Conrad's Last Campaign

by Leo A. Frankowski

  It was a perfect observation post. It had protective walls, a roof overhead, and a glorious view of the valley. The troopers had moved the Mongol bodies away and thrown dirt over the blood they had left behind. We seem to have lucked into the closest observation point as the flat tundra surrounded the city for miles in every other direction. At that we were at least a mile away.

  At this distance the impression through the field glasses was there was a lot of empty space. I could make out the palace complex at the southwest edge of the city and even that had a lot of green inside the walls.

  Speaking of walls, they weren’t very impressive either. The gates, like the buildings, had a Chinese look to them, but the walls couldn’t have been over thirty fifty feet high and they looked flimsy compared the standard thirty foot thick rubble filled walls in Europe.

  As my retinue spread out on both sides of me and we sat in our saddles gazing at the Mongol capital, there was only one thing to say, “That’s Karakorum? That village can’t be two miles square, and the walls are a joke!”

  Ahmed shifted in his saddle, “It’s closer to three miles on a side, but lord, remember that they have not had a thousand years to build walls like Constantinople. This place has only existed for less than a hundred years, and the Mongols do not like cities anyway. The khan is only here for a few days a year. This time of year he is usually at his camp about a hundred miles north of here. He is also only the Khan of the Golden Horde. His brother, Kublai, has his capital in Dadu in China. It is much bigger.”

  I shook my head in wonder. “It seems that we have spent six months traveling two thousand miles to attack a city used by a junior khan as a party pad.”

  Ahmed raised his palms and shrugged. “I thought that you knew what was here. You never asked me about it. However, it is much more important that it looks. The Mongols revere it as a symbol of their power. There is great prestige in owning Karakorum.”

  Ahmed pointed to the city and nodded as he added, “And I think that you should look closer before you decide how big it is, particularly that row of barn like buildings that hold the royal treasury.”

  There seemed to a lot of activity around the city. Ant-sized figures scurried about the walls and the surrounding fields. It looked like they were working on a moat and I would guess that they were placing stakes and mines in the fields.

  As with many Mongol cities, most of the population was transitory and lived in yurts erected both inside and outside of the walls. Those yurts were now in motion, leaving the area in yurt wagons going in every direction except ours. There were none left outside the city, and a steady stream of wagons was leaving the gates.

  The most disturbing thing was the train. A damned train! A steam train was entering the city through massive gates on the south wall! Whatever it was carrying had to be trouble for us. What the hell were they doing with one of my damned trains?

  “Ahmed, you might be right. This may be an important city, but important or not, we are going to burn it to the ground.”

  I called a messenger over, “Find Kolomel Ivanov and tell him to establish a camp in the best spot he can find near here. Tell him that we may be here for a while so the camp should be very defensible.” I turned to Sir Grzegorz. “That railroad belongs to you and your men. Have the airships find someplace you can cut it and send out a crew to cut the line.”

  He was still looking at the city. “Maybe we should make a quick sortie along the walls to disrupt their work. Scattering them now could save trouble later.”

  I handed him my field glasses, “They probably have swivel guns in those towers, and they certainly have artillery somewhere on that wall. Charging their artillery was expensive last time so let’s let Baron Kowalski soften them up first.”

  It was nearly dark when I arrived at the new camp. As we were no longer in the grasslands, there was no chance of building our often used sod walls, and there wasn’t a forest in site to provide lumber for a palisade. Kolomel Ivanov had established our camp along the banks of the Orkhon River in a place where there were hills to our back, a river in front of us and defensively narrow spaces between them. It took me almost half an hour to get to my tent after I reached the camp. I realized that the camp probably stretched fifteen miles along the river banks, making it larger than the city we were attacking.

  Among the messages awaiting me was one from the captain of the Flying Cloud informing me that my big gun had arrived. Despite my fatigue, I met with Kowalski and a couple of his engineers. I decided that that right beside the camp was as good a place as any to drop the gun. The river banks here were hard rocky material and the carriage was already here.

  Captain Stanislaw’s Tale

  Before dawn two lances of Wolves scoured the hills around us for enemy spies and then took positions giving a clear view of the area. When they were done, Flying Cloud made several passes over the area, looking for any enemy gunners. It was almost noon when they were satisfied that the area was secure, and they dropped toward the camp.

  It’s always majestic when an airship lands. It’s a slow motion ballet of engines and wind, lift and ballast, but this time, Flying Cloud had a new trick. She flew slowly down the river dropping lower and lower until she could put water pipes in the river, then the captain reversed the engines and gunned them to slow her. As she stopped, he swiveled two engines and drove her sideways over the bank. When the ballast tanks had filled enough to bring the ship to a stop on the bank, her sides began to roll up like Venetian blinds. She settled down as a bare aluminum statue, unaffected by the wind.

  Her captain and cargo master were the first down the ramp. They must have noted my amazed looks. I was still trying to see how they kept the cloth taut when they rolled it back down, when he approached. Instead of the usual military greeting he said, “Hell of trick, ain’t it. We learned it from Vagabond.”

