To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) (8 page)

Most of what I knew about Vespasian was based on Suetonius, a risky source at best, but I was pretty sure he was supposed to retire and disappear from public life for a number of years after
campaigning in Britannia, an operation orchestrated by Claudius in the original timeline, only to be recalled into the military to deal with the Jewish revolt in the east in 66 A.D.  Agrippina, apparently, had other plans for him.  It was a shrewd strategy.  There hadn’t been progress in Germany since Julius Caesar had crossed the Rhine, only to coming back across just as quickly without venturing very far.  The only noteworthy news in the area after Caesar was the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where three legions were annihilated under the command of Quinctilius Varus.  If Agrippina had plans to expand the empire, going there was the logical, if not dangerous, choice and appointing Vespasian was another.

We’d also heard from passing Roman
s, whose tongues were quite lucid after a few drinks and a scantily clad Helena, that Galba had been assigned to Vespasian’s command team.  After The Battle for Rome four years ago, Galba had gone back to Germany to retrain the nearly destroyed
Legio XV Primigenia
after it had helped Caligula reclaim his imperial power.  Later, he had been made governor of the Iberian Peninsula, another historical consistency.

I wasn’t sure why he had chosen to serve under a relative upstart like Vespasian, but I had a bad feeling it had something to do with our involvement.  As far as I knew, until 69 A.D., Galba’s life was fairly mundane, but since our arrival forced him into a civil war, and a bloody battle outside the gates of Rome, maybe we had piqued his interest in war a bit and
now he was itching for a fight.

Sometimes I wished Vincent were here
, for the sole reason of discussing the finer points of Roman history, but sadly I didn’t have that luxury.  Hopefully, in another few months, I would.  Either way, Galba was to retake command of the
XV Primigenia
and serve alongside five other legions under Vespasian’s overall command, six legions in total, twice as many as Julius Caesar had when he invaded Britain.

It was
clear that Agrippina’s intention wasn’t simply to invade Germany.  She was planning on conquering and taking up shop.  Six whole legions, along with their full compliments of auxilia was an army that could conquer the world.  It was also an army that could take control of Rome.  All we had to do was get Vespasian to understand his potential historical significance, convince Galba to back him, and somehow force Agrippina to step aside so Vespasian could take over.

Easy.

***

It took us about a we
ek and a dozen pointed fingers later, but we soon found our way to the enormous legionary barracks that was the army’s camp.

To say it w
as huge was an understatement.

It sat on t
he west bank of the Rhine River and was called Vindonissa.  It had been built around the birth of Christ and has since been called home by the
Legio XIII Gemina
, and if history was at all accurate, the
Legio XXI Rapax
should have just moved in.  Along with Galba’s
Legio XV Primigenia
and Vespasian’s
Legio II Augusta
, that accounted for four of the six legions meant to embark on the campaign.

It would be a difficult nut to crack as all that firepower would make sneaking in a challenge.  Santino’s UAV would have been helpful for advanced recon, but it was no longer available so we’d have to reconnoiter the camp the old fashioned way.

Like all legion forts, it had been constructed far from the tree line, a defensive strategy that ensured an attacking force would have to abandon the natural cover provided by a tree line to enter missile fire range.

General George Washington, before he was a general and when he was still a Redcoat, had made the mistake of not clearing out the tree line around Ft. Necessity before a battle during the Seven Year’s War.  The blunder had left much of his force dead, and he and his remaining men were just barely able to hold the line.

No insult to George Washington, but Romans would never make that mistake.  Their camps were so efficient and practical that no matter how many legionnaires were present, the fort would always be built around the same basic principles, just scaled up.

Camps worth keeping around, like this one, generally had far la
rger walls around its perimeter and were built with stone instead of wood.  The higher walls would make our infiltration route more difficult, but once inside we’d instantly know our way around.  The only possible snag was that we didn’t know exactly where Galba’s tent would be.  Vespasian, as the overall commander of the entire army, would be staying in the
praetorium
this time, not him.

But the
praetorium
was always situated directly in the middle of the camp, set halfway along the
via principalis
, and it didn’t take a huge leap in logic to assume Galba would be nearby.  As one of Vespasian’s legates, he was only one step below Vespasian in the chain of command, and the army’s generals would be posted near each other.  All it would take is a legionnaire who valued his life more than his pride to tell us where Galba was.

Simple.

We set up our own camp about two miles inside the tree line and camouflaged our tents as well as we could.  We buried them beneath a rock outcropping that jutted out over the landscape, creating a nice little space for our tents beneath.  We secured large bushes around the perimeter and draped a camouflage net over everything.  The site was practically invisible, and I was confident a scouting party would never spot it.

Once our hideaway was concealed, we spent a few hours resting before using the cover of night to scout the Roman camp from the trees.  Using a mixture of infrared and night vision optics, we were able to identify and chart the movement of guards upon the walls.  We timed their patrol route and noted in which direction they paid attention to at all points along their patrol.

At daybreak, Helena used a camera with a telephoto lens the size of a soda pop bottle to take panoramic shots of the camp and its surrounding.  While she was taking her pictures, I retrieved my small journal from a cargo pocket and took some time to sketch the landscape with a few pencils.  While using both sketches and photographs may seem redundant, utilizing them together was a practice indoctrinated in snipers, recon marines, and other units for decades.

We returned to camp in the early evening
, having shifted our recon position a handful of times, arriving to a freshly cooked dinner delivered by Santino.  He had shot, cleaned, and cooked a deer while Helena and I were away, and by the time we joined him, he was already packing leftovers in salt, preserving it for a lifetime.

