The Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  “Well, he’s retired now; that’s for sure,” said Peggy.

  “Where exactly did you take him?” Holliday asked.

  “Pretty much the end of the world,” said Osman. “Seven hundred miles southwest of here. Just before the Bahr al-Arab River turns into the Kotto River there’s a little place called Umm Rawq. That’s where I took him. He didn’t tell me where he was going other than down the Kotto for a few days.”

  “What’s in this Umm Rawq place?” Holliday asked.

  “A fish market, a dock, a store, a village, or what’s left of it.”

  “Why Umm Rawq?”

  “It’s right on the border and he could rent a boat. That’s the last time I saw him, heading upriver in the local steamer.”

  “Was there anybody with him?”

  “A guide. A local. I think his name was Mahmoud.”

  There was a pause. Finally Peggy spoke. “How exactly did you get him to this Umm Rawq place?”

  Osman smiled. He got up from the table, went to the big garage door and pushed it upward. The door rattled along the rails and they saw what was on the other side of the plywood bulkhead.

  “I’ll be damned,” whispered Holliday. “She must be fifty years old.”

  “Sixty-six,” said Osman proudly. Moored in a waterfilled dock cut into the rear of the barge was a pure white Catalina PBY flying boat, its hull riding easily on the river, its single high wing making the aircraft look like a gigantic graceful bird about to take flight. The triple-bladed black-lacquered propellers on the twin engines gleamed. “I bought her from the South African Air Force nine years ago and flew her up here from Johannesburg.” He stepped out onto the dock and looked up at the aircraft affectionately. The others followed him through the open doorway. “I spent a year refitting her, getting parts and restoring her. She and I have been partners ever since.”

  “She’s beautiful,” said Holliday, meaning it. The flying boat was a wonderful piece of history elegantly salvaged.

  There was a long silence as the group stood there admiring the aircraft. Far out on the river a Nile sightseeing boat went by, the booming electronic voice of a tour guide echoing over the water.

  “This is what you call a Bono moment,” said Peggy.

  “A what?” Rafi asked.

  Holliday sighed. “I think she means this is a moment of conscience.”

  “You’ll have to explain that,” said Rafi. “Pop stars aren’t my forte.”

  “It means we’re in a bit of a moral quandary,” said Holliday. “Right now Kolingba and his little crime patch are a bit of a joke. Give him a trillion-dollar mineral find and he won’t be a joke anymore.”

  “What are we supposed to do about it?” Rafi said. “I’m here for the archaeology, not a pitched battle.”

  “What do we do, Doc?” Peggy asked.

  “We either do nothing, or we try to find Limbani and make it an equal playing field.” He turned to Osman. “You’ll take us to Umm Rawq?”

  “Sure.” Donny Osman nodded. “I’m in.”

  “Me, too,” said Peggy.

  Rafi sighed. “I just wanted to find King Solomon’s Mines and now I’m going into a war zone.”

  10

  Konrad Lanz ducked through the oval doorway of the ancient Air Mali Ilyushin Il-18 and stood on the stairs for a second, looking out over the Fourandao airport, officially known as Kolingba International, even though the single cracked concrete runway was less than twenty-five hundred feet long and the bedraggled-looking terminal wasn’t even equipped with radar.

  The terminal was a single, squat building made of concrete blocks, a rudimentary tower jutting up from the center of the structure. To the left was a fuel dump, and a small parking lot lay on the right. To the side of the doorway into the terminal Lanz could see something that looked very much like a Soviet BTR-40 armored personnel carrier, but he guessed it was more likely a Type 55 Chinese knockoff.

  He went down the stairs, following the dozen or so other passengers on the flight from Bamako as they headed for the terminal. Lanz had been in dozens of airports like this and he knew their strengths and weaknesses. As he passed the armored car he saw that it was, as suspected, the Chinese version of a BTR-40. Two men lounged in front of the machine, both in jungle fatigues, paratrooper boots and aviator-style mirrored sunglasses. Both carried Tokarev submachine guns that dated back to World War Two.

