The Templar Legion

13

“. . This was certainly true in my case, and I can still remember very little of the intervening years until I came to myself once again as Reinhart Stengl Hartmann in this home for the aged overlooking the mountains of the Oberammergau. May I never leave it or see Africa again except in my dreams.”

Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, sat in his London office and closed the old copybook, pushing it to one side of his desk. He reclined in his chair, listening to the distant traffic noise from the Strand. It was this book, with its spidery, old-man’s handwriting, that had introduced the enormous strike-confirmed by the late Archibald Ives-in the first place. The copybook had been lost among the archival files of a minor takeover that had occurred almost thirty years ago, when his father, the eighth earl, was still running the company. Had Matheson Resource Industries not decided to digitize their files, and had a bright junior director not noticed a minor concession within what was once the Ubangi-Shari precinct of French Equatorial Africa, Sir James might have let the opportunity of a lifetime pass him by.

Reinhart Stengl Hartmann, dead for decades and forgotten long before that, had begun his career as a young man in the goldfields of South Africa’s Witwatersrand. With only minor success, Hartmann decided to try his luck elsewhere, finally settling on the operation of a rubber plantation in what was then the Congo Free State. With the annexation of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium in 1908, Hartmann was forced to move once again, this time to Ubangi-Shari on the other side of the Congo River. He operated as an ivory trader there until the 1920s and then, acting on a tip from a native guide, he traveled into the jungle interior, once again prospecting for gold. According to official reports made by the French governor of the province at the time, Hartmann did in fact find gold, but not in spectacular amounts. With the man branded a failure, the governor and just about everyone else forgot about Reinhart Stengl Hartmann.

Matheson, on the other hand, had years of experience reading ledgers, spreadsheets and every other sort of business document, and to him Hartmann’s tactics were as transparent as glass. Hartmann’s African concern operated under the name of Kotto Fluss Bergau-Kotto River Mining. On paper it appeared that all the shares of the company had been owned by Hartmann, but a closer look revealed that a majority of stock was held as collateral for large personal loans to Hartmann by a second company, this one operating out of Switzerland under the name Edelstein Malder Genf SA-Gemstone Brokers of Geneva.

Edelstein Malder Genf did business with only one other company: Makelaar Steen Amsterdam-Gem Brokers of Amsterdam, and they were doing a great deal of business. Matheson had laughed out loud when he made the final connection. Hartmann hadn’t struck gold on the Kotto River; he’d found diamonds, and lots of them, although not quite enough to wake the sleeping bloodhounds of De Beers.

Over a period of fifteen years Hartmann managed to accumulate a huge fortune, but his only obvious use of the money was the building of a bizarre estate in the middle of the jungle that looked remarkably like the home of a wealthy Bavarian farmer. Called Lowenshalle-the Lion’s Lair-it overlooked the Kotto River and the mist-clouded, three-forked waterfall a mile or so upstream.

Hartmann’s covert diamond trading practice was interrupted only by World War Two, but by 1950 a series of severe heart attacks made his life in Lowenshalle impossible. Within a few months he had abandoned everything, smuggling his last consignment of diamonds in the false base of an oxygen bottle as he returned to Europe. In Lowenshalle his few native servants drifted away, returning to their villages. The estate was stripped of any obvious valuables and the jungle quickly began to inexorably swallow up everything that Hartmann had built.

Back in Europe, Hartmann consolidated his holdings into a single limited trust, then settled into a retirement home in the Bavarian village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he spent his last few years writing out the story and the secrets of his life in what would become almost a hundred copybooks like the one on Matheson’s desk. Upon his death, with no heirs, the notebooks became the property of Hartmann’s trust, and the trust in turn became the property of Matheson Resource Industries when, decades later, it purchased Kotto Fluss Bergau from the Swiss bank that managed Hartmann’s interests. At no time, since the initial incorporation of Kotto River Mining and its attendant distribution companies, was there anything mentioned in writing or in rumor of any mining operations on the Lowenshalle estate or anywhere nearby. Like so many other stories hidden in the vaults and safety-deposit boxes of so many banks around the world, it would have probably stayed that way until the end of time if it hadn’t been for a few simple twists of fate.

“Almost enough to make you believe in God.” Matheson grunted softly to himself. There was a gentle double tap on his door. “Enter,” he said. The door opened and Major Allen Faulkener stepped into the room.

“Yes?” Matheson said briskly.

