1635 The Papal Stakes (80 page)

Sharon crouched lower, pointed to her eyes, then to the frontal arc across which the enemy was distributed. The three Hibernians, lever actions at the ready, nodded and raised their weapons slightly, ready to bring them up.

They got within twelve yards before the apparent leader of this group came walking out from the back of the villa. He scanned the surrounding area, and a moment later he must have spotted the four shadowy figures approaching in postures of stealthy menace. He brought up his gun, turned to shout.

Sherrilyn went down on one knee and brought her Glock 17 up into a two-handed grip. She squeezed the trigger twice; the leader went backwards—and around him, muskets fired off hastily into the darkness, murdering the air over the Sherrilyn’s lowered head as her three Hibernians set to work.

The echoing cracks of the .40-72 rounds and the creak of the lever actions seemed to set the rhythm for the harvest of death at the rear of the villa. Working from the flanks to the center, noting where the wild-firing muzzle flashes had been, North’s well-trained men cranked round after lethal round into their targets.

Six seconds later, Sherrilyn rose, charged the last ten yards, and found herself standing amidst the sprawled bodies of her attackers. She resisted the urge to spit on them. Instead, she hissed orders. “Corporal, find the man they killed back here and get his revolver. We’ll need it. You and you; watch our flanks. And be alert; our perimeter pickets will be inbound as well.”

“And what next, Captain Maddox?” asked the corporal.

“Next, we bust in there and save our people. So reload all your weapons now; you might not have another chance.”

Valentino, who had just finished getting his men organized for another general rush at the Marines’ table barricade, froze: gunfire at the back of the villa. And those were not his guns: the reports were too sharp and loud, and they came with the
bam-bam-bam
speed of multiple up-time weapons. Christ’s balls, they had a reserve force, hidden somewhere near the building! So now, there was only enough time to—

“Charge!” he screamed, firing a captured flintlock pistol at the barricades. “We have to seize the back door now!”

Emboldened by their numbers, and the now sufficient volume of smoke roiling up from the oil fire at the base of the stairs, nearly twenty of Valentino’s men rose and sprinted forward.

The Marines rose up to fire back, dropped several, were blasted down by the answering volley.

As Valentino’s men reached the table, two lever-action rifles roared down the stairs at them, dropping the first two to reach the makeshift barricade, as well as two others who tried to assault up the staircase itself. From the look of the hits they might not be dead, but were certainly out of the fight.

Many more survived, though, to get behind the tables and turn one around to face up the stairs. Seeing that, the rest of Valentino’s men dove for cover behind it, quickly grabbed hold of the other table and worked it around to match the position of the other. Within moments, one of his smarter mercenaries had found the unemptied revolver that had allowed one Marine to give them so much trouble; that fellow began snapping shots back up the stairs, where the volume of fire began to fall off.

The rearmost half-dozen who charged across the great room were now able to push past the tables and, without breaking their stride, they made it to either side of the back door, panting.

Finally, thought Valentino feeling the sweat that ran along his brow and down his sides, they had control of all the villa’s points of egress. “Reload!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Prepare to sweep the stairs!”

The firefight suddenly became so loud that Sharon could easily have believed it was going on right outside the radio room. She wondered if—how—Ruy could survive such a nonstop barrage of enemy fire—but then shut off the part of her mind that had spawned the question and the thousand mortal terrors she could feel clamoring behind it.

She looked over at Odo, who had frozen into immobility as the firefight surged. “Ambassador,” he asked, “should we perhaps—?”

“Keep sending,” she interrupted firmly. “That’s our job, so we keep doing it.” She drew her small revolver from her pocket and trained it on the door. “No matter what.”

Larry Mazzare tried to force himself to remain calm as Lieutenant Hastings eased open the panel behind the wall-hanging in the north wing’s hallway, but he couldn’t keep from holding his breath. Within this stairway—built and hidden at the core of what, to external observation, looked like the villa’s central, load-bearing stone wall and kitchen fireplace—the noise in the rest of the house had been dim. They had heard faint cries, and the dull, distant thrumming of gunfire, but it had been impossible to gauge how close, or how much of it, there was.

