The Last Roman (The Praetorian Series - Book I)

by Edward Crichton

It took us about a week and a dozen pointed fingers later, but we soon found our way to the enormous legionary barracks that was the army’s camp.

  To say it was huge was an understatement.

  It sat on the west bank of the Rhine River and was called Vindonissa. It had been built around the birth of Christ and has since been called home by the Legio XIII Gemina, and if history was at all accurate, the Legio XXI Rapax should have just moved in. Along with Galba’s Legio XV Primigenia and Vespasian’s Legio II Augusta, that accounted for four of the six legions meant to embark on the campaign.

  It would be a difficult nut to crack as all that firepower would make sneaking in a challenge. Santino’s UAV would have been helpful for advanced recon, but it was no longer available so we’d have to reconnoiter the camp the old fashioned way.

  Like all legion forts, it had been constructed far from the tree line, a defensive strategy that ensured an attacking force would have to abandon the natural cover provided by a tree line to enter missile fire range.

  General George Washington, before he was a general and when he was still a Redcoat, had made the mistake of not clearing out the tree line around Ft. Necessity before a battle during the Seven Year’s War. The blunder had left much of his force dead, and he and his remaining men were just barely able to hold the line.

  No insult to George Washington, but Romans would never make that mistake. Their camps were so efficient and practical that no matter how many legionnaires were present, the fort would always be built around the same basic principles, just scaled up.

  Camps worth keeping around, like this one, generally had far larger walls around its perimeter and were built with stone instead of wood. The higher walls would make our infiltration route more difficult, but once inside we’d instantly know our way around. The only possible snag was that we didn’t know exactly where Galba’s tent would be. Vespasian, as the overall commander of the entire army, would be staying in the praetorium this time, not him.

  But the praetorium was always situated directly in the middle of the camp, set halfway along the via principalis, and it didn’t take a huge leap in logic to assume Galba would be nearby. As one of Vespasian’s legates, he was only one step below Vespasian in the chain of command, and the army’s generals would be posted near each other. All it would take is a legionnaire who valued his life more than his pride to tell us where Galba was.

  Simple.

  We set up our own camp about two miles inside the tree line and camouflaged our tents as well as we could. We buried them beneath a rock outcropping that jutted out over the landscape, creating a nice little space for our tents beneath. We secured large bushes around the perimeter and draped a camouflage net over everything. The site was practically invisible, and I was confident a scouting party would never spot it.

  Once our hideaway was concealed, we spent a few hours resting before using the cover of night to scout the Roman camp from the trees. Using a mixture of infrared and night vision optics, we were able to identify and chart the movement of guards upon the walls. We timed their patrol route and noted in which direction they paid attention to at all points along their patrol.

  At daybreak, Helena used a camera with a telephoto lens the size of a soda pop bottle to take panoramic shots of the camp and its surrounding. While she was taking her pictures, I retrieved my small journal from a cargo pocket and took some time to sketch the landscape with a few pencils. While using both sketches and photographs may seem redundant, utilizing them together was a practice indoctrinated in snipers, recon marines, and other units for decades.

  We returned to camp in the early evening, having shifted our recon position a handful of times, arriving to a freshly cooked dinner delivered by Santino. He had shot, cleaned, and cooked a deer while Helena and I were away, and by the time we joined him, he was already packing leftovers in salt, preserving it for a lifetime.

  We poured over the images taken earlier as we ate, quickly remembering that we were no longer dealing with amateurs. Legionnaires were professionals. They weren’t a peasant army roused by a belligerent warlord in a time of fickle bloodlust, but career soldiers. Warriors. This was their job. And they were very serious about their craft. It took us an hour before we even found a possible loophole in their defensive network.

  We were able to note a single weak area – a blind spot along the north wall where patrolling guards left an opening, dead center of the wall. The segment of the wall in question was particularly dark and was left unguarded for about three and a half minutes.

  More than enough time to scale the wall and sneak inside.

  Helena and I spent the rest of the evening preparing for the operation to come, while Santino complained about having to stay behind and play spotter. He wanted to see “Ol’ Triple Chin,” as he had dubbed Galba for his jowls and multiple chins, but we didn’t have a ghilli suit for him. Helena and I were both trained snipers and camouflage with the use of a ghilli suit was our stock and trade, not Santino’s. While he may have been able to sneak up on God Himself, his kind of stealth was different from ours. He was a master at hiding in plain sight or in a crowd, but the art of camouflage was, as my trainers had said, less about avoiding detection and more about simply being undetectable at all.

  Ghilli suits allowed us to be one with the environment. They were handcrafted and modular so that Helena and I could tailor them to mimic whatever environment we wanted. We’d spent most of the past few days doing just that, adding bits of grass and local fauna to them, crafting the perfect disguise.

  By the time we finished them two days after finding Vindonissa, it was too late for Helena and I to delve into the conversation I knew we needed. We mostly kept to ourselves, but by 0200 on the third day, I tried to purge all thoughts plaguing my mind when we launched the operation by crawling our way through the low grass of the meadow toward the camp, back in sniper-mode.

