Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  “More?” Holliday said, dumbfounded.

  “How’s your Latin?”

  “Still passable,” answered Holliday.

  “Read the inscription on the sarcophagus.”

  “What inscription?”

  “Just under the overhang of the lid,” said Rafi. For the first time Holliday saw the stone-carved ribbon of writing that ran around the immense stone coffin. He translated as he went along.

  “ ‘ My past is my shield, my’ . . . uh, cruces, ‘cross is my future. Here lies, in the site of their gods, all that remains of the knight Guillaume and the’ . . . servus, what the hell is servus?”

  “Slave, I think,” said Rafi.

  “ ‘Slave and Great Discoverer, Abdul al-Rahman. Requiescant in pace in aeterno. May they rest in peace for all eternity.”

  “Al-Rahman’s bones are buried in the same coffin?”

  “Either that or the mausoleum was built on the previous site of al-Rahman’s grave.”

  “ ‘ My past is my shield, my cross is my future....’ What’s that supposed to mean?” Holliday asked.

  “I didn’t get it at first either,” said Rafi.

  “Get what?” Holliday said.

  “Press down hard on the cross on his shield,” instructed Rafi.

  Holliday leaned over the stone effigy of the knight and pressed down on the center of the black basalt–inlaid cross in the center of his shield. Nothing happened.

  “A little harder,” said Rafi.

  Holliday did as he was told. There was a grating sound, and then Rafi pulled out a tongue of stone that had eased out from the side of the sarcophagus. It was a stone drawer, released by some mechanism within the massive coffin. Inside the drawer was what appeared to be a book bound in leather. With the delicate touch of an archaeologist, Rafi lifted the volume up and laid it on the stone effigy. Slowly and with extreme care, he slipped a leather thong through the cover, which turned out to be a strap keeping the volume tightly shut.

  He carefully unfolded a series of thick papyrus pages like an accordion, spreading them out over the top of the sarcophagus. Holliday leaned over it. The pages were covered with line after line of text, the letters so small they were barely readable. Interspersed with the text were simple black-and-white ink drawings.

  “It’s Latin and French, side by side,” he said. “What is it?”

  “I call it the Templar Codex,” said Rafi. “From what I can tell Roche-Guillaume translated al-Rahman’s description of finding the mines and the eventual trip back to civilization.” The archaeologist pointed to a tiny illustration. As small as it was it was instantly recognizable—a Viking ship in flames, empty except for a funeral pyre and a body. “At a guess I’d say this relates to the death of our friend Ragnar Skull Splitter.” Rafi paused, clearly moved as he stared down at the seven-hundred-year old manuscript. “As I said, Roche-Guillaume was a historian. He wanted his own and al-Rahman’s stories to survive; and they did.”

  “People would pay millions for this, wouldn’t they?” Peggy said.

  “Easily.” Rafi nodded. “The manuscript is priceless, let alone what it reveals.”

  Holliday looked up from the pages and shook his head. “No, much more than just that. People would kill for this book.”

  “It belongs in a museum; the question is, How do I get it there?” Rafi said.

  “What’s the border situation?”

  “It varies. Kenya, the guards are all stoned on Khat and it could go either way; Eritrea is men with guns. Sudan, sometimes it’s a bunch of goats; sometimes it’s a full-scale military crossing. Somalia—don’t even think about it.”

  “Too risky to smuggle it out, then.”

  “So what do we do?” Peggy asked.

  “I want to at least get a photographic record of it,” said Rafi.

  “That’s easy enough,” said Peggy, lifting the big Nikon. “But what do we do after that?”

  “Put it back where we found it for the time being,” said Rafi. “Show the pictures to some museums, see if I can get one of them to back a proper expedition.”

  “Where’s the nearest border crossing into the Sudan?”

  “Metemma,” said Rafi. “Then Al Qadarif and Khartoum.”

