Conrad Starguard - Flying Warlord Part 16

"Who were you, again?" Duke Boleslaw said.

"I am Baron Vladimir Charnetski, your grace. We haven't met, but we are related. Two of my aunts married two of your uncles, and one of my second cousins married two of your aunts, once removed, one on your father's side and one on your mother's, after the first one died. Surely you remember your Aunt Sophy and your Aunt Agnes. Well, they're my aunts as well."

Reminding him of our family ties seemed like a good idea. Actually, it was no big thing. I occasionally think that I must be related to everybody. Coming from a vast family helps, sometimes.

"You are the nephew of my Aunt Sophy? I haven't seen the old girl in years! How is she? And what of my Uncle Albert?"

"Just fine when I saw them last, a few months ago. They have thirteen children now, with another on the way."

"Thirteen! How is that possible? Two years ago, they had only nine!"

"Twins, your grace. Two pairs of them."

"No! That's amazing! And my Aunt Agnes?"

"Not so good, your grace. She's had a bad cough for almost a year now, and we're all worried about her."

"I shall include her in my prayers. But look, things are rushed just now, Vladimir. What can I do for you?"

"I think it's more what I can do for you, your grace. I am Hetman of Count Conrad's army. I have a hundred and fifty thousand men coming to join your forces."

"That was true, then? It wasn't some kind of silly joke? He really does have that many men?"

"Of course, your grace! Who could joke about such a thing? Anyway, they'll be here in a day and you can see for yourself."

"Here in a day? That's disaster!"

"How can that be, your grace? We're on your side, after all."

"It's disaster because I can't feed the men I've got now! The food merchants have not come! The cowards have all run away! Even the peasants have gone, and they've taken most of the food with them!

I can't feed the twenty-five thousand men I have now! How am I going to feed a hundred fifty thousand more?"

"Oh, don't worry about that, your grace. We have food for a month with us, and all the grain we could ever need at the granaries in the Bledowska Desert. In fact, I can easily feed your entire army. I can have tons of grain here in a few days. Until then, we can feed your men and horses with what we have with us, but more food can be on its way here in an hour."

"How is this possible?"

"Easy. I brought a radio and a radio operator with me. We can send a message in a few minutes to the granary. They have mules and carts there. Why, four dozen carts a day can feed all your men and animals well. It has to come by rail instead of by boat because the boats are busy right now." I sent one of my men out to attend to it.

"Yes, I'd heard there was a battle going on at the Vistula. That's Conrad's riverboats, isn't it?"

"Yes, your grace, and Count Conrad is with them. They are slaughtering incredible numbers of the enemy, but it doesn't look as though they can hold out much longer. They say that tomorrow or the next day, the enemy will break through. Already, more than half of our men on the rivers are dead."

"Half dead? And still they fight?"

"Yes, your grace. They'll fight until they are all gone, every last man of them. I know. I trained them."

"On boats, perhaps. But what can footmen accomplish on a battlefield? Everybody knows that battles are won by men on horses! A footman can do nothing but get trampled."

"Wrong, your grace. Hors.e.m.e.n can do nothing against a ma.s.s of trained men with pikes! A pike is six yards long and can knock a knight out of the saddle before his lance can touch the footman. Believe me!

We've practiced the very thing many times in the last five years. Furthermore, I have more than twenty thousand guns coming with my troops, and they can kill an enemy at a mile! What I don't have is a force of hors.e.m.e.n, but you do. If we can work together, we cannot be beaten!"

"Vladimir, we'll have to talk more on this. For now, do you swear that food supplies will be here by this time tomorrow?"

"I swear it by all that's holy, your grace."

"Then I'll believe that much at least. I must go and give orders that the last of the food reserves are to be handed out and eaten. That will give the men one good meal, and after that we are at your mercy."

Chapter Twenty.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD.

Of all the mistakes I've made, the most serious was to set the number of riverboats at only three dozen.

We needed six times that number!

