The Templar Legion

by Paul Christopher

  “The missiles are dummies, but the Shipunovs are real.” Ozegbe squeezed one of the buttons on the control stick and the helicopter seemed to shudder as the twin cannons pulsed. From his seat Gash could see the rounds impacting the left-hand bank of the river, sending up huge gouts of mud and water.

  A pair of rounds caught a dozing alligator and tore it to shreds before it had time to move. In front of them the Kazaba Falls rose like a wall split by the three tumbling, mist-shrouded cascades of water.

  Gash gripped the edges of his seat but the young pilot just twitched the control handle, the nose came up and they rode above the falls to find themselves hurtling along barely twenty feet over the water.

  “I’ve seen enough,” said Gash. “Take me back.”

  “No problem,” said Ozegbe. He twitched the control handle to the left and they went into a long swinging turn over the jungle. For a split second Gash thought he saw something out of place, a shape that wasn’t quite right among the canopy trees, but he wasn’t about to ask his teenage pilot to go back for a look.

  “How often do you patrol this sector?” Gash asked instead.

  “Only once in a while. Everybody thinks that Banqui’s eventually going to try to take us out from the west but I don’t think so.”

  They headed back downriver, leaving the falls behind them.

  “Did he see us?” breathed Holliday, drenched by the spray coming up from the base of the waterfall closest to the village side of the river. Limbani crossed the slippery slabs of slick black slate ahead of him while Eddie came behind.

  “The spray hid us, I think,” said Limbani, raising his voice above the pounding of the falls. Directly beside them the sheer cliff rose a good two hundred feet straight up with only a ten- or fifteen-foot path between the edge of the cliff and the roiling whirlpooling water at the foot of the falls.

  “Do they patrol often?” Eddie called out.

  “Almost never,” yelled Limbani. “That is why I am worried. That and the new moon. They’re getting ready for something.”

  “Does that have anything to do with us getting soaked?” Holliday asked.

  Limbani didn’t answer. He turned slightly, took a step or two and simply vanished.

  “What the hell?” Holliday said.

  “Poof,” said Eddie, just behind him. “This guy is a magician, yes?”

  “Apparently,” said Holliday. He was glad Rafi and Peggy were back at the main camp taking pictures and taking their first steps at understanding a new civilization. If there was one thing Peggy hated it was small, dark tunnels. He took another two steps, stumbled in sudden darkness and then took a third step. Everything had become silent; the sound of the waterfall had become nothing more than a dull throbbing. “You with me, Eddie?”

  “Right behind you, compañero,” said the Cuban. “This is the way to el infierno, I think.”

  “Pretty damp for hell,” answered Holliday.

  “Maybe el diablo has a sense of humor,” Eddie said. “Gets you wet and cold before he roasts you for eternity.”

  There was a scratching sound on rough metal and the flame of an old glass chimney oil lamp blossomed. The lamp was being held by Limbani only a few feet ahead of them. Behind the doctor was a large rusted metal hatchway studded with rivets.

  “So where exactly are we, Doctor?” Holliday asked.

  “The doorway to the past.” The older man smiled. He spun the wheel on the hatchway and pushed it open, stepping aside to let Holliday and Eddie go through first.

  “Mierda!” Eddie whispered, stunned.

  “No way.” Holliday grinned, suddenly finding himself laughing. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. “You really are full of surprises, Limbani.”

  They were standing in an immense cavern behind the waterfall, the sides of the cave a football field or more apart, the stalactite-studded rock more than a hundred feet overhead. The rock was streaked with thick, threading seams of what could only be gold, those veins in turn surrounded by even thicker strands of what appeared to be quartz but which Holliday knew were not.

  “Gold?” Holliday asked.

  “In quartz and diamond matrices. The caves are the far end of the mother lode back at the three hills. King Solomon’s Mines, a greedy man’s Shangri-la.”

  Dozens of torches illuminated the sight as at least a hundred of the Pale Strangers worked on the giant object resting in its cofferdam, cradled by more than a score of heavy tree trunks on each side.

