The Templar Succession

by Mario Reading

  ‘Deer don’t shoot back,’ he said.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  They drove most of that day on a mixture of dirt roads and ungraded tarmacadam. Road gangs were everywhere. Thirty or so Ethiopian workmen would be overseen by one or two Chinese. It was clear that in ten years’ time the Ethiopians would have a halfway decent road system. Meaning that these same Chinese could then rape their country of whatever remained of its natural resources, Hart decided. Ethiopia, like Thailand, had largely avoided the colonial axe. But these newly fledged neocolonial executioners, chopper in hand, camo paint firmly in place, were sure as hell creeping up on her by the back door.

  In the meantime, the existing roads were poor to catastrophic. Around midday the rain began to fall. Even the Renegade, with its four-wheel drive, slewed across the rain-slick road like a tap dancer negotiating an olive oil spillage. There was much jubilation in Hart’s party at the thought of what the Captain must be having to endure with his shattered windscreen. Only Biljana kept herself apart from the forced levity. A part of her was still in shock, unwilling to fully believe the extent of the Captain’s perfidy. She never went as far as making excuses for him, but neither did she appear to relish the prospect of his downfall.

  By mid-afternoon they were still thirty kilometres short of Debre Damo. The rain was sheeting down like blood from a ruptured artery. Gersem indicated a track off to their left.

  ‘We go country road now,’ he said.

  ‘Country road?’ said Rider. ‘What do you call the roads we’ve been surfing down so far? Highways?’

  Gersem held his hand up to his mouth and laughed uproariously. ‘These are big roads. Major roads. Now we find bad one.’

  Watching the interplay between Gersem and Rider, it suddenly occurred to Hart that there would be no more stops from now on in. No more breaks. This was it. Once they committed to this road there would be no turning back for any of them.

  ‘Does this track lead anywhere beyond Debre Damo?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Gersem. ‘Road end there. Eritrea a few kilometres further on. Many military. Impossible go further.’

  ‘Military, you say?’

  Gersem made a face. ‘Maybe you call these militia, not military. Mostly are local people with rifles. In case the Eritreans come across the Tigrayan Mountains and attack fresh time.’ Gersem made a cutting motion across his throat and down along his chest. ‘These Eritreans very bad. They take our country. We not like them. People fight.’

  Hart stopped the car. He looked round at the faces of his friends. The engine ticked away in the background like fate’s timepiece.

  ‘We’re a democracy,’ he said. ‘Right? Here in this car?’

  ‘Right,’ said Rider. He answered so fast that there was no chance that he’d had time to think about Hart’s words, let alone what they might mean.

  ‘Right,’ said Amira. ‘So what do you expect us to do? Take a vote on something? At this stage in the proceedings? You must be joking.’

  Hart looked momentarily taken aback. ‘I thought you just agreed we were a democracy?’

  Amira shook her head in mock despair. ‘Despite all that’s happened to you over the past few years – all the scrapes you’ve got yourself into and, more importantly, that you’ve slithered out of – you still persist in misunderstanding yourself. And, even worse than that, you persist in misunderstanding everyone else around you.’

  Hart made a face. ‘How do you mean?’

  Amira hunched forwards. ‘You’re good at what you do, John. Surprisingly good.’ She registered Hart’s shocked face – he wasn’t used to receiving compliments from her. She hurried on, not wishing to lose her temporary advantage. ‘I mean you think on your feet. Instinctively. No need for a bloody vote.’ She sat back triumphantly. ‘Twice you’ve nearly put one over on the Captain. Twice. Something I’d have thought impossible before we set out on this charivari. We need you to continue doing it.’

  ‘Charivari?’ said Hart.

  ‘A mock serenade,’ said Rider. ‘An elaborate way of taking the piss out of something.’

  ‘Amira?’ said Hart, rolling his eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Rider,’ said Amira. ‘You could complicate Armageddon.’

  There was a sustained silence. Everybody was uncomfortable with it. But no one wanted to be the first to break it.

