Conrad's Last Campaign (30 page)

The western group of Mongols is still digging in, but Zephyr says that the work has intensified. They’ve are trenched clear across the pass that we took to get in here, and they’re rolling big boulders down from the hills to line up in front of the trenches.

It doesn’t look like they are moving on us anytime soon."

I had my aide attach a large map of
Mongolia to the blackboard. “I think that I do know where they’re going. This is a map that Ahmed drew up showing the Silk Road routes around Karakorum. Of course we all know that there is no one Silk Road. It’s like a patchwork of roads, but you’ll notice that there are only two easy routes going west. The Western Mongol force has just blocked off the route that we took to get here. If the khan’s army keeps moving in its current direction, it will be at the junction of the other pass leading west by the end of today.

All of the other useable routes out lead either south or southeast into
China. They’re big roads all going the wrong way.

They haven’t been waiting for us to attack
Karakorum. They’ve been buying time to block the passes. They want to keep up here.

We should all have realized what was happening as soon as we saw the railroad. The rules of war change when you can move men two or three hundred miles a day. Big brother Kublai is coming.
Karakorum is the hard place and Kublai’s army is the rock.

If I’m right, we should be hearing something from Vagabond by morning."

Stanislaw leaned forward in his seat, “Your grace, Gentlemen, we are getting hourly reports from Vagabond. She’s penetrated almost two hundred miles south and she hasn’t seen a large army yet, but, at the hundred and hundred fifty mile marks she did find large storage yards flanking the rails. The Captain says they are each about twenty acres in size and surrounded by palisades. In his first fly over about four days ago, he thought they were rail yards or commercial warehouses but this time he looked closer. The workers seem to be a mix of slaves and men in military uniform. He can’t tell what is in the warehouses and wagons, but he thinks the places may be military storage yards.

He hasn’t seen an army yet, but he’s still traveling south."

I looked around the table, “I’m convinced that Uncle Kublai is on his way. We’ll know for certain soon enough, but in case I’m right, we can’t wait until the last minute to plan how we’ll introduce ourselves to him. We have a lot of plans to make.”

In the lull, Baron Ryszard spoke up, “Your grace, everyone here knows that I am no coward and I enjoy a good fight as much as any man, but Kublai’s army could easily be twenty or thirty times our size. Perhaps this would be a good time to retire from the field.”

I tried to keep my voice as respectful as possible, “Baron Ryszard . You have the respect of every man here and your advice is valuable, but we may not have an option. We have forty thousand men and thousands of carts going the wrong way.”

In fact, I was happy he had brought up the idea of retreat. Discussing the possibility was the only way to get the men to see we only had one choice. “We have the expert here. Baron Ivanov is there any reason that we can’t go back to
Poland tomorrow.”

The Baron took time looking into the distance, rubbing his hands together and sighing. Finally, he said, “As I see it, our biggest problems would be starvation, pain, and death. We’re sitting in the middle of the toughest, fastest, meanest best trained army in the world. They could move out in good order by
midnight, kick the crap out of any Mongols in our way, and most of them would be dead in a month.

If Lord Conrad is correct, and he is not often wrong, the Mongols here are not going to attack us. They’re going to fortify the passes and try to keep us from leaving. I have no doubt that either Count Grzegorz or Count Wladyclaw can smash through any Mongol line, particularly with the help of Baron Kowalski’s excellent artillery, but it won’t matter if we can’t get our carts through before Kublai gets here. We need to reach the steppes with at least five thousand carts if we’re going to fight our way home and that’s what the blockades are for. Trenches, boulders, stakes, and harassment to stop our supply train, not our soldiers. There are a few thousand miles of starvation between here and civilization."

I took over the floor again. “That’s also the way I see it. They’ll try to hold us for a few days. If we attack one pass, the other army will hit our rear. If we get through one pass, they’ll concentrate on the baggage train and try to delay us. We know about the trenching, but they probably have the passes mined too. Nothing we can’t handle, but if were still clearing a pass when Brother Kublai gets here, the game is over.

