Conrad's Last Campaign (22 page)

I hit the control button again.

“What the hell is going on? This says that the Mongols were never going to attack
Poland again.”

Uncle Tom shrugged, “That’s right. It was just bad intelligence such as often happens in wars. Several of Novacek’s spies reported the same thirty thousand man relief column going to Sarai on their annual rotation. The same one Conrad has already destroyed.

“There was confusion that led the staff to assume that they were different columns and much bigger than they really were. You combine that with a few ambiguous references to a ninety-day timeline and someone suddenly sees a massive invasion, but Poland was never in danger.”

My frustration was evident. “That means that this whole campaign is a waste. He could turn back now, or could have turned back at Sarai, or could just have relaxed in his palace in
Jerusalem and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Shouldn’t someone tell him?”

“I don’t think so. He was getting bored and, frankly, boring to monitor. What fights he had were so easy they looked like a bad cowboy movie and every day was mind-numbingly the same. A few meetings, food, cigars, whiskey, watching more naked girls dance like the naked girls did last night, sex with another girl who looked like the one last night, and a lot of snoring.

“It wasn’t that he wasn’t bored with naked dancing-girls; he just didn’t know what else to do without television. For God’s sake, the man was so bored he spent a year drawing pictures of his new home.

“I had to do something or we’d both die of boredom.

“This way, he has an adventure, we have something interesting to monitor, and if he succeeds a railroad will be built on the Silk Road and stimulate both regions into tremendous progress.”

I leaned forward, “But what if he gets killed on this useless campaign?”

“Then we can start monitoring someone else.

“Besides, he knows. He has to know. How stupid would he have to be when he has been in Mongolian territory for months and hasn’t seen so much as a squad of soldiers since Sarai? If there was a million man Mongol army out there, he’d be dead by now, and he knows it. Hell, he built that camp like a fort because he knows that the Mongols favorite time for war is winter. When not a single Mongol showed up all winter, it was obvious that there was no one out there.”

“Then why is he still there?”

“Hatred. Blood lust. I’m certain that he still sees himself as a paragon of virtue, but he has become very casual about human life. A lot more people died during his
Africa trip than he admits too, and his attitude has changed. Once killing bothered him, but now he can execute a thousand prisoners or a hundred
evil
men and still enjoy his lunch.

“His hatred of the Mongols has grown over the years. You saw how he was genuinely angry when his generals objected to wiping out the Mongol civilians. I think he is planning genocide and is only restrained by the necessity of convincing his army to do it.”

I leaned forward and pushed the Resume button.

It took several days to get ready to move. Commissary had to pack their pots and pans, the wagons – thousands of them – had to be inventoried and reloaded. Everything got polished, repaired, sharpened, and packed. Two days before breakout, crews began to remove two large sections of our outer wall. The day before breakout the tents were removed from the soddies, cleaned, and packed away. The men would sleep under the stars that night and move out fast in the morning. The same day, the now useless medieval wagons and every scrap of paper and garbage was piled into a trash mountain that burned all night. Anything we weren’t taking was burned.

The R4
Wanderlust
landed in the early morning and took the tanks of spare acid and iron filings aboard. We hadn’t needed them yet, but there was no reason to leave them behind. I had requested that
Wanderlust
fly observation for us until
Zephyr
arrived or until they ran low on hydrogen.

The next morning, a few minutes after our morning rituals,
Wanderlust
rose majestically into the air, leveled off at about four thousand feet, and led forty thousand men up the river.

The plan was simple. We were obviously under some observation unless the Mongols had lost all of their wits, and stealth was not a requirement. So, using
Wanderlust
to avoid traps, we would travel north up the river until we got to the northern branch of the Silk Road, then turn right and go to Karakorum, looking for a fight all the way. Within a few days, we would be in the foothills of the Altai Mountains, and the road was the best route through to the capitol.

Once we left the river, we should make the gross mile days that I expected on the last trip. Now we were lean, well equipped and should make the nine hundred miles to
Karakorum in ten days.

It was fast. We traveled better than ten miles an hour in open country, ate lunch in the saddle, and stopped only for a few short rest breaks every day. We had saved the canned food for the trip and it was nice to taste mystery stew again.

Several times, we overran small groups of Mongol soldiers who had probably been told to shadow us from the front. When they couldn’t match our pace, they fell back into rifle range. We took neither prisoners nor casualties for three days.

About
noon of the second day, we reached the road. As before, we paralleled the road to avoid traffic. There wasn’t much to avoid, the word was out that we were coming, and this time we moved within sight of the road.