  “Unbelievable,” said Holliday. “It’s a Viking snekkja. What the British called a dragon ship. What the hell are you up to, Limbani?”

  The boat behind the cofferdam was sixty or seventy feet long, clinker built from fresh planks, the planks overlapped, sewn, riveted and the spaces stuffed tightly with moss. The workers were almost finished now, thirty rowing benches installed between the gunwales and a raised platform for the helmsman at the rowing oar. The gunwales seemed higher than ones Holliday had seen on replica ships but it didn’t take long to see why. Between the rowing benches were firing positions for rows of ballista, outsized crossbows used in medieval siege warfare, capable of piercing stone walls, killing dozens at a time and even casting enormous fireballs.

  “Roche-Guillaume’s idea?” Holliday said.

  “Presumably.” Limbani nodded. “The ship itself goes back to Ragnar Skull Splitter, who remained here until his death. According to Roche-Guillaume’s manuscripts the local people had already intermarried with the Romans who came here first. It is as though each explorer who came this way left something of his culture behind. Ragnar’s own vessel was used to bury him when he died of fever, but the design for the pirogues my people used for travel and fishing were of much the same design. This ship, which is called Havdragoon in the old language—Sea Dragon—was nothing more than those small piroques scaled upward.”

  “But why have you built her?” Holliday asked. “Why now?”

  “Because war is coming.”

  “You can’t be certain of that.”

  “As a matter of fact I can. I’ve told you that I had my own spies and the battle is to be very soon. It doesn’t matter who the winner is between Kolingba and his enemies. Either way we will be sought out and slaughtered. We have hidden long enough. With the dark of the moon we strike.” He waved toward the ship. A group of kilted workers were fitting a bloodred curling snake figurehead on the high, delicate stem of the ship.

  “This cavern stretches the length of all three sections of the falls. When the cofferdam is opened the cavern floor will fill and the ship will be thrust out into the stream with sixty men at her oars. And sixty more at the crossbows. A hundred pirogues will join us on the downriver journey, each paddler armed with a blowgun and a hundred killing darts.”

  “You’re mad!” Holliday burst out. “You’re leading your people to suicide!”

  “We never asked for war. We never wanted war. But we will not run from war. I know Kolingba and his mind. Just as I know the kind of men who will be fighting him. It may well be suicide to fight, but is it better to wait like sheep for genocide instead?”

  “Tiene razón, mi amigo,” murmured Eddie. “Better to die fighting than praying.”

  “Is that a quote?”

  “Sí. Fidel, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, I guess this time I agree with him.” Holliday turned back to Limbani. “We’ll fight with you, Doctor, but I want Peggy and Rafi kept safe from harm.”

  “I think I can manage that.”

  “When is the new moon exactly?”

  “Tonight.”

  30

  Time is a fickle concept during battle. Ask most survivors of D-day and they will tell you that it seemed to take forever for the combined American, British and Canadian forces to establish a beachhead, when in fact it took slightly less than three hours, from six twenty-nine a.m., the official start time, to nine seventeen a.m., roughly the time it takes the average office worker to rise and shine and get to work. In that same p
eriod of time on D-day there were approximately twenty thousand casualties incurred by both German and Allied personnel, which was almost two every second. So battle time is relative—it seems to take forever to survive and only a split second to die.

  Peggy’s photograph of Havdragoon, the Sea Dragon, bursting through the curtain of water at Kazaba Falls, big square sail set and stitched with its indisputably Templar cross, all sixty of her long oars out and her bloodred dragon figurehead glaring ahead, eventually appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world and on the cover of every magazine. It made Peggy a wealthy woman in her own right, got her unbelievable assignments and introduced a whole new civilization to the world. But all that was in the future.

  Both Holliday and Eddie were on the steering platform as the brand-new ship with its thousand-year-old design hurtled through the cave mouth and dropped down into the foaming, churning maelstrom below. As well as Holliday and Eddie, two of the Pale Strangers, Baltazar and Kaleb, manned the heavy steering oar with them, hanging on for dear life as the Sea Dragon hurtled down into the water, then rose again like its namesake, the great red dragon figurehead streaming water, its golden teeth seething with froth and a sudden wind from behind them bellying the sails as the sixty oars dug into the deep black river water and drove them forward.

