by Chuck Dixon
He’d hurt them. That was the plan. He set the Romans back on their ass and took them away from the direction his friends were traveling.
Now for the second part of the plan, get himself clear and not wind up on a cross. He was not Spartacus and had no plans to be. He ran easy, leaping fallen trees and ducking low branches. The little surfer dude kept up with him step for step carrying that bundle of javelins on his shoulder like it was weightless. Jimbo’s burden seemed lightened as well, the heavy bandoliers of grenades swinging from his shoulder, the scabbard of the scrounged gladius slapping his thigh as he ran. They were nothing at all. He just went mano a mano with the baddest motherfuckers of the ancient world and came out on top.
He knew that it was an adrenalin high and he’d pay for this elation when the crash came on him and the ammo started to feel like it weighed a ton. But he was in the moment, and he never wanted it to end. Running with a good buddy after a good fight, and nobody in the world would ever know they had been here or care about this nameless battleground. It was all he wanted. It made his life up until this day seem small, even though he knew he’d done some pretty awesome stuff in his life. But this just seemed so goddamned real. It was all about right here and right now.
God help him, he was loving it.
A crashing sound in the brush before him and two beefy legionnaires appeared sweating before him. He and Byrus had let themselves get ringed in, a cherry-ass mistake. Jimbo raised his M-4 high to take the downward stroke from a gladius. Sparks flew. The second Roman rushed in with a pilum held low in his fists. The wicked point was aimed for his guts.
Jimbo stomped a booted foot down into the knee of the swordsman and heard a popping sound before the guy dropped screaming to the ground. He turned to the spearman too late. The squared-off business end of the javelin took him hard in the lower ribs. The armor spread the impact. The point glided over the Kevlar and the spearman followed the momentum of his attack, colliding with the Pima. They fell to the ground together.
Byrus reached them to drive his gladius hard onto the back of the spearman. Jimbo threw the shuddering man off him, wiping the man’s blood from his eyes in time to see Byrus chop down to split the swordsman’s skull where the man lay grasping his twisted knee in his hands.
Shouts behind them growing closer. Footfalls sounded behind them, sandals cracking through the undergrowth and coming nearer. Jimbo went to stand and the pain in his side from the spear point sent an almost electric thrill of pain through his chest. He went to one knee. Byrus grabbed the bigger man’s elbow to haul him up. Jimbo clenched his teeth and manned up to get through the agony that threatened to take his breath away. That fucker cracked some ribs, the Ranger thought, and went to spit at the now-inert corpse lying at the head of a stream of blood. His mouth was too dry.
The little Macedonian shoved Jimbo against a tree and left him. He struggled to stay on his feet, dizzy with pain, his back to the stout cedar trunk. He saw Byrus leaping toward a gang of Romans exploding from the forest shadows for them. The surfer dude that time forgot was slashing with his short sword like some wild thing, growling and snapping as he burst in among the attackers. Men screamed and howled. A soldier jabbed with a pilum, and Byrus cut the wooden shaft from the long spear point with a single stroke and booted the man in the nuts. He then turned to a swordsman, batted the man’s blade aside and pulled the man onto his steel until the gladius’s blade exploded from between the man’s back ribs.
Jimbo raised his rifle to help Byrus out. He aimed at a sweating swordsman and depressed the trigger with no result. He looked down at the M-4 to see that the sword strike from that first legionnaire had dented the receiver on the weapon. The rifle was eighty-sixed. The dude with the broken pilum had gotten past Byrus and was racing with the severed end of the wooden shaft held in his fist like a club. Jimbo clawed for the Colt 1911 he had holstered on his sword belt.
He cleared the holster and was raising the weapon when his arm went dead and the pistol dropped from his numb fingers. The spearman had brought the hard wooden haft down on his forearm and was swinging it back for a blow to Jimbo’s head.
That was the last the Pima saw before the sky and all around him turned a starless black and he was adrift in the Big Fuck-all.
46
When Are You?
Dwayne took her in his arms. Mindful of the baby, he pressed her to him gently.
His coat was gritty against her cheek and stank of wood smoke. She didn’t care. Stephen wriggled in protest between them. Dwayne took her shoulders and stepped back, eyes on the child. There were equal parts of joy and regret in those eyes.
“Dwayne,” she began.
“I want to hold him,” Dwayne said and scooped the baby from her and held him close.
She studied his face in the hazed moonlight. Black soil highlighted the lines Dwayne’s face. There were more there than she recalled. What she thought was weariness in his expression she now recognized as age. Cold spiked up her spine with the realization. This man was older than the man she said goodbye to in Berne, considerably older. The gray at the temples was not discoloration from ash. The hard lines about the mouth and eyes, the sag of the lids. Twenty years had passed since their last meeting. She touched his sleeve, and he lifted his gaze from the cooing infant.
“Dwayne,” she began again.
“I wish I could explain, Caroline. There was no other way. You need to leave here now. Tonight.”
