by Weston Ochse
and
In Llongborth, I saw the clash of swords
and
In Llongborth I saw spurs
and
In Llongborth I saw the weapons
and
In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s
Heroes who cut with steel.
The Emperor, ruler of our labour.
She sat back, pleased with herself. She knew she was close. The remaining question was what was Llongborth. Since it didn’t translate, it was definitely a place. She decided to Google “Llongborth.” She had immediate hits. She selected the first one from Brittania.com, which explained that “Llongborth” was present in an Old Welsh epic poem and is believed to be the modern location for Portsmouth. She read the passage again.
In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s
Heroes who cut with steel.
The Emperor, ruler of our labour.
This poem referred specifically to Arthur and identified him as Emperor. Conducting an additional search for the Battle of Llongborth, she learned it was believed to have occurred circa AD 510 and was reputed to have involved King Gerren of Dumnonia, who was killed in the battle, and Prince Rivod of Brittany, who murdered his brother King Maelew and usurped the Briton throne. She could find no mention of Arthur.
She returned to the Britannia site and scrolled through and discovered the poem in full, which began:
Before Geraint, the enemy’s scourge,
I saw white horses, tensed, red,
After the war cry, bitter the grave
Then she ran through to the last lines:
When Geraint was born, Heaven’s gate stood open;
Christ granted all our prayer;
Lovely to behold, the glory of Prydain.
She soon found that “Prydian” was the Primitive Welsh word for Britain. She decided to search other sources and soon found that the location of Portsmouth as the site of the battle was in academic dispute, as was the year in which it took place. A scholarly text from a King Arthur site, citing earlier documents, believed that Llongborth was actually Langport in Somerset and that the year the battle occurred was actually AD 710. It also went on to say that King Arthur probably wasn’t present at the battle but that his men were, hence the sentence In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s Heroes / Who cut with steel. The poem never once mentions that the narrator saw King Arthur.
Which made sense later when she saw that the birth of Arthur was believed to have been circa AD 465. She continued searching and learned that Arthur was believed to have ruled the region known at present as Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. His castle was located in Cadbury and was presently known as Cadbury Castle. Bones and artifacts from the area date back to 3300 BC, but it is argued that the fortification on the giant mound was created circa 70 BC.
An interesting excerpt tied Arthur into the poem: If Arthur was conceived at Tintagel, then as a prince of Dumnonia, Cadbury Castle would have been within his dominion. Dumnonia had been mentioned before as being the seat of King Gerren, the Geraint referred to in the poem.
Another detail caught her eye. Several sources said that Merlyn was purported to have written the poem but then explained that as he was a right-hand man to Arthur it would have been impossible for this to be true because of the time difference.
Unless Merlyn happened to be a Tuatha, she thought.
She blinked hard. What had she stumbled on?
She remembered that Cadbury Castle had been built upon a mound. What kind of mound? And what sort of artifacts had been found there?
Half an hour later she’d discovered enough to make her worry. She checked the time. It was 0912 hours. She put in a call to Ian. She got no response. She put in a call to Holmes, then Walker, and received no response from either. If she was right, then everything they were about to do might be wrong. In fact, it might be the very worst thing they could do.
CHAPTER 41
REDLANDS AIRFIELD, SWINDON. 0715 HOURS.
Paul Legerski lay in bed with the sweet smell of sex still welling from his body. He’d seen Megan at the pub three times before and had always wanted to talk to her, but she was just too bloody beautiful to approach. But last night was Christmas Eve and he told himself this was the night. Completely lubricated with courage juice, he’d gone over, only to find her crying.
This he was good at.
Her aunt had passed away that morning and Megan was at the pub drowning her sorrows. He spent time asking about her aunt, what was it she loved about her, what had she learned from her. In the back of his mind, he knew this was unfair, but he really wanted her to work as quickly through the stages of grief as possible.
And it had paid off. An hour before closing, they went out for some crisps, then found themselves back at his place. He had the best closing lines around.
What is it you do? they’d ask.
I’m a pilot.
As in a plane?
Then he’d shrug and add, I teach people to parachute too. Then he’d look at the girl and say, Do you want to learn how to jump out of airplanes? Do you want to fly?
Once he got his courage up, those were the magic words and rarely did they miss. Just as they hadn’t last night.
He pulled the covers up to his neck and imagined the mole she wore just below her left breast. He was reliving the moment when a pounding came at the door.
Bollocks! Don’t they know it’s Christmas? He closed his eyes and was determined to ignore it.
But the banging came again along with someone yelling, “Open the damn door!”
First of all, he’d never open the door if someone yelled that. Second of all, the voice sounded American.
He slid out of bed and wrapped a sheet around his midsection.
The man hammered at the door again.
Paul was getting brassed off. He didn’t know who it was. It could be someone on drugs or—he thought quickly. Did Megan have a husband? He hadn’t seen a wedding band and she sure didn’t mention it.
The door suddenly exploded inward. Splinters from the doorjamb flew past him as the door landed on the floor. An immense black man in black fatigues was putting his foot back on the ground.
“Knock knock, Avon calling.” The man strode into the room. “Are you the pilot?”