  Like the weapons, the armored car was older than both the men leaning on it. Rust stained the front end, a headlight was missing and the windshield was so filthy it was opaque. The vehicle also had a decided list to the right, indicating to Lanz that either the tires were soft or the suspension was blown. The Chinese vehicle might as well have been on a stand with a brass plaque, because it obviously hadn’t moved in a very long time. It stood to reason; the Chinese were free enough with their ordnance and their vehicles, but maintaining them was a different story. Running vehicles like the Type 55 required a parts depot, mechanics and a motor pool, the dull everyday workings of a real army, something that dictators like Kolingba had very little interest in. On the other hand a pair of Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopters on a hardstand next to the main terminal looked extremely well maintained.

  Lanz stepped into the terminal. There was no doubt about immigration and customs protocol. An open area under two slowly spinning ceiling fans with two wooden desks and two wooden examination tables was obviously for locals returning home, while a closed door had a sign over it that said, FOREIGN VISITORS ONLY. Lanz opened the door and stepped inside.

  There were three uniformed men in a small, windowless room with a gray tiled floor. The uniform was the same as those of the men lounging around in front of the armored car outside. One of the men sat behind a scarred wooden office desk, while a second man stood beside him and the third man stood in front of the exit door leading out of the room. There was a wooden examination table to the right of the desk. The two standing men wore mirrored aviator sunglasses, while the man behind the desk did not. The two guards carried what looked like Tokarev TT-30 automatic pistols in cheap belt holsters. A framed photograph of Solomon Kolingba hung on the wall behind the man at the desk. There was a wooden bench running along the wall opposite the desk.

  Lanz stepped up to the desk and waited silently. The man behind the desk stared up at him. He was in his forties, the first gray showing at his temples. He wore round, stainless-steel-framed glasses. The name strip on his fatigues read, SAINT-SYLVESTRE; not surprising, since the Central African Republic had once been part of French Equatorial Africa.

  “Passport.”

  Lanz reached into the inner pocket of his cream-colored linen jacket and took out a passport. It was dark blue with CANADA stamped in gold above the Canadian coat of arms. He handed it over.

  Behind the desk Saint-Sylvestre leafed through the blank pages. “Canadian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name is Konrad Lanz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a Canadian name.”

  “My parents were Austrian. I immigrated as a child.”

  “You don’t travel a great deal, I see.”

  “On the contrary,” said Lanz. “I travel a great deal. You will notice the day of issue was only two months ago.”

  “A brand-new passport.”

  “The previous one was full.” In fact, Lanz had a number of passports but Canadian ones were easiest to get and he preferred to use brand-new documents when traveling to a country he had never visited before. God only knew which countries a madman like Kolingba disliked or had been offended by in his addled psyche.

  Lanz had spent a week researching Kukuanaland and its leader, and from what he had gathered there was no doubt that Freud would have had a field day deconstructing the self-made general’s life and lunacies. According to various reports, his mother had been a prostitute who may or may not have been functionally retarded. His father had apparently been one of her clients. Kolingba had two sisters and three
brothers, all of whom died violently and under mysterious circumstances.

  Kolingba’s moods and behavior were notoriously unpredictable and violent; the citizens of Kukuanaland lived in perpetual fear. On the other hand, the general’s second in command, Oliver Gash, was an enigma, appearing on the eve of the so-called “revolution” to offer his support. Lanz’s sources indicated that Gash had some sort of vague criminal past in the United States; Lanz wasn’t sure which of the two men was the more dangerous.

  “Why have you come here?” Saint-Sylvestre asked.

  “Business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “None of yours,” answered Lanz, wondering how far the man behind the desk could be pushed.

  “The Department of the Interior is concerned with everyone’s business, Mr. Lanz.” Saint-Sylvestre smiled.

  “I thought you were immigration, not the secret police.”

  “In Kukuanaland they are one and the same,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And there is nothing at all secret about our police.” The man’s smile hardened into something else. “We are a very open country, you see.”

