Kirov Saga: Hinge Of Fate: Altered States Volume III (Kirov Series) (15 page)

“There’s fire on my right coming
from that thicker woodland,” said Zykov.

There’s a flooded march just
beyond it, and a causeway from the settlement north of that area leading right
into town behind the railway inn.” Troyak was consulting his map. “So we’ll
have to follow the rail line in. It will swing down and approach the inn from
the southeast. I’ll lead. Bring your men up on my signal.”

Troyak checked his weapon, then
waved his men on. They crouched low, moving like black shadows, out from the
trees and along a narrow footpath that was leading them to the rail line. As
they approached, Troyak suddenly heard men shouting in a dialect he recognized.
They were reaching a culvert near a short stone rail bridge when a light machine
gun opened up on them. Thankfully, the fire was not well aimed, but it sent his
men to ground.

Troyak listened, recognizing some
words from the Khanty dialect, one of 36 indigenous languages in the Siberian
region. Troyak knew several, and many words from others, and this one was
common along the Ob River valley. So he decided to try something, and raised
his voice.

“Hey, watch out! Who are you
shooting at?” He spoke in the same dialect.

Silence. The gun stopped. Then a
hard voice spoke. “Who are you? State your unit.”

Troyak decided any designation
would do, and he knew his map, so he extended the ruse further. “7th platoon,”
he called out keeping that well open to interpretation. “We just came up from
Nizhniy Ingash! What’s going on here?”

“What are your orders?” The voice
was still hesitant.

“We need to get to that damn
railway inn!” The truth served the Gunnery Sergeant well enough, and he just
let it stand there.

“Anyone on your right?”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant.” Troyak
knew who he was talking to now, another NCO in charge of this squad he was
facing, and he had sized up the situation to understand that this was a reserve
unit positioned behind the tree line to the north to watch these roads. He
needed to convince this man he was a friend.

“Your flank is clear. We scouted
the rail line the whole way in. Come on, you’re wasting time. We’ve got the
heavy weapons.”

The other voice did not respond
for a time, and then finally called back.

“Come up to the rail bridge!”

Troyak did not want to risk his
men, so he decided to go alone. He signaled that they should remain in place,
and moved up quietly to a small stand of trees just below the bridge. He saw
movement ahead, through the bridged culvert, and surmised the other sergeant
was there. Then he could see him, raising his fist in salutation.

“How many are you?” The other
Sergeant still had a guarded edge to his voice. The sound of gunfire increased
off to the north.

“I have three heavy squads,”
Troyak said quickly.

“Come ahead then. The rail line
is clear all the way to the town center.”

Then came the sound of heavy
weapons fire, and Troyak looked up to see an amazing and unexpected sight. A
huge steel grey zeppelin had descended from above the town, a vast shadow from
above, and its black gondolas were spiked with gun barrels that were now
pouring heavy rounds on the town’s defensive positions.

The battle that Troyak had crept
up on was bigger than it sounded. West and north of the town, two companies of
the Grey Legion 22nd Air Mobile, off the
Oskemen,
were attacking a
single company of Karpov’s 18th Siberian Rifles. The remaining two Siberian companies
had broken into six platoons stretched along the town’s northern edge, with
good fields of fire over the lower wetlands to the north. But at least three
more full companies of the 22nd were deployed to this sector. One was pushing
in between the action farther west, and attempting to flank the extreme left of
the Siberian line. Two others were trying to fight their way across a small
causeway that Troyak had identified on his map earlier. If they won through
they would soon swarm through the town center and easily overrun the railway
inn. Troyak’s Marines had approached from the far right, where the Siberian
line hooked south through a woodland area to the rail line.

Small arms and machine gun fire
was already thick at the causeway, but the line had held, the stubborn Siberians
holding tenaciously until the sudden appearance of the airship. Now it was
blasting the Siberian positions from above with 76mm recoilless rifle fire from
its main gondola, and a heavier gun up front on the bridge gondola.

Oskemen
was back.

