by Tony Roberts
This is a book of fiction. All the names, characters and events portrayed in this book are Fictional and any resemblance to real people and incidents are purely coincidental.
CASCA: #41 The Longbowman
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To the memory of Gail Rhine, Casca publisher 2006-2014, without whom the later adventures of Casca would not have been told
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Continuing Casca’s adventures, book 42 Barbarossa
THE CASCA SERIES IN EBOOKS
PROLOGUE
Adrenaline is a wonderful thing; one may feel exhausted and virtually at the point of dropping, and suddenly all this is forgotten as the body floods with it. The only down side usually is the reason why adrenaline is released in the first place.
To Casca Rufio Longinus, this was due to being trapped in a narrow and filthy dark alleyway in the English port of Southampton. The ruffians who were closing in on him belonged to a local thieves guild and Casca had made the mistake of crossing the man running the guild. He’d stolen his woman. So the word had gone out to get Casca and dispose of him. With a handy dock nearby, it was clear where Casca would end up, if he allowed himself to be overpowered.
How he had come to be in Southampton was a long story. Casca had recently returned from a lengthy spell in the Steppes of Asia with the hordes of Tamerlane and, tired of the wild nomadic killing orgy, had left. He’d stopped off via Smyrna on the eastern coast of the Aegean and caught a boat to Constantinople where he’d deposited a few papers at the Blachernae Palace, then taken a merchant vessel west to Marseilles and thence through France to Gascony and Bordeaux. Bordeaux was controlled by the English and he’d decided to travel to their kingdom, not having been there for a while.
So now he was in Southampton, living in a dingy house near the docks. One shapely serving wench in the King’s Arms tavern had caught his eye and he’d shacked up with her, only to discover she was the target of Wat Cooper, a nasty type who ran the guild of thieves. Cooper decided Casca was a rival and had to be taken out. The result was Casca, having just come from the tavern on his way home, had been ambushed and driven off the streets into the dark alleyway where the six dagger-wielding men intended to finish him off.
Casca wasn’t one to hang about and let himself be sliced up by any old lowlife that chanced across him; he’d encountered too many of them in his fourteen centuries of existence and had no intention of falling foul of these particular cut throats. The alleyway was typical of an English port – or of any port in the known world, come to that. Filled with ordure, refuse, dead cats and dogs and infested with scuttling rodents. Rodents! Casca had a brief frisson of repulsion. The memory of the Black Death that had cut a swathe of chaos through Europe less than sixty years before came back to him. It had been the rats who had spread it so fast, or as most seemed to believe, bad air. Casca reckoned it was the rats.
No doubt these slowly converging men would add him to the filth of the alley. He didn’t see any reason why they would drag him out into the streets after killing him – his earlier thought about him being added to the dock might not be their intention after all. Best he was dealt with out of the way and no questions asked. Casca sucked on his lower lip, thinking fast. If he managed to overcome these human rodents, Cooper would only send more to take care of him, and perhaps they would be more subtle and skilled. For now, Cooper was confident that these six basic types would do the job well enough.
So, what to do about these men? They were the rough, tough backstreet brawlers he’d clashed with many times – muscular, filthy, no pride in either what they did or how they looked, and had no scruples about killing. None of them would be missed. It was too dark to make out their features, but then that really didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to ask them to stand in line and smile in the light of a torch just so he could remember how they looked before he killed them. He had enough nightmares about the ones he recalled already.
He had no weapon, but again that didn’t matter. He was capable of using the way of the Open Hand, taught to him on that Roman galley by Shiu Lao Tze all those centuries back, and which he’d infrequently practised and used ever since. Maybe he wasn’t perfect or refined enough in his moves, and perhaps he’d adapted them over the years to suit him rather than the more skilled Chinese monks, but hell, he was lethal enough. The six men were confident, over confident, maybe. They closed in, but the width of the alley only allowed one to get at him at a time. That suited Casca more than them, and was perfect strategy. If outnumbered in battle, seek a place that negated the superior numbers. Leonidas and his Spartans had done that at Thermopylae before Casca had been born, and they had held off vastly superior numbers until some damned traitor had led the Persians over the hills and behind the defenders.
The first one came for him, his right hand gripping a long narrow blade. It looked like a balloch knife, that evil, wicked twelve inch long pointed dagger used by warriors to slip up under the metal skirts of an opponent to emasculate him with. No messing about with this one, then.
The thief came at him, blade high, his free hand reaching out to grip Casca by the throat, hoping to pin him down while he stabbed him at leisure. Instead of going for the free hand, Casca knocked the knife hand aside and slammed his palm into the face of the man, breaking his nose. A quick withdraw and snap kick to the chin sent him backwards with a grunt of pain. The man struck the ground noisily, dropping his knife. The one behind him swore and stepped over the fallen man. “Right, pal,” he growled, “no messing about with me. Say your prayers to God.”
