Conrad's Last Campaign (33 page)

If they scatter and move out, we will never have a decisive battle. We won’t be able to do anything but harass them as they leave, and, frankly, our men would be very unhappy if we decided to take more months of their lives following Mongols around.

So, we’ll take a page out of the Mongol battle plan. We’ll make them think they are doing well. We’ll encourage them to keep letting us kill their men the easy way, by shooting them while they run at us. If they lose heart, we may even need to let them have a little success, like taking the outer defense ditches. The more of their men we can kill from home, the less we will have to handle on the tundra.

To encourage them, we’re going to hide our assets and minimize what we can do. I know that our artillery could take out the center of the Mongol camp without moving an inch from where they are and our planes could wipe any attack without breathing hard.

As long as they keep trying, we keep it low key.

Before they get too discouraged and stop sending us targets. We’re gonna kill them where they stand.

We’ll send out half our force through the back door, ride like Hell and get ready to flank the main Mongol force. The other half of the force will boil out the front door and head for the main camp. We’ll have a pincer on the Mongols.

At about the time they’re in position, we’ll open up with everything we have. We’ll throw in enough artillery to clear our front door, and then open up with the big gun on the center of the main camp. The rigidibles will drop the arrows we liberated from Karakorum and whatever bombs we can jerry rig. The airplanes will block the way south by blasting anything that moves that way. We will unleash Hell.

I know that each of you sees problems and complications that you have to handle, and I’ll give you time to consider the plan before we discuss it further, but a few things come to mind. Sir Eikmann, you’ll have to prepare our egress. We need a way to get past out own defenses with fifteen thousand or so men without slowing down."

“We considered that when we prepared the defenses, Sire. From the top of an embankment, a Big Person can jump the ditches without slowing down. If we add some charges in the right places, we can probably improve that by blowing some of the embankments down into the ditches. I’ll get back to you on that,”

“That’s a good start, but be certain we can do it. Sir Stanislaw, your job is one of the most important. There will be Mongol force of some sort at both ends of the valley. I’m hoping the back gate will be more lightly defended so we can go out that way. However, the entire plan will fail if the Mongols at the east entrance can tell their friends in the main camp that we’re on the way. So, you have to cut then off. Kill the rocket planes, find any messenger stations between the two forces and take them out. We’ll also need a good map of the best path for an army from the east end to take around to the main Mongol camp.

It took the Mongols almost a week to move that distance, Big People can do it in less than two days if you can find us a path.

Sir Kowalski, you are going to have to plan and execute a ballet. We need artillery at the east barrier until the force gets through, then most of the pieces need to be repositioned to support the main break out.

When the main force breaks out, they will need artillery support and you may need to move the smaller pieces closer to the Mongol camp.

Unfortunately, my injuries keep me from being involved in most of the planning. In a few minutes, I will need to go back to my tent and continue to heal. Tomorrow
noon we will convene again and go over our preliminary plans.

Please enjoy the wine before you leave."

Then I carefully and slowly walked to the stairwell and, as soon as I was out of sight, collapsed into the arms of the waiting corpsmen,

Doodles done by Su Song – and immediately burned.

The end is near. Now all I have to do is wonder whether my notebooks have reached my friend and whether the true Emperor has taken action. I have informed the general that I must leave tomorrow to coordinate supply shipments from the south. He was unable to hide his glee at losing me.

Thanks to Uncle Tom’s modifications, my body heals amazingly fast. I was mobile again in a week. I wasn’t completely healed, but the ribs were mending quickly, and I would be completely healed in another week.

The Mongols didn’t need encouragement yet to keep attacking us. They literally stacked up the bodies in front of us. They made no attempt to recover their wounded or dying and when the wind was from the west, the smell was nauseating.

They managed to reach the outer ditch just once. The sent in Chinese soldiers rolling boulders, intending to start filling in the ditch with boulders and bodies. We were still holding back on our full firepower in an attempt to get the herding Mongols in range, but the game was getting dicey. Our losses were small compared to the Chinese, but not negligible. The med tents were getting a lot of business and the graveyard was growing.

Baron Ryszard pitched a tent close to the outer embankment and assumed twenty four hour command of the western walls. Baron Krol did the same at the eastern defensive wall.

About two weeks after the first attack, I was taking a careful ride around the camp when several medical wagons charged by. I couldn’t keep up yet, but I followed them to the eastern defenses. A mounted Mongol force had reached our eastern side charged right in. No bells, no whistles, no chants, no hesitation, just charge!

A less experienced commander or a cowardly one might have been unnerved by the speed of the attack, but Krol already had cannon loaded with grape shot aiming outward and camouflaged machine gun wagons on elevated platforms. His men held fire until they could almost smell the leading Mongols and then unloaded with everything.

Half of the Mongols died in the first few minutes, but the other half kept coming. They were still coming when I reached the embankment, but it didn’t last long and nobody saved one for me.

