Conrad's Last Campaign (17 page)

He looked around for a moment unsure that he had not said too much, and then hurried on, “There have been a lot of late night bull sessions. Young officers have spent endless hours over charts and drawings, trying to find a way to help. Nothing untoward of course, as these are honorable men, not given to mutiny or oath breaking, but we have your answer and I have it laid out on that flip chart.”

There were doubtful looks around the table, including mine, but I decided, “Alright, I guess we should look at your charts. Proceed, captain.”

Lawson hurried to the back of the room and nervously flipped a page forward. “As you can see from this timeline, the first rigidible could fly out of the navy yards in just under sixty days.”

There was an explosion from Baron Gwidon’s seat. “Son, I hate to laugh in a meeting like this, but I run the shipyards and we couldn’t lay the keel on this thing in sixty days.”

“Normally, sir, I would totally agree with you, but there are some factors here that you are unaware of.

“Normally it would take over sixty days just to decide how long a keel to lay, but the engineering has already been done. The rigidible is a favorite topic among engineering students and aeronautical dreamers everywhere. Every detail has been thought out and argued about endlessly in labs and bars and officer’s dorms around the country. Thousands of man hours have gone into the five hundred pages of technical specifications and plans that I brought with me. That model is so accurate because there are many man years of planning in it.

“Not only do we know the length and design of the keel, the tools and fixtures to build it already exist in the Cracow Aluminum Works.

“This chart shows the first ribs being put in place in less than a week. I know that sounds silly, but the fact is that two molds for the rib sections already exist. If Captain Feliks checks his order book, he’ll find that he approved an order for
aluminum roof ribs
for the new royal exhibit hall, which coincidently looks just like the top half of a rigidible. The first ones can be delivered to the navy yards in less than a week.”

His eyes lit up and he babbled like a true believer, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. I didn’t know whether to have him arrested or give him a medal. Baron Gwidon was asking, “Why our shipyards? Shouldn’t this be an air force project?”

“No, sir. We don’t have a facility big enough. You have four adjacent dry docks that can be roofed over with canvas to make quick and simple construction sheds for rigidibles. Two of them are empty now, one will be empty in less than a week and the fourth contains a hull that could be floated out and anchored to make room.”

“And I suppose that I have already given orders to use the docks.”

“Of course not. However some of your junior officers have prepared the necessary movement orders to empty the two occupied docks and possible work schedules for your signature.”

It went on for a couple of hours. The kid had all the answers.

“Where are we going to get that much cover material?”

A page of the flip chart contained figures on current stores of aluminum, copper, and duralumin and estimates on production times for additional stocks. “Now that all the new planes are aluminum covered, we have thousands of square meters of unneeded airplane cloth and dope – and idle facilities that can make more.”

“How do you plan to get that much work done in sixty days?”

Another flip chart page contained man hour estimates and sample work schedules that covered seven days a week. “When you work around the clock seven days a week, the sixty days turns into two hundred normal work days, well over six months of normal work time.”

“Where the hell are we going to get that many men?”

“We just recalled them from the frontiers. We’ve got thousands of soldiers recalled from the frontiers who need some kind of garrison duty to keep them busy. It doesn’t take a lot of training to assemble this.”

Eventually, the charts and schedules and the captain’s enthusiasm won the day. By evening, the first orders had been signed. Captain Aleksander had been put on temporary duty at the ship yards to add his aircraft expertise to the building crew, and the adventure had begun.

My last comment to Captain Aleksander was, “We never suspected that there were such active unofficial groups among the young officers. I am still somewhat torn between giving you all medals and promotions, and having the shipyards build galleys so that we can bust you all down the rank of galley slaves. It has been an interesting day.”

One of the most interesting things was that Lawson turned to Alexander as they left and said, “Too bad we didn’t have time to talk about the other project.”

It was only two weeks after our momentous rigidible decision that the committee met again. The reports were encouraging. Aleksander and Quidon had identified over twenty junior officers who had engineering experience and had worked on the rigidible design over the years. They were spotted throughout the project as advisors and managers. In some cases they were given temporary rank to fit their new responsibilities. There were an additional thirty juniors familiar enough with the project to seed work crews and staff offices.

The keel of the first ship was down and the first shipment of rib sections had arrived on site. Design modifications were being made on the fly. This was going to be a minimal build. In place of small individual cabins, the crew would have aluminum and cloth camp beds clamped to the deck and hammocks for passengers. Toilets would be holes in the floor and bathing facilities would be buckets of water. The officers would live no better. Instruments would be pirated from existing aircraft and bolted in.

