One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  “I don’t see any slaves,” Lee said.

  “They’re all wearing those sandals with socks like a bunch of German tourists in Miami. It’s all soldiers building that place.”

  “They only want to use trained labor. These guys are engineer soldiers,” Chaz said.

  “Remember what Dwayne told us about the guys rowing the galley he was on. All free men with mad rowing skills.”

  “Still seems like they could use a carpenter, right?” Chaz laughed.

  “Surprised you find that funny,” Lee said, lowering his binoculars and eyeing his friend.

  “It’s funny. Nothing sacrilegious there, you atheist motherfucker.” Chaz grinned. “The man was a carpenter.”

  “All the shit we’ve seen, and you still believe?”

  “More than ever, bro.”

  “I respect that. I really do,” Lee said and rose to his feet. Chaz followed him back through the trees to a clearing where Boats waited with the mounts and pack animals. The SEAL was on watch, and looking the part in his body armor and kilt with his crazy ginger whiskers and long hair completing the picture. The only conflicting image was the stainless steel Mossberg Mariner in his fists. The pump shotgun was not standard issue for gladiators.

  “Did you see Jesus?” Boats asked in all seriousness.

  “Wouldn’t know him if I saw him.” Chaz shrugged.

  “Man, I didn’t think of that.” Boats scratched his chin through the beard. “What do you think he looks like?”

  “He won’t have a halo over his head,” Chaz said and took a seat on a rock. “He’ll look like any other Jewish teenager, I guess. You could pass him at the mall and not notice him.”

  “Anyone interested in the plan?” Lee said. “We rest while we wait on Bat and Jimbo, then recon that quarry.”

  “You jealous, Hammond?” Boats grinned. “Of what?”

  “The Indian and your girl sharing a kill together.”

  “You have one fucked up idea about romance, Boats.” Lee smiled.

  “So I have been told.” Boats shook his head ruefully.

  They took turns keeping watch and catching catnaps in the shade of the trees. The country here reminded them all of parts of the Helmand in Afghanistan: a rocky place with clumps of pine forest dotted around. And like that other place, the space between villages was unpopulated. Even if there were bandits wandering around, they’d steer well clear of the Romans toiling away below. Like a remora on a shark, proximity to the legion fort was giving the Ranger camp cover.

  What troubled Lee and Chaz was, if bandits and rebels were no real threat to a large force, then what the hell were the Romans forting up for? Was it possible they were warned about the team’s arrival? It was the only explanation. If Harnesh’s influence could cause a change in the local imperial wonk’s policy, then it stood to reason Sir Neal had agents on the ground in this time and place.

  There was no movement in the trees except for some spotted deer plucking berries off the juniper branches with their lips. Chaz was awake and watched them moving along silent as ghosts. It always amazed him how animals that big could move so noiselessly even over a floor of needles. That was what it was like to be prey.

  A big buck eyed Chaz while placidly munching the purple fruit. It raised its head at a crack of sudden thunder. A soft snort from its nostrils, and it moved off with its coterie of does following.

  That thunder was a gunshot. Chaz went to rouse the other two, but Lee and Boats were already on their feet. They moved from the trees and spotted Jimbo and Bat walking their mounts along the floor of a gulch below them. They looked like something out of time, a mishmash of the Old West and a Hercules flick. Except it was Bat Jaffe cradling the rifle as she walked. No squaw she.

  Chaz let out a low whistle, and the riders found him in the tree line. They turned their reins and followed a trail up the slope toward the camp.

  “Find water?” Jimbo asked as he slid the saddle from his mount.

  “Not yet,” Lee said. “You two slow down that other force?”

  “We bought us some time,” Bat said as she ran a brush over her mount’s back. “But those are some tough monkeys. They’ll keep coming on.”

  “You find the slave caravan?” Jimbo asked.

  Lee filled them in on what they’d discovered at long range.

  “We leave at sundown to recon in force to check out the quarry,” he told them. “Both of you get some rest until then.”

  “Not until I find us water,” Jimbo said. “These horses aren’t going to be worth shit without it. And we might need them if we have to make a run for it.”

  He pulled his rifle from its boot and picked up some empty CamelBaks and walked into the trees.

  “Speaking of tough monkeys,” Bat said, watching the Pima recede into the gloom.

  “You kept up with him,” Lee said, cupping her chin.

  “But I can’t take one more step. I need sleep and badly,” she said, shaking her head slowly and regarding him through heavy lids.

  Lee took the watch and sat with his M4 across his knees while the rest bedded down to recharge. Bat was as good as her word. Her head propped on her saddle at the head of a groundsheet, she was sound asleep in seconds.

  Jimbo returned within an hour with the CamelBaks bloated with fresh water. He insisted on watering the horses before lying down. Soon, Lee Hammond was the only one awake. Even the horses dozed deeply where they stood on the running line strung between the trees.

  29

  Déjeuner Pour Un

  Caroline Tauber grew restless after two days. After five, she thought she’d go mad.

  Staying in the two rooms for days on end, with her only human contact the two maids: one to bring her meals and another to take her laundry.

