rail line approached. There was a small stream that ran just north, and parallel to the rail, and it was well wooded, offering his men a perfect avenue to approach the town unseen. When they reached the end of this feature the ground opened again where segments of the woodland had been logged and cleared.

The Sergeant was in constant communication with Zykov and Chenko, who was leading the number three platoon behind him. He knelt, raising a silent fist as a signal to his own squad, which crouched low, waiting. Then he spoke through his collar microphone to Zykov.

“There’s fire on my right coming from that thicker woodland,” said Zykov.

There’s a flooded march just beyond it, and a causeway from the settlement north of that area leading right into town behind the railway inn.” Troyak was consulting his map. “So we’ll have to follow the rail line in. It will swing down and approach the inn from the southeast. I’ll lead. Bring your men up on my signal.”

Troyak checked his weapon, then waved his men on. They crouched low, moving like black shadows, out from the trees and along a narrow footpath that was leading them to the rail line. As they approached, Troyak suddenly heard men shouting in a dialect he recognized. They were reaching a culvert near a short stone rail bridge when a light machine gun opened up on them. Thankfully, the fire was not well aimed, but it sent his men to ground.

Troyak listened, recognizing some words from the Khanty dialect, one of 36 indigenous languages in the Siberian region. Troyak knew several, and many words from others, and this one was common along the Ob River valley. So he decided to try something, and raised his voice.

“Hey, watch out! Who are you shooting at?” He spoke in the same dialect.

Silence. The gun stopped. Then a hard voice spoke. “Who are you? State your unit.”

Troyak decided any designation would do, and he knew his map, so he extended the ruse further. “7th platoon,” he called out keeping that well open to interpretation. “We just came up from Nizhniy Ingash! What’s going on here?”

“What are your orders?” The voice was still hesitant.

“We need to get to that damn railway inn!” The truth served the Gunnery Sergeant well enough, and he just let it stand there.

“Anyone on your right?”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant.” Troyak knew who he was talking to now, another NCO in charge of this squad he was facing, and he had sized up the situation to understand that this was a reserve unit positioned behind the tree line to the north to watch these roads. He needed to convince this man he was a friend.

“Your flank is clear. We scouted the rail line the whole way in. Come on, you’re wasting time. We’ve got the heavy weapons.”

The other voice did not respond for a time, and then finally called back.

“Come up to the rail bridge!”

Troyak did not want to risk his men, so he decided to go alone. He signaled that they should remain in place, and moved up quietly to a small stand of trees just below the bridge. He saw movement ahead, through the bridged culvert, and surmised the other sergeant was there. Then he could see him, raising his fist in salutation.

“How many are you?” The other Sergeant still had a guarded edge to his voice. The sound of gunfire increased off to the north.

“I have three heavy squads,” Troyak said quickly.

“Come ahead then. The rail line is clear all the way to the town center.”

Then came the sound of heavy weapons fire, and Troyak looked up to see an amazing and unexpected sight. A huge steel grey zeppelin had descended from above the town, a vast shadow from above, and its black gondolas were spiked with gun barrels that were now pouring heavy rounds on the town’s defensive positions.

The battle that Troyak had crept up on was bigger than it sounded. West and north of the town, two companies of the Grey Legion 22nd Air Mobile, off the Oskemen, were attacking a single company of Karpov’s 18th Siberian Rifles. The remaining two Siberian companies had broken into six platoons stretched along the town’s northern edge, with good fields of fire over the lower wetlands to the north. But at least three more full companies of the 22nd were deployed to this sector. One was pushing in between the action farther west, and attempting to flank the extreme left of the Siberian line. Two others were trying to fight their way across a small causeway that Troyak had identified on his map earlier. If they won through they would soon swarm through the town center and easily overrun the railway inn. Troyak’s Marines had approached from the far right, where the Siberian line hooked south through a woodland area to the rail line.

Small arms and machine gun fire was already thick at the causeway, but the line had held, the stubborn Siberians holding tenaciously until the sudden appearance of the airship. Now it was blasting the Siberian positions from above with 76mm recoilless rifle fire from its main gondola, and a heavier gun up front on the bridge gondola.

Oskemen was back.

The crafty Petrov had swung south below the cloud deck while the Angara was struggling to descend and take up the chase as Karpov had ordered. He hid there until Angara came down after him, and once the two airships were feeling their way through the clouds at about 1000 meters, he fired flare rockets off his starboard side, then turned hard to port and dropped ballast for a fast climb. Oskemen broke into clear air, but when the Captain on the Angara spotted the flares slowly descending on parachutes, he took them for the running lights of his enemy, and maneuvered to gain position on them. When he fired his forward gun off the bridge gondola, Oskemen’s sharp eyed watchmen made out his position, and Petrov maneuvered off his tail.