“Which god?” Casca asked, then scythed his foot through the air and impacted it deep into the man’s guts. The victim gasped and doubled up, offering his neck. It was too much of a target to pass up and Casca smashed his hand down, edge hard, into the exposed part. He man struck the ground as if he’d been poleaxed.
Two down. Hopefully for some time.
The next two tensed. This supposedly easy victim hadn’t been so damned easy after all. One of them was the ringleader, the one who had received the money directly from the guild’s representative. He shoved the man alongside him towards Casca. “Kill him! Do it or no money!”
The man clenched his teeth and slashed wildly, a totally unskilled and wild strike, something Casca guessed he would have done. He was pressed up now against a pile of trash that had been thrown there some time back and effectively blocked the alley. Casca was at a dead end. Desperation gave him an ext
ra incentive and he grabbed the mugger’s arm and in a swift, vicious move, tugged hard in two directions, snapping the forearm. The man screamed, dropped the knife and tried to pull away but Casca was having none of it. He rammed the man’s head against the stone wall of the narrow passageway and the unfortunate crashed lifelessly to the dirt and filth.
“By hell you’re a bastard,” the ringleader said. He was armed with a knife and a club. He had both in his hands and went at Casca hard, blade and club rising and falling, hoping to overwhelm the scarred man at the end of the alleyway. It was hard to avoid the fallen by this time, especially as two were moving feebly, hoping to get out of the way, and they hindered the attack.
Casca thrust the club attack aside and grabbed the wrist holding the knife. His foot came up and struck the man in the family jewels and he then released his arms and pulled down hard on his head, sending the face into his raised knee. There came a satisfying crunch and the ringleader shrieked in a muffled way. He staggered back, clutching his now spurting nose and flaming gonads and sank to the ground slowly.
The last two hesitated, worried by the sudden reverse in odds. They decided the paltry few coins for a beer and a hump with one of the filthy port whores wasn’t worth the effort and ran, scattering into the darkness.
Breathing heavily Casca turned full circle. One was out of it, the one he’d smashed into the wall. The other three were moving and groaning. One was half up so Casca booted him in the jaw and knocked him flat onto his back. “Stupid cocksucker,” he growled. It was a good old Roman curse and he said it in Latin. He felt better using his natural tongue. It would not have been said in centuries, for the only people who spoke Latin now were the priests of the Christian religion, and he doubted the word ‘cocksucker’ was in their vocabulary.
The ringleader was on his knees, sobbing through the rivulets of blood dribbling through his fingers. His testicles were throbbing deeply but weren’t as bad as his pulped nose. Casca loomed over him. “Tell your master to lay off or I’ll come find him and pull him inside out from his arse.” Without further ado he punched the man behind the ear and he flopped to the ground.
A quick search and he found to his delight a small bag of coins, as he’d hoped. That would do for the moment, but what to do? He couldn’t stay in Southampton, and Elizabeth was hardly going anywhere. Cooper would probably by now have her under his gaze so that nobody could get near her.
Time to be gone, but where?
CHAPTER ONE
Bani Walid, Libya, Autumn 2011
The roar of exploding shells filled the air as multiple artillery strikes smashed into the ground and buildings, erupting into fountains of dirt, stone and debris. The small group of people huddled in the lee of a large whitewashed stone building ducked and cowered. They were mostly dressed in desert camouflage smocks but two wore western style civilian clothes – denim jeans and tee-shirts.
The burly scarred figure of Casca glanced down the rubble-strewn street off to his left round the corner of the former residence of the local town warlord and checked on the progress of the advancing line of governmental troops. They were getting close. He ducked back. “They’re nearly on us,” he said. “Let’s get over the fence and across to the airstrip.”
“And leave us open to being shot?” Morgan said, his voice strained. “You’re fucking cookoo, Romano!”
“We’re being picked up in three minutes. If we’re not there the chopper will pass over and leave. It’s our one chance, so move your goddam Texan ass, now!”
Morgan, a big, beefy bearded man from Houston, grumbled under his breath and spun away from the wall, clutching his AK47. It was the best weapon to have here, since everyone seemed to be armed with one and picking up dropped ammo was easy. The Gaddafi-backed governmental forces were losing heavily but they were still determined to make as much chaos as they could, and were going to execute the two oil company employees they had prisoner until Casca – now called Carlos – and his small band of mercs had snatched them.
The three other mercs in the group scrambled away from the wall and vaulted the worn and sorry looking wooden two-barred fence that stood at the rear of what probably had been the garden of the house up to a year or two ago. More shells screamed overhead. The rebel forces closing in on the settlement weren’t bothered as to who they hit. They were winning and that was all there was to it. As far as they were concerned all that were there were Gaddafi supporters and therefore deserved to die.
