The Templar Legion

11

Michael Pierce Harris sat in his room at the Khartoum Hilton and listened to the distant satellite-echoing voice of his boss.

“What’s the present situation?” Major Allen Faulkener asked from his London office.

“They’re getting ready for some sort of expedition, that’s for sure,” answered Harris. “They’ve been picking up everything from bug spray and hammocks to machetes and malaria pills.”

“The pilot, Osman?”

“Stripping down the engines on the Catalina.”

“Do you have any idea about their ETD?”

“Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Osman’s filed a flight plan for Umm Rawq.”

There was a brief silence. Finally Faulkener spoke. “There’s a Matheson twin Otter at the civilian airport in Khartoum. Take it down to Wau, on the border, in the morning. I’ll have a half dozen men on standby. That should be enough.”

“Enough for what?” Harris asked.

“They’re following in Ives’s footsteps,” said Faulkener, his voice rising and falling spectrally on the carrier wave. “Make sure they stumble and fall. Fatally.”

Returning from his regular afternoon stroll through town, Konrad Lanz stepped into the Bar Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon Palace Hotel and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The long, narrow space off the lobby was empty except for Marcel Boganda, the bartender. Late sunlight leaked weakly through the partially opened louvers on the window that looked out onto the Trianon’s colonial-style veranda.

The room was straight out of Rudyard Kipling, complete with a gently rotating wooden fan whickering overhead, a few old, cracked brown leather banquettes and club chairs scattered randomly. The centerpiece, the bar itself, was forty feet of art deco, deep red burled bubinga hardwood, the slab surface of the bar top as dense as marble. The bar was Marcel’s pride and joy; every drink was served with a coaster and every condensation ring was wiped up almost before it had a chance to form.

Marcel was in his fifties, round faced and short haired. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and dressed in evening clothes from the time the bar opened at noon to closing time at midnight. He was a formal, distant man and rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. It was only by accident that Lanz had discovered from a waiter in the dining room on the far side of the lobby that Marcel actually owned the Trianon.

Crossing the room Lanz took a seat on one of the tall, high-backed leather-covered bar stools at the veranda end of the room. He put his Carl Hiaasen book down on the bar and waited. It took a moment or two but eventually Marcel wandered down and took Lanz’s order: a chilled green-and-yellow bottle of Congolese Ngok beer with its lurid crocodile logo. Marcel poured the pale, corn-colored lager into a tall glass, letting the short head rise, just so. Lanz took a sip and sighed happily.

“Hot out there,” said Lanz.

“Most usually is, sir,” said Marcel. “It is a hot country.”

“Lived here all your life?” Lanz asked.

“I went away to school, sir. To France. The Sorbonne.”

“And you came back here?” Lanz asked, surprised.

“This is my home,” said the bartender simply, shrugging his shoulders.

“Kukuanaland?”

“Fourandao, sir.”

“What do you think about Kolingba?”

“I try not to,” answered Marcel. Lanz wasn’t entirely sure but he thought he caught a tinge of irony in the man’s voice.

“Does he ever come here?”

“No, sir. Our president is not a drinker.”

“How about his second in command, this Gash fellow?”

“Chocolate bourbon on the rocks from time to time,” said Marcel. “Why do you ask me so many questions, sir?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Marcel. I need an in to the president.”

“In my experience, sir, people who preface a conversation with ‘let me be honest’ are anything but, and what precisely do you mean by an ‘in’?”

“I’m an arms dealer, Marcel. I sell guns and ammunition, mostly to small African countries like this one, usually to their rebel factions, sometimes to warring religious and ethnic groups.”

“We have no rebel factions, sir, nor do we have warring religious or ethic groups.”

“What about this Limbani character?” Lanz said.

“Dr. Limbani has been dead for quite some time,” said Marcel. But there was a faint flicker of apprehension and a little twitch of the eyes that went with the statement. Lanz decided to leave it for the moment.

“Where does Kolingba get his weapons?”

“I couldn’t say,” said Marcel.

The bartender was looking very uneasy now, and Lanz decided to back off completely. “Well, if you think of a way I could get in to see the man, let me know,” he said.

“Of course, sir.” There was a pause. “Will that be all?”

“Another beer, Marcel.”

After Lanz finished the second beer, he picked up his book and left the bar. In the lobby he spotted a lone man sitting in one of the fan-backed wicker armchairs, smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of Centrafriquepresse. He was the same man who’d followed him on his afternoon walkabout. Lanz smiled. Saint-Sylvestre’s surveillance was nothing if not obvious.

