Robert Asprin & Linda Evans - For King and Country

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For King & Country

Robert Asprin and Linda Evans

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is

purely coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3539-7

Cover art by Larry Elmore

First printing, August 2002

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Asprin, Robert.

For king & country / by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7434-3539-7

1. Great Britain—History—To 1066—Fiction. 2. Attempted

assassination— Fiction. 3. Arthurian romances—Adaptations. 4.

Kings and rulers—

Fiction. 5. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title: For king and country. II.

Evans, Linda. III. Title.

PS3551.S6 F67 2002

813'.54—dc21 2002023216

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

The Time Scout series

Time Scout

Wagers of Sin

Ripping Time

The House That Jack Built

Also by Robert Asprin & Jody Lynn Nye

License Invoked

Also by Linda Evans

Far Edge of Darkness

For David James Hollingsworth, the sunshine of our lives.

* * *

My deepest thanks, as always, to Robert R. Hollingsworth, military

historian and battle choreographer (whose wonderful archery post

graces the cover) and to his lovely wife Susan Collingwood, whose

discerning eye keeps me on track. Thanks to them, as well, for the

loan of their libraries and their highly limited time!

I owe special thanks to Susan Gudmundsen, for climbing the

immensely steep slope of Cadbury Hill, just to take photos for me. The

weather was raw and thoroughly disagreeable, but up she went, into

the wet clouds, to get my 360-degree panorama, which illuminated the

whole climactic ending of the novel.

And another special thank-you to Patricia Grohowski, for her tireless

cheerleading, for pointing me in the direction of that wonderful little

shop where I found the books on Glastonbury Tor, for lending me

half her fascinating library, and for always finding a way to make me

smile, in the midst of all the howling.

I couldn't have done it without them!

—Linda Evans

Chapter One

The election should have made things better.

Would have, in fact, if held virtually anywhere else in the world. But this was Belfast,

the blazing heart of Northern Ireland, where sanity was a concept seriously out of

fashion. With the election only twenty-four hours old, the Irish "Troubles" were heating

up again, threatening to spiral as badly out of control as they had in the middle decades of

the previous century. And Captain Trevor Stirling was caught in the middle, a place

where no self-respecting Scotsman had any business to be.

Worse still, it was his ruddy birthday.

Stirling stood gazing down at the cake for long moments, its multitude of candles a

disquieting sight against the backdrop of the grim barracks. The dip and flare of the

flames echoed other fires, causing Trevor to recall stories about the explosion of '69,

when half of Belfast had burned. He'd lost a great-uncle in the fighting, an idealistic Scots

lad sent in by Britain to keep the peace. Young Trevor McArdle, his mother's only uncle,

had been caught dead in the cross fire.

Now it was Trevor Stirling's turn.

Memory replayed, cuttingly, the moment four years previously, when Trevor had

come home to his mother's cottage an hour outside Edinburgh, bursting with the news.

"I've just joined the Special Air Services!" he'd shouted, jubilant to be following a

good half of his male progenitors.

She'd run into the bedroom, weeping.

He hadn't really understood why—until his unit was posted to Belfast.

Stirling glanced up from the cake to see Murdoch, cavorting as usual in his underwear

and trading ribald jokes with Balfour and Hennessey, who were shouting out punch lines

above the blare of music. Good men to have at one's back in a place like this, among the

best in his command, in fact, and they hadn't forgotten his birthday, despite the rising

tensions and sporadic outbreaks of violence. He supposed there were worse situations in

which to find oneself. Nor was he afraid of the job he'd been sent here to do. He just

wished somebody else had been sent to do it, since he couldn't see either side in the

centuries-old feud backing off or seeing reason.

Stirling squinted back down at the flaming cake, attempting to count the improbable

number of lit candles, and had just come to the conclusion there were seven too many,

when Colonel Ogilvie sent the barracks-room door crashing back into the wall. Laughter

and party uproar chopped off. Someone killed the music even as Stirling snapped around,

blazing cake already forgotten. He blanched at the look on Ogilvie's face.

"We've got riots heating up in West Belfast, boys," the colonel growled, voice harsh

with strain. "Goddamned Paisleyites are burning down Clonard Gardens and ten blocks

surrounding Divis Street, and the IRA's not having any of it."

They scrambled for riot gear amidst a clang of slamming locker doors and thudding

boots. Candles guttered out on the forgotten cake, puddling into rainbows of melted wax

across the frosting. Chairs went crashing in the rush. Stirling prided himself on being first

out the door, shoving all civilian concerns back into a little-used corner of his mind. On a

job like this, anything less was suicide. Murdoch and Balfour were right on his heels,

Murdoch still struggling with zippers and Velcro on hastily donned battle gear. A convoy

of armored vehicles waited outside, engines idling in the muggy June heat.

