The napoleon job, p.1
The Napoleon Job, page 1
The Sword of Napolean
Nick Thacker
Contents
1. Napoleon
2. Billy
3. Saul
4. Billy
5. Billy
6. Requin
7. Ben
8. Saul
9. Ben
10. Napoleon
11. Julie
12. Jessica
13. Freddie
14. Stinson
15. Ben
16. Jessica
17. Ben
18. Stinson
19. Julie
20. Ben
21. Napoleon
22. Saul
23. Freddie
24. Freddie
25. Ben
26. Ben
27. Napoleon
28. Julie
29. Ben
30. Galbraith
31. Raoul
32. Raoul
33. Ben
34. Freddie
35. Ben
36. Ben
37. Ben
38. Ben
39. Ben
40. Galbraith
41. Ben
42. Ben
43. Ben
44. Ben
45. Ben
46. Julie
47. Julie
48. Freddie
49. Ben
50. Ben
51. Freddie
52. Ben
53. Freddie
54. Ben
55. Ben
56. Julie
57. Reggie
58. Julie
59. Reggie
60. Reggie
61. Ben
62. Ben
63. Julie
64. Julie
65. Julie
66. Freddie
67. Julie
68. Freddie
69. Julie
70. Julie
71. Julie
72. Freddie
73. Freddie
74. Ben
75. Julie
76. Ben
77. Ben
78. Ben
79. Ben
80. Ben
81. Reggie
82. Freddie
83. Reggie
84. Captain Edwards
85. Ben
86. Ben
87. Julie
88. Ben
89. Ben
1
Napoleon
7:18 pm | December 1, 1805
Austerlitz, Austria
“Gentlemen,” he began. “Do mind this hill. There will be a battle upon it, and each of you shall have your place.”
He looked up from the great wood table at his marshals. They each nodded curtly, expectedly. He pushed his lips together in a thin line. A battlefield smile; the best they could hope for from their Grand Commandant. He had led them this far, he had confidence he would lead them through the next storm.
And there was always a storm. There was always another battle, another fight. His marshals, the best of them at least, understood this. There was, for Napoleon’s France, no ‘ultimate goal.’ If dominating the entirety of the western world was accomplished, it would only be an accidental bonus of the true goal: the journey of conquering.
He had served as emperor of the French for about a year now, but his track record of victory had already begun to precede him. His men were proud, yet humble. Confident but loyal to their leader.
The victory would play out just as he had strategized; he was sure of it. It was not for his sake then that this meeting was taking place, but for his marshals. They needed to be as true to the plan as he; they needed to understand the risks involved and maneuver accordingly.
He turned to the man standing at his right. His most trusted aide. “Have we the numbers we were hoping for?”
The man nodded. “Yes, Commander. 75,000, prepared for battle. Fully stocked and well-fed.”
Napoleon nodded. They were not the numbers he had been hoping for, but it had been a year since the French Army had crossed the Rhine with his 200,000 troops. They had expanded their territory greatly, leaving detachments around Austria and the scattered nations surrounding. To prepare for the new Russian threat, Napoleon had navigated to this location, near the hill upon which his next victory lay.
“And they have no knowledge of our true capabilities?”
The man shook his head. “My scouts have returned with news that, to the best of their knowledge, the Allied commanders have not changed their perspective. They believe we are hurt, still limping from our retreat.”
Napoleon nodded once again, his brow furrowing. It was a calculated retreat, pulling back to feign a weakness, one that he had sold well, thanks to his hard-earned political talents of acting and subterfuge. He never liked to pull back from an easy victory, but he knew that the greater war was far more important to France’s success than a single battle.
He had also purposefully weakened the right front of his army, hoping to invite the Allies to attack at that point on Pratzen Hill, hopefully cutting off Napoleon’s communication line with Vienna. Instead, he had moved the center and core of his army to a position adjacent to the hill, hidden and out of sight.
“Commander,” another voice from across the table said. “We are to attack after they reach Pratzen Hill, yes?”
He nodded. He had already explained this.
“And if we fail… if we lose Pratzen Hill --“
“The hill is not the victory, but merely the battleground,” he snapped. “We feign a weakness to invite an incursion where we want it. That is the point. Pratzen Hill will be taken, but I assure you, men, it will be later be retaken.”
There were murmurs around the table. He knew they were skeptical. It was hard not to be. They were tired, overworked, fearful of the inevitable failure. Every army failed — that was historical fact. At some point, Napoleon’s march would come to an end.