All Paul could do was nod dumbly. Although he never took his eyes off the man’s face, Paul knew he wore some sort of body armor, had a pistol, a knife and a machete, and a rifle slung across his back. If Megan had an African-American soldier husband and she never told him about it, then he was as good as dead.
The man poked him in the chest. It was a simple move, but it hurt tremendously and woke him from his stupor. “Chop-chop. Get some clothes on. We need to get the plane in the air.”
Paul stood there, waiting for the man to leave, but the man merely crossed his arms. His eyes narrowed and it looked like he might have been getting ready for a growl. Paul sprang into motion. He grabbed pants and a shirt and ran into the bathroom. After doing what he needed, he exited and grabbed some socks and boots and a jacket.
“You have the whitest skin of any white guy I have ever seen,” the man said. “Do you get out much?”
Paul didn’t dare answer. He grabbed a set of keys and headed for the door. The man fell in behind Paul. They marched across the tarmac from his trailer to his own private hangar on the south end of Redfield Airport. He was fumbling with his keys when he noticed that the lock on the door had been wrenched away. He entered the hangar to find utter chaos. His cabinets had all been broken open and their contents removed. Odds and ends were in one pile while another pile held nothing but packed parachutes and a group of people dressed in black were sifting through them.
“Are … are you robbing me?”
Four other men and a woman stopped what they were doing to regard him. One man looked like he was cut from a solid block of stone. Another was tall and blond with a wide smile. Another was a short Arab with a robotic arm. Then there was a regular-looking blond guy. The woman was o
lder, but beautiful in an intimidating sort of way.
The man with the chiseled face approached Paul. “You’re not being robbed. And we’re sorry for all of this, but we need your plane and your parachutes ASAP. We also need you to fly us.”
“I—I can’t just fly. I have to file a flight plan and—”
“You don’t get it. You’re going to do this and when it’s all over you can come back and get shit faced at the pub. Now, where are your other parachutes? There’s only four here and we need two tandems.”
“Why—are we—”
A dog with body armor padded by, giving him a look.
“For god’s sake.” The angry black man grabbed him by a shoulder. “This is a matter of national security. We’re trying to help England.”
“But you’re American?”
“Well, look at Captain Obvious. Haven’t you heard of our exchange program? We get Anthony Hopkins and Michael Caine and you get us?”
The tall one spoke in a husky voice. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
Paul felt himself begin to tremble.
Then the woman approached him. She put her hand on his arm. “It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.” She stared into his eyes. “Say it.”
“Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Say it again.”
“Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Good boy. Now tell us where the other parachutes are.”
He pointed toward the back of the room, where a large industrial-sized box sat. “In there. But they haven’t been recovered yet.”
Four of the men, minus the angry black man, headed toward the container.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Then to the black man she added, “Brutes. Think he’ll be able to fly the plane if he’s too busy peeing his pants?”
Paul thought it was odd that she would say that. Because he knew that if he could possibly produce any urine at this moment then he’d be well into peeing his pants.
CHAPTER 42
IN DARKNESS SOMEWHERE NEAR GLASTONBURY TOR. 0750 HOURS.
Darkness and pain. He knew he was outside because of the cold that had long ago seeped into his bones. At first his body had rebelled, whatever nerve endings that hadn’t been broken by the beating screaming for him to get them warm. But the longer he’d remained outside, the softer their cries became, until now they were silent, relegated to the reality that the numbness masked the pain that had taken permanent residence in his body.
His legs trembled as they struggled to hold him upright. Although he couldn’t see through the blindfold, he’d known the instant the spike had touched his palm what they’d intended to do. And it was the merging of their laughter with his screams as they nailed first one hand onto a length of wood, then the other. He’d been crucified in honor of his Christian upbringing. Let Christ come down and save you, they’d howled, then added, But then he couldn’t save himself.
Of course he’d had his chance to escape. He’d thought he’d had the time. Walker and YaYa had exfilled the window and he’d heard a scratching in the hallway. Part of him had screamed for him to flee, but he’d paused, raised his weapon, and readied to fire. He hadn’t wanted to leave anyone behind him who would shoot him in the back when it was his turn to exfil the window.
When it came around the corner, he’d tried to pull the trigger but found himself frozen, incapable of even calling out. It stood there. She wore only a stitched smile, her naked body blossoming with pendulous breasts. Her pubic hair had been shaved, revealing a pierced vulva. Her arm came up and pointed to him and he felt himself pulled in her direction. He fought against it, resulting in a hobbled walk like a two-year-old, crossing the floor of the room until he was in her arms. She closed them, giving him a cold embrace; then she kissed him through the stitches.
He’d vomited then and lost consciousness.
When he next came to, he was standing in the middle of a pentacle being struck in the face over and over by men in suits, men dressed as women, women wearing strap-ons, and women dressed like animals. He remembered seeing an impressive figure sitting in a throne-like chair, laughing at him. The figure was regal and wore an iron crown. He was completely cloaked in green, the cloth patterned with holly leaves.