Stirling stood by the barracks door, directing the lieutenants and sergeants who

reported to him while other sections down at the next barracks did the same into a second

line of troop transports. Stirling's men were counting off their squad members as they

jumped into the lorries. One hundred twenty strong, in four-man fire teams, with

lieutenants and sergeants shouting out their counts, the loading went smoothly, at top

speed. Once the squads reporting to his section had called out their readiness by the

numbers, Stirling flung himself over the tailgate of the final transport, mashing his radio

send button to signal their readiness to move out.

Lieutenant Ian Howell and Sergeants Griffin and Everleigh, with their respective

teams, plus the men of Stirling's own squad, had piled willy-nilly into the armored lorry's

rear compartment, slamming loaded magazines into Browning Hi-Power pistols, SA-80

rifles, and MP5 submachine guns. Stirling was glad to have an MP5 in his hands, rather

than the service Patchett regular troopers were issued.

As the lorries jerked into motion, Hennessey snarled over his SA-80. "Wish to bloody

hell Ministry of Defense had never adopted these useless bits of trash. IRA's got AR-

180's, why the hell don't we?"

Lieutenant Howell muttered, "I'd like to see you try clearing snipers out of a building

with those old SLRs some of the other units train with. Be bloody glad you've got an SA-

80, not one of those."

Nobody answered. They all knew exactly what Howell meant—the SLR was a good

hundred and twenty centimeters long, a full meter and a third of another, impossible to

take down a hallway without hanging up the muzzle on something. Hennessey growled

obscenely again at the faulty magazine latch and shoved the loaded magazine in once

more, ruthlessly ramming it home until it caught properly.

"What I wish," Murdoch muttered, finally righting his uniform, "is for those johnnies

in the M.O.D. to pick somebody else for riot duty. Let the RUC handle things and send us

home."

"Royal Ulster Constabulary, my arse," Balfour shot back. "Bunch of Paisleyite

Orangemen, is more like, joined up after the Ulster Defense Force was outlawed, and the

IRA jolly well knows it."

Stirling just grunted. The history of conflict in Northern Ireland was twisted enough

to give even the slipperiest of diplomats a raging headache. Nobody understood Ireland.

Except, of course, the bloody Irish. "Might've waited a few minutes longer," he grumbled

under his breath. "Would've enjoyed at least blowing out the candles."

"Tough luck, Captain," Lieutenant Howell thumped Stirling's shoulder as the armored

lorry jounced and jolted through Belfast at top speed. "And that lovely bird we hired

hadn't even jumped out of the cake yet. Right raver, too, blonde and stacked, wearin'

nothing but buttercream icing . . ."

"Prat," Stirling grinned. "And if you think Ogilvie'd let a stripper past security . . .

Like as not, she'd be some Provo sympathizer, or worse yet, Cumann Na Mbann, and

that'd be the end of us, right quick, now wouldn't it?" The SAS had learned the hard way

how things worked in Northern Ireland. Up here, the Official IRA based out of Dublin—

touted by London as The Enemy for most of the twentieth century—counted for nothing.

It was the Provisionals, a splinter of the Officials born in the violence of '69, calling the

shots in Belfast.

Literally.

Mostly out of Armalite rifles. And that wasn't counting all the little splinters who'd

left the Provos in the '90s, at least three main groups of them, all hating the Protestant

Orangemen with a peculiarly Irish virulence that spanned centuries. The newest IRA

splinters made the Orangemen's paramilitaries look like schoolboys—and the Orange

terror squads proudly claimed kinship with Attila the Hun.

And every man—and woman—jack of 'em, Protestant Orange or Catholic Green,

hated the British military. Impartially and with a cold, calculating violence aimed mostly

at SAS troops sent in to contain the damage. As a seasoned SAS captain with a full year's

experience in Belfast—during which he'd watched seventeen of his mates shot and blown

to pieces—Northern Ireland gave Trevor Stirling nightmares. It was little comfort that

Northern Ireland's Troubles gave London's ministry types nightmares, as well.

They heard the riot and smelled the smoke long before the lorry ground its way to a

halt. A hasty roadblock had been thrown across Percy Street. The ugly sound of shouting,

of sporadic gunfire, smashing glass, and the unmistakable roar of a major fire blasted into

the lorry right across the open tailgate. A stink of gasoline fumes, gunpowder, and

burning buildings choked the blockaded road. Stirling jammed his helmet down tighter,

gripped his MP5 in a sweaty fist, and jumped down into the middle of the hell sweeping

through Clonard.

He peeled sharp left, taking up position along the wall their lorry had stopped beside,

and directed his section out of their transports and into position along both sides of the

street. In his own command squad, Balfour exited right, followed by Murdoch, who

moved ahead of Stirling, then Hennessey, who took up position ahead of Balfour. The

lorries lurched forward a few meters, giving them cover and spilling out other squads

farther along the street, under Stirling's terse radio instructions. Static sputtered in his ear

as more of his section reported taking up position.

