The Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  By ten he was saying good-bye to his last few guests, all of whom promised to send large donations to the Royal Academy. By eleven thirty the caterers were on the way out the door, and by midnight the apartment was his own again. He unlocked the door to his study, which had been off-limits for the evening, and stepped inside.

  The room was comfortingly dark, as it usually was, the only light coming from a small green lamp on the bar. He poured himself a glass of thirty-two-year-old Auchentoshan single-malt and went over to his desk to look for an old bottle of Rofecoxib. He flipped on the desk lamp and saw that there was already someone seated in his chair, blood leaking down the starched bib front of his evening clothes from the eight-inch gaping slash across his throat. The man’s head was so thrown back by the wound that Matheson could see the cocaine frosted around his nostrils. There were several more lines of cocaine on the desk in front of the dead man, along with a rolled-up five-pound note. Matheson put down the heavy glass of whiskey. He recognized the slaughtered body: it was Simon Wells, a puff-piece writer who made the circuit putting society names into his column in boldface. A completely harmless individual with a not-uncommon taste for drugs. For a moment Matheson thought about doing the dead man’s lines on the desk to calm his nerves a little, but thought better of it.

  A pole light came on in the far corner of the room. It illuminated a tall, thin black man holding an automatic pistol loosely in his hand. The man was dressed in an expensive-looking set of evening clothes and there was a glass of something that looked like gin and lemon on the table beside him. He reached for it with his free hand and took a moderate sip, the ice cubes tinkling pleasantly against the expensive Czech crystal.

  “My name is Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre of DGASEK, the Direction Générale d Action et de la Sécurité Extérieure de Kukuanaland, or to put it more simply, the secret police of that country.”

  Matheson was smart enough and sober enough not to try to bluff and bluster. If the man in the chair had wanted to kill him he would be dead by now; if Saint-Sylvestre was from Kukuanaland he knew about the huge neodymium and tantalum strikes discovered by Ives, a discovery of rare earths in such concentrations that he could single-handedly break China’s monopoly overnight.

  “May I ask why you killed poor Simon here?”

  “Sadly for him he was in here doing his drugs when I came into the room. His death was necessary to keep my presence secret.”

  “The door was locked,” said Matheson, trying to think as he kept up the stream of macabre chatter.

  “The French doors on the balcony weren’t,” said the black man. “They were either open or your dead toxico behind the desk there slipped them open with a credit card.”

  “May I sit down?” Matheson asked.

  “No,” said the black man. “Remain where you are.”

  “How did you get into the apartment? The party was by invitation only.”

  “I pickpocketed Elton John coming up in the elevator, or at least it looked like Elton John. Nobody gave me a second look. I could just as easily have come in with the caterers and gone around poisoning all your guests.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A great deal of money and a share in whatever it was Archibald Ives found below Kazaba Falls. Say one million pounds in cash and one full percent of any mineral concessions granted to Matheson Resource Industries, payable in preferred shares of MRI, since you can no longer use Silver Brand Mining as your shell company.”

  “One percent isn’t very much,” said Matheson. How the hell did he know about Silver Brand but not what Ives had discovered? Was there any value in that? Matheson’s brain tried to cut through the patchy fog of his headache and alcohol. Was there an advantage?

  “I’m not a greedy man,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “One percent and a million pounds isn’t enough for you to risk my divulging what I know before the fact, and after the fact I’ll be able to hold it over your head for the rest of your life. You know as well as I do that this is the sort of thing that brings down governments, let alone industrial concerns like yours.”

  “I deal in minerals, Mr. . . .”

  “Captain,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “And you’re about to deal in potential genocide.”

  “What is it you think you know that I would value so much?” Matheson asked.

  “In thirty-six hours you intend to launch a coup d’état against Solomon Kolingba that will promote Francois Nagoupandé as his successor. The coup is to be led by a mercenary named Konrad Lanz who has been recruiting officers and noncoms from the Ali Pasha Hotel on Clapham Street. The private soldiers will be hired by agents in Sierra Leone, ex-members of the Revolutionary Front Army of Liberia and butchers each and every one. ”

  “If you win the coup and install Nagoupandé he will immediately set about to kill as many Baya as he can—Kolingba’s people. When he’s done that, he’ll murder the Yakima. You think Kolingba is dangerous because he is mad, but your good friend Nagoupandé in the silly uniform you bought him is even more dangerous simply because he is sane. He is a pragmatist, Lord Emsworth. A new broom sweeping clean, and in Africa that means killing your enemies. You are about to turn Kukuanaland into a killing field.”

  “You think you know a great deal,” said Matheson.