The crafty Petrov had swung south
below the cloud deck while the
Angara
was struggling to descend and take
up the chase as Karpov had ordered. He hid there until
Angara
came down
after him, and once the two airships were feeling their way through the clouds
at about 1000 meters, he fired flare rockets off his starboard side, then
turned hard to port and dropped ballast for a fast climb.
Oskemen
broke
into clear air, but when the Captain on the
Angara
spotted the flares
slowly descending on parachutes, he took them for the running lights of his
enemy, and maneuvered to gain position on them. When he fired his forward gun
off the bridge gondola,
Oskemen’s
sharp eyed watchmen made out his
position, and Petrov maneuvered off his tail.

Minutes later the
Oskemen
nosed down again into the soup, all guns blazing on the big fins and elevators
of the
Angara
, returning the insult it had endured when first ambushed
at the outset of the engagement. Yet Petrov’s gunners were very good, and they
put three 105mm rounds into the big vertical rudder that completely jammed its
useful operation.
Angara
could not maneuver, and could do nothing more
than to climb into the thickening clouds and try to hide from the other ship,
but Petrov had other business. He immediately turned south, racing to support
the troops he had put onto the ground, and now he arrived in the thick of the
assault on Ilanskiy, his heavy guns lending much needed fire support to the
Grey Legionnaires.

Troyak had no idea which side he
might support in this fight, but he was talking to this one, a fellow Siberian,
and so he decided that he could do one thing to easily convince this cautious
Sergeant that he was a friendly force.

“Hold on!” he called to the other
man at the far end of the railroad bridge, still crouching low, suspicious of
this sudden incursion on his flank in the midst of a firefight.

Troyak pinched his collar mike
and delivered a quick order to Zykov. “Put a needle right through the main
gondola on that airship!”

Zykov barked back the order and
his SAM team of two men quickly off shouldered the hand held weapon, which
looked like an old style bazooka, and was fired in much the same way. Seconds later
the SAM streaked up at the big target above, boring right in on the main
gondola as Troyak had ordered, and blasting through the thin shell with a
bright orange explosion. One of the three 76mm guns there was destroyed
completely, the other two pods riddled with shrapnel, and there was a fire
amidships on the gondola that quickly involved the number three engine.

The Russians defending the town
hooted jubilantly, their voices obviously surprised and delighted with what had
happened. “Good enough, Sergeant?” Troyak shouted to the shadow by the bridge.
“Come on! I need to get my weapons teams up and we’ll finish the job.”

He heard the other Sergeant
shouting again in the dialect he understood, telling his men to stand down.
With no time to lose, Troyak waved his squad forward, and the Marines rushed on,
Troyak in the lead. They passed into the culvert and under the rail bridge, and
saw the Siberian Sergeant staring sheepishly at these big, well muscled men in
dark camouflage uniforms and mushroom top Kevlar helmets. Troyak grinned at the
man, clasping him on the shoulder.

“There’s no one on your right,
Sergeant,” he said. “But from the sound of things there’s a lot of action on
the left flank. Follow me!”

They pushed on through the tree
line, then skirted the rail line as it made a wide sweeping arc south and
curved up towards the town center. Now he began to recognize the place again,
for he and Zykov had searched a long hour for Fedorov when he had first gone
missing here, though that seemed ages ago. Yes, thought Troyak, this is where
we slapped that smart ass NKVD Lieutenant around, and made him clean out those
box cars with his squad. No trains here today, and maybe no gulags further east
either.

The place looked strangely empty,
devoid of life and haggard with neglect. Ilanskiy was no longer a way station
for Stalin’s prison trains. Stalin was dead.

Troyak saw the big airship come
about, whistling to Chenko when he saw his men come up. “RPG-30!” He yelled,
pointing at the airship. Chenko whistled and his squad soon had the weapon in
action, which was a man portable 105mm anti-tank weapon that was so good it had
come to be called the “Abrams killer.”

