The Templar Legion

29

Konrad Lanz stood in the baking heat of Mopti Airport in northeastern Mali and watched as a dozen workers crawled like busy ants over the rickety wooden scaffolding surrounding the old Vanguard cargo aircraft. They were painting over the green cedar on the tail, as well as the striping that was the usual livery of Lebanon Air Transport, covering it with a flat black spray paint that would render the place virtually invisible from the ground at night.

Reflective chrome strips were being painted over around the windscreen, and the windscreen itself was being covered on the inside with polarizing film. Even the wheels on the landing gear, the bare aluminum tips of the propellers and the open engine nacelles were being given the flat black paint job. Not that stealth was a real concern for Lanz.

Mali had few jet fighters, Nigeria had only fifteen Chinese fighters with five pilots fully trained on them and Cameroon had four light attack aircraft, three of which were out of service and the fourth having been grounded since the death of the Cameroon Air Force’s only instructor the year previous.

It was doubtful that they would have any trouble in the air from any military source. Nigeria had twenty ancient Russian antiaircraft guns, most of them placed around the capital city, Mali had no air defense system at all and Cameroon had twelve of the same antiaircraft guns as the Nigerians, also placed around their capital. With no moon Lanz considered it very unlikely that there would be anything else in the sky when the time came.

He watched the men working for a few moments more, satisfied that they’d make their deadline of ten p.m. tomorrow. As well as the painting, the Vanguard had to be fitted with extra webbing for cargo, and jump seats for the two-hundred-man companies. The end-user certificates for the small arms they’d purchased in Belgium, Spain and the Croatian port of Rijeka had passed inspection in Beirut and were supposed to be delivered to Mopti today.

The small tent city at the end of the airport’s single runway and the two hundred men occupying it had also been ignored, as had the strange paint scheme of the old prop-jet cargo planes. Enough palms had been greased to keep officials at bay for the next thirty-six hours, but Lanz knew perfectly well that rumors were flying about their presence in the town of more than a hundred thousand only a few miles away on the river.

Lanz turned away from the Vanguards and crunched across the hard-packed sand to the oversized marquee tent they were using as base headquarters. He nodded to the guards on each side of the opening. They were well kitted out in worn lowland leaf-pattern camo fatigues from the Vietnam era, and instead of berets they wore the much more useful boonie hats. Officers wore camo baseball caps, which were the only indicators of rank.

He stepped inside the tent. There were three large models laid out on tables in the center of the tent. All were to scale. The one on the left showed the airport, the one in the middle showed the compound and the surrounding square and the one on the right showed the dock area.

Captain Pierre Laframboise, leader of Vanguard One, was studying both the airport and the compound models carefully. Lanz had worked with Laframboise on several different projects over the years and the two men both liked and respected each other. Laframboise was a big man with a big beard and a big belly. He liked to eat almost as much as he liked to fight.

“Having second thoughts, Pierre?”

“I always have second thoughts, mon vieux,” said the big man.

“About what?”

“About news getting back to this bizarrerie de nature Kolingba so that he’s ready and waiting when we come. About the distance we have to march from the airport to the palace or fort or whatever it is.”

“It’s barely a mile,” said Lanz. “Fifteen minutes at a trot.”

“And all jungle. He could have a battalion waiting for us in ambush.”

“He doesn’t have a battalion-we’re going in at two-to-one odds.” Lanz smiled, listening to Laframboise clucking away like a worried hen. It was almost a ritual, this fretting of his. But it was fretting that had saved both their lives on more than one occasion. “But I see your point. Why don’t we stagger the companies-five minutes between Vanguard One and Vanguard Two down the airport road.”

“Better.” Laframboise nodded. “Not perfect, but a little better.”

“Anything else?”

“This Limbani character. It would be un catastrophe if he showed up. We can’t fight on two fronts any better than Hitler or Napoleon did, mon brave.”

“Limbani’s a myth, a pipe dream. It’s been almost seven years since Kolingba took over. If Limbani were alive he’d have made a move by now.”