  “I’m not one for verbal jousting, Lord Emsworth,” Saint-Sylvestre said quietly. “I killed your banker, Leonhard Euhler from the Gesler Bank in Aarau. I killed the Brocklebank sisters in Vancouver, negating the value of your Silver Brand short-sell plan, and I killed Allen Faulkener because he got in my way. You will pay me what I ask because you are greedy, and because you know that I can and will murder without compunction. ”

  “I will murder your wife in her bed at Huntington Hall, which would not unduly concern you, but I shall murder her in your bed along with Jeremy Congreve, the twenty-year-old son of your estate manager, Tom Congreve, which you would find mortifyingly embarrassing, since there already are rumors extant of your impotence. I would kill your twin sons, Justin and Jonathan, at Barlborough Hall School, gutting them like fish and leaving them floating in Butchertown Pond in the copse behind the main building. And if that didn’t convince you I’d kill your eighty-three-year-old mother at her assisted-living apartment in Oxfordshire. I’d take my time with her, Lord Emsworth; I can guarantee you that.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Matheson asked. His legs felt rubbery and acid was creeping up his throat.

  “The same reason you are,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “Money. And you’d better make it quick; you’re running out of time.”

  29

  Konrad Lanz stood in the baking heat of Mopti Airport in northeastern Mali and watched as a dozen workers crawled like busy ants over the rickety wooden scaffolding surrounding the old Vanguard cargo aircraft. They were painting over the green cedar on the tail, as well as the striping that was the usual livery of Lebanon Air Transport, covering it with a flat black spray paint that would render the place virtually invisible from the ground at night.

  Reflective chrome strips were being painted over around the windscreen, and the windscreen itself was being covered on the inside with polarizing film. Even the wheels on the landing gear, the bare aluminum tips of the propellers and the open engine nacelles were being given the flat black paint job. Not that stealth was a real concern for Lanz.

  Mali had few jet fighters, Nigeria had only fifteen Chinese fighters with five pilots fully trained on them and Cameroon had four light attack aircraft, three of which were out of service and the fourth having been grounded since the death of the Cameroon Air Force’s only instructor the year previous.

  It was doubtful that they would have any trouble in the air from any military source. Nigeria had twenty ancient Russian antiaircraft guns, most of them placed around the capital city, Mali had no air defense system at all and Cameroon had twelve of the same antiaircraft guns as the Nigerians, also placed around their capital. With no moon Lanz considered it very unlikely that there would be
anything else in the sky when the time came.

  He watched the men working for a few moments more, satisfied that they’d make their deadline of ten p.m. tomorrow. As well as the painting, the Vanguard had to be fitted with extra webbing for cargo, and jump seats for the two-hundred-man companies. The end-user certificates for the small arms they’d purchased in Belgium, Spain and the Croatian port of Rijeka had passed inspection in Beirut and were supposed to be delivered to Mopti today.

  The small tent city at the end of the airport’s single runway and the two hundred men occupying it had also been ignored, as had the strange paint scheme of the old prop-jet cargo planes. Enough palms had been greased to keep officials at bay for the next thirty-six hours, but Lanz knew perfectly well that rumors were flying about their presence in the town of more than a hundred thousand only a few miles away on the river.

  Lanz turned away from the Vanguards and crunched across the hard-packed sand to the oversized marquee tent they were using as base headquarters. He nodded to the guards on each side of the opening. They were well kitted out in worn lowland leaf–pattern camo fatigues from the Vietnam era, and instead of berets they wore the much more useful boonie hats. Officers wore camo baseball caps, which were the only indicators of rank.

  He stepped inside the tent. There were three large models laid out on tables in the center of the tent. All were to scale. The one on the left showed the airport, the one in the middle showed the compound and the surrounding square and the one on the right showed the dock area.

  Captain Pierre Laframboise, leader of Vanguard One, was studying both the airport and the compound models carefully. Lanz had worked with Laframboise on several different projects over the years and the two men both liked and respected each other. Laframboise was a big man with a big beard and a big belly. He liked to eat almost as much as he liked to fight.

  “Having second thoughts, Pierre?”

  “I always have second thoughts, mon vieux,” said the big man.

  “About what?”

  “About news getting back to this bizarrerie de nature Kolingba so that he’s ready and waiting when we come. About the distance we have to march from the airport to the palace or fort or whatever it is.”

  “It’s barely a mile,” said Lanz. “Fifteen minutes at a trot.”

  “And all jungle. He could have a battalion waiting for us in ambush.”

  “He doesn’t have a battalion—we’re going in at two-to-one odds.” Lanz smiled, listening to Laframboise clucking away like a worried hen. It was almost a ritual, this fretting of his. But it was fretting that had saved both their lives on more than one occasion. “But I see your point. Why don’t we stagger the companies—five minutes between Vanguard One and Vanguard Two down the airport road.”

  “Better.” Laframboise nodded. “Not perfect, but a little better.”

  “Anything else?”

  “This Limbani character. It would be un catastrophe if he showed up. We can’t fight on two fronts any better than Hitler or Napoleon did, mon brave.”

  “Limbani’s a myth, a pipe dream. It’s been almost seven years since Kolingba took over. If Limbani were alive he’d have made a move by now.”

  “Your bones are getting brittle with age, mon ami; you speak in absolutes and you know that in this business there is no such thing.”

  “He’s paying us well, Pierre, enough to retire maybe, to open that restaurant of yours in Tours, for me to see my daughter a little more, to be an ordinary citizen.”

