The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  "Sure," said Holliday. He'd first used the technology during combat missions in Desert Storm, the first brief war with Iraq. The theory was as old as navigation, but instead of using a sextant to take a bearing on the sun and stars you used a radio beam to triangulate your position by pinging off a series of geosynchronous satellites.

  "It's already been set with our base coordinates," said Tidyman. "Now you just follow the bouncing ball."

  Twenty-five minutes later they reached the Siwa-Mersa Matruh highway and crossed it at right angles, running along the northern edge of the long east-west depression that held the oasis. After another hour, the town well behind them, Tidyman guided the Goat down a barely visible track that led into the depression. In the distance to the south one of the huge saltwater lakes that dotted the oasis glittered in the brilliant sun. To Holliday the shimmering lake looked like a heat mirage on the highway.

  The desert here was rocky, interspersed with small pockets of vegetation. Ahead of them dark, bare hills with windswept crags and plateaus rose before them. So far they hadn't seen another vehicle. Every few minutes Tidyman would ask if they'd reached the next flagged location on the GPS and Holliday would call out the coordinates.

  "Do you have some sort of plan?" Rafi asked. "Or are we just playing this by ear?"

  "First we get across the border. Then we head for Jaghbub." Tidyman eased the Goat around an outcropping of sandstone, then found the track again. "I have friends there," the gray-haired Egyptian continued. "If they've heard anything about your friend, they'll tell me."

  "Where exactly are we?" Holliday asked, looking down at the GPS unit in his hand and then at the barren landscape ahead of them.

  "This is the Masrab al-Ikhwan," answered Tidyman. "What they once called the Thieves Road."

  "Appropriate," muttered Rafi.

  "Once upon a time it was the only southern passage between Egypt and Libya. It was used mostly by smugglers and slave traders going to and fro."

  "You seem to know your way around even without this thing," said Holliday, indicating the GPS unit in his hand.

  "My father was a captain in the Long Range Desert Group, based at Siwa during the war. His maps were just about my only inheritance. I've put them to good use over the years. They used to rattle back and forth through here all the time."

  "When we find the people who took Peggy, if we find them, then what are we supposed to do?" Rafi asked, a skeptical tone in his voice.

  Tidyman glanced over at him and smiled blandly.

  "I would have thought that was obvious, my young Israeli friend." The smile broadened. "We kill them."

  At the next GPS waypoint Tidyman hauled the wheel around, turning the old truck north, navigating carefully along the base of the ranging lines of dunes following the now invisible pathway through the sand. There were no landmarks now, only the burning sky above their heads and the relentless sun.

  "We're traveling parallel to the border now," commented Tidyman. He waved a hand. "The old Italian fence is a couple of miles to the west. Long since buried by the dunes, of course. Mussolini was really an arrogant fool, thinking that he could tame the desert with a string of wire."

  They traveled for another twenty minutes, then pulled into the meager shade offered by a wind-sculpted pinnacle of rock. The sandstone looked vaguely like a truncated version of the Sphinx.

  "Why are we stopping?" asked Rafi, suspicion clear in his voice.

  "A bit of a recce, as my father would say," Tidyman said and smiled. "And a little bit of protective coloration." He half turned in his seat and dragged a small knapsack from the back of the Goat. "Get out and stretch your legs," the Egyptian offered. "It will take a minute or two."

  Tidyman climbed out from behind the driver's seat with the knapsack and Holliday joined him.

  "Your Israeli friend doesn't seem to like me very much," said Tidyman.

  "He's worried abut Peggy."

  "He is romantically involved with your cousin?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't worry. We'll find her," said Tidyman. He put his hand on Holliday's shoulder. "Tell him I am sorry for his pain."

  "I will."

  Tidyman nodded, then followed a steep pathway that ran up the tall pale outcropping of stone. Holliday turned and saw Rafi approaching.

  "What was that all about?" he asked.

  "Extending the hand of friendship." Holliday shrugged. "He thinks you don't like him."

  "He's right," grunted Rafi. "I don't like him and I don't trust him."

