The man nodded. They were given food and water and told to wait. For what or how long they did not know.
Sometime in the afternoon a young man, whose name they eventually learned was Yosef, arrived at the cave. After a brief conference with the old man, Yosef beckoned to Schwartz and Creed. The followed him out of the cave.
For the rest of the day and into the night they followed Yosef along paths that snaked around, over, and sometimes through the hills. Sometime after dusk they reached another cave hideout, which was unoccupied. Yosef found a small stash of fresh water and dried fish. They ate and then slept as best they could on the cool stone floor. Just before dawn, Yosef led them over the hills to a spot from which they could see the blue water of the Mediterranean in the distance. Schwartz scanned the horizon, trying to make out anything she recognized. Somewhere down there, hidden under that field of blue, was Freedom. She knew only that they had come ashore about three kilometers south of the city called Ashkelon.
“Ashkelon?” she said to Yosef.
He pointed to a collection of buildings nestled in the hills to the north. Good, thought Schwartz. We must have been within two or three klicks of here when we came ashore.
“Hurry,” said Yosef. “More Romans come from Caesarea.” He pointed to a road that ran along a ridgeline overlooking the sea. “They take the road south. Many more.” He looked at Schwartz’s face to make sure she understood. She met his eyes and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “We will hurry.”
“Goodbye,” said Yosef. “May the Lord bless your voyage.” With that, he turned and started back down the hillside.
“Did I hear that right?” Creed asked. “Still more troops arriving?”
“Rome’s not taking any chances,” said Schwartz. She pulled the comm from her robe. “Olson, can you get a read on my location?”
“Yeah, hold on.” After a moment: “Looks like you’re about thirty-four hundred meters southeast of us.”
“Okay, we’re headed to you as fast as we can.”
“Lucky for you, we had a mechanical problem with the air pumps that delayed the launch.”
“You haven’t surfaced?”
“Not yet. We’re working on it.”
“No wonder I can’t see you.” She had been scanning the water for signs of Freedom’s nose cone.
“Gleeson’s doing a final test of the pumps. If that checks out, we’re good to go. We should be topside by the time you get here.”
“Copy that. See you soon.”
They hurried over the hills, across the wide, Roman-constructed road, and down the steep ridge toward the beach. The sun was now fully above the hills. The beach was deserted; a handful of fishing boats lingered near shore. They made their way north along the water’s edge to what they estimated was the closest point to Freedom. Still there was no sign of her. The buoy, if it was still afloat, was too small to be seen from this distance.
“Olson, what’s your status?”
“A few more minutes,” said Olson.
“Copy that.”
Schwartz and Creed stood on the beach, looking back and forth between the sea and the road running along the ridge, feeling very exposed. They could try to swim out, but they didn’t know exactly where Freedom was, and if she surfaced nearby when they were in the water, they might be swamped by the swell. As they waited, one of the fishing boats began back toward the shore.
“Think they’d be willing to give us a ride?” Schwartz asked.
“I was thinking the same thing,” said Creed. “The question is, how do we explain—”
A vast swell arose about two kilometers out from the shore as if portending the surfacing of some primordial leviathan. A gleam of metal pierced the top of the swell, followed by a gunmetal grey cone that soon became a tower. Waves swept outward in all directions from the tower, sending nearby boats rocking. Shouts carried across the water, and fishermen could be seen pointing at the strange metal beast. Freedom’s ascent slowed and then came to a halt; the waves gradually dissipated. Roughly the top thirty meters of her was visible, the bulk of her mass remaining underwater. Once the swells died down, the metal cone was barely visible from the shore, but the fishermen farther out had to be awestruck. If only they realized just how big the leviathan truly was!
The men on the boat that had been heading into shore stopped for a few minutes to stare at the thing and then, evidently deciding it wasn’t going to do anything else of interest, continued rowing. A few minutes later, the boat arrived at the beach, several of the men leaping into the water to pull her onto the sand. Her nets, covering most of the deck, were full of hundreds of fish.
One of the men, brown-skinned, with a shaggy beard and wearing only a cloth wrapped around his loins, greeted Schwartz and Creed with a cheerful wave.
“Good morning,” said Schwartz.
The man looked from Creed to Schwartz and back to Creed again.
“Don’t look at me,” Creed said in English. “She’s in charge.”
“We need to go to that… thing,” said Schwartz in Aramaic. She didn’t know the word for ship and doubted it would help if she did.
The man replied with an excited string of syllables, pointing at Freedom’s prow still protruding from the sea like the spire of some undersea temple. Some of the other men approached, adding their own thoughts to the discussion. None of it was comprehensible to Schwartz.
“Yes, very exciting,” she said in Aramaic. “We need to go to it.”
A puzzled exchange between the fishermen followed. The man who had spoken first then asked something a question that Schwartz took to be confirmation of her question.
“Yes. We go on your boat to… the new thing?”
The man shook his head, saying something and gesturing toward the fish in the boat.
“Fish wait,” Schwartz said. “We pay much copper.” They still had a few rolls of copper wire left; each of them had to be worth several boatloads of fish.