Stirling swept the area with a quick, careful scrutiny, looking for trouble spots. The

Catholic neighborhood consisted mainly of rundown flats, in grubby, multistory buildings

owned by Protestants who refused to grant their tenants basic civil rights, never mind

ordinary maintenance and upkeep, but charged rents triple the going rate across the

border in the Irish Republic. Most of the windows in Stirling's line of sight were pouring

black smoke and lurid flames, the classic trademark of the Orange paramilitary terror

squads. Women and children ran like screaming ants, carrying whatever they'd managed

to salvage and trying to stay clear of the gun battle raging from street to street. Sporadic

weapons fire cracked like distant fireworks, the sharp reports of handguns and small-

caliber carbines overlain by the deeper crashes and crumps of heavy rifles.

Stirling's hundred-twenty-man unit hadn't even finished piling out of their lorries

when a howling mob of Orangemen burst into view from Divis Street, lobbing gasoline

bombs through broken windows and raking the corner of Divis and Percy with small-

weapons fire. Two women and several children, including a copper-haired little girl

barely five years old, crashed to the pavement, screaming and writhing or bent at

grotesque angles, ominously still in the glare of the flames. Then someone else opened

fire from near the roof of a building three blocks distant and four Orangemen crumpled to

the street, gut-shot.

The mob scattered, burning and shooting as they went. Stirling clenched his jaw and

gripped his MP5 until his knuckles whitened, aching to fire into the thick of those

bastards, but he was not about to shoot live ammunition into a crowd with women and

children scattered through it. His radio sputtered with Ogilvie's voice, shouting, "The

police are trying to contain them before they reach St. Peter's church and the school!

Move out by sections and drive those damned Orangemen back, trap 'em between the

police barricades and our guns! And for God's sake, watch the rooftops, we've got IRA

sniper fire coming from everywhere, they're likely to take potshots at us for the sheer fun

of it!"

"Bloody lovely!" Balfour snarled as their section ran forward in a flanking movement

toward the Orangemen, leapfrogging their way under whatever cover was available. "The

election of the century, they call it. Catholics claim they finally got a majority, while the

Orangemen are claiming fraud, and bloody Sinn Fein's all set to vote in reunification with

Dublin, like the IRA wanted for years. And now we've got the bleeding Orangemen

bombing us. Goddamned Ministry of Defense would've done better to let us wipe this

country down to bedrock!"

It was a common enough sentiment in the SAS, one that Stirling didn't share, as it

happened; but he understood it, only too well. "Button it, Balfour," he snapped. "Before

some Orange bastard blows your head off! You can't do a job while you're complaining!

And put your bloody respirator on, we're about to pump CS at them!"

He jammed his own gas mask on, then they were in the thick of it and there was no

time for anything but survival. They moved down Percy Street in relays, with

McCrombie driving their armored command lorry at a slow crawl to provide cover

wherever possible. Every doorway and window offering possible cover for gunmen

brought sweat prickling out beneath Stirling's body armor. Unpleasant trickles ran down

his brow and dripped stinging salt sweat into his eyes under the rubber mask, an added

misery courtesy of the sticky, hot June weather. He blinked furiously to clear his vision,

cursing the heat and the bloody "Troubles" that made tear gas necessary.

The Orange terror squads fell back under a steady hail of tear gar canisters fired into

the mob, along with rubber shot and so-called baton rounds, thick oblongs of rubber fired

from 37mm grenade launchers. They fired into the street just in front of the mob, sending

the rubber projectiles cannoning like super-balls hurled with enough force to break bones.

The rioters melted into side streets to fight pitched battles with Catholic youths

throwing rocks, broken bottles, and flaming gasoline bombs of their own. Orangemen

shot back with pistols ranging from great-grandfather's Webley revolver to smuggled-in

Makarovs manufactured three months previously in Russia, passing through three or four

hands before ending on the streets of Belfast.

Surprisingly few IRA guns answered back. The price, Stirling realized after a

moment's puzzlement, of keeping guerilla weapons scattered, part of the IRA's effort to

keep its arsenal out of police and army hands during neighborhood sweeps. The IRA

excelled at planning terrorist hits in advance, but responding to a sudden emergency was

more difficult, given the level of searches these neighborhoods routinely underwent. It

was ironic; the very reason the IRA had armed itself so heavily in the first place was

situations exactly like this one, starting back in '69, with Orange terror squads burning

Catholic neighborhoods, shooting civilians, and the ruddy police and outlawed B Special

squads helping them do it. That was the whole reason the British army had been

activated, to keep Orange-controlled police and their mates in the marching societies and

paramilitary units from wholesale massacre of Catholic minority neighborhoods.

Not much had changed, since '69.

