The Last Roman (The Praetorian Series - Book I)

by Edward Crichton

  ***

  It wasn’t long before my GPS tracker showed we were coming up on what I assumed was some kind of military checkpoint. The truck started to slow, confirming my suspicion, before coming to a complete stop.

  This was it. If the driver, whoever he was, couldn’t smooth talk his way through the guards, we were as good as dead.

  Hearing muffled voices outside, I pulled out my Sig P220. It was equipped with a suppressor, so I could make silent work of any potential peeping Toms and hopefully turn a bad night into a slightly less shitty one.

  I held my breath, hoping the additional silence would prompt the checkpoint guards to send us on our way. Three minutes in, I began to feel the need to breath, but knew I could hold it for another two minutes if I needed. SEALs spent considerable time training our lungs to withstand water pressures at slightly deeper depths than most people, and we could hold our breath well beyond the average minute and a half.

  Just in case.

  Thankfully, a few seconds after the fourth minute mark rolled around, the driver gunned the engine and I slowly exhaled under cover of the moving vehicle.

  So far, so good. All we needed to do was make it through the guards at the entrance to the enemy’s base and we could slip out of the containers in the unloading area. Hopefully, most of the base would be asleep and only a few drowsy guards would be milling around.

  Thankfully, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. We slowed as we rolled up to the base’s entrance, but the guard must have waved us through because we quickly sped up and moved inside. As we passed into the cave, my GPS stopped updating through the satellite, and instead our green dots were overlaid against a black background. Thanks to the UAV, stowed away but still active, we could at least keep track of where we were in relation to each other, but without all the terrain details.

  The truck stopped and I heard two car doors open and shut quietly. Then came the sound of someone subtly tapping on the container. All clear. I waited a few minutes until I heard the double click over the radio, indicating it was time to move.

  I opened the container door carefully, pistol aimed and ready. As the door swung open, I tracked the opening down my gun sights. It seemed clear so I carefully hopped out of the cramped container, finding myself in what looked like a large storage room. It was a domed cave the size of a small warehouse with a shit ton of boxes, crates, containers, and the like sloppily arranged throughout. There was no order to the chaos, just junk strewn about in as inefficient a manner as I could think of. It looked like my old dorm room. I guess mommy terrorists didn’t make their spawn clean their rooms or make their beds as baby terrorists.

  Holstering my Sig, I pulled out my HK416, checked the inserted magazine, flicked off the safety, and formed up with the rest of the team. With Helena playing sniper, I was teamed up with McDougal. He quietly started issuing orders.

  “All right, mates. Nice and slow and quiet. Remember, don’t pop the first thing you see. We’re here for Abdullah. Santino, you’re on point. Vincent, hang back a bit with the rest of us. Bordeaux, place the C4 at your discretion, but keep it subtle.”

  There was a chorus of affirmatives and a second later my eyepiece flashed. Quickly tapping through the sheath that covered the touchscreen, the most recent activity was brought up on my eyepiece. Helena had sent a data packet labeled “Strauss” which consisted of a single green dot with two adjacent green lines running out from the dot in the shape of a V. The area between the lines was shaded a light green, indicating Helena’s field of fire. She also had a few, smaller, red V’s, indicating areas where she’d placed her claymores. The red indicating they were set for manual detonation.

  Thoughtful of her.

  It looked like she had taken position on the roof of a building situated alongside the main road we’d recently traveled. Three red V’s were situated along that road, intermittently placed, indicating three individual explosions to cover our escape. The map I had drawn earlier to the equipment cache ran right through the field of explosions. If we had to bug out quick, straight ahead was our best bet.

  The cave complex was typical of the kind used by terrorist cells throughout the former Crescent Empire. It was a honeycomb of passageways and dead ends, and no two complexes were anything alike. The ceilings were low, forcing Bordeaux and me to continuously keep our heads down, and the tunnels were poorly lit, with a string of light bulbs hung sporadically along the way. There was a dank, old smell in the caverns, even though they may have only been dug out a few months ago. Santino, thankfully, was an expert at navigating through this type of terrain. He’d been in caves just like these before and had an innate ability to find whatever he was looking for. He was a born tracker.

  He carefully made his way along the walls, never straying more than a few inches from them, pausing at each junction. Occasionally, he’d pause and drop his night vision for a clearer look, but never long enough to break up our rhythmic movement. We didn’t run into a single soul for most of the trip. Not surprising, considering the unprofessional discipline of this particular bunch, as well as the late hour. Occasionally, Bordeaux would stop and place a brick of explosive along the ceiling, hiding it away inconspicuously in the shadows.