Until we know different, we’re going to assume Kublai is coming. That means we have very little time to get organized. We can’t fight him here and we can’t fight him tomorrow. We need to find a place to stand where we limit his access to us. We need a canyon, a peninsula, something constricted and we need time to find it and move.

This meeting is to figure out what we are going to do. We have the toughest army in the world and enough ammo to kill all of Asia. We just need to avoid getting overrun by sheer numbers.

A few things are obvious. At first light, Count Wladyclaw will send out a company of wolves with a company of engineers to sabotage that rail line. A Chinese army can’t walk more than twenty miles a day, so we need to put them on foot.

Count Grzegorz will be in charge of finding a place to make a stand. I’ll be working with him as will Commodore Stanislaw.

Baron Ryszard , you get charge of
Karakorum. We know it has to be lightly defended, but we can’t afford to leave it behind us, and there may be supplies that we can use. Forget any plans I made. Find a way to kill it quick and simple. Tell Wladyclaw and Kowalski what you need to get the job done.

The rest of you figure out what I’ve missed. We haven’t heard from the pilots. Can we defend their base where they are, or they need to move? There are a thousand things to discuss.

You’ve got food, cigars, and soft places to sit. There are runners outside who can summon anyone else you need.

Get to work."

One long army hour later, a half hour after darkness fell, we got a message from the Vagabond “Campfires sighted. From horizon to horizon. Three hundred fifty miles south.”

We had found Kublai.

About the same time, a full company of engineers left camp with their escort of Wolves. The men would sleep in the saddle and be ready for railroad demolition in the morning.

An hour before
midnight I broke up the meeting. Everyone would need some rest before sunrise. My last order of the night was for the radio corps to set up a camp wide broadcast to take place after morning rituals. As tired as I was, I had a hard time sleeping. Even with Terry and Shauna massaging my sore muscles my mind was full of images of Chinese catapults and Mongol horsemen.

Rumors of the size of the Mongol army were certainly circulating through the camp, and some warriors were going to be fearful. I had to replace those fears with a sense of pride and determination. In the dim light of early morning, I climbed to the highest point in the camp and took the microphone the communications corpsman handed me. Most men would just be finishing their morning rituals. At my first word, the camp went silent, “You may have heard that we have company coming. In fact we have learned that we are surrounded by three Mongol armies. The armies of
Mongolia have fortified and blocked both roads back to Poland, and a large Chinese army, led by Mongols, is approaching from the south.

They think they have us trapped, but we are the meanest, toughest, fastest army in creation, and we go anywhere we want. Moreover, six months ago, standing on the plains of
Mongolia, each and every one us made the decision to kill Mongols and end forever the threat to the civilized world.

So we will fight. That is what the Christian Army does. We kill the enemies of
Poland. We annihilate those who would threaten our families and our friends. Today that means we kill the heathen Mongols.

The Mongols will help us in this. They are bringing a lot of Chinese friends. They will line them up in close order from horizon to horizon, to make certain that we can’t miss hitting one, no matter where we aim.

Months ago, I promised you the wealth of Karakorum. Tomorrow, we will take it, and then leave to prepare our welcome for the Mongols. In a few days, we will see our enemy’s campfires stretching to the horizon. Before we leave, their funeral pyres will be even larger.

We fight for
Poland, for God, for our families. God Bless us all."

I pushed the pause button again. “He actually did it! He convinced them they have to stay and fight a useless battle. That’s either suicidal or just plain stupid.”

“I know”

Uncle Tom look unconcerned but I went on, “They can leave anytime they want. They could walk through either Mongol blocking army and have plenty of time to get the carts that they really need across any Mongol blockade, or they could just load the bare essentials and the booty onto panniers and high tail if for home. Without dragging the baggage train they could be back in Poland in a few weeks, and the Mongols could never catch them. They could even take time to loot Karakorum and still get away clean.

If they run short of food or want to ship booty home, they have a fleet of airships to help them."

Uncle Tom looked amused. “Don’t sell the warrior’s intelligence short. They aren’t used to aerial resupply and even Ivanov didn’t think about it. They’re also blinded with gold fever and adrenalin, and they’re warriors who think in terms of glory and booty not retreats and running. Most of them don’t really want to go home that way.