As homemade Molotov cocktails ran short in supply, lit car flares took their place,

arcing through the air, crashing through windows and igniting curtains, upholstery,

anything combustible in their path. If the fire fighters weren't brought in soon, all of West

Belfast would go. Stirling's section left Percy Street under cover of their armored lorry,

moving down Divis Street in an effort to drive the rioters into the police barricades set up

this side of the school and neighboring church. Through his gas mask, Stirling caught

sight of the police squadron at last, firing lead-filled, CS-coated bean bags from their

grenade launchers into the melee, bringing down combatants from a distance of several

meters. A couple of the constables gripped shotguns, as well, firing shot shells loaded

with miniature rubber batons.

Unfortunately, the constables were firing indiscriminately at both Orange raiders and

Catholic defenders, drawing the attention of someone with a high-powered rifle. A

constable near the edge of the confusion screamed and went down, clutching his gut and

bleeding between tight-clenched fingers. An instant later, a gun-wielding Orangeman

suffered the same fate, sprawling under the rear bumper of a burning car.

"Got us a sodding sniper!" Murdoch shouted, ducking down. "Anybody see where

he's firing from?"

Stirling scanned windows in a frantic effort to spot him, while the constables broke

and ran—straight for the SAS lorry they were using for cover. "Bloody damn—"

He ate pavement as the constables skidded in. Bullets whined off concrete walls and

window casements as the sniper tracked them. Policemen were shouting, "Do something!

Do something, goddammit!" and Murdoch was screaming at them to shut up and keep out

of the way. A stiff wind had sprung up, fanning flames and sweeping away clouds of CS

gas. Stirling snatched off his gas mask, which was impeding his view, and raked the

windows with a frantic gaze, looking for their hidden IRA gunman. He tracked

movement at a broken fifth-story window—Christ, a ten-year-old kid without enough

sense to hide, watching the riot like it was a thriller on the telly. "I don't see a thing, curse

it!"

"Maybe he's broken through a roof somewhere, shooting through a hole in the roofing

tiles? They've done it before, often enough."

Another constable went down less than a meter from Stirling's position, screaming

and badly wounded. Orangemen were in retreat, firing at every window in sight, blasting

away at shadows. The IRA sniper was driving them back from the church, at least, but

there was no way to contain them as long as the sniper kept Stirling's section pinned, as

well. "We've got us one savvy, trained sniper, here," he snarled. "Knows enough to keep

back from the window, so we can't see spit!"

He rolled prone under the fender of their stationary lorry, where McCrombie had the

advantage of bulletproof glass. Stirling craned his neck into contorted positions, trying to

see the uppermost windows and rooflines without exposing himself to sniper fire. He was

studying windowpanes in the building across the street from their riot-happy ten-year-old

when he saw it. Reflected movement showed the boy leaping back from the window. The

reflection also showed a flash of light from deeper inside the room: muzzle blast from

their IRA gunman.

"Got him! Fifth floor, third window along from the corner! Bastard's using the boy for

reconnaissance." God, putting the child between himself and the guns of the SAS . . .

Irish Republican Army ruthlessness occasionally horrified Stirling.

One of the constables crowed, "Marvelous! We'll get that stinking gun out of his

hands and off the streets!"

Stirling shot the copper a disgusted glance. "Isn't the bloody gun that's dangerous,

mate, it's the man behind it. Stop thinking like a copper for a change, eh? These lovely

blokes are trying to kill us, last I noticed, IRA and Orangemen alike. Take all the guns

you can carry, they'll still kill you with rocks and bombs and bottles full of petrol."

While the copper sputtered, Murdoch growled, "We'll have to take him out, curse

him. Can't get across there with him shooting at us and we can't contain those bleeding

Orangemen, sitting on our bums!"

"If we had a Scorpion, like we keep asking London," Hennessey put in disgustedly,

"that'd make quick work of it. Those 30mm cannons would take care of our IRA man up

there, right handy, like."

"Yeh," Stirling shot back, "along with his neighbors and the building next door and

the county over the border, besides. The very last thing those ministry types want is

tracked vehicles rampaging through Belfast. Might look bad on the telly, come election

time."

"So pump a CS canister in with him!" the constable snarled. "Isn't that what you SAS

types are supposed to do? Control the bleeding snipers?"

"That'd be grand," Balfour growled, "if we hadn't shot the last canister three blocks

back."

The constables were out of CS rounds, as well.

And none of the other squads in his unit could get close enough to resupply them,

what with the emergencies under way all around them and the very sniper they needed to

take out controlling the entire street. Stirling cursed long and loud. "Right, then. I'm in

command of the entry team, so it's my job, isn't it? I'll circle round the block, get in from

behind while you draw his fire. Murdoch, you're with me. Lay down a covering fire,

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摘要：

ForKing&CountryRobertAsprinandLindaEvansThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2002byBillFawcett&AssociatesAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform....

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