Krol and one of his aides were looking over the battlefield from the top of a embankment as I drew up. I just opened my mouth to warn Krol about “dead” Mongols when a shot rang out and his aid dropped where he stood. Machine guns raked the area the shot had come from.

Krol grabbed his aid under the arms and pulled him down to where the corpsmen could get him on a stretcher. There was a lot of blood and I doubted that he would reach the med tent alive.

He stood there for a moment with his aides blood spattered on his left arm and chest. He was breathing heavily and his mustache dripped sweat. When he saw me he grunted in my direction, gave a minimal salute and said, “My mistake, Sire, but I’m afraid that Albin has paid the price.”

“It was a mistake, Baron, but Squire Albin could have warned you about dead Mongols, or discouraged you from standing where you were. The error was also his. You had better send out a mercy crew to make certain that none of the other ‘dead’ Mongols are still suffering.

Is there anything you need? Do you need more men or anything that I can send you from stores?"

His voice was higher than usual and he seemed distracted, “No, they’re going to rotate in about half an hour. I’ll have plenty of men and we barely touched our ammo supply. We’re good.”

“Sire Krol, you have done a good job here. I will not worry about this barricade while you command it. Perhaps you should have a little rest now and let one of your captains organize the mercy squads.”

I stopped by the med tent on the way back and learned than Albin had, indeed, paid the ultimate price for his mistake. As Christians, we were required to inter our dead. Since there was little space in our crowded camp, the Chaplains had dug a cave into the valley wall. Albin would be placed there and his name added to a plaque. The last act of the Chaplain when we left this valley would be to collapse the cave and place the plaque over the entrance. May God have mercy on their souls.

I figured that the Mongols would stay for three more months. The medieval world was governed by seasons. There was a hunting season, a fishing season, a harvest season, and a war season between the planting and harvest seasons. In my old timeline, the Mongols had shocked their opponents by fighting in the winter season by using the frozen rivers as roads into
Russia and the Middle East, but generally, there was a war season.

I’m certain that my own men thought that the plan was to sit out the war season in the valley and then head for home when the game was called on account of weather. I guess I should have told the Mongols what they were supposed to do.

About four weeks into the siege things had been quiet for several days, when we got a message from Zerphr. Apparently the Mongols were moving more troops east for another attempt at that entrance. They had moved about half way and were camped at a site where the trail came close to the mountains that ringed our valley. The next day, the observation post at the ridge reported that the Mongols had brought up artillery and fired several volleys at them. However, all the shells fell short, very short, so the post wasn’t particularly worried.

When the ridge post failed to check in the next morning, we sent squad scrambling up the hillside to check on them. They didn’t get very far.

In was barely dawn when I was awakened by battle sounds. I felt no need to move fast or soon. This attack wouldn’t be any more exiting than the last. Terry was spooned next to my stomach and Shauna cuddled up behind me. It was a warm, soft, drifting sleep that stole away quietly – until the explosion happened in front of my tent.

The three of us were out of bed, covered enough for decency and astride Silver in less than a minute. We sped toward the front and arrived in the middle of the biggest battle yet. I stopped at the headquarters bunker for the inner barricade to get my bearings.

Beyond the outer barrier, the Chinese and Mongols were moving forward, but this was no probing attack, no march of the cannon fodder. The siege towers were back, shortened, better armored, and mounting swivel guns. The foot soldiers pushed barriers ahead of them again, but moved from cover to cover, using the flotsam from prior battles for shielding.

The Mongols were all on foot, no longer willing to give us easy targets by standing tall in the saddle.

As I watched, machine gun fire raked our own men – from behind. It wasn’t very accurate, but it didn’t need to be. Half a dozen men took fifty caliber shells in the first thirty seconds. I looked up to see firing from the ridge top and thirty or forty Chinese troops manning a captured machine gun, swivel guns, and a couple of small mortars. One of those mortars had been my wake up call.

The bastards had flanked us.

We were in serious danger of being overrun, but the army was already fighting back. From somewhere, ten men dislodged a wooden footbridge and carried it up onto the embankment to cover the defender’s backs. Big People were pulling wagons up the hill and leaving them behind soldiers for cover. Reserve warriors were grabbing shields and throwing themselves on the ground next to the defenders, holding the shields up to defend from the guns on the ridge.

The machine guns on the front line were busy stopping the attack, but on the inner defensive line and in the camp, several level headed officers had turned their guns around and started firing at the ridge line. It was a long shot, over 1200 yards straight up, but doable.

It wasn’t enough. We were being pushed back. Despite the spirit shown by the men, confusion was crippling our front line. It’s hard to concentrate on killing the man in front of you when the unseen man behind you is shooting at you.

