One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Dwayne moved from the crowd of fighting men around the mast and Caroline followed. He leaned over the gunwale to watch the twin rows of oars driving them forward. Both teams were pulling full out. They couldn’t keep it up long after twenty hours of rowing with only short rests.

  “We’ll be in a fight before the day is over,” Dwayne said, eyes locked on the foamy wake created by the blades slicing through the chop.

  “What will we do?” Caroline’s voice was small. “Get yourself a spear and keep your back to the mast. When the fighting gets closer, you move away. The reach of the spear will help. Use both hands and maintain a solid stance. You get pulled off your feet, and you’re finished.”

  She digested those bleak instructions. “Where will you be?”

  “Wherever the fight is thickest. They’ll need me. You’ll be able to keep me in sight. I’m taller than any of these guys. Remember, when you stab someone, make sure you twist the blade so you can pull it out.”

  “You get in much spear fighting in the Rangers?”

  “I’ve been in my share of knife fights. Blades are blades. The principle is the same.”

  “This is hopeless, isn’t it?” She pressed closer to him, and he put an arm around her shoulders.

  “I won’t lie to you. We’re probably fucked from the start,” he said, his chin in her hair. “But battles are funny things. You can’t give up. Sometimes the math turns on its head, or an unexpected, variable changes everything.”

  “Example, please,” she said. She wanted him to keep talking about anything to get her mind off what might lie ahead.

  “Like Napoleon’s hemorrhoids.”

  “What?”

  “Napoleon had ’roids the size of grapefruit the morning of Waterloo. Couldn’t get on his horse. Sat in his tent on one of those donuts all day. Had to rely on his generals to tell him what was going on. He got bad intel and went all-in when he should have withdrawn.”

  “Is that true?” She laughed.

  “One tube of Preparation H and we’d be speaking French now,” he said gravely.

  She laughed hard enough to make some of the crew turn their heads.

  “Maybe we should make that our next trip,” he said. “A little butt cream for the little corporal.”

  She collapsed against him, helpless with laughter that turned to sobs.

  AHINADAB WAS AT the stern, pacing back and forth, with an ear cocked for any new word from the hawkeyed boy atop the mast. Xin was conscious once more and in a foul mood. His ruined nose was covered by a bloody cloth tied around his face. It might have looked comical if not for the glare of Xin’s angry eyes blazing from his bruised face. He stood by watching his captain muttering and pacing.

  The sail was down with the wind dying as the sun rose. The sail masters moved the lines back and forth along the gunwales to catch each breath of air. Soon the sail became a liability as a backing breeze blew across the prow. The sail was acting as a brake now, so it was hauled up and secured.

  The captain climbed the ladder to the tiller deck and called to the boy atop the mast. The boy turned from the frightening vision of the pair of ships looming closer. He scanned the sea before the bow. Ahinadab spoke to Yada and pointed his fist toward the lion head and opened his hand, fingers splayed, at an angle to starboard. The helmsman shoved the tiller to bring the bow about. Ahinadab clapped a hand to his shoulder and called down to Xin.

  Xin marched across the deck and growled orders to the rowing boss who set a new rhythm half again more rapid. Groans rose from the rowers below, causing Xin to stomp and spit and howl a stream of invective down at the exhausted men. The oars creaked and rose to match the new pace set by the regular thump of the staff on the boards. Boys filled buckets with sea water and threw them in a shower down on the overheated rowers. It was a race against time and exhaustion now.

  Ahinadab called orders to the fighting men who were standing idle at the starboard freeboard staring at the sails closing the gap behind them. A score of them rushed aft where the Nubian helm mate handed out wooden mallets and pry bars.

  Caroline moved to watch, fascinated as the men, under the direction of the captain, removed the tall structure that rose from the stern to curve high over the helm deck. The thick truss rope was undone and dropped to the deck where crewmen stood holding the slack. Men at the prow undid the truss rope at that end and made it fast to a ringbolt set a meter above the deck.

