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The cannon bellowed from amidships and this time the result drove the king wild with joy because the coastal gun and all of its powder charges went up in a fireball.

“Sail on, Suffolk, sail on!” Henry shouted. “Sail my ship right down their bastard throats and destroy every enemy gun that may threaten us. We will win the day, of that I am certain.”

John drove until he could not stay awake any longer then swapped positions with Simon. Neither Luca or Antonio could drive and this uneven, treacherous road was no place to learn. A broken axle or a shredded tire would leave them badly in the lurch. He and Simon traded the wheel throughout the day and into the evening. On the last changeover before dusk, John climbed into the passenger seat, ate some bread and meat washed down with wine and fell fast asleep but not for long. Simon came around a bend and had to slam the brake pedal to the floor to avoid a tree across the road. All of them got out and surveyed the scene. The tree had probably been there for a while since there were deep cart tracks around it in the boggy ground of the meadow. The ground was soft enough that the car would surely become stuck if they tried the same maneuver. Try as they might, the four of them were unable to shift the tree. Without a saw or an axe they were stymied. With nightfall upon them John had an idea and asked how much powder they had. Plenty, was the reply. He proceeded to remove his shirt and rip off one of the sleeves, mumbling that he hated the puffy things anyway. He tied off one end, filled it with black powder, tied off the other end and wrapped it around the fallen trunk at a narrow point. Then he had them all step back and fired his pistol into the powder bag. With a boom, the tree splintered, and though it was not a through and through break, a series of stomps finished the job. First they lifted half the tree away, then the other half.

“Bloody ingenious, I’d say,” Simon said, patting John on the back. “I’ll pump the boiler, we can get on the move again, and you can go back to sleep.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” John said, pointing his smoking gun at the thicket where the tree had fallen.

More than a dozen dark figures were moving onto the road, slowly, cautiously, but methodically.

“Rovers,” Simon said.

John couldn’t tell how they were armed but if they hadn’t shot already they probably didn’t have guns. At times like these his thinking became sharp, his senses, acute. Like any man, the anticipation of danger made him fearful, but once danger was there, he was unlike most. He was at his calmest when violence was about to break out.

“Luca and Antonio, get the muskets out of the car. When you’ve fired them, use them as clubs. Simon, take my pistol and use the butt end on as many heads as you can.”

“What are you going to use?” Simon asked.

John bashed a fist into his palm and said, “These.”

The rovers called to each other in French and fanned out to encircle the car.

One of the men, the largest fellow who was doing the most jabbering, grabbed John’s attention. When he saw that Luca and Antonio had their muskets in hand he pointed at the big man.

“Leave that one for me,” John said quietly. Then he shouted, “Hey you! Yeah you! You’re going down.”

The man couldn’t understand him but he seemed to understand he was being called out. He reacted with a low cackle and then charged.

“Fire!” John shouted, and two of the rovers pitched over.

John stood his ground and waited for the brute to come to him, and when he did, a long knife in hand, John deflected his knife arm with a chop block then clapped him across the ears with the flats of his palms, rupturing his ear drums and collapsing him in agony. He finished him off with a kick to the throat and picked up his hefty butcher’s knife in time for the two rovers coming at him, screaming their heads off.

He mule-kicked one in the gut and caught the other one in the temple with the knife, then fell on the first one, stabbing him multiple times in the chest. He smelled the next attacker before he saw him, a small, particularly odiferous man, who lunged at him with a knife and missed when John shoulder-rolled away. John sprang to his feet and before the man could get his bearings, he stomped his face and felt it cave under his boot.

In the few seconds before engaging the next attacker he heard the satisfying sounds of musket stocks cracking against bone and figured that Antonio and Luca were holding their own. But Simon was having a harder time. In his peripheral vision John saw him being dragged into the woods on his back by two rovers, one on each leg.

John slashed at the throat of his closest adversary and launched himself at Simon’s abductors, tackling both of them with outstretched arms like a swooping bird of prey. Simon got to his feet and paused to watch in admiration as John stabbed and crushed the two rovers.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” John shouted at Simon.

