In the massive hangar where Czarina Evdokia met her namesake, there was quiet. Tim, Nick, Tim’s friend Ivan, Filip Pavlovich, and a grizzled old Streltzi who had effectively become Tim’s sergeant major, were standing around talking quietly. They looked over at the new arrivals and started in their direction.
That was apparently when Anya noticed that Filip had been wounded because suddenly she was gone, moving like lightning to Filip’s side.
When Bernie got there, Nick and Tim were watching the scene, while Anya, oblivious to them all, fussed over the slightly wounded Filip, who was eating it up.
“I’m an astronaut or the closest thing Russia has in this century,” Nick said, in a tone of profound disgust. “And a war hero.”
“I’m a war hero too, and the youngest general in the history of Russia,” Tim agreed. “Even if the czar only gave me the rank because he didn’t have an army to give me.”
“And who gets the girl?”
“The nerd!” they said together in a harmony of disgust.
“What is the world coming to?” Bernie agreed, amused.
A few hours later, with Anya still fussing over Filip, they got down to business.
“Somebody tell me, please,” Nick whined, “why we’re going to Ufa. It’s the back of beyond.”
“Because we need a place that’s far enough out that it will be difficult for Sheremetev to just roll over it.”
“Ufa is on a river,” Ivan pointed out. “Doesn’t sound safe to me.”
“You’re right,” Tim said. “But who says we’re going to stay in Ufa? It’s just a… staging area. Well, not just a staging area. Ivan the Terrible built a fort there, you know. And it’s about as far upriver as you can go in one of the steam barges. You can get a little past it, yes, but it’s the last fortified position out that way. If we were to stop, say, at Nizhny Novgorod, one, Sheremetev would have to come after us. And two, it would be real easy for him to get here.”
Ivan nodded. “That’s true. So what you want to do is use Ufa as your border with Old Russia.”
“Exactly,” Czar Mikhail said. “Meanwhile, we will find a place that is difficult to reach save by dirigible and build a safe haven there. So what we want to do is ship as much to Ufa as possible by boat and barge, and then from Ufa we’ll take what we have to on to.. whatever place we find. That’s the basic outline. The details will have to be filled in as we go along. That will be Tim’s job. And yours.”
Chapter 83
“Because you must!” David Sikorsky shouted. “The Boyar Duma has ordered the arrest. Director-General Sheremetev wants these people stopped!”
“One of those people,” the commander of the Nizhny Novgorod Streltzi snarled, “is the czar of Holy Rus. And if he wants to go, I’m letting him go.”
David pulled out his emergency pistol. “The patriarch has proclaimed that the czar is under a spell!”
“Didn’t look like it to me,” the commander said.
“Can you imagine Czar Mikhail standing on a barge, waving to peasants? Of course he was under a spell! Send a radio message. You’ll get confirmation from Moscow.” David rubbed his eyes. It had not been a good evening so far.
After making his way to the Volga River, stealing a rowboat, rowing across the river, and having to walk a mile back to Nizhny Novgorod, he had to deal with these uncultured cretins. He had bribed his way into the commander’s office and had some support among the officers. Much of the service nobility was unhappy with the changes that Czar Mikhail had proclaimed since his escape from the hunting lodge. The loss of serfs would ruin some of these men and probably do some harm to all of them.
“Just listen to me,” David finally got out. “What the czar is being forced to do will destroy all order in Russia. We’ll be back to the Time of Troubles. Radio Moscow. There will be great rewards for those who support me in this.”
And they did. It took most of the rest of the night, but by the next morning David had his force. It was barely two hundred men, perhaps fifty of the service nobility and one hundred fifty of the Streltzi.
The next morning at the docks, they loaded up the ferry that ran to and from Nizhny Novgorod and Bor, and began taking men across the river.
“Don’t overload her!” Nick shouted. “I know she’s big, but she’s not a boat!”
“Are you sure this thing is safe?” Tami Simmons muttered to Bernie. “I don’t want my husband and kids, not to mention me, falling out of the sky.”
“Safer than any airplane in this century,” Bernie said. “And that guy over there is probably one of the most experienced dirigible pilots in the world.”
“And just how much experience are we talking about?”
Nick shrugged. “Not a lot. Maybe two hundred hours. But he’s the best we’ve got, and that’s the quickest way out.”
“Maybe we ought to take the steamboat,” Gerry Simmons said.
“Okay by me,” Bernie said. “But you’re the ones who have to talk to the czar and czarina about it.”
“Well, scratch that idea,” Tami sighed. “Alexsey is running a little fever.”
“Troops!” someone shouted. “Troops landing!”
“Landing where?” Bernie shouted back.
“On the banks of the Volga,” said Petr Kadian, one of the Gorchakov deti boyars. “That way!” He pointed.
Tim headed for him. “How many? What strength?”
Tim followed Petr Kadian down the street to where he could see the troops forming up down by the river, though forming up seemed rather a generous overstatement of the sort of milling mob that was down by the river. Part of that feeling was because Tim was a professional. Not a very old or experienced one, but a professional nonetheless. Part of it was that he was still very young and most of his experience was with game pieces, not men.
All of which didn’t mean that Tim wasn’t right. The force that David had raised in Nizhny Novgorod was only partly Streltzi and not the better part of Nizhny Novgorod’s Streltzi. They were filled out by peasants who had very little training. If they had been defending their city walls, they would have been fine. If they had been called up to fight off an invasion with time to get used to the idea, they might have done all right. But they had been drafted into a scratch force to go arrest the czar-and in one night. They weren’t sure if they should be obeying this stranger, whatever the radio telegraph said. Why should they trust the radio? It was new, it was a device, not a person they knew. They had seen the czar standing on a steam barge just the day before. They liked him. He had waved to them and so had the czarina. They really wished that political officer from Bor had just, well, stayed in Bor and not bothered them.
So they milled around, argued about where to stand and who was in front and who was behind in the line of march, and hoped that they would be too late. Tim didn’t know that was what was happening. He wasn’t experienced enough to know what was happening just by looking, but he was bright and had the right instincts. There was something very weak-looking about the force he was facing. He didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it. It was a big force. Almost twice as big as he had been expecting, something like two hundred men. But they didn’t have the AK4’s he’d been expecting. Two-thirds of them didn’t even have AK3’s; they had old match-lock muzzle-loaders. “Come on. Let’s form the men up,” he said to Petr Kadian.
That proved unnecessary. By the time they got back to the hangar, Ivan had the men they had brought with them from Murom formed up with the help of Princes Natasha’s more experienced guardsmen.