  The towering aphlaston was disassembled in sections by the removal of wooden dowels that were ingeniously concealed in the detailed carvings of crabs and scallops and sea bass that ran about the base of the graceful timber arc.

  She was witnessing an action that any archeologist of the classical period would give his Ph.D. to see. So much of the modern understanding of construction and operation of these fabled ships was guesswork.

  The entire rear section was hollow rather than formed of solid timbers. It was quickly stripped away to leave a flat area of deck behind and a step lower than the tiller platform. Caroline assumed that the aphlaston was integral to the structure of the ship, a continuation of the keel board. That may have been the case on other ships of this design. On the Lion it was decorative in nature. It most likely served the function of a hiding place for smuggled goods. The sections were hauled down and slid aft to tumble into the water, where they bobbed in the wake and were soon out of sight.

  Crewman took the slack stern end of the truss rope and ran it through a ringbolt set aft. The thick line was hauled tight, and the slack end doubled back forward and held in place with cleats. Wooden rods were inserted between the doubled lines. Hand over hand, the men wound the ropes tighter and tighter until the truss line creaked and hummed with their efforts. When the line was turned to its maximum torque, new cleats were hammered in place and secured with dowels.

  Xin snapped orders and crewmen hurried to the wooden raft that lay dogged down to the deck by lines. It was the same raft that brought Caroline and Dwayne on board what seemed like an eternity ago. The men lifted the raft and carried it aft where other men struggled with the weight to get it past the tiller. Ahinadab himself lent a hand as the grunting men set the raft in place upon the newly revealed section of deck. A stout line was tied to a heavy iron stanchion on deck and run through a bolt set at one end of the raft.

  “What are they doing?” Caroline asked when she sensed Dwayne at her side.

  “Beats the shit out of me. I was Army.” Dwayne took a seat with his back to the hull.

  She glanced back at him. Dwayne had a broad-bladed sword in his fist and was running a stone along its edge.

  “They let you have that?”

  “No one tried to take it away from me.” He grinned.

  She looked down at his bare torso. Dwayne was lean and covered in the muscles he owed to the hard work of soldiering rather than athleticism. His left side was sheathed in a patch of smooth skin that was not his own. It was a skin graft to repair flesh seared lifeless in the heat of an IED blast.

  His arms were covered from shoulder to cuff with tattoos. The Ranger skull with crossed daggers. Paratrooper wings. An ace of spades. A snarling fox with a scroll beneath it that read Rangers Lead The Way. And near his wrist was new ink he picked up somewhere recently: a silhouette of a wooly mammoth. The ink covered ridges of scar tissue he’d earned during long deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

  “You pick out a weapon yet?” He squinted up at her and she looked away.

  “I have my eye on a few.” She moved aside for crewmen carrying stacks of hemp sacking down the center deck.

  The men tossed the sacks down to waiting hands below deck. Consumed with curiosity and anxious for any distraction, Caroline climbed down past the sweating, gasping rowers to follow the sacking down to the hold.

  Dozens of crewmen worked in the gloom shoveling ballast sand into hemp sacks held open by others. Once filled with the stinking sand, the sacks were knotted closed and handed up to others in a chain relay until they reached
the main deck. The men worked silently and rapidly to fill sacks and raise them to men above waiting to hand them upwards.

  She moved up past the heaving oarsmen to stand along the port gunwale. The fighting men, along with the ship’s boys, were all occupied handing sacks of sand along from hand to hand toward the stern. Gripping the freeboard for balance, Caroline moved to follow them.

  The men were building a pile of sandbags atop the raft set now where the stern structure had stood. Xin directed the work as the men placed the sacks in rows across one another. They were making a roughly square stack that had to weigh at least a ton by now with more sand coming.

  Caroline looked away from the laboring men and back across their wake. The two ships were closer now, their sails continuously visible above the swell of the sea. She could make out the motion of their oars. Like the Lion, they had both raised sails. The spars tilted back and forth atop the masts. The sun was high and, now and again, points of light flashed from on board the ships. Spear points, she imagined with an involuntary shudder.