“I thought you’d like to know,” said the security officer, “Harris is in play.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t bugger it up this time,” said Matheson. “If he’d done it right on the Khartoum highway we wouldn’t be in this position now.”

“He’s got six of the Sinclair woman’s ‘specials’ with him, and they’ve got their orders. If he does bugger it up he knows what’ll happen to him,” said Faulkener.

“Excellent.” Matheson nodded. “Once we’ve dealt with Holliday and his interfering friends perhaps we could give some thought to President Kolingba’s successor.”

The smell of cooking fish was mouthwatering. Samir, in his role as chef, had rolled the thick deboned catfish steaks in cornmeal and dropped them into a quarter inch of dark palm oil. The oil seethed in the bottom of a big cast-iron frying pan on one of the two burners on the wood-burning cookstove that stood on a firebrick base on the forward deck of the Pevensey. The other burner was being used to brown thick circles of sweet potato. The elderly Sudanese man deftly flipped the slabs of fish and potatoes with a homemade sheet-metal spatula. A pile of kindling in a sagging wire basket was stacked beside him along with a hatchet in case he needed to feed the stove.

While Samir cooked, his boiler room partner, Bakri, took over in the wheelhouse and Jean-Paul, the third member of the crew, poled the river, calling out the depth of water under the steam barge’s flat-bottomed keel. It was early and mist still twisted in ghostly trails over the river, the sun a bright hammered bronze disk rising over the ragged fog hanging above the lush jungle trees to the east.

“We’ll find some shade in a few hours and wait out the worst of the sun,” suggested Eddie. Samir flipped a golden brown catfish fillet and a scoop of sweet potatoes onto a tin plate and gave it to his boss, but Eddie gallantly handed it over to Peggy instead. She ate a tentative morsel of the fish and her eyes widened.

“It’s delicious,” she said. She speared a fried piece of sweet potato onto her fork and popped it into her mouth. “Wonderful!” Samir smiled happily and began filling the rest of the plates.

“The giraffe catfish isn’t like the mud-fish bottom-feeders in America,” said Eddie. “It prefers to eat plant material, so the taste is usually fresher.” He laughed. “In Cuba now they think the catfish is an agent of the devil god, Babalu Aye, because he can walk overland on his fins, but they eat him anyway.”

Holliday sensed it before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. As he took his plate from Samir some instinct and perhaps a fleeting glint seen out of the corner of his eye made him suddenly tense and twist around on the plastic milk crate he was using as a seat. He squinted, looking for something he wasn’t quite sure was there, and then he saw it: a phantom in the mist above the trees, the first flash of sunlight reflecting off the windscreen of a low-flying aircraft. A small plane, maybe a Cessna Caravan, tricked out with floats and painted dark green to blend in with the jungle treetops.

A split second later he spotted a bright double flash from under the wings followed by a strangely clipped, hollow whoosh, like the abruptly terminated sound of a bullet striking water at high speed. The sound was horribly familiar: a pair of underwing Hellfire air-to-ground missiles being fired-forty pounds of fire-and-forget high explosive coming at them at roughly a thousand miles an hour.

“Incoming!” Holliday bellowed. And almost before the warning was out of his mouth the Hellfires struck. Used by a skilled operator, the AGM-114 Hellfire could be aimed through the open window of a moving vehicle. In the case of the two missiles aimed at the Pevensey, one struck the rear wall of the lounge behind the wheelhouse and the second exploded in the boiler room simultaneously, putting a ragged hole the size of a car door through the bottom of the old barge.

Bakri, standing in the wheelhouse, was vaporized on the spot. As the Pevensey suddenly lurched with the impact of the two missiles, Jean-Paul, standing in the bow with his pole, was thrown into the river, and Samir, crouched in front of his frying pans, had his ribs crushed as the stove tipped over on him, then was turned into a human torch as the furiously boiling cooking oil spilled onto his head, neck and chest. Samir’s thin cotton clothing and his hair burst into flame as the blackened, crackling firewood spilled out of the overturned stove and he died, his bubbling scream choked off as his mouth and throat filled with the burning oil.

Sitting on the starboard side of the barge Holliday instinctively threw himself toward Peggy and Rafi, his outstretched arms bowling them over as a hail of cast iron, glass and wood debris flew over them. Pevensey, helm gone, swung hard into the current, then almost tipped over as the surging water poured into the gaping hole in her bottom.