  ‘What I’m really saying,’ continued Amira, after the prolonged pause had gone beyond uncomfortable, ‘is that we want you to decide for us. Since Danko’s death this whole thing has taken on the quality of a nightmare. We are all exhausted. Physically and mentally. You started this thing, all those years ago in Kosovo. We need you to finish it.’ She held up one hand to stop Hart interrupting. ‘We have been leading a homicidal maniac by the nose around a country none of us except Gersem either knows or understands. Now we appear to have backed ourselves into a corner. The Captain may or may not be after us. Personally, after last night’s fiasco, I very much hope that he’s broken away and made for Eritrea. But I suspect that he hasn’t. You’ve humiliated him on two separate occasions now. He got back at you once by executing Danko in front of Biljana and your friends. He’ll want to get his own back on you again. Which means that Biljana is still vulnerable. And will remain so until he’s out of the game. Because how best can he harm you?’

  ‘Through her,’ said Hart. His voice sounded tired. As if it was struggling out from under an extreme weight.

  ‘You bet.’ Amira glanced at Biljana to see if she was listening.

  Biljana’s eyes were steady and straight. Her entire attention focused on Hart.

  Hart stared down the road behind them.

  ‘Yes. He’s coming,’ said Amira, catching the direction of his gaze. ‘You can count on it. He’s probably only a mile or two behind us as we speak. Look at this road. Our car is loaded to the gills. His car, even though it doesn’t have four-wheel drive, is carrying just one person. He’ll have made time on us coming up here. And he has a rifle. If he gets up on one of these…’ She hesitated.

  ‘Ambas. These hills are called ambas,’ said Gersem.

  ‘If he gets up on one of these ambas, he can cover the road a kilometre ahead of him. He can pin us down.’

  ‘Even with four bullets?’

  ‘If even one hits home, he’ll have us.’

  Hart put the car into gear and began driving again. ‘You say they don’t let women climb up to the monastery?’

  ‘No,’ said Gersem. ‘No woman, not even a female animal, has been on the plateau for sixteen hundred years.’

  Hart shook his head in disbelief. ‘Is there anywhere else we can leave them then?’

  ‘You mean like a hotel? Or a guest house?’ said Gersem.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is nowhere like that,’ said Gersem. ‘There is just a village with a few huts. This is not a tourist place.’

  Amira’s words had spooked Hart, as they were meant to. They had also galvanized him into action. He kept looking in the rear-view mirror as if he expected the Captain to appear behind them at any moment. ‘Anywhere near the monastery then? Someone’s house maybe?’

  ‘No,’ said Gersem. He cocked his head to one side as though it might facilitate his thinking. ‘But there is a tomb.’

  ‘A tomb?’

  ‘They bring bodies there,’ said Gersem. ‘People who want to be buried near the monastery because it is a well-known holy place. Both men and women can be buried there. It is near to the spot where we climb up. It is not a pleasant place. But people could hide in there. It is very big.’

  ‘Rider?’ said Hart.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you found the key yet?’

  ‘The key?’ said Rider.

  ‘To the assault rifle.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ said Rider, snapping out a mock salute. ‘It was in
a zipped compartment in the sleeve. Shame we didn’t think to look in there before you got the drop on the bastard.’

  ‘Can you use a rifle?’ Hart said.

  ‘Can I shoot, you mean?’ Rider made a face. ‘If I have to. I believe they trusted me with a .303 Lee Enfield once while I was still at school. The one time they let us into Bisley for some sort of inter-schools competition. This one here on my lap can’t be much different. Trigger. Magazine. Firing pin. What’s not to like?’

  Hart rolled his eyes.

  Amira caught the look. ‘I can use a rifle too.’

  ‘Right.’ Hart nodded his head emphatically. ‘Then you three hide in the tomb. I will climb up onto the plateau with the pistol and then I will get a couple of the monks to help me drag Gersem up with the sawn-off shotgun hidden about his person. There’s only the one way up to the top, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gersem. ‘Only one way.’

