The Last Roman (Praetorian Series - Book One) (57 page)

“What? Why?” Santino asked, looking from me to
Caligula and back and forth.

“Come on!” I almost yelled, grabbing Helena and
helping her off the couch. Pulling her close to make a quick
getaway, I was about to start announcing politely that we were
leaving, but realized everyone’s attention was elsewhere. Only
Varus, holding his friend and emperor’s head in his arms, paid us
any attention. He looked angry, but he knew as well as I did that
fingers might soon be pointed in our direction. His look suggested
he felt we were innocent, but I couldn’t be sure. All I knew was
that in a place like Rome it was best to avoid getting caught than
to stick around with even the slightest bit of suspicion directed
towards you.

I nodded to my friend and hauled Helena out of the
room, Santino catching up to help me with her.

Not even to the house gate, realization seemed to
dawn on her. “We didn’t actually change anything, did we? What you
said before. About fate finding a way to set things straight.”

I thought about it.

It made sense. With Claudius out of the picture, the
only logical thing for fate to do was to have Agrippina rule while
she waited for Nero to turn fourteen. She had practically ruled
alongside Claudius anyway.

I thought about it.

No, I couldn’t buy that. I wouldn’t. There was no
way some natural force controlled the outcome of all living things.
I had free will. I had a choice. I controlled my own fate and so
did Agrippina. We had to stop the madman I knew Nero would become
from ever taking the throne. For all I knew, the current situation
would make things far worse than I could possibly imagine.

“No,” I said, thinking hard about what to do. “We’re
fucking changing things.”

I sifted through every shred of knowledge I had
about ancient Rome. There had to be something we could do. Both
Caligula and Claudius may be dead, and with it Rome’s chances of a
bright future, but there must be someone who can help. I cross
referenced as many dates, names and events as I could in my mind to
try and find someone.

I could only think of one man. Only one man in the
entirety of the Roman Empire could have a positive effect on the
course of history. He was the only one because he’d done it before.
He’d taken an empire on the brink of collapse and realigned it back
towards greatness.

Vespasian.

COMING
SOON

Keep reading for a brief snippet
from the next book in the ongoing Praetorian Series:
To Crown a
Caesar
.

It took us about a week, and a dozen pointed
fingers, but we soon found our way to the enormous legionary
barracks that was the army’s camp. To say it was huge was an
understatement. It sat on the west bank of the Rhine River, and was
called Vindonissa. It was 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 larger walls around its perimeter, built with stone instead
of wood. The higher walls would make our infiltration route
slightly 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 three 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 it. 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 started 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 would be able to study them later, and plan our
attack from the relative safety of our camp. Helena and I shifted
positions three times during our recon, gathering intel for
hours.

We returned to our camp in the early evening,
arriving to a freshly cooked dinner delivered by Santino. He had
shot, cleaned, and cooked most of a deer while Helena and I were
away. 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 weren’t dealing with amateurs any
longer. Legionnaires were professional soldiers. 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
left unguarded four 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 that he had 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 through the use of a ghilli suit was our
stock and trade, not Santino’s. While he may be sneakier than a
ghost, 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 ourselves, trying to sleep and rest
instead. I tried to purge all thoughts plaguing my mind by 0200 on
the third day, when I began to steadily crawl, inch by inch, along
the low grass meadow towards the camp, Helena tucked in right
beside me.

I was back in sniper-mode.

Meticulous and focused.

In little under an hour, we made the first leg of
our journey smoothly and without incident. We didn’t have to worry
about something 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.

I pushed my arm out again to inch myself forward,
but 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 ditch. 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 that our
grassy ghilli suits should blend right in.

The trip took about ten minutes, and when I bumped
my head against something hard after crawling up the other side of
the trench, I knew we had made it to 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 sent a double click over my radio to alert Santino
that we had arrived, and waited for what seemed like an hour before
I heard Santino’s faint voice in my ear.

“Clear. Four minutes. Mark.”

Helena was already rising to her feet, turning her
back to me before 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 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.

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

I risked 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 neatly. I couldn’t
stop a slight sense of unease at the fact I hadn’t brought Santino
instead of Helena. This was when we could have used him. I could
see guards aplenty scattered through the interior of the camp and
there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of resident randomly going
about one bit of business or another.

We anticipated as much, but the thought that we
still needed to make our way to the center of all this 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 of the
operation about absence from it. Four years ago, I never would have
brought Helena with me tonight. She had 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 was still confident in her ability to perform her
role tonight perfectly, but seeing the sheer enormity of what we
had to go through was disconcerting.

I tried to push it out of my mind and turned away.
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, in the middle,
an alarm would go up almost immediately. Instead, we took advantage
of our dark camouflage and the wide rampart floor, and quietly
shifted positions to the inner edge of the rampart and crawled our
way behind him. I thought I would have to shoot him when I saw his
head snap around in our direction, but it turned out he was merely
swatted at an insect. A few moments later he turned towards the
center of the wall to meet up with his buddy, and I let out a slow
breath through my balaclava. I glanced at Helena, only my eyes
revealing my relief. She returned my look with a flick of her own
green eyes, and a gentle nudge to urge me forward.