Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars

by Christopher, Paul

  The book had originally been the subject of his doctoral thesis at Georgetown University back when he’d been at the Pentagon more than a decade ago, but with the passage of time it had turned into the massive, doorstopper epic that he used as both a hobby and a way to occupy his mind when it started to turn into the dark corners of memory that sometimes haunted him. At nine hundred pages he’d just finished with John Ericsson and the construction of the Union Navy vessel Monitor, the first American ironclad, and he still had a long way to go.

  He’d been interested in the subject of armor since he was a kid playing with his uncle Henry’s antique lead soldiers in the big Victorian house up in Fredonia where the old man still lived. Henry had been a teacher at the State University of New York in Fredonia for years and before that something vaguely sinister and hush-hush during the Cold War. It had been Uncle Henry who’d interested him in history in the first place, and it was Uncle Henry who’d managed to wangle him the congressional recommendation that got him into West Point and out of the intellectual desert of Oswego, New York. Not to mention freeing him from a life of stormy alcoholic desperation with his widower father, a railroad engineer on the old Erie Lackawanna Line until he was laid off in the early seventies.

  By then Holliday was already off to West Point, and a few years later, gone to war in Indochina. When his father died of liver failure in the spring of 1975, a twenty-four-year-old Holliday, now a field-promoted captain in the 75th Ranger Regiment, was helping the last evacuees board helicopters during the fall of Saigon.

  Holliday sat at his desk working until taps sounded at ten o’clock. He got up, made himself a cup of tea, and then went back to his computer and spent another hour checking over what he’d just written. Satisfied, he switched off the computer and leaned back in his battered leather office chair. He intended to spend a few minutes reading the latest Bernard Cornwell book and then head to bed. His telephone rang. He stared at it, listening to it ring a second time. He felt a little lurch in the pit of his stomach and a clench in his throat. Nobody called with good news at eleven o’clock at night. It rang a third time. No use putting off the inevitable. He picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  “Doc? It’s Peggy. Grandpa Henry’s at Brooks Memorial in Dunkirk. I’m there now. You’d better get here quick; they don’t think he’s going to make it.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can.” It was three hundred and fifty miles to Fredonia, seven hours if he drove straight through. He’d be there by dawn. Peggy was weeping now; he could hear the tears in her voice. “Hurry, Doc. I need you.”