The men conferred again. Schwartz heard the Aramaic words for evil and dangerous.
“No,” she said. “It is not evil. It is not dangerous. We pay. Much, much copper.”
The men conferred again, staring out at the pointed thing protruding from the sea. A few of the fishing boats were cautiously rowing toward it; one looked to be less than fifty meters away, and nothing terrible had yet befallen it.
The bearded man turned to Schwartz. “Yes,” he said. “We will take you close to it.”
“Good,” said Schwartz. “We go now?”
“Soon.” He pointed again to the fish.
Schwartz nodded, and the men went to the nets and began to haul them out of the boat. Schwartz turned away and walked a few paces up the beach, pulling out the comm. “Olson, we’re….” She trailed off, looking up at the ridge. “Hold on.”
“Holy shit,” said Creed, following her gaze. “He did it.”
Some two hundred women were making their way down the ridge toward them. At the head of the group was their captain.
Chapter Fifty-three
“Schwartz, are you there?” said Olson’s voice from the comm.
“Prepare for some additional passengers, Olson,” said Schwartz. “A lot of them.” She turned off the comm and palmed it, walking back to the bearded man. He looked at her quizzically, and she pointed at the women coming down the hillside. “We need more boats,” she said, having picked up the word from the men’s conversations.
The man asked a question that she half-understood.
“Yes. More people go to… the new thing.”
“Much copper?”
“Much, much.”
The bearded man grinned. He ran down the beach toward another boat that was coming into shore. After an exchange with the men of this boat, the bearded man turned back to Schwartz and shouted something that she took to be an affirmative. By this time, a few boats had reached Freedom. They were too distant for Schwartz to make out what they were doing, but she supposed they couldn’t do too much ha
rm; it wasn’t like they were going to break through the hull with second century fishing gear. They would return home with an interesting story that would not be believed and would soon be forgotten.
A few other boats began to make their way to the shore. As they approached, the bearded man shouted and beckoned to them, pointing to the women, who were now starting across the beach.
“Olson, you’ve got some visitors,” said Schwartz into the comm.
“I see that. What did you say about passengers?”
“The captain is on his way back. He’s got… looks like close to two hundred women with him. I’m arranging transport with some fishing boats. How many rolls of that heavy gauge copper wire do we have left?”
“Five or six, I think.”
“That should be plenty. Expect the first group of passengers in about half an hour.”
*****
Jason arrived on the beach, trailed by the refugees, to find that Schwartz had already begun arranging for transport of the women to Freedom. Over the next hour, she and Jason enlisted five more fishing boats. Some of the fishermen had already seen Freedom up close and, having grown bored of banging on her hull, joined the effort. The boats were brought up alongside the hull and the passengers climbed a ladder that had been lowered from a hatch about three meters above the level of the water. The women were cautious but surprisingly calm, although Jason heard screams when Freedom’s stabilizing rockets fired to keep it from pitching to the side, producing a deep rumbling underwater followed by a burst of bubbles on the surface. The stabilizing burns only lasted a few seconds, though, and when they finished the loading continued.
Schwartz had gone along on the first boat to reassure the women that there was nothing to be afraid of, and she remained at the hatch for the next hour to assist them in getting aboard. Jason and Creed remained on the shore to oversee the process. About half of the women were still on the beach when Creed gave a shout. Jason turned toward the ridge and cursed. Roman soldiers—thousands of them—were marching up the road from Caesarea. Even if they couldn’t make out Freedom from such a distance, they would certainly be interested in a couple hundred Jewish women fleeing Judaea in boats. At this point, more than half of the women still waited on the beach. It would take them another hour to get them all on board. The Romans were at most a twenty-minute march from them.
“Olson, this is the captain. Come in.”
“I’m here, Captain. What’s happening?”
“We’ve got trouble. An entire legion heading our way. Is your rescue team still ready to go?”
“They can be. But Captain, they’re only ten men.”
“Ten men armed with automatic weapons,” said Jason.
“Still, they can’t face down an entire Roman legion!”
“They just have to hold them off for a few minutes.”
“Sir, we’re already short of men. Even if we get all those women aboard, our mission—”
“Our mission right now is to get those women aboard Freedom,” said Jason. “Maybe I can’t save humanity, but by God, I can save two hundred people. Get that team to shore, and send all the weapons and ammo you have. Creed and I will be joining the effort.”
“Aye, Captain. They’ll be coming to you on the next boat.”
*****
The defenders took cover behind a cluster of waist-high rocks about fifty meters inland from where the refugees waited. They each had an automatic rifle and, between them, five thousand rounds of ammunition—enough to take out every single Roman soldier, if none of their shots missed, Jason ruefully noted. Each of them wore a helmet and a suit of body armor that would be more than adequate protection from arrows and javelins. They all had combat knives, and five of the men, including Jason and Creed, also wore pistols. They had no grenades, explosives, or larger caliber weaponry; most of their weapons had been ditched when they were running from the Cho-ta’an.
