One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Through their NODs gear, they could see sentries moving along the ramparts atop the earthen walls. Within the camp no one was visible but an aquilifer of the Twenty-third standing alone before the command tent.

  Lee and Bat led the way over the open ground with Chaz and Jimbo following at intervals. Boats remained in camp with the horses. This would be a strictly infantry operation. They were in full battle rattle. All but Lee wore the period-modified body armor. In addition to that, they were lumbered with side arms, CamelBaks, ammo, night gear, and their rifles. Bat and Jimbo sported their Winchesters. Jimbo had a cut-down twelve gauge in a scabbard on his back and a belt of buckshot and slugs around his waist. Lee and Chaz humped their M4s and ammo and had attached underslung grenade launchers to the rifles. Bandoliers of the fat 40mm rounds were slung over their shoulders.

  “Render unto Caesar, my ass.” Chaz chuckled drily as they set out over the broken ground to skirt the fort. They slipped easily past a widely spaced picket line set outside the ring of earthworks. They all wore their NODs and could see the sentries standing at their posts as clear as if under a noon sun.

  The Romans, struggling to remain awake, could see nothing beyond ten feet of their assigned positions in the muted moonlight. Once past the fort, they climbed the slope at a punishing run. The thirty-degree grade leveled off to a table of land above the fort. The ground was rough but mostly level at a thousand-foot elevation. The team leapt from surface to surface over the fragmented ground.

  They moved across the headland to look down at the feeder road snaking along between the slab-sided rock formations of a narrow gap. Following this led them along a curving ledge for a mile or more. They came to a spot where the plateau’s tabletop summit fell away sharply into a bowl-shaped depression. Here lay the quarry.

  It was a broad area bit from the rock in a half-circle formation a half-mile across. The land literally stepped up from the floor of the manmade hollow. Through the NODs, they could plainly see where the rock had been cut in slabs by tools and then segmented to make blocks. Tall stacks of cut stone sat in orderly rows in the center of the pit.

  Along one wall of the quarry was a stone building with a roof of wooden planks. A wooden watchtower stood where the quarry opened up at one end to allow the feeder road access. They could see a pair of men in the open tower plainly lit by torches sputtering on poles. There was a fenced corral for oxen. Against the wall of the quarry yard directly beneath their vantage point were broad tarps slung between posts driven into the ground. These would be the slave quarters. Reclining figures could be seen in rough rows outside the shelter of the tarps. These were slaves who opted to sleep under the stars or were, more likely, an overflow from the unexpected arrival of the Twenty-third and their captive charges.

  As tactical situations went, this one sucked about as bad as it was possible for anything to suck. The mission was to free the slaves from captivity or at least give them a running head start. But here they were all bottled up with one narrow route of escape and that route past a fortified position packed with soldiers from the baddest army on the planet.

  The Rangers’ advantage of surprise had been blunted, but they still had long-range firepower unheard of in this period. Now they had to work out a way to create the leverage needed to give a mass escape a chance in hell of succeeding.

  The moon was dropping, making the shadows longer and darker. The team sat away from the ledge to take a meal break.

  “We can take out their guards easy,” Jimbo said. “Bat and I put on suppressors and bring down the guys in that tower. There can’t be more than twenty more in that hut. Slip down there and kakk them in their sleep.”

  “Then march a thousand prisoners past that fort?”

  Chaz said, “’Cause that’s the only way out.”

  “You can’t even be certain the slaves will run for it,” Bat said. “No one cooperates in a fluid situation. Some might just freeze, and we need a one hundred percent evac, right? What do we do then?”

  Lee sat sullenly skipping rocks.

  “Could we get them to fight?” Jimbo said.

  “And risk losing the target we came here to rescue?” Bat said. “Besides, that’s no fighting force down there. They may be slaves, but that’s all they have in common. I’ll bet most of them don’t even share a language. They’re not going to stand and fight together.”

