The Templar Legion

12

Peggy sat in the copilot’s seat of the Catalina’s skeletal cockpit and stared down at the mottled green landscape three hundred feet below. Doc and Rafi were asleep on the piles of equipment in the rear of the big amphibian. “You never think of the Sudan as being green,” she said. “It’s all about Darfur and droughts.” She tripped the shutter release on the Nikon and took a half dozen more shots.

“Southern Sudan is a whole different thing,” said Mutwakil Osman, the Catalina’s pilot. “Twice the size of Texas and about a third of the population-less than seven million people.”

“It looks beautiful,” said Peggy.

“Not for long,” said Osman. “When big corporations have their way it’ll be clear-cut, strip-mined and turned into an oil field within ten years.” He glanced over the side. “There’s the river.” Directly in front of them the sun was beginning to slide out of sight, turning the horizon into a flaring line of golds and reds that stretched into darkness on either side. “Just enough light to put her down.”

Osman gently pushed the oversized wheel forward, then toed the left foot pedal. The plane went into a long sliding turn down the wide expanse of the silvery river snaking beneath their wings.

There was a faint vibration throughout the hull as the aircraft touched the surface of the river, slicing into the dark water and sending up a rooster-tail spray that rose up on both sides of the cockpit like a curtain that dropped away as Osman throttled back on the engines. Peggy noticed a half dozen dugouts on the water, the men slapping at the surface of the river with their paddles.

“A welcoming committee?” Peggy asked.

“Croc beaters.” Osman grinned. “Hit one when you land and it could flip the old girl on her ass.”

Osman guided the plane toward a narrow wooden pier. Docked there was an ancient river barge steamer that made the African Queen look like a speedboat. The steamer was about sixty feet long, twenty-five feet wide and had shrouded paddle wheels on either side of the deck. Rising above the tarred hull was a squat engine house and above that was a rickety-looking wheelhouse. At one time or another someone had attempted to paint the superstructure of the steamer white but the sun and the rain had steadily done their work and where any paint was left the color was a dejected gray. The entire vessel seemed to sag in the middle like a tired old horse.

“What on earth is that?” Rafi said, poking his head through the bulkhead door.

“That’s the Pevensey,” said Osman. “She delivers supplies up and down the river. You’ll be taking her to the first cataract.”

“I’m surprised she floats,” said Rafi.

Osman killed the engines and they coasted the last hundred feet, sliding up on the shallow, sloping mud beach beside the pier. “Welcome to Umm Rawq,” Osman said. He reached out and slipped a CQ radio frequency card out of a holder beneath the fuel gauge. He handed it to Peggy. “Hang on to that. If you ever need a lift sometime, just give me a call.” He gave her a grin, then went off to speak to the captain of the Pevensey while Peggy, Rafi and Holliday began to explore the village.

Umm Rawq was a sordid little place with a single street of mud-brick hovels and a sheet-metal shanty selling banana beer and Batman Forever glasses from Mc-Donald’s. The whole village smelled of fish. An unseen radio boomed out tinny Afropop, and children played in the muddy, rubbish-littered road. None of the children were older than three or four, and the only male in the village was the gray-haired old bartender. The only other adult males they’d seen since landing were the crocodile beaters.

“Not the most hospitable place in the world,” Doc said.

“It looks like the Lord’s Resistance Army has been through here,” said Peggy. “They take all the children over eight or nine and the able-bodied men. All in the name of God. Rape, murder, mutilation.”

“I thought they were in Uganda?” Rafi said.

“They’re spreading all over central Africa now. Here and the Congo as well.”

“I’ve seen enough of Umm Rawq,” said Holliday. They returned to the dock just in time to see Osman before he headed back toward Khartoum. The crocodile beaters had landed their long, narrow dugouts and were busy taking supplies from the Catalina on board Pevensey.

“I had a talk with Eddie,” said Osman. “He was only going as far as Am Dafok this trip but he’s willing to take you as far as the first cataract.”

“Eddie’s the captain?”

“Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso, to be precise,” said Osman with a smile.

“Edimburgo Vladimir?” Peggy said.

