Free To Crown a Caesar (The Praetorian Series: Book II) by Edward Crichton

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 our selves, 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 some thing 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 se nt 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