  After ten minutes of wandering through the seemingly endless maze, we made it to a doorway guarded by two men leaning lazily against a wall, flanking a curtained entrance. Santino halted and held up a clenched fist. He then pointed to his eyes before holding up two fingers, indicating the count of bad guys. Turning his hand into an open palm, fingers spread apart, he indicated toward the bad guys’ position.

  McDougal understood and slashed a hand along his neck, indicating Santino dispatch the guards silently. Santino gave him a sinister smile, completely devoid of the jovial attitude he normally exuded. It was a smile filled with nothing but vehement professionalism, a trait that had once saved my life. He drew his nasty looking combat blade and doubled back along a side passage, coming up along the guards’ flank.

  Vincent moved up to the corner and pulled out a small mirror to keep watch in case he needed to help. A few seconds later, I heard a small clatter, which I assumed was Santino getting one of the guard’s attention. Santino probably took him out the second he was out of his partner’s vision. The second guard, confused as to what happened to his buddy, followed his partner’s path. A few seconds later, Santino emerged from the corner, wiping his bloody blade clean on the shirt of one of his downed targets. We made our way to his position.

  I glanced down at his handiwork. Both men had died by a single knife thrust through the back of the neck, their spinal columns severed in typical Santino style. Their deaths had been quick and relatively painless, at least as far as death by knives went.

  “Nice job, buddy,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” his friendly smile returning. “The second guy didn’t walk directly into it like the first, but he went down just as clean.”

  I had to remind myself that he was just doing his job. Santino had always been able to simply “switch himself off” whenever he needed to. He could be a compassionate friend one moment and one of the deadliest killing machines ever made the next.

  Vincent used his mirror to look through the curtain, making sure it was clear. After a few seconds, he sent a thumbs up our way. Slowly, we proceeded through into a conference room of some kind. There was a long table with chairs positioned along its sides. The walls were adorned with decorations, easily making it the nicest area we’d seen so far. There were still cups and the remains of a meal lying about, proving my earlier theory of poor parenting. Along the far wall was another door.

  This time, Vincent pulled out a long, thin snake cam that connected to his eyepiece. He slipped it under the wooden door and scanned the room. Retrieving it, he nodded.

  “He seems to be sleeping,” Vincent reported. “He’s lying on his side, facing the far wall.”

  “All rig
ht,” McDougal ordered. “We go in slowly. Wang, you know what to do.”

  “Aye, sir,” he whispered, already pulling out zip ties to handcuff the prisoner with.

  McDougal stood primed beside the entryway, his mustached face a chiseled block of marble, his posture relaxed but poised. He took one last breath before whispering, “Go.”

  We breached the room with fluid grace. Despite not having worked together before and coming from different schools of learning, we flowed into the room with deadly efficiency. Quickly confirming the room was clear, easy due to its large size and sparse furnishings, Wang moved for Abdullah. Unfortunately, our target was far from sleeping. Facing the wall, he was mumbling incoherently while clutching an object about the size of a volleyball. It was giving off an eerie blue glow and was dimly illuminating his side of the room.

  Our entrance didn’t go completely unnoticed, and our target sluggishly moved into action. It was unfortunate for his wellbeing, however, that Wang was far quicker. As soon as the small Brit entered the room, he leapt at Abdullah as he lay on the bed, locking the man’s arms behind his back before maneuvering him to the floor, slamming his face into the ground. Forcing his knee into the man’s neck and placing the barrel of his rifle into his cheek, Wang effectively neutralized the target without a sound, but it didn’t seem like Abdullah would come easily. He struggled ferociously, far more than expected, and his eyes flitted about in unfocused confusion.

  “Wang, confirm ID on target,” McDougal ordered.

  Wang nodded, pulling the grainy image supplied by the CIA up on his eyepiece. The rest of us spread out amongst the room, covering the entrance we’d just entered.

  “ID confirmed, sir. This bloke is definitely Mushin Abdullah.”

  “Good. Gag him, bag him, and prepare to move him out.”

  Wang responded by stuffing a piece of cloth in the man’s mouth and taping it shut with duct tape, followed by applying two zip ties around his wrists. I recalled times in training when I played the bad guy and my buddies had to breach my position and secure me for transport. They were generally pretty nice about the zip ties, and left them relatively loose. Sometimes, however, they weren’t so nice, and I remember one asshole who tied them so tight, I lost all sensitivity to my hands for hours. I only hope Wang did just as thorough a job.

