The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  There in front of them, like a giant's favorite toy that had been cast aside, was the broken remains of an airplane, the tail section at right angles to the fuselage. It had a bubble nose, the Plexiglas clouded by the passage of time, and a second turret just behind the cockpit. Holliday knew there would be a bottom ball turret in the sand below. It was a World War II B-17 bomber, the star and bar of the United States Air Force still just barely visible on the portside wing. There was a unit identification number on the tail section: a boxed letter G, a line of numbers and then an open letter E below. The numbers were still clearly visible: 230336.

  As they neared the wreckage of the old aircraft the sun climbed above it and they could make out the faded nose art on the fuselage just beneath the cockpit: a finned bomb shaped like a valentine heart with the italicized name curved below the design-Your Heart's Desire.

  "Very funny," said Holliday.

  "I thought you'd appreciate the irony," said Tidyman. He pulled the truck to a stop a dozen yards from the wreckage. "The crew must have bailed out somewhere to the north; there was no sign of any bodies in the aircraft itself. The plane flew on until it ran out of gas and bellied into the sand."

  "What does this have to do with anything?" Rafi asked, the anger clear in his voice. "We didn't pay you to take us on a nostalgic tour."

  "I think I know," said Holliday calmly, looking out the windshield at the remains of the old bomber.

  "There were maps dated 1945 for Libya and what they once called French Equatorial Africa, part of which they now call Niger. A place called Madama was circled along with the words 'Festung' and 'Benzin' written in grease pencil.

  "The map was in German. Festung is German for fortress and Benzin means fuel. They were going to refuel there."

  "I don't get it," said Rafi. "The plane has American markings."

  "It was called KG200," explained Holliday. "Battle Group 200. They flew captured aircraft, English and American. This plane was probably part of their First Squadron; they were completely run by the SS. This is the plane that was used to ferry out Walter Rauff's booty."

  "Quite right," said Tidyman. "Four thousand kilograms of gold; almost five tons." He turned to Holliday and Rafi. "Come and take a closer look." Without waiting for a reply the Egyptian climbed out of the Goat and walked toward the wreckage.

  "He knows about the gold," whispered Rafi.

  "Apparently," said Holliday.

  "But how?"

  "I think we'd better find out." Holliday opened his door and followed Tidyman toward Your Heart's Desire.

  The tailplane had torn off the rest of the fuselage just behind the waist gun positions, offering the only easy access into the aircraft. Sand had drifted into the opening but the interior was clearly visible.

  "Interesting," commented Holliday, coming up beside Tidyman. Holliday had once toured an intact B-17 named Fuddy Duddy on a visit to the National Warplane Museum in Elmira, New York, and he could see that Your Heart's Desire had been completely stripped. The waist gun positions had been removed, as had the bulkheads between the gun positions and the bomb bay. There was an odd collection of empty wooden pigeonholes retrofitted against the fuselage walls and it took Holliday a minute to figure it out.

  "Storage for the gold bars arranged so that the weight would be equalized," he said finally. "Hell to fly, I'd guess."

  "I suspect so," Tidyman said and nodded. "When it was discovered, there was a set of auxiliary fuel tanks in the bomb bay made from fifty-gallon drums. An extra five hundred gallons, which must have stretched their weight to the limit."

  Rafi appeared beside them.

  "You seem to know a great deal about it," said Holliday to the Egyptian.

  "Indeed I do," answered Tidyman. "Not surprising since I was the one who discovered her."

  "So you removed the gold, hid it away," said Holliday. As casually as he could he slipped his right hand into the pocket of his jacket.

  "Oh, dear me, no." Tidyman laughed. "I'm nothing more than a toiler in the fields, a journeyman smuggling cigarettes and a few guns from time to time. A billion and a half dollars in gold would be a death sentence for a man like me. That sort of greed gets your throat cut in a Cairo back alley or the Bouhadema slums in Benghazi. No, no, Colonel Holliday, I put the bullion in much safer hands."

  "You knew who we were right from the start, didn't you?" Holliday said.

  "Of course, just as I know that you have a small pistol in the right-hand pocket of your jacket. Be so good as to remove it with your thumb and forefinger. Then drop it on the ground." Tidyman's own weapon, an old Helwan 9mm, appeared in his left hand and he put the muzzle up to Rafi's temple. "You have until the count of three before I blow your young friend's brains all over the nice clean sand."

  "You traitorous son of a bitch," breathed Rafi hotly, his voice shaking with anger. "I never trusted you, not from the very beginning."

  "The wise man doesn't insult he who has a gun to his head," said Tidyman. His eyes on Rafi, the Egyptian began to count aloud. "One… two…"

  Holliday brought the palm-sized Hawg.45 out of his pocket and dropped it at his feet.

  "Now kick it away," instructed Tidyman.

  Holliday did as he was told. Tidyman stepped back three paces, well out of range of any foolish attack, the pistol in his hand still raised.

  "So whose safe hands did you put the gold into?" Holliday asked.

  Tidyman tilted his head to the left.

  "Theirs," he said.

  Holliday and Rafi turned to look.