The original design called for two gross cigar shaped gas bags with complex plumbing for refilling and dumping hydrogen all controlled from the bridge. That had been simplified to ninety fatter bags manually operated by the crew.

The engineers would have preferred highly modified engines designed for low-speed and high power, but had adapted the nacelle design to accommodate four existing bomber engines on each rigidible.

Despite the last-minute changes, the basic design was working and, so far, Murphy was taking a vacation. We were confident enough to begin discussing what supplies should be ferried out first. We were somewhat hampered by the fact that Lord Conrad could not ask for what he wanted. The airwaves were still public and his codes were known to more than us.

Captain Feliks took the lead for the quartermasters. “We have decided that the first requirement of an army is food. Hungry soldiers get sick and die. Of course, we can’t send our standard rations in the first few shipments. Canned food is over sixty percent water and Lord Conrad’s problem right now is that he has too much water, so we have ordered a hundred and fifty tons of rice and flour. Cooked rice is about seventy five percent water, so a hundred tons of dry rice will make four hundred tons of cooked rice, and a man can survive on as little as two pounds of cooked rice per day and live well on three pounds. Wheat does not have as good a ratio of dry-to-cooked weight, but in a gruel or porridge it comes close.

“As we get closer to launch, we hope to identify other lightweight, high calorie foods to ship. It’s taking some time because the priorities are somewhat different from normal expedition planning. On the ground, space is primary and weight secondary, so we look for dense products to ship. In the air ship our primary concern is weight, so we need to reevaluate potential foods.”

All throughout the meeting, we had been wondering about the six-foot long crate that they brought. The last crate launched massive program and I wondered, no,
dreaded
, what this one would do.

Then the rest of the meeting was concluded, it was Lawson and Alexander’s turn. Lawson was now a regular member of the committee, but he still tended to talk hurriedly as if no one would listen.

This time they uncrated a six-foot long wing. It was a white wing with two tiny motors, one on each side, and a spindly looking elevator sticking out the front. I was about to ask what the hell it was, but Captain Lawson never needed any encouragement to talk.

“This is a project that we didn’t have time to talk about at the last meeting. Unlike the rigidible that we’re building, this one carries less cargo and is therefore less pertinent to our current situation. It’s about the same gross weight as the other ships, but it has other strengths.

“This is a fast courier ship with unlimited range and high speed. This ship could fly from Cracow to Cracow, around the world, without refueling and averaging well over gross miles an hour.

“We didn’t press it in the last meeting, because we weren’t certain what role it could play in the very near future. During the last two weeks, we figured out how it might save Lord Conrad’s butt, I’m mean, how it might have a significant effect on an effort to rescue and supply a possible future distant force, and we figured our how to make one with the material and manpower the air force has on hand.”

Baron Quidon was our savior, or tried to be. “The last time we let you talk, you got us into a multimillion pence project, used up all the aluminum in Europe, got a commitment for two thousand workers, and possibly got us all charged with treason.

“I don’t think you can do that again.”

I don’t know if Lawson was supremely confident, or just unaware of reality. “You forgot that we didn’t use up all the cloth, hydrogen, or wood, and a lot of air force workers are still available, and this is a great machine. As a soldier, you’ll love it, and we don’t need any more money.”

Quidon shook his head, “I know I’m going to regret this, but why will I love it?”

“Well, you notice it’s a different shape. The regular rigidible is a cigar shape and this is a flying wing.” I guess the kid liked repeating the obvious. “But the real difference is inside. You’ll notice that the center third of the wing is a slightly different color than the outer thirds. That’s because only the outer thirds contain hydrogen, and they hold only enough to almost, but not quite float the ship.

“We decided to call this a compound airship because part of the lift is provided by gas burners in the center section. The center section is, in effect, a hot air balloon very much like the toys we demonstrated at the last meeting.

“Remember that the ultimate range limitation on the pure hydrogen rigidible was the need to frequently valve off and then replenish the hydrogen. In this one, you never need to valve off hydrogen. If you want to go down, you turn the burners down and light the fires to go up. Since the ship is near neutral buoyancy anyway, it doesn’t take much fuel to lift it and the liquid fuel is a lot easier to carry than spare hydrogen is. N

“It’s not immortal, but its range is several times that of a hydrogen only ship.”

Komander Evan jumped in. “So, you can stay up a long time. So what? You still have to carry fuel to drive this thing. What’s the advantage?”