“He’s Cuban. His mother liked the name Edinburgh, as in Scotland, so she called him Edimburgo, but when she went down to the registry office the official said Edimburgo was an ‘enemy’ name, so she had to tack something revolutionary on to balance things out-hence the Vladimir. Cabrera is the father’s name. Alfonso is the mother’s, which is how they do it in Cuba. His friends call him Eddie. He was over here as an ‘adviser’ during the Angola crisis in the nineteen seventies and he defected. He’s been here ever since.”

Eddie turned out to be six-foot-six, coal black, completely bald and as muscular as a stevedore. He flashed a million-dollar smile, and the twinkle in his eye made Holliday like him immediately. Eddie moved with the grace of a dancer, which as it turned out was how he’d been trained-ten years with the Cuban National Ballet, then off to Angola. He wore a black KA-BAR bowie knife the size of a short sword in a sheath on his hip.

The interior of the Pevensey was as ramshackle as the outside of the boat. Two passenger cabins were tucked behind the engine room, both the size of confessionals, and there was a “lounge” behind the wheelhouse with a grimy porthole on either side. A carpet the color of mold sat atop the worn decking, accented by a red velvet couch that had turned pale pink over time and that obviously doubled as the captain’s bed.

While the croc beaters loaded all their supplies on deck, Captain Eddie ushered them into the lounge and offered them drinks, which turned out to be a choice of either Mamba malt liquor or 112-proof Red Star Chinese vodka. Holliday, Rafi and Peggy chose the malt liquor as the lesser of two evils. Eddie lit a long Cohiba cigar with a battered Zippo and poured himself a generous tumbler of vodka, then settled himself into an old wooden office chair. Along with a homemade chart table and the couch, the office chair was the only furniture in the little room. Behind the tall Cuban’s head, resting on three pegs in the wall was an old, well-used-looking AK-47. The room was lit by a large window covered with a pair of grimy, tacked-on homemade cardboard shutters.

“Memories of better times?” Holliday asked.

“Old times, not necessarily better ones, senor.” He turned away and addressed his other guests in the crowded little room. “So, mis comandantes, Donny tells me you wish to travel into Senor Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

“Something like that,” said Rafi.

“That would make of me the Helmsman.” Eddie smiled.

“A literate Cuban,” said Peggy with a brittle tone in her voice. Holliday knew that Celia Cruz, one of Peggy’s best friends in high school, had come over on the Mariel boatlift and had lost her mother and her father in the process.

Eddie slid the cigar from his mouth and gave Peggy a baleful look. “There are many things that Fidel did badly, senorita, but educating his people was not one of them. The country of my birth has a ninety-nine-point-eight percent literacy rate; your country cannot say the same, I’m afraid. There are also no student loans-university in Cuba is free.”

Peggy frowned and took a pull at her bottle of Mamba.

“My cousin sometimes has strong opinions,” said Holliday.

“Perhaps your cousin should judge the man in front of her and not the nation’s politics. I am not Fidel.” Captain Eddie stuck the cigar back into his mouth and once again Holliday saw the twinkle in his eye. “I have a much better tan, yes?”

Even Peggy couldn’t help laughing.

“You must not take life so seriously, amorcita,” said Eddie. “After half a century of Fidel, Cubans would have all slit their wrists by now if life was a serious thing. Havana is a city where the flushing of toilets is rationed and it is all the fault of ‘embargo.’ Everything is the fault of ‘embargo.’ Cockroaches are the fault of ‘embargo.’ ” Eddie grinned broadly. “But our prostitutes on the beach at Veradero all have university educations.” Holliday laughed along with the others, but he could see the evening disintegrating into tipsy stories about the ills of the Castro regime.

“How long will it take us to get to the first cataract?” Holliday asked, getting down to business.

“A night, a day and another night,” said Captain Eddie, taking a big swallow of the Chinese vodka. “Pevensey is not as swift as she once was.”

“And from there?” Rafi asked.

“From there I do not go,” said Captain Eddie. “Beyond the first cataract is the province of the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, their madman leader.” He smiled and sucked on his cigar, then blew a huge cloud of smoke into the air. “It is also said the ghost of Dr. Amobe Barthelemy Limbani walks there as well.”

“You don’t seem to be the kind of man who’d believe in ghosts,” said Holliday.

“Travel up and down this river long enough, senor, and you find yourself able to believe anything.”

“How soon can we get going?” Rafi asked.