“Your bones are getting brittle with age, mon ami; you speak in absolutes and you know that in this business there is no such thing.”

“He’s paying us well, Pierre, enough to retire maybe, to open that restaurant of yours in Tours, for me to see my daughter a little more, to be an ordinary citizen.”

The big man smiled sadly. “They always pay us well, Colonel, as well they should-we are supposed to die for their money if necessary. And we are not ordinary citizens; we are what we are because of you, and so we have bad blood with our families, and the restaurants in Tours are always somewhere in the future. We’re going to die in a place like this someday, Konrad, and you know it.”

Lanz turned away and stepped out of the tent into the sunlight again. He climbed up into the cab of the postwar Bedford S Type canvas van that stood beside the marquee and headed into Mopti and the waterfront, where the two big pinasse cargo vessels were bringing up the arms from Bamako.

He swung the heavy old army truck down the track that ran between the lines of tents farther along the runway. Most of the men were outside, sitting on camp stools or old lawn furniture they’d found somewhere.

They were stripped to the waist in the heat, playing cards or board games and drinking Castel beer that Lanz had figured into the budget. Some of them were doing small bits of housekeeping: shining boots, replacing laces, even pipe-claying belts.

Most of them were young, not much more than twenty-five, and of those almost all were black- discards, deserters or just plain fed up from armies of other African nations that barely fed them and rarely paid them. With the money each one of them hoped to make in the next few days they could keep their families for months and sometimes years. To these it was worth the risk.

Almost all of the boys, black or white, young or old, were laughing and smiling and telling jokes together, but as he drove by he caught the occasional long look into nowhere, usually from the scarred, sunburned older ones, his best men from the Belgian days and some from even further back. Addicted to it, just like him, throwing the dice with the devil one more time, trying to beat the odds once again.

He reached the end of the hardened track in the sand and turned onto the highway leading into Mopti. As he drove toward the town and the teeming port on the banks of the wide, sluggish river he thought about his conversation with Laframboise, one of the old guard and, like most of them, Lanz included, inclined to be superstitious.

He’d told Pierre that Limbani was a myth and for the most part he believed it, but myths and superstitions sometimes had some basis in fact. What was the old adage? “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”? Limbani had been out of the picture for almost ten years now; was slight hope keeping a faint trail of smoke rising, or was it something more substantial? He stepped on the gas, pushing the lurching old truck a little harder. He put any thoughts of Limbani out of his mind. What was substantial was the crates of AK-47s still wrapped in their paper, and wooden boxes of ammo sitting on the docks, waiting for him.

The Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter lifted nose-down to the hardstand, its counter-rotating rotors sounding like a pair of hammering commercial washing machines. The sudden furious noise and lurching takeoff brought Oliver Gash’s lunch abruptly into his throat. The takeoff was completed with an equally sudden lift of the nose, the small yellow stucco buildings of Kukuanaland International rotating in front of him like a yo-yo until all he could see was a patch of sunlit blue sky and all he could feel was his gut falling along with his lunch, his bowels simultaneously demanding to be opened.

Gash gritted his teeth but that only made it even worse. He told himself that the pilot was risking his own life as well, but the broad, gum-chewing face of Flying Officer Emmanuel Osita Ozegbe, eyes hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses, didn’t give him the security he needed. Ozegbe looked about sixteen years old and about sixty pounds overweight, like someone who smoked too much weed, watched too much TV and ate too many Doritos. He’d met lots just like him back in Baltimore. Welfare weenies who’d never get off it until Medicare cut off their legs from diabetes and they went on disability benefits instead.

“Where you want to go today, boss?” Ozegbe said, speaking the standard Sango patois. He spun the helicopter slowly around on its axis. It was only through an incredible application of willpower that Gash didn’t simultaneously soil his pants and puke all over his lap.

“Upriver,” Gash managed, using the same language. “Kazaba Falls.” This was where the rumors consistently placed Limbani.

