by Chuck Dixon
“Our Iranian friends settled in?” Lee asked.
“They went right down to the nuke and never left it,” Morris said and poured a cup from the dregs. “They’re checking levels and running a diagnostic in sandals and shorts. Here’s to us nerds, huh?” He stopped mid-sip and blinked at Bathsheba.
“You’re a woman,” he said.
“Thanks. You’re nice,” she said.
“I mean. I don’t know you, and here I am talking about—”
“She’s hip, Mo,” Chaz said. “She’s coming with us.”
“I’m Bat Jaffe. I’m teaching the guys Hebrew.”
“Oh. Well. I suppose. Yes,” Morris said and retreated, cup and carafe in hand.
“That was the brain behind all this, right?” Bat said.
“One of them. Dr. Morris Tauber, engineer and theoretical physicist,” Jimbo said. “But not a whiz at the social niceties.”
“He’s interesting,” Bat said.
“He’s gonna get more interesting when that coffee hits him,” Boats said. “I put four fingers of Maker’s Mark in the pot.”
14
The Order of March
The runner reached the slave caravan where they camped the second night. Or rather, the third runner reached them, as the message was relayed from one station to another along the road. Every Roman citizen bragged that these roads allowed a message to travel from any point in the empire to another within two weeks.
The caravan of slaves and their minders had made slow progress, yet had passed forty mile markers since departing Nazareth the day before.
The runner used his medallion from the cursus publicus, the official messenger service authorized throughout the empire, to make his way past the sentries posted about the fortified camp. In the moonlight of the Ides of Sextilis, he trotted along the rows of tents until he found the tent where the centurion Bachus slept. An optio offered to take the packet from the messenger.
“I am under orders of the prefect of Judea to deliver this into the hands of centurion Trivian Bachus and only him,” the messenger, a slim boy of fourteen years insisted with the imperious attitude of a Claudian. The boy was a slave, and in the hierarchy of the imperium, a slave was empowered by the office of his master. Thus the legion optio was obligated to obey this lowly youth as though ordered by prefect Gratus himself.
The messenger was admitted to the tent. The optio spoke softly, and the centurion stirred naked on his cot. Bachus sat up with a mumbled curse and took the packet from the runner’s hand. It was held closed by a blob of wax embossed with the prefect’s seal, a pair of swans with necks entwined. He tore it open and read by the light of a lamp held overhead by the optio.
Ut Cen. Mettius Trivian Bachus
De Valerius Epidus Gratus, prefectus Judaica
Be warned that word has reached this office of an attack by rebels meant to halt your progress toward Philippi. You are to take refuge at the nearest fortifiable location and arrange for any reinforcements necessary to its defense. At all costs, the lives of the slaves in your charge are to be protected from harm and prevented from escape until further word from me.
The note was in the prefect’s own hand. The letters were poorly formed, and the words ran together in a way that made them almost illegible. His signature, a simple VEG, was scrawled across the bottom, accompanied by another wax seal.
Bachus allowed his optio prime to read the message aloud as he sat at his campaign desk to pen an acknowledgment. The terse words of a soldier were written and sealed with Bachus’s legion signet ring, a crude horse beneath the numeral Twenty-three. The runner was given drink and a place to sleep on the floor of a tent. Bachus dispatched one of his own men to run south to the next station to carry his reply, by relay, back to the prefect’s villa in Caesarea.
“What are your orders, sir?” the optio said. “Dispatch scouts to search the road ahead for a defensible position,” Bachus said. “We’ll march at first light to follow. Half rations of water and food for the soldiers. Nothing for the slaves until we reach our goal. I have no idea how long we must hold before relief arrives.”
“The Jews must have grown bold to seek to face three centuries on the march, sir.”
“Perhaps there is someone in our charge they prize,” Bachus said, running a hand over the bristles sprouting on his jaw. “There could be one or more of their leaders among the slaves we escort.”
“Then why not execute them all and have done with it?” the optio asked bitterly.
“I do not know, and I cannot guess. But I know this: Gratus may very well be mad, which only means that his commands must be carried out to the letter. I’ve no wish to incur the wrath of a lunatic with his power and influence.”
“And when shall I have the men roused to break camp?” the optio said.
“Now, Sextus,” Bachus said, stooping to reach for his boots. “We will march to greet the sun’s rise.”
15
Warrior Princess
It was a boy.
After eighteen hours of labor, Caroline Tauber gave birth to an eight-pound, twenty-one-inch howler.
“We’re not naming him Maximus,” she said just before the drugs took effect and whisked her away to Happy Mommy Land.
Dwayne held the squealing red bundle in his arms and just stared.
“What are you going to name it, sir?” a nurse asked him.
“Damned if I know,” he said and allowed another nurse to gently pluck his son from his arms to place him in a plastic-walled bassinet and wheel him away. He then numbly followed an orderly back to the suite to await Caroline and his son after the post-op cleanup had been completed.
The biggest flower arrangement he’d ever seen was there on a table. Next to it was a huge teddy bear in Ranger camouflage and sergeant’s stripes. He’d phoned Morris when they wheeled Caroline into the delivery room. Plenty of time for his bros to call the order in to a local florist.