As the panel opened and light shone in, the answer became obvious to all of them: they were at the epicenter of a vicious firefight. Moans, smoke, surging spasms of gunfire, screamed orders, and running feet vied with the stink of burning oil, wood, and gun smoke—all of which drove home the point just how bad the situation was in the villa’s interior. Worst of all, none of the voices they heard were familiar to them.

Antonio Barberini asserted, “I don’t think it’s safe to go out there.”

“No,” answered Hastings, “it isn’t.” He began closing the door. “To the cellar, then.”

Odoardo sighed again; he didn’t really want to go back to the great room and charge up those stairs, no matter how much that asshole Valentino assured him he’d be all right. He looked over Linguanti’s shoulder to determine if Valentino was readying such an assault—but suddenly forgot why he had decided to glance in that direction. He poked Linguanti, a sudden malign smile stretching from one well-tufted ogre-ear to the other.

Linguanti, looking up, saw that expression, saw Odoardo’s eyes fixed gleefully on something behind their group. Linguanti turned around and saw what the big man had noticed: one of the smaller wall-hangings in the northern hallway had swung out slightly, as if it had been a narrow door opening. It was now closing again, soon to be flush against the wall.

“That,” said Linguanti, with a demonic grin to match Odoardo’s ogrish one, “is quite a piece of luck.”

“Yeah,” said Odoardo, hefting his fowling piece in one hand and his axe in the other, “let’s go
that
way.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

As his feet shot over the battlements of the Castell de Bellver’s lazarette, Harry Lefferts heard the sound of the dirigible’s distant engines go through what sounded like a split-second of dopplering:
they’ve spun them about.
Sure enough, the balloon shed speed so quickly that, like the bob of an arrested pendulum, Harry did not travel all the way over the crenellated wall, but only swung forward, and—slowing—he could feel that he would start backward within the next few seconds.

Damn it,
he thought,
I said “slow down” not “stand on the brakes.”
But no use crying over spilt milk; the end of his forward swing had brought Harry well past the inner rim of the lazarette’s battlements and into plain view of the two guards upon it.

They stopped, stared, mouths open as a black-suited ghost flew out of the dark at them.

Harry used that moment of surprise to hammer out rounds at the closest of the two, intending to use only two bullets. But the sway in his motion ruined his aim, and he had to track the target, firing as he did. The third and fourth rounds hit the Spaniard, who went down with a groan.

The other, startled out of his shock by the gunfire, had admirable reflexes: he had his miquelet musket up, cocked, and discharged almost before Harry could blink.

But the Spaniard’s speedy reaction came at the cost of accuracy; the musket ball whispered off into the night.

Harry stretched his legs downward as far as he could. He popped off one round at the second guard—just to make him duck—and then the back of his boots and calves came into jarring contact with one of the merlons of the lazarette’s battlements.

Harry flexed his legs, holding himself there, and released the rest of the landing spools. With an additional three feet of line, he was now able to pitch forward on to the roof, with slack to spare. Staggering ahead as the backward pull from the cable abruptly ended, Lefferts congratulated himself on a job well done—and looked up to see the guard almost upon him, sword drawn.

Since Harry was using both his hands—one free, one gripping his gun—to keep himself from falling nose-first on the roof, he knew he couldn’t bring his weapon to bear in time. So, with his weight already forward, and with the Spaniard’s backswept sword now arcing toward him, Lefferts did what he was best situated to do.

Harry’s tight, forward roll took the Spaniard by surprise. Granted, the surprise did not last long—not quite half a second—but it was enough. And it was fatal.

Harry came out of the roll awkwardly but was still able to wobble up to one knee, spin and steady himself with his off hand as he brought up the gun with the other. He knew he was going to do some piss-poor shooting now, but that hardly mattered: the Spaniard had turned and charged again.

When Harry fired, the guard was less than three feet away. Just to be certain, Lefferts fired three more times, almost draining the magazine. It was essential that this particular fight was over
now
.

And it was. A second after the guard fell, Harry was up, using the handset to signal for Dr. Connal to belay the grappling hooks down the line. Soon the dirigible would be moored in place, the others could join Lefferts, and the real fun could start. And he now had plenty of time in which to accomplish that.

