Castro y Papas flinched forward, clearly following an instinct to help, stopping himself as he inevitably realized that there was nothing to be done.
The smaller assistant asked, “Do you need the water or spirits, yet?”
“No, but have them ready. And you”-Asher looked up at the taller assistant-“be quick with that knife.”
In the same instant that Owen Roe O’Neill took his last, long step to close with the slow-eyed guard, he drew his dagger and thrust straight forward.
The weapon’s point entered the man’s heavy neck just where the Irish colonel had intended: at the larynx. As the guard wheezed horror and dismay, Owen withdrew the knife at an angle, dragging its keen edge sharply across the jugular vein. Dark blood spurted and the man, in the midst of scrabbling after his own weapon and trying to rock up to his feet, suddenly grabbed at the mortal wound.
Owen knew the man was dead, but this way he would die neither quickly nor silently: in the time it took him to exsanguinate, the guard might tip over boxes, flail about destructively, and thereby, bring other soldiers to investigate. Can’t have that. Owen, arm coming back from the exit slash, shot forward again into another thrust.
This time, the man was on his knees, moving feebly, when the Spanish dagger sunk almost four inches of its length into his temple. The guard’s struggles ceased abruptly; he fell forward, face down on the paving stones, the blood leaking out of him in an ever widening pool.
Owen turned to Dillon at the door. “Have you locked it?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Then get over here, on the double.”
Dillon did, and together they quickly found the box of spare culverin balls that had been placed square atop the trapdoor into the exit tunnel. Lifting the balls out, they lightened the crate and moved it aside, exposing the trapdoor.
Locked. They could blow the lock off, but that was loud-and besides, this room was for storing tools, also, wasn’t it? “Dillon, keep watch outside. Tell me when those late-night strollers are at the other side of the arms yard.”
“They’re over there now, Colonel.”
Owen quickly found what he was looking for: a hammer and chisel. He set the nose of the chisel in place, tried a test blow.
Nothing more was needed. Evidently the trapdoor had not been used in many decades, nor cared for in the meantime; the lock, its securing arm almost rusted through, came flying off with a dull clatter. He tapped a sequence of knocks on the door’s beams, a tattoo that the up-timers called “shave and a haircut.” He got the “two bits” response-and yanked open the trapdoor.
Thomas North’s dusty face looked up at him. “About bloody time, bog-hopper.”
“Get your lazy sassenach ass up here and sort out the men. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
North came up in two bounds, swapped his nine-millimeter for his SKS, and stared at the locked door. “Any sign of the other element yet?”
Owen received his armor and the rest of his weapons from the oldest of the Wild Geese, Anthony Grogan, and shook his head. “No, we’re still waiting for Harry’s signal.”
“And what is the signal?” asked North’s xueta guide, looking up at them from his position in the secret tunnel.
Surely there’s no harm in telling the fellow now, Owen thought, but North only said, “Even down there, you’ll know it when you hear it.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Valentino led the main charge toward the villa, approaching it at an oblique angle to stay out of the sightline of the fifteen men who had volleyed at the external guards. That fusillade did its job, dropping the four enemy silhouettes all at once, like an invisible wave knocking over straw men.
At the head of almost fifty mercenaries and assassins, Valentino reached the side door into the villa, which he guessed was a secondary entry into a great room. Never having been inside, and not having dared pump local inhabitants for information, his attack depended upon overwhelming force, not advance intelligence. However, even his profound superiority in numbers would not be sufficient if the fight became a protracted gun battle.
“This group has up-time weapons,” he hissed at his men, “so they will win if we keep our distance. But we will win a melee. So we volley and charge. Now, Arturo, take your group to the back of the villa; Ignatio, take your men around the front. Kill any external guards, keep anyone inside from getting out. Use any up-time weapons you find to hold off reinforcements from their perimeter patrols. Now go!”
The two units of half a dozen men rushed off into the darkness just as the fifteen musketeers caught up with the rest of the group along the southern wall of villa. “So if we’re supposed to charge, why not charge in now?” panted Odoardo.
“Because we have to seal all the possible exits first. Remember, no one is to be left alive. No one. Now, Linguanti, let’s give them something else to worry about.”
Valentino’s wiry lieutenant nodded and produced a ceramic bottle of olive oil about the same time a few shots spatted back and forth at the front of the house. He lit the linen wick jammed into the top of the bottle and nodded to Odoardo, who drew back his immense, trademark axe and smashed open one of the two shuttered windows along that stretch of wall. Two reports-pistols probably-boomed in futile retaliation the same instant that Linguanti lobbed the fire bomb inside.
Sherrilyn Maddox heard the volley, turned on her heel and started sprinting eastward, back toward the villa. Too focused on her job to be scared or surprised, she assessed the situation quickly: the attackers had infiltrated past, or eliminated, an outpost. Probably the southern one, since the sound of gunfire-and now, shouting-was spreading from the south of the villa.
She was about two hundred yards out and, fortunately, the root cellar lay right along her most direct approach to the villa’s rear entrance, which opened into the building’s great room. The four men walking the perimeter like she was might arrive in time to be useful, but not if they came rushing directly back toward the villa; whoever was attacking was professional, and would be sure to have set up ambushes to interdict reinforcements.
And damn it, she could already start to feel her knee stiffening like a rusted door hinge: unwilling to bend, threatening to break. But that was just too bad. Even if she was doing irreparable damage to it, she had to push it to the limit; the next five minutes could, quite literally, decide the future course of the Western World.
Refusing to limp, she glanced north toward the western skirts of Monte Cengio; two lamps burned brightly there. That signal meant Taggart had heard the attack and was even now collapsing inward toward the villa with most of his pickets. But there had been too little warning; he would not arrive in time, given how quickly the attackers were pressing their advantage. Sherrilyn could already see wisps of smoke rising up from the villa and heard gunfire at the front and then the back.
As she reached the root cellar and knocked a “shave and a haircut-two bits” tattoo on the door, she calmly accepted that she was the only relief force in a position to rescue her friends.
The cellar’s storm door banged back, and Rolf, the largest of the hidden reserve of three Hibernians emerged. She drew her Glock, waved it toward the villa, and resumed running. “Follow me,” she hissed at the forms already trailing her at a crouch.
As soon as the defenders’ two pistols fired pointlessly out the window, Valentino sent his men through the southern door of the villa.
Gunfire-flintlocks and one or two up-time weapons-barked a lethal salute as his men went through; three fell, a fourth staggered, but the next wave was in and firing back into a vast chamber seething with desperate, human chaos.
From what Valentino could make out as he entered in the third rank and dodged quickly to the side, they had been lucky enough to come directly into the villa’s large, and surprisingly plain, great room-which, to his eyes, was appointed more in the style of a vast, well-to-do farmhouse. The long, plain tables were littered with trenchers, utensils, a few pewter plates, all in the process of pre-cleaning, the leavings mostly scraped into feed buckets bound for whatever livestock they had out back. A dozen-maybe a score-of domestics of all shapes, sizes, and sexes were now running to and fro, some focused and purposeful, most shrieking and confused. A few were pushing smaller trestle tables over for cover; a few more-workers who had no doubt been furnished with the weapons of off-duty Marines-were attempting to reload, their quiver-fingered haste and inexperience ensuring that they would likely be dead before they even got the wadding snugged down against the ball.