Conrad's Last Campaign (18 page)

I suddenly realized that I had the scale very wrong. This thing was going to be as big as the dirigibles! “I’ve got a hundred more questions, but we should get this back to camp before dark.” I called over the lance’s leader, “Leave half your men here to guard the plane and tell them to give the copilot any help he needs to ready. As soon as we get to camp, I’ll send another lance out with supplies for a few days. Oh, and someone needs to give the pilot a lift back to camp.”

As we left, I looked back to see the Big People were eating their lunch by clearing grass and vegetation from a runway behind the plane. No one gave them orders to do so. Someday, I’m going to figure out how they know what to do.

By the time we reached camp, night was falling. I left word that there would be a staff meeting for Sirs Wladyclaw, Eikman, and Ivanov at two the next morning, and retired to my tent. I still had to remind myself that two on the new clock was
ten AM on my old clock.

I decided that since I had to waste time eating, I might as well use the chance to finish my talk with Lieutenant Goetz. We laid two of the drawings out in front of us as we sat on the floor eating bowls of rice and cooked vegetables. It was obvious that Goestz’s enthusiasm came from more than duty. He loved the airships, and never gave a simple answer.

“What’s the cargo capacity on one of these ships?”

“It depends a little on how it’s manned and how long the mission is. Gross lift is about five hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The structure is about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The weight of the crew, fuel, food and water, and ballast varies, but for most missions it won’t be over thirty thousand pounds. That leaves a theoretical capacity of around two hundred thousand pounds. After you figure in Murphy’s Factor for unseen contingencies, you might get a hundred fifty thousand pounds fo useful cargo. Figure seventy-five tons on most trips, or a little less to be safe.”

“How fast do they cruise?”

“These first four may be a little underpowered. They’ve diverted sixteen engines from the bomber program for these four ships. We figure seventy-five or eighty miles an hour in calm air. But you gotta remember these are ships, not airplanes so they’re sensitive to wind speed. Some Eagles claim they’ve encountered high-speed trade winds at about nine thousand feet, going from west to east. If they’re right, they could get here from
Gdansk in a day. If not, then three days each way. In fact, the wind resistance of a rigidible is so high I doubt they will ever get much over a gross mile an hour in calm weather.

“The
White Dragon
is another matter. No one has any idea how fast it’ll go. The builders say that they are stressing it for a hundred eighty miles an hour, but not many people believe their calculations.”

I pulled out the
White Dragon
plan and Goetz leaned over to point out features. “It looks a little different that this drawing now. The first test flight did not go all that well. They built a ten foot wide model and rigged it up with a timer that would cycle the heater on and off.

“It made one hell of a leap up and glided down according to plan, but on the top of the second cycle it flipped over. I guess that’s what you meant about keeping a flying wing in the air. Since this drawing was made, they’ve shifted a lot of the weight lower in the fuselage to give it a lower center of gravity and they’re debating whether to add a tail boom.

“If you look at the control cabin, you’ll see how fanatic they are. You see how there are only three main controls? The cables from the two ailerons, the gas valves, and the control cables for the top vents, all come into the rear of the main cockpit. Eight men could fly this thing if they had to.

“And, look at this little thing below the cockpit. That’s a small gas engine running an air pump. The entire cockpit is sealed and pressurized. This thing is designed to get to thirty thousand feet and the constant change in pressure as it went up and down would drive the crew crazy if they didn’t stabilize it.”

Later, as I reclined under the stars with a cigar in one and a glass of whiskey in the other, I reviewed the day in my mind. In truth, I had found the conversations unsettling. I had almost come to peace with the betrayals by my wife, my liege lord, and half the people who owed their lives and prosperity to me. I had decided to move on from Poland and never return, but this conversation was upsetting.

Without me,
Poland would have ceased to exist in another hundred years. In my own timeline, there were centuries where an independent Poland was missing. I had done my best to raise them out of the mire of medieval ignorance. With my guidance and knowledge, they built river boats, steam engines, and guns. I had introduced paper, printing, and indoor plumbing. The entire Christian Army was my invention.

And now they didn’t need me. I had always passed on my knowledge to others and I had formed and worked with engineering teams for years, but I was always the real leader; the spark of invention. Now they didn’t need me.

Even the last drawing, which Goetz and I had not discussed, showed how far my pupils had come. They needed a larger plane than the DC3 type that they had, and the designer had not wanted to wait for new engines to be designed and tested and a new airframe tested, so he just scaled up the exiting twin-engine plane by fifty percent and added a third engine. Need more power, just add one more engine just like the ones already in production. It worked for Junkers and Ford. Whoever the designer was, he came up with it without any advice from me.

The dirigible projects were well thought out and well planned. I was certain they would work and the only input I might have is to tell the aluminum foundry that adding a little magnesium and zinc could improve the strength of the duralumin.

My students, my
children
, had grown up and were surpassing their parent. In truth, what more could a parent wish for than that his children would grow up, be successful, and surpass even the parent in competence and success? Indeed, what more, except maybe a little more damned gratitude!

I was going to save their sorry butts one more time. One last time I would go into battle and relieve them forever of the Mongol threat, and then I’m out of here. The ungrateful bastards will never hear from me again.

The staff meeting was a large one, but at least we didn’t need to sit on the ground. I had the quartermaster set up a canopy well away from the camp with folding chairs and two large folding tables that we liberated from Sarai. Lieutenant Goetz sat on my right. I opened the meeting as if everyone already knew what we were going to do.

