The Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  At the stern of the tug they found an old skiff turned bottom up and half covered by a rubberized canvas tarpaulin. The little boat didn’t look like it had been used in decades. Originally it must have served as a lifeboat or to inspect the hull, something that clearly hadn’t been done for a very long time. Hidden underneath the dinghy was a very old British Seagull 1.5-horsepower engine that looked as though it had been designed by a mad prewar inventor in his shed at the end of the garden. Along with the spindly little outboard they found a half-rotted coil of rope that had once been the skiff’s painter.

  They hauled the engine back to the foredeck and used the rope to bind it as securely as they could to the body of the man in the boiler suit. When they were done they checked to make sure no one was watching from one of the fishing boats in the harbor, then heaved their unwieldy burden over the side. He landed on the surface with a huge splash. The surface muck parted, then swallowed the body whole. Ten seconds later the muck was a single undulating layer of flotsam, the body having vanished without a trace.

  “The engineer wasn’t being paid enough and he deserted,” said Rafi.

  Holliday looked down at the placid surface of the water.

  “Sounds reasonable enough,” he said and nodded.

  “Now what?” Rafi asked.

  Holliday thought about Peggy and the task that lay ahead.

  “We get to As-Sallum before the good ship Khamsin does.”

  9

  After discharging Faraj, they took the midnight train from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh by way of El Alamein, the small Egyptian seaside town where Montgomery held the line against Rommel’s tanks and began the drive to the west that eventually pushed the German general out of Africa altogether.

  The terrain, what little they saw of it, was a mixture of dreary, splintered desert, raw, low dunes and scrubby patches of dusty green farmland trying to survive in an arid ocean of sand. In the distance, on the right-hand side of the train, with the dawn light creeping up behind them, the ocean appeared like an enormous mirage of the water the desert could see but never vanquish.

  By the time they’d boarded the train in Alexandria there were no sleeping compartments available so they’d spent the night in the surprisingly elegant wood-paneled bar car, drinking from fat silver cans of Luxor Beer and discussing their situation. By dawn, still awake, they were alone in the car except for the bartender, asleep on his stool in the far corner. The cold fury of the sunrise turned the sky around them a thousand shades of pink and gold and the wheels chattered monotonously over the endless track beneath their feet.

  “Tell me everything you know about this German, Walter Rauff. There must be some clue in his history in North Africa that could help us track down the gold.”

  “Find out where the gold came from and we find Peggy?” Rafi said.

  “Something like that.”

  Rafi thought about it for a long moment, assembling his thoughts. At the far end of the car the bartender woke up briefly, saw that he wasn’t needed and instantly was asleep again.

  “I don’t know if this is completely accurate, but as I recall he was in the navy and got thrown out over some sex scandal—sleeping with an admiral’s wife, or daughter or maybe both. Anyway, he managed to get into the SS, the death’s-head battalion in charge of the camps. He figured out a scheme of gassing people using mobile extermination units and on the basis of that he was sent to North Africa with Rommel. His job was to come in behind Rommel’s units exterminating North African Jews from Morocco to Palestine. He was also in charge of sweeping up their assets—the source of all the gold. In 1942 and 1943 Rommel got stopped in El Alamein, right around here actually.” Rafi glanced out the window at the barren landscape.

  “Anyway, he fell back to Tunisia to round up the Jews with his Einsatzkommando Tunis for a while, then beat it out of Africa altogether. Italy, I think. That was 1944. After the war he was captured by the Americans, escaped and used Bishop Hudal’s ‘ratline’ to escape via the Vatican, first to Syria for a while, then to Chile.” Rafi shrugged. “He ran a crab-packing plant for several years, then started working in intelligence for the Chilean government. He used to travel back to Germany all the time but he was never caught.”

  “Did this Rauff have any contingency plan for escaping if Rommel was killed or captured?” Holliday asked.

  “Most of the SS units had secret plans for escape if they started losing the war. The Vatican had their whole ratline system set up as far back as 1942, taking SS men first to Syria, then to South America.”

  “Any alternate routes?” Holliday asked.

  Rafi nodded, then took a last swig from his warm can of beer.