And, remember they can’t all go home. Conrad can’t."

“But he has to know it’s stupid. Why is he doing it?”

“The slavery. Remember he spent a year as a slave. Not a well treated household tutor slave or well fed kitchen slave, a subhuman animal slave. A piece of machinery. He was in Hell for months and I still don’t understand why he never once asked me for help.

Now he’s consumed with anger. The old Conrad would never have allowed the slaughter of women and children and there’s enough of old Conrad left in him so that he still lets his men talk him out of it. He tolerates the insubordination because deep down inside he doesn’t like his own orders.

He can’t go home, but maybe if he kills enough bad guys he can rid himself of the anger and let the old Conrad out again.

For now, I’m with Conrad. Thousands of people have invested countless man years of effort and busted their butts to get this army to this battle. It would be a shame to go home now."

The cannon fire began about an hour later. The truce was over, and Ryszard was beginning his bombardment. At breakfast I learned that I had missed Stanislaw’s return to his ship. Apparently the airship dropped the sedan chair on the empty space in front of my tent and continued to drop until there was a lot of slack in the line. Then Stanislaw stepped in, fastened his safety belt and rose into the sky.

He left a message that he was on his way to confer with the fighter pilots. When he was dropped there, Flying Cloud would continue to search for a place to make our stand.

I breakfasted on bread slathered with soft white cheese and a tumbler of cold well water. I was still licking my fingers while my bodyguards dressed me in armor. Except for a few weeks in our winter camp, I had been wearing armor almost every day for year. My body was wearing calluses where the straps wore on my shoulders and the chafing on my calves was permanent. I dreamed of living in my favorite silk bathrobe or, better yet, in my favorite bare skin, but today I would ride forth in full golden glory – again.

Ryszard was at the observation point with of his personal lance, watching shells landing on Karakorum. As we watched the bombardment, he explained what he had decided to do. “I’m going to burn all the residential and business areas with incendiaries. It doesn’t take very many of them to get a good fire going, and I want to save as many shells as possible for the main event. They’re supposed to be empty anyway. Then we’ll flatten that palace and the meeting hall with the five incher. The khan’s treasure warehouses are those buildings by the far wall. We’ll spare them until I see what’s inside.

We’ll punch some exit holes in the north wall early in case there are Europeans stuck in the city. Count Wladyclaw is stationing several companies near that wall with instructions to kill anyone leaving the city with a weapon or wearing armor, or just looking like a Mongol, and let women and children pass. When the fires die down a little, Kowalski is going to punch some holes in the wall, and then he’ll clear a road for us from the front gate to the warehouses."

He always pissed me off with his bleeding heart crap, but the plan was basically sound, “My Liege, you seem to have things well in hand, but I must remind you that we have no facilities for prisoners and it is much to dangerous to leave them behind us. Do not take prisoners.

Keep me informed. I want to know when you launch the attack."

By the time I got back to my tent, there was a lot of news waiting. The radio crew had run a microphone and speaker into the tent so that Sir Wladyclaw and I could conference with Stanislaw from my desk. He told us that the Chinese Mongol army was on the move. They began breaking camp at first light and were moving to the rail cars. They were also moving with air cover. Zephyr needed to stay at high altitude to avoid the two Chinese rocket planes that circled the camp. Unless we neutralized the planes, there was no chance of surprise on either side. I put it on my todo list. Well, Stanislaw’s todo list.

The more important thing was choosing a place for our stand. I was anxious to finalize the decision, but the air corps needed time to finish their survey. Zephyr was flying a forty mile grid pattern that would take several more hours to finish while Flying cloud was following caravan trails and working the guides for suggestions. I set a meeting for nightfall to make the final decision.

The rest of the day was a steady parade of conferences. When will we make the move? Answer after we take the city. We didn’t need the entire force to deal with Karakorum, but I didn’t want to spit our forces in such hostile territory. The last time we did that Captain Ivanov earned a promotion to Baron, so I decided that the column would pack up and prepare to move, but stand in place while Ryszard handled the city.

