The Baltic War(241)

Darryl McCarthy was the one nearest the entrance to the rest of the tower. He had an electrical detonating device in his hands and a truly disgusting grin plastered on his face. Melissa wasn't sure if the grin was because of the overall situation, which Darryl seemed to view as a great adventure, or the more specifically cheerful fact that the many weeks they'd had to delay their escape had had its side benefits. One of them being that, with the Shorts serving as the couriers and go-betweens, Darryl and Tom had been able to replace the primitive fuses they'd originally planned to use with much fancier mechanisms. Harry Lefferts seemed to be an endless cornucopia, when it came to anything that could wreak havoc and destruction.



Rita Simpson was crouched right next to her. "Never expected you'd wind up in a combat operation at your age, huh? Me neither, tell you the truth, and I'm still a spring chicken."



Melissa shook her head. "No, it's not that. It's—"



She heard a sharp cracking sound, coming from somewhere outside. That had to be a rifle shot. Glancing over, she saw that Darryl was already—



"Yee-haaaaa!" he shouted.



The noise was deafening. Even the heavy stonework seemed to shake.



Darryl was up and entering the main part of St. Thomas' Tower the instant the blast ended. "Oh, man!" she heard him shout. "You wanna talk about a beautiful sight!"



Melissa lowered her head. "I can't believe it. We just blew up the Tower of London." Her voice began to rise. "For God's sake, it's a historical monument!"



But Rita was already hauling her to her feet. "Come on, Melissa. Worry about it later. Besides, there's still plenty more blowing up to do."





"He still hasn't come out, Uncle," said Jack Hayes nervously.



Squatting next to him, in the shadows, Stephen Hamilton shrugged. "His problem, not ours. The stupid bastard was told not to shit under there."



He gave his young kin a look that was as sympathetic as anything Hamilton could manage. "I'll do it for you, if you'd rather."



Jack Hayes was still peering intently at the big heavy wooden staircase that led up to the White Tower's second-floor entrance. The huge central keep of the Tower of London had been built more than six centuries earlier, and had been designed from the standpoint of early medieval warfare. Having only one entrance, and that one far above the ground, had undoubtedly made sense at the time. But once that staircase was destroyed, most of the Tower of London's mercenary soldiers would be trapped inside the keep, with no way to get out except a very risky jump or using a rope or jury-rigged ladder.



No harm would come to them, of course. Not, at least, so long as they stayed there. And they didn't even need to stay for all that long. Just long enough.



"No!" Jack suddenly exclaimed, almost yelling the word. His hands made an abrupt motion. The White Tower's staircase blew out at the upper corners and, a moment later, collapsed into a pile of wooden rubble. Thankfully for the sake of Jack's nerves, there was no sign of the corpse that had to be lying at the bottom of all that now.



It was the first time the nineteen-year-old had ever killed a man. Difficult, that was. Hamilton could remember his own first killing, which he'd done at a younger age and in a considerably messier manner. It had bothered him, even.



"You go with your uncle Andrew, remember," he told Jack. "He'll be in the dungeons."



Hamilton rose and hurried toward the Lieutenant's Lodging. The adult males of the family had been in position well before dawn. Now he could see the family's women already coming out, carrying their bundles, with the children following behind. Except for the one infant Griselda, who was being carried by her mother, all the children were carrying bundles also. Even little Jack and George were each carrying one—not very big, of course—toddling on their three-year-old legs.





For the past month, Sir Francis Windebank had ordered Cromwell guarded by mercenaries instead of Yeoman Warders. That had been just another of the many insults that, one piling on another, had led Andrew Short to return to that same dungeon. Not as a guard, but as a jailbreaker.



He was glad of it, now, though. He'd have found it very hard to kill Warders.



"There's an attack on the Tower!" Andrew shouted at the two soldiers, pointing back over his shoulder with his left hand. When their eyes followed, he drew his pistol and shot them both. Twice each. Their halberds clattered to the stone. One blade was chipped; the other, cushioned by landing on its owner's corpse.



All four shots had hit center mass. A bit below the ideal sniper's triangle, as Lefferts called it, but Andrew hadn't wanted to take the risk with an up-time pistol he still hadn't fired all that often. It didn't matter. The men were both dead, and it didn't take Andrew long to find the keys.