Lyons uncoiled and pounced, but two .45 barrels tracked him. “Fuck you, V! We always handle things in house. And we never leave a man behind!” He pounded the aluminum desk hard enough to bounce the microfiche reader off, shattering it across the concrete floor.
Kat collapsed to the deck, sobbing into the broken machine. Two suits cuffed her wrists behind her back and hauled the terrified girl to her feet. The oldest agent snickered and stuck his palm in front of her chin.
“You ought to be in Hollywood. Spit it out. I know the game.”
The waterworks shut off instantly. Kat grinned back and hacked a metal clip out, just the right size to jimmy the handcuffs. Lyons snorted.
“Mate, you don’t have any idea who you’re screwing with.”
Three weeks later…
“Wow, the Tower of London. Complete with shackles and everything. Rather dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
Kat froze on the bottom rung of her pushup and arched her back.
“Yeah, gotta love the view.” She finished her set and snagged a towel from the far corner of her windowless basement cell.
The chipper man on the other side of the bars leaned in and draped an arm through the feeding slot. A black-suited King’s Guard cracked a club against the bars, just an inch from Captain Lyons’s balding head.
“Arm’s length, Captain! I don’t know what strings you pulled to get in here, but inside these walls I call the shots!”
Lyons jumped back and dipped his brow at the hulking guard always at his elbow. “My apologies, Sergeant. I’m just happy to see she’s not sealed in an Iron Maiden.”
The soldier turned up his bushy chin and twirled his Billy club. “Unfortunately not. Everything has gone downhill since we began letting traitors have lawyers.”
“Fat lot of good they did me.” Kat moved a little too fast and tripped over her leg manacle. “From arrest to trial and execution in less than a month. Isn’t it all so efficient? So bloody civilized.”
Kat propped against the wall and folded her arms, returning Lyons’s naughty grin.
“Anyway, thanks for dropping by. So, boss, I’m afraid I’m a little short on gossip. What’s new with you?”
“Nothing much.” Lyons clucked his tongue and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m resigning first thing in the morning. Head on back to the regular army, where things make sense. It’s only a matter of time until Hitler makes his big move. I’m sure it’ll be this year. The big money’s on later this summer. I’d rather be on the front lines where the enemy wears a uniform, know what I mean? Of course, it sure would be great to have a friendly, if only homely face watching my six. If you’re interested in changing careers, I could get you a cushy job as a civilian translator in a field headquarters.”
“Homely!” Kat wagged her finger. “Aren’t you a peach. But my bum is in high demand, sweetie. So let’s start a bidding war. Just this morning the chaplain offered me my last rites. The warden sweetened the deal with a last meal. What did you bring to bargain with?”
Lyons deflated. “I’m so sorry. I don’t think even V expected them to push for the death penalty. Even in rehab off in the countryside, this duke holds some serious sway.”
He tugged off his bifocals and massaged his brow. Kat’s eyes twinkled, but she swept her gaze over to the hawkish guard perched just behind Lyons’s shoulder.
The captain had never worn glasses before.
Kat shuffled as close to the bars as her ankle shackle allowed. “Hey, can he at least give me a goodbye kiss? You understand, right? From the looks of you, I bet you could appreciate the magic of a hot kiss from a cute guy.”
“No touching, convict. He can kiss your cold lips in the morning!” The guard bared his teeth, but pried his eyes off Lyons for a good three seconds to stare her down.
Lyons puffed out his cheeks and set his spectacles back on his nose.
Minus the steel lower lens frame.
“Relax, please. How much time do we have left?”
The soldier fumed and craned his neck to the wall clock behind him. Lyons shuffled his feet.
His left boot shot out in Kat’s direction.
“Five minutes, but I’m going to round it off. This skirt’s always talking shit. Let’s go.”
“Don’t leave me!” Kat collapsed to her knees, wailing and beating a fist over the floor. Her temper tantrum faded as fast as it came. A second later, she scurried to her feet and stuck her closed palms in her pockets.