But not yet. Not today, not tonight.
Not tomorrow.
He understood not only his strategy and the strategies of the his opponents — he knew his opponents themselves. He knew their inner thoughts, their desires, their histories and their understandings of the battlefield. He knew what they knew, and that was why he knew his strategy would work.
He turned to Legrand, whose forces would be bearing the brunt of the Allied attack tomorrow at first light. “General,” he said, “are your men prepared?”
“Of course, Commandant,” Legrand answered without hesitation. “They understand the precarious nature they will put the rest of the Army in if they fail. And they will not. We will hold the flank.”
Napoleon moved on to the rest of his marshals in attendance. Davout’s Third Corps would be marching from Vienna, but he trusted this man more than the others, and he knew Davout would arrive on time. When he finished discussing final plans and tactical changes, he retired and returned to his private tent.
There, he took stock of himself. He was weary, but excited. Nervous, but cautiously prepared. He was not shaking, he was not unsteady.
He took in a deep breath and prepared his letter to Josephine. Perhaps it would be his last, though he suspected it would be one of many more to be penned by his hand.
He sat at the desk and gathered his thoughts. In staring down at the plank page, he noticed the rigid body of the saber tucked against the side of the tent and the desk.
Napoleon stood and reached for it, bringing it close. In the absence of most of his worldly possessions, this singular item had given him peace and comfort when confusion and chaos began to reign supreme.
He pulled it from its sheath, admiring the bluish-gold steel, the elaborate markings on it, and the sheer craftsmanship of it all. He let his fingers fall over the five embossed roses on the hilt, knowing the power they held within. It was a truly remarkable piece, and though it had not been originally intended for battle, he had worn in during raids and skirmishes, and he planned to do so again tomorrow.
It was his sword, and it would be the one most cherished by the great commander.
2
Billy
10:26 am | March 7, 2021
Imrali, Turkey
The prisoner stood on the edge of the cliff looking out over the water. It was a sheer two-hundred-foot drop to the roiling, churning waters below, but it wasn’t even a straight shot. Jagged boulders and edges jutted out from the side of the cliff, ensuring that anyone unfortunate enough to fall — or anyone insane enough to jump — would have a rough way down.
Billy Beckham smiled. It reminded him of the carnival games he used to try to win as a child. His parents would take him once a year, and he would save his allowance for months so he would have enough to play all of the games. Even though his father told him over and over again that they were all rigged — that they were designed to be either impossible or extremely difficult to win — Billy couldn’t help it. He was infatuated by the way the ball bounced around as it fell through the vertical shaft on its way to the bottom. The tiny rubberized metal sphere would bounce and dance around and over the wooden ledges, eventually finding its way into one of the six chambers at the bottom of the glass-front case. One of the chambers would offer a prize, the others nothing.
He had never won. His ball somehow always found a way in one of the outside chambers.
Billy took a step backward and turned around, imagining that the carnival game reference was a metaphor for his life. I never won. Never won nothing at all.
He took a deep breath, wondering if it would be better to just jump of f and end it all right then and there. Surely it would be quicker. Surely he would beat the twenty-nine years of the thirty-year sentence he had still facing him.
An American by birth, William Beckham had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when traveling through Turkey and had ended up with a bag of drugs on his person.
Okay, so he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and made a few wrong decisions.
He had claimed to not know where the drugs had come from, but he was missing that crucial element when it came time to explain himself: an alibi.
He had merely wanted to have a good time his last night in Instanbul. The friends he had met — or at least the people he had been calling friends — had finally taken him to a secret spot, where he had been promised an incredible time.
The party had been fun enough, but at some point someone had slipped something into his drink. He awoke the next morning, already locked up and behind bars.
He hadn’t had much money before the trip, and twenty-eight-year-old Billy had not known any lawyers. As such, he had been at the whim and mercy of the Turkish judicial system, which had decided to make an example of him. He bounced around the system for a year, expecting to be held back and eventually released, made a mockery of, held out to the western world in the tabloids as an example of white privilege. He would, after much grief, head home.
Unfortunately, Turkey was not interested in sending him home. He had handed a sentence that had shocked him.
Thirty years without bail.
It wasn’t the first time an American had gone astray overseas and ended up in another country’s prison system, but it was one of the few times that the country’s court system had gone the extra mile to deliver an unnecessarily cruel sentence. He had wondered if it was even real — if he had accidentally, somehow, pissed off the wrong person. But he’d had no lawyer or money to hire an investigator.
