Conrad's Last Campaign (28 page)

“That doesn’t mean that they are going to let you have the city for free. Between the palace and the rest of the city, there’s a lot of empty space. There’s a huge flat area east of the palace that’s usually packed with yurts and vendor stands and temporary businesses. Part of that’s taken up by a small rail siding. Now it looks empty, but if you look carefully from above, you can see that it’s been crisscrossed with concealed trenches and spikes.

“They’re also reinforcing parts of the city. Some of the civilians are dumping dirt on their roofs to protect from cannon balls and digging shelters under their homes. Over by the treasure houses on the East wall, the warriors are doing the same on a larger scale.

“They are also blocking major intersections with spiked tree trunks. Some are already in place, and others are hanging on tackle, ready to drop on soldiers. They’re got laborers digging ditches across some of the roads and it looks like they’re sandbagging the treasure houses.

“Two other things, lord. The walls are a joke. The best ones are less than thirty feet tall and not more than six or eight feet thick. I even think that some of the walls on the Eastern side might be mainly mud walls. Or course, they do have swivel guns mounted at intervals on the wall and there thirty or forty cannon scattered around, but those walls are obviously for population control, not war.

“The last important thing is something I can’t tell you. I have no idea where the defenders are. I can tell you that there seventy or eighty thousand Mongols in the camps outside the city, but that damned city couldn’t hold ten thousand people on the best day of its life. I don’t see any big barracks. I can’t tell you where the defenders are.”

And then my “million man Mongol army” vanished in front of my eyes.

Komander Jazinski leaned forward at the end of the table, “Your grace, there’s even more mystery here than you’ve mentioned. We’re always hearing about millions of Mongols, and we certainly got hit by a lot of them when they invaded us, but most of those troops were Chinese or Turkish or some other kind of auxiliary troops. My family was in agricultural businesses. Take my word for it. This is a dry, cold place. Their main food is meat and the grass is terrible for grazing. They must move their herds constantly, and even if they import half of their food, there can’t be over a hundred, hundred fifty thousand adult males in this county out of a population of maybe a million. Even if they’re all home, all mounted, and no one has a cold, after the number we already killed, there can’t be eighty, ninety thousand effectives left.

“If this report is correct, it looks like Karakorum’s almost empty.”

I decided to step in. I was a little uncomfortable that they might realize the ‘million man Mongol army’ that I had been touting might actually be a little smaller than that. “Whatever their numbers are, their plan is obvious. They want us to attack
Karakorum and they don’t really care if we level it. Their plan is to bring those two reserve forces and hit us from behind while we are bogged down there, fighting street to street. That defensive work is just to slow us down until the cavalry arrives. Mongols don’t defend, they rope-a-dope, they trick, they sneak and they attack when they want to.

“That’s handy. If they come to us, we won’t need to go looking for them. We will make a few changes in their plan. Instead of fighting street to street, we’ll level the city with artillery and walk in over the dead bodies of the defenders. When the other two armies show up we’ll be ready for them.”

I was delighted with the report. If we were going to face a Mongol army not more that twice our size with our machine guns, rifled cannons and twelve shot rifles, this was going to be a cakewalk. We’d be home before the end of spring. You know, someday I will stop thinking like that, but when that day comes I will probably have an arrow sticking out of my chest, be shot in both legs, and have a barbarian axe buried in my skull. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy, but some things, I just learn slow.

Outside, Kowalski was walking around the naval gun with a look of admiration. He was patting the carriage and almost crooning to it. I had to slap him on the back to get his attention, “We, baron, where do you plan to put your new toy?”

He never took his eyes off of it. “Put it? Hell, we’re less than fifteen miles from the city. I could just leave it here and blast the piss out of them. I could level that city and never leave this spot.

“However, their best cannon can’t reach out more than three or four miles, so we’ll move downstream until we’re maybe five miles from the city and set up wherever it looks good. We’ll just have to use a lighter powder charge.

“We’ve got three hundred rounds that the
Flying Cloud
brought in and another seven hundred rounds they delivered with the carriage. A thousand rounds won’t actually level nine square miles of city, but it’ll punch some damned big holes in it.

“We’ll have her secure on the carriage and all of the ammo loaded by tonight. We’ll set up a fire base and move her tomorrow. Morning, two days from now, you can start using her.”

The next day was a watch and wait day for us.
Zephyr
continued to scout for the Wolves sabotaging the rail line.
Vagabond
radioed that she wouldn’t arrive until morning, and that she would deliver her supplies directly to the main camp.
Flying Cloud
did a circuit of the other two Mongol camps and by noon was parked high over Karakorum.

That’s when the fun began. The
Flying Cloud
was on station for less than an hour when two rocket planes took off from a runway inside the city. They both looped over our camp and then circled off one of the mountains looking for thermals. When they rose as far as they could, one of them took off down the rail line. The other went
Cloud
hunting.

She coasted in from the mountainside picking as much speed as possible and then turned nose up, blasting her engine as she headed for the dirigible. Stanislaw was ready for it. He had mounted a couple of machine guns to fire through the floor of the cargo bay. He blasted out tracers while the attacker clawed for altitude. As the plane started to fall off her climb, her pilot fired a missile – which fell short by a thousand feet.

The ballet went on most of the afternoon. There was no way Stanislaw’s crew could hit a tiny plane moving a hundred miles an hour thousands of feet below them, and try as he might, the Mongol pilot couldn’t get to the dirigible.