  “My God!” Holliday breathed, soaked to the skin but feeling an exhilaration deep in his soul he thought was long forgotten.

  “¡Increíble, mi hermano!” Eddie roared ecstatically.

  “Krigsanggen!” screeched Baltazar and Kaleb beside them, and in that moment they knew they all spoke the same language, whether they understood one another or not. Something had risen from the deep past and propelled them forward and there was no way back.

  Sea Dragon steered easily out of the whirlpools at the foot of the falls and slid effortlessly toward the near bank of the river, the land-side oars rising at a single command from the ship’s undisputed captain, Loki, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed, bearded fury who stood in the bow of the ship, his strong right arm hooked around the red dragon’s neck like a lover. He carried not one but two blowpipes across his back and, according to Limbani, could use them both at once and so quickly that the motions were only a blur.

  A gangplank was thrown aboard and Limbani crossed into the ship with Peggy and Rafi on his heels. Ahead of them on the river the sun was setting quickly.

  “It will be dark soon,” said Limbani. “We need to load the rest of the warriors and their supplies on board. Even with this wind Loki says it will take almost until dawn to get us downriver to Fourandao.”

  “That should be just about right.” Holliday nodded. He paused and gave Peggy a short look. “Did you bring our weapons?”

  She nodded. “Stripped from Jerimiah Salamango’s imps.”

  Three men came across the gangplank carrying a sagging litter loaded down with AK-47s, ammunition belts, two RPGs with a half dozen rounds each and a pair of brutal-looking Saiga automatic shotguns with nine or ten eight-round magazines each.

  “Bueno,” said Eddie, “my favorite, un acelerador de cabeza.” He grinned, looping the sling crosswise over his shoulder and pushing a half dozen magazines into his belt. “In the army we called them Fidelitos—small but with a big mouth.”

  Holliday turned and looked directly at Peggy. “Now, look—” he began.

  “Don’t even start, Doc. I’m a big girl; I’ve taken photographs in a dozen war zones. I’m not your responsibility. We’re coming, and that, cousin o’ mine, is that.”

  “You don’t have anything to say about this?” Holliday said, turning to Rafi.

  “I’ve spent the last hour arguing with her. I lost. We’re coming, because if she goes then I’m damn well going with her.”

  “You’re both crazy,” said Holliday.

  “No, mis amigos,” said Eddie with a grin, “we’re all crazy.”

  Konrad Lanz had been sitting in the navigator’s jump seat of the old Vickers Vanguard for three and a half hours and his legs were beginning to cramp. Looking between the pilot and copilot’s seats there was nothing to see but the velvet black of the night and the green and yellow glow of the instruments. For the past hour or so they had been flying at under five thousand feet, and so far they hadn’t heard a single query on the radio.

  “How much longer?” he asked the pilot, another one of the old guard named Janni Doke, a South African in his late fifties who could fly anything from a Piper Cub to a jumbo jet.

  “Twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five.”

  “I’d better get the boys ready, then,” said Lanz.

  “You do what you want, baas; just make sure you leave me a couple of roughies to top up the tanks. We’re on fumes as it is,” responded the gruff old Afrikaner.

  “Will do,” said Lanz.

  “You’re sure about the landing lights?”

  “Positive. The approach lights are on all night. They get some late cargo going in and out.” He paused. “There’s only one runway, eight thousand feet, just like I told you in the briefing. The runway lines up with the tower. You can’t miss.”

  “The helicopters? Even on the ground they could blow us all to Hades.”

  “Three RPGs. One each for the Kamovs, one for the tower. There’s an old armored personnel carrier but there’s no one manning it at night. The wheels are flat. It’s just for show.”

  “All right.” The Afrikaner half turned and looked at Lanz in the darkness. “Radio checks every ten minutes, okay, baas. No radio check and I’m gone with the wind. No screaming savages putting this old cheeky prawn in the pot for his dinner, understand?”

