The Templar Legion

3

“Herodotus said that Egypt was an acquired country; it was the Nile’s gift,” Holliday said, staring out at the arid landscape of the Ethiopian Plateau from the backseat of the battered old Toyota Land Cruiser.

“Herodo-who?” Peggy said, sitting beside Rafi, who was behind the wheel.

“How could a nice Jewish archaeologist marry a Philistine like her?” said Holliday, giving his cousin a playful swat on the back of the head.

“She’s your relation.” Rafi laughed.

“She’s your wife,” countered Holliday.

“Why doesn’t one of you answer my question?” Peggy asked.

“Herodotus was an ancient Greek. He’s sometimes called the father of history,” answered Holliday. “He traveled all over the ancient world collecting stories about each country he passed through.”

“He was also called the father of lies,” said Rafi. “He collected fables and legends as much as he did hard facts.”

“Like King Solomon’s Mines?” Peggy asked.

“Herodotus was before Solomon’s time,” said Holliday.

“But he planted the seed,” said Rafi. “He had all sorts of stories about the mysterious land of Punt.”

“Punt?”

“Like a football,” said Holliday. “No one’s ever quite figured out where it was.”

“And the Russian armored personnel carriers?” Peggy asked, nodding out the window at yet another burned-out BTR-60 rusting away beside the road. The highway had been littered with them all the way from Addis Ababa.

“Remains of the Ethiopian Civil War,” said Holliday. “Almost twenty years of murder and mayhem that accomplished absolutely nothing. Two Marxist groups fighting for power while the arms dealers got fat. All that was left when they were done was wholesale corruption and poverty. That was in 1991. Not much has changed since.” They went past a road sign: BAHIR DAR 20 KM. They had almost reached it: Lake Tana, the source of the Nile.

Archibald “Archie” Ives wiped the sweat off his face with a T-shirt he was using as a towel and prepared the single stick of high explosive, carefully fitting the detonator wires into the open, puttylike end of the seveninch tube. A hundred feet down the sloping hill the trickling stream that would eventually become the Kotto River burbled along through the jungle foliage.

Ives had come into Kukuanaland by the back door, flying in on a helicopter from Chad. He’d been in the tiny hellhole of a country for the better part of a week now, looking for likely locations chosen from the file of aerial shots the company had commissioned more than a year ago. Today was his last day; tomorrow he’d be back at the extraction point and twelve hours after that he’d be having a beer at the Cafe Khartoum in the Burj Al-Fatah Hotel.

He rubbed a hand across his leathery, sun-worn jawline and felt the grimy, gray-blond stubble. At sixty-three he was getting far too old to be running around in the jungle like this. On the other hand retirement didn’t come cheap these days, which was why he’d bullied the company into putting a profit-sharing clause into his contract this time. He was sick and tired of making fat cats like Sir James Matheson rich while he worked for peanuts.

Ives dropped the explosive into the hand-drilled shot hole, tamped the claylike soil on top of it, then ran the detonator wires back up to his position on the top of the hill. He sat down on the ground with his legs crossed and attached the wires to a small USB unit, which he then plugged into his laptop. He set the controls, switched on the recorder and took one last look down the hill. Nothing on the ground and no planes in the sky, not that Kukuanaland had much of an air force: a single aging Soviet Mil Mi-24 attack helicopter from the seventies with no one to fly it. Kolingba, the lunatic leader of the country, had an even older Cessna 170 single-engine he sometimes flew himself but apparently he was terrified of being brought down by ground-toair missiles from one of the adjoining countries, so he rarely took to the air.

With the laptop balanced on his lap Ives hit “enter.” There was a split-second pause, a distant muffled crumping sound and then the earth beneath him shook briefly. There was another pause and then the data began forming on the screen.

“Bloody hell,” the geologist whispered. He replayed the data to make sure there were no mistakes, then set the recorder aside and stood up. He walked down the hill to the stream and squatted, thinking hard, then splashed water on his face, being careful not to swallow any; he was well aware of the parasites that could be living in the water-everything from schistosomiasis to cholera, typhoid and a dozen other horrors. He wiped off his hands and face with the T-shirt towel, then took out a cigarette and lit it. He coughed once, spit out a wad of phlegm, then took a long, satisfying drag.

At best he’d expected to see a few small circular patches of the familiar alluvial “pipes” on his computer screen, evidence of some sort of deposit. What he hadn’t expected was what he’d seen: so many of the circular blobs that they merged into a single gigantic pipe, indicating that the hill he was on was no hill at all; it was a single, enormous kimberlite deposit bigger than anything he’d ever seen before. It was easily as large as the Venetia strike in 1992 and perhaps even larger. On top of that the kimberlite appeared to be surrounded by a reef of precious metals dense enough to be gold or perhaps even platinum. His eyebrows rose at the next stream of data. This was better than all the others put together, or worse, depending on your point of view.