  Once Wang had him secured, he hauled Abdullah to his feet and poked his gun into the captive’s back. Abdullah started moaning through the gag, so Santino shut him up with a simple cross-check to the man’s jaw with the butt of his rifle.

  I looked at the man as he struggled, noticing foam seeping through the tape on his mouth, and eyes that didn’t seem to focus on anything. He didn’t look like the bioengineer and terrorist mastermind I had pictured. He just looked insane.

  Shaking my head, I glanced at Santino as he walked over to Abdullah’s bed. His eyes squinted at something on the floor and I saw him lean over and pick up the weird glowing ball Abdullah had been clutching earlier. Santino turned it over in his hands a few times before shrugging and placing it in a bag.

  McDougal twirled a pointer finger over his head in a circular motion and indicated toward the door. We filed out the way we came in, pausing only for a second so Bordeaux could plant one of his charges. This one, a C-4 satchel charge, was the largest bomb he had. It had enough force to demolish a small office building. The room’s location near the center of the cave complex made it the best spot for the bomb.

  Santino led us back the way we came, again stopping at each intersection, making sure the coast was clear. Things were going well until we were about halfway to where we left the trucks.

  That’s when the shit hit the fan.

  Rounding a corner, Santino ran into a trio of bad buys turning from an adjacent corner down the hall. The three men hesitated. Santino and Vincent did not. Santino shot the man in the middle with a quick three round burst to his chest while Vincent surgically placed a single bullet in the second man’s skull.

  The third man was the lucky one… for the moment. Santino quickly adjusted his aim and shot him in a similar fashion as the first, only those few seconds were all the other man needed to pull the trigger. Our rifles were equipped with suppressors, effectively muffling their noise to a soft cough, but the third man’s weapon was not. Thankfully, all the dying man managed to hit as he fell to the ground were the walls and ceiling, but the sound of the rifle aimlessly discharging echoed throughout the tunnels.

  So close.

  “Bollocks,” McDougal whispered. “Double time it.”

  He didn’t need to tell me twice, and I started to pick up speed to catch up with the rest of the team. Only a dozen steps past the fallen men, I heard the familiar non-stop firing of a M249 as Bordeaux opened up on a group of bad guys coming up on our rear. SAWs were notorious for their ability to put an amazing amount of rounds down range in a hurry, and Bordeaux’s bulky frame and the cave’s narrow corridors made his line of fire a death trap for anyone who ventured down the hall. Within seconds, a dozen bodies hit the floor, twitching in a final act of protest as their nervous systems shut down.

  We continued down the perilous corridors, mainly relying on Bordeaux’s cover fire toward the rear to survive. Only four other men got in our way, and they were quickly gunned down by precision fire from our lead pair.

  Reaching the warehouse cavern, we quickly found a 4x4 pickup truck and piled in. Wang and his hostage moved inside the cab while Bordeaux, Santino, Vincent, and McDougal jumped into the flat bed.

  “Hunter! You’re driving,” McDougal ordered.

  I didn’t have time to answer. In true Dukes of Hazzard fashion, I dove through the window feet first and into the driver’s seat before frantically searching for the keys.

  Visor. Cup holders. Under the seat. Where?

  They were in the ignition.

  Leave it to the terrorists to be either that smart, or that stupid.

  Before I started the engine, I noticed Abdullah struggling against his restraints. Wang, having none of it, threw an elbow into the side of his head, and the terrorist leader slumped unconscious.

  Wang leaned over him and smiled. “Bloody good fun, eh, Hunter?”

  “Yeah…” I replied, noticing a bad guy emerge from the hallway we had just come through. Before he could bring his AK-47 to bear, I stuck the muzzle of my rifle through my window and triggered a three round burst into his face. If not for the shemagh wrapped around his head, I would have been rewarded with the sight of a disgustingly mutilated face. “… real fun.”

  I felt nothing at his death. I didn’t care about the nameless terrorist he had been, or his father who had just lost a son or his son who had just lost a father, and I wouldn’t feel any different later. It had been me or him, and I shot first. I didn’t like it, but that wouldn’t stop me from doing my job.

  Ignoring my first kill of the night, I quickly floored the clutch, threw the truck into first gear, and gunned the engine, fishtailing through a one hundred and eighty degree turn.

  I heard a loud crack against the rear window, and I saw blood on it.

  “Jesus!” Santino shouted, holding his head with one hand, shooting his rifle with the other. “Where the fuck did you learn to drive, Hunter?”

  I laughed. Serves him right for all those smartass remarks. And I was all the happier for the chance to put all that reckless street racing time as a kid to good use. With a smile on my face, I slammed on the gas.