Captain Eddie puffed his cigar thoughtfully and then emptied his glass of vodka. “Give me time to get steam up. An hour.”

“You travel the river at night?” Holliday asked, surprised.

Eddie smiled. “It is the best time,” he said. “Sometimes the safest. What you can’t see cannot see you in return. Mostly.”

True to his word Eddie had the Pevensey fully loaded, boiler hissing, and pulling into the downstream current of the river almost exactly an hour later. Two crew members kept the boiler fueled, while the third member of the crew stood in the bow using a long pole to check for clearance. Peggy and Rafi had taken one of the two cabins, and Holliday stood beside Captain Eddie at the wheel. There was a simple marine telegraph to the right of the wheel with settings for “full ahead,” “dead slow” and “stop,” and a chain dangling down from the ceiling that was connected to the steam whistle on the roof of the wheelhouse. Night had fallen and the only light came from the red glow of Captain Eddie’s ever-present cigar.

“You’re like Churchill with that cigar,” said Holliday, looking out onto the dark river ahead.

“He was a connoisseur, that man,” said Eddie. “A man of muy good taste. He smoked La Aroma de Cuba and when they stopped making those he smoked Romeo y Julieta.”

“You know a lot about Churchill?”

“I know a lot about cigars. My father ran one of the biggest Habanos factories until the day he died. He knew Churchill personally.” Eddie reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and handed a cigar across to Holliday. “Please, senor, have one. It is a Montecristo No. 3.”

“I’m afraid I quit smoking many years ago.” Holliday sighed. “Although it’s very tempting.”

“If one does not give in to temptation occasionally, how can one appreciate the strength of will it takes to resist it?”

“You sound like a Jesuit professor I know at Georgetown University.”

“There, it is God’s will that you smoke this fine cigar,” said Eddie. Holliday took the cigar and rolled it around in his mouth. The Zippo flared between Eddie’s fingers. He let the kerosene smell fade, then applied the flame to the tip of the cigar. Holliday took a light pull. The taste was honey and rich earth. He could almost believe the stories of such cigars being rolled on the thighs of young virgins. “Not only virgins,” said Eddie, reading his mind. “Pretty ones.” Both men laughed and the engine chugged its regular coughing beat. The jungle on either side of them was dense and dark, wetland vines and roots spilling over into the water. Holliday could feel a steady tension rising out of nowhere, and then he realized he was thinking of being nineteen years old and crouching in the belly of a PBR going upriver on the Song Vam Co Dong in the Angel’s Wing, listening to the jungle and knowing he’d never hear the one that killed him.

“Bad memory?” Eddie said.

“Old memory,” Holliday replied.

“In the jungle?”

“Yes.”

“The worst fighting is in the jungle, always. I have asked myself many times why that is and I cannot think of an answer.”

“I think it’s because the jungle has no history,” said Holliday. “Things live and breed and die all in a day in the jungle and no one remembers. I was on patrol once and we found what was left of an old French fighter from the nineteen fifties, a Dewoitine, I think it was called. The jungle had almost swallowed it up completely; there were vines growing out of the pilot’s eye sockets.”

“What was your rank?” Eddie asked.

“Then? I was a PFC. I came out of it a lieutenant.”

“And now?”

“Lieutenant colonel,” said Holliday.

“Not very far up the ladder for a man of your years.”

“I opened my mouth when I should have had it closed.” Holliday laughed. “You don’t get to be a general by having opinions; you get to be a general by following orders. In my army, at least.”

“Mine, too, I am afraid. I never rose above primer teniente.”

“More opinionated than me, then,” said Holliday.

“There is a phrase in English, I think: ‘to suffer fools badly’? I was very bad at this and there were a great many fools among the Cubanos in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, I can assure you.”

One of the boiler crew, a gray-haired man named Samir, knocked on the wheelhouse door. He rattled off something in Arabic, got the nod from Eddie, then vanished into the darkness.

“What was that all about?” Holliday asked.

“Samir is our cook. He was inquiring about breakfast and asking for permission to take a piece of chicken as bait.”

“Bait for what?”

“Moonfish, perhaps a turtle if we are very lucky.” Eddie dragged on his cigar, lighting up his dark, laughing eyes. “They only bite on white meat, of course.”

“Of course,” said Holliday, and they continued down the dark jungle river.