“Well, Jack, I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”
Lyons sagged his shoulders but shot her a wink with his back to the guard. “It’s at midnight, right? Hanging, I assume? That’s the way traitors always went out. Well, I’ll be in the abbey saying a prayer for you as soon as the sun goes down. Then I’m shipping off to Egypt first thing in the morning.”
Kat purred. “Africa in the summer, huh? And I thought it was hot where I’m going!”
A few minutes after sunset, Kat slid her untouched plate of sauerkraut, potatoes and eisbein against the bars. “Go ahead and get this crap out of here. In a just world, you’d be hanging the chef!”
“Shut up and assume the position. You know the drill.” Two guards rapped their clubs on the bars.
“Yeah, yeah.” Kat squatted down and faced the wall, both hands slapped against it. She twisted her head a tad, but not far enough to break the rules and let the guard entering her cell see the whites of her eyes.
“Figured your shift would be over with by now, Sergeant. Come to see me off? Knew you were a big softy.”
The junior man scooped up her dinner and brought in a fresh chamber pot, always keeping a shoulder on the right wall. Just outside and against the left wall, a grinning noncom leveled his machine pistol through the iron rods.
“The warden doubled up the duty roster for tonight. Someone up above seems worried you have an ace up your sleeve. Even issued the inner guards firearms. Never seen that before. Part of me almost wishes you were half as dangerous as they think you—ah, shit, mate!”
The moment maid service hefted the old pot, the sheared off bottom popped open like an inverted tin can. One brimming with a day’s worth of the worst brine. The private sprang back inside the cell on reflex, blocking his superior’s line of fire for a heartbeat.
Just about his last one as Kat snagged her free-hanging ankle chain and kicked off from the wall, plowing into the back of his knees. She tucked and rolled with the hit, his somersaulting body blocking the sergeant’s swaying muzzle for a second longer. Between the private’s knees, Kat shot her chain underhanded into the open doorway.
“Gawgg!”
The sergeant raced his machine pistol to the frigid stone floor while clutching his collapsing windpipe. Kat scooped up the gun and leveled it on the private with one hand while tilting the sergeant’s chin up with the other.
“Drop that silly club and hold him steady. If he doesn’t get a tracheotomy right now, I’ll live longer than him. Move, boy!”
After a quick glance at his sergeant’s blue face and the eyes rolling back in his sockets, the youngster conceded and followed the only person who seemed to know what to do. While the kid kneed on the dying man’s flailing arms and held his head back, Kat whipped out Lyons’s present. She flipped the lock pick over and found her patient’s Adam’s apple, then ran her fingers up a tad. With a flick of her wrist, she sliced the scalpel across his trachea. It was dull from carving open the chamber pot, but still got the job done.
Kat gripped the private’s hand and forced his index finger into the hole she made, before giving the sergeant a couple of quick breaths directly into his throat. His chest rose a smidgen.
“Ok. Do not take your finger out until the medics take over. Keep his head titled back and give him a breath every five seconds and he should make it. Ah, ah. Shhh.”
She stuck a finger to his quivering lips. “Don’t yell for help or I’ll take you both with me to hell. Just wait here. Trust me, the alarm is going o
ff soon enough.”
After ransacking the sergeant’s belt and hefting her trusty shackle chain, she flittered out of the cell, not bothering to shut it. Twenty meters down the corridor of empty tombs for traitors past, she skidded to a stop.
The steel hatch leading upstairs had no lock to pick.
“Fellas, I’m trying to go easy. Why do we always have to do things the hard way?”
Still chuckling, Kat rapped on the door three times like the soldiers favored. Someone slid open the viewport inside.
“Shit! Sound the alar—aack!” The guard dropped as he stared cross-eyed into a gun barrel, but the floor offered little safety. The tear gas grenade Kat cooked off through the hole landed right in his lap.
Huffing and slinging snot, he punched a big red button on the wall and skittered across the security station floor. The guard racked the slide on his submachine gun and slapped his coughing partner huddled behind the desk.
