“What are your orders, sir?” the optio said. “Dispatch scouts to search the road ahead for a defensible position,” Bachus said. “We’ll march at first light to follow. Half rations of water and food for the soldiers. Nothing for the slaves until we reach our goal. I have no idea how long we must hold before relief arrives.”
“The Jews must have grown bold to seek to face three centuries on the march, sir.”
“Perhaps there is someone in our charge they prize,” Bachus said, running a hand over the bristles sprouting on his jaw. “There could be one or more of their leaders among the slaves we escort.”
“Then why not execute them all and have done with it?” the optio asked bitterly.
“I do not know, and I cannot guess. But I know this: Gratus may very well be mad, which only means that his commands must be carried out to the letter. I’ve no wish to incur the wrath of a lunatic with his power and influence.”
“And when shall I have the men roused to break camp?” the optio said.
“Now, Sextus,” Bachus said, stooping to reach for his boots. “We will march to greet the sun’s rise.”
15
Warrior Princess
It was a boy.
After eighteen hours of labor, Caroline Tauber gave birth to an eight-pound, twenty-one-inch howler.
“We’re not naming him Maximus,” she said just before the drugs took effect and whisked her away to Happy Mommy Land.
Dwayne held the squealing red bundle in his arms and just stared.
“What are you going to name it, sir?” a nurse asked him.
“Damned if I know,” he said and allowed another nurse to gently pluck his son from his arms to place him in a plastic-walled bassinet and wheel him away. He then numbly followed an orderly back to the suite to await Caroline and his son after the post-op cleanup had been completed.
The biggest flower arrangement he’d ever seen was there on a table. Next to it was a huge teddy bear in Ranger camouflage and sergeant’s stripes. He’d phoned Morris when they wheeled Caroline into the delivery room. Plenty of time for his bros to call the order in to a local florist.
He sank down into a chair, physically and emotionally drained. He could swear that bear was laughing at him.
“Hooah, Sergeant Teddy.”
“I’m not wearing that,” Lee said.
“I had it custom-made for this op,” Jimmy Smalls said.
“Maybe you want to look like a Dollar Store Spartacus. I’ll stick with my Dragon armor,” Lee said.
The team was on the main deck of the Raj unloading the crates Jimbo had brought back on the launch. The crates were drop-shipped to the port in Limassol care of Praxus Enterprises, the shell corporation the team used as an avatar for their dealing with the outside world. They even paid taxes. Sort of.
“This is the same as Dragon,” Jimbo insisted. “Bob Tosches made these up for me at his shop.”
“What did you tell him? He must think you’ve lost your damned mind.” Chaz laughed.
“This looks like a fucking dress!” Lee said, holding up something that looked like a skirt fashioned from old-school pre-digital desert camouflage.
“It’s a utili-kilt. Guys in construction wear them. The goddamn Scots highlanders wore kilts, and they were badasses,” Jimbo said. “Besides, they’ll help us blend.”
“At a gay pride parade?” Lee said in disgust and threw the kilt down.
“Buckles, my man? Where’s the Velcro?” Chaz said, holding up a layered torso armor with steel studs in rows.
“It’s a lorica segmenta. Standard issue for the Roman army. It’s better than the shit we wore in Iraq. There’s shoulder protection, and straps that hang down to protect your balls.” Jimbo held up a set of the torso armor manufactured in black Kevlar. “It’s layered, so it breathes. This shit is awesome. You’ll see when you try it on.”
“Buckles, bro?” Chaz said, jiggling a belt strap with a steel buckle jangling at the end of it.
“We can’t be having Velcro and plastic fasteners back in The Then,” Jimbo said. He was losing patience.
“I think they’re cute,” Bat said and held a set up against her as if she were at Neiman’s.
Jimbo sagged.
“You’ll look like Xena,” Lee snorted.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Bat said.
“I think he was talking to me,” Jimbo said.
“I’m wearing my BDUs and Dragons,” Lee said and walked away forward to the bridge.
“Oh, hell no,” Chaz said and pulled a helmet from within a box. Packing peanuts spilled to the deck.
He held the helmet up. It was a recreation of a Roman galea in black ballistic cloth over a high-impact plastic dome. It was accented with brass bosses, and had cheek guards and a bill at the rear for protection to the back of the neck.
“It’s optional, okay?” Jimbo snatched the helmet from Chaz’s hand. He didn’t mention that he’d ordered greaves to cover their shins as well.
Bat laughed.
“Fuck, yeah!” They all turned to see Boats standing in his cutoffs with the retro armor strapped on. With his wild red hair and beard, he would have looked at home in the German auxilla.
“At my signal, unleash hell,” Boats intoned gravely. Now they all laughed.
16
Transit: the Med
All personnel and gear aboard, the Ocean Raj weighed anchor and moved out into the Mediterranean. They’d take their time to bring the ship to its new anchorage roughly thirty miles off Haifa in waters almost two thousand meters deep. The team would use the transit time to shake down their equipment and make any last-minute adjustments to the mission plan. Most strategies don’t survive long once the boots hit the ground. The team worked out countless contingencies and tried to anticipate as many surprises as they could imagine.
The law of unintended consequences was squared and then cubed by traveling into the past. Where every op had its share of gotchas, the world of the ancient past was mostly unknown. They would be making landfall at a strip of beach south
