“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.
Chapter 60
Sergeant John Hampstead looked over at his captain. “They’ll be coming, sir. Now that the balloon is gone.”
“I know.” The captain nodded. “But where?”
Hampstead shrugged. “Maybe on the left. There are some gaps on that side. Sure as hell, we can’t be everywhere.” Their unit had been left on the outer wall to stiffen the peasant levies which were unarmed, just there to make it look like the wall was manned. The peasants had sticks painted to look like rifles and muskets, because the Russian government wasn’t keen on arming peasants. Armed peasants tended to turn into Cossacks or bandits. Not that there was much difference between the two.
So Sergeant Hampstead and Captain Boyce had been assigned to go to wherever the Poles attacked and shoot so that it looked like the whole wall was manned by armed troops.
Captain Boyce nodded again. “It’s as good a place as any, John. Start shifting the men.” They could hear shooting from behind them. The Russians were in Rzhev and would be occupied for hours cleaning out the Polish troops in the town. If the outer wall was to hold, it would be them that held it.
* * *
“Form the men just inside the wall! We’re going to wait right there.”
“What about the firing ports, Captain?”
“I’m getting sneaky, John,” Captain Boyce told his sergeant. “As important as holding this part of the wall is, convincing the Poles that we are just one of the units manning them is just as important. We need to give them a reason why the other parts of the wall aren’t shooting.” Then he turned to the peasant levies. “Who’s in charge here?”
Having identified the man, Boyce explained what he wanted. “Tie ropes onto the golay golrod. When I give you the word I want you to pull these two sections apart. As quickly as you can. Then when I tell you, push them closed again.”
Then man nodded and started giving orders. It would give them a roughly twenty-foot front. “John, two ranks only and keep the pike men in reserve. Have the men fire as the golay golrod clear the breech. Then fall back as soon as they have fired. Reload and reform as the walls come back together.”
* * *
It didn’t go like clockwork. Unless you were talking about a clock with a busted arrester gear.
“Open!” The walls started coming back with dozens of men pulling each wall. The troops started firing. Blam Blam, Blam Blam, and the walls retreated. And they did a credible job at first of retreating behind the golay golrod but then things went awry. Some men kept going, others stopped too soon and the walls caught up and passed them, leaving them exposed to enemy fire. Almost no one had time to reload because they were too busy moving. Then there were the Polish troops—who had been taking sniper fire from those walls for weeks. As best Boyce could tell, no one gave the order but the Polish formation went into a charge as the walls opened. They took casualties, lots of them, since Boyce’s troops were firing from pointblank range. But the Poles saw the breech and ran right over their fallen to get to it.
Boyce ordered the wall to close before it was all the way opened. But it wasn’t soon enough. The walls didn’t close all the way; they were blocked by Polish troops.
Boyce on one side and Hampstead on the other, they struggled to reform the men and close the breech. They weren’t alone. The Russian peasants, armed with whatever was handy, were right there with them.
* * *
Ivan didn’t really know why he’d been assigned to this wall section, or even why he’d been pulled away from his farm. But one thing he did know was that Polish forces loose in Russia were a bad thing. He’d been hearing the stories all his life, how the Poles had decimated his village and killed his grandfather.