Conrad's Last Campaign (19 page)

The movement to the winter camp went better than I expected. The steppe was drying and we could move fast again. We no longer used the empty carts for firewood as we might now need them.

We found the river two days into our journey and began following it south. Despite relatively heavy traffic on the river, the banks were sparsely populated. We put lances on both banks to stop any traffic that might be carrying food or other supplies we would need, such as tent canvas. Most boats pulled over when hailed by an armed lance, and most of the rest headed for the bank when a few heavy caliber rounds landed near them. We only had to sink one or two.

We paid the private owners with a little of the gold we liberated from Sarai and left script with captains of government or corporate owned cargos. Carriers of Monogl tribute and supplies were given their lives in exchange for their cargos. I would have preferred to charge them with aiding and abetting the enemy, but we didn’t have time to assemble firing squads.

We picked up enough food and supplies to fill all of our carts to overflowing and I debated putting prize teams on the larger ships to carry the supplies downriver for us, but I decided that we didn’t have the men or expertise to pull that off.

As planned, we gave the civilian population a wide berth. Occasionally, a farmer would take a shot at a scout before he realized there was an army behind him, but generally they left us as alone as we did them.

We didn’t find any cities and we gave the towns and villages a wide berth. One larger town was brave enough to send out emissaries to ask for peace. We thanked them, and then paid well for their extra grain stores and some wagons to carry it.

Something about that meeting bothered me. Three old men came out to meet us. They were obviously peasants, but I couldn’t tell if they were Mongols or Turks. They were scared stiff. When they delivered the wagons of grain and meat that we purchased, they were very surprised to get paid. They seemed to think that we were going to kill them and take the goods. I particularly remember one small girl who, for some stupid reason, rode out with her father. She had the most beautiful brown eyes, but when she saw me she screamed in terror and couldn’t be comforted. Her father apologized through the interpreter but said she couldn’t help it because she had heard that Christians killed everyone, everywhere they went.

I blamed the papal troops that scourged the Holy Land for the rumors, but decided that we needed to do some better PR work.

We were only moving about two dozen miles a day because we were dragging a lot of medieval carts with us, but there was no hurry as we had almost three months before we could attack Karakorum.

We still reached the borderlands of the steppe in about three weeks. I stopped short of the foothills and their trees because I decided that with our firepower advantage, a clear field of fire was more important than any shelter that the trees would provide. We picked a flat area near the river and set up the camp about a thousand yards from the bank.

Well, a thousand yards on one side of the camp and fifteen miles on the other. The camp was huge. We had about the same number of men as Caesar had in
Gaul. His nightly camps were twenty miles in circumference and the ditches and palisades were sometimes visible to low flying planes as late as the twentieth century.

Ours was a little smaller, but I decided to follow his example of a round palisade with a major gate at the four compass points. It wouldn’t give a definable corner or side for enemies to concentrate on. Caesar surrounded every camp with a palisade, dirt hill, and a moat. He had timber. I didn’t.

However, we had plenty of the world’s oldest building materials: dirt and sod. This land hadn’t been farmed in recorded history so the sod was almost three feet thick.

I called Wladyclaw and Eikman together in my tent. I explained what needed to be done, “Sir Eikman, your men will have to take the lead on this project, but every man in this army is available to you as workmen. Requisition as many as you need from anywhere – and that includes the Wolves.

“We need a sod wall at least eight feet tall and five foot wide around the entire perimeter. Use the current camp size for your template, but make it circular and keep the walls at least gross yards out from the nearest tent. Your men can get the material by cutting the sod away from the outside edge of the wall. We’ve got about two thousand saws and, in a pinch, swords and axes will cut the stuff.

“When you get the right height, you should have ditch about a two or three-foot deep and twenty feet wide where you removed the sod. Dig out the center of that hole to about six-foot deep and use the fill to build a rampart around the outside.

“When the perimeter is safe, you can start working on machine gun emplacements. You’ll have to make them the same way. The only thing to work with here is mud and grass. Put up enough gun platforms and ramps from the interior to defend every wall section. Of course, we won’t have enough machine guns or artillery to populate every platform, but place some at regular intervals around the wall and keep enough in reserve to fill in where needed if we are attacked.

