“How likely is he to trounce you this time if it comes to a shooting war?” Reverend Green wanted to know.
“I wish I knew,” the colonel said. “The patriarch was sure that we would win before Prince Gorchakov sent his letter, and we might have been in a shooting war before now if Sigismund III had died this time around when he did in that other history. But he lasted six months more. Boyar Sheremetev was less convinced of our chances in a shooting war and remains so. At the same time, we have learned a lot from the Dacha and the Gun Shop. Even from those silly board games they are playing in the Moscow Kremlin now. Still, it will be better for all if we can reach a negotiated settlement.”
Which was, Kseniya knew, the stance of the Sheremetevs and their supporters. None of them had any way of knowing it, but just then a young lieutenant named Timofeivich was reporting to his general in a place called Rzhev.
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 Minié 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 Radziwiłł 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.