  “Then that’s how we go,” said Holliday. “Photograph the codex and everything else, put it all onto a memory stick and change the chip in your camera. If some nosey parker wants to see your vacation snaps, we’ll show him a lot of goats and smiling kids. I’ll carry the memory stick and the chip, Peggy plays photographer and we keep Rafi innocent as a lamb.”

  “That’ll be the day.” Peggy snorted. “Considering who got us into this mess.”

  “Sorry,” said Rafi. “I didn’t really think; I just wanted both of you to see this place and the codex.”

  “Spilt milk and all that,” said Holliday briskly. “Let’s get the pictures taken and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Holliday thought he saw a movement in the jungle at the edge of the clearing. He turned quickly and stared out the open doorway of the mausoleum. He kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the clearing and waited. Nothing moved.

  “What’s that all about?” Peggy asked, looking at her cousin carefully. She knew that look. He was on high alert.

  “Nothing,” said Holliday slowly. “Just a little spooked, I guess.”

  6

  Archibald “Archie” Ives had been an old Africa hand for most of his adult life. The son of a Welsh coal miner, with a second-rate degree in geology from a third-rate college, Ives paid his dues as a prospector and assayer in British Columbia and Nevada, but his first job in Sierra Leone for a Canadian fly-by-night diamond exploration company was a perfect fit. He didn’t find any diamonds but it felt like coming home.

  For the next thirty-five years he’d roamed around Africa, sometimes working for himself and sometimes working for corporate interests, big and small. He’d gone from rags to relative riches a half dozen times, but what he really liked doing was tramping around in the desert or the jungle, looking for the next big strike and not really caring much whether he found it or not. He lived for the hunt. He hadn’t been back to England in a dozen years, and he had no intention of doing so. His recent job for Matheson had come through their office in Bamako, Mali.

  Ives had never worked for Matheson before, but he’d heard stories about the company’s questionable business tactics. Still, stories were just stories, and the money they were offering was real. In fact, it was too real, and it was too much, which raised all sorts of alarms in Ives’s head. All of which he ignored. Beggars couldn’t be choosers and there was no question of his beggarly status at the time the offer was made; in fact, he had less than a hundred Mali francs in his pocket and a longoverdue hotel and bar bill at the Kempinski El Farouk. He’d taken the money and he’d done the job and, according to Major Allen Faulkener, the Rifles (retired), he had also earned a bonus that would put him on easy street for the rest of his life. He was supposed to meet with Faulkener in Khartoum, sign a nondisclosure, hand over his paperwork and get his bonus. Easy as pie.

  Except Archie Ives didn’t believe a word of it.

  He drove the Land Rover along the flat, featureless Al Qadarif–Khartoum highway, the air-conditioning on full blast. There was nothing but desert on either side of him, and the black road ahead. He hadn’t seen another vehicle for two hours. The sun beat down on everything like a great hot hammer. Nothing moved except the Land Rover. Anything in the desert in this heat was well on its way to being dead.

  Ives lit a cigarette. The site he’d discovered in the jungle outback of Kukuanaland was worth billions. The fact that the site even existed was itself a priceless piece of information, of course, and at the same time dangerous. Was Faulkener simply going to give him his bonus and then let him walk away? It was doubtful. According to the scuttlebutt, Faulkener was no more a member of the Rifles than Archie was. The SAS was more likely, or maybe even MI6. In the rarefied
atmosphere where people like that did their business, the Archie Iveses of the world were nothing but loose ends, a note in a file folder with the word “terminated” stamped across his photograph. Like a spot of gravy on a club tie, Archie was something to be wiped away and forgotten.

  The smart money said he should drive on past Khartoum and follow the Pan African all the way to Cairo. But that wasn’t really smart at all. He was a prospector, and prospecting was all he knew. Bloody Africa was all he knew. He could hide out for a while, but eventually his money would run out and he’d have to look for work. Bells would ring when he showed up in a mining office anywhere on the continent, and Faulkener and his people would be on him like dingleberries on a camel’s arse.