“Put one more round into that aft
gondola and silence those guns.” Troyak pointed, and the RPG was quickly
deployed, a light weight shoulder fired weapon that was designed to defeat
reactive armor by firing a decoy rocket ahead of the main shaped charge. The
RPG-30 could blast through 650mm of armor. It could smash through the side
armor of the toughest battleship, and the zeppelin would pose no challenge in
that regard. So Chenko disabled the decoy and instead selected a special long
range thermobaric round that relied on the oxygen in the air to create a much
enhanced explosion and fire, with a very strong shock wave.

The airship was about 500 meters
above them, just within the 600 meter range of this special round. It blasted
into the aft gondola, exploded, and blew it clean away, along with both 76mm
gun mounts and the number five and six engines in the bargain. The sustained
blast wave was so violent that it also blew away much of the duralumin frame
above the gondola, and ignited a fire that would burn the
Oskemen
to a
torrid death. The nose of the airship canted upwards as the fire consumed its
tail. Fire and shock had ruptured most of the aft gas bags, and the higher
buoyancy in the nose quickly pulled the ship’s front end up.

The Siberian squad that had come
up with Troyak’s men gaped in awe at the sight of the massive airship in raging
flames above, black smoke clouding out like sable blood. Only the two good
engines on the forward bridge gondola were still running, and they slowly
dragged the burning hulk of the airship northwest over the open ground beyond
the village, where it began to fall. They saw long rope lines extending down
from the undamaged nose segment, and men clinging to them, hoping to reach the
ground before the blazing wreck of the ship as the
Oskemen
fell to its
doom.

“Alright!” Troyak shouted at the
Siberian Sergeant. “Take your men across the rail yard and work your way west.
That’s your fight now. We’ll hold the town center.”

His manner was so commanding that
the Siberians immediately obeyed, their rifle squads rushing across the rail
yard and into the town beyond. Troyak smiled. Now to see what is happening at
that damn railway inn.

Chapter 14

Troyak
led his Marines
swiftly on, racing past squat warehouses by the rail yard and into the cluster
of small dilapidated houses at the edge of the town center. The railway inn was
another two or three blocks, and he stopped to reorganize his squads, barking
sharp orders to the men.

“Weapons teams here! Set up your AGS-30
here!” This was the belt fed automatic grenade launcher with a high fire rate
30 round drum. It would stand in for the lack of a mortar team, and they had a
full pack of extra ammo drums to lay down some good sustained barrages. Troyak
pointed out the direction of fire. “Right there,” he said. “Make your range
about 800 meters. Rifle squad, on me! Demolition teams ready! Zykov! Follow me
in!”

The assault rifle squads of five
men each moved out, the sixth man was a demolition expert, and the seventh
stayed behind with the heavy weapons to fire on Troyak’s order. The men moved
with expert swiftness, racing from the lee of one house to the next in brief
rushes covered by at least two men on overwatch at all times.

Up ahead Troyak saw a building
labeled “Secondary Boarding School Number 1,” and he remembered it from his
last visit to the town. School was out today, and there had been no classes in
session here for many months. Beyond this place lay the railway inn, so he
signaled for a silent approach.

“Zykov, take your squad around
the right and through that wooded park behind the inn. Signal me when you are
in position. You men, follow me.”

He was through the back doorway
to the school building and inside, intending to get a good look at his
objective across the street before he committed his men further. He reached a
window and peered cautiously around the edge. There it was, with the same
quaint sign he remembered: Rail Crew’s Holiday House. It was here that Fedorov
had first stumbled down that back stairway, and the iconic figure of the young
Sergei Kirov had come up after him. It was here that Ivan Volkov had vanished
in the year 2021 in his hot pursuit of Fedorov, so close on his trail in space,
yet eighty years off in time.

The railway inn was the hinge of
fate that day, for that dark stairwell was a portal to distant times where a
knowing man could place his hands on levers that would move the decades and
reshape the contours of all modern history.

Now Troyak recalled his orders.
He was to take the building and report back to Admiral Volsky on
Kirov
for final orders. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. They had tried the radio
several times and though they could still raise the
Narva
, they could
not get through to
Kirov
. He put a man on the radio and told him to keep
trying.