To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (50 page)

“Hmm,” I
hummed.  “Shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”

“We
could
just go around,” Santino pointed out.

“We could, but I’d rather not have anyone behind us.  This post means we have to be pretty close to the AO.  I don’t want anyone sneaking up on us while we’re reconnoitering Agrippina’s location.”

“You’re the boss.”

I nearly missed my next breath at the comment, but quickly recovered. 
“Any thoughts on a tactical approach?”

“I’d say the best way to take care of them is to have them come to us,” he
suggested.

“Yep,” I agreed, squinting through my binoculars.

He glanced at me.  “You don’t actually have a plan?”

“Well,” I said, meeting his look.  “One could call it that.”

“Call it a plan?”

“Yeah.”  I shrugged.  “
Sure.  Why not?”

He snickered.  “This should be good.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Santino and I rode our black horses
towards the guard post, our pace innocent and nonthreatening.  Before setting out, we’d radioed for the rest of the group to move up to our recon position and wait to receive the bad guys.  Once they’d set up the perimeter, the two of us had set out.

“You ready for this?”  I asked him.

He turned towards me and smiled.

“Try not to laugh too hard
,” I said.

“Man, t
his should be
really
good.”

Only a few yards out, I gave the post a quick perusal and noted the posture and positions of each guard.  Santino had been right.  Most looked like they didn’t want to be there, while the rest merely let on like they cared.  They were so out of it
upon our arrival that those out front were visibly surprised by our presence, even though we had been in view for the past ten minutes.  A centurion came out to meet us, one of his buddies not far behind.

“Halt,” the centurion called.  “State your business.”

I gave him a warm smile.  It was easy to smile.  I’ve always wanted to do this.

“My name is Ben Kenobi,” I told the centurion.  “
This is Luke Skywalker.  Let us through.  We’re on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan. ”

“You’re on a diplomatic mission to…” the centurion looked at his companion curiously, “…Al
-der-an?”

“You don’t need to see any identification,” I continued, waving my hand at him.  I looked
at Santino.  He was staring at me, his mouth hanging open, no grin in sight.  Even he couldn’t believe I was doing this, and he didn’t even seem to care that he was possibly blowing the entire ruse.

“We… don’t need to see a
ny identification?”  The guard repeated slowly, again looking towards his partner.

Was this actually working?

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for?”  I asked with an inkling of hope.

“What?!”  The guard yelled, indicating to his comrades.  “Seize these fools!”

He reached out to grab the reigns of my horse, but before he could grasp them, I pulled out my Sig and shot him in the chest.

“Boring conversation, anyway,” I said, my smile
evaporating.  I pulled hard on the reigns, orienting Felix back towards our convoy, enticing him to put on some speed.  I turned to Santino, conveniently galloping at my side and offered him a toothy grin.  “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Really
??  That was your plan?”

“Don’t tell Helena.”

“Oh, you owe me big time, buddy,” he replied, his grin returning.  “Big time.”

I didn’t think he’d say anything
, but my impending romantic doom wasn’t nearly as important as the thing that had just struck my back.  I craned my neck to see an arrow sticking out of my shoulder, luckily stopped from impaling me by my body armor.  Santino looked over and noticed it as well.

“Move it,” he said, pushing his horse even faster for the last hundred yards to our waiting teammates.

Arrows started falling all around us and Roman soldiers mounted horses to give chase.  We had a good lead on them, but sniper fire from our comrades was already picking the Roman archers off.  By the time we reached the small recon dune, most of the Romans giving chase laid dead behind us.  The half dozen remaining Romans noticed their predicament, and turned tail and fled.  We couldn’t let them alert anyone of our presence, so we picked them off as well, one by one.

From the time I shot the first centurion to when the last R
oman fell from his horse, only four minutes had passed.  Quick, clean and proficient.  Once we were sure no one was getting up, the team moved quickly through the bodies and policed them.  Only Helena neglected her duties, rushing over to me instead to examined the arrow stuck in my back.

I didn’t feel any pain, and I knew there was no way the primitive arrow could
have penetrated the Kevlar that lined the combat fatigues I wore under my robe.  Even so, she examined it carefully before diagnosing that it was clear for extraction.  With a quick yank, she pulled it free from my MOLLE vest.  Stepping around to face me, she broke it in half and threw it at my chest angrily.  I knew what she was thinking.  Another stupid mistake that could have ended much worse than it had.  She stood there for a few seconds, just staring at me silently, and then she threw her arms around my shoulders and pulled herself in tight.  She hung there for a while before pulling back, holding me by my arms.  Her face revealed her concern, but she shook her head at me before turning to help the others.

I watched her go.

Women.

***

“I’ve got two guards in the Northeast cupola,” Vincent reported over the radio.  “Two more at the base of the tower.”

“Copy,” I replied, making a mark in my notebook.

“Five more at the gate.”  That was Wang.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled, scribbling furiously.

“Three on the south wall.”  Helena this time.

“All right, all right,” I commed.  “Slow it down.  So far we have forty Praetorians scattered throughout the perimeter.  Keep going.  Slowly.”

Their constant updates were disheartening.  We’d arrived three hours ago around midnight, and had set up shop about an hour after that.  All of us from Madrina to our former legion buddies were scattered around the decent sized seaside resort, counting and cataloging bad guys.  We’d expected plenty of guards around the site, but things were quickly getting out of hand.  No one had bought into Helena’s theory of their being thousands of guards, but we were at least expecting her Sacred Band of three hundred Praetorians.  Granted, she’d co-opted many of those men into her new ninja battalions or whatever, and since we’d just got done killing fifty or so of them, I thought maybe we’d get lucky.