“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He swung the helicopter around until he had the appropriate compass heading, put the stick and the helicopter into a nose-down attitude and gunned the throttles. Gash was jerked back in his seat and suddenly they were in rapid motion, tearing through the sky a hundred feet above the ground, the great sound of the big Klimov turbo shafts blotting out everything. Except the sound of his own ragged breathing and his companion’s gum snapping.

The helicopter flew like a video game, everything controlled from one complex stick with thumb buttons, finger-grip controls and toggle switches like a Christmas tree. Ozegbe threw it around the sky like a farm boy driving a tractor-there was no finesse or subtlety or sense that the young man was managing a stupendously complicated piece of machinery.

With the stick and the heads-up weapons panels and the virtual dials and controls displayed on little screens here and there in front of him it really was no more than a video game; he was flying some exotic version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and was barely aware that he was actually flying a weapons platform that would have taken out all the pilot’s competition in south Baltimore in a single twenty-minute session with a stop at the nearest New York Fried Chicken to top things off.

“How long you been flying this?” Gash yelled into his microphone. The kid’s eyes stayed glued to the controls.

“Two hundred hours on a flight simulator and another two hundred hours on the full-sized simulator at the Ukhtomsky factory outside Moscow.”

“How much time actually flying?”

“Thirty hours with the instructor. Fifteen hours here. I do a two-hour patrol of the western border once a week. That’s all we have gas for.”

“What about weapons?”

“The missiles are dummies, but the Shipunovs are real.” Ozegbe squeezed one of the buttons on the control stick and the helicopter seemed to shudder as the twin cannons pulsed. From his seat Gash could see the rounds impacting the left-hand bank of the river, sending up huge gouts of mud and water.

A pair of rounds caught a dozing alligator and tore it to shreds before it had time to move. In front of them the Kazaba Falls rose like a wall split by the three tumbling, mist-shrouded cascades of water.

Gash gripped the edges of his seat but the young pilot just twitched the control handle, the nose came up and they rode above the falls to find themselves hurtling along barely twenty feet over the water.

“I’ve seen enough,” said Gash. “Take me back.”

“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He twitched the control handle to the left and they went into a long swinging turn over the jungle. For a split second Gash thought he saw something out of place, a shape that wasn’t quite right among the canopy trees, but he wasn’t about to ask his teenage pilot to go back for a look.

“How often do you patrol this sector?” Gash asked instead.

“Only once in a while. Everybody thinks that Banqui’s eventually going to try to take us out from the west but I don’t think so.”

They headed back downriver, leaving the falls behind them.

“Did he see us?” breathed Holliday, drenched by the spray coming up from the base of the waterfall closest to the village side of the river. Limbani crossed the slippery slabs of slick black slate ahead of him while Eddie came behind.

“The spray hid us, I think,” said Limbani, raising his voice above the pounding of the falls. Directly beside them the sheer cliff rose a good two hundred feet straight up with only a ten- or fifteen-foot path between the edge of the cliff and the roiling whirlpooling water at the foot of the falls.

“Do they patrol often?” Eddie called out.

“Almost never,” yelled Limbani. “That is why I am worried. That and the new moon. They’re getting ready for something.”

“Does that have anything to do with us getting soaked?” Holliday asked.

Limbani didn’t answer. He turned slightly, took a step or two and simply vanished.

“What the hell?” Holliday said.

“Poof,” said Eddie, just behind him. “This guy is a magician, yes?”

“Apparently,” said Holliday. He was glad Rafi and Peggy were back at the main camp taking pictures and taking their first steps at understanding a new civilization. If there was one thing Peggy hated it was small, dark tunnels. He took another two steps, stumbled in sudden darkness and then took a third step. Everything had become silent; the sound of the waterfall had become nothing more than a dull throbbing. “You with me, Eddie?”

“Right behind you, companero,” said the Cuban. “This is the way to el infierno, I think.”

“Pretty damp for hell,” answered Holliday.