“Just checking to see if I’ve still got all my bits.”

There were only half a dozen uninjured rovers now. They yelled at each other and, to a man, ran away into the thicket, leaving their bloodied and battered brethren crawling and writhing in the dirt and grass.

“Everyone okay?” John asked, dropping to his haunches.

They all had bruises and Luca had a superficial cut on his leg but that was it.

“So, you think they would have eaten us?” John asked.

Luca said, “Well, not Antonio, since he is as tough as an old boot, but the rest of us? For sure.”

Antonio smiled and felt along his musket stock for cracks.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” John said.

Antonio replied, “We may, as you say, get out of here, signore, but, alas, we cannot get out of Hell.”

With his banners flying across Gothenburg, King Henry, Cromwell, the Duke of Suffolk, and William the forger were rowed the short distance from their river anchorage to the city center. The palace of King Christian was only a short walk from the shore through a tangle of narrow streets which led to the large unpaved square in front of the red-brick royal home, grand in scale but austere in design. Along his route English soldiers were deployed every ten paces to protect the king’s party from assault but there was no trouble. The men of Gothenburg were beaten and the square was filled with maimed bodies.

The palace, which had the misfortune of being elevated on a manmade plateau and thus in the sights of the singing cannon, was holed along its river-facing façade, with piles of bricks scattered about and black smoke billowing from the damaged roof. Henry’s field commander, the Duke of Oxford, approached the king and bowed.

“The palace is taken, Your Majesty.”

“And the king?”

“Inside, in custody.”

“Well, bring him out, man. Do not keep me waiting.”

Oxford ran up the stone stairs to the wrecked palace and soon returned with a very old white-bearded man dressed in the simplest of robes, his bony wrists bound with rope.

“This? This is Christian?” Henry asked.

“It is, Your Majesty?” Oxford said.

“Does he speak our language?”

“He does not, but one of his courtiers does.”

Oxford had his men bring a young man, hands tied, through the pile of bodies. Henry spoke to Christian through him.

“Know that today you have been vanquished by Henry, king of Brittania,” he said.

Christian’s voice was raspy from breathing smoke. “Why attack us? We have not threatened you of late. We offer nothing strategic in our position. We have nothing you would want save our women.”

“We will have your women but they are not the reason for conquest. We will have your iron mines.”

Christian coughed and looked at Henry quizzically. “You have iron mines in your own lands. Surely you have not exhausted the metal.”

“Methinks yours is better. These cannon we have employed to vanquish you. This man, our forger, will smelt your iron and make many more of them, even better than our own. Did you not know that your ore was precious?”

“Nay, I did not.”

“Where is your best mine?”

“I will not say. Why make it easy for you?”

Henry asked the translator who hailed from the nineteenth century, “Do you know?”

“Will the knowledge save me?” he answered in English.

“It will.”

“Dannemora,” he answered.

When Christian heard the word, he cursed the man. Henry commanded Oxford to bring him to his knees.

“How far is this place?” Henry asked the courtier.

“One day by horse, to the east.”

“And are there forges near the mine?”

“The best in the Norselands.”

Henry ordered Oxford to arrange a troop of men to accompany the translator and his forger and put down the populace along the way. They were to take control of the mine and the forges and begin the production of bigger and better cannon. He huddled with Oxford and Cromwell, and then summoned the cooperative young man who drew for them a map of the Norselands in the dirt. It was decided. Twenty ships would be sent through the straits to the south to sail along the eastern coast to the closest point to the mines. Henry would wait for the ships to return with singing cannon and shot. He would move into the habitable parts of the palace and avail himself of the fair-haired Nordic women he had heard so much about. But first, he had a king’s job to do.

Christian was still on his knees, eyeing Henry venomously. Henry drew his heavy broadsword.

“Do you wish me to translate?” the courtier asked with a slight smile.

“Methinks you do not think well of your master,” Henry said.

“I will not lament his fate,” the man said. “He is exceedingly cruel.”