But that’s all he remembered. He’d been hit so frequently and violently that his memory of that period was like an old 8mm movie, skipping ahead, with black spots between images. Then his vision had stopped, but the beating had continued.
Sometime afterward, he’d awoken to find them cutting him. Thin lines of pain along each arm and each leg, one by one by one. He was beyond screaming and whined like a broken dog with each pull of the knife, trying desperately to ignore the bombastic hilarity of his cutters as they laughed uproariously at their deeds.
Then they began to touch him. He’d cried as his body ignored his complaints. A part of him had a will of its own and ignored his protests. He imagined himself trussed somewhere on the ground so he could be cut, then a man, or a woman, or both, wrapping themselves around him and making his body tremble.
And now, as he hung crucified in the middle of the vile celebration, he pushed all those images aside, forgot about the abuse and the pain and the cold, and instead focused on a single image—Preeti standing, her head cocked, her long hair falling down to one side, a self-conscious look on her face, not for a second realizing how beautiful and how wonderful a person she was and how lucky he’d been to know her for a time.
CHAPTER 43
REDLANDS AIRFIELD, SWINDON. 0755 HOURS.
Yank sat behind the pilot, making sure he wasn’t going to do anything stupid. At this point, Yank doubted the pilot would do anything that would make him mad. He’d intentionally tried to terrify the poor kid, both because he needed the man to be afraid of something immediate and because Yank was pretty sick and tired of this whole idea of creating a white-only England. Each time they’d discovered a group had gone missing or someone was killed who had been involved with helping immigrants and refugees, it had served to fuel his anger. Add to that the ineffectiveness of the government and he wanted to punch something or someone. Not only had they emasculated Section 9—which should have been ten times the size of SEAL Team 666 because of all the supernatural shit going down in England—but it was clear that there was compliance at the highest levels, making him wonder how long they’d been planning this. That it took Jen’s death for anyone to notice was a terrible thing, but at least they had the chance to stop what had been inevitable before.
He tried to imagine how England would look without Queen Elizabeth and parliament and instead having King Arthur sitting on the throne. Would there be a round table? How would this sixth-century ruler be able to survive in the modern era? Or would it be kept a secret, King Arthur working from behind the scenes, ordering the complicit MPs to do his bidding? It was all too much.
The plane rumbled down the runway and took to the sky. Holmes and the witch were set up for a tandem, just as YaYa and Hoover were. They’d had to work on the straps for the team dog, but they’d managed finally. The rest of them wore regular commercial chutes, which would get them to the ground, albeit more slowly than their military counterparts.
Yank glanced out the window. They were in a Super Twin Otter de Havilland. He’d jumped out of this model before, so knew how to exit, but it didn’t mean he liked it. He remembered his first mission with Triple Six when they’d HALOed into the Sea of Cortez. Laws and Walker had given him no end of shit for supposedly being afraid of heights. Not that he’d let on, but someone must have let the secret slip.
Truth be told, he was terrified of heights and spent most of the time while he was in the air with his eyes closed in some form or fashion, even if it was only to pretend to sleep.
They were heading to Bratton Castle. He’d had the pilot program the coordinates into the navigation system. He glanced at them to make sure they hadn’t been changed.
51° 15' 49.32" N, 2° 8' 36.6" W. Check.
Laws had checked the wind and weather and had plotted for them to jump from an altitude of 4,000 feet north and west of their target. It would be a cold jump, but they wouldn’t be in the air for long. The two tandem jumper pairs were going out first, separated by ten seconds. Then the rest of them would pile out together. What the pilot did after that didn’t really matter. Either there’d be an entirely different England within a few hours or Triple Six would have accomplished their mission.
And what was that mission?
To kill the mythical King Arthur or at least stop him from becoming king once more, all while trying to not get killed by supernatural hounds and whatever else might be thrown at them. A hard-core terrorist looked easy by comparison. He fought the urge to rub at the bruises the hounds had caused when they’d taken him.
He glanced out the window, then averted his gaze back to the controls. He heard Laws laugh behind him but wouldn’t give him the chance to bring the phobia up again.
It wasn’t long before the pilot announced they were ten minutes out.
The SEALs set their watches.
They’d expected to hear from Ian and his Marines, but there had been radio silence. Several times during the short flight, Holmes had tried to establish contact but with zero luck. Everyone tried to keep their thoughts positive, but the mind could very easily spin lemonade into citric acid.
Laws posted by the open door hatch and got everyone in line.
Yank kept his eye on the pilot.
At five minutes, the pilot slowed the airspeed.
The SEALs did a radio check on their MBITR.
Laws counted down the last thirty seconds and sent YaYa and Hoover out first. After a ten-second gap, Holmes and the witch went next. Then it was Walker and Laws.
Yank patted the pilot on the back of his head, then slid out the door into the air. He let three seconds pass, then pulled his ripcord. He saw the line before him, with YaYa far to the front and lower in altitude. He searched for his landmarks. Keevil Airfield was northeast. He found the town of Bratton, then spied the white horse drawn on the side of the mound. He didn’t know where it came from, but it was made from something white and seemed as large as a football field. The plan was to land west of this landmark, then climb the mound together.