“For where? For when?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, his expression softening. “No time will have passed for you. Or for me. You’ll see me again just like you left me.”
She was speechless, not something she could ever recall being.
“I can’t tell you anything else. Don’t ask me, Caroline. Samuel would be here, but it didn’t work out that way. One thing I’ve learned is that you can make almost any mistake right if you try hard enough. But you can never make up lost time.”
He handed the baby back into her arms and embraced her once again.
“We’re in no rush. Harnesh’s people can’t open a window until sometime tomorrow local time. Still, it’s a good idea you two leave now.”
“Aren’t you leaving too? I mean. With us?” she said, swallowing tears. She wanted to cry like a child and could not focus on one single cause for it.
“I’m good. I’m safe here for now. Invisible to them.” He pulled back a ragged sleeve and showed her a gleaming steel wristlet like Samuel wore. He smiled that wolfish grin of his. “Besides, I’m kind of looking forward to seeing their faces.”
She smiled back. Her mind was swirling with questions that he forbade her to ask. The questions themselves terrified her. This was a man who shared a life with her that she had yet to live. His memories were her future—hers and Stephen’s. She fought down her anxiety and a crushing sadness that would overwhelm her if she gave it a second’s consideration.
“Then we’d better move along. There’s still a curfew in effect,” she said and was surprised when he picked up the carpetbag and took her arm in his.
“We always said we’d do a real tour of Paris someday,” he said casually.
“Not like this,” she said, and they moved through the gloom, the city silent but for the ring of tramping boots moving away along the cobbles of an adjacent street. After a bit, she recognized the route they were on.
“You’re taking me back to the place where Samuel and I came through the field,” she said.
“It’s still in place and programmed to open. We have some wiggle room. Like I said, no crazy need to rush, but we’re still on a timetable.” He gripped her arm closer. She looked up at him, but his eyes were fixed on the path ahead.
She had questions, but they were all about events to come.
“Harnesh’s man, the one with the white hair, he’s dead,” she said.
“Madeline Villeneuve wrote about it. You were quite the woman of mystery for a while there, babe,” he said and turned to smile at he
r. “You did good.”
“It was for Stephen. I’d die for him, you know that.”
He said nothing. His smile faded and he looked away. The chill from earlier returned deeper than before.
They stayed to the shadowed side of a broad boulevard. Tramping feet echoed toward them and Dwayne pulled them into the deeper darkness under a tattered storefront awning.
They watched a troop of soldiers tread by in formation, an officer striding before them with a sword on his shoulder. They wore Uhlan-style helmets and trousers with the stripe down the leg, cavalry who’d been reduced to infantry after their horses went to the butcher.
Dwayne and Caroline waited until they were out of sight around a turn in the avenue before continuing on. A building in their pathway had collapsed in the recent shelling to block a street. Dwayne took the baby and helped her climb over the hill of rubble. They came down the slope of bricks and broken mortar to the garden area and the alley where she and Samuel had entered only a bit more than a week ago. They stopped at the mouth of the narrow passage and he gently returned Stephen to her arms.
He took a slim black case from his pocket and placed it in the carpetbag.
“Everything you need is in here. A throwaway cell phone, an American Express black card, passports, visas, and driver’s license.”
“Who am I now?”
“Mrs. Sydney Jean Hochheiser of Calgary, Alberta,” he said and smiled at her wince.
“Well, I’ve been pretending to be Canadian anyway. What about the clothes?” she said, glancing down at her voluminous brocaded skirts.
“There’s plenty of period reenactors walking around Paris these days. No Frenchman is going to risk losing his cool by reacting to you. Use the card to buy some casual clothes and whatever else you need and take the train to London. There’s already a suite there in your name at the Marleybone. It’s a four-star. When you get there, call me.”
“And say what exactly?”
“That you and the baby are fine unless...”
“What?”
“You might get there a little sooner than anticipated.”
“Like our six-month vacation from the world?” she said.
“It shouldn’t be that far off.”
“I hope not. I wouldn’t want Stephen to be walking the next time you see him.”
Dwayne laughed then started to say something. He bit off the words as well as the laughter. He looked past her with hard eyes. She turned to see the first tendrils of white mist forming.
“Wait until it fills the alley,” he said.
“Once more,” she said and stepped to him. He took her and their child to him and held them as though they contained a healing power to make his world right again. Her tears came then, and he crushed her closer.
“One thing,” he said, no louder than a breath in her ear. “Tell Hammond, ‘the oracle at Joppa.’ Just that. He’ll know what it means.”
“The Oracle at Joppa,” she whispered back against his neck.
“You have to go. Now,” he said, releasing her. The baby in her arm and the carpetbag in hand, she walked away from him into the engulfing mist. “Don’t look back,” she heard him say. It sounded like a warning he’d often repeated or even a statement of philosophy rather than a timely thought of the moment.
Caroline did not look back. She only walked into the alley back toward her own present and his past.
47
Caesarea Redux
“We’re exposed here. We can’t keep waiting,” Bat Jaffe said.