“We came out here to kill Mongols. We got a nice batch of them in Sarai, but a lot of them are left. Like you, I thought we would have run into their main force by now, but I have no intention of speculating on why they are absent.

“However, we are less than a thousand miles from their heartland with a trained force of almost forty thousand warriors and well over forty thousand Big People. Our men are fired up about the glory and considerable wealth that would come from ending the Mongol terror for good.

“We can do that by destroying
Karakorum. That won’t end all Mongols everywhere, and we cannot expect to attack the Chinese Mongols. They now control single cities with populations as large as our county and manufacturing resources that are antiquated, but massive. If threatened, they could field several million man armies, but there is little love lost between the various Mongol families, and it is unlikely that the Chinese Mongols would spend a lot of time avenging their poor cousins. They might even see it too their advantage if their troublesome cousins ceased to exist on their flanks, and frankly, if the Mongols and Chinese want to keep killing each other, it’s none of our business.

“
Karakorum is an old and well defended city. From what we have learned on this campaign, we believe that it has high stone walls and other good defenses. Up until yesterday, I was uncertain of how we would take it.

“We have the best trained and best armed warriors in the world, but as Captain Ivanov will tell you, we are painfully short of artillery and siege equipment. The solution to that problem has come to us. The man to my right is Lieutenant Goetz. He flew here in one of our new long-range aircraft to show us the plans you see before you.”

Of course, Goetz and the plans were just there to raise morale and impress the troops.

“These are drawings of new air ships that we are told will be in operation within six to eight weeks. If plans go well, we should start receiving about two deliveries a week of about seventy-five tons of supplies.

“Among those supplies, I plan to request a large number of artillery shells and the biggest damned artillery piece they can fly in one of these. This time, we’ll stand back and blast the walls down the old fashioned way. We’ll stand off, kill most of them with high explosive, incendiary, and gas artillery shells and then mop up the rest.

“Obviously, this will take time to arrange, so we will be spending winter out here and attacking as soon as the weather clears.

“Some things we have to do are obvious. Captain Ivanov, you will spend the day prioritizing the supplies that you need shipped in. While we have a pressing need for ammunition, it works best when fired by a healthy and well fed warrior and that’s your field.

“Sir Wladyclaw and Kolomel Eikman will work with the guides to determine the best place to hole up. We need a place that is isolated, lightly populated, or, even better, deserted so we don’t have to fight with current residents and near our line to
Karakorum.

“We could stay right here on the steppes, but it’s short of water and there will be a damned cold wind blowing through here next month.

“Lieutenant Goetz needs to get back in the air no later than tomorrow morning so Ivanov’s crew will need their lists ready by the end of the day.

“That’s the obvious. What am I missing, gentlemen?”

Of course, the main reason for the
isolated
location is as long as we are more than walking distance from civilization, we won’t have any desertions. You simply cannot desert on a Big Person. As soon as she realizes what you are doing, she will turn around and dump you in front of your commanding officer. Big People are smart and loyal.

By the next morning, the pilot was on his way back to his plane, and we were well on our way to making decisions. The guides had pointed out that we were probably less than fifty files from the river Ortz. It was directly on our line of march and eventually flowed down to the Cuman Sultanate.

We were in the middle of nowhere, but the sultanate’s borders were only about three hundred miles south, beyond a low mountain range. I decided that we would march east-northeast until we met the river and then follow it to within a hundred miles of the sultanate. We would make camp there for the winter.

We didn’t know if the Mongols had taken the sultanate, but my guess was that gold and greed were a powerful combination. Once we were established, Captain Ivanov would send a crew dressed as civilians into the south to buy a herd of cattle and whatever other supplies were available. Even if there were Mongol overlords, my bet was that the cattle and wheat merchants needed cash and wouldn’t care who had it.

Our most annoying discussion was about what to do with the river residents. Any river was going to have towns, villages, settlements, and farms along it. I saw no problem but Sir Wladyclaw asked, “If we travel down the river, we are going to run into a lot of civilians. What are we going to do about them?”

“Oh, I don’t know… Since they’re Mongols, how about killing them all?”

“Your grace, we have discussed this many times. The Christian Army is not a barbarian horde and, thanks in large part to your influence, we don’t kill women, children, even unarmed men. The villages and farms will be mostly women and children and will include a lot of slaves and tradesmen who have never warred on anyone.

“We can’t massacre the civilian population, can’t herd them along with us, and can’t afford to leave garrisons behind to control them. We’re going to leave a lot of spies behind us.”

I could barely control my anger. Why couldn’t I have troops as loyal as Caesar’s? When Vercingetorix sent his women and children out to the Roman lines, Caesar’s men turned them away to starve in the no man’s land between the lines. I was cursed with an army that didn’t even want to stop a Mongol woman from breeding more enemies.

When I had my breathing under control I told them, “With that in mind, these are the rules of engagement. When we reach the river, we will travel south, but we will detour inland to avoid any villages or cities by at least two miles. Likewise, we will give any farmsteads at least a bowshot’s room.

“We won’t pick a fight with anyone except armed troops and garrisons. If however, we see a garrison, we will destroy it, and anyone who fires on us will be left for the buzzards. Farmer or fireman, you fire on us and you die.

“As for leaving spies behind us, good. If any Mongol force attacks on these open plains, our superior range and machine guns should make easy work of them, and there will be fewer to face at
Karakorum.

“Does anyone see any problems with these marching orders? Good. The meeting is closed. Everyone get back to work. The rain has stopped. Tomorrow we march.”

We could have used another day or so to dry out the grass, but I was in no mood to sit around. I am not used to having my orders questioned.