Lawson was almost gleeful. “That’s the other thing. You don’t need fuel to drive it. The lift does it. Those two little engines on the wing are just for maneuvering. Some of you have flown gliders or read about them or had friends that flew them. One of the tricks of getting speed out of your glider is catch a thermal and get up high. Then you nose down, glide forward, and trade your height for speed.

“That’s what this does, but it makes its own thermals going up or going down. On the way up, the wing shape lets you angle the ship forward to move horizontally. When you reach the top, you cut the heat and do the same glider trick on the way down. It might make you seasick, but it’ll move you farther and faster than anything else on earth.”

I still wasn’t convinced. “As usual, you’ve done a great job and made fantasy almost believable, but I still fail to see any urgency to build this. Perhaps when we have more time…”

But he wasn’t done. “Please, just another thirty seconds. Let’s all imagine that somewhere out there forty thousand brave Christian Army warriors are facing, let’s say, a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand Chinese infantrymen and mounted Mongol warriors.

“Now picture yourself being one of those infantrymen or Mongols and you look up in the sky. Something is dropping out of the sky. It’s big, but so high that you really can’t tell how big. It’s the biggest and fastest thing you’ve ever seen. You shoot at it, but it’s way out of ra
nge. Then as it levels out ahead of you, twenty pairs of machine guns open up and start mowing a path through your army, gross feet wide, killing everything. You’re dead, and everyone and everything near you is dead.

“That’s what this machine does. That rigidible keeps you alive and this kills your enemies. Anywhere in the world. We’ll call it
Equalizer
.”

There was less discussion this time. If Lawson said that they had the manpower and materials, we were inclined to believe him. If he said that he would deliver it on Saturday, I might have believed him.

We built it.

Have you ever noticed that we thank God for good things, but we curse “the gods” when things go wrong. Catholic or not, I was tempted to start the cursing.

It rained for seven days and seven nights, and then just kept on raining. Not the buckets and barrels of the first seven days, just enough mist and drizzle and showers to keep everything damp, cold, and miserable. This was the second time that rain had brought disaster to this mission. One more time, and I would change my name to
Noah
Stargard.

Even the Big People weren’t able to move more than ten miles an hour in this muck, and wagons sank in axle deep when they were moved. It was far less fluid than pure mud would have been, but you still couldn’t put any real pressure on it.

The cold was getting worse. By the calendar, we were now in November and even though the medieval calendar was flawed, it was obviously close to winter. We had made another eight hundred miles before the rain started so we were now almost two thousand miles from Cracow, and well beyond the range of rescue or arrest.

The scouts were still reporting an almost eerie emptiness on the Steppe. There were a few Mongol yurts but no herds of animals, no moving bands of men. We had drifted away from the
Silk Road, but a reconnaissance showed that traffic was stopped there too.

Of course, we weren’t running parallel to the real
Silk Road. The traditional route ran far south of us. It started near modern Beijing, skirted the northern edge of the Gobi Desert, crossed the Middle East south of the Caspian Sea and ended in Constantinople or Alexandria, but for about a hundred years the Mongols insisted that the caravans follow a route from Sarai through Karakorum, so we were a lot of miles north of cities, supplies, and good roads.

The men played cards, polished weapons and armor, dreamed about, bragged about, and lied about women, but mostly they tried to find a dry place to stretch out. We were camped on the highest spot in sight but there just wasn’t enough high ground for a city of forty thousand men. We had done our best to ditch around the camps, but the damned sod was three feet thick. You couldn’t get a shovel through it.

Someone got the bright idea of cutting the sod and using it to build low walls around the tents to deflect the water. Of course, we didn’t carry sod cutters with us, so they used what shovels we had and the two thousand saws the quartermaster had insisted in bringing from Sarai.

A few of the men used their swords to cut sod. My first reaction was absolute rage that someone would defile a sword that way, but then I realized that the sword was just a tool to keep you alive and if keeping you dry kept you healthy, cut with my blessing. We’ll sharpen them again before we go.

Me, I sat in my tent and planned. I’m not the worrying type. I plan ahead and in fact plan a lot for every contingency that I can see, but I don’t “worry”. This time there had been little time for planning. I knew when I heard the Mongols were coming that they had to be delayed so I reacted the most rational way possible. I got all the men and weapons together that I could lay my hands on and went to harass the enemy.

