There Will Be War Volume VII

by Jerry Pournelle

  “How many left in the unit, Lieutenant?”

  “One hundred fifty-three, sir. No wounded, nobody seriously ill.” Rostov thought a moment and brightened a little. “We’ve more than enough vehicles to carry everyone; we can probably even carry most of the fuel we have in drums, drain the fuel trucks…” His voice died. They both saw the problem.

  “A fuel drum takes up as much space and weighs much more than a man,” Wrenn said. “There’s no way to carry enough to get all the vehicles, with all the men, as far as we need to go. We’d better talk to Colonel Podgorny.”

  Podgorny reacted to the news with stolid Russian equanimity. “We have to leave. We will find some way. Lieutenant Rostov, what was the situation in Moscow when you last met with Zimyanski?”

  “Not good, sir. The KGB had taken over the city; they were stockpiling caches of materiel—anything they could lay their hands on, but mostly food, clothing, and ammunition. This has caused a lot of looting, much of it very well organized. There’d been a firefight with bandits the night before we got there. Another Nationalist group, probably Islamics. And Zimyanski mentioned raids by Ukrainians. It’s getting crazy, Comrade Colonel.” Rostov had unconsciously lowered his voice. “Really bad.”

  Podgorny frowned, thinking. “What about the KGB? Don’t they control the city anymore?” Inwardly, he thought, they can’t even manage so much as that?

  Rostov almost laughed out loud. “They barely control Red Square, Colonel. They have conscripts rummaging in the ruins of the Kremlin night and day. Everything they can lay their hands on gets spirited out of the city. The caches I saw, other supplies, records, whatever is left of technical value, even intact granite blocks from Lenin’s Tomb. Moscow is an empty larder, Comrade Colonel.”

  Wrenn hoped he didn’t look as discouraged as he felt. He joined Podgorny at the maps on the colonel’s table, where he found their own position relative to the KGB-controlled forces still active in the area. They were deep within territory controlled by the remnants of the Soviet Army, now under command of the KGB; surrounded, as it were, by the “enemy.”

  “What are the chances of us bluffing our way through some of these lines, Colonel?” Wrenn asked.

  “Very bad. Owing to the nature of our unit, we are very closely watched by the KGB commanders. Sealed caches of fuel are hidden in buried pits all over Russia, but we do not know where they are. The KGB knows, but they do not have the formula nor the expertise for manufacture of the immunizer against A-Devyatnatsat. Army intelligence kept it from them very successfully, so as not to lose its autonomy when the Party structure collapsed. Even the KGB’s subsequent liquidation of the Intelligence sector did not succeed in obtaining the secret. So they need us, to make their fuel safe from the”Gas Bug," and we need them for what meager supplies of food and ammunition they dole out to us." He shrugged, thought a moment, then looked squarely at Wrenn.

  “Captain Wrenn. If the KGB should maintain its control, perhaps extend it; perhaps even regain command of the bulk of the remnants of the Soviet Union, reinstate the Party… what, in your opinion, would then happen?”

  Wrenn was surprised by the question, but when he finally answered, it was with the quiet conviction of a man stating a natural law. “The Alliance would be back in Russia within the decade. Perhaps within the year. The obliteration carried out by the U.S.S.R. was unmatched in human history. No nation on earth could forget it and call itself civilized. The next time, with no petroleum fuels, the Alliance would use steam engines. They’d walk if they had to—hell, they’d swim. Likely, they’d even lift the ban against China joining the Alliance.” Podgorny’s eyes flashed his anger, but he held his tongue. Vast tracts of land had already been lost to the Chin, whose largely nonmechanized forces had suffered little from the Gas Bug. Only the threat of Alliance nuclear intervention had kept the Chin from annexing all of Siberia.

  Wrenn looked at Podgorny and Rostov. He didn’t know if they had ever heard the truth about the Alliance or not, but they were going to hear it at least this once. “The Alliance’s publicly professed purpose was the elimination of Soviet Communism. In the last century, Nazism had shown itself to be unacceptable in a civilized world. In this, your Party was no different.”

  “Ironic to think that your country and mine hunted down the last vestiges of Nazism together, is it not?” Podgorny asked quietly.