  “They’ll be too scared to bolt. Crucifixion is a bitch,” Jimbo said. “As lousy as busting rocks is, at least they get to live.”

  “Clusterfuck,” Lee said and tossed a spray of pebbles to bounce away over the rocky surface.

  “You’re the one who always has an angle, Hammond. These kind of shitty situations are your specialty,” Chaz said.

  Lee held up one finger.

  “One. They’re not going to move the slaves. Those poor assholes will die down there. So we’re stuck with this scenario. But this part of the scenario is static, and that’s good.”

  He raised a second finger.

  “Two. The Romans can shut them in as easy as closing a door. Not good.”

  He raised a third finger.

  “Three. We could lead the Romans away from the fort. Think of a way to draw them out. Risky.”

  A fourth finger.

  “Four. Or lure them down the feeder road to the quarry and chop their asses up while they’re in the gap. That has its risks too.”

  His thumb extended. “Or...”

  “Both,” Chaz grinned.

  “Or both,” Lee said and closed his fist.

  The horses heard them first.

  Boats was in the trees well away from and a bit above the smoldering campfire. He’d pissed in it to make it smolder. He didn’t want a blaze that would take away his natural night vision. The smoky embers would serve as a lure for the curious should anyone come snooping around.

  He was half-dozing, half-waking and wondering idly how a sailor like him always wound up so far from the sea. A horse snuffled softly. Another stamped a hoof. They smelled something on the cool wind whispering through the junipers. Boats watched the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. Shadows shifted between the boles. Shapes took form and parted from the dark to stalk across the clearing through the haze created by the dying fire.

  A thrum like a swarm of angry bees cut the air. The bedroll Boats left as a decoy was pincushioned with the trio of shafts. These were the fuckers who were dogging Jimbo and Bat. Boats rose silently to his feet and kept his eyes locked on the clearing where more dark shapes joined the others for a murmured exchange around the empty bundle of blankets. There were a dozen or more visible in the camp area and at least three times that number in the surrounding woods.

  It was time to move on. That was it for the horses. No matter what happened, Boats couldn’t protect the remuda against this kind of odds. All he could do was lead the archers deeper into the trees and away from the rest of the team.

  One of the bowmen was more pissed than the others and began cuffing some of his buddies. An officer. A real prick from the sound of it. The group began to break up to fan out for a search. Whistles and calls echoed through the forest. Boats could not have that shit happening. They were here in one bunch with their commander in range. The SEAL aimed to take advantage of that.

  Boats raised the Mariner and let fly with three rounds of buck. The officer took the first load full in the chest and was flung back spraying blood. The next two rounds sent a spread of 9mm lead balls that struck three more of the archers. The officer was stone dead before he hit the ground. A second archer died gurgling. Two more thrashed and howled, causing the horses to whinny in panic at the shrill animal sounds and the rank stink of blood.

  The SEAL was moving as the third load left the shotgun. He jinked left to get out of the line of fire then hooked right to climb up the hill and deeper into the trees. He topped off the Mariner as he trotted, pulling more buck rounds from the loops on his belt. A cut-down M4 was slung on his back, and a bag full of nasty go
odies slapped his thigh as he ran.

  A pulsing sound passed behind him, followed by a clatter in the woods to his right. The little fuckers were firing arrows at him on the fly. He ran in a snake pattern, keeping the trees between him and pursuit as much as possible. More whistles, more clattering. There were voices calling off to his left. More answering behind and to his right. They were bracketing him. It was only a matter of time before they closed the arms of the pursuit and caught him between.

  Boats threw himself into a shallow depression and dug in his goodie bag for his NODs. He was outnumbered and would be out-positioned in moments. His one advantage was the dark. He dropped the night-vision array before his eyes. The gloom of the woods vanished and all was in sudden stark monochromatic contrast. The SEAL could not have timed it better as a pair of archers stalked by where he lay recumbent in the shelter of the night. He let them move past him up the hill until they were closer to one another.