  Focused and meticulous.

  In little under an hour, we made the first leg of our journey smoothly and without incident. We didn’t have to worry about something like random search lights and Roman torches could barely reach out past their palisade. Additionally, as luck would have it, tonight’s moon was as far from full as it was going to get.

  When I pushed my arm out again to inch myself forward, all it came into contact with was air. I looked under my hood and saw the ground fall away steeply. We’d made it to the trench. I tapped my toe twice in quick succession against the soft grass, letting Helena know we’d made it to the first major impediment. She gave my ankle a gentle squeeze to confirm she understood, and I slide forward.

  Navigating the trench was easy, just down to the bottom for a few meters, then back up. We’d noted the previous night that the ditches appeared freshly dug, possibly as simple upkeep to ensure they were kept clear. But it also left the soil loose and littered with freshly dug grass, just enough for our grassy ghilli suits to blend right in.

  The trip took about ten minutes. When I bumped my head against something hard after crawling up the other side of the trench, I knew we’d reached the palisade. Glancing up, I peeked through my hood of grass and took in my surroundings. The wall of the Roman fort stood immediately in front of me, at least thirty feet high.

  I sent a double click to alert Santino that we had arrived by tapping my radio’s push-to-talk button twice in rapid succession. We waited for what seemed like an hour before I heard Santino’s faint voice in my ear.

  “Clear. Four minutes on my mark…” he paused “…mark.”

  Helena was already rising to her feet, turning her back to me as she shrugged out of her ghilli suit. I pulled it off her shoulders and packed it into her backpack while she did the same with mine. We wore our night ops combat fatigues with our olive drab MOLLE vests over them. We were lightly armed, but Helena also had a small grappling hook dangling from her vest, which I dutifully retrieved and prepared to toss over the wall. I made a few quick circles in t
he air as I spun the hook, releasing it on the fourth. It went sailing over the wall and silently made contact with the rampart’s floor thanks to its rubber tips. I pulled the rope until it was taut, giving it another tug just to be sure it was secure. Satisfied, I started my ascent, Helena right behind me.

  A short climb later, I bounded over the lip of the wall, landing quietly onto the rampart. I side stepped immediately to the left so Helena could land behind me. When she did, we gathered up the rope and I reattached everything to her rig.

  I risked a quick look out over the camp, seeing for the first time an endless sea of torches illuminating an incalculable number of tents, all lined up in neat little rows. In that moment, I couldn’t avoid a slight sense of unease tickle the back of my mind at the fact that I hadn’t brought Santino instead of Helena, because this was when we could have really used him. I could see guards aplenty scattered through the interior of the camp and there were thousands of resident randomly going about one bit of business or another.

  We’d anticipated as much, but the idea of sneaking through the forest of tents below us was unsettling. Santino could have walked down the via principalis stark naked and go completely unnoticed, but I had to be here since I was the only one with enough facts to talk to Galba and Helena’s ghilli suit didn’t fit him. It hadn’t been out of the question for us to craft his own ghilli suit out of locally made materials, even if it wouldn’t have been up to the standards of our modern ones, but none of us had voiced any concerns during the planning stage about his absence. Four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have considered bringing Helena on such a dangerous mission. She’d been a green rookie, chosen for Pope’s Praetorians because of a falsified record, but four years of operating with Santino and me had honed her into an effective military machine.

  I tried to push it out of my mind as Helena placed her hand on my back, indicating she was ready to move. I reached behind me to tap the side of her leg to confirm I was ready as well. When we reached the first guard, I took aim with my air pistol fitted with tranquilizer darts, but didn’t fire. I knew enough about Roman camps to know that if this guard didn’t meet up with his partner, now at the other end of the wall, an alarm would go up almost immediately. Instead, we took advantage of our dark camouflage and quietly shifted positions to the inner edge of the rampart, and crawled our way behind him.

  At one point, I thought I would have to shoot him when I saw his head snap around in our direction, but it turned out he was merely swatting at an insect. He turned toward the center of the wall to meet up with his buddy a few moments later, and I let out a slow breath through my balaclava. I glanced at Helena, only my eyes revealing my relief. She returned my look with a flick of her own green eyes and a gentle nudge to urge me forward.

  When the guard was out of sight, I pulled Helena’s grappling hook and rope from her MOLLE vest once again. I placed the hook on the rampart’s wooden floor near the corner and tossed the rope out over the inner wall. The corner was pitch black so we had no insecurities about standing out against the lightly colored stone wall. I maneuvered myself out over the wall and fast roped to the bottom, taking stock of our surroundings after touching the ground, waiting for Helena to join me. Our corner of the camp seemed deserted at the moment, but that could change at any moment. When Helena’s boots hit the grass behind me, I turned to see her jerk the rope to dislodge the hook, stepping aside to ensure it didn’t fall on her. After it landed, I picked it up and secured it to her rig for the last time, and we moved off into the small city.