The marching orders were simple: keep moving! By the second day, we were leaving the steppes and closing in on the
Altai mountains. This area was populated much more heavily than the steppes. There was a major town about every hundred miles, villages about every twenty miles, and a lot of small settlements. We flowed through it all without stopping.

I knew that if there was going to be trouble, it would be in the foothills of the Altai. It was the first place the Mongols could hope to set up an ambush. Sure enough, in the afternoon of the third day, I received a radio call from the
Wanderlust
.

“Lord Conrad, you have friends preparing a welcoming party for you. They seem very anxious to make your acquaintance. About twenty miles ahead, you have hostiles on hidden ridges both sides of the road. We count eighty cannon with heavy supporting infantry. I would estimate two thousand hostiles, half cannon tenders and half infantry. Looks like they’ve been waiting for awhile.”

“Thank you,
Wanderlust
. Do you see any alternate routes? I hate to stop for a party.”

“No, lord. They obviously picked this spot because it’s the first bottleneck on the road. You’ll pass a good-sized village a few miles ahead of you and then follow a river eastward. The river will broaden out to a lake for a few miles and then narrow as you start into a valley. At that point, there are foothills on both sides of the route. Cannon are dug in just over the crest of the hills. The troops are camped between the foothills and the mountainside. You can identify the hills by the Chinese-style pagoda high on the right side.

“You might be able to get Big People around the back by skirting the mountainside, but they’d be single file sitting ducks. I should also warn you that the cannon are well dug in. They’re ready for a slug fest.”

“Thanks, we’ll take care if it.”

I wished that I did know how to
take care of it
. I was feeling the normal anger we all get when our enemies stubbornly fail to fulfill our expectations for their stupidity.

Since they hadn’t even made a probing attack all winter, I had assumed that the mission to kill their horses had been a success. I believed that, being short on horses to support an attack, they would hold up in their walled cities and wait for battle. Unfortunately, someone seems to have read the story about the Persians and three hundred stubborn Greeks.

I guessed that whatever mobile forces they had left were now in a reserve column ready to reinforce the ambush on whatever pass we took through the mountains. If we took a different pass, we’d probably run into a similar force whose job would be to hold us there until the reinforcements arrived.

It was a good plan. Too damned good. If we had stumbled into it, it could have seriously wounded us. Even knowing about it, we were going to have a hard time getting through. We had plenty of artillery shells now and we outranged the Mongol cannons, but
Wanderlust
told us that their cannon were well dug in. That means we would need almost direct hits on most of them to put them out of commission. That could take days, during which their reinforcements would arrive.

Our only chance for an easy passage was to move much faster than they expected. I called over one of my messengers. “Send a message out to the scouts. There is a valley about twenty miles ahead. They’ll see some hills with a pagoda on the right side. There are Mongols beyond those hills. They are to make a lot noise going through the valley and back but are not to find the Mongols. We want to convince them we’re too stupid to see them. Then report back to me as soon as we camp.”

I called over Sir Wladyclaw and asked, “How many night fighters do we have along?”

“Three companies. They aren’t operating as night fighters now, but they have been trained for it.”

“Tell them to get well rested as soon as we camp. They may be getting up very early tomorrow morning.”

We stopped in full daylight and camped by the lake about five miles short of the ambush pass. I hoped it was late enough in the day to seem natural to the spies watching from the mountainside ahead. The staff conference started almost immediately.

It was crowded with fifteen people around the two tables. Most of the barons, all of the counts, and two komanders made a group almost too big to work with. The cooks, realizing that this was a working meeting with no time or space for plates and manners, set up a sideboard with fresh bread and chunks of meat, vegetables, and onions that could be skewered one-handed. I told the two scouts that I was conferring with to get some food and opened the meeting.

“Most of you know that we stopped early because there is a Mongol ambush ahead. The
Wanderlust
tells us that the enemy has dug in about eighty cannon on both sides of a valley ahead. Of course, we could blast them out with our artillery or the Wolves could go up and kill them all, but an artillery duel would be long and expensive and even the Wolves would be foolish to charge up a hill with forty cannons and hundreds of rifles waiting at the top.

“Armor or not, it would be foolish to crest a hill in front of a cannon firing grapeshot.

“I’m certain that they have sent for reinforcements. We can, of course, kick the ass of any army that comes at us, but we want to avoid a nasty firefight in a narrow pass. We know that close up, they can still hurt us so we should clean up this mess before they get friends.