“Ten near the docks,” Santino radioed.

I marked it.

I personally didn’t care how many men were there.  Only one person mattered and that was Agrippina.  The caves five years ago had
housed just as many terrorists, and those men had been equipped with AK47s, not swords and shields.  If not for my piss poor driving skills, we would have been fine.  Clearing out a village no bigger than a downtown city block, full of Romans who weren’t expecting us shouldn’t be a problem, especially if we were well prepared.

There seemed to be a lull in the team’s updates.

I glanced up from my notebook, the same one I’d been scribbling nonsense in for the past few months. “Any more tangos?”  I asked

“I’ve got one more coming out of the building,” Helena updated.  “Maybe back from a bathroom break.”

“Anything else?”

Silence.

“Good,” I continued.  “Hold your positions for thirty mikes and maintain visual contact, then report back to camp.”

I received a chaotic series of clicks in return, but it sounded
like everyone got the message.

I was already at our camp, maybe f
ive miles from the villa Agrippina had occupied inside the village.  Wang had spotted her on a balcony earlier, so we knew exactly where she was staying.

We were near the beach
behind a few high dunes in case the Romans came snooping.  In preparation for the team’s arrival, I moved down to the shoreline and sketched an accurate representation of the town in the damp sand.

North of
Tripolis, Syria, modern day Tripoli, Lebanon, the town was negligible in size, but the villa that sat in its center was formidable.  The complex sat on a little more than an acre of land, but half of that space consisted of the interestingly designed villa.  Some kind of amalgamation of Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian architecture, it sported arches, columns, cupolas, minarets, and designs I was completely unaware of.  It looked like a piece of junk in my opinion, but I was hardly an expert.  At least it had enough entrances and hiding spaces to sneak in a ten man squad from random trajectories.

To my sketch, I added the fo
ur walls, towers at the corners and every guard lookout station we had identified.  I added the dock, and made sure the size was as close to scale as I could manage.

I took a
few steps back and admired my handiwork.  It would do.  I started adding some more detail to the dock area, probably the most accessible route into the complex, when I noticed the first arrival.  I looked up to see Helena making her way towards the camp, unaware that I was on the beach.  She looked in our tent to find it empty, so I called out to her before she grew concerned.  She waved back and entered the tent for a few minutes, emerging without her gear and wearing shorts and a tank top, her feet bootless.

She
walked down to the beach slowly and sat next to my diagram, burying her bare toes in the damp sand.  She extended her hand to me.  I looked at it for a second but she was insistent, so I let her pull me down to the sand next to her.  I followed her lead and took off my boots.

The sand felt good between my toes
, almost like a massage, and I suddenly felt as though I were elsewhere.  Alone, on the beach, with our toes in the sand, the moonlight streaming down from out over the Mediterranean, I almost thought we were on vacation.

“Jacob, can we talk?”

I let my eyes close shut of their own accord, feeling the image slip away with her words.  The last time she wanted to “talk” was during that first month in Rome when she told me she’d been a green rookie covering our backs in combat.  That had been bad enough.

“If it’s about the mission, I really don’t want to hear it,” I told her matter of factly.  “We have to do this.  With luck…”

“It’s not about the mission,” she cut me off quietly, her voice devoid of anger or frustration.  “Or timelines or Agrippina or anything like that.”

Her tone threw me.  She’d been our most vocal
advocate for taking down Agrippina since this whole mess started.  She’d always had more reason to hate her than any of us.  Even me.  But just now she sounded as if she didn’t even care at all.

“Then what’s this about?”

“It’s… it’s about us.”

“Us?”  I asked, curious
.  “You finally breaking up with me?”

“What?  No.  Of course not.”  She shook her head distractedly.  “I love y
ou more than…”

“I love you too, Helena,” I interrupted.  “I don’t think I say it enough, but I do.  More than anything else.”

“I know you do, Jacob.”  She sighed.  “I’m sorry I’ve been so distant, but I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“This have anythi
ng to do with what we talked about in Galba’s tent a few months ago?”

“In a way, yes,” she replied, still very distracted
, “but also no.”

She picked up a handful of sand and
I watched as it streamed between her fingers, the wet clumps making tiny mounds as they impacted the beach.

“
Its okay, Helena.  Just tell me.”

She choked a halfhearted la
ugh.  “It’s really so simple…”

“Hey, lovebirds,” Santino called out from the dune, Wang, Gaius, and Marcus beside him, “leave room for the Holy Spirit down there.”

I sighed and waved frustratingly at him, but I shifted my attention back to Helena.  I was on the edge of my seat over what she was going to tell me.  All the tension between us aside, I wanted to know what was bothering her.  Had to know.  She was staring at the sand and looked sad, rather than annoyed.  I simply could not guess what was bothering her.  What could do this to her?

I reached across my body and gripped her
cheek with the palm of my hand, rotating her face towards me.  I waited until she met my eyes, her bright green ones confirming her sadness.

“Now’s not the time for jokes,” I said.  “
I’d really like to know what’s going on.  Once we’re done with the briefing, we’re going to sit back down, right here, and we’re going to talk about it.”