Conrad's Last Campaign (14 page)

Back at the compound, he looked over the battle kite were making, inquired about the Devil’s Breath which we had not had much success with and marveled at the tiny model steam engines. We didn’t yet have satisfactory full-sized engines ready, but he loved the little lamp driven toys we build for research. We presented him and several of his advisors with the toys.

Before he left, he insisted on several more rides around the track. We removed the staff cars from the track so his coach could run free. He and his advisors laughed it up on the padded seats, leaned out the windows to feel the wind, drank wine just to see it not spill and acted like kids. Then they had more horses hitched up to see how fast they could make it go. At one point, he had his coach removed and put an open staff car back on the track so they could feel the wind while they rode around and around.

He left happy.

The first week out of Sarai was an easy one. We camped about fifty miles east of the city on the first night. That was far enough to outpace any refugees from the city and kept us from listening to recriminations, complaints, and demands for help.

By the time I lead my column into camp, the tents were set up and the cook fires burning. My new tent was near the center of the encampment and my new bed already warmed by my bodyguards.

Captain Ivanov had been sending supply columns into the grasslands for the last five days we were in Sarai. As the advance scouts confirmed our belief that there weren’t any mounted Mongols left in the vicinity, he became bolder at sending out advance parties.

As the older wagons were loaded with food and fuel, they were grouped with a lance or two and sent out to set up base camps ninety to a hundred miles apart. The old wagons couldn’t stand the speed our column marched at, but with a five-day head start and running fifteen hours a day, they were able to keep up for a while.

It was three thousand five hundred more miles to
Karakorum, and I wanted to be there in forty days. It looked like the first thousand miles was going to be an easy ten-day ride.

As I leaned back in my saddle, I was feeling confident. My army might look a little odd with most of them carrying or wearing bear skin coats and the rest wearing hooded wool coats that looked like they belonged in a manger scene, but morale was high and eating was good.

The shopping trip was a success and we had enough supplies, barely, to get us to our destination. I even had a new tent and a barrel of wine for staff meetings and quiet evenings.

We had lost only a little over two hundred killed and about seven hundred wounded at Sarai, and we disposed of around thirty thousand Mongol troops. That’s a kill ratio of fifty-to-one. At that rate, we could stand up to a Mongol force of two million men.

Of course, not everything was perfect. Hitler’s army had killed over fifty Russians for every German soldier who fell, and we all know how well that worked out.

There was also a distinct chill in the air. I thought it was the middle of October, but it could have been either the beginning or end of the month. I knew the date, but it was wrong. The world was still using the Julian calendar and I knew enough history to know that it was off by about ten days from the real year now, but I didn’t remember if the calendar ran fast or slow.

My conversations with Sir Piotr had been frustrating. I had left the Holy Land over-supplied for a quick horse killing raid and ended up critically short of ammo, weapons, artillery, and supplies for a raid that has now turned more serious. It still wasn’t an invasion, but we would probably be in at least one pitched battle.

We were just over one thousand miles from Crakow. In the 20
th
century, I could hop in my car before breakfast and sleep that night in my own bed in Poland. In the 13
th
century, I might as well have been on another planet. We were weeks away from reinforcements and months away from heavy equipment supplies.

Sir Piotr was sympathetic when we spoke on the radio.

“Your grace, the only fast enough to get to you is an aircraft, but our standard fighter has a range of only three hundred miles and can’t carry anything heavier than the pilot’s lunch.

“You may remember that Novacek and I both recommended that development of multi-engine, metal aircraft be initiated, and you firmly insisted that it was a bad idea.”

“And I still feel the same way. Those aircraft need high-octane fuel and a lot of spare parts. Until we have depots around the world, they are going be of limited use. It’s better to put our resources into better railroads and harbors for now.”

“You are almost fortunate, Lord Conrad, that in your absence we felt that we had to use our own best judgment as to what programs to continue. Thanks to your efforts and those of Sir Boris, the Christian Army does not have to be selective about what programs it funds. There are three prototypes of a new twin-engine cargo aircraft sitting in a hangar in
Warsaw.