  The boy atop the mast shouted down from his perch. He was stabbing a finger out and shrieking to Ahinadab who roared back at him. The boy was pointing at something ahead of them, not behind. The men stopped their labor and stood looking at one another with a new tension. Caroline feared it was another ship athwart their course. She stood on her toes and raised herself up on the freeboard. She could see nothing.

  “It is land,” Praxus said, beside her now. “He says he sees land.”

  44

  The Narrow Passage

  THE PROW LIFTED from the water, powered both by the increased pace of the oarsmen and levered by the sand-weighted raft positioned at the stern.

  Caroline balanced on her bare feet atop the port freeboard, held steady by a hand wrapped in a spar line and Dwayne’s grip on her leg.

  “What can you see?” he said.

  “It’s either an island or a point off of some mainland,” she said. “We’ve been on a northerly course generally. There’s no way we reached any major islands or the Greek mainland so soon.”

  Ahinadab was at the bow perched high on the prow structure. He was staring at the coastline ahead. He turned and bawled a command to Xin, who repeated it in a scream to Yada who adjusted the tiller. The captain called back again and again, making fine adjustments to their course with gestures and curses. The helmsman pushed and pulled the tiller in direct response.

  “Ask him what the skipper is up to.” Dwayne nodded toward Praxus. The boy was shifting his gaze anxiously from the growing shapes in their wake to the shadow on the horizon before them.

  Caroline climbed down to the deck with Dwayne’s help and entered an exchange with Praxus who shrugged and raised his hands. Dwayne didn’t need a translation. The little bastard knew shit.

  “He says Ahinadab is a clever seaman,” Caroline said. “He assures me that the captain has something up his sleeve, so to speak.”

  “Yeah, a real admiral,” Dwayne said. “He’s probably going to beach this tub and try to hide from the guys who are after us.”

  “Well, that’s a plan. But what about the sandbagging?” She looked sternward.

  Crewmen were tying netting down over the six-foot-high pile of sand sacks atop the raft. They were securing the bags to the raft structure with thick lines.

  “Damned if I know.” Dwayne shook his head. Any of the crew not occupied with rowing or dogging down the raft were busy tossing stuff overboard, anything not essential to the operation of the Lion was heaved into the water. Amphora, crates, baskets, spare lumber—all floated behind the bireme toward the pair of dreadnaughts bearing down on them. The sail and spars were tipped over the freeboard behind the last row of oars so as not to foul them. Even live pigs went over the side to paddle squealing over the waves.

  Whether because of the lightened load or a renewed enthusiasm among the oarsmen, the Lion felt as though it was enjoying a new burst of speed. The coastline grew to stretch across more and more of the horizon before them even as the Carthaginians inexorably closed the distance behind. They were suspended between certain death and uncertain salvation.

  Ahinadab called orders that were echoed by Xin and others. The fighting crew rushed over the boards to retrieve weapons. Men armed themselves with swords and spears. Some tied on leather skullcaps over which they secured helmets. With grim purpose, men strapped on leather corsets studded with iron bucklers. They tied on metal greaves backed with sheepskins to protect shins and forearms. Fighters retrieved round shields decorated with symbols of gods and animals from hooks along the port and starboard rails. Two boys placed embers in the brazier amidships and placed within irons to heat so that wounds could be cauterized to prevent men bleeding to death.

  Sea birds from the coastline swarmed above them and found perches along the freeboards only to flap away when the fighting men pulled shields from where they hung.

  Echephron, the elderly seer, stumbled between the men hustling to arm themselves. He called out for Praxus who came running. The old man waved a hand at the birds gliding over the deck and landing to peck at the boards for scraps. Praxus picked up a length of discarded hemp line and fashioned a knot in one end while the old man barked at him. Swinging the line like a flail, Praxus brought down one of the birds with a blow to the head. The knot crushed the gull’s skull and it dropped, twitching feebly, to the deck.