  “Down through Libya by air to a desert air base in Vichy-controlled Niger, then across the ocean to Brazil or Chile.”

  “This is beginning to make a little sense now,” said Holliday. He took a large-scale folded map of Egypt and Libya from the little overnight bag on the seat beside him. He spread the map out on the table. “Any idea where the air base in Libya was?”

  “The name Al-Jaghbub sticks in my head, but I’m not positive.”

  Holliday found it on the map.

  “There’s an oasis town called Al-Jaghbub halfway down the map.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Rafi, excited now. “Didn’t Ducos mention it when we were talking to him?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Holliday, “but it fits. It would make a perfect staging base for a long-distance flight to Niger.”

  “So the Nazis get freaked out by Rommel losing and put the gold on a plane for Brazil?”

  “And it gets lost somewhere between point A and point B,” Holliday said, nodding.

  “And that fits, too,” said Rafi. “Hudal was a bishop with connections and insiders both in the SS and at the Vatican.”

  Holliday sat back in his seat.

  “Now I see,” he said. “The monk from Biblical Archaeology School in Jerusalem, this Brother Brasseur or whatever his name is, he wasn’t searching for Templar texts in the Archives; he was trying to find Hudal’s records. They were looking for the SS gold right from the beginning.”

  They arrived in Mersa Matruh at six thirty in the morning. It was a city of two hundred thousand or so, a miniature Alexandria, the sea masked by a line of hotels and resorts along the Corniche, all new and all modern, with the old city of its real Berber inhabitants behind the high-rise façade, selling the produce grown on the little desert farms they’d seen from the train. They booked into the Beausite, a moderately priced five-story hotel with its own sand beach. A single phone call to the concierge presented them with an insurmountable problem. They took their complimentary continental breakfast out onto the balcony of their narrow room to discuss the situation.

  “We’re screwed,” said Rafi abjectly, looking out over the ultramarine ocean in front of the hotel. He tore off a corner of his croissant and buttered it. “It’ll take you weeks to get a visa for Libya with an American passport and I probably couldn’t get one at all.”

  “So then we do it without visas,” said Holliday, sipping his strong coffee.

  “How do we manage that?” Rafi asked.

  “Look on the map,” said Holliday. “The closest place on the Egyptian side is Siwa Oasis. That’s only a couple of hundred miles from here. Siwa is less than fifty miles from Jaghbub.”

  “Across an impenetrable border,” grunted Rafi. “They’ve got something like two million land mines planted. Fences, cameras, the whole deal. Egypt and Libya were at war back in the seventies.”

  “That’s LRDG territory,” said Holliday. “I guarantee it’s like a sieve.”

  “LRDG?”

  “Long Range Desert Group,” explained Holliday. “The Brits and the Germans chased each other back and forth across the border for years. There has to be dozens of caravan trails through there.”

  “Not any that I know about,” said Rafi.

  “Then we’ll find someone who does,” answered Holliday. “I�
�m not about to give up on Peggy now.”

  Later that day they purchased a high-wheeled military surplus Czech-made UAZ-469 tin-can jeep from a defunct safari tour company. They spent the afternoon stocking the knockoff, tin-roofed Land Cruiser with supplies, including as many maps of the area as they could find. The following morning they left for Siwa Oasis, traveling due south through the desert. The bare-bones vehicle drove like a tank and had virtually no suspension but the simple Peugeot-Citroën diesel engine ticked over nicely, and even though the dashboard and its instruments were primitively built, everything seemed to work well enough. The top end of the speedometer read 120 kph, but the reality was more like 90, or about fifty-five miles an hour.

  “I wonder what ‘pri vjezdu voziola do terenu zapni predni nahon’ means,” said Rafi, reading a riveted notice on the dashboard behind the plain, three-spoked wheel of the truck. “Sounds a little ominous.”

  “Let’s hope we never find out,” said Holliday, sitting forward, trying to peel his perspiration-soaked shirt away from the sticky vinyl seats. No wonder the safari tour company had gone under. He tried to imagine some cheesesteak-overweight tourist from Winnetka enduring a sweltering day in the un-air-conditioned Soviet truck. It wasn’t pretty.