“It has not completed testing and only the prototypes are available, but it does have a normal range of fifteen hundred miles and can be flown almost twice that far if the cargo is replaced with spare fuel tanks.

“I say
almost
lucky because you are already at the extreme range of the aircraft. From where you are now, we could possibly provide you with a ride home or deliver a few hundred pounds of cargo, but in a few days, even that will be impossible.

“If we had begun sooner, there might be enough planes available to create a supply chain, but the best I can do now is to suggest that with Herculean effort we could begin to turn out a steady supply of the planes in less than two months.”

It had come to the point where I was no longer surprised that Sir Piotr was thinking ahead of me. Perhaps I was getting too old for the game of Save the World. “The new planes were a good idea, but they won’t help me. I fully plan that in thirty days we will be in combat or on our way home, but I’ll keep it in mind in case need something both vital and light weight, such as radio parts or medical supplies.”

“You are probably right, your grace, but I will put a team on the problem of getting some supplies and air cover out to you. Maybe they can find a way to stage out supplies with three or four planes, or find alternate routes, or something to get help to you.”

I had the feeling that I was not only on my own, but going to stay that way.

Francine’s Diary

It was a busy day at court today. Both the Italian and the Dutch ambassadors were seen in open court. The Italian ambassador was particularly livid, “MY BROTHER’S WIFE! The bastards raped my sister-in-law! She’ll probably spend the rest of her life in a convent! If they couldn’t tell she wasn’t Mongol from her looks and her language, the lack of SMELL should have told them. If it weren’t for your Christian Army, this would be war, and there will be repercussions in spite of them.”

He went on for a while about treaties being meaningless and rights of passage being revoked and so on, and the Greek ambassador was just as angry, “One hundred thousand guilders! They burned one hundred thousand gilders of merchandise and three warehouses. We lost a half-dozen men fighting the fires. Who is going to pay for this?”

The king raised a weary hand and said, “There will be reparations. The Christian army will repay you the entire cost of the damage, and provide pensions for the families of them who died. Isn’t that right, Sir Piotr?”

Sir Piotr had stood with head down during the entire audience and still did not look up, “As Your Majesty commands, we obey.”

King Henryk waited until the ambassadors left before he continued rather angrily, “By the way, Sir Piotr, where the hell is Sarai and what is Conrad doing there? I don’t seem to remember authorizing any new expeditions. Last I remember, I ordered him to invade the
Holy Land three years ago and he responded by disappearing for a year, and then showing up to the battle late with a bunch of black Africans dressed in Christian Army uniforms.”

“As you know, my liege, he has information that the Mongols are about to launch a new attack on us. He decided that it would be best to delay them as much as possible.”

“We are very aware of the rumors on a new attack. Half of the army is back in Poland and moving to the borders. However, we are not particularly concerned. We are surrounded by Conrad’s snowflake forts, armed with machine guns, and protected by an air force. If the Mongols come again, we would slaughter them.”

Sir Piotr finally looked up. “Duke Conrad believes that they will not come the same way they did before. Mongols learn fast and adapt other people’s technology for war. Even if they cannot conquer the forts or hold the cities, they can still kill millions of citizens.

“The way to stop it, he believes, is to head off, or at least delay, the invasion by taking the fight to the Mongols.

“Sarai is, or was, a major administrative center on the
Volga River about a thousand miles south of Moscow and Tver. It is now a major center of ashes.”

The king was not mollified, “I repeat, I do not remember authorizing such an expedition. Your lord already has the Holy See angry with us from his refusal to lead the Crusades and refusing orders to deal with a heathen pack of heretics. Now he has half of
Europe after our blood.

“I want him back here as soon as possible. You will radio him our royal order that he is abort this mission and to return to this court as soon as possible.”

Piotr’s head was bowed again, “As Your Majesty commands, we obey.”

On Campaign with Conrad

Things went well for the first ten days. Captain Ivanov’s plans were good. On seven of those days, the army arrived at the camp grounds at dusk to find fires lit, latrines dug and campsites staked out. Twice it required that we travel a few hours into the darkness when our progress was slow and on day nine, we had to radio the supply column to move back to a new position when it was obvious that we had no hope of meeting them.