Kowalski and I debated whether to take the naval gun with us or disable the monster. It was powerful, but we’d have to remake The Pride and the Passion to move it. We decided to drag it along. We had more ammo than any army in history and plenty of cannon, Sten guns, machine guns and rifles to shoot it with.

I was surprised that we had over three months of food with us. We could probably outlast the Chinese in a siege. Just to make certain, we’d shop a little in Karakorum before we left.

Late in the afternoon, Ryszard sent word that the fires were still burning in the city and that he would carry out his attack at first light.

At dark, our move team showed up. All the barons, both counts, and, not surprisingly, Captain Stanislaw were there. This time the sedan chair had a rudder on the back and springy skids in place of the legs.

I began the meeting with a good old fashioned pep talk. “All we need is a good place to fight in and a little time to get it ready. Komander Jazinski has already pointed out that there aren’t all that many true Mongols in
Mongolia. There aren’t more than sixty or seventy thousand fighting men left here. We’ve already faced them a couple of times and kicked their asses.

The Chinese army isn’t going to be much different. It’s bigger, but no better. They’ve been doin’ a lot of raping and they all have slave girls, but there still can’t be more than a hundred thousand or so more Mongols in the entire Chinese Empire. We learned this winter that the Turks have joined the Mongols so enthusiastically that you can’t tell one from another, so add another sixty, seventy thousand Turks. The rest of the men sitting around those campfires are Chinese or other subjects. We already know that they don’t want to fight us. The Mongols will push them forward as cannon fodder but they will fight only as hard they have too.

It doesn’t matter if there are a thousand of them or a million. They are just targets, and we have lots of ammo. This won’t be a stroll in the park, but we can beat them.

Now let’s choose their graveyard."

The first suggestion was that we use the pass that we came through on the way in. True, it was now full of Mongols and trenches and boulders, but the Mongols were never a major problem, and after we cleared them out, we would have a ready made defensive wall left behind.

I gave the idea five points for creativity and ten points for dumb. The Mongols there could refuse battle and vanish into the hills until we were under attack and then jump us from behind.

Our second choice had a similar problem. The rigidibles had found a glacial canyon about thirty miles north. The mouth of the canyon was perhaps fifteen hundred feet wide and the steep hills protected the sides. Once we were dug in, we couldn’t be dislodged by anyone. Unfortunately, the Chinese could decide to simply blockade the entrance and keep us there until we came out to fight against their prepared positions.

We settled on a canyon about twenty five miles east of us on the
Silk Road segment that led to Korea. Both ends of the canyon were narrow and it had relatively high hills on both sides. The surrounding mountains would make the Chinese Mongols take days to ride around if they wanted to attack our back door, and the second opening gave us room to run if things went wrong.

Before we broke up the meeting, I asked Sir Grzegorz for any news on the troops delaying the Mongols. “After a little consideration, I sent an additional party with Wolves and Engineers south. The original party didn’t start destroying tracks until they were almost two hundred miles south, and they’re looking for big things to wreck. They’re searching for bridges and viaducts. They’ll keep going until they meet the Chinese. Then they’ll do some damage to the rolling stock and depend on the Big Peoples speed to get them out of there.

The second party is pulling up rails and twisting them starting about one hundred miles out and they aren’t necessarily looking for big targets. Any bend in the road or any switch that can be twisted up quickly is a target. On the way back, they’ll pull up track all the way home.

However, Captain Stanislaw has come up with a good delaying tactic. "

Stanislaw tried to look surprised and then humble and failed at both, “Your grace, when the captain of Vagabond realized that it would be handy to put bullet holes in the steam engines - if the planes could reach trains, he remounted two of the fighters and flew them south. He’ll drop the planes over the trains and provide the Chinese with some holes to patch.”

“The plan, Captain, is ingenious, but you said that the planes can’t re-hook to Vagabond, so how do you get them home? Those trains are way out of range.”

“Vagabond can’t take the planes back on board, but she’s carrying extra barrels of fuel. They’ll attack at first light and after the attack they’ll all fly north. When the planes are low on fuel, they’ll all land and Vagabond will refuel the planes for the flight home.

It’s slightly risky. We know that those wooden planes can be brought down by ground fire, but the Chinese have never seen a real fighter plane so we figure they can do two or three passes before anyone thinks to shoot at them."