Of course, at the time, I wasn't sure if we would be able to use them at all. The river might have been frozen over, the water level could have been too low to get by some of the rapids, or any one of a number of things could have gone wrong. I don't know. I needed sleep, and there wasn't much of that to be had.

There came a time when we were the only boat north of Sieciechow, on a sector that hadn't been patrolled in days, and we found that the Mongols had completed a bridge across the Vistula. Thousands of enemy troops were rushing across it.

"Baron Tadaos, we've got to take that bridge out."

"Sir, we're out of Molotov c.o.c.ktails and Halman bombs. We're out of peashooter b.a.l.l.s. The flamethrower is exhausted. We have maybe a thousand rounds of swivel gun ammunition left and those troops outnumber ours by hundreds to one. How are we going to do it?"

"We're going to ram it. Captain Targ! Prepare to offload your men and your war carts!"

The captain gave a few orders that had his men scurrying, then ran up to me.

"We're going to attack that bridge, sir?"

"We are, but you are not. We're going to ram that bridge, and doing that will likely sink us. There is no point in your company going down with the boat. It would accomplish nothing, and you are needed elsewhere. You will get your men ash.o.r.e and fight your way south to Sandomierz. Once there, you will join the garrison and help defend the city."

He stared at me for a long minute.

"Yes, sir. What about my wounded?"

"Take the walking wounded with you. The others will have to be left behind. There's nothing else we can do."

"Yes, sir."

I could see that he wanted to say more, a lot more, but he turned and went to obey his orders.

"Tadaos, I can handle the helm alone, but I'll need one man in the engine room. See if you can find a volunteer, a good swimmer. Then get the rest of your men ready to join Captain Targ."

He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Pig s.h.i.t!"

Then he spat on my boots.

"Nine years I've been working for you and you don't know me any better than that? You might have taken command of this battle, and done some dumbs.h.i.t things, but I am still master of this boat and baron of the whole d.a.m.n River Battalion, or what's left of it anyway! Three-quarters of my men are dead now, and you expect me to turn around and run away? This is my d.a.m.ned boat and this is my d.a.m.ned duty station and I will d.a.m.n well stay here until we've won or we're dead! And if you think that any man of mine feels any different, you can d.a.m.n well ask them yourself!"

Then he turned his back to me and put a new string on his bow, his hand shaking with anger.

I stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I turned to the helmsman, a young kid who looked to be fourteen.

"Get out of here, boy."

"No, sir." His face shield was open and he was crying, tears running down his cheeks. "No, sir," he repeated and continued to stand his post, though the tears must have blinded him.

I turned and went below.

"Baron Piotr, get your men together. I'm going to take out a bridge by ramming. You and your men are going ash.o.r.e with Captain Targ."

He didn't get up from the map board.

"Yes, sir. We heard something about that. But the fact is that we really don't know whether the boat will sink or not. Ash.o.r.e, well, we wouldn't be able to do that much good for Sandomierz, since most of us here have been sitting at desks and radio sets for years. We are way out of training. But if the boat does stay afloat, we're going to be needed here to continue coordinating our efforts. We still have eleven boats on the river, after all. So, begging your pardon, sir, but we're staying."

"d.a.m.n you, Piotr, that was a direct order!"

"Sir. I am a Radiant Warrior, blessed by G.o.d to do His holy work. I am not going to run away now."

I looked around the room. All of the men were trying to look busy.

"This is mutiny!" I shouted.

"Yes, sir, I suppose it is," a mousey-looking radio operator said. "But it's really for the best, sir. Our place is here."

"d.a.m.n you all," I shouted and went down to the cargo deck.

One of the crew was flooding the odd-numbered watertight tanks, to give the boat more weight, he explained, and never mind about the buoyancy. He wanted to make sure that we hit the bridge as hard as possible.

"It'd be a shame to waste our last blow at the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, wouldn't it, sir?"

The troops were jamming the war carts up against the forward drawbridge, again to increase the impact.

Captain Targ came up to me.

"I regret that I have to report a mutiny, sir. I was afraid that this might happen, but the men won't leave.

