The Templar Legion

30

Time is a fickle concept during battle. Ask most survivors of D-day and they will tell you that it seemed to take forever for the combined American, British and Canadian forces to establish a beachhead, when in fact it took slightly less than three hours, from six twenty-nine a.m., the official start time, to nine seventeen a.m., roughly the time it takes the average office worker to rise and shine and get to work. In that same period of time on D-day there were approximately twenty thousand casualties incurred by both German and Allied personnel, which was almost two every second. So battle time is relative-it seems to take forever to survive and only a split second to die.

Peggy’s photograph of Havdragoon, the Sea Dragon, bursting through the curtain of water at Kazaba Falls, big square sail set and stitched with its indisputably Templar cross, all sixty of her long oars out and her bloodred dragon figurehead glaring ahead, eventually appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world and on the cover of every magazine. It made Peggy a wealthy woman in her own right, got her unbelievable assignments and introduced a whole new civilization to the world. But all that was in the future.

Both Holliday and Eddie were on the steering platform as the brand-new ship with its thousand-year-old design hurtled through the cave mouth and dropped down into the foaming, churning maelstrom below. As well as Holliday and Eddie, two of the Pale Strangers, Baltazar and Kaleb, manned the heavy steering oar with them, hanging on for dear life as the Sea Dragon hurtled down into the water, then rose again like its namesake, the great red dragon figurehead streaming water, its golden teeth seething with froth and a sudden wind from behind them bellying the sails as the sixty oars dug into the deep black river water and drove them forward.

“My God!” Holliday breathed, soaked to the skin but feeling an exhilaration deep in his soul he thought was long forgotten.

“?Increible, mi hermano!” Eddie roared ecstatically.

“Krigsanggen!” screeched Baltazar and Kaleb beside them, and in that moment they knew they all spoke the same language, whether they understood one another or not. Something had risen from the deep past and propelled them forward and there was no way back.

Sea Dragon steered easily out of the whirlpools at the foot of the falls and slid effortlessly toward the near bank of the river, the land-side oars rising at a single command from the ship’s undisputed captain, Loki, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, bearded fury who stood in the bow of the ship, his strong right arm hooked around the red dragon’s neck like a lover. He carried not one but two blowpipes across his back and, according to Limbani, could use them both at once and so quickly that the motions were only a blur.

A gangplank was thrown aboard and Limbani crossed into the ship with Peggy and Rafi on his heels. Ahead of them on the river the sun was setting quickly.

“It will be dark soon,” said Limbani. “We need to load the rest of the warriors and their supplies on board. Even with this wind Loki says it will take almost until dawn to get us downriver to Fourandao.”

“That should be just about right.” Holliday nodded. He paused and gave Peggy a short look. “Did you bring our weapons?”

She nodded. “Stripped from Jerimiah Salamango’s imps.”

Three men came across the gangplank carrying a sagging litter loaded down with AK-47s, ammunition belts, two RPGs with a half dozen rounds each and a pair of brutal-looking Saiga automatic shotguns with nine or ten eight-round magazines each.

“Bueno,” said Eddie, “my favorite, un acelerador de cabeza.” He grinned, looping the sling crosswise over his shoulder and pushing a half dozen magazines into his belt. “In the army we called them Fidelitos-small but with a big mouth.”

Holliday turned and looked directly at Peggy. “Now, look-” he began.

“Don’t even start, Doc. I’m a big girl; I’ve taken photographs in a dozen war zones. I’m not your responsibility. We’re coming, and that, cousin o’ mine, is that.”

“You don’t have anything to say about this?” Holliday said, turning to Rafi.

“I’ve spent the last hour arguing with her. I lost. We’re coming, because if she goes then I’m damn well going with her.”

“You’re both crazy,” said Holliday.

“No, mis amigos,” said Eddie with a grin, “we’re all crazy.”

Konrad Lanz had been sitting in the navigator’s jump seat of the old Vickers Vanguard for three and a half hours and his legs were beginning to cramp. Looking between the pilot and copilot’s seats there was nothing to see but the velvet black of the night and the green and yellow glow of the instruments. For the past hour or so they had been flying at under five thousand feet, and so far they hadn’t heard a single query on the radio.

“How much longer?” he asked the pilot, another one of the old guard named Janni Doke, a South African in his late fifties who could fly anything from a Piper Cub to a jumbo jet.

“Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.”

“I’d better get the boys ready, then,” said Lanz.

“You do what you want, baas; just make sure you leave me a couple of roughies to top up the tanks. We’re on fumes as it is,” responded the gruff old Afrikaner.

“Will do,” said Lanz.

“You’re sure about the landing lights?”

“Positive. The approach lights are on all night. They get some late cargo going in and out.” He paused. “There’s only one runway, eight thousand feet, just like I told you in the briefing. The runway lines up with the tower. You can’t miss.”

“The helicopters? Even on the ground they could blow us all to Hades.”

“Three RPGs. One each for the Kamovs, one for the tower. There’s an old armored personnel carrier but there’s no one manning it at night. The wheels are flat. It’s just for show.”

“All right.” The Afrikaner half turned and looked at Lanz in the darkness. “Radio checks every ten minutes, okay, baas. No radio check and I’m gone with the wind. No screaming savages putting this old cheeky prawn in the pot for his dinner, understand?”

“Every ten minutes.” Lanz turned and went back through to the aircraft cabin. The original twenty-eight-row, triple-double seat configuration had been removed and replaced with twenty-five double rows of quad buckets from a few old C-47s they’d raided in Europe and North Africa.

Since the Vanguard’s folding air stairs fore and aft would be far too slow for egress, they’d been removed, and Janni Doke and a few others at Mopti had cobbled together emergency slides from several old parachutes that would let everyone off quickly, gear and all.

Most of the boys were sleeping or pretending to as Lanz made his way down the narrow aisle between the two cramped rows, shaking shoulders and giving out the five-minute warning. With that done he stood by the rear exit door with the three RPG teams and waited.

The PA system clicked on. “Three minutes. Approach lights in sight,” Janni Doke said crisply. The old aircraft seemed to sag in the air, yawing a little to the left and sending Lanz lurching against the bulkheads.

“Final approach two minutes. Interior lights off.” The airplane went dark.

Now was the time for the Kamovs to come off their hardstands and flank them all the way down the runway, tearing them up with cannon fire.

“Approach. Landing, one minute. Clear!” No Kamovs, at least for the moment. Thirty seconds from now and it might be a different story.

Lanz could feel everyone tense. This was the worst, the final few seconds of stillness.

“Contact!”

The wheels shrieked as they touched the runway and skewed a little as they hit. Janni straightened the plane out and kept both feet on the brakes. The big props howled as they ran down…. Lanz counted backward from ten. At zero he gave the order.

“Doors open!” He and one of the men from an RPG team worked the wheel until there was a quick hiss of air. Lanz pushed the heavy door outward and to the left against the fuselage. The first RPG team dropped the homemade inflatable slide out the doorway and Lanz pulled the lanyard that activated the big CO₂ cartridge. The ramp bellied out perfectly.

“Go, go go!” The three-man teams hit the ramp first and deployed twenty feet beyond the wingtip of the aircraft, giving them a clear shot. The Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades went off almost simultaneously, leaving a long, twisting trail of smoke that vanished into the darkness.

Three explosions lit up the night as the first projectiles hit. The teams had already reloaded and a second volley went screaming through the air. Only one of the Kamovs had been fueled and armed, and it detonated spectacularly, a black-and-yellow gobbet of greasy, fiery smoke bubbling up into the air. The first strike on the tower had hit just below it, smashing into the air traffic controllers’ chamber. The second volley hit the tower directly and the lights went out.

The Battle of Kukuanaland Airport had begun.

On the presumption that the coup attempt would be made on this night, Oliver Gash had seen to it that General Kolingba’s last three Bacardi and Cokes that evening were laced with two milligrams each of the drug known as Rohypnol, or roofies. The general got only halfway through the second drink before he passed out in front of his enormous wide-screen TV watching Operation Petticoat, his favorite Cary Grant movie.

Kolingba would ideally be out of it until somebody came along and put a bullet through his head, but Gash wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as the first snores started erupting from the immense body, Gash made his way down to Kolingba’s office, let himself in with a key he’d made for himself long ago and began cutting a picture window-sized hole in the floral wallpaper-covered drywall.