He sure tried. He landed several times to re-arm and refuel. He tried again and again to get more altitude. He rode the thermals until they died and then fired off one or more rocket motors to get more altitude before he left the thermal. He would fire a rocket motor during his high speed run back to the dirigible and then another one during his ascent. The men started betting on when he would tear the wings off his plane.

The closest he got was one missile that exploded at the same level as the dirigible but hundreds of yards behind it.

Eventually, about a thousand troopers found reasons to “do observation” near the front and even the Mongols working on their walls would occasionally take a break to watch the fight.

On the morning of the second day, I met with Sir Grzegorz, Sir Wladyclaw, and Baron Kowalski in the chilly darkness before sunrise. We stood around Stanislaw’s map of the city and gulped down hot chocolate and coffee against the morning cold. Kowalski pointed down at the east wall. “If you want to do serious damage to that wall, I’m going to have to move artillery around the city. As it is, we can only really damage the western and northern walls. We’ll need to move the camp up to the city walls and surround them like the Vandals attacking Rome.”

Sir Wladyclaw agreed. “We’ve got an unbeatable defensive position where we are, but we’re not here to defend, we’re here to kill. It’s time to step out and fight.”

They waited silently, if not gracefully, while I pondered the map. “Prepare to break camp. It’s time to play a game of
barbarian
. If we don’t get more aggressive, we’ll be here until Christmas.

During our move out to the tundra,
Vagabond
showed up with Komander Edmund’s idea of “antiaircraft” weapons. I was sitting on Silver watching the men pack up the camp when I heard the unmistakable whir of a dirigible overhead. A few minutes later, my radioman ran over with a message. “It’s the
Vagabond
, sire. She wants to know where the antiaircraft equipment should land.” I missed the strange wording for a moment until I looked up though my field glasses. The dirigible had six of our old wooden biplanes hanging underneath her.

“Get me the captain of the
Vagabond
.” The captain was waiting on the mike when I reached the radio wagon. “Captain, we’re grateful for the equipment, but we could have used a little more warning. We’re in the middle of moving our camp.”

“I’m sorry, sire, that we didn’t give you more warning, but we have been ordered to limit long distance radio due to the tense situation between Hetman Piotr and the King. The Hetman doesn’t want this mission to distract them right now.

“I think you’ll find the planes worth the trouble, your grace. They’re listed as scrap on the army books, but they’ve got new engines and upgraded guns and they’re years ahead of anything else within five thousand miles of you.”

They put a nasty drag on us, but I can hold them onboard for a day if I have too. The biggest problem is that the pilots are bugging the Hell out of me to let them shoot some Mongols. Well, that and the fact that we’re useless for other work while we have planes hanging under us. "

I left Baron Krol with the job of deciding where to put the planes. He had them land on a section of riverbank that had recently held tents. The planes were another media event. Unlike the failed US Macon,
Vagabond
was not a true carrier. It could not recover planes in flight and was simply a transport that could carry aircraft one way. However, watching as each plane’s pilot revved up his engine and dropped away from the carrier brought cheers from the troops that they buzzed before landing.

The
Vagabond
then landed near them and unloaded hundreds of gallons of fuel and spare parts. After her crew enjoyed a few hours of much-needed ground leave, she took off to start patrolling the southern skies. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I hadn’t asked, “What situation between Piotr and the king?”

Life was good. Unbelievably good. I had gone from having an undermanned, underfed, under equipped little army back to having the most powerful army on the continent. I even had airplanes – with machine guns on them. I had more ammo than any general in history and better weapons than anyone else in the world.

I was beginning to think that this would be a replay of the Africa campaign. All I had to do was take one small city and wipe out a couple of armies from long distance and we were home free. The only problem was that I was not certain where “home” was. Well, that and the fact that I was absolutely and totally wrong about the war.

With Korea now part of the Mongol Empire, Kublai decided that it was time to take the Song capital and integrate them into his empire. To assure that the city would fall, we prepared to cast the two largest cannon in history.

Now the Poles have changed all that. They have begun a winter campaign against the Kipchak Khanate. They have destroyed the administrative center at Sari and have moved toward
Karakorum.

We have even been ordered to stop work on the Fists of Heaven. They would have been thirty feet long, firing a thirty inch ball up to ten miles, and would have been our greatest achievement in weaponry. The barrels would have been large enough to let six men crawl inside and sleep comfortably, but now they will have to wait. Perhaps next year.

The Kipchaks have not been able to respond to the Polish invasion due to a mysterious ailment that has wiped out most of their horses. Kublai’s administrators have spent the entire winter scouring the countryside for one hundred fifty thousand new horses and sending them to Karakorum. Most of the horses are untrained and require additional work once they reach Mongolia.

I was told to juggle the railroad schedule to free up enough cars and engines to move the entire force and its supplies to
Mongolia in the early spring. During the winter, I established supply depots along the line to Mongolia and stocked with them food, ammunition, weapons, and clothes for the men. As the khan’s plan involves surprise, the northernmost depot is one hundred fifty miles south of Karakorum, close enough to supply the army but far enough way to avoid detection. There has been considerable disruption of the economy and even famine in some areas as the rail equipment has moved north and been parked, But the khan is adamant.

The exact date of the final northward march depends upon the Polish army, but I have been warned to have enough cars available for the entire army on three days notice. Just finding a place to store twenty five miles of cars is a challenge.

The Kipchaks have been ordered to delay the Poles in Mongolia. The great khan has ordered that they avoid pitched battle and draw the Poles into an attack on the capital. Once the Poles are fully engaged, it will be my job to move the largest army in Chinese history the final one hundred and fifty miles onto the Mongolian plain and end the Polish threat forever.