Free Rough and Ready by Sandra Hill Page A

on the shoulder, "Joke's
    over. I fer one have had enough playacting, as if we're freakin' Vikings.
    When
    do we go home?"
    "Yeah, this is taking reenactment to a new level," JAM agreed, wiping his fingers with distaste over the tabletop to remove some of the ash from the fire.
    You could say JAM was a bit anal about cleanliness. In fact, he had a cleaning lady come to his Coronado apartment twice a week, and he lived alone. How much dirt could one man make?
    "My family went to one of those time capsule kind of villages when I was a kid,"
    Pretty Boy said, "except it was Colonial, like Williamsburg, and people stayed there for vacations and pretended they were really back in time. Some vacation!
    My brother Danny and I got the only spanking of our lives for putting a bag of salt in the communal kettle of porridge."
    "My dad took me on one of those trail rides when I was ten. You know, like City Slickers. My mom had just died, and he wanted to cheer me up." Now this was something. JAM rarely talked about his childhood. "I never ate so many baked beans in all my life… on tin plates. I always wondered… Did cowboys have permanent gas with all those beans they ate? I mean, really, do you think Roy Rogers farted in front of Dale Evans?"
    They all grinned at that image.
    "I'm confused about one thing. The language," Cage said. "I can tell that these ladies are speaking a different language, but I can understand them perfectly."
    Torolf nodded. "One reason might be that Old Norse is similar to modern Icelandic, and we all took the short course in Icelandic before we went there last year. Old Norse isn't at all like Norwegian today. Even a thousand years ago, though, there were enough similarities between the Viking and Saxon languages that people could speak to one another."
    "How do you explain the women being able to understand us?" Pretty Boy asked.
    Torolf shrugged. "A miracle?"
    "Seriously, Max, you've made yer point," Cage said.
    "All that Viking crap yer always spoutin'… we get it now. Life was hard, yada, yada, yada. Now, let's go home."
    They are not going to believe me about the time travel. Not yet. "I want you to help me get rid of Steinolf first."
    "For real?" Pretty Boy asked.
    "For real. He's as bad a motherfucker as those crazies who took down the twin towers. He's terrorized most of the people in this region. If someone doesn't stop him, he's going to take over all the Scandinavian countries. I'm not going home till he's dead meat, along with his sadistic followers."
    "Okay, we stay till Steinolf is gone. Right, guys?" Cage looked at each guy in the group, individually. They all nodded.
    "What do we use for weapons?" JAM asked. They were all sharpshooters, to some extent.
    "Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. Yeah, we have no night vision goggles, or thermal imaging, or a boatload of weapons, but we'll improvise." He pulled the KA-BAR knife out of his boot. "This is all I have."
    The other guys had knives, too, and JAM had a ninja throwing star.
    "Any of you good at archery?"
    Cage and Geek raised a hand.
    "I doubt if any of you have used a broadsword, but all you really need to know is how to swing it in an arc to lop off a head or slice off a limb. Aim for the neck."
    They all gave him a look of wonder.
    "I can use a slingshot really well," Cage offered. When Pretty Boy elbowed him with a chuckle, he added. "Hey, don't knock it. I can down a rabbit at fifty feet with a slingshot. I even downed a bear one time, but then I had to finish it off with a bowie knife."
    "You are so full of shit," Pretty Boy said with a laugh. "You had me till that bear bit."
    "Okay, so I knocked off rabbits, not bears. Same thing."
    "In what world?" Pretty Boy countered.
    "Enough, guys! We can make some other weapons," Torolf concluded. Besides, he didn't need to tell these experienced SEALs that in the best battle no shots were fired. He doubted they would be able to claim that for Steinolf's gang when all was done.