We returned to camp in the early evening, having shifted our recon position a handful of times, arriving to a freshly cooked dinner delivered by Santino. He had shot, cleaned, and cooked a deer while Helena and I were away, and 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 were no longer dealing with amateurs. Legionnaires were professionals. 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 was left unguarded for 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 about having 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 with the use of a ghilli suit was our stock and trade, not Santino’s. While he may have been 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, but by 0200 on the third day, I tried to purge all thoughts plaguing my mind when we launched the operation by crawling our way through the low grass of the meadow towards the camp, back in sniper-mode.
Focused and meticulous.
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.
When I pushed my arm out again to inch myself forward, 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 trench. 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 for our grassy ghilli suits to blend right in.
The trip took about ten minutes. When I bumped my head against something hard after crawling up the other side of the trench, I knew we’d reached 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 to alert Santino that we had arrived by tapping my radio’s push-to-talk button twice in rapid succession. We waited for what seemed like an hour before I heard Santino’s faint voice in my ear.
“Clear. Four minutes on my mark…” he paused “…mark.”
Helena was already rising to her feet, turning her back to me as 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 had 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.
A short climb later, I bounded over the lip of the wall, landing quietly onto the rampart. I side stepped immediately to the left so Helena could land behind me. When she did, we gathered up the rope and I reattached everything to her rig.
I risked a 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 neat little rows. In that moment, I couldn’t avoid a slight sense of unease tickle the back of my mind at the fact that I hadn’t brought Santino instead of Helena, because this was when we could have really used him. I could see guards aplenty scattered through the interior of the camp and there were thousands of resident randomly going about one bit of business or another.
We’d anticipated as much, but the idea of sneaking through the forest of tents below us 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 about his absence. Four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have considered bringing Helena on such a dangerous mission. She’d 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 tried to push it out of my mind as 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, an alarm would go up almost immediately. Instead, we took advantage of our dark camouflage and quietly shifted positions to the inner edge of the rampart, and crawled our way behind him.
At one point, 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 swatting at an insect. He turned towards the center of the wall to meet up with his buddy a few moments later, 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.
When the guard was out of sight, I pulled Helena’s grappling hook and rope from her MOLLE vest once again. I placed the hook on the rampart’s wooden floor near the corner and tossed the rope out over the inner wall. The corner was pitch black so we had no insecurities about standing out against the lightly colored stone wall. I maneuvered myself out over the wall and fast roped to the bottom, taking stock of our surroundings after touching the ground, waiting for Helena to join me. Our corner of the camp seemed deserted at the moment, but that could change at any moment. When Helena’s boots hit the grass behind me, I turned to see her jerk the rope to dislodge the hook, stepping aside to ensure it didn’t fall on her. After it landed, I picked it up and secured it to her rig for the last time, and we moved off into the small city.