“I have a plan for an attack that should solve the problem, but it requires several steps, careful timing and lots of cooperation. I expect you all to work out the details before we retire.

“The moon will set just after midnight tonight, leaving us a lot of dark to work with and Baron Krol is leading three companies of trained night fighters. That gives us about seven hundred men to sneak up two hills in the middle of the night.

“The scouts over there at the sideboard report that the hills hiding the ambush are barely able to qualify as
hills
. They have a rather gentle slope: perhaps three hundred feet high and less than a half mile long on both sides of the valley. We know from
Wanderlust
that the cannon are spotted along the crests of the hills and the camps are further back near the mountainsides.

“So, here’s the plan. After moon sets, the night fighters and four other companies of Wolves ride out as quietly as possible to as near to the ambush as they can get without being heard. That should leave them about two miles out.

“The night fighters will wait until an hour before first light and then sneak up the hills and take out the sentries as quietly as possible. When the sentries are neutralized they will take out any soldiers sleeping near the cannon. That’ll require rifles and Sten guns and it’ll wake up everyone.

“When Baron Kowalski’s men hear the gunfire, they’ll start lobbing star shells over both enemy camps, and the Wolves will charge both hills. If you’re two miles away, they should crest the hills in less than four minutes. With the cannon neutralized, it should be a cake walk. Their job is to sweep the camps near the mountains. It’s a smash and bash. Fly through without stopping, shoot everything in sight, and then pull back to the infantry line.

“When the sun rises, we can finish off any survivors.”

The staff did come up with some improvements. The infantry commanders suggested that when the fighting started, three of their lances should take machine guns up each hill and set them up at the ridge to cover any retreat and add long-range firepower. The Wolves could sweep through the camp and back toward the ridge and be supported by the machine guns.

Then someone mentioned that having your own machine guns firing from behind you might place a severe burden on the widows and orphans fund, so the plan was revised to place the machine guns between the cannon emplacements and the Mongol camp and not use them unless the Wolves were in serious trouble or after the Wolves exited the camp.

Baron Kowalski pointed out lobbing star shells that far out would be inaccurate unless we moved the artillery up closer to the ambush site, so we decided to use illumination flares instead.

The night fighters pointed out that neutralizing the sentries on both hills was absolutely essential before either force infiltrated the cannon field. If either force jumped the gun it could sabotage the other, do they worked out a series of signals using lighters.

The session went on for almost two hours, but an operation like this often took days to plan, so it still felt rushed. If anyone thinks that we were overplanning, that we didn’t need to think so hard when we had the best guns, fastest mounts, and all of the machine guns, they should look up the Battle of Isandlwana where a Zulu army wiped out a modern British force using only spears against rifles. The Gods of War favor those with the mostest and the bestest, but only if they don’t act the stupidest.

Word had already been sent down to the troops to sleep soon. Even four hours of sleep can make the difference between a battle won and lost. The knights began waking their men an hour after midnight. A small scouting party had left half an hour before to mark the place where the Wolves would wait while they still had moonlight.

I was up before my bodyguards called me. I had not been sleeping well anyway. I am one of those lucky people who dream in full color and 3D and my dreams are endlessly entertaining. I spend every night slashing my enemies to death, rolling in fabulous wealth and bedding every woman I ever dreamed of. However, lately I sometimes found that when I slashed my dreamland enemy or touched my dreamy date, they would suddenly look up at me with big brown eyes and begin to scream in terror and then cry inconsolably.

I buckled on my armor and was leaving my tent when Sir Grzegorz approached me. “Going for a moonlight walk, your grace?”

“You could not have forgotten that we have a battle, kolomel.”

“Indeed, I remember it. In fact I am leading the right hand column of Wolves and Baron Krol is leading the left hand column. Which of us do you expect to be incompetent? Or do you plan the lead the charge up the middle?”

“Do I need to remind you, kolomel, that I am in command of this army and I lead them?”

“You are my commander and greatly respected. However, with all due respect, a general does not need to lead every patrol. You have competent officers and, again with respect, I suggest that you might let them do their jobs. In any case, that bright golden armor of yours might not be the best thing to wear during a sneak attack.”

That’s when I noticed that his armor was covered with a black poncho. I fumed anyway. First, they make dirigibles and airplanes and machine guns I didn’t order, win wars I didn’t start, and now they wanted to fight without me! But he had a point. My getting killed on a minor raid would end this campaign and my presence at the head of the troops would undermine the other commanders.