The Romans, struggling to remain awake, could see nothing beyond ten feet of their assigned positions in the muted moonlight. Once past the fort, they climbed the slope at a punishing run. The thirty-degree grade leveled off to a table of land above the fort. The ground was rough but mostly level at a thousand-foot elevation. The team leaped from surface to surface over the fragmented ground.
They moved across the headland to look down at the feeder road snaking along between the slab-sided rock formations of a narrow gap. Following this led them along a curving ledge for a mile or more. They came to a spot where the plateau’s tabletop summit fell away sharply into a bowl-shaped depression. Here lay the quarry.
It was a broad area bitten from the rock in a half-circle formation a half-mile across. The land literally stepped up from the floor of the manmade hollow. Through the NODs, they could plainly see where the rock had been cut in slabs by tools and then segmented to make blocks. Tall stacks of cut stone sat in orderly rows in the center of the pit.
Along one wall of the quarry was a stone building with a roof of wooden planks. A wooden watchtower stood where the quarry opened up at one end to allow the feeder road access. They could see a pair of men in the open tower plainly lit by torches sputtering on poles. There was a fenced corral for oxen. Against the wall of the quarry yard directly beneath their vantage point were broad tarps slung between posts driven into the ground. These would be the slave quarters. Reclining figures could be seen in rough rows outside the shelter of the tarps. These were slaves who opted to sleep under the stars or were, more likely, an overflow from the unexpected arrival of the Twenty-third and their captive charges.
As tactical situations went, this one sucked about as bad as it was possible for anything to suck. The mission was to free the slaves from captivity or at least give them a running head start. But here they were all bottled up with one narrow route of escape and that route past a fortified position packed with soldiers from the baddest army on the planet.
The Rangers’ advantage of surprise had been blunted, but they still had long-range firepower unheard of in this period. Now they had to work out a way to create the leverage needed to give a mass escape a chance in hell of succeeding.
The moon was dropping, making the shadows longer and darker. The team sat away from the ledge to take a meal break.
“We can take out their guards easy,” Jimbo said. “Bat and I put on suppressors and bring down the guys in that tower. There can’t be more than twenty more in that hut. Slip down there and kakk them in their sleep.”
“Then march a thousand prisoners past that fort?”
Chaz said, “’Cause that’s the only way out.”
“You can’t even be certain the slaves will run for it,” Bat said. “No one cooperates in a fluid situation. Some might just freeze, and we need a one hundred percent evac, right? What do we do then?”
Lee sat sullenly skipping rocks.
“Could we get them to fight?” Jimbo said.
“And risk losing the target we came here to rescue?” Bat said. “Besides, that’s no fighting force down there. They may be slaves, but that’s all they have in common. I’ll bet most of them don’t even share a language. They’re not going to stand and fight together.”
“They’ll be too scared to bolt. Crucifixion is a bitch,” Jimbo said. “As lousy as busting rocks is, at least they get to live.”
“Clusterfuck,” Lee said and tossed a spray of pebbles to bounce away over the rocky surface.
“You’re the one who always has an angle, Hammond. These kind of shitty situations are your specialty,” Chaz said.
Lee held up one finger.
“One. They’re not going to move the slaves. Those poor assholes will die down there. So we’re stuck with this scenario. But this part of the scenario is static, and that’s good.”
He raised a second finger.
“Two. The Romans can shut them in as easy as closing a door. Not good.”
He raised a third finger.
“Three. We could lead the Romans away from the fort. Think of a way to draw them out. Risky.”
A fourth finger.
“Four. Or lure them down the feeder road to the quarry and chop their asses up while they’re in the gap. That has its risks too.”
His thumb extended. “Or—”
“Both,” Chaz grinned.
“Or both,” Lee said and closed his fist.
The horses heard them first.
Boats was in the trees well away from and a bit above the smoldering campfire. He’d pissed in it to make it smolder. He didn’t want a blaze that would take away his natural night vision. The smoky embers would serve as a lure for the curious should anyone come snooping around.
He was half-dozing, half-waking and wondering idly how a sailor like him always wound up so far from the sea. A horse snuffled softly. Another stamped a hoof. They smelled something on the cool wind whispering through the junipers. Boats watched the trees on the opposite side of the clearing. Shadows shifted between the boles. Shapes took form and parted from the dark to stalk across the clearing through the haze created by the dying fire.
A thrum like a swarm of angry bees cut the air. The bedroll Boats left as a decoy was pincushioned with the trio of shafts. These were the fuckers who were dogging Jimbo and Bat. Boats rose silently to his feet and kept his eyes locked on the clearing where more dark shapes joined the others for a murmured exchange around the empty bundle of blankets. There were a dozen or more visible in the camp area and at