“Well then, sir, you shall serve me now. There is no need for my words to be spoken in his language. The old fox will know well enough the meaning of my English steel. A king should take a king.”

He loomed over Christian who turned his head and spit on Henry’s boot.

“Your blood will wash away your spittle,” Henry cried as he brought his blade down on the old man’s neck.

John finished his stretch of night driving and relinquished the wheel to Simon. At this point in the journey, the noise and the rattling were second nature. He made sure that at least one of the backseat passengers was awake and on lookout before he folded his arms and let his head rest upon his shoulder.

John was the first one out of the helicopter. The others followed, stooping to avoid the spinning rotors. To a man they reflexively squinted at the rotor wash despite their protective goggles. The Black Hawk lifted up and the dust settled, leaving them on the cool, hard plain in the darkness of a moonless desert night. They were two clicks away from the target, a solitary farmhouse glowing green through night-vision gear. Mike Entwistle and six men began a looping double-time march to establish a position behind the house. John took the remaining Green Berets and headed straight for it.

The house was small and rectangular with a low wall surrounding it. Daytime surveillance photos from a high-altitude drone flyover showed the house to be the same tawny color as the desert floor; it was, after all, made of the same mud and sand. It had a flat roof and three windows on each side. In the past, there had been irrigation and cultivation but whoever owned the farm was long gone and now there was no greenery and no crops. The only livestock were the few goats that roamed within the walls. The three windows visible to John had the same luminosity as the rest of the house. There were no lights or fires inside. Even the Taliban had to sleep. If all went well, they’d be back in the helo in twenty minutes with their tango in plastic cuffs and a bag over his head. Still, it would have been a heck of a lot easier and safer to incinerate everyone inside with a Predator strike. Hopefully getting Fazal Toofan alive was worth the risk, but it wasn’t his call.

He heard Stankiewicz on his earpiece whispering to Tannenbaum. “Hey T-baum, how many Haji’s inside?”

“Fuck if I know. They come and go all the time. It’s like a Taliban Motel 6.”

“More like a roach motel.”

“Everyone, shut the fuck up,” John said into his mike. “Essentials only.”

Entwistle was making good progress. John saw six green men halfway to the house. Both squads would set up and do their final surveillance when they were about fifty yards from the front and back. If everything looked good they’d close in, breach, toss in flash-bangs and gas, smoke any hostiles, and get their guy.

When John was a hundred yards from the target he lost sight of the Entwistle squad as they circled to the far side. John and his men were spread out, at least ten yards from one another, with John at point about five yards ahead of the others. The distance from there to the wall was the length of a football field. In John’s high school days he could have run it in just over eleven seconds with full pads and helmet.

He paused his men with a hand signal. It was shy of their muster point but he didn’t like something. It was no more than an instinct but he always trusted himself. He hated being on this featureless terrain. There was no cover. The night was ridiculously quiet. The pucker factor was too damn high.

He saw the bright flash through his night scope before he heard the shot, a point of violent light coming from the top of the mud-brick wall.

Stankiewicz swore loudly and dropped to his knees.

Someone yelled, “Medic,” and Ben Knebel rushed over.

There were more flashes of light coming from the top of the wall.

“Engage!” John shouted, flopping on his belly and squeezing off a series of short bursts of automatic fire. “Engage!”

John felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Sorry to wake you,” Simon said. The car was stopped. Simon shut down the boiler.

“What’s going on?”

“Listen,” Simon said, pointing into the darkness. “It’s the sea. We’ve made it to the coast.”

Luca leaned over the seat. “We’re close to Italia. I tell you, I can almost smell it.”

The oxcart bumped along an uneven path for hour after hour. The driver had hitched his beast to the wagon at dawn and had rolled through the gate at Marksburg Castle, telling the guards he would return from Dusseldorf in a week’s time. Emily and JoJo tried to make themselves as comfortable as possible under the pile of rough sacks but every jolt ran straight to their bones. They had a small skin of water to keep their mouths moist but that was it for sustenance. And they were treated, every so often, to the driver’s mumbled self-lamentation, cursing a God who had abandoned him.