  They drove for five hours, switching drivers every fifty miles and stopping only four times, once to eat their prepared lunches, twice for bathroom duties at one of three government rest stops and once to fill the gas tank from the jerry cans of diesel fuel lined up in the cargo area of the truck. Other than dunes the only changes in the landscape were occasional radio transmission towers, half a dozen roadside oil rigs, a few sand drifts across the two-lane blacktop and the remains of an ancient fort. Here and there they saw signs in Arabic and English telling them they were either entering or leaving a military zone. There wasn’t a single gas station, hotel, motel or refreshment stand to be seen.

  “There was a sixth-century B.C. king of Persia named Cambyses who once sent an army here,” said Rafi, looking out at the bleak, monotonous landscape. “They were on a mission to destroy the Oracle at Siwa.”

  “What happened?” Holliday asked.

  “There was a sandstorm. The whole army vanished, all fifty thousand of them. They were never seen again.”

  Finally after more than a hundred and sixty miles the landscape began to change, dunes becoming hills, hills becoming stony, stunted mountains, palms and patches of green beginning to appear. Abruptly the lands fell away and a palm-filled depression appeared, saltwater lakes twinkling in the brilliant sun, fields of alfalfa bending in the desert wind. Siwa lay below them.

  Siwa is not the oasis most people visualize from the movies. Instead of a single pool of water surrounded by a grove of palm trees, Siwa is a fifty-mile-long depression, twenty miles across, once the bed of a fast- flowing mountain river, perhaps even the Egyptian version of the Grand Canyon. In this long, relatively narrow depression there are large groves of date palm, olive groves, wheat fields, saltwater lakes and freshwater streams and springs that turn the desert into a blossoming verdant sanctuary.

  The oasis at Siwa is known to have been occupied by man for at least ten thousand years. When Alexander the Great came to Siwa to consult the oracle of Amon Ra the town was already dominated by the enormous clay and mud fortress known as the Shali, a complex construction of fortified buildings as much as five stories tall built up the slopes of an artificial mountain. The huge fort lasted for thousands of years until the 1920s, when three days of successive torrential rains “melted” the mud-brick structure like a child’s sand castle ruined by the encroaching tide. Even now the Shali is an impressive creation and still looms over the town.

  The town of Siwa contains about ten thousand inhabitants, mostly involved with the marketing and sale of Siwa grapes and olives as well as tourism. Most of the townspeople as well as the farmers and grove owners are ethnic Berbers. There are half a dozen small hotels in Siwa and Holliday and Rafi chose what appeared to be the best of them, the Safari Paradise, a lodge surrounded by a cluster of individual bungalows and all facing a bubbling springwater pool. After booking into one of the little cottages, they freshened up, then headed for the main dining room in the lodge.

  The dining room of the Safari Paradise was surprisingly elegant considering that it was located in a place that, along with Timbuktu, may well have inspired the phrase “the middle of nowhere.” The white plaster walls were hung with colonial oils of Egypt and Siwa in particular, and the ceiling was crisscrossed with coffered wooden beams. The tables were covered with white linen, starched napkins fanned elaborately at each sterling silver place setting. The maître d’, whose name was Omar, wore evening clothes. There was a variety of entrées on the enormous tasseled menu, from New York strip loin and prime rib to chicken kishk and kofta kebabs. Appetizers ranged from French fries or zucchini strips to pita and baba ghanouj with zabadi-mint yogurt dip and wara’enab-stuffed grape leaves. They ordered from a pleasant waiter who spoke perfect English. Holliday, being the more adventurous eater, chose the chicken kishk and the stuffed grape leaf appetizer. Rafi ordered a cheeseburger and fries. They both ordered tea.

  They were just finishing up their meal and thinking about coffee when a man materialized at their table. He was tall, broad-chested and wearing long shorts and an old-fashioned fatigue jacket with a collarless white shirt beneath it. His face was square with a full gray beard, shaggy gray hair down to his shoulders and heavy dark eyebrows over large, intelligent, pitch-black eyes. The nose was long and aquiline and would have suited a Caesar. His skin was dark as iced tea. When he spoke he showed a line of small white teeth, bright against the dark tan. He had the rich baritone voice of an actor or a politician. The accent was not quite British, Mid-Atlantic. Canadian maybe, thought Holliday, but he wasn’t absolutely sure.