  “Commendable,” said Lanz.

  “So, I ask again, what is your business here?”

  “Guns,” said Lanz.

  Saint-Sylvestre blinked behind the steel-framed glasses. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m an arms dealer.... Mr. Saint-Sylvestre, I specialize in small arms of all types up to and including man-portable antitank systems like the American LAWs or the Russian RPG-7.”

  “Actually, it’s Captain Saint-Sylvestre, Mr. Lanz.” He paused. “What makes you think your services would be of interest to us?”

  “Because the pistols your two guards are wearing were designed in the nineteen thirties. So were those submachine guns the guards outside were carrying.”

  Saint-Sylvestre glanced down at the passport in his hands and changed the subject. “You were in Mali.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you do any business there?”

  “None to speak of. I made a few contacts.”

  “And one of them suggested you visit us? Anyone in particular?”

  “A man named Ives,” said Lanz, throwing his line into the water. “Archibald Ives.” There was no reaction from Saint-Sylvestre other than a brief note he jotted on a pad close to his right hand. The ballpoint he used was a Montblanc—his own, or booty from an unwary foreigner who’d passed through the bleak little room that was Saint-Sylvestre’s fiefdom?

  “And are you bringing any of these weapons into the country?” Saint-Sylvestre asked, nodding toward the single suitcase Lanz carried.

  “Just the catalogs,” Lanz answered.

  “The suitcase,” said Saint-Sylvestre, indicating the examination table. Lanz lifted the case and spun it around. The guard standing beside Saint-Sylvestre ran the zipper around the edges of the case and threw back the top. Saint-Sylvestre glanced inside. Toiletries, neatly packed summer-weight clothing and a half dozen thick catalogs: Armament Technology Incorporated of Canada, Browning, Bushmaster, the Czech Republic’s eská Zbrojovka Uherský Brod, China’s Norinco, Russia’s Rosvoorouzhenie.

  Captain Saint-Sylvestre picked up a catalog at random and leafed through it, then dropped it onto the table. Using the Montblanc, he turned over the clothes in the suitcase. He found only a library-edition copy of Carl Hiaasen’s most recent novel. He picked it up. “What is this?”

  “A very funny book about the cult of celebrity in the United States.”

  “You don’t have this cult in Canada?”

  “It’s hard to tell.” Lanz shrugged. “There are no celebrities in Canada. They all go to the U.S.”

  “The book is funny?”

  “Very.”

  “The author is a celebrity?”

  “I suppose,” said Lanz.

  “Then he ridicules himself?”

  “I don’t really care.” Lanz sighed. He was getting bored with the man’s convoluted interrogation. “I bought it to read on the plane.”

  Saint-Sylvestre dropped the book back into the suitcase and changed gears again. “Empty your pockets, please.”

  Lanz did so. Saint-Sylvestre picked up his wallet. He examined all the credit cards and counted the cash. There was four thousand dollars in U.S. hundred-dollar bills.

  “A great deal of money.”

  “I’m a great believer in cash.”

  “So am I,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He counted out ten hundred-dollar bills, folded them and slipped the money into the breast pocket of his uniform. He looked up at Lanz and smiled.

  “Tax,” he explained.

  “That’s what I thought.” Lanz nodded.

  “No cell phone?”

  Lanz shrugged. “Would I get a signal?”

  “No camera?”

  “I didn’t come here to take pictures.”

  “It is a very beautiful country,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “There are many attractions for the visitor. Many colorful birds and exotic animals.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Although the jungle can be very dangerous. Sometimes fatal,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “I strongly advise you to stay in Fourandao. For your own safety.”

  “Of course,” said Lanz. Now, what was that all about?

  “You may go,” said Saint-Sylvestre. Lanz nodded, repacked his suitcase and put everything back in his pockets, including his wallet.

  “Perhaps you could recommend a hotel,” said Lanz.

  “There is only one. The Trianon.”