It’s possible that plan was accomplished when I sent the Big People out to kill the Mongol horses. My reasoning was that a Mongol without a horse was just a nasty little man who needed a bath. We hadn’t heard back from the Big People, but we hadn’t seen any herds of horses in weeks. I might have been able to turn back then, but I was convinced that there was a Mongol invasion force forming somewhere and we needed to bloody it before it got to
Poland.

It felt good to wipe out the garrison at Sarai, but forty thousand Mongols was a damned small outfit for an invasion, and I was convinced that there was another force forming in
Mongolia or already on the trail.

My plan was to find that Mongol army, hit them hard before winter set in, and high tail it back to
Poland before the worst of winter stopped us. It was more than the horse raid plan I started out with, but if it succeeded the Mongol threat would be gone for many years.

Unfortunately, we were having problems finding any sign of a Mongol army or even any sign of living Mongol horse herds, and I did get fired.

As a result of being recalled, I had promised the men with me untold riches and glory. If we couldn’t find a Mongol army, the only way to fulfill that promise was to empty the treasuries at the Mongolian capital at Karakorum, and we were rather short of artillery, ammo, mines, men and everything else needed to storm a fortress city with high stone walls.

I needed a plan. I couldn’t very well assemble the army and announce, “We’ve had a nice little walk our here, but now it’s time to amble back home.” Neither would I ever return to
Poland. I had spent a lifetime making the Christian Army and Poland the most powerful force in Europe, made a county preacher into a pope, cherished a wife for many years, and made a minor king into one of the most powerful monarchs in Christendom and my reward was betrayal by virtually everyone I had helped.

I was recalled to
explain myself
. If I returned, the only possible explanations would require a lot of blood be spilled, some of it royal and some of it holy. My anger was only dampened because I was bored with my life anyway and had enough gold with me to form an empire anywhere I went. The army and the Mongols were my real problems.

So, I sat cross-legged on the carpet and thought and drank liberated wine and stared out at the rain for three days. Occasionally one of my bodyguards would offer a back rub or sex or bring me a meal. I accepted the back rubs and meals, but passed on the sex.

I still hadn’t decided what to do when the answer dropped out of the sky, literally. We were buzzed by an airplane. Almost two thousand miles into a barren steppe, an airplane buzzed us. I ran outside and looked up to see twin-engine aircraft about the size of a DC3 circling overhead. The brilliant and beautiful crest of Poland gleamed on its bright aluminum tail. Obviously Sir Piotr had once again gone against my orders and this time built the twin-engine cargo plane I didn’t want. When he wasn’t busy betraying me, he was a handy man to have around.

After several passes, the pilots apparently identified my tent and circled tightly over it. One of the pilots leaned out of his window and dropped a canister with a long green ribbon streaming behind it. I was still putting on my armor when a trooper brought it to me.

Inside, a message read, “Will land on high hill three miles west of your location.” I told the trooper, “Get a squad together. Full armor. We’ve got visitors.” Silver was waiting for me when I left the tent. She must have also seen the plane. As I swung up in the saddle, I felt a twinge of guilt because I hadn’t curried or brushed her for three days. I had never before missed my morning rituals.

We headed west and a squad formed up around us as we approached the camp perimeter. It was slow going. Silver picked the driest, highest, firmest paths but her powerful legs still often sunk inches into the ground. It took us over an hour to reach to the relatively high and dry hill the plane was on.

Even close up, the plane still looked eerily like a DC3 until I noticed that it had huge puffy rolligon tires on it. The pilots were sitting lazily in the open cargo door but they both jumped to attention when we topped the hill. They were like twins. Both were less than six feet tall and wiry rather than muscular. Their chiseled faces and easy lithe movement showed that they were in as good a shape as any warriors. Their brown leather jackets and the gloves in their epaulets would have looked natural in World War II, except for the one inch orange crest on the leather helmets.

They saluted as I dismounted and one handed me an official envelope in royal colors, sealed with wax and tied with an official ribbon. “Lieutenant Goetz, sir! This message is the official reason that we have made this trip, and with all possible respect, I suggest that you do not open it.”

“You might want to explain that, lieutenant. I am in the habit of reading my mail.”

“Sirs Piotr and Krzysztof are sticklers for oaths and rules, sir. So, the official purpose of our trip is to deliver that message from Sir Piotr, and we can swear a holy oath to anyone without offending powers, secular or holy, as to the truth of that. The real message is still in the plane.