Lee Hammond said nothing in reply. They were hiding in plain sight on a terrace above the walled harbor. It was the oldest part of the city. The pillars were green with age, the tiles cracked and weed-choked. For three days they’d been living like the rest of the town’s homeless in whatever nook or niche they could find to get out of the weather. They were starting to draw attention from the locals. Lee stood with a foot on a curtain wall, watching the boats coming and going over the sun-dappled water.
“Boats needs real medical care, antibiotics, surgery,” she said.
Lee spat. His eyes were locked on the broad stone pier where their raft lay concealed in ten feet of water.
“We can come back, Lee.”
He turned to her then back to where Chaz sat by the wounded SEAL in the shade of a tattered awning. Boats was conscious but in pain, even if he’d never admit it. They were keeping him hydrated and doing their best to drain the pus from the swollen wound in his thigh. There was nothing they could do to stop the fevers he was spiking more and more frequently.
“We can come back,” Chaz said.
“And where do we look?” Lee said.
“Jimbo will make it to the exfil point. He might have to take his time, but he’ll make it. He’ll leave a sign. You know he will,” Chaz said.
Lee scanned the pier again.
“Are we in range of the field?” he said.
“For a text message,” Chaz said.
“Text Mo Tauber,” Lee said. “Give him the date. We leave tonight.”
Chaz retrieved the transponder from his pack and booted it up.
Lee walked away down the terrace. Seabirds parked there fluttered and skittered from his path. Bat followed.
“It’s the only option,” she said.
“It’s still fucked up.”
“No argument there.”
“Jimbo will make it. That Indian can make it out of any tight spot. He made it out of one carrying me on his back once.” Lee looked away from her.
“We get Boats away safely and come back,” Bat said.
“And sit and watch this shithole? For how long?”
“Maybe we can get a timeline. Some kind of fix on when Jimmy might make it here.”
“How’s that work?”
“I have to think that the contact we had with the Romans will wind up in their history somewhere,” she said.
“That’s what happens? You guys rewrite history, right? That’s what we came back to do, am I right?”
“You think we can rely on retro-intelligence. That’s never as reliable as you make it sound,” Lee said.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” she said.
As it turned out, Marcus Rupilius Pulcher was illiterate.
He would never have written an accurate report of the events leading to the destruction of five centuries in any case. The optio who served as his scribe was dead, his head ripped off by one of the killing bolts of lightning that fell upon them in that draw.
The centurion knelt in his tent, draining his second skin of wine. It did not improve his mood. It did nothing to quell the screams of the wounded lying outside in the rough camp laid by the few survivors. The remaining men of his formation, those who had not already run away, were so small in number that a proper sentry could not be posted. There was no relief for those who suffered from injuries. They could only shriek until their throats were raw. They would lose consciousness and bleed away until they were lifeless, still and pale.
Pulcher’s own wounds were painful, but he would live. His right arm and leg were scored with gashes made by tiny bits of wire that had appeared there instantly with the clap of thunder that had reduced his forward century by half The same scraps of metal gutted the horse he was riding. He’d fallen hard from the saddle, narrowly missing being brained by the kicking hooves of the dying animal.
Here in solitude, he removed his armor and tore his clothing into strips to bind his arm and leg. His body broke out in a chilled sweat from the pain. The binding cloths were swiftly soaked black with his blood.
For all the sacrifice of his men, there was nothing to show for it. They never even saw their attackers. It was as if they were struck down by a force of nature. They had drawn the ire of some dark and vengeful god. There was no opportunity to draw blood, to sink their blades into the flesh of their enemy, to hear his cries for mercy.
It was his command. All fault would be his. All shame would be upon his name.
&
nbsp; He regarded the gladius that lay before him in its scabbard. The sword had been purchased by him in Damascus. The blade was the finest steel, The hilt and tang were polished brass worked with a clever skein of oak leaves. The grip was red oak stained dark with his sweat over the years. The pommel was the head of a roaring lion, its mane worn smooth by his resting palm. It had cost him nearly a year’s pay, and he never once regretted its purchase.
He unsheathed it and admired the gleam along its razor edge. There was a nick in the blade back near the hilt where it had once caught the blow from a Parthian ax head. One of the many times it saved his life. One of the many times it drank deep of the blood of the enemies of Rome.
Pulcher set the lion-head pommel in the loose dirt before him and rested the tip of the blade against the soft bone where his ribs joined. He wondered idly who might own this blade after this day. It did not matter now. With a violent exhalation to empty his lungs, he drove himself forward onto the sword with all his weight and force.
He was dead within seconds with little pain but for bitter memories fleeting past.
With him died history.
48
The Ocean Raj
“Caroline? What’s this number? It’s not the Bern exchange or the burner I gave you.”
“I changed phones after you left, Dwayne. I thought it was safer.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Miss me?”
“I’ve hardly had time to, babe. Been busy as hell since I got back. Your brother just got the guys through the field. I was gonna call you.”