  Wrenn could only nod. When he spoke, his voice was sad, tired. Old. “All history is irony, Colonel.”

  After a time, Wrenn stood up from poring over maps and paced the length of the room. He turned, spoke his thoughts aloud. “But, ideologies notwithstanding, our first concern now is survival. To survive, we have to get you and your men out of Russia. And I just don’t know how we can get a hundred and fifty men and all their equipment almost a thousand miles through hostile territory to Alliance lines in the West.”

  Throughout, Rostov had listened quietly. Now his head went up, his eyes bright. Something the American had said earlier; something about steam.

  “I know how.”

  Podgorny and Wrenn turned as Rostov went to the map table, got his bearings, and pointed to a light blue area east of Moscow, hugging the contours of the city limits like an encroaching lake.

  “Here is what we need,” Rostov said quietly. He was already calculating travel times from their current position to the goal he indicated. It was less than half a day’s drive, the unit could make it easily, but once there… it was bound to be heavily guarded.

  “What is it?” The American pressed, impatient with the young Russian’s silence as he leaned over the map.

  Rostov, concentrating, hardly turned. “This is the marshaling yard of the MBBR, part of the Kalinin and Byelorussian Divisions.”

  Wrenn was puzzled. “Divisions? You mean military units?”

  Podgorny had brightened at Rostov’s mention of the MBBR, and now he grinned widely. “No, Captain Wrenn. The MBBR is the Moscow-Byelorussian-Baltic Railway.” He slapped a bearlike hand against Rostov’s back, staggering the younger man, who grinned at the recognition.

  “Comrade Lieutenant Rostov is suggesting we steal a train!”

  Eyes of jet black glittered beneath heavy lids as the checkpoint guard went over their papers again. The guard was Private Kurga, KGB; a Mongol from one of the Siberian divisions, the blood of conquerors in his features. And he knew it.

  Kurga had little love for these Caucasus types. Their American prisoner was an oddity, but Kurga had seen Americans before. He respected them; on the whole, they were good fighters. His hatred for them was based not on their invasion of Russia, only their failure to win. Kurga’s people had always despised weakness. The Americans’ refusal to use their nuclear superiority to obliterate the hated Sovs was beyond Kurga’s capacity to understand. He finally looked back up at the teknik lieutenant and his ugly sergeant. “I will notify Colonel Serafimov. You will wait.”

  Kurga lifted the field telephone while his own assistant watched the American. Zorin and Rostov waited, looking bored.

  Kurga pounded on the telephone. He grunted a few commands to his aide. The man rose and left. Kurga turned back to Rostov. “The phone is out. But the colonel should be overseeing the loading of the train. My man will notify him of you and your prisoner.”

  Rostov nodded his head at Zorin, who went to accompany the guard. As the door closed behind them, Kurga turned to examine the bound American. Not much to look at, but who was, these days? Shirtless in the cold autumn morning, the thin man shivered slightly, skin tight as a drum over wiry muscles. Kurga guessed he’d be good in a fight; fast and mean. But weak, he decided with some regret, as all his people were weak.

  Kurga turned upon hearing a sound from outside like a sack of grain being dropped. He moved past the American and opened the door. Zorin was standing over the body of Kurga’s assistant, sheathing a bloody knife in his own boot. It was the last thing Kurga saw before Rostov’s rifle butt crushed his skull.

  Wrenn caught Kurga’s
body and lowered it to the floor. Zorin dragged the other guard in and closed the door as Rostov cut the American’s bonds.

  “I am very glad you suggested cutting those cables you saw, Captain Wrenn,” Zorin muttered as he bent to help the American remove Kurga’s uniform.

  Wrenn nodded. “Now if only we can find the papers we need in this office.” He looked up at Rostov, standing at the window. “Can you see the train, Lieutenant?”

  Rostov shook his head. “Too much smoke and fog. I see some trucks. Most of the smoke seems to be from camp fires, but the fog isn’t helping any.” The haze cleared for a moment, and through a gap in the buildings Rostov made out the slab sides and big iron wheels of a locomotive. Then the fog closed again.

  “Da! Very close.”