“It’s your job, Grzegorz, to handle the grumbles from the Wolves. I know that some of your men are a total pain in the ass when it comes to grunt work. This time, everyone has to do their part. However, you can select fifteen lances of your most pain in the ass aristocrats and send them out on scouting parties while the work is done. Pair each squad with one of Ahmed’s translators and tell them we want a complete map of everything within thirty miles of us. It’s better to have them gone than have the men see them slacking off or arguing about joining in real labor.

“Oh, and tell the squads going south that they should go as far as the foothills and keep an eye out for any bogs.”

Despite the size of the job, the fortifications would only keep the army busy for a few days and then I would have to come up with more tasks. Nothing is more dangerous to an army than boredom.

January 12, 1264

Dearest

I may not be home for several more weeks, but with military secrecy the way it is, I may be reading this to you myself.

I am still getting used to working with a mixed crew. It was decided that the common crewmen should come from the Tall Ships. This thing is more of a ship than a plane and it needs crew used to handling a nine-hundred foot long craft. Our pilots are knights from the air force but they answer to a first officer who is from a cargo ship. The radio operator who got your job is also from the air force, but the rest of the crew is pure navy.

We anticipate some problems convincing the pilots that they will fly the way the first officer orders rather than by the seat of their pants. The pilots have never flown on a craft so big that they had their commanding officer sitting behind them.

The ship will be almost empty for the first flight. In addition to the regular crew, we’ll have twenty technicians with their tools and spare parts, hydrogen tanks, tanks of sulfuric acid and crates of iron filings. Baring unforeseen trouble, it was decided to make the shakedown cruise the first operational cruise. We’ll fly to a seaport (I don’t know which yet), pick up cargo and head out into the wilds on our first real trip.

You know it took three days to fill the balloons the first time, with technicians hanging everywhere looking for leaks and tightening up connections. You would have loved the controlled chaos. There must have been two hundred workers here at one time, testing control cables, running the engines, erecting partitions in the crew quarters. It reminded me of an ant heap that had been stirred with a stick.

You’ve seen the flight deck or course. It still looks roomy even with the five flight officers and all the equipment in it. I finally convinced the engineers that we were NOT going to literally stand watch for twelve hours a day and they welded tall stools at most of the stations, then the pilots had another argument about seat belts. They finally convinced the engineers that even though they weren’t going to do loop the loop, a firm seat is important even in a swaying boat.

The crew quarters are about the same as you saw them three weeks ago. A few partitions, some light weight tables bolted to the deck, some posts for hammocks, and no galley. It was decided that the first ship would go with cold sandwiches and canned food. The galley, if you can call it that, consists of a gas-powered samovar for hot tea and a couple of trays of hot water that you can heat cans of food in.

I have the only private cabin, a spacious eight foot cubical with a bolted down bed, a bolted down table, two chairs and a sink – with a water bottle over it and a bucket under it. Not luxury, but it does give me a place to write this letter.

You asked how they were going to handle “personal functions” and it was handled with engineering efficiency. There are three closets in the crew quarters and two in the rear cargo hold with little red lights in them. The navigator has a switch on his panel that turns on the lights when we are over populated territory - if he remembers.

Welcome to the Christian Army Economy Outback Cruise Line. No frills, no food, no warmth and if we get too damned high, no air. I love pioneering.

Hey, they gave everybody nice new warm leather jackets, leather helmets, and wool scarves. How could anyone complain?

The kidding stops and the gasping starts when you get to the cargo bay. You’ve seen it before it was enclosed or floored, but now that it’s finished, the scale is enormous.

You now step down from the crew quarters to the cargo deck that is slung under the envelope. Now you really see that it is a two dozen foot wide, and eight gross foot long cavern. Since it hangs beneath the ship, the entire space is clear of obstructions. Overhead you can see the structural rings but the four cargo cranes are lost in the darkness. During the day, light comes from the windows and even suffuses through the thin fabric on the sides. There is a two foot wide duralumin grid on each side and one in the center. The rest is floored with wood. The grids are partly structural and partly to provide places for the cargo hold downs.

You can’t see the ballast and hydrogen tanks anymore and that makes it look even bigger.

I have to close now. We’re leaving in a few hours and I’m needed on the flight deck.

January 16, 1264

We’re here. In fact we’re here and ready to leave. We’ve learned a lot and survived the schooling, always a good combination.