  “Every ten minutes.” Lanz turned and went back through to the aircraft cabin. The original twenty-eight-row, triple-double seat configuration had been removed and replaced with twenty-five double rows of quad buckets from a few old C-47s they’d raided in Europe and North Africa.

  Since the Vanguard’s folding air stairs fore and aft would be far too slow for egress, they’d been removed, and Janni Doke and a few others at Mopti had cobbled together emergency slides from several old parachutes that would let everyone off quickly, gear and all.

  Most of the boys were sleeping or pretending to as Lanz made his way down the narrow aisle between the two cramped rows, shaking shoulders and giving out the five-minute warning. With that done he stood by the rear exit door with the three RPG teams and waited.

  The PA system clicked on. “Three minutes. Approach lights in sight,” Janni Doke said crisply. The old aircraft seemed to sag in the air, yawing a little to the left and sending Lanz lurching against the bulkheads.

  “Final approach two minutes. Interior lights off.” The airplane went dark.

  Now was the time for the Kamovs to come off their hardstands and flank them all the way down the runway, tearing them up with cannon fire.

  “Approach. Landing, one minute. Clear!” No Kamovs, at least for the moment. Thirty seconds from now and it might be a different story.

  Lanz could feel everyone tense. This was the worst, the final few seconds of stillness.

  “Contact!”

  The wheels shrieked as they touched the runway and skewed a little as they hit. Janni straightened the plane out and kept both feet on the brakes. The big props howled as they ran down.... Lanz counted backward from ten. At zero he gave the order.

  “Doors open!” He and one of the men from an RPG team worked the wheel until there was a quick hiss of air. Lanz pushed the heavy door outward and to the left against the fuselage. The first RPG team dropped the homemade inflatable slide out the doorway and Lanz pulled the lanyard that activated the big CO2 cartridge. The ramp bellied out perfectly.

  “Go, go go!” The three-man teams hit the ramp first and deployed twenty feet beyond the wingtip of the aircraft, giving them a clear shot. The Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades went off almost simultaneously, leaving a long, twisting trail of smoke that vanished into the darkness.

  Three explosions lit up the night
as the first projectiles hit. The teams had already reloaded and a second volley went screaming through the air. Only one of the Kamovs had been fueled and armed, and it detonated spectacularly, a black-and-yellow gobbet of greasy, fiery smoke bubbling up into the air. The first strike on the tower had hit just below it, smashing into the air traffic controllers’ chamber. The second volley hit the tower directly and the lights went out.

  The Battle of Kukuanaland Airport had begun.

  On the presumption that the coup attempt would be made on this night, Oliver Gash had seen to it that General Kolingba’s last three Bacardi and Cokes that evening were laced with two milligrams each of the drug known as Rohypnol, or roofies. The general got only halfway through the second drink before he passed out in front of his enormous wide-screen TV watching Operation Petticoat, his favorite Cary Grant movie.

  Kolingba would ideally be out of it until somebody came along and put a bullet through his head, but Gash wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as the first snores started erupting from the immense body, Gash made his way down to Kolingba’s office, let himself in with a key he’d made for himself long ago and began cutting a picture window–sized hole in the floral wallpaper–covered drywall.

  It took fifteen minutes to cut the hole, revealing several thousand tightly wrapped, pressure-sealed bricks of American hundred-dollar bills. As he recalled, each of the bricks was made up of one hundred bills, or ten thousand dollars. One million dollars, or one hundred of the bricks, filled up roughly half of an ordinary Samsonite hard-shell suitcase, and twice that load weighed roughly forty-four pounds. It took Gash four hours to fill twelve of the suitcases, for a total weight of 528 pounds.

  Twenty-four million dollars was certainly nowhere near enough for the humiliation and idiocy he’d had to put up with over the years with Kolingba, but it gave him more than enough liquidity to get to the lion’s share of the money he’d hidden away in a variety of banks from Cyprus to San Remo and beyond to even more obscure bits of geography that specialized in hiding other people’s money.