  “My name is Emil Abdul Tidyman,” said the man, sitting down without being asked. “I hear you’re looking for a guide.”

  10

  “What makes you think we need a guide, Mr. Tidyman?”

  “Simple enough,” said the tall man with a smile. “You drive into Siwa in an old Czech Goat, which means you must have bought it outright, because nobody rents them, and if you bought a Goat you must be thinking of going somewhere the usual safari treks won’t take you. You also clearly have a military background; you walk like a soldier, and you have a soldier’s haircut and bearing. I expect at least a major, but probably a colonel.”

  Tidyman shook his shaggy, gray- haired head, then continued.

  “And certainly no one but an experienced officer, probably with time in Afghanistan, would know that despite its point of origin, a Czech-made Ulyanovsky Avtomobilny Zavod- 469, even well used, is a far superior vehicle for desert use than either the Land Rover or the Toyota Land Cruiser. Which, in my experience, means you probably want to go somewhere you have no business going.” Tidyman sat back in his chair. “Am I close . . . Colonel?”

  Holliday ignored the question.

  “Just what experience of yours would that be, Mr. Tidyman?”

  “Much the same as yours, I expect,” answered the man. “But mostly confined to Africa. The Congo, specifically Katanga Province, Biafra, Angola, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea . . . there are others.”

  “A mercenary?”

  “Soldier of fortune.”

  “Macho crap for idiots who drive around with rifles in their pickup trucks. Most mercenaries I’ve run into are section eight discharges and goofs who couldn’t get through Marine basic training. Losers.”

  Tidyman shrugged and smiled, showing off his pearly little teeth.

  “Whatever gets you through the night, Dr. Holliday.”

  “You know my name.”

  “I’m an old friend of the desk clerk here.”

  “You live in Siwa?”

  “I summer here, you might say, I winter in cooler climes.”

  “Odd choice,” said Rafi.

  “One of the perks of multiple citizenship,” said
Tidyman. “And one of the drawbacks. My Canadian citizenship gets me free health care, but I have to live there for several months a year. The same is true of the free dental care I get in England. My Egyptian citizenship provides me with my livelihood.”

  “Neat trick,” said Holliday, laughing. “Three passports.” He was beginning to like the smooth-talking man across from him despite himself. He was very charming in a slightly devilish way. And clearly he was extremely intelligent. “How did you work that?”

  “I’m the perfect expatriate,” answered Tidyman. “Never at home wherever I go. My father was a Brit, my mother was Egyptian. I was born in Cairo shortly after World War Two but raised in Canada, where I became a naturalized citizen. Unlike you hyper-patriots in the States, Canadians are quite tolerant of people with various passports. You have your melting pot, the Canadians have their mosaic. All depends on your point of view.” He smiled. “And despite propaganda to the contrary, Canadian health care really is quite excellent.”

  “What’s this livelihood you mentioned?” Rafi asked.

  Tidyman smiled again, showing his teeth.

  “People come to me with their fondest wishes and I provide them with their heart’s desire.”

  “Very poetic,” said Holliday. “If a bit enigmatic.”

  “What was it Churchill said about enigmas?” Tidyman said, smiling broadly, the black eyes twinkling.

  “It was a radio speech in 1939,” said Holliday. “He was talking about Russia: It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In other words, it’s complicated.”

  “A historian,” added Tidyman. “Interesting.”

  “I thought it was Jim Carrey who said that as the Riddler in Batman Forever,” said Rafi, smiling himself now.

  Tidyman laughed.

  “Ah, yes, Mr. Carrey, another expatriate Canadian. You can bet your bottom dollar he gets his annual checkups back in Canada.”

  “What are you getting at, Mr. Tidyman?” Holliday asked.

  “What I’m getting at is that my livelihood is like Churchill’s quotation: complicated.”