When they got to a section that the Russians mostly controlled, Tim used the volley gun platform and scaled the wall. This time he almost got chopped up by a Russian peasant with a bloody ax and covered with gore. “Open the walls! Open the latches! Let the volley guns through!” And, surprisingly enough, that’s just what they did.
The Russian version of the volley gun was an outgrowth of the same technology used in the AK3. The plates were loaded with AK3 firing chambers and were ignited by a quick fuse. They were slower firing than the ones in the west, but Russia was still having trouble with primers. They had twenty-four barrels arranged in three rows of eight. If all went well, the preparatory work was done on the chamber plates before the battle started, so all that was needed to reload was to pull a chamber plate and replace it with another before lighting the fuse. They were cranked, but only for traversing.
The last Russian slipped from in front of the volley gun. The gunner lit the fuse and started cranking. Crack Crack Crack Crack . . . twenty-four barrels in order. Then the gunner pulled the plate, inserted another and did it again. The gunners for the volley guns were big men. The plates weighed upwards of thirty pounds.
The volley guns wouldn’t have been enough by themselves, but they took the pressure off the Russian troops long enough for a semblance of organization to occur. Unarmed peasants retreated to be replaced by armed Streltzi carrying AK3’s, and the weight of fire shifted. The battle for Rzhev was effectively over.
Chapter 61
“Lieutenant, you are to report to the general’s quarters.”
Two weeks after the battle, things had stabilized. Rzhev was surrounded by three walls, one inside the other. The Rzhev wall that had been built in a somewhat haphazard manner by the Poles and the two layers of golay golrod together constituted a fairly formidable defensive network. Starving the victorious Russians out would take time. Meanwhile, the walls were bolstered by sand bags and firing platforms. Neither Tim nor General Izmailov had yet had occasion to mention Tim’s orders to the volley guns, given in the general’s name. Tim had been starting to hope—against his better judgment—that the general was going to let the whole thing pass.
“What am I going to do with you, Lieutenant?” General Izmailov sighed rather theatrically. “I have been reading a translation of an up-time book on a French general who had an elegant solution for this situation. He was dealing with a general, not a lieutenant, who acted on his own authority. At their base, the situations are quite similar. Bonaparte’s elegant solution was to give the general a medal to acknowledge his achievement.” There was a short pause but Tim knew he was far from out of the woods.
General Izmailov continued, “Then, to maintain good order and discipline in the army, he had the man shot for disobeying orders.” General Izmailov paused again and waited. Tim remained silent.
“What do you think of Bonaparte’s solution, Lieutenant? I could have you a medal by sunset.”
Tim hesitated, looking for the right words. “I can’t say it appeals to me, sir. But I grant that the solution has a certain, ah, symmetry.” He stopped. Tim really wanted, right then, to bring up the political consequences to the general should he find it necessary to execute a member of a family of such political prominence, even a minor member of a cadet branch. He didn’t, though, partly because it would sound like a threat—probably not a good tactics against someone like Izmailov—but mostly because Tim understood that while what he had done was the right thing for that battle, it was the wrong thing for the army. He had sat in Testbed and watched as Colonel Khilkov used his family position to destroy a couple of Russian cavalry regiments. He knew as well as General Izmailov that if word got out, his example would be used to justify every harebrained glory-hound for the next hundred years. Who knew how many people that would kill? Tim had known when he was doing it that it would cost him, but not how much.
“For political reasons I can’t use Bonaparte’s elegant symmetry. You will get neither the medal nor the firing squad. Those political reasons are only partly to do with your family.” General Izmailov gave Tim a sardonic smile. “I will take the credit for your brilliant move and it may save my life when I must explain to the Boyar Duma my acquiescence to Colonel Khilkov’s less-than-brilliant actions. We will say that it was a contingency plan. You will get a promotion, then you will receive the worst jobs I can come up with for some time to come. You will accept those jobs without complaint! Understand me, Lieutenant. You deserve the medal you will never get, but you also deserve the firing squad that you won’t face this time. Don’t make the same mistake again.”