He sank down into a chair, physically and emotionally drained. He could swear that bear was laughing at him.
“Hooah, Sergeant Teddy.”
“I’m not wearing that,” Lee said.
“I had it custom-made for this op,” Jimmy Smalls said.
“Maybe you want to look like a Dollar Store Spartacus. I’ll stick with my Dragon armor,” Lee said.
The team was on the main deck of the Raj unloading the crates Jimbo had brought back on the launch. The crates were drop-shipped to the port in Limassol care of Praxus Enterprises, the shell corporation the team used as an avatar for their dealing with the outside world. They even paid taxes. Sort of.
“This is the same as Dragon,” Jimbo insisted. “Bob Tosches made these up for me at his shop.”
“What did you tell him? He must think you’ve lost your damned mind.” Chaz laughed.
“This looks like a fucking dress!” Lee said, holding up something that looked like a skirt fashioned from old-school pre-digital desert camouflage.
“It’s a utili-kilt. Guys in construction wear them. The goddamn Scots highlanders wore kilts, and they were badasses,” Jimbo said. “Besides, they’ll help us blend.”
“At a gay pride parade?” Lee said in disgust and threw the kilt down.
“Buckles, my man? Where’s the Velcro?” Chaz said, holding up a layered torso armor with steel studs in rows.
“It’s a lorica segmenta. Standard issue for the Roman army. It’s better than the shit we wore in Iraq. There’s shoulder protection, and straps that hang down to protect your balls.” Jimbo held up a set of the torso armor manufactured in black Kevlar. “It’s layered, so it breathes. This shit is awesome. You’ll see when you try it on.”
“Buckles, bro?” Chaz said, jiggling a belt strap with a steel buckle jangling at the end of it.
“We can’t be having Velcro and plastic fasteners back in The Then,” Jimbo said. He was losing patience.
“I think they’re cute,” Bat said and held a set up against her as if she were at Neiman’s.
<
br /> Jimbo sagged.
“You’ll look like Xena,” Lee snorted.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Bat said.
“I think he was talking to me,” Jimbo said.
“I’m wearing my BDUs and Dragons,” Lee said and walked away forward to the bridge.
“Oh, hell no,” Chaz said and pulled a helmet from within a box. Packing peanuts spilled to the deck.
He held the helmet up. It was a recreation of a Roman galea in black ballistic cloth over a high-impact plastic dome. It was accented with brass bosses, and had cheek guards and a bill at the rear for protection to the back of the neck.
“It’s optional, okay?” Jimbo snatched the helmet from Chaz’s hand. He didn’t mention that he’d ordered greaves to cover their shins as well.
Bat laughed.
“Fuck, yeah!” They all turned to see Boats standing in his cutoffs with the retro armor strapped on. With his wild red hair and beard, he would have looked at home in the German auxilla.
“At my signal, unleash hell,” Boats intoned gravely. Now they all laughed.
16
Transit: the Med
All personnel and gear aboard, the Ocean Raj weighed anchor and moved out into the Mediterranean. They’d take their time to bring the ship to its new anchorage roughly thirty miles off Haifa in waters almost two thousand meters deep. The team would use the transit time to shake down their equipment and make any last-minute adjustments to the mission plan. Most strategies don’t survive long once the boots hit the ground. The team worked out countless contingencies and tried to anticipate as many surprises as they could imagine.
The law of unintended consequences was squared and then cubed by traveling into the past. Where every op had its share of gotchas, the world of the ancient past was mostly unknown. They would be making landfall at a strip of beach south of what was today the port of Haifa. Back in 16 AD, it was Caesarea, the seat of imperial power in Judea. Their research informed them that they could lose themselves in the crowd of a bustling port city and also readily buy the horses they needed.
Of course, their research could be bullshit. One variable and the whole op was turned ass up. The city could be in the grip of plague or famine. It could be suffering the aftereffects of an earthquake or fire. Maybe the legions were there clamping down after a week of riots. They could motor their rubber raft right through an imperial fleet.
Doc Tauber worked at fine-tuning the Tube, but he still couldn’t guarantee what time of day they’d pop out, high noon or the middle of the night. They could drop into mirror seas or the middle of a hundred-year storm. There was just no way to know. It was impossible to be prepared for every eventuality, but they’d be ready enough to stay flexible when, not if, things went sideways.
They had enough of the Carthaginian coins on board to live like kings in first-century Rome. They’d only take enough to buy mounts and incidentals. Lee Hammond took care of the currency they’d need for paying their way. A few days in a lemon-juice solution removed the centuries of patina from the coins so they’d look closer to the right vintage in the eyes of anyone they met back in The Then.
Jimbo rolled a fifty-gallon drum off the lower rear deck of the Raj. Bat stood by with one of the Winchester 70s. The sea was as flat and calm as a tablecloth. The sun was low to port, making the sea glimmer in copper and deepest green. The ship was moving slow. The barrel rose and fell on the rolling, creamy wake.
“Let it drift on out,” Jimbo said.