  I was too focused on the ship to notice the lack of military courtesy. “That was the ship that crashed a few months ago.”

  They must pick airship captains from the people who model for recruiting posters. As usual, this one was trim, handsome, with a killer smile and an easy, graceful way of moving. “They had several old blue water sailors aboard when it went down. They complained all the way home that ‘of course we crashed, you idiots! We couldn’t reef the sails. If you can’t reef the sails in a storm, you sink. Any idiot knows that.’

  By the time they got back to Gdansk, the engineers did know it. When they rebuilt Vagabond, the envelope covering was replaced with twenty slightly heavier cloth panels that could be manually reefed up like the sails on an old ship.

  When we were in port last month, they installed this new system for us. You notice that we have three rows of panels the length of each side with electric spoolers. It slows us down about eight knots, but we can ride out a gale by going to ground, reefing the covering and blowing the gas. We’re just a heavy metal statue when we do that. It’s also easier when we’re maneuvering near the ground and having wind problems."

  I was so fascinated by the rigidible that I almost forgot we why we were there. I noticed there were now leather caps on top of the hydrogen cells so that they could be battened down when they were grounded in rough weather. In my own timeline, virtually every airship except the Hindenburg had been killed by bad weather. These people seemed to have solved the problem the first time they saw it.

  The informal moment passed when the captain snapped to attention and saluted, “Captain Stanislaw reporting, your grace. I have a large cargo for you. Do I have permission to offload at this location?”

  “Permission granted. I believe that my quartermaster and your cargo master can handle the unloading. Do you have any cargo besides the new gun?”

  “Sir, I am carrying the five-inch naval gun and three hundred rounds of powder and explosive shot. We brought all the ammunition we could carry and left no margin for additional cargo. As it was, we had some difficulty in maintaining altitude and directional control.”

 
; “Captain, neither of us is needed for the unloading and I’d like to catch up what’s happening in the dirigible corps. I suggest that your off duty men stretch their legs and get a little fresh food while you and I confer in the officer’s tent. We’ve got one of the best commissary corps in the army.”

  As usual the cooks had laid out a feast of fresh bread, roast mutton, rice, cheese, whatever vegetables they had been able to find – and standard canned lunches for those who like life plain and simple. There were folding chairs for the men and a small tent for conferencing out of the sun."

  By the time we sat down without plates, curious officers filled every seat in the tent, pretending to eat, hoping for a story. If you ever want to start a successful carnival, include a tent with dirigible. Everybody loves them.

  It didn’t take much to get him talking. “Are all of the airships configured like yours now?”

  “No, sir. Just the overland ships. R7 and R9 are Atlantic Clippers. They have auxiliary sails, and then there’s Sea Sicker. I don’t know how you describe that one.”

  “I thought that you were only going to build four ships?”

  “That was the plan, but an empire as large as ours needs fast, long distance travel. They already had the jigs, the plans, and the docks, so they just kept on building. We’re up to nine ships now and the plans are to have regularly scheduled service everywhere in the Empire by late next year.

  “Oh, you asked if they were all the same. I was about to explain that R7 and R9 are different. They were built to take advantage of the trade winds between Europe and the new world. They’re a little bigger than my ship and they’ve got two sails on each side. When they’re extended, they look like the fins on a fish. Their route takes them south out of Gibraltar, down the coast of Africa to where the winds change, across to the southern continent and then north up the coast to our colonies and trading posts. They go back by the northern route, south of Greenland and north of Poland.

  “They have the wind at their back all the way and a skillful captain with a little luck can do the whole trip and come home with full fuel tanks.

  “’Course, it don’t always work that way.”

  What a great line. There wasn’t a fork moving in the entire tent, while we waited for him to go on.

  “Captain Morrison had some difficulty on his second trip. He was on his homeward leg just south of Greenland when he hit a terrible storm one night. The winds weren’t strong enough to damage his ship, but ice formed on the canopy, a lot of it. Even after he dumped all of his ballast, he couldn’t maintain altitude. He sent the crew down to dump cargo but it was bulk stuff in big sealed containers, and they didn’t have equipment on board that could move containers that size.

  “I can tell you, that was the last time any airship will rise with a cargo she can’t dump herself. He had about twenty passengers on board, so he set them to breaking into the containers and dumping the cargo piecemeal.

  “He sent the crew up the canopy to start breaking ice loose. They tried climbing the ribs and pounding on the ice from inside to dislodge it, but they mostly just put holes in the fabric. When they got down to wave height, he reefed the top section of the envelope. Most of the canopy motors burned out but with sledge hammers and pry bars and the ones that worked, he got the fabric rolled up.

  “That knocked enough ice loose to gain some altitude. Unfortunately, half the damned ice fell on the deck and had to be manually thrown overboard and he still didn’t have enough altitude to get out of the storm. Ice started to form on the exposed ribs and the interior structure and threatened to bring them down again. While the passengers tried desperately to dump buffalo meat and bales of rubber overboard, the crew had to climb the ribs with fire axes, hammers, pipes and whatever else they could find to bust loose the ice and get it overboard. Half the crew had to stand on the upper deck and dump snow and ice over the side with a few shovels, a few boards, and their hands.