  ‘And your brother is up there?’ said Hart.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hart. ‘You wanted a plan. That’s it.’ He negotiated his way round a particularly pernicious hole in the road. ‘Will we make Debre Damo before nightfall?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gersem. ‘We should be up there before it gets dark. This will be to our advantage. If the Captain follows us, he will be highlighted against the setting sun. We will have the protection of the hut on the cliff face. He will need both his arms to climb.’ Gersem’s voice tailed off. He wasn’t convincing anybody, not least himself.

  ‘The moment he starts up,’ said Rider, ‘I can emerge from the tomb and cover him from the bottom. I’ll let him climb up about ten yards, so he’ll be really vulnerable. He’ll have no choice but to chuck down his pistol and give himself up.’

  ‘Will the three of them be well enough concealed inside the tomb?’ said Hart. ‘Are you sure of this?’

  ‘Yes. There are many catafalques,’ said Gersem. ‘Many hidden corners. It would take a man much time to investigate them all. Especially in the dark. There is no electricity anywhere in the valley.’

  ‘What if he brings a torch with him?’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘And I’ll have taken him prisoner by then anyway,’ said Rider. ‘My assault rifle to his blunderbuss. Hey, Amira. If the newspapers call Hart “the Templar”, what will they decide to call me after you’ve written me up in your piece?’

  ‘My encomium, you mean?’ said Amira. ‘The piece of hagiography I will design especially around you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rider.

  ‘The “Tosser”,’ said Amira. ‘Nothing else would be remotely appropriate.’

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  The Captain glanced down at Rider’s laptop on the seat beside him. It looked to him as if Hart and his party must have stopped once again for the night.

  The Captain typed in a request for an accurate position. The computer came back with the words Debre Damo. The Captain Googled the place. After a moment he laughed out loud.

  ‘Clever bastard,’ he said. ‘Talk about a cul-de-sac. You must have known about this somehow, John Hart. No one comes across a place like this accidentally. Not even you have that much luck.’

  He read some more about Debre Damo. Whichever way you looked at it, there didn’t seem much alternative but to climb to the top of the amba using a rawhide rope. The priest who originally discovered the place had apparently enlisted the help of a flying snake during his first ascent. But one could hardly count on that at this stage in the proceedings. And if the Captain climbed up via the rope, he would be a sitting duck. Which was presumably the plan. Added to which, given that the place was a monastery, no one would be happy to see him slinging a rifle onto his back before he began scrambling.

  What the Captain couldn’t work out was whether Hart had simply chosen Debre Damo as a safe place his party could lie up in and regain their energy. Or whether this was the place where he intended to confront the Captain once and for all.

  Which was when the Captain read about the ‘strictly no women’ rule.

  So this is it, the Captain said to himself. The showdown at the OK Corral. Hart was sending him a subliminal message via the very laws of the place he had chosen. He was telling the Captain that this time the women must be kept out of it. That they would be placed in safety somewhere, upon which Hart would confront him on a ground of his own choosing.

  Well. The Captain would see about that. He wasn’t a gentleman and he wasn’t a player. And as far as he was concerned this was no game. May the worst man win.

  It didn’t take the Captain long to find the abandoned Renegade. They had left it at the bottom of the hill in what he supposed was the tourist parking area. Though the Captain had difficulty imagining much tourism going on in a godforsaken place such as this.

  He drew the Mazda up beside the Renegade and cut the engine.

  The late-lamented Hank had obviously had a weakness for expensive toys alongside his number-one hobby of pissing off his wife, because there was a two-thousand-dollar pair of Swarovski binoculars tucked inside the glove compartment.

  The Captain scanned the surrounding hillside with his new acquisition. The sun was only just beginning to set, so that there was more than enough light left to see. And the binoculars were magnificent. Crystal clear. Yet another posthumous gift from Hank to go alongside the Mazda.