  Ives dragged on the cigarette. He was boxed in and he knew it. He needed Faulkener’s bonus and getting it would probably be his death warrant. He crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray and blew a cloud of smoke at the windshield. A sign ticked by. Two hundred kilometers to Khartoum. He still had time to figure something out. Something to save his life.

  The border crossing at Gallabat was of the herd-of-goats variety. Holliday watched as a bored Sudanese customs official in a round hut with a thatched roof checked their papers, held out his hand for a bribe as though it were the most normal thing in the world and looked longingly at Rafi’s Rolex. Rafi studiously avoided the look and gave the man a hundred Ethiopian birr—a little over ten dollars—which seemed to do the trick. The customs man was armed with a Type 56 assault rifle, the Chinese knockoff of the Russian AK-47. Holliday thought that kind of hardware was a little extreme for a border crossing populated by more goats than people, but then again, for a country that had been at war in some form or another since Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah came out of the desert in 1881 claiming to be the Mahdi, the Second Coming, carrying weapons in the Sudan was probably second nature.

  The customs official followed them out of the little hut, weapon across his chest, still staring at the Rolex. Holliday didn’t take his eye off the man’s trigger finger until they were well on their way.

  “That was fun,” said Rafi.

  “Serves you right for wearing that thing in public,” said Peggy. “I wasn’t sure if he was going to propose marriage or shoot you.”

  They went west for another hour, eventually finding their way along rutted dirt roads to the two-lane blacktop of the Pan African Highway. There was nothing to see but the desert, scorched by the blinding sun.

  They thumped onto the highway and turned north.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if this whole thing is a such good idea,” said Holliday.

  “What do you mean?” Rafi asked.

  “We’re already keeping things from the Ethiopian government, not the most stable bunch in the world, and to get in through Kolingba’s back door we’re going to have to go through Sudan or Chad—once again, not models of stability.”

  “It’s not like I’m trying to steal anything,” argued Rafi. “This is about knowledge; it’s not a treasure hunt.”

  “Tell that to Kolingba,” answered Holliday with a grimace. “As I recall his big rant has something to do with white colonials and Jews raping the entire African continent, and his backyard in particular. It’s the same party line Amin used in Uganda, and we all know how that ended up.”

  “So we just give it up? The biggest archaeological find since King Tut, and we just give it up?” Rafi asked bitterly.

  “We think about it,” said Holliday. “We think about what’s at stake.”

  They drove on in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

  “Sometimes I wonder why countries like this exist,” Peggy said finally, staring out the windows. Holliday looked ahead. There was traffic in the distance now, a sure sign they were getting close to Khartoum.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” said Rafi. “This whole area was once like Kansas, or the veldt country of Kenya. Enough rain for crops and grazing for animals as large as elephants; there were even forest areas.”

  “Hard to believe,” said Holliday. They were pulling up on a battered tan Land Rover that looked like it belonged in a World War Two movie.

  “Some geologists see the Sahara as a living thing, moving slowly from west to east and north to south. There’s a whole school of thought that says the Sahara is on a cyclical schedule, growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking over millions of years.”

  A hundred yards ahead of them the Land Rover suddenly lurched and then swerved, striking the low railing of a bridge spanning a dry waterbed far below.

  “Holy crap!” Peggy said.

  The Land Rover climbed the rail, swung sideways and then toppled off the bridge. Rafi quickly checked the rearview, then braked. They were a few yards onto the bridge.

  “Flat tire?” Rafi said.

  “Maybe,” answered Holliday. He looked around. The only feature on the trackless desert was a low, stony ridge away to their right.

  “What do we do?” Peggy said.

  “We see if anyone survived,” Holliday said. He pushed open the door and stepped out onto the road. The heat hit him like a slap in the face. “Bring some rope,” he said over his shoulder to Rafi. He slammed the door and sprinted across the deserted highway to the bridge abutment.