  "He's all we've got at the moment," said Holliday. "So make nice."

  Rafi nodded and walked a little way into the shadows off the rocky outcropping. Joining him, Holliday saw it wasn't rock at all; the outcropping was made up of aggregated fossil oyster shells and dense chalk.

  "Miocene," said Rafi. "Twenty million years old, give or take a millennia or two, despite what your so-called Creationists think."

  Holliday's shoe stubbed itself on something buried in the hard-packed sand at his feet. He squatted down and swept some of the sand away. It looked like a blackened tin. He dug away more sand and tugged at the can. He held it up. The can had oxidized over the years but the label was still readable.

  "Campbell's Cream of Tomato," said Holliday.

  Rafi had discovered another tin.

  "Vacuum Oil Company." Like the soup tin, this one was blackened with oxidation.

  "The original name of Socony Mobil," said Holliday. "This must have been a Long Range Desert Group camp back in the war."

  "So what do we call this place?" pondered Rafi. "A garbage pit or an archaeological site?"

  "That would depend on your point of view, I suppose," said Tidyman, coming down from the rock. "On my father's maps it is referred to as the Mushroom, I suppose because of its shape."

  Rafi turned away without comment. Tidyman shrugged and smiled thinly at Holliday.

  "As I said, your friend does not like me."

  "He doesn't have to," answered Holliday, a little curtly. "Did you see anything up there?"

  "A great deal of nothing," said Tidyman. He nodded politely to Holliday, then went to the truck. He squatted down and took a screwdriver out of his knapsack, then removed the blue-and-white Egyptian license plate and replaced it with an oblong Libyan plate, black on reflective green. That done, he put on a rear plate and then a magnetic stick-on symbol on the door, much like the one Felix Valador used on his truck in Cannes.

  "The license plate I understand," commented Holliday. "But what exactly is that?" The stick-on symbol showed four lengths of open pipeline in forced perspective with a line of cursive Arabic below it.

  "It's the insignia of the Great Man-Made River Authority, Qaddafi's big irrigation project. Jaghbub Oasis is the wellhead for the pipeline that goes to Tobruk." He stood back and examined his handiwork. "Luckily they use a Chinese knockoff of the Goat called a BJ-212 to get around in." He shrugged. "It won't stand close inspection but it would pass a quick surveillance from the air."

  "Is that likely to happen?"

  "It's happened to me before. But Colonel Qaddafi is rather stingy with fuel for those Mil-24 Hind helicopters of his and they have to come all the way from the air base at Kufra; that's almost four hundred miles south."

  "How far is Jaghbub from here?"

  "About twenty miles. But we'll wait here until it's dark. The actual border is only about two miles west of us."

  They waited for nightfall, Tidyman dozing, his back against the Mushroom, Rafi pacing, listening for sounds that weren't there and worrying, Holliday looking idly at the debris left behind by the Long Range Desert Group more than half a century before. Not for the first time in his life Holliday found himself thinking about the borders between countries and why men fought over such artificial boundaries. Once a holocaust had been birthed for one man's need for Lebensraum, but Hitler was by no means the first to fight for more territory, nor would he likely be the last.

  When night came it came quickly
, the sun burning down among the windswept dunes and flat-topped sandstone buttes, leaving nothing behind but a dark pink curtain against the darkness. Tidyman roused himself and they climbed back into the Goat. There was a chill in the air and Holliday shivered as Tidyman started the engine and went around the base of the tall mushroom-shaped rock.

  "Ten minutes to the border now. If there is any trouble I will handle it," the Egyptian said quietly. They drove on, the desert more rough stones and gravel now rather than sifting sand. The darkness was almost absolute and Tidyman piloted the truck along the trail more by instinct than sight. When they crossed the border there was no indication other than a brief pinging sound from the GPS unit in Holliday's hand.

  "That's it," he said. "We're in Libya now."

  12

  Tidyman drove the old vehicle carefully, guiding it slowly, picking his way forward.

  "At this rate we'll never get there," said Rafi.