  The old man hobbled to the dying creature, and with Praxus’ help, lowered himself to his knees by the bird. Working with a hook-bladed knife, Echephron deftly sliced the bird’s torso down the center and worked his fingers among the guts.

  All activity ceased but for the steady rumble of the oar stems in their locks. All eyes were on the old man who knelt plucking organs from the gory mess of the gull’s remains. The men stood silently watching, all forgotten but the work of the seer. Echephron examined each bit between bloody fingers and clucked softly to himself. Liver, lungs, heart. He removed the loops of entrails and gingerly unwound them in his hands to their full length. Applying steady pressure from one end to the other, he caused them to spit out a writhing mess of worms onto the deck.

  Echephron looked stricken as he raised his head to meet the cold gaze of Ahinadab. The captain turned from his oracle without a word and strode back to his spot at the prow.

  “So, the gods have spoken. We are officially boned,” Dwayne said.

  THE SEA EITHER side of the Lion turned pearlescent in hue as they neared the shoreline. Ahinadab called from the bow and the oars lifted from the water. The ship slowed. Ahinadab gestured broadly from his perch toward the helm. Yada’s eyes were locked on his every move, and the helmsman walked the tiller bar back and forth to make the course changes his master demanded.

  Caroline leaned far over the freeboard rail. Moving beneath them was water the color of indigo. She dropped back to the deck and turned to Dwayne.

  “Ahinadab may just live up to the hype,” she said. “He’s plotting a course between shallows. The ships chasing us have a deeper keel than us, so they have to slow down, too.”

  “Yeah, he’s a goddamn genius until he runs out of sea,” Dwayne frowned.

  “He knows these islands, Dwayne. As a military man, you must appreciate the advantage of fighting on terrain you’re familiar with.”

  “As a grunt I know it’s better to avoid a fight you can’t win. I’m hoping the skipper knows a way out of here.”

  “Now you’d prefer running.”

  “Once the shit’s flying, Rangers don’t run. But I’m for any plan that gets you away from here in one piece.”

  She looked away to see the oars of the lead pursuer leap from the water. It was close enough to see the prow above the ram carved in the shape of a clawing wolf. The bow of the ship dropped lower in the surf with the sudden halt in forward motion as the oars backed water.

  THE LION WOUND a slow course along the deep-water channel. The lower bank of oars were working to provide only enough momentum to maintain seawa
y. They entered a current that swung the stern around in a gentle half turn. Xin and the Nubian joined Yada to keep the rudder true and the bow aimed landward.

  Caroline leaned out over the rail to look past the lion head to see that the coastline was comprised of two islands, not one. Propelled by the current, the bireme was cruising into the broad gap between two high headlands. The sun was dropping, and the sea between the cliffs was already in shadow. As she hoped, Ahinadab knew these waters well. There was a chance they could lose their pursuers who were making slow progress one behind the other and falling further and further behind the Lion of Ba’al. Splashes of white water rose all around the pair of ships. The Carthaginians were reducing their ballast just as the Lion had.

  She gripped the rail as the deck lifted under her. The Lion was in the grip of the tide. The ship rose on the current and rushed in toward the chasm between the islands. The oars trundled inward, and the rowers collapsed across them with heaving chests.

  The Lion was soon in the shadow of the cliffs that lined either side of the channel. The waterway was several hundred meters across with black volcanic rock rising above them to blot out the sky. White water glowed phosphorescent where it pounded against jagged rocks at the floor of the walls. These islands were probably once one and riven in two by an earthquake long ago. The channel followed the fault line, which guaranteed a safe depth for passage by the shallow draught bireme.

  Confined by the walls, the channel became a sluice that caused the current to grow swifter. Ahinadab clung to the prow as water crashed over him. He called back orders that were echoed to Yada by the crew shouting over the din booming in the passage. The helmsman bent to the tiller in his fight to keep them to the center of the channel and the bow in line with the racing water.

  The darkness deepened as the glow in the sky retreated over the edge of the western cliff face. They were racing down a throat walled with rock toward blackening shadows “Does the master know where we are going?” Caroline asked Praxus.