  Holliday stared down into the shallow gorge. The old Land Rover was on its back like a turtle, smoke and steam wafting up from the rear of the vehicle. Quickly, Holliday estimated the distance from the bridge to the hard-packed bottom of the ancient watercourse; the Land Rover had fallen at least thirty or forty feet. In this part of the world, the chance that it was equipped with seat belts was nonexistent, which meant that the driver and whatever passengers were accompanying him would have been thrown around like dice in a craps cup. The odds of anyone surviving the fall were slim.

  Rafi appeared with a skein of rope.

  “How much is there here?” Holliday asked.

  “Twenty-five meters.” Eighty feet.

  “Should be enough.”

  Holliday looped a quick double-figure-eight knot around one of the bridge rail pipes, pulled it taut, then eased himself over the edge. The side of the shallow gorge was a mixture of rock, baked mud and crumbling sand. Without the rope, getting down to the overturned Rover would have been impossible. He reached the bottom and stepped back, looking upward.

  Rafi was already on the rope, the first-aid kit from the Land Cruiser dangling from his shoulder on its strap. Holliday didn’t wait. He crossed the cracked-mud surface of the bottom of the gorge and approached the overturned Rover. The driver’s-side door hung open, twisted and bent. Smoke and steam were coming up out of the crumpled engine compartment.

  He reached the door and squatted down. The windshield was shattered, covering the driver in a glittering shroud. The man’s eyes were closed and there was blood coming out of his mouth and nose. There was also a large bloodstain on the front of the man’s tan shirt. The stain went from the left center of the man’s chest and spread down his shirt to the belt of his shorts.

  The man was still breathing, but only barely. Holliday gently eased him out of the vehicle and onto the sand. It was at that point that Holliday saw the ragged hole in the back of the seat and the matching entry wound in the man’s back.

  “We’ve got trouble,” he said as Rafi joined him. “He’s been shot, whoever he is. Large-caliber through the back of the seat and into his lungs.”

  “Bandits?” Rafi asked. He paled and looked back up to the top of the gorge. “Peggy!”

  “Not bandits,” said Holliday. “Bandits aren’t that accurate. This was an assassination. There’s a pro out there somewhere.”

  “We’ve got to get him to some kind of hospital.”

  “Move him and he’s dead,” said Holliday. There was a cold distance in his voice. He’d seen this kind of thing too often to disguise it with platitudes. The bullet had probably chewed up the man’s insides like a Weedwacker.

  “Why this guy?” Rafi asked, stunned. He star
ed at the man, listening to the bubbling, ragged breath.

  “Get his wallet; find out who he is.”

  Holliday ducked back into the overturned truck; he’d seen two things of interest when he dragged the body out: an old, well-worn leather dispatch case and the familiar shape of a canvas rifle case. He tossed the dispatch case out through the open doorway, then clambered farther into the interior of the truck and grabbed the rifle case. He wriggled backward, hanging on to the gun case, and ducked out into the open. Rafi was leaning over the wounded man, listening intently. As Holliday opened the back flap of the gun case he heard a shouting voice echoing from above.

  “What’s going on down there?”

  Holliday looked up to see Peggy, camera slung around her neck, peering over the bridge rail.

  “Get down!” Holliday yelled.

  “Peggy!” Rafi yelled, still crouched over the dying man.

  There was a clanging sound and the whine of a bullet ricocheting off one of the bridge stanchions less than a foot from where she was standing. A split second later echoed the cracking sound of the gunshot. Peggy screamed and jerked back.

  “Get behind the truck!” Holliday yelled. Peggy didn’t need to be told twice. She dropped out of sight. Holliday pulled the gun out of its case. The weapon was an old-fashioned Winchester 76 complete with a modern Swift 687M telescopic sight and a canvas sling. Holliday rummaged around in the case and came up with a fistful of rounds. The original caliber had been 45.40 but these shells looked like .357 magnums. He took a long, desperate minute to slide the rounds into the loading port.

  “He’s dead,” said Rafi, staring down at the body of the man from the Rover.