  "Speed is not of the essence," said Tidyman, keeping his eyes rigidly facing ahead. "Care is. This part of the journey can be very treacherous. Drive off the track and we could easily get mired in the sand. And then we really won't get there." The Egyptian said something briefly in Arabic. "Dying of thirst is not just an expression in this country-it is something to seriously be avoided."

  They drove on through the night, the only sense of the terrain around them coming from looming areas of blackness where the stars were blotted out. They seemed to be hugging the base of a large uneven mound on their left. On the right another mound rose about a hundred yards away. The ground below them was rough, the suspension rattling, jarring Holliday and his companions.

  Suddenly it was bright as day. A bright white flare rose above them and lit up the Goat. In the sudden burst of illumination Holliday could see another vehicle less than a hundred feet away, directly in front of them, blocking the track ahead. Tidyman jammed on the brakes. The other vehicle was almost identical to theirs in configuration, but with the back half of the cab removed and a long-barreled Russian-made KPV heavy machine gun mounted. A uniformed soldier stood behind the gun. If Holliday remembered correctly the weapon fired about five hundred rounds a minute and was capable of shooting down airplanes, or in this case turning the Goat into scrap metal along with its passengers. The flare faded out and the other vehicle's headlights flashed on, pinning the Goat down.

  "Now what?" Rafi said.

  "Don't move," ordered Tidyman.

  "Wouldn't think of it," said Holliday.

  "When I lower my arms switch on the headlights," instructed the Egyptian quietly, pointing to a black knob on the dashboard.

  "Roger that," said Holliday.

  Tidyman cracked open his door and climbed out of the truck, raising his hands in the air.

  "Do you think he knows what he's doing?" Rafi asked as Tidyman walked forward into the light.

  "He'd better," said Holliday. "If he doesn't we're dead."

  Tidyman walked forward, keeping himself in the center of the twin pools of light thrown by the other vehicle, his silhouette casting long twisting shadows behind him.

  "What the hell is he doing?" Rafi said urgently, his voice tense.

  Holliday didn't bother responding. His hand hovered over the knob. He panicked for a moment, wondering if the knob pulled out or pressed in. He finally decided it pulled out and prayed that he was right. A wrong decision and he and Rafi would be blown to kingdom come.

  Tidyman reached the other truck. Above the sound of the idling engine Holliday could hear the Egyptian's voice speaking in deliberately loud Arabic, his hands still high above his head. Someone in the truck responded. Tidyman did a slow pirouette.

  "Checking him for weapons," said Holliday.

  Tidyman completed his turn, then stopped, hands still high. There was a curt order from inside the other truck. Tidyman walked over to the driver's side and bent down slightly, talking with whoever was inside.

  Holliday tensed, sensing something in Tidyman's movement.

  The Egyptian's hands dropped abruptly, something glinting as it slid out of the sleeve of his jacket.

  Holliday hit the lights.

  The blinding beams lit up the other truck and Holliday had a brief impression of Tidyman's hand sweeping in the side window of the vehicle. A split second later a gun appeared in his other hand and there was the barking sound of a single shot being fired. The man at the machine gun didn't even have an instant to respond; he simply crumpled into the bed of the truck as Tidyman's other hand withdrew through the driver's-side window, the dripping blood on the long blade of the knife he held black in the headlights. The whole thing was over in the blink of an eye.

  "Dear God!" Rafi whispered, horrified.

  Tidyman walked away from the truck, wiping the blade on the leg of his pants. He came back to the Goat and leaned through Rafi's open window. The young archaeologist recoiled in horror.

  "You killed them!"

  "Of course I killed them," snapped Tidyman, sounding angry for the first time since they'd met. "As they would have killed you. This is the real world, my friend, not some theoretical position argued in a debate. There is no morality in this business. They were the enemy." He looked across at Holliday. "I'm going to drive their vehicle off the track and behind that group of rocks on the left. I'll need some help with the bodies. If they're not buried the birds will come and lead anyone to them. If we are lucky the search parties won't find them for a while."

  "I'll come," said Holliday.