  Lanz nodded. The guard at the exit door stepped aside. Lanz picked up his suitcase and left. Saint-Sylvestre watched him go. Finally he spoke to the guard beside him in rapid-fire Sango.

  “Tondo ni wande,” he instructed. Keep watch over the foreigner.

  “En, Kapita,” said the guard. He followed Lanz out the door.

  11

  Michael Pierce Harris sat in his room at the Khartoum Hilton and listened to the distant satellite-echoing voice of his boss.

  “What’s the present situation?” Major Allen Faulkener asked from his London office.

  “They’re getting ready for some sort of expedition, that’s for sure,” answered Harris. “They’ve been picking up everything from bug spray and hammocks to machetes and malaria pills.”

  “The pilot, Osman?”

  “Stripping down the engines on the Catalina.”

  “Do you have any idea about their ETD?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Osman’s filed a flight plan for Umm Rawq.”

  There was a brief silence. Finally Faulkener spoke. “There’s a Matheson twin Otter at the civilian airport in Khartoum. Take it down to Wau, on the border, in the morning. I’ll have a half dozen men on standby. That should be enough.”

  “Enough for what?” Harris asked.

  “They’re following in Ives’s footsteps,” said Faulkener, his voice rising and falling spectrally on the carrier wave. “Make sure they stumble and fall. Fatally.”

  Returning from his regular afternoon stroll through town, Konrad Lanz stepped into the Bar Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon Palace Hotel and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The long, narrow space off the lobby was empty except for Marcel Boganda, the bartender. Late sunlight leaked weakly through the partially opened louvers on the window that looked out onto the Trianon’s colonial-style veranda.

  The room was straight out of Rudyard Kipling, complete with a gently rotating wooden fan whickering overhead, a few old, cracked brown leather banquettes and club chairs scattered randomly. The centerpiece, the bar itself, was forty feet of art deco, deep red burled bubinga hardwood, the slab surface of the bar top as dense as marble. The bar was Marcel’s pride and joy; every drink was served with a coaster and every condensation ring was wiped up almost before it had a chance to form.

  Marcel was in his fifties, round faced and short haired. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and dressed in evening clothes from the time the bar opened at noon to cl
osing time at midnight. He was a formal, distant man and rarely spoke unless he was spoken to. It was only by accident that Lanz had discovered from a waiter in the dining room on the far side of the lobby that Marcel actually owned the Trianon.

  Crossing the room Lanz took a seat on one of the tall, high-backed leather-covered bar stools at the veranda end of the room. He put his Carl Hiaasen book down on the bar and waited. It took a moment or two but eventually Marcel wandered down and took Lanz’s order: a chilled green-and-yellow bottle of Congolese Ngok beer with its lurid crocodile logo. Marcel poured the pale, corn-colored lager into a tall glass, letting the short head rise, just so. Lanz took a sip and sighed happily.

  “Hot out there,” said Lanz.

  “Most usually is, sir,” said Marcel. “It is a hot country.”

  “Lived here all your life?” Lanz asked.

  “I went away to school, sir. To France. The Sorbonne.”

  “And you came back here?” Lanz asked, surprised.

  “This is my home,” said the bartender simply, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Kukuanaland?”

  “Fourandao, sir.”

  “What do you think about Kolingba?”

  “I try not to,” answered Marcel. Lanz wasn’t entirely sure but he thought he caught a tinge of irony in the man’s voice.

  “Does he ever come here?”

  “No, sir. Our president is not a drinker.”

  “How about his second in command, this Gash fellow?”

  “Chocolate bourbon on the rocks from time to time,” said Marcel. “Why do you ask me so many questions, sir?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Marcel. I need an in to the president.”

  “In my experience, sir, people who preface a conversation with ‘let me be honest’ are anything but, and what precisely do you mean by an ‘in’?”

  “I’m an arms dealer, Marcel. I sell guns and ammunition, mostly to small African countries like this one, usually to their rebel factions, sometimes to warring religious and ethnic groups.”

  “We have no rebel factions, sir, nor do we have warring religious or ethic groups.”