Meals were different, as we were hoarding the canned goods and using perishables first. We had only combat staff with us, so it was necessary to expand the quartermaster corps with troopers who were also cooks. Fortunately, any group of men this size has a mass of hidden talents. Morning meals were fresh bread, baked overnight by the newly appointed kitchen staff, and cheese or dried fruit. If our enemies were having any problem finding us, the smell of baking bread was certainly giving us away.

Before we moved out, the cooks would pass out more bread, dried meat and fruit. Lunch was taken in the saddle. Of course, the fruit would give out in a few days, but it was good while we had it. The cooks tried to provide a little more variety at night. We had a lot of flour, but no time to bake raised bread at night. One of our Jewish troopers showed the kitchen staff how to make unleavened bread in about thirty minutes. It was dry and tasteless, but was good for scooping up oatmeal or rice from a bowl. The grocery shopping at Sarai had gone better than I expected.

We had constant problems with the new wagons, and on some stretches we simply had to slow down to keep the radio carts from shaking themselves to death. Each night, the cook fires were partly fed with the bodies of no longer needed old style wagons, so I expected that problem to burn it self out in another week.

Of course, we couldn’t burn all of the empty wagons. Some of them had to be converted into fuel wagons or as the troops called them “shit wagons”. There wasn’t a lot of cooking fuel where we were, so whenever we came to a stand of trees the Big People would chew them into handy logs and load them into the fuel wagons. When there weren’t trees, dried bovine end product was gathered during the day and shoveled into the shit wagons. We were moving pretty fast, so we weren’t very successful poop pickers in the early days, but we learned to send workers ahead of the column and find moments to shovel.

This was definitely not the way I had planned this trip. I pictured fourteen non stop hours in the saddle, traveling light, eating on horseback, and dashing to
Mongolia. We were still moving faster than most armies could in this century, but it was beginning to feel like a camping trip. I hoped that as we consumed the old style supplies and lightened up, we could begin to move the way I planned.

We were traveling parallel to a branch of the
Silk Road and about thirty miles north of it. The road itself was useless for us since traveling it would stretch us out to a fifty mile long column dodging one mile an hour camel caravans. I also didn’t want the hassle of going through the small towns and villages that serviced the road, so I settled for having the road scouted periodically for Mongol troops and food supplies. Neither appeared on the road.

In fact, we were traveling through an eerie emptiness. There should have been people on these steppes, but the farmsteads we passed were empty and there were no horsemen shadowing us, no figures watching from the horizon.

Occasionally we passed small herds of dead horses, their skulls crushed and their bodies rotting. Whenever we saw them, it obviously disturbed the Big People and they refused to pass close to them. I suppose we would feel the same way seeing dead gorillas or Neanderthals. It’s just too close to home.

There was a lot of peaceful time in the saddle to think ahead and plan, but after a week of deep thought, the plan was still just, “Find Mongols”, “Kill Mongols”, “Go Home before you die”. Simple but elegant.

Then things began to change. Over a period of two weeks, I was betrayed by one of my own men and then by God himself.

If I ever find the man who did it, I will give him a short trial and then kill him slowly with my own hands! He will curse his mother for giving birth to him! Screw the rules of civilized punishment. The bastard deserves all the pain I can give him. To this day, I dream of his neck between my hands.

On the tenth night, I was sitting next to a campfire roasting a bread stick. The cooks had passed out lumps of bread dough, bundles of small sticks, and something that looked like sour cream. You wrapped the dough around the stick in a lump about the size of a hot dog and roasted it over the campfire. When you pulled the stick out, it left a hole for the sour cream or whatever else that tasty stuff was.

The stars were bright and life was good when I was told that a coded message had arrived from Sir Piotr. It was in my personal code that only I and Piotr could use. By the time I decoded it, I was livid. I was recalled! King Henryk was calling me back to
Poland to explain my actions in Sarai and my general unwillingness to follow his orders. The list of transgressions was a long one, including refusing to attack the Holy Land when ordered, misappropriating Crown funds, and insulting the Pope. My orders were to turn back immediately and they were signed by Count Piotr, Hetman of the Christian Army. My most loyal friend had sold me out for a promotion to count and stolen my army.