Lanz went up the broad, sweeping staircase to the mezzanine, then walked up three more flights to his small room under the eaves. It was simply furnished with an iron bedstead, a mattress that had seen better days and a simple spindle-legged desk with an old-fashioned brass swan-neck lamp. Lanz dropped the book onto the desk and stepped across to the window, which gave him a view over the square and into the compound directly opposite the hotel.

The compound ran a hundred and fifty feet on a side, the walls quarried cut stone, the large gate wood-strapped and hinged with iron. Guard towers, tin roofed and constructed from plywood, had been added at each corner. The so-called “presidential residence” was up against the east wall, and there was a rudimentary barracks building kitty-corner to it. A smaller brick building that sat directly across from the residence was almost certainly a guardhouse. The barracks looked as though it could hold between a hundred and a hundred and fifty men.

A tin-roofed shed had been built against the wall next to the guardhouse-obviously the motor pool. Lanz counted two bumblebee-striped Land Rovers with tinted windows, three armored personnel carriers and an even dozen “Mengshi” Chinese Humvee knockoffs painted in jungle camouflage, 50-caliber machine guns mounted just forward of the sunroof hatch. Considering all the other Chinese equipment he had seen, the machine guns were probably W-85s. Fourandao had a population of less than five thousand; the compound’s ordnance was easily enough to protect the town from direct assault as long as there was no air element.

Lanz went back to the desk and sat down. Taking up the book, he carefully stripped off the celluloid library cover and the original jacket. He set the book aside and laid the dust jacket illustration-side down on the desk.

Lanz had been a soldier since his compulsory military service in the late seventies. He’d worked with every sort of intelligence tool, from satellite imagery and phone taps to photo intelligence and drugged “persuasion” of the enemy. Of all these techniques he’d never found anything more useful and more accurate than the evidence of his own eyes.

On the inside of the dust jacket was an accurate scale map of central Fourandao, the information gathered during his afternoon strolls during the past few days. The map was drawn lightly in pencil directly from memory after each of his daily constitutionals.

Fourandao was laid out in an elongated grid centered on Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba, the old city square directly in front of Lanz’s hotel. There was one main street running north and south, intersected by the road from Bangui that followed the west-east course of the Kotto River. On the outskirts of town the road from Bangui became Rue de Santo Antonio, and the north-south street was Rue de Liberdad. Two banks sat on the Rue de Liberdad-Banque Internationale pour le Centrafrique and Banque Populaire Maroco-Centrafricaine-and one on the square, the Bank of Central African States. Of the three, two were known to have been heavily involved in money laundering and financing for blood commodities. The Bank of Central African States occupied the only building of over four stories in Fourandao, the upper floors containing the People’s Republic of China consular offices, the Kukuanaland Department of Customs and Excise and the Department of the Interior.

The two main streets were the only ones that were paved; the interconnecting grid of residential streets were dirt tracks. Lanz could detect no sewer system of any kind, which meant that the interconnecting streets flooded during the rainy season. Except for the buildings on the square Fourandao relied heavily on tin-roof and concrete-block construction. In most cases the quality of the concrete blocks had been poor, and without any foundations or drainage the majority of the buildings were crumbling at their bases. The only exception to this was a walled and guarded group of three modern blocks of flats that appeared to be built out of concrete. From what he could gather from eavesdropping in the bar of the hotel these flats were occupied by government bureaucrats in favor with Kolingba.

On his walks Lanz had noted evidence of malnutrition and rickets among the population, and on several occasions he’d seen huge rats nesting in the garbagechoked ditches. Dense foliage encroached on the edges of the town, and he’d seen several native women carrying bundles of firewood out of the jungle. Fourandao was as close to the edge of civilization as it was possible to get. There was no police force, since that function was operated out of Saint-Sylvestre’s euphemistically named Department of the Interior, no fire department, no city hall or any other civil authority. Kukuanaland was a country in name only; in reality it was nothing more than a criminal fiefdom that probably didn’t stretch much beyond the town limits.

Smiling to himself, Lanz began neatly filling in the street names he’d gathered that day. Every battleground had its weaknesses and he was reasonably sure he’d discovered Fourandao’s.

Oliver Gash sat in Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre’s office overlooking the Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba and studied the huge aerial photograph of Fourandao that took up the entire wall behind the policeman’s massive African mahogany desk, rumored to have once belonged to Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-dead dictator of Zaire, who had in turn purchased it from the estate of the late General Gnassingbe Eyadema, the long-standing “president” of Togo. Both Gash and Captain Saint-Sylvestre were smoking Marlboros, the cigarette of choice among those in Kukuanaland who could afford them. Gash had once joked to General Kolingba that they should advertise in tourism magazines abroad, touting Kukuanaland as a vacation destination for smokers. Kolingba had taken him seriously and Gash had to spend weeks talking him out of it.