  An Ethiopian man was in the process of being hurried up the cliff. A rawhide rope was looped underneath his armpits, and two men were manhandling him from above. He was about halfway up the fifty-metre cliff. By the look of him, the Captain reckoned the guy must be on the far side of sixty.

  Then the Captain steadied the binoculars and looked closer. Yes. He was sure he’d recognized him. It was his park guard. Gersem. The one he had bushwhacked and whose rifle he had stolen. So Gersem had switched sides? That explained how Hart had found this place so quickly. There was nothing lucky about it.

  The Captain focused the binoculars above the climber’s head on the entrance to the hut that the monk in charge of the rawhide rope used for shelter during inclement weather.

  Yup. There was Hart, tugging away at Gersem’s rope. True to form, Hart was poking his head out from cover like an eager schoolboy on a school corps exercise. An elderly monk was hunched up beside him, helping him manage Gersem’s weight. Had Hart noticed the Mazda far below him? Would he work out it was the Captain’s new car? Or would he still be expecting the Captain to be driving the wreck with the shattered windscreen he had inherited from the journalists?

  The Captain was tempted to take a pot shot at Hart just for the hell of it, but the range was too far over open sights and in such poor light. It would just be a wasted bullet. The Ethiopian would make a better target, drifting on the cliff face like a hangnail, but why kill him? He didn’t figure in anything much. And he was clearly injured worse than the Captain had figured at the time, or he wouldn’t have needed hauling up. Perhaps there was a medic up there? That would tie in with Hart’s tender-minded and flatulent thinking. The man seemed obsessed with making himself vulnerable when he didn’t need to.

  The Captain checked around some more. No sign of the women. Which was not surprising, given the sexual apartheid prevailing upon the mountain top. Human beings were asses, thought the Captain. When they were handed their freedom on a plate, they insisted on sabotaging their good luck with crazy rules.

  So where did you leave them? the Captain mouthed silently to Hart. Where did you dump my daughter and the Eisenberger woman? The Captain scanned the village below him. Fifty huts. Maybe more. But no hotels. No guest houses, no electricity, not even a fucking windmill. It would be impossible for him to check out every one of the habitations, which had presumably been the point of the exercise. So maybe they were hiding out in the open? That would have been the sensible thing to do. He would never find them then.

  But these were Wester
n women, the Captain told himself. Their natural instinct would always be to search for cover because that is what they were used to. And if the rain started up again at anything like the level of that afternoon, cover was what they would assuredly need.

  The Captain slung the rifle over his shoulder and slid the pistol inside his belt. Then he locked and secured the Mazda. When he was finished making his preparations he crouched down beside the Renegade and let all the air out of the tyres. Why not? It never did to leave possible escape routes open behind you if you didn’t need to.

  When he was satisfied that no one would be driving away fast in the Renegade, he cradled the rifle and moved off to the right. Anyone imagining that he would calmly climb up the rawhide rope and straight into a trap must need their heads examining.

  It took the Captain twenty minutes to find the entrance to the tomb. No one was around to guard the place. There was just a barred gate, with a chain and padlock securing it. The Captain checked the padlock. It was unlocked. Anyone could go in or out at will.

  He stepped inside the tomb and looked around. The place had originally been a cave. It was maybe one hundred metres wide by about two hundred metres long, spread out beneath the amba like a Bavarian beer cellar. The perfect place.

  ‘Anybody home?’ shouted the Captain.

  Did he hear a furtive reaction from somewhere deep inside the natural crypt? Or was it only a rat, jinked by the unexpected sound of a human voice?

  The Captain ventured further inside.

  ‘The big bad wolf is coming!’ he intoned. ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of an Englishwoman. Be she alive or be she dead. I’ll grind her bones to make my bread.’

  The Captain was enjoying himself all of a sudden. What did he have to lose? Hart, the Ethiopian guard and, in all probability, the man called Rider were no doubt planted up there on the plateau, busily counting sheep. He’d already left a pile of charred bodies in his wake. A few more would make no difference now. He might as well relish the process. It was almost like the good old days again, back when Serbia swept everything before her by sheer force of will.