  There might have been a thousand rows of tents before us, each containing eight sleeping men, and I had no idea how many tents there were per row. To find our way through, we simply picked a narrow avenue in one of the denser areas of the camp and slowly made our way toward the center, looking for a potential legionnaire to interrogate.

  We didn’t have to wait long before our first candidate appeared.

  A man stumbled out of his tent nearly on top of us, muttering about how he really had to use the bathroom. Helena moved first and tackled him to the ground, covering his mouth in one quick motion. I knelt beside him and pushed my small boot knife against his throat.

  “Galba,” I whispered into his ear. “Where’s his tent?”

  The man’s eyes were filled with shock, wide open and unbelieving, as though he were witnessing an apparition before him. He trembled and I heard the sound of running water beneath me. I glanced down to see that the man had urinated himself. Helena looked down as well, just in time to shift her knee out of the way. She looked back up at me and rolled her eyes.

  “Galba?” I whispered with some force this time, driving my knife deep enough to draw a droplet of blood.

  The legionnaire shook his head vigorously, his eyes wide with terror. Helena moved her hand just slightly. “Two tents behind the praetorium, three in the direction of the porta decumana.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. Your helpfulness won’t go unrewarded.”

  Helena covered his mouth again and I shot him with a tranq dart before he could do something stupid. She looked at me with wide, annoyed eyes, not finding my parting words nearly as humorous as I did. We waited a few seconds for the affects to take hold and I removed the dart. I rolled him near the entrance to his tent with the shove of my boot. A random passerby wouldn’t suspect any foul play, just another drunk passed out on the ground, and he’d probably be too out of it when he woke up to even remember us.

  I flicked my fingers toward the praetorium and we carefully stalked our way through the camp. It took us about fifteen minutes, but we were eventually in position to cross the via principalis.

  Luckily, traffic wasn’t heavy, but there were guards posted sporadically. If not for a few parlor tricks Santino had taught us about creating diversions and dividing and conquering, this operation would have been over almost before it began.

  But we were lucky, and our insertion seemed complete when we found ourselves in front of the tent the legionnaire had indicated was Galba’s. I glanced at my watch. 0330. We had a few hours before the army started its daily hustle and bustle. I followed Helena as she reached the tent’s entrance and gave the camp one last look. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I patted her on the shoulder and followed her inside.

  I stepped into a large open space, littered with mobile furniture and storage containers scattered throughout in a haphazard manner. After a second to take in my surroundings, I went directly to the bed. Looking down, I saw the fat face of the ugly man I knew to be Galba. I never did figure out how his head always looked so fat while his body stayed in the tip top shape of any legionnaire.

  Helena and I exchanged nods, and I bent over to clasp a gloved hand over his thick lips.

  His eyes shot open, but he didn’t flinch, try to escape or utter a noise. In his eyes I saw immediate recognition, even with our concealing facemasks. He was one of the few people who knew who we were. I held a finger vertically over my covered mouth and waited for him to nod in understanding. When he did, I slowly removed my hand.

  “You,” he growled. “I should have you arrested and crucified. I’ve recently received word from the empress that you have officially been charged with the murder of Caligula.” He narrowed his eyes at me angrily.

  I cocked my head to the side and looked at Helena. Her indecipherable figure shrugged. That was news to us. I’d always wondered why she hadn’t pegged his murder on us years ago, but I guess it was better late than never for her.

  Interesting timing, though.

  I pulled off my mask, revealing a face I knew was familiar to him and stood up straight.

  “Servius. I need you to listen to me.”

  “Listen to you?! Why should I do that, you traitorous murderer?”

  I leaned down and whispered, “Servius, do you really think we killed Caligula?”

  Galba looked at the foot of his bed before looking back at us, shifting positions s
o that he was sitting up and crossed his arms over his chest. It gave him the appearance of a chubby, stubborn two year old.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. You are many things, but I always considered you loyal, and since you didn’t try to usurp power for yourself after his death, I see no motive.”

  Helena removed her own mask and pulled her very long hair from beneath the back of her vest.

  “Listen to him, Galba,” she said. “You may not want believe what he has to tell you, but you need to trust us.”

  I looked over at Helena, who had cleaned up since our time in the tavern, and was back to the ravishing green eyed beauty I’d always known her to be.

  “So you brought your woman,” Galba commented as he looked around. “Of course you did. Where is the funny one? I actually liked him.”

  I’m sure Santino will be ecstatic.

  “Servius,” I pressed, “what I’m about to tell you will sound ridiculous, outlandish, and frankly impossible, but I need you to keep an open mind.”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” He asked nervously. “My name is Lucius, not Servius.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said sternly. “Your real name is Servius Sulpicius Galba. You only took the name Lucius Livius Ocella Sulpicius Galba from your step mother and her family, who loved you dearly and raised you as one of their own.” I saw his eyes widen in surprise. “Now, let me tell you another story. One about you, me, Rome, its future, and how I need your help to ensure its very survival.”

  If you’re interested in Edward Crichton’s upcoming Sci-Fi epic Starfarer: Rendezvous with Destiny, keep reading for a sneak peek at the first few chapters.

  INCOMING TRANSMISSION . . .