“Hey man, it’s no big deal,” he said, putting away the gun. “If you got dibs on her, I’ll back off.”
Cass knew he was smarter than Bernie. He hadn’t done well in school, but that was because school just bored him. Besides, he was a football star. He didn’t need to bust his hump in English class. He knew he could pick up what Bernie was doing pretty quick. He could probably push Bernie out, if he wanted to. But he wasn’t going to put up with much crap from the dumb-ass down-timers. Not him. Not ever.
Chapter 42
Cass winced at the bright sunshine when he walked out the door three mornings later. “Oh, man, that hurts.”
“Think you might want to be a little more careful with the booze?” Bernie’s smirk was irritating. “Sun shining off snow can really dazzle you, but the biggest part of your problem is your hangover. Three days and three hangovers. No wonder it hurts.”
“Maybe,” Cass muttered. Drinking was about the only thing he was enjoying. Well, that and the girls. Every place they stayed had servant girls. Even staying away from Bernie’s boss-and wasn’t it a laugh that a girl was the boss in Russia-wasn’t hard, not when you had all those other girls around.
Bernie put on his heavy coat. “You ready? Let’s get a move on. This trip is taking forever. I wish the car was running, I really do. Steering and braking with no power while being towed behind a team of horses is a real pain.”
“What did you expect? The thing sat on blocks for years, man.” Cass snorted. “Let’s go. Get to this Dacha place and see if you can get it running.”
Hours in the carriage with only a couple of troops who didn’t speak English was a real bore. But Cass didn’t want to ride on one of the carts out in the open and especially didn’t want to be on horseback. Too cold for that, by half. It was the usual order today. Out ahead of everyone, a double column of ten guards on horseback spread out. Then came the rolling stock. First came the fancy-ass sleigh that the women were in. Cass hated to admit it, but it was actually kind of neat. Boxy, but still sort of streamlined and buffed to a high gloss. Then Bernie was freezing his ass off in that old junker of his. Cass was behind Bernie’s car in his carriage. Then all the carts with all the stuff the Gorchakov dude had sent. At the end of the line there were six more guards. Plus guards in some of the rolling stock.
Bernie patted the dash. “Oh, yeah. Once I get it running it will be able to do thirty miles an hour at least. Even on these roads and pulling a bunch of stuff.”
Vladislav Vasl’yevich was riding beside Bernie’s car just then. Partly because he was actually interested in how it worked and could see lots of military applications for these motorized vehicles. Mostly, though, over the course of a day’s travel, he would spend time all along the column. He checked everything, several times a day, to make sure everything was working and looked for trouble before it happened.
Vladislav had seen and reported on hundreds of military applications in the time that Bernie had been at the Dacha. He hadn’t exactly been ignored. The czar now had a. 30–06. It was handmade with gold engraving, but there was a very limited supply of bullets. There were people making new guns, flintlocks, but only in small numbers, as experiments. There were the war games in the Kremlin. But in Vladislav’s opinion the military had been slow to consider the potential usefulness of the up-timers’ innovations in weapons and tactics.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing that…” Vladislav stopped at the shout from the front of the column and shots ringing out. “Bandits! To the knyazhna.” He looked around to assess the situation.
The road here curved from southeast to east. The bandits had either been spotted by the guards out in front or had sortied too early. Probably spotted-that shout had been Petr Kadian’s. It was a large party, it must be. This many trained solders wouldn’t be easy to overcome. From the noise, there were probably around thirty or forty bandits. Most were hitting the front of the column, and the outriders on the north side, which was the inside of the curve. That meant that Vladislav’s men were more spread out than the bandits were and the bandits could react a little faster. Vladislav noted in passing that Bernie was trying to get his. 30–06 out of the back seat of the car. That could help, depending on how Bernie held up in combat.
Surprisingly, the other outlander, Cass, was out of his carriage and running toward Bernie’s car. “Get down!” Vladislav shouted. “Get down before you get shot!”
What was the man doing? Vladislav wondered. He was playing with the back of Bernie’s car. The back of the car opened like a great mouth, hiding Cass from Vladislav’s view.
There hadn’t been bandits in this area for years. It was too well patrolled. Not out of fear of bandits, but to provide warning of an attack by Poland. Vladislav waved to the embassy bureau troops who were bringing up the rear. “To the knyazhna! Don’t worry about the carts, protect Natalia Petrovna and Bernie!” They could probably replace the stuff in the carts if they had to, but they had to protect the princess and Bernie. Vladislav shot one of the bandits and dropped the pistol. He drew the second. He always carried one in each boot and two in his belt.
“ Yeeeehaaaw! ”
Vladislav looked around, startled by the scream. Cass had reappeared from the back of Bernie’s car and was carrying a long gun of some sort. He was running at the woods on the north side of the road, screaming like a banshee. Clickety boom, came the noise. And again. Clicktey boom. Clicktey boom. Two bandits were down, one with most of his head blown away. Vladislav watched as Cass cut to the right. Clickety boom. Cut left. Clickety boom. Cass ran in some sort of wild pattern that the attackers couldn’t follow. Neither could Vladislav.
Crack. A different noise sounded. One of the bandits fell from a horse. Since most of the bandits had been on foot, Vladislav figured he was probably their leader. They should have been paying attention to Bernie instead of Cass, who stood behind his car taking well-aimed shots at the attackers. He was propped up on the front of it, rather. Vladislav could see his head and shoulders. The bandits would be lucky to see his head, or the. 30–06 that was killing them. It would take a special miracle to actually hit a target that small.
Bernie had frozen for a moment, when the attack began, immobilized by another flashback to the battle of the Crapper. But as he usually did, he managed to shake it off quickly. Store it away, rather; he never did really shake off those memories.
A familiar detachment came over him. He reached over the back seat, got his rifle, opened the glove compartment and took out a box of ammo. Then he got out of the car and took position using the hood as a firing stand.
Immediately, he spotted a man on horseback and shot him out of the saddle. Then he looked for Cass. The idiot had managed to take out at least two attackers because they’d been completely caught off guard by his broken field charge and weren’t accustomed to the rate of fire of an up-time pump-action shotgun. But they were fighting men and they were all around him. Bernie could see a bandit already taking aim at Cass from the side.
Bernie took him down. One shot. All he needed. He wasn’t in the league of someone like Julie Sims when it came to sheer marksmanship but he was very steady in a fight. At this close range and with a modern rifle, that was plenty good enough.
Lowry gunned down another bandit at point blank range. But for the first time one of his opponents fired back before he fell. He missed because Lowry’s rush unsettled him, but they wouldn’t all miss.
There was another bandit just beyond Cass, aiming at him. Bernie took him down. A bandit next to him. He went down too.
Another flashback paralyzed Bernie for an instant. Furiously, he drove it under. But he’d been out of it long enough for Cass to shoot down another bandit-and three bandits to fire at him.
Blind luck-Cass lost his footing and fell. The bullets passed harmlessly over him. He hadn’t done that intentionally, though. In fact, it was obvious he hadn’t even seen the three men to his left.
Bernie shot one of them. The other two immediately ducked for cover. Bernie fired two more shots to keep them down, giving Lowry a chance to get away. Then he started reloading the rifle.
Vladislav looked around again. The situation wasn’t as bad as it had at first appeared. The attackers had