  The big man smiled sadly. “They always pay us well, Colonel, as well they should—we are supposed to die for their money if necessary. And we are not ordinary citizens; we are what we are because of you, and so we have bad blood with our families, and the restaurants in Tours are always somewhere in the future. We’re going to die in a place like this someday, Konrad, and you know it.”

  Lanz turned away and stepped out of the tent into the sunlight again. He climbed up into the cab of the postwar Bedford S Type canvas van that stood beside the marquee and headed into Mopti and the waterfront, where the two big pinasse cargo vessels were bringing up the arms from Bamako.

  He swung the heavy old army truck down the track that ran between the lines of tents farther along the runway. Most of the men were outside, sitting on camp stools or old lawn furniture they’d found somewhere.

  They were stripped to the waist in the heat, playing cards or board games and drinking Castel beer that Lanz had figured into the budget. Some of them were doing small bits of housekeeping: shining boots, replacing laces, even pipe-claying belts.

  Most of them were young, not much more than twenty-five, and of those almost all were black— discards, deserters or just plain fed up from armies of other African nations that barely fed them and rarely paid them. With the money each one of them hoped to make in the next few days they could keep their families for months and sometimes years. To these it was worth the risk.

  Almost all of the boys, black or white, young or old, were laughing and smiling and telling jokes together, but as he drove by he caught the occasional long look into nowhere, usually from the scarred, sunburned older ones, his best men from the Belgian days and some from even further back. Addicted to it, just like him, throwing the dice with the devil one more time, trying to beat the odds once again.

  He reached the end of the hardened track in the sand and turned onto the highway leading into Mopti. As he drove toward the town and the teeming port on the banks of the wide, sluggish river he thought about his conversation with Laframboise, one of the old guard and, like most of them, Lanz included, inclined to be superstitious.

  He’d told Pierre that Limbani was a myth and for the most part he believed it, but myths and superstitions sometimes had some basis in fact. What was the old adage? “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”? Limbani had been out of the picture for almost ten years now; was slight hope keeping a faint trail of smoke rising, or was it something more substantial? He stepped on the gas, pushing the lurching old truck a little harder. He put any thoughts of Limbani out of his mind. What was substantial was the crates of AK-47s still wrapped in their paper, and wooden boxes of ammo sitting on the docks, waiting for him.

  The Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter lifted nose-down to the hardstand, its counter-rotating rotors sounding like a pair of hammering commercial washing machines. The sudden furious noise and lurching takeoff brought Oliver Gash’s lunch abruptly into his throat. The takeoff was completed with an equally sudden lift of the nose, the small yellow stucco buildings of Kukuanaland International rotating in front of him like a yo-yo until all he could see was a patch of sunlit blue sky and all he could feel was his gut falling along with his lunch, his bowels simultaneously demanding to be opened.

  Gash gritted his teeth but that only made it even worse. He told himself that the pilot was risking his own life as well, but the broad, gum-chewing face of Flying Officer Emmanuel Osita Ozegbe, eyes hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses, didn’t give him the security he needed. Ozegbe looked about sixteen years old and about sixty pounds overweight, like someone who smoked too much weed, watched too much TV and ate too many Doritos. He’d met lots just like him back in Baltimore. Welfare weenies who’d never get off it until Medicare cut off their legs from diabetes and they went on disability benefits instead.

  “Where you want to go today, boss?” Ozegbe said, speaking the standard Sango patois. He spun the helicopter slowly around on its axis. It was only through an incredible application of willpower that Gash didn’t simultaneously soil his pants and puke all over his lap.

  “Upriver,” Gash managed, using the same language. “Kazaba Falls.” This was where the rumors consistently placed Limbani.

  “No problem,” said Ozegbe. He swung the helicopter around until he had the appropriate compass heading, put the stick and the helicopter into a nose-down attitude and gunned the throttles. Gash was jerked back in his seat and suddenly they were in rapid motion, tearing through the sk
y a hundred feet above the ground, the great sound of the big Klimov turbo shafts blotting out everything. Except the sound of his own ragged breathing and his companion’s gum snapping.

  The helicopter flew like a video game, everything controlled from one complex stick with thumb buttons, finger-grip controls and toggle switches like a Christmas tree. Ozegbe threw it around the sky like a farm boy driving a tractor—there was no finesse or subtlety or sense that the young man was managing a stupendously complicated piece of machinery.

  With the stick and the heads-up weapons panels and the virtual dials and controls displayed on little screens here and there in front of him it really was no more than a video game; he was flying some exotic version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and was barely aware that he was actually flying a weapons platform that would have taken out all the pilot’s competition in south Baltimore in a single twenty-minute session with a stop at the nearest New York Fried Chicken to top things off.

  “How long you been flying this?” Gash yelled into his microphone. The kid’s eyes stayed glued to the controls.

  “Two hundred hours on a flight simulator and another two hundred hours on the full-sized simulator at the Ukhtomsky factory outside Moscow.”

  “How much time actually flying?”

  “Thirty hours with the instructor. Fifteen hours here. I do a two-hour patrol of the western border once a week. That’s all we have gas for.”

  “What about weapons?”