  He rose to one knee, turning, and took them one after the other easy as shooting skeet. The buck loads slammed into their backs and lifted them off the ground to fall limp as dolls. They wore layers of leather plates that the buck cut through like slices of Wonderbread. Boats came to his feet slowly, noiselessly. Movement was not the key now. It was all about stealth. He was a fucking ghost, an all-seeing phantom among them, striking from every direction. He’d ninja their asses until they lost their mud and ran away. As he rose, an archer ran toward him up the hill with bow bent back.

  Boats fired from the hip, and the running archer stopped as though he’d rushed into an unseen wall. The arrow was loosed and skipped off the armor at Boat’s shoulder. It felt like he’d been struck with a hammer even though he knew the shaft had been fired early. He felt a tingle down that arm. Another shaft whirred by just over his head, and he dropped back to cover and rolled to a new position.

  When he rose again, there was an archer just before him. They were closing about him like a noose. They used the flurry of arrows to drive him where they wanted him to be. Boats raised the shotgun and rushed forward to brain the man with the butt. The SEAL stumbled to the ground with the falling man and heard voices close by. He was on his feet and running laterally along the hillside. His best hope was that he’d broken out of the ring of pursuers. He’d make distance from them and use the Mike-Four to whittle their number further from a safe firing position.

  A hammer blow to his right leg drove him to the ground. He slid down the slope, struggling to regain his feet. The leg was numb as though from blunt force trauma. Boats turned on his side and levered up on his elbows. He filled the air with buck at the sound of movement above him. A wet shriek rang out, and the woods went silent.

  Boats moved to stand, and a lancing pain made him gasp aloud. He looked down to see a long arrow shaft stuck through his upper leg at a wicked angle. The barbed point was through the front of his bare thigh, the shaft jutting from a ragged hole in the flesh. A good two feet of wood stuck from the back of his leg. A wide stream of blood ran down his leg from the exit wound. It looked black through the NODs lenses. The pain was growing and would get a lot worse very soon. If he was going to move, it had to be now.

  No option left to him but to follow the path of least resistance. The SEAL hobbled downhill. Voices called from all around. Boats could see the little fuckers moving fast through the trees around him. They were still blind to his location. One of them would run across the blood trail he was leaving and follow it right up his ass. He had seconds, not minutes.

  Below him he saw the tumble of a deadfall; rotting tree boles were piled up against the base of a line of stout oaks to create a natural defensive position. Boats dropped to one knee and dug in his goody bag and pulled out a Claymore mine. He flipped down the metal legs and secured the mine to face uphill away from the deadfall before inserting the detonation wire lead into the plug atop it. Dragging his wounded leg, trying to keep it as straight as possible, he crawled/slid into a wedge between two fallen trees, playing the thin det wire out behind him.

  He was invisible now but immobilized. Boats was making the best of a shitty situation. The plan was to hammer these fuckers hard enough to make them turn tail. They might leave him alone long enough to let him withdraw and find the rest of the team. He lay back, propped against the bark of a dead tree trunk with the plastic det clicker on his lap. He examined his wound. The leg wasn’t broken, but there was bone pain deep in his leg. There was a steady flow of blood from the exit wound, but it wasn’t pulsing. That would change if he was dumb enough to yank the shaft out. Better to let the flesh swell around the wound for now. But he couldn’t have the wooden shaft sawing in his leg as he moved, and he would need to move.

  Boats slid his combat knife from the sheath on his chest and lifted himself enough to see the feathered end of the arrow protruding from his leg midway between the hip and knee. He used his fingers to secure it in place where it entered the muscle and sawed at the springy wood. It hurt like a bitch as the vibration traveled down the shaft into his leg and rocketed up into his groin. He bit down on a strip of belting clenched in his teeth and kept cutting until the shaft came away clean. The SEAL lay back panting and sweating, his mane of red hair sodden and matted to his head.

