To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (53 page)

As gravity pulled them to
the ground, all three members of Bravo Team were rushing forward to plant themselves firmly against the perimeter wall.  My view was obscured in that moment, but I was able to watch as Wang and Santino rounded the corner of the outer wall’s entrance and disappear into the complex.  I shifted my attention to the other known guard positions within my line of sight.  Each contained their occupants, seemingly unaware of what was happening around them, and then they too were removed from the game.

Two minutes later, Santino’s voice came over the com.  “Alpha
Lead, this is Bravo Actual.”

“Go ahead,” I answered.

“Beachhead secure.  Give us five mikes to change out of our wetsuits, and regroup at rally point one.”

“Roger, Bravo
Actual.  Charlie Actual, howcopy?”

“Solid copy,” Bordeaux’s voice came back.  “Rally point one, five mikes.”

I sent him a double click and waited with Helena and Vincent for a very long five minutes.  When time was up, we rose to our feet and double timed the one hundred yards to the southern end of the beach side perimeter wall.  Charlie Team would be coming in from the north.  We made the trip in seconds, arriving at the outer wall just before Charlie. 

At
the head of our three person column, I led Alpha Team forward as we scooted our way along the wall, approaching the entrance Bravo Team had already cleared.  I tracked Charlie approaching from the opposite side of the entrance, Bordeaux with his Big Fucking Gun on point.

I reached the corner first.

When Bordeaux arrived, he pulled up short and sent me a nod.  I returned the gesture, rounding the corner just as he did.  I dropped to a knee while Bordeaux plunged straight through.  Helena stood above me offering additional cover.

The immediate area was clear.  No sign of Bravo
Team.

With a quick flick of his wrist, Bordeaux gestured for both teams to follow him in.  I complied, moving into the complex with Helena and Vincent right behind me.  We fanned out to the right while Charlie
– including Gaius and Marcus – went left.

I took a quick look around.  The interior of the courtyard was
pleasant but rather unremarkable, decorated with cobblestone pavement, a few hanging gardens scattered about and a fountain with a sizable swimming pool alongside it.  It was almost as nice as that four star resort I’d dreamt about a few days ago, sans bikini clad women.  There were also a half dozen bodies scattered about, each with neat bullet holes in their chests.  Alpha and Charlie quickly went to work concealing them in the shadows.

The job took about three
minutes, and there was still no sign of Bravo.  Definitely not part of the plan.  Helena and I were just about to toss a body into a pile of his friends when we heard a twig snap behind us.  Reacting instantly, we dropped the body and spun around, bearing our weapons in the direction of the sound.  A single silhouette appeared in the darkness, only to reveal himself as Titus when he stepped into the light.  Realizing his blunder, his masked face glanced at the ground in embarrassment.

Two other figures emerged out of the darkness like
shades in the night, the more experienced Wang and Santino.  One of the masked figures, I assumed Santino, stepped up beside Titus and whacked him in the back of the head in admonishment.  The other figure, Wang probably, patted Titus on the shoulder consolingly.

I looked at Helena.  She rolled her entire head in an exa
ggerated gesture of annoyance.

Everyone’s masked faces made the whole scene as comical as
a Three Stooges routine.

I stood and moved towards Santino while Helena rolled the body amongst his buddies.

“Sit-rep,” I demanded once I was within whisper distance.

His masked face glanced around the courtyard.  “Perimeter secured.  Eight additional tangos down and out.  There’s only one entrance to the
town that we can find and it’s been cleared.”  He paused while he consulted the lens situated in front of his right eye and manipulated the screen attached to his forearm.  “UAV confirms all sighted tangos in the courtyard have been eliminated.  Tagging new targets inside the town.  Transmitting.”

I nodded and checked to make sure Alpha and Charlie were done cleaning up the bodies. 
After confirming that they were, I turned back to Santino before tapping my own forearm screen to call up the information being sent by Santino’s UAV.  Red blips popped up at set intervals throughout the town, some stationary, others on patrol.  It was a standard security detail found in any legion fort.  I watched as four red blips walked past two green ones, the ones representing Santino and me.  The distance between us had only been a handful of meters, but they were on the other side of the inner courtyard wall, completely oblivious to our presence.

My heart didn’t so much as skip a beat. 
While it was pounding at a consistently accelerated tempo, the sensation was normal, and I was focused – on mission – a rarity for me these days.

A ticker in the upper right hand portion of my
eyepiece reported forty six hostiles scattered throughout the village, the same number as last night.  I clicked my com and radioed Madrina, who sat safe and secure in our forward operating base, little more than a mile away.

“Base,
Alpha Lead.  Prepare to receive UAV control from Bravo Actual now.”

I nodded to Santino and he returned
the gesture with the tap of a finger.  In an instant, Santino relinquished control of his UAV over to Madrina.  While he could still update intel through his touch screen, Madrina now controlled the flight pattern for the UAV and would be our primary eye in the sky.  She was using our spare set of interfacing equipment, something she hadn’t a clue how to use mere weeks ago, but could now operate with a certain amount skill.  The hardest part had been convincing her she wasn’t practicing some form of black magic.

“Okay, Jacob,” she said and I wince
d at her lack of radio discipline.  Santino rolled his eyes at the slip up but I pushed it out of my mind.  She was doing her job as well as any fish out of water could.  I’d had my doubts about allowing her to use anything we’d brought with us from the future, but Bordeaux had vouched for her, and that was good enough for me.

Everything seemed ready to go.

“Flash my eyepiece if you need to update our intel,” I ordered her, tapping Santino on the shoulder at the same time.  When he turned, I hooked a thumb towards the door. “You’re on point.”  I turned to Bordeaux.  “Charlie’s rearguard.”