It took fifteen minutes to cut the hole, revealing several thousand tightly wrapped, pressure-sealed bricks of American hundred-dollar bills. As he recalled, each of the bricks was made up of one hundred bills, or ten thousand dollars. One million dollars, or one hundred of the bricks, filled up roughly half of an ordinary Samsonite hard-shell suitcase, and twice that load weighed roughly forty-four pounds. It took Gash four hours to fill twelve of the suitcases, for a total weight of 528 pounds.

Twenty-four million dollars was certainly nowhere near enough for the humiliation and idiocy he’d had to put up with over the years with Kolingba, but it gave him more than enough liquidity to get to the lion’s share of the money he’d hidden away in a variety of banks from Cyprus to San Remo and beyond to even more obscure bits of geography that specialized in hiding other people’s money.

When he was finished he lined up all the suitcases outside the door to Kolingba’s office, gave two guards a hundred-dollar bill apiece to carry them down to one of the bumblebee Rovers, explaining to them that he was running a late-night errand to the airport for the general. It was a common enough occurrence and neither one of the soldiers questioned the order.

Gash went back upstairs for one last look at the monster and then, whether out of spite or simply for fun, he slipped the diamond-encrusted Rolex off Kolingba’s pudgy wrist. On the television Cary Grant and Tony Curtis were discussing various methods of getting five navy nurses off their submarine, which had now been painted bright pink.

Gash watched for a moment, marveling at the Americans’ ability to make war funny. He briefly thought once more of killing the general with his own silver automatic, but instead simply took the automatic and slipped it into his waistband. He checked the Rolex. Four fifteen in the morning, time to go unless he wanted to get caught in the cross fire. He zipped up his Windbreaker to cover the silver-plated pistol, went out into the compound and climbed into the Rover and flashed his lights at the gate guards. They jumped to it, throwing open the gates, and Gash drove out onto the square.

He turned left toward the waterfront rather than right toward the airport, but nobody seemed to notice or care. He was halfway to the docks when every light in Fourandao went off and an explosive echo came rolling down from the airport. He’d made it in the nick of time. Or maybe not. He put on a little more speed, his mind working as he drove. He’d expected the coup to be centered on the airport and all the communications hubs located in and around it. What if it was a two-pronged attack, coming up from the water as well, catching anyone fleeing in a pincer movement?

“Shit!” He pulled out his cell phone and tried it. No signal. They’d already hit the microwave towers. “Shit!” he said again. He reached the docks and the turn onto the road to Banqui. The drive would take him four hours; if they were coming up the river road he’d be squeezed and caught. There was no use turning left, because the road ran out half a mile or so upriver, turning into nothing more than a native track. “Shit, shit, shit.”

There were more explosions coming from the direction of the airport. He rolled down the window and craned his neck, looking back the way he’d come. The sky was on fire.

With the window still open he paused and cocked an ear. He knew the sound. Outboard engines, lots of them.

“Goddamn!” he whispered. They were coming up the river! He stared out through the windshield. Directly in front of him was the entire Kukuanaland navy, the single rigid inflatable defended by an old Russian machine gun. He barely paused to think about what he was doing. He drove the last few yards down to the docks and began humping the suitcases out of the back of the Rover and into the patrol boat, keeping an ear out for the approaching outboards coming from the other direction.

By the eighth suitcase he was sweating and the engine noise was too close for comfort. He abandoned the rest of the cases, untied the boat from the old wooden bollard and hit the ignition button on the engine. It coughed, coughed again and died. The engines from downriver were getting closer.

“Go, you bitch!” he hissed. He hit the button again, there was another greasy cough and then the engine caught. Grinning through the sweat pouring from his brow, he gunned the engine, turned the wheel hard and hauled the boat upriver. There was nothing in that direction but bush and jungle. He’d hide there for a night or two, then slip down the river to freedom. He eased the throttle forward and turned the boat through a large curve in the night-black river.

And saw a nightmare. If front of him, no more than a hundred yards away, there was a monstrous dragonheaded ship coming right at him, oars like the huge legs of some unearthly water bug rising and falling in perfect cadence with a giant cross-scribed sail billowing over everything.

“No,” he said, wide-eyed. How could a Viking ship, of all things, be here, on this river, now? It was impossible. And in that instant he knew he wasn’t getting out of this one alive.

