lefferto rubbish, and walk away.”
“Why? I am proud to be a lefferto and I will not-”
“You will be dead if you do not do as I tell you. The attack has failed. The Spanish will find many dead lefferti. They will search very hard for the rest. Do not be stupid. Get rid of the lefferti clothes and doo-dads and do not look back. Go into hiding for a week, at least. Can you do this?”
“ Si. I-”
“Excellent. Go. Now. Dr. Connal?”
“Yes?”
“You stay here with the boats.” North held up a hand. “No complaints. Someone has to guard our ride home.” He turned to his own men. “You two come with me. I suspect our rifles will be needed to help Captain Lefferts with his fighting withdrawal. Which, if my ears don’t deceive me, is rapidly approaching.” He scooped up one of his favorite up-time toys-an SKS semiautomatic carbine-and ran toward the Ponte Cestia at a crouch.
For one terrifying moment, as new gunfire crackled out over the Tiber behind him, Harry Lefferts feared that the Spanish had boxed him in. That they had somehow known he planned to withdraw by boat after traversing the Isola Tiberina and had therefore put a blocking force at the bridge.
But the steady fire was coming from Thomas North’s anchor watch. The Limey had apparently pulled his team forward. As Harry reached the Ponte Fabricia, he dropped to a knee and reloaded his Remington for the third time. He looked up intermittently to wave the rest of the Wrecking Crew past him, then the Hibernians, and then the Wild Geese. By the time Owen Roe came along, bringing up the rear, having expended the last of his ready pepperbox cylinders, the Spanish had started closing the distance. They were getting bold again.
Despite the fading light, the early moon showed Harry a good target at just over fifty yards: a foot soldier whose slightly heavier and more weapon-festooned outline suggested a senior sergeant, marshalling the advancing troops. Harry raised his rifle, ignored the incendiary throbbing in his shoulder, let the crosshairs float down to settle on the silhouette and squeezed the trigger. He did not wait to see the result; he simply turned and ran.
As he passed North and his men, there was a loud explosion in the distance, somewhere in the north of Trastevere, from the sound of it.
Harry continued to run until he reached the boats. Thomas North and his two Hibernians were already close behind him by the time he got there. They jumped over the sides together. Waiting hands grabbed them while others-white with clutching poles and oars-pushed the shallow-bottomed punts off and out into the swifter current. As the oars started to creak in the locks and the boats picked up speed, Harry looked back over his boats and the city.
In his own boat, Owen Roe O’Neill sat in the thwarts, empty-eyed, clutching the bullet-tattered cloak that had belonged to the earl of Tyrone. George Sutherland was alternately weeping and laughing. Matija, the bleeding from his arm wound staunched, watched with dull eyes as Dr. Connal moved away from Felix and sat next to Harry.
“Let me look at that shoulder, Captain Lefferts.”
“I’m just Harry, Doc. And I can wait. Finish up with Felix, first.”
“I have finished. He’s dead, Harry.”
The pain as the doctor started cleaning the shoulder wound was welcome. Resisting that pain made it easier to resist the deeper, sharper agonies that were cutting down into his soul. Gerd. Juliet. Felix. John O’Neill. Several of the Wild Geese. Most of the survivors wounded. And scores of rioters and lefferti littering the streets of Rome. Their jaunty hats trampled. Their faux sunglasses shattered.
Harry reached into his chest pocket and drew out his own sunglasses. They were the ones that had given birth to, and had become the trademark of, the myth of Harry Lefferts: commando, ne’er do well, adventurer. And above all, a man who could not be beaten. He looked at his own, distorted reflection in the glasses, ghostly in the fading light. Unbeatable. Uber cool. Yeah, right.
Harry snapped the glasses in two and threw them into the Tiber.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY
Cardinal Gaspar de Borja y Velasco actually clapped his hands once in sharp, exultant glee. “Senor Dolor, this is excellent news. And we owe our victory, it seems, to your excellent stratagems. Which you must explain to me: how were you able to defeat the Wrecking Crew when no one else in Europe seemed capable of doing so?”
Dolor shrugged. “By giving them what they expected to see. In every particular.”
Borja frowned. “More detail, please, senor: I am not a military man.”
Truer words were never spoken-particularly by you, red hat. “Your Eminence, you may use simple traps to catch simple beasts; a bit of food left dangling over a pit will capture most unwary predators. But Lefferts and his Crew were not unwary predators; like foxes, they were inherently wary of traps and ploys-having used so many themselves.
“So, in setting this trap, I was mindful that we had to create the illusion of a reasonable defense, but with a few subtle flaws that they could exploit.”
“Such as?”
“Such as their belief that we had only a third of the troops that we actually had stationed in the insula Mattei. To create that illusion, we had to mimic-in every detail-what an undermanned garrison would do. In this case, that involved denying casual access to the interior of the insula, thereby concealing our supposedly scant numbers. But careful observers would detect other hints of insufficient forces: our victualing from sutlers was sufficient for only one-third of our men. To make that possible, we had to stock the insula weeks beforehand with enough food and drink to supply the other two-thirds of our men for three months. So the Wrecking Crew drastically underestimated our true strength.”
“Also, the second story of the courtyard of the Palazzo Giacomo Mattei was the only site in the entire insula where it would be reasonable to house prisoners, and yet have them visible to the outside. Had Lefferts not been able to see his targets ahead of time, he would either have had to cancel or mount a general assault.”
“Which we would have crushed,” Borja asserted with chin raised.
“Yes, but with much greater cost to us, Your Eminence. It was essential to make Lefferts confident that he would be able to succeed with finesse, rather than brute strength. I do not think a brute strength approach would have worked in any event, but we could be sure of this: if the Wrecking Crew had resolved themselves to the idea that they could only succeed through direct, massive destruction, they would have been far more dangerous to us. Look what they did to the Tower of London. So I gave them a scenario in which it seemed reasonable-quite reasonable, in fact-to believe that they could achieve their objective by finesse. This is particularly attractive to the up-timers, who show marked concern with the amount of peripheral damage-and therefore, civilian casualties-they might inflict.”
“They are contemptibly stupid,” put in Borja.
They are excessively moral-a distinction you will certainly not perceive, Borja. “Whatever the reason, preventing unnecessary casualties is a routine component of their modus operandi, Your Eminence. And we counted upon it here. Sure enough, perhaps a week before Lefferts’ attack, we began to notice careful movement within and around the belvedere. We set up long-barreled wheel-lock rifles in the shuttered rooms of the courtyard’s loggia, each weapon mounted in weighted braces and held fast by vises. This ensured that their aim points remained constant unless we changed them.”
“You used them almost as if they were artillery pieces.”