Ives stood there for a moment having a silent conversation with himself. He could tell his bosses what he’d found, he could keep it to himself or, God help him, he could tell Kolingba, since it was on his land, after all. It was a short conversation. If he told his bosses he might make something out of the find; if he kept it to himself there was no way he could work the deposit without a huge investment; and if he told Kolingba the madman would promise him great riches, then slit his throat as soon as he had the location. He marked the site in his memory, even though the satellites would do a better job of it. Three hills, this one the highest, the river at his back and the sound of the three-fingered Kazaba Falls a mile or so upstream. A thousand years ago this would have been a paradise for the native Yakima tribe, an unparalleled source of food and water. But with no known resources and no obvious reason to be developed, it had languished, empty and unexplored for as far back as anyone could remember, a place of ancient legend and taboo. In creole Sango it was the Guda Kwa Zo, the Land of the Dead.

Ives gave a little sigh, then unclipped the satellite phone from his belt. Any remnants of that distant paradise would be destroyed by the phone call he was about to make. He dialed a private number in London, then listened to the ethereal buzz and hum as the connection was made. The call was answered on the second ring.

“Gardenia quadrant. Primrose seven by magnolia four.” The code was the same one the Royal Navy had used for tracking U-boats in World War Two. Ives thought it was James Bond nonsense.

“Yes?”

“Westminster,” said Ives. There was a long pause.

“What sort?”

“House of Lords at the very least,” said Ives. “The House of Commons as well.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Good Lord.”

“Too right,” said Ives.

“I shall inform His Majesty.”

The phone went dead.

“You bloody well do that,” said Ives. He trudged back up the hill to collect his gear and get the hell out of Kukuanaland. He could almost taste that first beer.

Michael Pierce Harris-formerly deputy director of operations for the CIA before being forced to resign or face a long jail sentence-sat in one of the comfortable leather club chairs in the office of the special projects director of Matheson Resource Industries. He was sipping single-malt Scotch from a heavy crystal glass and smoking an aged Cuban El Rey del Mundo Gran Corona. The tall windows to his right looked across Park Place to the looming brick pile of the St. James’s Club directly across the narrow, out-of-the-way street.

Major Allen Faulkener, the Rifles (retired), hung up the phone on the leather-covered top of his seventeenth-century desk. As director of special projects for MRI, it was his job to make sure that the sometimes “socially unpleasant” aspects of the huge mining corporation’s affairs were smoothed out long before the first ton of ore was extracted from a site.

MRI was the second-largest mining company in the world, right after the massive Barrick Gold. Like Barrick, MRI was officially headquartered among the bleak, featureless towers on Bay Street in Toronto but did virtually no business there, simply taking advantage of Canada’s very liberal and freewheeling laws regarding mining ventures.

The real business of MRI was done in London and the company presently operated in Papua New Guinea, the United States, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Australia, Peru, Chile, Russia, South Africa, Pakistan, Colombia, Argentina and Tanzania. For some time now it had been studying the geological possibilities of embarking on a venture based in the hinterlands of Kukuanaland.

“Well,” said Harris, putting his glass down on a silver coaster that sat permanently on the lacquered twenties Chinese end table. “What’s going on?”

“Apparently we’ve been given the green light by His Majesty,” said Faulkener, thoughtfully looking up at the rather gruesome watercolor on the wall of his office. It was called The Last Stand at Islandhula and showed a regiment of red-coated, mounted British soldiers being slaughtered by an enraged group of Zulu warriors.

Africa was never Faulkener’s battlefield of choice, but these days that was where the goodies were. “Time to show us your mettle, Harris. This is the sort of thing you and your CIA brothers were so good at.”

“Do tell.”

“I’m afraid it’s Africa this time. A wretched little place called Kukuanaland.”

“Solomon Kolingba.” Harris nodded. “A true-blue nut bar.”

“He has something we want,” said Faulkener. “We need to figure out how to get it.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Harris, lifting his heavy glass.

“You’ll drink to anything,” said Faulkener. He stood, went to the sideboard and poured himself a glass of the same single-malt Harris was drinking. He stood there for a moment, his gaze turning once again to the watercolor of the Islandhula massacre. “There’s one other thing,” he muttered. “Nothing more than a loose end, really.”

“Oh?” Harris said.

“Have you ever been to Khartoum, Mr. Harris?”