If he had been sent to Imrali because of someone’s nefarious reasons, those reasons were still a mystery to him.
His hands were un-cuffed, his legs free, and he lifted his eyes up from the rocky earth and stared back down the hill toward the Imrali island prison in the distance. There was a small courtyard in the center of the complex, but this was the first time Billy had been outside the prison walls since his arrest, and certainly the first time he’d been outside with walls around him or shackles on his hands and feet.
He looked toward the cloudy sky, trying to find the pinpoint of light that represented the sun, hidden behind folds of fluffy water. He thought he saw it, then tried to use that information to determine what time of day it was. The trouble was, he couldn’t remember if he had to calculate for how far they were from the equator or not, and if that were the case, he had no idea what that meant for the calculation…
“Billy! Over here!” the voice had come from a man, Taavi, whom he had befriended over the past year. He didn’t particularly like the man, and he felt the feeling was mutual, which was ironic, as he had explained to Billy early on that his name meant ‘adored.’ Still, Taavi was the only person he’d met so far who spoke English. Billy had not yet picked up enough Turkish to get by, but thankfully everything in the prison was scheduled and regimented. He didn’t need to learn Turkish to stay alive here — if he wanted, he didn’t need to think or speak or even wonder anything at all.
He walked toward Taavi’s voice, joining him and three other prisoners who had been taken out of their cell block earlier. They had been put in handcuffs, then marched out of the back door and toward these cliffs at the edge of the island, where the cuffs had been removed. No one had been told what was happening, but there had been enough armed guards marching next to them the whole time that Billy knew this was some sort of planned exercise. More than likely the Turkish government had told the guards to give them all a bit more sunshine and exercise, so they were begrudgingly letting them out to play for an hour or so.
He looked at the guards now, recognizing for the first time that they weren’t all wearing the uniform of the prison’s main security force — black and khaki, with a tiny yellow logo emblazoned somewhere on it. Some of the new guards wore black pants with tight black shirts. Their weapons seemed different, as well, though Billy had no idea why.
Billy didn’t waste much energy worrying about it. Truth be told, he probably wouldn’t have needed a guard watching him twenty-four hours a day. They were on a remote island off the coast of Turkey, and the only thing here on Imrali was the prison itself — no homes, no roads, no other inhabitants at all. They were ten miles of open water from the nearest shore. A boat came twice a week to drop off supplies and mail for the inmates, but that was it.
He had yet to receive a letter from anyone back home. His parents had past away five years earlier, his mother right after father, from early onset cancer, though he couldn’t remember what type. He remembered not feeling terribly sad when that had happened, though he did wish his father were still around. It would be nice to talk to the old man, to ask him about the carnivals and the relatively safe, fun times they had when Billy was just a boy.
Somewhere along the line his old man had checked out from parenting, or from life in general, either because his job at the power plant had gotten too busy, or he had found out about his cancer diagnosis, or something else altogether. Billy never knew. His mother did her best, but she ruled with an iron fist, and he had very little interest in softening his heart for the hardest woman he had ever known.
He was now completely alone in this world, and he probably would be until he died. It was a fact he had come to accept. As crazy as it had seemed before his sentencing, he wondered if it was all that bad.
Free food, free entertainment, free everything. For thirty years.
Sure, most of it was crap — the ‘fresh’ food was ten minutes away from going rotten and the only entertainment was the monthly movie they would allow the prisoners to see, but inevitably it was a movie from America that he had already seen fifteen years ago. Perhaps he could get into chess — there were prisoners who spent hours each day across from each other, a board between them.
He walked over to where Ramon was standing, falling in line next to the other for prisoners. The guards circled them, each brandishing an assault rifle but with the point of it aimed down toward the ground.
“Any idea what’s going on?” he asked.
Taavi shook his head. “Exercise?”
Billy smiled. “Standing in line next to you isn’t much exercise, friend.”
Taavi scowled, but didn’t respond.
The guard in front of the line began barking orders in Turkish. Billy had no idea what any of the words were, but he recognized his prisoner number being called and looked up at the man. The man repeated the number, staring straight into Billy’s eyes.
Billy heard the slight lilt at the end of the string of numbers, and realized it had been a question. He cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. That’s me.” He recited his prisoner number for good measure and the guard nodded and continued down the line, checking that he had the right people in front of him.