Fortunately, my runners and my aids had dressed almost as fast as I did, and there was a radio cart in the bunker. I grabbed one of the radio men and told him to get a message out to the Eagles. “Time to fly. Kill the bastards on the ridge. Now!”

Kowalski had already swiveled some of his artillery in that direction, but dropping a shell on a crest that far up was damned near impossible. Still, it might keep their heads down. Didn’t seem to help much. The Mongol mortar men kept dropping shells onto random areas of the camp as often as they could reload.

In front of me, the Chinese had reached the forward ditch and they were throwing ladders over it. Most of them were dying, but a few had picked spots where the machine guns had cleared away the defenders and they were getting though. The machine gun platforms could hold them, but Baron Ryszard apparently thought it was time to call it.

He signaled for a retreat to the inner defenses. Big People raced by me on both sides to recover the wounded and dead, while others hurried to man the carts parked under each elevated gun. As the machine guns in the inner line took over defense, the teams on the forward line began dropping their guns into the carts and racing back in my direction.

Ryszard had trained them well. The movement was smooth. Five thousand men in a half mile long line raced on foot across the empty stretch between the walls and took positions among the men already on the inner line with virtually no confusion and very few losses. The machine guns were reset before the Chinese got half way across.

Ryszard ended up on the ground between me and his radioman. “I needed to get the men out of the way before our next move. I hope you approve, Sire.” He pointed at a line of white stones across the killing field. “Kowalski has pieces ranged in on that line. He’ll let loose when they reach it.”

Above us, I heard airplane engines, but I was too busy to look up. Eventually I heard several long bursts from the thirty cals on the planes and I stopped worrying so much about my back.

The machine guns slowed the enemy advance, but didn’t stop it. We didn’t want it stopped. When the first Chinese reached a white stone I heard whistling overhead. Baron Ryszard tugged on my arm, “Time to duck, Sire, and plug your ears.”

Then the ground started shaking and the earthquake went on forever. For the next twenty minutes, all I heard was whistle, boom, rocks and debris falling, whistle, boom, ………

When we looked up, the killing field was a montage of body parts. There were a few bodies lying around, but it was mostly dirt covered hands, heads, torsos and feet, most with shreds of red uniforms hanging on them. There were so many that your mind blocked it out and you didn’t even feel nausea. It was just pieces, not pieces of people.

A few shots rang out up and down the line where troopers were making certain that none of the survivors, if any, suffered.

Up on the ridgeline, the fighting had stopped. The planes were still making passes, but not finding anything to shoot at. From both sides, squads from the other ridge emplacements were converging on the Chinese squad, prominently displaying Christian Army flags so the pilots would know which side they were on.

It took a day to find out what had happened, and it was a story that would have made a ninja proud. The ridge troopers had become careless about watching the outer wall because it consisted of steep walls that would be almost impossible to for the Chinese to climb, particularly impossible in the dark.

The Chinese had waited for a full moon and then used cannon fire to create a ladder for their troops. The cannon fire the previous day had not fallen short of its mark. Instead, it was always planned to form cracks and footholds in the cliff face. Probably starting a few hours before dark, a small group of mountain climbers had scaled the cliff in the moonlight and lowered ropes down to their companions. By morning a sizeable squad had climbed the cliff.

Just before dawn, they attacked the observation point and took control of two machine guns and a handy place to shoot them from. I doubt that many of my men could have climbed that cliff even in the daylight and I vowed to never underestimate our enemy again.

The Chinese attacks stopped. I didn’t know if they were waiting for a better plan, executing a better plan, or just taking a break, but it gave us a chance to finish our preparations. After we reclaimed the outer defense line, the engineers planted charges in several locations on our side of the embankments. The charges would drop the embankments into the ditch and create a quick exit ramp.

The machine gun carts were inspected, greased and prepared for rapid deployment. Kowalski selected his most mobile cannon and set the men to greasing the wheels, loading the carts with grape shot and tightening every bolt and band. Half the pieces would be left in camp, firing high explosive shells from a distance, but the other half would go with us when we charged.

Stanislaw’s men scavenged explosives and shells and improvised bombs for the rigidibles. Flying Cloud was carrying thousands of liberated Mongol arrows that would be simply shoveled out the hatch over enemy troops.

Zephyr finished its survey of the terrain around the valley and sent down maps of the possible routes. It turned out that the best route from our eastern barriers around to the western side ran north of us through difficult but passable terrain. The Big People had excellent night vision and great stamina, so they could make the normally seven day journey in less than two non-stop days, but Sir Grzegorz argued that the men should stop for three hours of sleep during the night. “The men can sleep in the saddle and we can make a grand dash into battle. Hell, we’ve all done it before, but they can’t be at full capacity that way. Better the trip should take a few more hours and they should hit the battlefield refreshed. We know that we want the battle to start at dawn, so we’ll try to arrive near the battlefield early and let the men sleep the rest of the night, and stop for a few hours of sleep during the first night.”