  Tidyman opened up the back of the Goat and took out his pack as well as something that looked like a paint roller and a mop handle. He screwed the handle onto the roller.

  "What's that for?" Holliday asked.

  "Cleaning up tire tracks," answered Tidyman. "Got the idea from stories my father used to tell me."

  "Is that really necessary?" Holliday said. "Won't the wind do it for us?"

  "In 1927 a man named Ralph Bagnold crossed the Libyan desert by automobile. He was the first commandant of the LRDG. You can still see the tire tracks from his expedition if you know where to look." He shook his head. "The sand crust has a great deal of salt mixed with it and is quite friable. Some parts of the desert are very unforgiving." The Egyptian put the roller device over his shoulder and headed off into the darkness. Holliday followed.

  It was almost midnight by the time they finished. When they were done they trudged back to the Goat, where Rafi awaited them. Before reentering the truck Tidyman took a flashlight from his pack and turned it on. He swept the beam around the area. The tracks were gone; there was no sign that the other truck had even existed.

  "Not perfect; they'll tumble to it eventually," said Tidyman. "But it will do for now." He tucked the flashlight into his pack and got behind the wheel again. This time Rafi sat by the door rather than rub shoulders with the Egyptian. Tidyman started up the truck and headed onward again. They drove on in silence, the steep sloping walls of the sand hills gathering around them. The moon began to rise.

  "How soon?" Holliday asked finally.

  "Not long," said Tidyman. "Almost there."

  And suddenly they were there. Coming through a narrow passage between two rearing slabs of wind-carved sandstone they saw the town of Al-Jaghbub in the distance far below them, looking like a child's clay model, the bleached houses and walls smoothed by time, some crumbling and some no more than ancient foundation stones. In the middle of the town, like a jewel in the center of a crown, the dome of a mosque and its accompanying minaret rose above the buildings around it. Holliday was astounded to see that kind of sophisticated architecture in such an out-of-the-way location.

  "The mosque of Muhammad bin Ali As Sanusi. He is buried there," said Tidyman, reading Holliday's thoughts. "This was the capital of the Sanusi movement and he was its founder. It is little known now but some scholars mark it as the birth-place of Radical Islam, precursor to the creatures who brought us 9/11."

  To the north they could see the oasis itself, a dense green shadow
of date palm trees and small fields of grain. On the south side of the old walled town, separated by a distinct end to any vegetation at all, was the Great Sand Sea, an endless vista of elegant waves, frozen by some celestial wizard, never breaking on the shore, creeping forward inch by inexorable inch through the millennia. The moon stood high in the late-night sky, turning everything to shades of cold black shadow and golden sand.

  "It's beautiful," said Rafi, speaking for the first time since the death of the two men in the other truck.

  "And to us it's very dangerous," warned Tidyman.

  "Then why are we here?" Rafi asked belligerently.

  "We're not," answered Tidyman.

  "Then where the hell are we going?"

  "Nowhere," answered Tidyman obscurely. He put the Goat in gear again and turned southeast, heading out into the sea of dunes following the snaking line of troughs, working directly away from the town.

  "Where exactly are we going?" Holliday asked.

  "Exactly?" Tidyman answered. "We're going to twenty-eight degrees forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds north by twenty-three degrees forty-six minutes and ten seconds east." He paused. "Exactly."

  "And what, exactly, are we going to find there?" Rafi asked.

  "I told you," answered Tidyman with a secretive smile. "Your heart's desire."

  They drove on through the night, stopping every now and again for toilet duty and once to gas up. They ate on the run, chewing their way through cheese and pita sandwiches wrapped in foil, made up for them by the hotel in Siwa. Holliday kept an eye on the GPS unit in his hand and finally, with the sun rising on their right, they reached the coordinates the Egyptian had described.

  "We're here, give or take a hundred yards or so," said Holliday. There was nothing to see but the undulating sand and a single spine of sandstone directly in front of them. Tidyman drove ahead, then turned around the base of the stone obstruction.

  "Holy crap," said Holliday, borrowing one of Peggy's favorite expressions.