Avenging Angels (Bad Times Book 3)

by Chuck Dixon

  “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.

  “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?”

  “He 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.

  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 stood 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 sidearms, 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 leaped 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 bitten 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 goodies 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 Wonder bread. 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 thro
ugh 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 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.