We're down to less than four full platoons now, and they've seen too many friends die to run away at this point. It would be like dishonoring the dead. Anyway, if the boat hangs up on the bridge, you'll need us to repel boarders, so it's for the best."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n you all to h.e.l.l! But that bridge still has to 90 !:"

"Of course, sir. Speaking of which, we'd better all get up on deck or we'll miss the show. Tadaos won't be waiting for orders, you know. AH platoons! Report on deck! Pa.s.s the word!"

"You are all crazy people!" I shouted.

"Yes, sir," a warrior said as he brushed by me, heading for the stairs. "I suppose we are."

I got on deck when we were less than three-gross yards from the bridge. We were going full-speed downriver and the helmsman had us aimed dead center.

The bridge was built rather high for such a temporary thing, and the top of the roadway was higher than the deck of the boat. It-was built on wooden tetrahedrons made of oversized telephone poles that looked to be simply set on the river bottom, with the roadway strung on ropes above them.

There were thousands of men and horses on it, rushing across, and while some of them were shouting and pointing at us, they still kept coming. There were men getting on the bridge the moment we hit.

The impact was enough to knock us all over, and we all went skidding across the splintered deck. As I got up, I saw that we had not punched a hole through the bridge, as I had expected. We had actually tipped it over!

The part of it that was right in front of us was already in the river, and the roadway was caught by the current. On both sides of us, like water breaking over a dam, the long flexible bridge was pulled slowly over on its side.

The water was filled with thrashing horses, but with fewer men than you would expect. Not that many of the desert-bred Mongols could swim. Those few that did make it to sh.o.r.e didn't live long. The captain already had the swivel guns in action.

But the bridge was still in one piece and we hadn't gone through it. Tadaos got us into reverse and we backed off the wreckage.

A crewman ran up from below and reported to Tadaos, who turned to me and said, "The bow is smashed up, but we're still afloat. Maybe you ought to see about repairing the damage, sir."

So I went down to play steamboat repairman, again. On the way, I stopped to tell Piotr to radio the other boats that a bridge could be taken out by ramming. He had already done so.

The next morning, after the other boats had taken out four other bridges and lost two of their number doing it, it became strangely quiet, all along the Vistula. Some men thought that we had actually won and the enemy had given up. Others were sure that it was some kind of a trick. The planes reported that the Mongols were concentrating in a dozen groups, each a few miles east of the river, but not going back any farther. It was eerie and quiet for the first time in a week. Even the catapults were unmanned.

Then, the morning after that, an even stranger thing happened. All at once, along the whole river as far as we could tell, enemy troops led their horses down to the frozen banks of the river. Holding on to the horse's tail, they got the animals swimming across the icy waters of the Vistula, pulling the rider behind them.

We steamed through them, drowning hundreds, but they were like lemmings and we couldn't begin to stop them all.

Tadaos looked at it in disbelief.

"If they could do that, why didn't they do it a week ago?"

"There's your answer," Captain Targ said, pointing to the west bank. "Every horse had a man behind it when it went into the water. Only maybe half of those men are still there when they come out."

"Good G.o.d in Heaven, you're right! They are deliberately throwing away half of their army just to get across! Who could order such a thing? Why do they do it? Don't they realize that we no longer have anything to fight with?"

We all shook our heads and watched half of the enemy army die.

I don't know. Maybe they ran out of food. Maybe they just got impatient. It's likely they never realized how close to the wire we were. The only thing sure was that the Battle for the Vistula was over and the Battle for Poland had begun.

FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI.

We set up a system where each platoon "adopted" up to ten of Duke Boleslaw's troops, at least for dining purposes. Later we had to up it to twelve. More of them were coming in every day, and many had had a hard time finding us.

The printshop in Cracow made up thousands of little signs that said where our camp was; one of the Big People ran them to Eagle Nest and the planes were soon dropping them on friendly troops who looked lost. It helped, but as it turned out, it also told the Mongols where to find us. Maybe that wasn't so bad.

We wanted to find them.