  We accelerated quickly, but not quickly enough to dissuade two guys with guns from jumping out in front of us, firing their AK-47s wildly.

  “Down!” I shouted.

  Everyone ducked as bullets passed through the area where our heads had just been, riddling the front windshield, making it impossible to see through. Wang kicked it out.

  It didn’t stop bullets anyway.

  The guys in back made short work of the shooters as we passed by.

  But
we weren’t out of the woods yet. My rear view mirror revealed no less than six other trucks turning on their head lights and revving up their engines for what I could only imagine would be a rather fantastic chase scene.

  Communication silence no longer necessary, I radioed Helena.

  “Strauss. We’re outbound from the cave complex. Under fire and pursued. Prepare to offer cover fire and get ready for extraction in a black pickup. We’re the ones getting shot at.”

  All I got in response was the telltale double click of static.

  It wasn’t long before I saw the end of the tunnel we were racing through, the light from the night sky never looking so good. My passengers were keeping the trucks in pursuit honest, making them think twice before gaining any ground on us. One lucky shot took the lead driver in the head, causing him to turn directly into the wall. The truck careened off of it at high speed and at an angle that caused it to roll over and over, ending up on its side. The other trucks slowed down, managing to avoid the crash.

  “Sir, I suggest Bordeaux blow his charges in five seconds,” I yelled over my shoulder at McDougal.

  That would just about give us enough time to squeeze out of the entrance before the tunnel collapsed behind us and the debris cloud obscured my vision completely.

  “Do it, Bordeaux,” McDougal ordered. “Three, two, one. Hit it!”

  The shock waves hit us in succession, one for each charge, the truck bucking after each detonation.

  Too soon. The trucks behind us would make it out as well.

  My apprehension was quelled a bit when we arrived at the cave entrance where I saw six bodies crumpled on the ground, blood oozing from shots to their chests.

  That’s my girl.

  About the same time, I also noticed the lights strung along the tunnel behind us going out, the dust cloud chasing after us as the cave collapsed. Maybe I could lose them in the cloud if I wasn’t caught in it as well. Just as the cloud reached the last truck, I blew through the entrance and never looked back.

  Outside the narrow tunnel, I immediately swerved the truck violently, hoping to throw off the incoming heavy fire. The enemy trucks that had managed to escape spread out in a long line and fired on us simultaneously. My passengers in back were now at a disadvantage, and were reduced to keeping their heads down and hanging on for dear life.

  I couldn’t see Helena, but I saw an update on my eyepiece, which I called up with one hand on the wheel. It showed a solid green dot on a side street, with a timer running steadily toward zero. She’d be ready at that position in twenty seconds.

  Within that time, I noticed two of the trucks behind us swerve out of control with one neat little hole apiece through each windshield. These trucks didn’t receive the punishment from the gunners in my truck, so it must have been Helena.

  And she didn’t think she could handle it.

  “That girlfriend of yours can really shoot, Jacob,” Santino commented from the flat bed.

  “Shut it,” I replied, swerving the truck through a wicked turn down the side street Helena indicated would be her pickup location.

  Slowing as I approached the waypoint, I saw Helena bolt from a side alley and leap into the back of the truck with the same grace she had shown exiting the cargo container earlier.

  “She’s aboard,” McDougal yelled, his rifle ablaze. “Move!”

  I gunned the truck once again, following Helena’s map through the field of claymores, our pursuers gaining quickly.

  “Those claymore would really come in handy now, Strauss,” I heard Santino yell.

  “Give me a second!” She snapped back.

  My map showed we had just crossed the middle claymore when Helena blew the first one, then the middle one a few seconds later, and finally the last one when we were well beyond the kill box. But each one going off in succession was enough to shake the town awake. We’d taken care of the trucks in pursuit, but seconds later, the town’s civilian population apparently decided now was a good time to file out of their homes and into the streets, probably wondering what was happening so early in the goddamn morning.

  Then I saw him. A man. No more than thirty years old standing in the middle of the street. I know McDougal had said civilians were to be considered expendable, but this man had a baby cradled in his arms.

  In the seconds it took to close the gap between us, our eyes met, and I instantly knew I couldn’t run him down. His face was awash in sheer terror and with my eyes widening, I tried to swerve down another side street, managing instead to do the worst possible thing.

  I flipped the truck, and we started to roll. By the time our truck rolled three times, my vision had already flashed brightly behind my eyes before going completely black when my forehead smashed into the steering wheel.