“Lock and load! Kill that bitch!”
They both spun around different sides of the desk and covered the door.
That was already open.
A set of shackles dangled from the viewport and wrapped around the inside handle.
Something clanked off the metal desk between them, followed by a thud. The first guard blinked through the searing tears and swung around.
“Now, ugh, is that any way to talk about a lady?”
The coughing yet grinning banshee sprang off his unconscious partner. His finger grazed the trigger before she double clapped his temples, shutting off the lights.
She ransacked the key ring on his belt before charging the staircase. Flinging open the ground floor’s steel hatch, Kat popped her ponytail out for a quick recce.
Tat-tat-tat-tat
“Whoops!” Kat jumped back from the twin Thompson guns zeroing in on her nose and skipped up the tower’s stairs. One flight up though, someone leaned over the railing and blazed down at her. Yet another kicked open the ground door and sprayed up at her.
Without breaking stride, Kat skipped to the narrow stained-glass window in the turret wall and buttstroked it into oblivion. She shimmied through the minuscule slat, biting her tongue as shards carved up her ass and chest. But at long last, she tasted fresh air.
She hopped the single floor down into the courtyard, landing with a whoop on her feet.
“Oh, am I early?”
A dozen Royal Guardsmen in a circle around the courtyard unslung their rifles at the same time. Some rotund gent in a dark robe and a black hood in his belt hollered from a wooden platform straight ahead. He waved a thick rope noose her way.
“That’s—”
The fat executioner disappeared under a sulfuric haze of acrid white smoke. Same as everyone else. Ten more smoke grenades sailed over the walls in as many seconds and blanketed the field in a putrid fog. At the same time, the well-lit fortress plunged into darkness as a small blast in the distance shut off the power.
The men fired blind nonetheless, but Kat resisted the urge to make things easy by returning the favor. Instead, she crouched and ran headlong towards the outer wall. Her outstretched fingers smacked it hard, but Kat kept groping around. She ignored the gun sliding away from her bleeding knuckles and just scraped along the jagged stone wall, not making a sound until she hit an aluminum tube.
Kat monkeyed up the modern drainpipe bolted onto the ancient wall, but still couldn’t see much after popping her head above the clouds. Some generator-powered searchlights raked the yard, but not a single light flickered on the south end of the complex.
The wall just meters away from the Thames.
With the pipe screeching and sliding between her knees, Kat leapt the last few feet in the air and slapped the top of the battlements with both hands.
But never got a grip on the well-worn medieval stone.
“Took you long enough! Are you getting rusty?”
Lyons heaved the girl by her slim wrists over the ledge and tossed her on top of the Traitor’s Gate, ten minutes after the sun went down.
“You know me, always fashionably late.” Kat grinned at the tied and gagged Guardsman with the bag over his head. Behind him, the driver from that fateful night a million years ago hissed.
“Let’s go, you crazy bastards!”
He looped a grenade launcher over his back and snatched some bar hanging off the outer wall. Lyons shoved her against the ramparts and stuck a zipline in her hand. Kat couldn’t tell where the line ended, but followed the two men without comment, for once.
Fifty meters later, she bounced off the deck of The Abbey and flittered below deck. A second overpowered motorboat nearby roared east, out to sea, spraying a fountain in its wake. Lyons’s personal toy boat just trolled along to the west at port speed.
She hugged both of the guys, but punched the first aid kit in half. “I cannot begin to thank you all, but what the hell? The team shouldn’t have blown their cover to save my ass.”
Lyons and the other agent chuckled.
“But you’re just a ghost.” The brother in arms, who’s name she couldn’t recall, reached into a cupboard and tossed a newspaper in her lap. One stamped with the next morning’s date.
Under the FASCIST ITALY INVADES ALBANIA headline, a grainy picture of some girl only vaguely similar to her was plastered in the bottom corner.
“Traitor shot trying to escape? They couldn’t even get my name right. Damn, you’re good, sir.”
