Red Templar

1

Lieutenant Colonel John Holliday (U.S. Army Rangers, retired) had spent half a lifetime in the military and had flown millions of miles in various airplanes without the slightest fear for his own safety. But now as he rode along in a Tupolev 154 airliner he was suddenly aware of the craft’s appalling crash record, not to mention its NATO designation: Careless.

“Why did we have to take this particular flight, Eddie?” Holliday asked his companion. Eddie, whose full name was Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso, was an expatriate Cuban who had saved Holliday’s life recently in the middle of an African revolution. The man was now accompanying him to Turkey, and perhaps on to Russia. They traveled at the request of a man named Victor Genrikhovich, who’d buttonholed them in the Khartoum International Airport. Genrikhovich, who only spoke Russian, looked like someone who’d just walked out of a Bowery flophouse, and claimed he was a curator at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Under most circumstances Holliday would have smiled, given the man a dollar and gone on his way, but this Bowery bum knew the name Helder Rodrigues and the Latin term Ferrum Polaris. Either the name or the Latin would have stopped Holliday in his tracks; both together were enough to get him onto a plane bound for Istanbul, even a decrepit old Soviet model belonging to a company called Assos Airways.

“Senor Genrikhovich said it would get us to Istanbul the most quickly,” answered Eddie. The Cuban had been born barely a year after Fidel made his triumphant entrance into Havana in 1959, and spoke fluent Russian. He turned to Genrikhovich, who sat across the aisle eating his complimentary cheese sandwich, and spoke a few machine-gun phrases. Genrikhovich nodded and spoke briefly through a mouthful of half-chewed sandwich. Eddie turned back to Holliday. “Same as before. He says there is someone in Istanbul he wants us to meet. This man will explain everything.”

“He has to tell us something. I’m on a plane to Turkey, for Christ’s sake. Who are we meeting?” Holliday asked.

Another exchange between Eddie and Genrikhovich, and Eddie turned back to Holliday. “His name is Theodore Dimitrov. A monk.”

A monk-at least that made a bit of sense, thought Holliday. Helder Rodrigues had been a monk of sorts, guardian of Aos, Sword of the East, one of four swords taken out of the Holy Land by four different Templar Knights shortly after the fall of Acre in 1291, which effectively ended the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

Aos in turn was the perfect mate to the sword he and his cousin Peggy had discovered hidden in his uncle Henry’s library at his home in Fredonia, New York: Hesperios, Sword of the West, the sword that had taken him and Peggy halfway around the world and back again and showed them a dark, underground universe of secrets that still plagued him.

And now this-Ferrum Polaris, Sword of the North. The third Damascus blade of the quartet supposedly made by Alberic, the mythical and magical dwarf blacksmith common to the mystical cultures of a dozen empires and nations. To Holliday it somehow seemed that the ghosts of those four Templar Knights from eight hundred years ago were haunting him, forcing him to discover their final secrets before their souls could finally rest.

The seat belt sign flashed on and the intercom crackled as the heavily accented voice of the pilot announced that they were making their final approach to Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Holliday sighed. He stared up at a loose, rattling rivet in the roof of the old aircraft and hoped for the best.