  Voices came from above him. They were gathering together up there. Sure as shit one of them came across his blood trail and called the others. From his shelter under the apex of two fallen boles, he watched them cautiously moving down toward him. They had arrows nocked and their bows curved back ready to fill the air with missiles. The little men glanced about, blindly scanning the dark ahead as the center man bent to follow the smear of crimson on the forest floor.

  Four of them moved cautiously toward the deadfall with two more behind. All had bows raised and bent full back, moving the barbed points back and forth, sighting down the shaft for the target they knew to be here. Knew to be close.

  The SEAL covered his eyes with one arm and flipped the cover off the clicker. He depressed the switch twice.

  A charge of C-4 send hundreds of steel balls rushing from the Claymore. In an instant, the area before the mine was transformed into a ballistic hurricane of flesh, bone, and blood as well as a cloud of dust and fragmented debris from the forest floor.

  The four archers closest to the blast were vaporized. The two behind were dismembered. A seventh archer unfortunate enough to wander into the kill zone lost both legs below the knee and collapsed with a high keening cry that died away as his blood sprayed from torn stumps. All in a fraction of a second thanks to the baddest anti-personnel weapon in the SEAL’s arsenal.

  Lying less than fifty feet behind the blast, Boats was deafened. His head felt like there was a clapper inside it striking off the inside of his skull. He fought to remain conscious.

  He lost that fight.

  31

  At Madame’s Pleasure

  Caroline knew two things for certain. She could not be in this room when the registrar returned with either gendarmes or soldiers. And the single door to the hallway was the only way out of this room. The door was locked from the outside, but the key was still in the slot. She knew this by crouching silently and peeping into the keyhole to see it was blocked by the barrel of the key.

  Her room was on the third floor. The windows opened onto a narrow balcony that was mostly decorative. It was an escape route she’d hesitate to use if she were alone. With Stephen in her care, it was beyond any consideration.

  She swiftly packed the carpetbag with all it would hold, then put on the woolen coat and hat and a pair of scarves. The baby was dozing in his basket, but would not be for long if the plan she carried out was to work. Caroline retrieved the revolver from its hiding place and worked the hammer back with the heel of her hand. She then went to the door and pounded on it with her fist.

  “My child! My child is ill! Mercy! You must have mercy!” she screamed in her tourist French and hoped she was selling her desperation. The drumming on the door and the shouts of his mother awoke Step
hen with a start. His pitiable cries added to her performance.

  She could see a shadow shift in the crack of light under the door. Big, dumb, drunken Patrice heard her. “Please, help me. Have mercy on a small child who has harmed no one. I beg you, sir!”

  The key rattled in the lock, and the door swung inward. Patrice entered the room with wide eyes devoid of suspicion. Caroline backed farther into the room and raised the pistol in both hands.

  “Please?” Patrice said once he realized what he was looking at.

  “My baby and I are leaving,” Caroline said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Pick up that bag, and I will not be forced to hurt you.”

  Patrice looked down at the packed carpetbag resting by the door.

  “I am not certain...” he began.

  “Well, I am certain, monsieur,” she said and gestured at him with the revolver.

  Reluctantly, he picked up the bag and turned his back on her as she indicated he should do with a twirl of the pistol barrel. She shifted to a one-handed grip and lifted the handle of the basket containing the squalling Stephen.

  “We will use the back stairs and the servants’ exit,” she said, following the big man down the hall at three paces distance.

  “Please do not shoot me, madame,” he said with a small voice.

  “Please do not make me,” she said. The way was awkward in the narrow hallway with the weight of the basket in one hand and the heavy wool coat that fit like a tent over the brocaded dress and all the goddamned layers of petticoats. The boots had raised heels that she’d thought were so cute but now realized were impractical for getaways. This would have all gone so much easier in a pair of sweats and Nikes, she thought.

  She turned at voices behind her. The three cigar smokers were coming to the top of the open stairway from the second floor. They’d seen her and were calling out in alarm. They looked as though they meant to catch up and subdue her.