Lyons leaned back and fired up his pipe. “Even I can’t do that. No, I think the royals are just happy to put this whole fiasco behind them. Lord knows they have bigger problems. Speaking of which, I can understand if you aren’t chomping at the bit to serve again, especially in the desert. So just tell me which country you’d like a passport from.”
Kat chewed a handful of aspirin like candy. “You really think the Nazi’s are coming?”
“You know them better than me. What do you think? The oil fields in the Middle East are the most valuable possessions the UK has. Cut the Royal Navy and Air Force off from our only oil supply and the whole Kingdom and Commonwealth will be squirming under SS jackboots within a fortnight.”
Kat ground her teeth. “You think too much. Let’s just go kill some Nazi’s.”
“I’m not talking about spy stuff. This is going to be a full-blown war. Make the Great War seem like a schoolyard scuffle.” Lyons bit his lip.
Kat rushed over and kissed his frowning head. “Really? All right, you silver tongued rogue. It’s a date!”
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Acronyms/Slang/Terminology
.50 caliber: M2 .50 caliber (12.7mm) machine gun. Large and heavy, almost always mounted on a vehicle because it requires three soldiers to carry the weapon, tripod and just a small supply of ammo.
Relatively poor accuracy and a slow rate of fire compared to most machine guns, but its ability to throw a half-inch slug with the force to penetrate a brick wall or light-armored vehicle at over a mile makes it a favorite among all branches of the Service. Barely changed in design since World War 2.
2-oh-3: Single shot, 40mm grenade launcher. Attaches underneath a M16 or M4. Official designation: M203. Usually just called the 2-oh-3.
2-40: M240b 7.62mm medium machinegun. Normally referred to simply as the “2-40.” About 10 pounds heavier than the SAW. Just barely able to be carried and effectively used by a single soldier, it’s usually mounted on a vehicle or, if dismounted, an extra soldier is assigned to carry the ammo.
3-20: M320 grenade launcher. Fires 40mm “normal” or 25mm “smart” grenades, slowly replacing M203.
AT-ratio: Single use, disposable bazooka-like weapon. Standard unguided anti-tank rocket used by US Army. Swedish made, it’s dirt cheap but deadly against light armored vehicles/fortifications. Effective range only 300 meters.
AHA: Ammunition holding area. Ammo dump. When not in the field, anything
that goes boom, from small arms rounds to artillery shells, are stored there.
AMRAAM: Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile. A beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile. The most modern versions have a range of 100 miles.
Apache: AH-64 attack helicopter. Fast, armored and heavily armed, this chopper also boasts a 128x Forward Looking Infrared Radar sensor system. Whether used as scouts, quick reaction fire support, or just flying snipers, the Apaches are probably the most feared and respected helicopter in the world. Primary disadvantage is the small fuel capacity, leading to relatively short on station times (1-3 hours, depending on equipment load-out).
APC: Armored Personnel Carrier. Lightly armored/armed vehicle used for support tasks. Examples: Armored ambulances, mobile command vehicles, transporting combat engineers.
B-2: “Flying wing” stealth strategic bomber. Costing $2 billion a pop, they’re the most expensive aircraft in the inventory.
COMSEC: Communications security. Referring specifically to the daily changing cryptographic code groups used by the encrypted radios.
DPICM: Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions. Generic term for a variety of artillery and airdropped sub-munitions that bridge the gap between anti-vehicle and anti-personnel explosives.
FRAGO: Fragmentary order. A modification to the original mission plan that doesn’t alter the core objectives, just how they should be achieved.
HARM: High-Speed Anti-Radar Missile. Radar seeking missile that homes in on enemy air-defense radars.
HEMTT: Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck. An eight-wheel drive, diesel-powered, 10-ton cargo truck. Standard supply truck of the US Army.
Humint/Sigint: Human and Signals (electronic) intelligence. Information collected by interrogating people or eavesdropping on electronic communications.
The Caliphate Invasion Page 44