Our first learning experience was the launch. The creaking and crashing of lines letting loose was exciting and we majestically rose slowly into the air until a wind gust shoved us sideways and we hit the dock with our cargo bay. This thing is almost totally uncontrollable at low-speed and low altitude. I intend to name it
Zephyr
because you can only control it in a light breeze.

We are going to need a ground control system at the docks. Perhaps several donkey engines pulling cables to control it until it is away.

When we got a few hundred feet up, everything changed. This ship loves the sky. The engine noise is a low, steady, pleasant growl in the background and you fly with the air instead of fighting it like an airplane.

We headed out to sea on our first leg. In part, we didn’t want to shock the entire city of
Gdansk and in part we didn’t want to danger groundlings if we crashed. In spite of a thirty mile an hour headwind, we were able to keep up a good speed down the coast.

The orders were to “maintain a low profile”. How do you maintain a low profile in a ship the size of a battleship flying through the sky? Do you only fly at night and hope that no one notices the stars going out? We decided to hide very high in the sky.

The grey canopy is rather close to sky color and I figured if we stayed high up, the perspective would hide our size and we would even benefit from any clouds under us. We dropped ballast and went all the way up to sixteen thousand feet. Boy that was cold.

The construction crews were still installing the hooks and hold downs on the cargo grid and had to work in padded gloves. Valve and meter techs were wiping the frost off of their instruments, and the only happy people were the mechanics stationed in each engine nacelle. They were warm.

Once we passed the borders of Poland, I bled off hydrogen and brought us down to a more comfortable six thousand feet. We still avoided major population centers until we reached our port on the Black Sea.

The only problem was that bag sixteen developed a slow leak. The crew evacuated the gas, dismounted the old bag and had a new one ready to go into place before we reached the base.

The facilities were new, built by Byzantine engineers at our expense and on land donated by the Empire. You’ll be impressed when you see them. When we kicked the crap out of the Mongols and the Muslims, we saved their ass and restored some lands to them. They are now firm friends of the Army, if not of Poland itself.

The landing field is in a sheltered valley near Anapa on the coast. They poured huge concrete pads with one foot iron rings and winches imbedded in them to control the hold down chains. They built it right next to large lake where we can refill our ballast tanks. In the last two months, the army construction crew installed a rail spur from the coast and put up some rough warehouses.

The landing was an anticlimax. Less than thirty hours after we left, we bled off hydrogen and dropped slowly into the landing field. Before we were even winched down, the ground crew had attached hoses and water pumps from the lake to top up our ballast The floor of the cargo hold is heavily reinforced and we wanted to be held down firmly during our loading.

We dropped half of the sulfuric acid and iron filings to refill the hydrogen tanks later. It took a full day to load fifty tons of rice and ten tones of crates. That was our second learning experience. The cargo cranes were rigged to load and unload cargo through the deck, like a ship except they were being lifted through the deck instead of dropped.

However, that required hovering the rigidible in one spot and at one altitude while cargo offloaded or uploaded. Rigidibles do not hover, they float. Raising cargo through a hole in the deck was a pipe dream or something you might do once in a total emergency. Cargo loading is something done while you are firmly tied down and done through the side cargo doors.

Unfortunately, the side cargo doors were too small and the ramps too weak for fast loading. That will have to be redesigned before our next trip.

Lesson number three was evident as soon as we lifted. It really looks bad to be in a three gross yard long ship that is slanting down at the front by, say, thirty degrees. There had been confusion because of the time constraints and the restricted access and the cargo handlers had stored all the boxes near the rear of the craft and stacked the rice near the front. It looked good enough for a sailing ship, but rice is heavy and now so was the bow.

We could have dropped ballast and restored balance, but I swallowed my pride and had the shipped winched back down to the ground. It took several hours to shift the cargo around to balance the load better.

The rest of the trip was uneventful except that the rear port side engine began to knock badly about twelve hours out from Anapa. We had made the assumption that since this thing flew, it needed engines like a plane, fast and light. We were wrong. Engine weight is not a problem with this beast, but the engines have to run for days without maintenance. When I return, I am going to recommend that the engines on the unfinished ships be replaced with marine engines.

Since the engines are in their own standing room sized pods, we took the engine offline and the mechanics were able to start the repair in flight. They had the engine stripped down and the crankshaft shimmed almost before we reached Lord Conrad’s camp.