  The rooms seemed to be getting smaller with each moment. How could she have thought this place was quaint? Or cozy? It was rundown and cramped and reeked of wood smoke and kerosene. There were no distractions but the newspapers and a few books.

  She could not even hold a conversation with the maids. She sensed it was her foreignness, her tortured French, and a touch of class distinction. Though these rooms were modest and her clothing of middling quality, they were beyond the means of the girls who served the rooms in this hotel. And thus there was a societal divide that prevented all but the most mannered and inconsequential small talk.

  It wasn’t boredom driving her slowly mad. Who could be bored? The sounds of artillery rose louder every day as the Prussian batteries grew closer to the city. Shells were falling inside the outer defensive walls now. The papers, when there were papers, screamed of civilian casualties, hospitals and churches being bombarded and deeper shortages to come. There were more and more soldiers in the streets that she could see from her windows.

  They had been pulled from the outer forts and defensive positions to be in place should the Prussians and their allies breach the walls and enter Paris itself. Gun carriages rumbled by at one point and wagon after wagon of wounded passed beneath her windows at all hours. There were rumors of riots in the streets over politics and rationing. The troops could be fighting a war within and without soon.

  She felt trapped. She sensed that was the mood of the entire city. But her plight was special. She was alone in a strange city in a time not her own, truly and utterly alone. And she had no idea when her self-imprisonment would end or if it would ever end.

  Only Stephen kept her together. The care of a helpless infant was her only focus. She fed him and changed him and cuddled him, and he helped her forget that the sounds outside the windows were not thunder but war.

  His presence was also a source of worry. Stephen was healthy and thriving and not terribly demanding. If he got sick, she had no idea what she would do. She certainly could not trust the medicine of the day when even the basic concepts of cleanliness were in their earliest days. And with thousands of wounded crowded into every available hospital space, who would care for a single baby?

  There wer
e a few books in the room, novels mostly, and she tried to read them, hoping to improve her grasp of French, only she couldn’t seem to concentrate on the pages. She turned to using the sewing kit bought for her by Samuel. It occupied two days, but she took in a rather nice dress in burgundy with black brocade. It didn’t hang on her like a sack now. There was another bottle green dress that needed less work, and a voluminous wool coat that she felt comfortable leaving at a fuller fit. And a pinafore-type dress she could wear in the rooms over a starched blouse.

  There were undergarments as well that needed figuring out. A corset, bustier, pantaloons, and a bewildering selection of skirts that she knew were worn under the dress, but their proper order eluded her. Also a tidy selection of gloves, scarves, and a carpetbag to keep it all in.

  There were two hats, and she favored a broad-brimmed black one with a veil. A fine pair of leather boots that buckled up the sides. They turned out to be a half-size too big but would accommodate the sweat socks she kept as her only modern garment. The rest of her twenty-first-century clothes, she tore into strips and burned in the stove.

  She wondered at Samuel’s knowledge of period dress. The wardrobe was reasonably complete. Caroline assumed he had help from an eager shopkeeper once that fat roll of francs came out of his pocket.

  At the bottom of the carpetbag was an item she knew he had probably needed no help selecting—a fat, ugly revolver with a box of shells. It served to remind her of the seriousness of it all, as if the sounds of the barrage outside would let her forget how dire her situation was.

  The pistol looked peculiar, sort of like a cowboy’s weapon, but less elegant somehow. Caroline had no interest in firearms but took the time to learn how to load it. It had a cylinder that held nine copper-jacketed rounds marked with .36 on the striking end. But it also had a larger barrel suspended below the first. After some jiggering, she determined that this barrel held the paper-wrapped shells that looked to her inexpert eyes like they belonged in a shotgun.

  She was never political in school or after and really had no opinion for or against guns. It was an issue that she never troubled to think about. And, as most of her education was in England, the subject seldom came up in conversations.

  The thought of having to use a firearm in her own defense never entered her mind. And she absolutely had never imagined she would be so often in the company of men to whom guns were a tool of their craft. But she’d been in a firefight now and even killed her share when the time came to choose between her own death and the death of another.

  She’d also been in a fight without a firearm at hand and knew which scenario she preferred. The brutal looking pistol would be her constant companion from here on.

  On the sixth day, she dressed in the bottle-green dress and all its layers of underskirts. She balanced the veiled hat upon her head at what she thought was the proper angle, using girlhood memories of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady as a guide. She then slipped the cash and coins into a beaded purse, bundled Stephen up, and went downstairs to take a meal in the hotel’s first-floor dining room. She left the revolver hidden beneath layers of clothes in the carpetbag lying on the floor of an armoire, which she locked. She did not anticipate a gunfight in the lobby of Le Hotel Exemplaire.

  The dining room was a gloomy affair. The finely etched windows facing the street had been covered with boards to protect them from looters, vandals, and potential cannon shells. A layer of cigar smoke hung in the air, wafting from a table where three gentlemen sat in hushed conversation.

  The only other diners were an older married couple who were just ordering as Caroline entered with the basket containing Stephen on her arm. An unescorted woman with a child was something to be remarked upon, and her fellow diners made no secret that she was a fresh topic of conversation.