The Frenchman
held his thumb up and signaled for his people to fall in.  Helena and Vincent were already behind me, but by the time I looked back at Santino, Bravo Team was already stacking up behind him as he knelt by the door that would lead us into the town.  I quickly moved to catch up, Santino already using a fiber optic cable that he had snaked under the wooden door.

The cable had a small monocular attached to the end, with two rings encompassing the device.  Santino held it up against his eye, manipulating the rings to twist the lens beneath the door left and right, and to focus it.  We used to have a fancy version that connected to our computers and projected images directly to our eyepieces, but I broke it two years ago. 
Stepped on it.  Santino had not been happy.

Apparently satisfied, he pulled it
back and tucked it into a pouch on his rig.  He sent a nod to Titus, who slowly gripped the simple ring door handle and carefully opened the door inward.  Wang stood just to the side, sticking his UMP into the opening.  With a quick nod, Santino and Titus moved in, Wang following, with Alpha and Charlie behind them.

Laid out before us was a simple walled city, no more than
a village by modern standards, and like any good Roman city, it was easy to navigate.  Built along a simple grid pattern much like any legion fort, the city possessed five main roads that ran along its length.  Its center road was twice the width of any two of the others and ended at the steps that led to the largest building in the town, Agrippina’s villa.  Bisecting these roads were maybe twenty shorter ones that ran parallel to each other.

Along these roads were a series of smaller buildings.  During our recon, we hadn’t noticed movement from anyone other than Agrippina and her Praetorians, so we weren’t sure what they were meant for.  Whether the town had been abandoned prior
to their arrival or if they had evacuated the city at the same time, we couldn’t determine.  Either way, dozens of buildings were left scattered throughout that could contain any number of hidden problems.

I led Alpha team to the very first of these buildings, Charlie stacking up behind us while Santino directed his team to a building opposite the road we’d emerged onto.
  I kept one eye on my eyepiece to keep track of the patrol’s progress as I peeked around the corner to get my first real look at the villa.

It was huge, almost half as wide as the town itself, its bulk cutting off the inner two roads that flanked the main road.  Our UAV scans had shown that it sat in the back half of the city from our position, and dominated everything around it.  Maybe six or seven stories high, its peek offered a three hundred and sixty degree view of its surrounding area.  The view must have been spectacular, with the Mediterranean Sea to the East and nothing but scrub desert as far as the eye
could see in every other direction.

I nodded to no one but myself as I completed this analysis in a though
t.  I pulled my head back, but something caught my eye and I had to force myself from doing a double take.  It seemed that many of the villa’s surrounding buildings were incomplete, or in various stages of construction.  Some were completed, but the majority consisted of little more than a roof and its support structure. While, nothing seemed out of place by the scene, something about it tickled me in a bad way.  Maybe this was a new town under renovation, but something felt off about its varying stage of completion.

Before I could think on it more, I felt Helena’s hand
squeeze my shoulder, indicating everyone was ready to move out.  I reached back and tapped her leg, confirming I understood her gesture.  With another glance at my eyepiece to confirm the patrols were out of sight, I rounded the corner and set off into the town.

I pushed forward, my rifle held out in front of me in a ready position, my eyes partially focused through my scope.  Walking us forward at a
quickened pace, my team and I swept the roads for previously unknown assailants, stopping at every intersection we encountered.  Our objective was to avoid contact before entering the villa by not drawing attention to ourselves.  There were too many Praetorians patrolling the exterior grounds to ensure we remained undetected if we started dropping bodies.

It was child’s play.  Back in 2021, even the most primitive of guerilla forces
could be equipped with signal jammers that could block our communications or low level disruptors that sent out the briefest of EMP pulses that could short out everything from our UAV to our red dot sights.  Needless to say, infiltrating this town was even easier than sneaking into the Roman provincial compound back in Caesarea.

But that didn’t mean I thought our infiltration would be effortless.  We were about two thirds of the way to the villa when my
eyepiece indicated one of the patrols was about to turn a corner and put them into direct line of sight with our line of movement.  I raised a fist to signal a halt and shook two pointed fingers towards the wall to my right.  Like most of the buildings, it was in a state of near construction.  Built of clay, adobe or some such material, the building had multiple large windows cut into place.  I leaned to my right and rolled myself over the lip of the sill and into the empty shell of a home.  I crouched and leaned against the inner wall, keeping an eye on my eyepiece and waited for the four red dots coming up behind us to pass by.

Their progress was slow, calculated, and when they moved
near enough for me to hear them, I heard nothing but the shuffling of their feet and the subtle clinking of metal on metal, be it armor, sword or both.  No words were exchanged, nor was there any sign that they were doing anything but their jobs.  It was almost disconcerting the level of discipline they were putting on display tonight.  They were dedicated beyond reproach, stalwart warriors without equal.  Either these guys were the last of Agrippina’s original Sacred Band, recruited from the best and most loyal Praetorian ranks, they themselves recruited from the best of the legions before that, or her new band of miscreants were more formidable than we thought – a thought that gave me further pause for thought.  Roman legions trained and equipped in the art of modern warfare would be something worth considering.  A few thousand of them wouldn’t sway the course of a world war, no, but they’d be an interesting variable thrown into the mix.

Something worth considering
for the book I’ll have to write some day.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Helena and Vincent rise to their feet.  A quick glance
at my eyepiece confirmed the patrol had passed by us and were moving towards the villa.  I rose to my feet and climbed over the ledge more carefully this time.  Santino and his team emerged from a similar house across the road and stacked up, my team and Charlie doing the same.  Without a word, I started moving again, following a safe distance behind the roaming patrol.