  “They had to cut the rear sails loose and jettison them, but they kept the two front sails out to keep themselves pointed downwind. The log says that it went on for over four hours. I’ll tell you, I sail one of these and I’m not a bit afraid of heights, but the thought of climbing those bare ribs in the middle of the night, pounding ice loose during a storm – with the wind shaking you around and nothing but ten thousand feet of air between you and the ocean gives even me nightmares.

  “By the time they got to warm air, they lost two men. One slipped off the ribs and was thrown overboard. Another lost his grip and fell to the deck. The fall killed him. It was one Hell of a night.

  “Well. We’ll never fly again with a cargo we can’t jettison and the engineers are working on plans for de-icing heaters for the canopy, but things still go wrong.”

  We were still listening to him when the gun and ammo had been unloaded and his crew fed.

  I almost forgot to have our conference. Eventually, I excused everyone from the tent except the captain, myself, and a few of my staff members. “Captain, I need to know more specifics about your current mission. I have the feeling that we are not well-coordinated.”

  He opened a leather folio and pulled out several maps. “You are correct, your grace. When we only had one ship overhead doing scout work, casual communications were adequate, but now we have a squad here and we need to liaison better if we are to be integrated into your campaign.

  “As to our situation, Wanderlust has returned to Poland, but in addition to my ship, Zephyr is overhead, scouting out the railroad line for the Wolves. Vagabond is due on station late tomorrow. She’s been rebuilt, refitted, and she’s carrying some kind of anti aircraft weapons to protect us from the Chinese planes.

  “We’re all prepared for extended duty. We plan to be here for the duration.

  “We actually arrived almost in the area about forty-eight hours ago, but we were told to limit radio communications until the problems at home sort themselves out so I waited until you got here to announce ourselves, and spent some time mapping out the area.

  He selected a map and set it between us. “If you look here, this is where you and I are now. This camp is on this river bend. Now look about fifty miles north. This spot is a narrow river canyon. It has very steep walls, and a narrow opening at both ends of the canyon. It’s only easy to get to from the air. It’s protected from the worse weather, has a river to replenish our ballast, and the narrow openings at both ends make it easy to defend if anyone figures out we’re there. We didn’t see any human habitation for miles so we hope to go unnoticed there.

  “We’ve already set up our base there. We wanted to coordinate the location with your people, but you’ve been too busy to be bothered the past few days. We brought in several hydrogen plants and dropped them down on the riverbank. Zephyr brought a couple of squads of marines with their gear, but frankly we could use a company out there, and we’re a little short of supplies since we sent everything over to your people. We don’t even have any Big People with us.”

  “I’ll have Baron Krol break loose a company and assign it too you. If this map is accurate, they can be at your site by nightfall with a couple of weeks of supplies, unless, of course, you want to take them yourself in the Cloud.”

  “We can take their wagons and supplies, but Big People don’t like air travel much so I suggest they ride out on their own.”

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  He reached for another map. “As I said, better liaison. I’ve got a map here of the current Mongol positions, and I don’t know who to give it to.”

  “I’ll set up two staff members to keep in regular communication with you, but right now, show us the map. We’re trying to plan a campaign.”

  He spread the map out on the table and started to brief me while the others crowded around. It was gold, simple, pure, premium gold that any commander would kill for. “This map covers about a hundred miles in all directions, so the scale is a little small. However, this is Karakorum.”He pointed to a spot near the cen
ter of the map, “and about fifty miles north this is the khan’s winter camp. Our guides say that it should be empty this time of year, but there hundreds of Yurts there. There are only a couple of permanent structures, but the whole camp is dug in and defended pretty well. They have a moat, small walls, and some cannon and they just happen to straddle the only road north.

  “South of us, there are several more small towns along this river. Our chink guide says that they are built around the palaces of some high officers. Damned near every officer is called a ‘khan’ so sometimes it’s hard to sort out who’s who.

  Most of them are empty now, but this one is an exception. They’re set up like the other camp. There are lots of yurts, lots of horses, lots of activity. Several groups seem to be consolidating there, and its close to where you were ambushed on the way in. "

  He reached for a third map. “I spent part of the day yesterday looking down at Karakorum though a telescope. This is a map of the city, and I have to say that is isn’t much of fort. From what I’ve heard, I expected Sarai to be better defended. Frankly, it looks like you could send in the quartermasters to serve lunch and they could clear out the Mongols while they’re setting up the tables.

  “The place is about two and half miles east to west and about a mile and half north to south. It has the usual four gates at the compass points. The main gate is in the south wall near the khan’s palace – and it’s a palace, not a fort. A large single story brick building with columns running on three sides.

  “Now, up in the North West corner is the Saracen quarter. That’s where the merchants have their houses. Our guide says he stayed in a home there on his way to Sarai. The other northern corner is for craftsmen and small businesses. Aside from the craftsmen and a few officials, our guide says there aren’t many Mongols in permanent residence. Most of them still don’t like cities.

  “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.