The white-feathered dart caught him at the base of the throat. The neurotoxin hit his brain within two seconds. He had just enough time to raise the Rolex to his face before he died.

Gash didn’t see the Sea Dragon as it swept around the bend in the river; nor did he see Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso standing at the bow with his Fidelito unlimbered in his arms, singing quietly to himself.

Beside him Holliday waited. They made the turn and kept on sweeping downriver, all sixty oars lifted from the water now, carried only by the current. With the first pink light of dawn at their backs they saw the oncoming Zodiacs, twenty of them, spread in an arrogant line across the river almost from bank to bank. In the stern of the Sea Dragon, Loki, standing at the steering oar, gave a single, loudly shouted order.

“Strybord!” Thirty starboard oars hit the water as one and held there, the men on their benches straining at the current as the Sea Dragon turned her broadside to the looming inflatables, each filled with well-armed men.

Holliday and Eddie began to fire, the AK making its distinctive death rattle and the Fidelito sounding like fifty noisy doors slamming.

“Brand ambroster!” Loki yelled. At fifty yards each of the huge ballistas found its mark, ripping into the Zodiacs and their occupants, sinking thirty-five of the rubber boats. The heavy packs worn by most of the men dragged them under the black water to drown. Crocodiles slid silently from their perches on the riverbanks to slaughter the rest. The few Zodiacs managing to escape the initial barrage were slammed into by the Sea Dragon and crushed under her hull. A very few soldiers still in the water were finished off by dozens of blowguns on board.

“Adios, pioneers,” Eddie whispered, jacking the empty magazine out of the shotgun.

Loki called out the order, the oars dipped and Sea Dragon turned in toward shore.

At first it seemed like a rout. There hadn’t been a single survivor at the airport and Lanz hadn’t lost a man, but he was worried. According to Zodiacs A and B, the two inflatables waiting with the amphibians, everything had proceeded on schedule right up to the time the other half of Lanz’s force was supposed to land and make its way inland to the compound. There had been a few garbled messages, some scattered gunfire and then a single transmission about a Viking dragon that no one understood.

By the time Lanz and his men reached the compound it was clear that all hell was breaking loose. A few crazed townspeople were talking about ghosts and silent death, and instead of having to break through the compound with mortar fire, as they’d expected, the entire compound simply threw open the gates and asked to be taken prisoner, something Lanz hadn’t been prepared for.

He discovered Kolingba asleep in his bed, obviously drugged, and without any orders from Matheson he simply handcuffed the snoring dictator to his bedpost.

He tried to radio Nagoupande’s party, which was being helicoptered in from Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria, but so far he hadn’t been able to raise them. In the end he simply let the garrison go, collecting all their weapons first, then posted pickets and sat back and waited for Matheson and the new dictator of Kukuanaland to arrive.

By five a.m. there was still no sign of the two hundred men coming in from the river, and their mysterious absence was starting to make his own men nervous. They were beginning to talk about pulling back to the airport, which was not a good sign.

Half an hour later the first reports of mysterious deaths began to reach Lanz in the compound, where he was busily digging the rest of the cash out of Kolingba’s office wall and stashing it in his senior officers’ packs as a bonus. Pickets and guards around the square were turning up dead, unwounded except for something that looked like an oversized blowgun dart. At first Lanz didn’t believe it, but one of the few men left outside the compound brought one to him.

“What do you think, Pierre?” Lanz asked, turning to his old friend and colleague Laframboise.

“My honest opinion, Konrad?”

“As always.”

“This is your ghost, Limbani. I sent a patrol down to the river, six men. Two came back-one babbling and feverish from some kind of blowgun dart that had grazed his leg through his trousers, the other one talking about a dragon boat like the Vikings once used.”

“That’s insane,” said Lanz.

“They say there’s a Viking ship on the river and our Zodiac teams have vanished. They say there are ghost walkers, griots and sorcerers in masks, killing our men with darts, and there you are.” He pointed to the dart on what had once been Kolingba’s desk.

“What do you suggest?”

“How much money did you find in that wall? Twenty, thirty million?”

“Something like that.”

“Then we get out while we can, what’s left of us. We make a flag of truce and march out of this compound and hope we aren’t murdered as we go.”

“Matheson? Nagoupande?”

“It’s their bed; let them lie in it.”