“Okay,” Bat said and dropped her Ray-Bans onto her freckled nose to cut down the glare off the water. She stood rocking easy with the slight movement of the deck. Three weeks on board, and she had her sea legs back. But striking a moving target from a moving deck was still going to be a challenge.
The barrel bobbed away until it was a good two hundred yards out. It was a crimson dot catching light as it dipped and rose in the gentle current.
“Find your target,” Jimbo said. He had a pair of binoculars to his eyes.
Bat rode the slight rise of the deck and sighted over the scope to locate the barrel. She lowered her eye to the scope cup. The drum seemed to leap within touching distance.
“Got it,” she said.
“All yours, then,” Jimbo said.
She locked the reticules on the barrel and held that position as the deck fell beneath the soles of her sneakers. Holding her breath, Bat waited until the deck climbed up and the barrel was in view again. She let her breath out slowly and squeezed firm and steady on the trigger.
Jimbo saw a geyser of foam six feet in front of the barrel.
“That an honest miss?” he said.
“If you mean, was I on it, I was,” she said.
“You’re hitting short.”
She lowered the rifle and twiddled a dial atop the scope then raised it again to find the barrel now drifting closer to three football fields distant. Breathe in, ride the roll, squeeze.
Through the lenses, Jimbo saw a hole punched in the metal skin of the barrel. The force made the drum take a quarter spin.
“Money,” he said with a grin.
She jacked a fresh round and retrained the 30x and nailed the barrel again. Four more times she worked the bolt and brought the crosshairs down and drilled the steel drum clean each time. The barrel was five hundred yards aft on her last strike and sinking low in the water.
“Nice,” Jimbo said. “How’d that feel?”
“Like holding my first puppy.” She smiled.
“What’s your best?”
“In the rings from a thousand meters.”
“On a range?” he asked.
“A place called Qana. Took a Hezbollah sapper through the head,” she said and pulled the bolt from the rifle with an expert tug.
“Headshots are a bitch.”
“He didn’t give me much choice,” she said. “I’m going forward to clean the Winchester if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure.” The Pima nodded. “Far as I’m concerned, that rifle’s yours from now on.”
“Thanks.” She flashed a smile and walked to a ladder with the rifle under her arm.
Damn, Jimbo thought, Lee better watch his ass around this girl. He wouldn’t want to do anything to piss off someone who could shoot like that.
Bat found Chaz in the cabin they used for meetings and as a day room. He had buds in his ears from an iPod and listened to his tunes while running the blade of a combat knife, an eight-inch Bowie type with a brass tang, over the surface of a whetstone.
“What’re you listening to?”
“Right now? Gorillaz. Part of a mix,” he said.
“They’re okay. You like Bonde do Rolê?”
“Brazilian, right? Yeah. I have some of them on here.”
“Death to your speakers. Death to your speakerssssss...” she growled in an exaggerated basso.
Chaz laughed. Bat poured some coffee from a pot warming on a hot plate.
“Hey, while I’m putting an edge on my blade, you need your knife sharpened?” He nodded to the bayonet in a web scabbard on the belt of her cutoffs.
“Thanks, but I promised my dad I’d always do that.” She sat across the table from him, shaking a paper packet of Equal in her fingers.
“A Kabar. Your dad a jarhead?”
“First Marines. Semper fi, do or die. He carried it in Vietnam. He was at Hue City after Tet.”
“So that’s where you get it,” Chaz said.
“My mom’s tougher. Public school teacher in Cleveland. She’s been in more fights than me or Dad.” She took a sip.
“So why this fight, girl? You coming along to be with Lee or for the action?”
“A chance to see what you guys have seen? Like I could pass that up? Besides, you could use my help.”
“A chance to visit your holy lands the way they used to be. Kind of a pilgrimage.”
“Same for you, Chaz. I’m sensing this is more than just another op for you.”
Chaz examined the razor edge
of the blade in the light from the ceiling lamp.
“My dad was a deacon. Church of Christ. I turned my back on all that,” he said, studying the silvery gleam off the polished metal. “Thought I had all the answers. Then I joined the army, got deployed, and had my world rocked. I saw shit I couldn’t handle, shit that drinking couldn’t make me unsee. You have to deal with that, right? Well, I went back to my father and begged for his help. I found peace there in The Word with his guidance. Cancer took him three years back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Chaz,” Bat said.
“It’s okay. He went easy. He was right with God. And knowing I was the same gave him his own peace. It was good between us in those last years. I’m thankful for that.” Chaz slid the oiled blade into a leather scabbard.
“He must have been proud of you,” she said.
“I just wish he could see what we’re about to see.” Chaz smiled easy. “The way I look at it, Jesus saved me, and now I’m returning the favor.”
17
Station Five
The mist was growing to fill the well at the center of the chamber.
The tension was high as the technicians waited for whatever would emerge from the veil of icy mist spreading from the black steel array. Any opening of the field was a cause for anxiety. There were so many imponderables, so many opportunities for disaster. They were, after all, playing with the building blocks of the universe here. What lay beyond the chilling fog, growing denser with each passing second, was no abstract mystery. It was real, and it was dangerous.