My reply was short, obscene, and used the word bastard more than once. I paced the tent angrily, barely resisting the urge to smash everything around me.

The reply came back from COUNT Piotr much too rapidly. As I decoded it, my anger peaked and then subsided. As I remember it, the message read:

My liege lord and old friend. You have my greatest respect and all of the loyalty that my oath allows. However, you personally required that I swear to my king with all the force of my faith in God. I have no choice but to follow the orders of the king here in
Warsaw. I cannot provide any help or support if you do not do the same.

I especially urge you not to corrupt the personnel that are still loyal to you. We both know that the Eagles and some other personnel, such as the young man you selected for special promotion a few years ago, would put their moral souls and their ability to breath in severe jeopardy to help you.

You must not put them in danger. Return as soon as possible.

I have convinced our sovereign not to transmit your orders or your demotion in the clear, as any appearance of disloyalty would be damaging to
Poland. I have further imposed a radio blackout on traffic to or from your command to reduce the chance of confusing orders being received.

Your loyal friend, Count Piotr

It was clumsy, but he was reassuring me as much as he could without risking a treason charge. Nothing in the letter was incriminating to him even if the letter was decoded, but it was clear between friends.

He couldn’t support me openly without chancing execution, but he could work behind the scenes. He had just told me who was still loyal to me and given me a hint as to who had access to our private code. A few years ago, I had chosen a few young men to be trained as my possible replacement. One of them, Krzysztof Osiol, was now a komander in the Eagles. He was our most promising candidate and I had made certain that he had experience with several branches of the army and acquaintances in all of them. My bet was that he now had access to my private code.

But I had still been betrayed. The first message referred to events that happened in Sarai only two weeks before. In this century, it should have taken months, not days, to get a message to Poland. The only fast communication within a thousand miles was our radios. One of my own operators had to have taken a bribe to send a message from the merchants to their representatives in Poland. If I ever find out who he is, I will end his miserable life.

His mention of radio blackout was depressing. It reminded me that my position here was not my normal one. I never worried much about rank and orders because of my firm belief that men will follow a good leader and abandon a bad one no matter what his rank.

So far, I had been proven right repeatedly. As a loyal vassal to men of higher rank, I had changed a nation, built armies and industries almost changed a world and my rank was never the highest among the players. Hell, I even conquered North Africa with an army I built and led personally starting with the rank of
slave
, with no help from kingship or kinship.

Now I was in the middle of the steppes leading almost forty thousand strangers, and a few hundred personally known vassals into battle. I had sent most of my African army home and now led men I didn’t know personally. Now Piotr was implying that if my army knew I had been recalled, they would mutiny; that they would not follow me into battle willingly.

Despite a copious amount of wine, I slept fitfully that night and awoke unrested, but I knew what I had to do. I splashed my face with cold water and called for my adjutant. “I have an important announcement this morning. In one hour, I want every radio wagon listing to my broadcast from here. Tell them to rig speakers outside the wagons so that every man can hear me.”

It took almost two hours to set up, but eventually I stood at a mike before my tent and before the thousands of men who could personally see me I addressed the troops. “I have news from
Poland. The nobles there have decided that our mission is a failure and that we must return home now. I have orders to turn coward and retreat immediately.

I will not follow those orders. I am going to kill Mongols and you are invited to join me.

It is each man’s decision. If you stand facing the sun this morning, Poland is over your left shoulder. In that direction lays home, safety, and failure. If you go that way, you may be able to make it to the Volga River and follow it down to Polish domains, or you may be able to fight your way across the Ukraine to reach the Polish border.

In front of you is a different world. In front of you is the chance to make certain that your wives are never raped by Mongols, that your children are never enslaved and your homes never burned. In front of you is the richest and most evil empire in the world. Those who conquer it will gain glory from God and immense wealth.