  Caroline just didn’t give a damn. She had to get out of the room or lose her mind. She sat demurely in a chair offered by a waiter and smiled as the same waiter filled a glass with some very doubtful looking water. He presented her with a hand-printed menu, issuing slurred apologies for the scant bill of fare. She read the top two items, consommé de cheval au millet and epaules et filets de chien braises, and lost her appetite entirely. Her choice was of either horse or dog.

  “I will have a cheese plate with bread, please,” she said.

  “We have only black bread today,” the waiter said gravely.

  “That will do. And wine.”

  The waiter plucked the menu from her fingers and vanished.

  “Perhaps the lady would prefer a filet of Castor or Pollux,” one of the cigar smokers said to the amusement of the others.

  “Pardon?” Caroline said, confused.

  “They are elephants,” the married woman said with a disapproving glance at the table of guffawing men.

  “Were elephants,” the wit remarked, to answering guffaws from his friends.

  “The zookeeper at the Gardens shot them and sold the meat to a butcher,” the woman informed her with an irritated glance at the table of jokers.

  “He became a wealthy man over Christmas,” the woman’s husband added with a tinge of umbrage.

  “Terrible,” was all Caroline could say in reply.

  “You are not French,” the woman said.

  “I’m certain that is obvious,” Caroline said. It was an opening to a conversation and, as rusty as her French was, she was overcome with pleasure to speak to another human being. “I am Canadian, but not French Canadian. I’m traveling with my husband and son.”

  “Your infant is so young,” the woman said with a touch of disapproval. Caroline knew this was a faux pas on her part. It was not usual to bring newborns out in public so early.

  “The room is so stuffy. I wanted Stephen to breathe some fresh air. I suppose I was mistaken,” she said and produced what she hoped was an ironic smile as she waved away a strand of cigar smoke.

  The woman looked doubtful. Her husband paid no mind to the conversation as plates of lumpy soup were set on the table before them.

  “Your husband is not with you?” Apparently, the woman was more curious than hungry.

  “He’s away on business,” Caroline answered airily.

  “Outside the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when do you expect him to return?” Caroline realized that the cigar smokers had ceased their own exchange and were listening to the conversation of the two women. The husband was slurping soup in a world of his own. She’d stepped in it good. How the hell could her “husband” be “away” on business with the entire German army surrounding the city?

  “I’m not certain. I am worried, though. I begged him not to go. The danger, you know?” she said, feigning alarm. The woman’s face softened. She probably thought Caroline was some kind of idiot. Let her think that.

  The woman introduced herself and her husband, and Caroline forgot the names as quickly as they were uttered.

  “Caroline,” she said. “Caroline Tauber.”

  The woman’s face darkened. Her husband looked up from his soup with narrowed eyes. The cigar smokers frowned in their fragrant fog.

  “Well, I will leave you to dine in peace,” the woman sniffed and turned her back.

  The waiter arrived then with a plate containing a wedge of runny cheese and a half loaf of coarse black bread. Caroline ate, grateful for the food as well as the silence, as bland as the former and uncomfortable as the latter was.

  She finished her meal with two glasses of vin ordinaire and departed the dining room without any farewells from the married couple or the cigar trio. Their eyes followed her from the room.

  Upstairs, an hour or so later, she was interrupted at nursing Stephen by a strident knock at the door.

  She opened it to find the hotel registrar standing in the hallway regarding her with an arched eyebrow. Behind him stood a tall, broad man in a stained apron and the knobby nose of a heavy drinker. There was to be trouble, and the little man had brought some kitchen help to back him up.
<
br />   “May I help you, monsieur?” she said.

  “Where is your husband?” the registrar demanded. The bitch in the dining room had run to the management.

  “He is away on business.”

  “How can that be, with war at the city’s doorstep and the Germans days away from the heart of the city? I knew your husband was up to no good. He broke my lock. He arrived after curfew. Now he has departed, leaving a woman and baby behind?”

  “And paid you well for these inconveniences,” she said, arms folded.

  “What did you tell the other diners your name was?” His eyes gleamed.

  Her reserve slipped a bit.

  “Tauber, was it not?” He smiled, showing little yellow teeth.

  “What of it?”

  “Your husband—” he made the word sound like an obscenity “—signed my book as Monsieur P. Rivard. And Tauber...this is a German name, is it not?”

  She began to protest. The obnoxious little man held up a hand and turned his face from her.

  “You will remain in your room, and I will go to the police, or perhaps the guard. They will want to speak to you. Perhaps you will share the truth of this matter with them,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Patrice will stand at your door until I return. We shall see what this business is that your man is about, German bitch.”

  With that, he slammed her door shut and she heard the key turn in the lock and footfalls departing for the stairs. The giant kitchen servant, Patrice, would be left behind to make certain she did not leave this room.

  30

  Unforgiving Options

  A low overcast turned the light of the moon into a pale glimmer that cast blue highlights on the rocks. The Roman fort lay in a pool of black shadow shed from the hill above. The glow of signal torches guttered and flared as the night wind stirred. The village beyond was dark and the road empty of traffic. The Rangers saw no sign that the reinforcement column had arrived. They could expect them the following day for certain.