  Wrenn, who had been searching the dispatcher’s desk, came up with a fistful of papers that looked official.

  “Here are some dispatches, a large folder of invoices; some receipts, some vouchers. A few are pretty recent.” He began reading them carefully. “From the looks of it, the rail net around Moscow to the west is virtually nonexistent.” He ran his finger down a list of train schedules and destinations, points of departure and routings. Maps would be worse than useless for finding an escape route; the front was too fluid, the Alliance attacks on the rail net and the scorched-earth policy of the Russian defenders too efficient. The only reliable information would be gathered from accounts of routes actually traveled, which could reasonably be expected to still exist.

  “Here,” Wrenn finally said. “This looks good. Several trains have been operating out toward Bryansk and Orel through secure areas, running ammunition and supplies as well as evacuating Soviet forces eastward via Tula and Kaluga…” Wrenn’s voice trailed off as he concentrated on deducing the paths the trains must have taken to circumvent the shattered Moscow rail net.

  “Yes. From Tula and Kaluga they brought back several units of the Soviet Fifty-third Motorized Infantry Division.” He looked up at Rostov. “That division was engaged with Anglo-Brasilian forces in the battle for the Kiev Zone less than a month ago, and this says they made the entire return trip by rail.”

  “Then the lines into Kiev are still intact,” Rostov said quietly. He didn’t add that Kiev was no longer in Soviet hands.

  “According to what I can make of this,” Wrenn went on, “it will mean a detour of two hundred miles east-southeast first, then a trip back over to Bryansk before going straight on, hell-bent-for-leather toward the Alliance lines. But we could make it. All your men, your stocks of immunizer and usable fuel, even your vehicles.” He paused, then added: “Assuming we can capture the train crew alive. We’ll need men familiar with the equipment if we’re to have a prayer of nursing a locomotive that far without stopping to refuel or finding places along the way where we can get water for the boiler.”

  Rostov nodded. “And sand for the tracks and a hundred other things. We make lots of assumptions from this moment, but we have only one certainty: If we stay in Russia, we can lie down next to this Private Kurga and his man right now.” He looked at Zorin and nodded. The sergeant pulled out a small radio and began speaking rapidly into the microphone, alerting the rest of the unit to move in. When Zorin had finished, he handed the guard’s uniform to Wrenn. The stocky Russian grinned apologetically.

  “Sorry, Comrade Captain. These tartars are a stubby lot, and you Amerikanski seem to stack it pretty tall.”

  Wrenn grinned back. The pants cuffs would barely reach his ankles and the jacket sleeves rode up his forearms. “I’ll make do.”

  Colonel Maksim Fyodor Serafimov, KGB, dropped his clipboard and rubbed his bleary eyes. Almost done, he thought. The clipboard held the manifest for the last shipment of supplies to be loaded on this last train. Serafimov cursed. The other trains had been easy; personnel, objets d’art, technical equipment, record books, computers and gold, gold, gold. Things needed to rebuild the country, or the Party, which was the same thing. Nothing anyone could possibly make use of for personal survival.

  But these last few shipments had been nightmares. Party Central had plenty of supplies and weapons but still wanted more, and the level of black-market pilferage alone, just among Serafimov’s own men and the damned army boys, had been staggering. But once the insurgents had gotten wind of such a stockpile…

  The first train out had been blasted right off the tracks. The crew and troops had been caught utterly unprepared, and the railyards had become an abattoir. Serafimov smiled. The next time, he had been ready with a well-planned ambush, and the slaughter of the raiders had been total. Serafimov had discovered their contact in the railyards and turned him to his own purposes. Serafimov looked down, contemplated his new boots. The little fellow had turned out to be useful in more ways than one, he considered. And now, finally, things were quiet again. No more bandits, at least.

  Colonel Serafimov grunted in consternation, however. Where had the bandits come from in the first place? Had things deteriorated that far, already?

  He sighed, deeply. Yes, he decided. Moscow was a husk. Little remained to indicate the city had once been the center of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The Party was a gaggle of terrified old men hiding in caves, guarded by fanatics like himself, supported by fanatics like himself. The Kremlin, Saint Basil’s, Lenin’s Tomb, all the landmarks of Serafimov’s youth were rubble. And with the departure of this last train, only ghosts would remain to walk the streets of Moscow.