One of the interpreters bowed to Stanislaw, “Pilots not have trouble finding engines. Kublai so proud of new engines he have them painted bright red with yellow smoke stacks. Tell warriors easy to see.”

I spent the rest of the evening hours touring the artillery emplacements, encouraging the men, congratulating them on their work and occasionally dismounting to share little food or a hear a few jokes. The men were polite, respectful, grateful, and, as usual, a little uncomfortable with having the boss around. Being the boss was not a path to popularity.

The next morning I was up early. The day started badly.

I decided to give a hand to Baron Ryszard. Actually, I decided that I was bored out of my mind from planning and paperwork and that I was not going to miss another battle. While they were dressing me, I told Terry and Shauna that they would not be riding with me today. They were the world’s best bodyguards but I had decided that modern warfare was not a place for nymphs. This was no longer medieval warfare. We now had bullets flying around, lots of them, and my bodyguards absolutely refused to wear armor.

They wailed and whined and cried and clung to me and begged me to let them come. When I ordered them to Shut Up, they choked back their tears and sobbed silently. That was worse than the wailing and whining. Terry finally promised to wear greaves on her legs and arms and convinced me she could shelter between my body and my shield. I refused to relent on Shauna, but I finally promised she could ride in the future if she could find some way to protect herself on Silver’s back.

I was already in a foul mood when Grzegorz rode by my tent. He gave a snappy salute from horseback, donned his most respectful face and said, “Your orders conspicuously failed to specify from where you will observe and direct the battle. I assume you will have a radio cart, but on the eave of a battle, we don’t know where to send messages?”

“You know damned well that I’m not putting on this tin suit to be an observer. We’ve come a long way and now I’m going to lead a column into that city.”

“Most odd, Sire, Baron Ryszard has also ridden far this last year and shown great courage in every battle. One might think he has earned the right the lead his men into battle.” Before I could skewer him, he shrugged and turned his horse to leave, “But, the Hetman knows best.”

I do not like it when subordinates question my decisions, but I just gritted my teeth. He knew that the Wolves were as loyal to him as they were to me and I wasn’t going to punish him. It didn’t help that the bastard might be right. Maybe my proper place in this battle was on a high hill next to a radio cart and a bunch of runners.

I always thought that one of the reasons that Alexander beat the Persians was that Alexander led the Greek side from horseback in the middle of the battle and Darius led the Persians from a sedan chair sitting on a hill surrounded by guards. Sooner or later, however, we were going to stop being a medieval army. Now that we had radios and observers flying over the battle, and a well trained force, it was probably time to stop being Alexander and become Eisenhower – but not today, damn it. Today, I’m going to kill something in
Karakorum with my own hands

Baron Ryszard was clearly not happy when I showed up with three companies of mounted infantry. As I drew up beside him, I gestured down to the city. “Baron, you are doing a good job. The plan is yours and the battle yours to lead. However, I am going to make one small addition. I will take a small force and lead a distraction. These laggards were lounging around with nothing to do, so I will take them through the railroad gate and perhaps draw off some fire from you and strengthen your flank.”

Ryszard was a little happier when he realized that I was going to let him lead his own men. He would charge through the western wall, opposite the khan’s treasure houses. The artillery had cleared a path for him all the way through town.

I had decided to make my assault through the railroad gates because if we went through the gate, we’d be right next to the khan’s palace. A good place to start killing Mongols. There was also a large empty area just beyond the gates that was usually filled with Yurts that would give us a lot of maneuvering room inside the walls. It was staked and ditched, but neither would slow up Big People.

That maneuvering room also meant that we would be very exposed, but I had a shock tactic that should give us plenty of time to find cover. When Ryszard signaled the charge, I signaled to a lance of wolves who had loaded a boxcar with a hundred fifty pounds of black powder and parked it about a half mile down the tracks. A few minutes later a flaming boxcar appeared from the south, pushed by two Big People. Less than a quarter mile from the gate, the Big People pealed off and we began our charge, sweeping around behind the boxcar, but giving it lots of room. I lowered my shield around Terry as we approached the wall.