The fishermen ferrying the men and equipment had marveled at their clothing and artifacts but seemed more fascinated than frightened. The sight of a Roman legion on the road, however, had filled them with trepidation. Several of the men fled; only the promise of the rolls of copper (Olson had brought the rolls to the airlock so the fishermen could see them) kept the rest of them working. Jason fully expected the rest of them to flee in their boats if the Romans reached the water.
A cohort of Roman soldiers had broken off from the main group and was making its way down the steep hillside toward the beach. Most of the legion was out of sight, probably taking a respite while the smaller group dealt with the refugees on the beach. That was a relief: five hundred men was still way too many, but it was better than five thousand. Unfortunately, the remainder of the troops would undoubtedly follow when they heard the sounds of automatic weapon fire.
Women continued to be ferried to Freedom; there were now only eighty or so left on the beach. Each fishing boat could carry at most twelve women, and each round trip took about forty minutes. Jason needed to hold the legion off for at least an hour.
He regarded the eleven men crouched behind the rocks, nervously checking their weapons. These were not combat-hardened troops; they were spacemen who spent their days overseeing janitorial robots or running diagnostics on faulty equipment. They’d been at war their entire lives but had never fired a shot at the enemy. There was a holographic training range aboard Freedom, and all the crew were required to maintain their firearms certification, but even the most realistic simulation was a far cry from actual combat. Jason had been involved in several ship-to-ship battles but had never used a handheld weapon in combat before his party had been attacked by bandits in Syria. The men they were facing, on the other hand, were some of the most experienced, disciplined and bloodthirsty warriors ever known. More than two thousand years after the Roman Empire’s zenith, its legions were the stuff of legend.
“All right, men,” Jason said. “Our mission is to protect those women until they can get aboard Freedom. We are not going to defeat a Roman legion. We are not going to try to defeat a Roman legion. These men are better trained, better disciplined, and all-around better soldiers than we are. Our only advantage—and it’s a considerable one—is technology. Use it wisely.
“In about five minutes, five hundred Roman soldiers are going to come marching down the beach. Do not fire until I give the order. At this point, the enemy doesn’t have a clue what we’re capable of, but the moment any one of us fires a shot, we’ll have their attention. There are another forty-five hundred soldiers on the road, and a gunshot is going to send them pouring down that ridge right toward our position. It’s a twenty-minute march from the road to here. In case that’s not a hundred percent clear: twenty minutes from the first gunshot, we are going to be surrounded by several thousand men who have been training to kill you since they were old enough to lift a spear. I swore an oath to protect those women. That means that none us is getting on a boat until every single one of them is safely away from shore. Is that understood?”
“Aye, sir!”
“Good. Creed, keep an eye on the boats. If our fishermen start to get skittish, your job is to convince them to keep ferrying passengers.”
“Convince them, sir?”
“Use whatever profanity you’ve picked up in Aramaic, for starters. Then fire a few rounds into the sand. Make them more afraid of you than they are of the Romans.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Schwartz, you there?”
“Aye, Captain.”
“How are things aboard Freedom?”
“Chaotic, sir. But Olson and I have things under control.”
“Good. Olson may have to manage by himself. I need you.”
“Sir?”
“You’ve still got your Galil seven sixty-two?”
“Um….”
“It’s all right, Schwartz. I didn’t figure you’d jettison an antique sniper rifle. You’ve got ammo for it?”
“Yes, sir. A few hundred rounds.”
“That should
be plenty. I need you to climb on top of Freedom and fire a few shots over the bow of any boat that tries to skip out on us.”
“Is that going to be an effective deterrent, sir? They aren’t even going to know where the shots are coming from.”
“Creed is going to tell them.”
“Understood, sir. On my way.”
Jason turned back to his men. “The moment the last refugee gets on a boat, we’ll make an orderly retreat. Head for the nearest boat. We’re all going to get out of this and give the Romans a hell of story for the people back home. Nichols, take Gutierrez and Shelby and go to those boulders over there. Tsao, take Davich, Silvers and McCourt to those rocks to the south. If we’re spread out, maybe it will take them a little while to figure out there are only a dozen of us. All right, move out!”
The two groups of three made their way north and south, respectively, and took up position behind cover. The defenders were now spread across about forty meters of beach, with the evacuation going on fifty meters behind them. The cohort, meanwhile, having made its way down the ridge, had reformed into a square formation, twenty men across. The Romans marched directly toward the shore, sure of their ability to dispatch any opposition. Good, thought Jason. Overconfidence will work in our favor. He wondered what the Romans thought they were dealing with. Probably a few dozen rebels with slings and spears hidden amongst the rocks. Jason wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t have preferred a force of a hundred hardened Jewish rebels equipped with stone age weapons, but he would have to make do with twelve spacemen armed with rifles.
The cohort continued to advance toward the water. If they were allowed to continue, they would pass directly between Jason and Tsao’s men. The Romans no doubt had seen them moving between the rocks but showed no sign of wariness. Having traversed most of the beach, they probably thought they were in the clear: No more than forty men could be hiding behind the rocks that still lay between them and the water, and a cohort of Roman soldiers had nothing to fear from a handful of men toting slings.
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 34