When the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter made a pinpoint landing in the center of what had been the Fourandao garrison compound at six thirty a.m., there wasn’t a soul in sight. Brigadier General Francois Nagoupande, dressed in full uniform, and Sir James Matheson climbed out of the helicopter accompanied by eight heavily armed members of Blackhawk Security as bodyguards.

Papers fluttered in the wind, including several dozen American hundred-dollar bills. Several dead bodies littered the ground, but there wasn’t a living human being anywhere.

“Find out what the bloody hell is going on!” Matheson snarled at the Blackhawk Security force. The men ran off in various directions to search the buildings. A moment later one returned.

“Yes?” Matheson snapped.

“There’s a big fat guy in there asleep, or maybe drugged. He’s handcuffed to his bed.”

“Ah,” said Nagoupande. “Show me,” he said to the man. They went back into the main building. A moment later there was a single shot.

Nagoupande reappeared, slipping his Colt.45 back into its holster on his web belt. He had blood spray across the lower part of his face and across the front of his jacket. “The king is dead.”

“Long live the king,” said a voice from the blasted front gates of the compound. Limbani appeared with Holliday on one side and Eddie on the other. Behind them were Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre and a half dozen uniformed members of the Kukuanaland secret police. Seeing Limbani, Nagoupande struggled to drag his gun from its holster. Saint-Sylvestre beat him to it.

“Do something!” Nagoupande screamed at Matheson.

“I only deal with winners, I’m afraid,” said Matheson smoothly. “Who that is remains to be seen.”

Limbani stepped forward, looking up at the infuriated man in the brigadier general’s uniform. “You look very foolish, Francois. The English have a word for it-popinjay, isn’t that correct, Sir James?”

“You know who I am?” Matheson said, impressed.

“Of course.” Limbani nodded, resting his hand on Saint-Sylvestre’s shoulder. “My nephew has told me a great deal about you and what you wish to do to my country.”

“Your nephew?” Matheson said, dazed. Horribly a number of things clicked into place and the man visibly sagged.

“On his mother’s side.”

Nagoupande began to scream, his fists clenched like a child having a tantrum. “It’s not your country, Limbani; it’s my country! I am the president of Kukuanaland!”

“No, you’re not,” said Saint-Sylvestre, putting the muzzle of his Glock against Nagoupande’s forehead. He pulled the trigger, and Nagoupande slid to the ground like a deflating balloon.

“So,” said Matheson, trying to put some heartiness back into his voice. “Presumably it will be you I’ll be dealing with, Dr. Limbani.”

“No,” said Limbani, “you’ll be dealing with my minister of resources, who is also my foreign minister and who is, by chance, my nephew.

“The first thing you’re going to do,” Limbani continued, “is get back in your helicopter, taking your nasty little friends with you. The next thing you will do after arriving back in England is establish something called the Kukuanaland National Trust, a nongovernmental organization headed up by my friend Colonel Holliday here, as well as his cousin Miss Peggy Blackstock and her husband, Dr. Rafi Wanounou.”

“The purpose of the trust is to develop ideas for utilizing the three-hundred-million-pound endowment you will give the trust for the betterment of the people of Kukuanaland, especially where it regards such things as infrastructure and education. Should you prefer not to establish the trust my nephew can take all of the concrete antitrust and war-crimes information he has on you personally as well as a number of your employees and disperse it throughout the world press as he sees fit. Then perhaps we shall discuss your rare earths; agreed?”

“I’ll be in touch,” said Matheson coldly, his face an angry mask. Without another word he waved the bodyguards back onto the helicopter, followed them aboard and slammed the door shut. The group in the compound stepped back as the rotors began to whir, and a moment later the Black Hawk lifted off the ground, tilted away and disappeared into the morning sky.

“His nephew?” Holliday said to Saint-Sylvestre.

“A spy in the house of love, I believe it’s called.” The secret policeman shrugged his shoulders. “He needed someone on his side to even the odds a little.”

Holliday toed the rumpled body of Nagoupande, sprawled on the ground and bleeding into the hard-packed earth. “We should get this cleaned up.”

“And after we do,” said Peggy, “I do believe it’s going to be a very nice day.”

“Always the optimist,” said Rafi, smiling fondly at his wife.

Peggy stared at the body on the ground. She shrugged. “Beats the alternative.”