“Maybe el diablo has a sense of humor,” Eddie said. “Gets you wet and cold before he roasts you for eternity.”

There was a scratching sound on rough metal and the flame of an old glass chimney oil lamp blossomed. The lamp was being held by Limbani only a few feet ahead of them. Behind the doctor was a large rusted metal hatchway studded with rivets.

“So where exactly are we, Doctor?” Holliday asked.

“The doorway to the past.” The older man smiled. He spun the wheel on the hatchway and pushed it open, stepping aside to let Holliday and Eddie go through first.

“Mierda!” Eddie whispered, stunned.

“No way.” Holliday grinned, suddenly finding himself laughing. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. “You really are full of surprises, Limbani.”

They were standing in an immense cavern behind the waterfall, the sides of the cave a football field or more apart, the stalactite-studded rock more than a hundred feet overhead. The rock was streaked with thick, threading seams of what could only be gold, those veins in turn surrounded by even thicker strands of what appeared to be quartz but which Holliday knew were not.

“Gold?” Holliday asked.

“In quartz and diamond matrices. The caves are the far end of the mother lode back at the three hills. King Solomon’s Mines, a greedy man’s Shangri-la.”

Dozens of torches illuminated the sight as at least a hundred of the Pale Strangers worked on the giant object resting in its cofferdam, cradled by more than a score of heavy tree trunks on each side.

“Unbelievable,” said Holliday. “It’s a Viking snekkja. What the British called a dragon ship. What the hell are you up to, Limbani?”

The boat behind the cofferdam was sixty or seventy feet long, clinker built from fresh planks, the planks overlapped, sewn, riveted and the spaces stuffed tightly with moss. The workers were almost finished now, thirty rowing benches installed between the gunwales and a raised platform for the helmsman at the rowing oar. The gunwales seemed higher than ones Holliday had seen on replica ships but it didn’t take long to see why. Between the rowing benches were firing positions for rows of ballista, outsized crossbows used in medieval siege warfare, capable of piercing stone walls, killing dozens at a time and even casting enormous fireballs.

“Roche-Guillaume’s idea?” Holliday said.

“Presumably.” Limbani nodded. “The ship itself goes back to Ragnar Skull Splitter, who remained here until his death. According to Roche-Guillaume’s manuscripts the local people had already intermarried with the Romans who came here first. It is as though each explorer who came this way left something of his culture behind. Ragnar’s own vessel was used to bury him when he died of fever, but the design for the pirogues my people used for travel and fishing were of much the same design. This ship, which is called Havdragoon in the old language-Sea Dragon-was nothing more than those small piroques scaled upward.”

“But why have you built her?” Holliday asked. “Why now?”

“Because war is coming.”

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“As a matter of fact I can. I’ve told you that I had my own spies and the battle is to be very soon. It doesn’t matter who the winner is between Kolingba and his enemies. Either way we will be sought out and slaughtered. We have hidden long enough. With the dark of the moon we strike.” He waved toward the ship. A group of kilted workers were fitting a bloodred curling snake figurehead on the high, delicate stem of the ship.

“This cavern stretches the length of all three sections of the falls. When the cofferdam is opened the cavern floor will fill and the ship will be thrust out into the stream with sixty men at her oars. And sixty more at the crossbows. A hundred pirogues will join us on the downriver journey, each paddler armed with a blowgun and a hundred killing darts.”

“You’re mad!” Holliday burst out. “You’re leading your people to suicide!”

“We never asked for war. We never wanted war. But we will not run from war. I know Kolingba and his mind. Just as I know the kind of men who will be fighting him. It may well be suicide to fight, but is it better to wait like sheep for genocide instead?”

“Tiene razon, mi amigo,” murmured Eddie. “Better to die fighting than praying.”

“Is that a quote?”

“Si. Fidel, I’m afraid.”

“Well, I guess this time I agree with him.” Holliday turned back to Limbani. “We’ll fight with you, Doctor, but I want Peggy and Rafi kept safe from harm.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“When is the new moon exactly?”

“Tonight.”