Holliday had a brief glimpse of the aircraft as it roared overhead. He hit the river, automatically assessing: a Cessna Caravan 208. Nine passengers, but six or seven was more likely with the Hellfire payload. The water closed over his head as he was pushed down toward the stony bottom, his vision cut in half by the silt-heavy current. Then he remembered.

Crocodiles.

The Nile version, up to twenty feet long and sometimes weighing as much as a ton-bronze, the green-yellow-and-dirty-purple prehistoric horrors-could travel up to forty miles an hour if they were hungry enough. They had sixty-eight cone-shaped teeth and a bite force of five thousand pounds per square inch. They sometimes hunted in packs of five or more and had been known to take down a four-thousand-pound black rhinoceros. An average-sized human being would be little more than a hors d’oeuvre.

Holliday flailed his way frantically back to the surface. He was being swept along with the current along with the remains of the Pevensey. He shook the water out of his eyes and spotted Rafi struggling to drag an unconscious Peggy toward the shore. Captain Eddie was already there, hauling himself up the muddy bank. The half-submerged wire kindling basket whirled by and Holliday reached out and levered the hatchet out of the top piece of firewood. On the shore Captain Eddie yelled out a warning.

“?Detras de usted! Behind you!”

A huge, surging creature was powering its way toward him, massive armored tail swirling, its dead dinosaur eyes barely breaking the surface of the swiftly flowing river. Almost immediately Holliday realized that the grotesque creature had its attention elsewhere-it was racing toward Peggy as Rafi and Captain Eddie tried to haul her out of the water.

Holliday twisted away to one side like a matador playing a bull and backhanded the blade of the hatchet into the creature’s eye. The crocodile reared up, making a terrible, deep-throated bellowing sound. Holliday managed to jerk the hatchet out of the animal’s eye and struck out for the shore as the wounded creature rolled away from him. He reached the shallows and staggered to his feet as Captain Eddie came back down the bank and held out one hand.

“I would advise you to be a little quicker, senor,” said the Cuban. He jerked Holliday up onto the muddy shore, sweeping the big bowie knife out of its sheath. As Holliday stumbled up the bank he turned and saw Eddie lunging forward and driving the heavy blade up to the hilt high between the eyes of the already half-blinded giant that had been seeking its revenge.

The crocodile squirmed and shivered as the knife went into its brain and then suddenly went rigid. Eddie pulled out the blade, reached into the water, grabbed one of the creature’s stubby legs, then half flipped the body, exposing the pale, eggplant-shaded belly. He pushed the bowie knife into the crocodile’s throat and sawed downward, esophagus, heart, lungs, liver and intestine spilling out into the shallows like a hideously foul-smelling stew. He used his boot to push the disemboweled creature’s corpse into the current.

“That should keep his friends busy for a while,” said Eddie, grabbing Holliday’s elbow and helping him up the riverbank. At the edge of the dense jungle Rafi was bending over Peggy, who was sitting up and coughing, her back against the thick trunk of a tree that overhung the river.

“She’s okay,” said Rafi. “Half-drowned but okay.”

Eddie watched the remains of Pevensey washing up onshore like flotsam. He turned back to Holliday. “You have some serious enemies, senor. Perhaps you should have warned me.”

“Sorry about that,” answered Holliday, hands on knees as he tried to catch his breath. “I didn’t think they wanted me that badly.”

“I think you were wrong, Comandante,” said Captain Eddie. “I think they want you very badly indeed.”

Holliday climbed to his feet, his clothes smeared with mud, stinking but alive. “Where’s the widest part of the river closest to here? I need about fifteen hundred feet, say half a kilometer.”

“We’ve just been attacked with rockets and nearly eaten by crocodiles,” said Peggy, her voice weary. “Why would you want to know something like that?”

“Because that’s how much water a good floatplane pilot in a Caravan needs to land,” said Holliday.

“Twenty kilometers behind us or thirty ahead,” said Captain Eddie, wiping the blade of his knife across his jeans. He slid it back into its sheath.

“How long to get to us here?”

“By boat, four hours, more likely five at this time of day. Twice that by land. There are very few trails, so they would have to stay close to the river, follow its turns.”

“Are they likely to find boats?” Holliday asked.

“Perhaps a dugout or two, small ones, not what they need. There are no villages along that part of the river,” answered Eddie.

“So we’ve got eight hours, maybe, until nightfall.”

“For what?” Rafi asked, crouched beside Peggy.

“To get ready,” said Holliday.