  Serafimov recalled a passage from Lenin, from his journals of the Revolution: “When the trains stop, that will be the end.”

  “Colonel?” Serafimov jerked upright. He had gone two days with almost no sleep, and his nerves were brittle as ice. He looked up to see his aide in the doorway.

  “Yes, Sergeant Sokoloff?”

  “The train crewmen say they are having some trouble getting a head of steam up.” Sokoloff had grown up innocent of what steam engines were. Diesel and electric locomotives were all he had ever seen, those and a few of the Magnetikas, pride of the TransEuropean Mosrail System, riding on force fields at incredible speeds.

  With the war, the U.S.S.R. had pressed back into service everything she could lay her hands on, and the old leviathans of steam had returned. Along with their incredibly arrogant operators. Dinosaurs, Serafimov thought with contempt of the hulking steel brutes. Great big ones with little lizards to run them.

  “All right, Sergeant. We’ll deal with that in a moment. Any raids this morning?”

  “None, sir. It’s been very quiet since we…” Sokoloffs voice trailed off, and Serafimov nodded, knowing the younger man’s thoughts.

  Since the hangings, Serafimov thought; you would like a brief respite from pilferage and raiding? Here’s my recipe; works every time: String up some seventy-odd men on insulated power lines along your perimeter. Tie their hands to said cable, just close enough together to let them support their own weight, but too far apart to free themselves, then lash their necks securely to the cables with thin wire: radio cable is good. The socially irresponsible fellows last for as long as they can do chin-ups.

  Serafimov turned his pencil end-over-end, tapping it against the desk top. Three hours of chin-ups was the record, he recalled, and that man had been very strong, and very small. Serafimov shook his head. And all for a case or two of Polish hams from the Party stocks. He sighed, finally looked up at Sokoloff. “Hard times, Sergeant, yes?”

  Sokoloff nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well. Anything else?”

  “Yes, sir. A detachment of tekniks just arrived, started loading their vehicles and several drums of fuel immunizer on the flatbeds near the rear of the train. Their papers were all in order, so Lieutenant Drusiev passed them along.”

  Serafimov frowned. Tekniks? With Gas Bug immunizers? He should have received notification for any cargo so critical. Still, few people beneath Serafimov’s rank knew how fast things were collapsing; so an unnotified shifting of a few army types was only surprising, not suspicio
us. He stood, stretched, picked up the manifest clipboard, and headed for the door.

  “Come along then, Sergeant. Let’s see these tekniks. Then we’ll see if we can’t give our reluctant trainmen some incentive toward proper socialist zeal for the task at hand.”

  The morning fog lifted while Podgorny’s men hurriedly finished securing their vehicles aboard the flatbeds. Podgorny himself, accompanied by Rostov and Zorin, had walked to the train’s head both to get a look at the locomotive and ascertain the number of guards. The entire machine was lousy, as Zorin put it, with KGB. Wrenn made himself scarce.

  The three Russian officers sidestepped a small lorry of crates and went behind a building. When they came around a corner, they got their first look at the engine.

  “Oh,” was all Podgorny said. Zorin muttered, “Christus,” with very little emotion.

  The engine was enormous, a leviathan of steel, hulking over the tracks like a basking brontosaur dozing after a dewy morning’s feeding.

  Or a dragon, Rostov thought. Dragons were not exactly state-sanctioned images in Soviet literature, but Rostov had had as much exposure to samizdat novels as anyone else in Russia. However he chose to look at it, black slab-sided, double-decked, implacably hissing, wreathing itself in steam, it remained the biggest thing Rostov had ever seen that wasn’t supposed to fly or float.

  “I know this type,” Zorin blurted. “It’s the P-38; the largest steam engine ever built in Russia. Maybe the world. And the last. Didn’t do too well on the heavy-load lines up north or into Siberia; too cold for it. They weren’t in service very long before they pulled them off the lines.”

  “Diesel fired?”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel.” Zorin was still staring. He felt like he was looking at a 215-ton ghost.