We poured over the images taken earlier as we ate, quickly remembering that we
were no longer dealing with amateurs.  Legionnaires were professionals.  They weren’t a peasant army roused by a belligerent warlord in a time of fickle bloodlust, but career soldiers.  Warriors.  This was their job.  And they were very serious about their craft.  It took us an hour before we even found a possible loophole in their defensive network.

We were
able to note a single weak area – a blind spot along the north wall where patrolling guards left an opening, dead center of the wall.  The segment of the wall in question was particularly dark and was left unguarded for about three and a half minutes.

More than enough time to scale the wall and sneak inside.

Helena and I spent the rest of the evening preparing for the operation to come, while Santino complained about having to stay behind and play spotter.  He wanted to see “Ol’ Triple Chin,” as he had dubbed Galba for his jowls and multiple chins, but we didn’t have a ghilli suit for him.  Helena and I were both trained snipers and camouflage with the use of a ghilli suit was our stock and trade, not Santino’s.  While he may have been able to sneak up on God Himself, his kind of stealth was different from ours.  He was a master at hiding in plain sight or in a crowd, but the art of camouflage was, as my trainers had said, less about avoiding detection and more about simply being undetectable at all.

Ghilli suits allowed us to be one with the environment.  They were handcrafted and modular so that Helena and I could tailor them to mimic whatever environment we wanted.  We’d spent most of the past few days doing just that, adding bits of grass and local fauna to them,
crafting the perfect disguise.

By the time we finished them two days after finding Vindonissa, it was too late for Helena and I to delve into the conversation I knew we needed.  We mostly kept to our
selves, but by 0200 on the third day, I tried to purge all thoughts plaguing my mind when we launched the operation by crawling our way through the low grass of the meadow towards the camp, back in sniper-mode. 

Focused and meticulous
.

In little under an hour, we made the first leg of our journey smoothly and without incident.  We didn’t have to worry about some
thing like random search lights and Roman torches could barely reach out past their palisade.  Additionally, as luck would have it, tonight’s moon was as far from full as it was going to get.

When
I pushed my arm out again to inch myself forward, all it came into contact with was air.  I looked under my hood and saw the ground fall away steeply.  We’d made it to the trench.  I tapped my toe twice in quick succession against the soft grass, letting Helena know we’d made it to the first major impediment.  She gave my ankle a gentle squeeze to confirm she understood, and I slide forward.

Navigating the trench was easy, just down to the bottom for a few meters, then back up.  We’d noted the previous night that the ditches appeared freshly dug, possibly as simple upkeep to ensure they were kept clear.  But it also left the soil loose and littered with freshly dug grass, just enough
for our grassy ghilli suits to blend right in.

The trip took about ten
minutes.  When I bumped my head against something hard after crawling up the other side of the trench, I knew we’d reached the palisade.  Glancing up, I peeked through my hood of grass and took in my surroundings.  The wall of the Roman fort stood immediately in front of me, at least thirty feet high.

I se
nt a double click to alert Santino that we had arrived by tapping my radio’s push-to-talk button twice in rapid succession.  We waited for what seemed like an hour before I heard Santino’s faint voice in my ear.

“Clear.  Four minutes
on my mark…” he paused “…mark.”

Helena was already rising to her feet, turning her back to me
as she shrugged out of her ghilli suit.  I pulled it off her shoulders and packed it into her backpack while she did the same with mine.  We wore our night ops combat fatigues with our olive drab MOLLE vests over them.  We were lightly armed, but Helena also had a small grappling hook dangling from her vest, which I dutifully retrieved and prepared to toss over the wall.  I made a few quick circles in the air as I spun the hook, releasing it on the fourth.  It went sailing over the wall and silently made contact with the rampart’s floor thanks to its rubber tips.  I pulled the rope until it was taut, giving it another tug just to be sure it was secure.  Satisfied, I started my ascent, Helena right behind me. 

A short climb later,
I bounded over the lip of the wall, landing quietly onto the rampart.  I side stepped immediately to the left so Helena could land behind me.  When she did, we gathered up the rope and I reattached everything to her rig.

I risked
a quick look out over the camp, seeing for the first time an endless sea of torches illuminating an incalculable number of tents, all lined up in neat little rows.  In that moment, I couldn’t avoid a slight sense of unease tickle the back of my mind at the fact that I hadn’t brought Santino instead of Helena, because this was when we could have really used him.  I could see guards aplenty scattered through the interior of the camp and there were thousands of resident randomly going about one bit of business or another.

We
’d anticipated as much, but the idea of sneaking through the forest of tents below us was unsettling.  Santino could have walked down the
via principalis
stark naked and go completely unnoticed, but I had to be here since I was the only one with enough facts to talk to Galba and Helena’s ghilli suit didn’t fit him.  It hadn’t been out of the question for us to craft his own ghilli suit out of locally made materials, even if it wouldn’t have been up to the standards of our modern ones, but none of us had voiced any concerns during the planning stage about his absence.  Four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have considered bringing Helena on such a dangerous mission.  She’d been a green rookie, chosen for Pope’s Praetorians because of a falsified record, but four years of operating with Santino and me had honed her into an effective military machine.

I tried to push it out of my mind
as Helena placed her hand on my back, indicating she was ready to move.  I reached behind me to tap the side of her leg to confirm I was ready as well.  When we reached the first guard, I took aim with my air pistol fitted with tranquilizer darts, but didn’t fire.  I knew enough about Roman camps to know that if this guard didn’t meet up with his partner, now at the other end of the wall, an alarm would go up almost immediately.  Instead, we took advantage of our dark camouflage and quietly shifted positions to the inner edge of the rampart, and crawled our way behind him.