Why, he probably had a full twenty seconds.

“That’s it,” muttered Thomas North when he heard the up-time pistol roaring atop the lazarette. “Gate team, on me. Stair assault team, on Colonel O’Neill. Ground level security, with Mr. Ohde. Ready?” Nods. Thomas nodded back and pushed open the door of the long-duration storeroom.

He had expected troops running in every direction, meaning a hard fight to even get to the gate. Or a score of them gathered in the arms yard, readying a skyward fusillade. What North had not expected was what he now encountered: a moment of absolute, stunned silence in the Castell de Bellver.

North did not stop to enjoy that second, or the striking architecture picked out by the torches flickering in their cressets; he sprinted to the left, and then turned left again into the wide passage that was the Castell’s inner gatehouse and portcullis. Several figures had risen from a table pushed up against the south wall; two more were scrambling to put on their helmets and get their weapons.

North raised his SKS and started firing. At this murderously close range, he felt no need to double-tap any of his targets. The weapon barked repeatedly, each shot momentarily illuminating the crowded, falling bodies. He had killed three of the five when the rest of his team moved past. One defender charged out to engage and died immediately; another took cover behind the doorjamb to cock his musket. He never got the chance to fire it; a flurry of .44 Hockenjoss & Klott blackpowder rounds from two Hibernian revolvers chipped stone, and then clipped him. As the Spaniard came around, grasping his wounded arm, the next two bullets took him straight through the cuirass.

North scanned the gate area: no guards left alive. “Lower the portcullis and smash the gears,” he ordered a large Hibernian who was already producing an iron-headed mallet. He pointed to another. “Corporal, we’ll have company clustering along the moat soon. Pull up the drawbridge, and watch the Spanish closely. No reason to fire at them unless they’re doing something productive. Keep a sharp eye out for them trying to turn the guns on the ravelins about to blow open this gate; shoot any who try it. Once we have the second floor in our control, you’ll put two overwatch marksmen up there.” The Hibernian nodded and moved to carry out his orders. Thomas turned, called back into the arms yard, “Gate secure.”

As Frank had expected, the gunfire on the roof—because of both its suddenness and intensity—stunned the Spaniards in the room into momentary immobility. The infiltrators, however, had expected this signal and the shock it generated. They reacted with the surety of long training. Asher’s bigger assistant swept up the knife that had been entrusted to him and, in completing that act, sliced through the neck of one of the guards. He started turning toward Captain Castro y Papas.

The small, average-sized assistant smashed one of his two long-necked bottles of ethanol full into the face of the closest guard; the guard fell to his knees, bleeding and dazed. Without pausing, the assistant swung the other bottle, cracking it less accurately against the side of the other’s head. While that fellow scrambled from the room, holding his ear, the assistant spun toward Dakis, the razorlike shards of a broken bottle in either hand. But Dakis had recovered in that brief interval and leaped away, over toward Giovanna.

Frank could hardly follow Vincente’s lightning reflexes as his arm shot toward his sword—which would be quicker to use, at this range, than his uncocked pistol—and jumped at him, grabbing at Don Vincente’s sword hand. “No!” he cried.

Vincente looked down into Frank’s eyes, wondering. Perhaps he had expected to see hatred. Perhaps fear. If Frank was sending the look he hoped, the hidalgo would see an appeal, even pleading.

Vincente frowned—just as the bigger assistant started closing in for the kill. Frank threw his hand out, turned to put his body between the long, scalpel-sharp knife and the captain’s body. “I said ‘no’—and that includes you too.”

The large assistant stopped, stared, was about to ask a question—but was interrupted by Dakis’ harsh voice. “Drop the knife.”

They all turned, looked. Dakis did have his gun out. He was holding it directly against Giovanna’s right temple.

Turlough Eubanks came sliding down out of the mists on the guide line—now lashed to an iron fixture in the lazarette’s roof—with a humming noise. He made a wide-legged landing, breaking his forward fall with one hand, securing his gear with the other. “How’re we doin’, Harry?” he grunted out.