“And, with respect, I have recommended that you discard the official message because it is both unpleasant and irrelevant. I am privy to its contents and I know that Sir Piotr has been instructed to order, again, your immediate return now under threat of courts-martial. Your rank is to be revoked if you are not in Cracow in thirty days, your lands are subject to confiscation in that case, your titles are in jeopardy, and the pope has threatened excommunication if you do not apologize publicly for your disrespect to the papacy.

“As none of this is relevant to the Christian Army, you neither need to read nor respond to it. Sir Krzysztof recommends that you spare yourself the aggravation of communicating with fools.

“I apologize, sir, if I have spoken out-of-place. The real reason for the trip is in a locker. Have I your leave to fetch it?”

Well. I guess I didn’t need to read it after all. The kid probably had a point. I often told my staff, “If you feel an irrational need to talk sense to a fool, spend your time teaching a frog to sing or a horse to fly instead. It will have the same results and at least the frog won’t talk back.”

“Lieutenant, you have my leave, but I am anxious to inspect your craft, and I would ask your permission to board.”

It was a thoroughly modern plane. It was aluminum ribbed inside, all metal outside. “Aluminum and copper alloy,” the lieutenant pointed out, “poured and then cured at room temperature for six days to strengthen it and then covered with a thin layer of pure aluminum to stop corrosion.” In
America, we called that
duralumin
and I was surprised the metallurgists came up with it without my help. I would have to send a message back that the addition of a small percentage of manganese would strengthen it even more.

There was a passenger door ahead of the wing and a large cargo door that swung up from behind the wing. Most of the floor was taken up with two rectangular tanks running the length of each side. We were sitting on those tanks because there was room for little else in the plane. Goetz tapped the tank he was sitting on.

“The tanks will be staying here. They were fitted for this trip because we are way out beyond our normal range. They’re empty now and we’ll drop them to save weight. Even with the tanks out, it’ll be a little close getting back.”

“Speaking of that, how the hell did you get here? We’re three thousand miles from your base. Even with these tanks, you couldn’t possibly make it that far.”

“It was an adventure, but we didn’t come from Poland. A navy flotilla prepared a rough landing field at a place called Anapa on the Black Sea. They offloaded fuel for us. There were three of us, all with extra fuel tanks, that flew down to the base in easy stages. That left us just over two thousand miles for the last leg.

“From the
Black Sea we headed inland about a thousand miles. We found your trail and followed it until we found a nice flat pasture to land in. Then I refilled from their spare tanks and came on to find you.

“The other two planes are still sitting in that pasture with a couple of lances of warriors, waiting to refuel us for the trip back, if we make it.”

“That was a hell of a trip to deliver a message that you didn’t want me to read,” I said.

“There wasn’t much room left over for cargo, but the real message is still in the locker, along with a couple of boxes of cigars and some fine whiskey Sir Krzysztof threw in at the last minute.”

He leaned back and flipped open a locker bolted to the floor. He first handed me a heavy set of saddlebags. “This is from Sir Krzysztof: your cigars and whisky.” Then he retrieved a rather large leather blueprint case. “This case contains plans for your resupply mission and a new code book. This you will want to read.”

I opened the map case and glanced at the first page and then back at the pilot, “You are serious that they are going to build this?”

“Not just serious, sir, and not just planning. That ship and its three sisters are a third done already. I’m under orders from Captain Aleksander and Baron Gwidon to get your feedback on the best use of the ships.”

Outside, the squad had already dismounted and broken out rations. We joined them and the copilot on the ground while I perused the other drawings. Goetz pointed out, “Those aren’t the actual engineering plans, of course. There are five hundred pages of those, but these should give you a good sense of what we’re doing and let us get your feedback.”

Between munches, I scanned the ten pages of drawings. The first five were cutaway drawings of a standard looking dirigible, but the last three were pictures of a flying wing with ridiculously small engines. “Lieutenant Goetz, I’m not clear on what this is, but I’m pretty sure that we don’t have the technology to keep a flying wing in the air.”

“I’m not sure what a ‘flying wing’ is supposed to be, but the
White Dragon
is a rigidible and it should at least get up in the air. After that, it might have problems.

“The official description is a
compound rigidible gliding gun ship
, but the workers just call it the
Sea Sicker
. It flies, or will fly, with a combination of hydrogen and hot air. It has enough hydrogen to maintain neutral buoyancy but the idea is that you open the gas burners and, as it rises, it glides forward then the crew cuts the burners and it slides forward again on the way down, trading height for speed. It ought to be a wild ride, and I’m not certain that even the builders really think it’ll work.”