Minutes later the Oskemen nosed down again into the soup, all guns blazing on the big fins and elevators of the Angara, returning the insult it had endured when first ambushed at the outset of the engagement. Yet Petrov’s gunners were very good, and they put three 105mm rounds into the big vertical rudder that completely jammed its useful operation. Angara could not maneuver, and could do nothing more than to climb into the thickening clouds and try to hide from the other ship, but Petrov had other business. He immediately turned south, racing to support the troops he had put onto the ground, and now he arrived in the thick of the assault on Ilanskiy, his heavy guns lending much needed fire support to the Grey Legionnaires.

Troyak had no idea which side he might support in this fight, but he was talking to this one, a fellow Siberian, and so he decided that he could do one thing to easily convince this cautious Sergeant that he was a friendly force.

“Hold on!” he called to the other man at the far end of the railroad bridge, still crouching low, suspicious of this sudden incursion on his flank in the midst of a firefight.

Troyak pinched his collar mike and delivered a quick order to Zykov. “Put a needle right through the main gondola on that airship!”

Zykov barked back the order and his SAM team of two men quickly off shouldered the hand held weapon, which looked like an old style bazooka, and was fired in much the same way. Seconds later the SAM streaked up at the big target above, boring right in on the main gondola as Troyak had ordered, and blasting through the thin shell with a bright orange explosion. One of the three 76mm guns there was destroyed completely, the other two pods riddled with shrapnel, and there was a fire amidships on the gondola that quickly involved the number three engine.

The Russians defending the town hooted jubilantly, their voices obviously surprised and delighted with what had happened. “Good enough, Sergeant?” Troyak shouted to the shadow by the bridge. “Come on! I need to get my weapons teams up and we’ll finish the job.”

He heard the other Sergeant shouting again in the dialect he understood, telling his men to stand down. With no time to lose, Troyak waved his squad forward, and the Marines rushed on, Troyak in the lead. They passed into the culvert and under the rail bridge, and saw the Siberian Sergeant staring sheepishly at these big, well muscled men in dark camouflage uniforms and mushroom top Kevlar helmets. Troyak grinned at the man, clasping him on the shoulder.

“There’s no one on your right, Sergeant,” he said. “But from the sound of things there’s a lot of action on the left flank. Follow me!”

They pushed on through the tree line, then skirted the rail line as it made a wide sweeping arc south and curved up towards the town center. Now he began to recognize the place again, for he and Zykov had searched a long hour for Fedorov when he had first gone missing here, though that seemed ages ago. Yes, thought Troyak, this is where we slapped that smart ass NKVD Lieutenant around, and made him clean out those box cars with his squad. No trains here today, and maybe no gulags further east either.

The place looked strangely empty, devoid of life and haggard with neglect. Ilanskiy was no longer a way station for Stalin’s prison trains. Stalin was dead.

Troyak saw the big airship come about, whistling to Chenko when he saw his men come up. “RPG-30!” He yelled, pointing at the airship. Chenko whistled and his squad soon had the weapon in action, which was a man portable 105mm anti-tank weapon that was so good it had come to be called the “Abrams killer.”

“Put one more round into that aft gondola and silence those guns.” Troyak pointed, and the RPG was quickly deployed, a light weight shoulder fired weapon that was designed to defeat reactive armor by firing a decoy rocket ahead of the main shaped charge. The RPG-30 could blast through 650mm of armor. It could smash through the side armor of the toughest battleship, and the zeppelin would pose no challenge in that regard. So Chenko disabled the decoy and instead selected a special long range thermobaric round that relied on the oxygen in the air to create a much enhanced explosion and fire, with a very strong shock wave.

The airship was about 500 meters above them, just within the 600 meter range of this special round. It blasted into the aft gondola, exploded, and blew it clean away, along with both 76mm gun mounts and the number five and six engines in the bargain. The sustained blast wave was so violent that it also blew away much of the duralumin frame above the gondola, and ignited a fire that would burn the Oskemen to a torrid death. The nose of the airship canted upwards as the fire consumed its tail. Fire and shock had ruptured most of the aft gas bags, and the higher buoyancy in the nose quickly pulled the ship’s front end up.

The Siberian squad that had come up with Troyak’s men gaped in awe at the sight of the massive airship in raging flames above, black smoke clouding out like sable blood. Only the two good engines on the forward bridge gondola were still running, and they slowly dragged the burning hulk of the airship northwest over the open ground beyond the village, where it began to fall. They saw long rope lines extending down from the undamaged nose segment, and men clinging to them, hoping to reach the ground before the blazing wreck of the ship as the Oskemen fell to its doom.

“Alright!” Troyak shouted at the Siberian Sergeant. “Take your men across the rail yard and work your way west. That’s your fight now. We’ll hold the town center.”

His manner was so commanding that the Siberians immediately obeyed, their rifle squads rushing across the rail yard and into the town beyond. Troyak smiled. Now to see what is happening at that damn railway inn.