Dirt flew everywhere from the impacts and a small sun baked mud brick hovel erupted into a thousand pieces. Too bad if someone had been taking cover in there. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Morgan muttered as he followed the other three. The two civilians, two scruffy unshaven Europeans, one from Belgium the other a Norwegian, took off after the men as if the hounds of hell were on their tail.
Carlos had an earpiece attached to a small battery operated radio clipped to his belt. Now it crackled into life – the range wasn’t that great so he knew when the rescue chopper was close. “Dragonfly to Termite,” Hayley’s welcome voice came through to him, distorted and tinny, “two minutes to pick up.”
Carlos grabbed the microphone dangling by his throat. “Roger. Hostiles present. Need clearing.”
“Roger that,” and Hayley went silent.
Carlos took off in the wake of the others. In a moment or two the sound of the chopper would be heard and everyone would want a piece of its ass. Carlos hoped to hell the machine was up to the rigors of a quick evac under fire. Memories of Vietnam came to him briefly, then he dispelled it, landing on the other side of the fence and scrambling after the others who were now on the other side of a clump of bushes. There, the land flattened enough to form a decent pick-up point, but it was exposed.
Carlos reached the others, all crouching in a semi-circle, facing the way they’d come. “Keep down,” he ordered the two oil employees. No point in them getting hit now after all the effort of getting them here. “Pick up in ninety seconds,” he said to the rest.
“I can hear a chopper,” one of the mercs, a South African called Klinger, said, turning his head this way and that, trying to zero in on where it was coming from.
“Our taxi,” Carlos said.
“Why couldn’t we have flown in instead of walking our asses off?” Morgan complained. “Shee-it. That goddamned boat was a death trap; hell knows how it stayed afloat, then a walk for days in that desert. It was hotter than the devil’s dick, for Chrissakes!”
The others grinned, even Carlos. Then figures came spreading out from the other side of the house. “Here they come. Pin them down!” Carlos snapped.
Three AKs chattered briefly, peppering the house and ground with 7.92mm bullets. One zig-zagging figure flung his arms up and collapsed to the ground, and the rest threw themselves flat and began filling the air with magazines of bullets.
“Hell! They got a fucking ammo dump down there or what?” Morgan demanded, trying to burrow into the gravelly dirt.
“Chopper!” Klinger said in triumph, pointing to the south-west. The black shape was close to the ground, flying in over the uneven rolling dunes, coming in from the desert side and not the sea as might be expected. It was long and black and had twin pods hanging down under the fuselage.
The gunmen around the house twisted and looked skywards in alarm. As the chopper cleared the last dune and headed straight for the rendezvous point, they got up and began running towards the bushes. Hayley Richter, the pilot, swung the machine ninety degrees and both pods opened up with flashes of light as the chain guns spat death.
The ground fountained with thousands of little impacts and the gunmen were riddled, chunks of flesh flying off with blood splattering the ground. Men screamed and toppled, some hit by thirty or more rounds, now unrecognizable as who they had been seconds before.
“Hell, yeah!” Morgan yelled. “Fucking ragheads! Take that you motherfuckers!”
“Get going!” Carlos snapped. “We’ve got seconds!”
T
he helicopter swung sharply, almost striking the ground, then roared in and halted in a heartbeat. Wheels dropped and the chopper sank to the ground, the engine intake sucking in great amounts of air. Ducking, the men ran to the door on the right hand side and Klinger hauled it open, helping the two oilmen in, then diving in himself. The two others followed, then came Morgan. Carlos swung full circle and saw more figures coming at them from two directions. Time to be out of there. He grabbed Morgan’s arm even as the chopper began to move and was hauled in as it cleared the ground, the wheels already retracting.
“Shit, this guy knows his stuff,” Morgan said as Carlos slammed the door shut.
“I’ll tell her,” Carlos grinned.
“A girl? She married?”
“Nope, but forget it; she’s taken.”
“Not when she sees me,” Morgan said emphatically. “This sucker’s hungry for pussy.”
“Hands off, Morgan, or you’ll be dropped off into the sea, got it?”
“Shee-it. Guess it’s Fatima in Casablanca then,” Morgan grumbled.
Klinger chuckled. “I’m off to Jo’burg after this. I’ve got two hot girls there who’ll be longing for my attention. I don’t need to worry, man.”
“Asshole,” Morgan muttered and sulked against the fuselage.
Carlos checked on the two civilians. They were fine, if shaken and reacting now they were up and away from the immediate threat of decapitation or shooting. After a few moments with them, he made his way to the cockpit. The familiar shape of Hayley was there and she turned her head at his approach.
“Any problems?” she asked, smiling at his familiar, rugged, scarred face.
“Nope,” Carlos said, sighing as he sank into the co-pilot’s seat. “Nice machine,” he commented, glancing at the confusing array of switches, dials and computer screen readouts.
“Amazing what you can pick up these days if you know where to look,” Hayley said, flicking one switch and sending the chopper over a high dune with feet to spare.