“So what exactly does he do on these little walks?” Gash asked.

“He walks.” Saint-Sylvestre shrugged.

“No camera?”

“None that we can see.”

“Anything in his room?” Gash asked.

“Nothing incriminating. He has a number of weapons catalogs.”

“Did you run a background check?”

“Of course. He could be what he says he is-at first glance he appears to be an experienced mercenary who knows Africa well.”

“But you have doubts,” said Gash. It was a statement, not a question.

“I always have doubts, Dr. Gash. It is my business to have doubts. Our friend Lanz doesn’t ring quite true. Why does a mercenary soldier suddenly switch to being an arms dealer? Why would a supposed arms dealer travel here knowing perfectly well that we are supplied by the Chinese and have been since the beginning? There are no fools in the arms business and if a man is an arms dealer he is a fool. Ergo, I don’t believe it.”

“All right,” said Gash, stubbing out his cigarette in a huge ceramic ashtray on the desk in front of him. “What is he doing here?”

Saint-Sylvestre smiled. “At a guess I would say he’s on a reconnaissance mission.”

“To do what?”

“To facilitate a coup d’etat,” said the policeman mildly.

“Dangerous words, Captain,” responded Gash. “Talk like that could get you into serious trouble.”

“I’m not promoting the idea, Dr. Gash; I am merely giving my opinion.” Saint-Sylvestre was well aware that he had to take a very circumspect path with Gash. The man was an uneducated savage, but he had what the Americans called “street sense” and a certain animal shrewdness that was sometimes mistaken for intelligence. Worst of all Gash had the killer instinct of a sociopath, which would have been Saint-Sylvestre’s diagnosis had he been a doctor. In some ways Gash was even crazier than Kolingba.

Gash lit another cigarette, smirking as he did so. “All right, then, Captain, in your opinion, who is he working for?” In Baltimore it would have been easy to figure out which of your rivals was strong enough to make a play for your turf; here the same rules didn’t apply.

“I’m not sure. Originally I thought it might be one of our neighbors-Chad, the Congo, Cameroon-but I don’t think that’s the case.”

“Why not?”

“He’s white, for one thing. I seriously doubt that the government of Chad would hire a white mercenary, not to mention the fact that they’ve got too much to lose internationally. The same is true of the Congo-to be seen as an aggressor now would be all the excuse the U.N. would need to send in troops. Cameroon doesn’t have the money to launch a serious invasion and they’d have to go through the rest of the country to get to us. It doesn’t make sense.”

“What does?”

“He came here from Mali, but he wasn’t hired there. He also mentioned a man named Archibald Ives. I asked a few questions. Ives was a geologist.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead. Murdered in the Sudan.”

“There’s no oil in the CAR is there?” Gash asked.

Saint-Sylvestre shook his head. “Not a drop. They gave up looking for it years ago.”

“What, then?”

“He was a primarily a mineral geologist, a prospector. If he was in Kukuanaland there’s no record of it, so that means he came in illegally, probably through the Sudan.”

“Looking for what?”

“I spent some time thinking about that,” said Saint-Sylvestre, leaning back in his chair. “Any geologist in his right mind wouldn’t come into Kukuanaland on a whim. He must have known what he was looking for. The only way he could have known that would be through remote sensing, probably from a satellite.”

“The Americans? The CIA?”

“No, they wouldn’t risk the political blowback if they were found out, and we don’t have anything they want anyway. Kukuanaland is hardly strategic.”

“They’d like to wipe us off the map; I know that much,” said Gash. “That creepy secretary of state keeps on making all these war-criminal claims about the general.”

“You don’t need a geologist for that,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He shook his head. “No, somebody was looking for something and they found it. This Ives fellow was sent in to corroborate whatever their remote sensing told them. Lanz is here because the only way these people can get what they want is by getting rid of General Kolingba.”

“A mining company?” Gash said.

“A big one.” Saint-Sylvestre nodded. “Big enough to have access to a remote sensing satellite. Big enough to finance a small war.”

“So we bring Lanz in and you interrogate him.”

“To what end?” Saint-Sylvestre said. “We’d find out who the company was, but not what they’re looking for, because I guarantee that Lanz doesn’t know. If Lanz fails in his mission they’ll just send in someone else.”

“So what do you propose?”

“We continue surveillance; let him think he’s getting away with it.”

“And?”

“Eventually he’ll pack his bag and go. And I’ll be right behind him.” Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre sat back in his chair and smiled.