  A hundred feet away half a dozen men sat perched on camels. They were dressed in full Tuareg costume, long indigo robes, almost black robes, indigo turbans and veils worn like masks over the bottom half of their faces. Five of the men carried Chinese Norinco Type 86S automatic rifles, a Bullpup variant of the Russian AK-47. The sixth man carried a Norinco rocket-propelled grenade launcher strapped across his back. A long tether made from braided leather was snubbed around the high horn of his saddle, leading back to three pack camels behind them. Chain bridles were threaded through their wide nostrils to keep them in check. The camels had a uniformly sour expression on their faces, as though they were all chewing something foul-tasting.

  "My brothers from the Brotherhood of the Temple of Isis, the men who kidnapped your friend."

  13

  Tidyman drove the Goat into the lee of the spine of rock, pulling it in as close to the sandstone wall as he could. It was easy enough to see why. The rock promontory ran almost exactly north-south. Left where it was, the sun rising over the length of rock in the morning would cast an enormous shadow running away from the truck and easily visible from an air patrol passing overhead.

  The men in Tuareg dress spoke briefly to Tidyman, then gave him a bundle of robes from one of the pack camels. Fifteen minutes later the Egyptian, Holliday and Rafi, now dressed exactly like the six armed men, were aboard the trailing camels and moving west, away from the wreckage of the B-17. Ten minutes after that Your Heart's Desire had been swallowed up by the endless sand. To a distant observer on the ground or in the air, they would look no more ominous than a plodding caravan of nomads.

  They rode for twelve long days, heading deeper and deeper into the Great Sand Sea. At night the camels would be rope hobbled and tied to simple picket lines to keep them from wandering off and the men would set up simple leather tents over bended "withies," skeletal supports of thin twigs. Tea was boiled on simple stoves made out of galvanized bowls placed over tin cans filled with dried camel dung. Meals usually consisted of goat meat jerky or nocturnal desert rat, fennec fox, and even surprisingly succulent sand vipers the men sometimes hunted in the late evenings.

  At night Holliday and Rafi were inevitably bound with ropes and guarded by at least one of the men with automatic rifles. From the moment they had been captured, Tidyman kept well away from the two men, sleeping in his own tent. During the long, tedious days Tidyman rode the last pack animal, while Holliday rode the first. An a
rmed guard rode in the rear.

  Holliday had no idea where they were going. All he knew was that they were traveling south-west, the sun setting ahead of them and well away to his right-hand side. They were headed roughly in the direction of the Niger border, the same route that Your Heart's Desire had been taking when some long-ago disaster struck; perhaps a multiple engine failure, a control malfunction, or maybe a fuel leak. It didn't matter; whatever the problem, it had been enough to precipitate the desperate act of bailing out over the desert.

  He tried to imagine what it would have been like for the bomber crew, most likely only four men since there would have been no need for gunners: pilot, copilot, engineer and navigator.

  They would have hit the silk low because the aircraft would have been flying that way to conserve fuel. They would have hit the desert hard but close together, and then they would have taken stock of their situation. It couldn't have been good.

  The men would almost certainly have had neither water nor food, and if by some chance they did, it wouldn't have been much-sandwiches perhaps, or a thermos or two of coffee. Four men, probably relatively small in stature, as most airmen were at the time, would last seventy-two hours at most and probably much less if they traveled in the heat of the day. They would have known that, but they would have tried anyway. But how far can a person walk in the shifting sands of a desert in the three or four days they had before they collapsed and died? Sixty miles, seventy, a hundred at most. Not enough.

  Somewhere along the way they would have started stripping off their clothes, the worst thing they could do since it would only accelerate the evaporation of their sweat, hastening their dehydration. Their tongues would thicken, their lips would crack and their noses would begin to bleed.

  Eventually they'd stop perspiring and fever would set in. As the cells in their brains dried out convulsions and hallucinations would begin. Trapped within the skull the cerebral fluid would actually begin to boil. Soon after that the kidneys and other major organs would begin to fail one after the other, leading quickly to toxemia, plasma loss, coma and eventually death.

  It would be an inexorable, inevitable, excruciating way to die. Somewhere in the rolling sands around him, probably mummified, were the remains of those four men, anonymous and long forgotten, their mission lost to eternity.

  Somehow, as Holliday plodded on hour after hour, it became terribly important that he find out the names of the crew of Your Heart's Desire, and he vowed to do just that if he somehow managed to get out of his own predicament. Failed or not, the mission and the men who flew it deserved their small place in history.

  On the thirteenth day of their journey the landscape began to change; the rolling dunes gave way to smaller, more sculpted waves of sand, broken with hard crust desert and stretches of barren, hard, rocky plateaus with very little sand. They traveled faster on the plains and traveled longer, sometimes far into the numbingly cold nights. There was a tension in the air; Holliday had seen it often enough on forced marches-they were nearing their destination. It couldn't be soon enough for him; Peggy had been missing for more than three weeks now and Holliday was beginning to fear terribly for her safety. Rafi was almost frantic with worry.

  On the fourteenth day the landscape changed again. The broken plain gave way to a massive escarpment rising above the flatland at least two thousand feet, a huge, apparently impenetrable wall directly in front of them. As they approached it throughout that day Holliday began to pick out sandy scars in the face of the escarpment, the mouths of wadis, or ancient riverbeds forming sloping approaches to the high wall.

  Toward the end of the day they reached one of these and barely slowed as they climbed up the escarpment along the winding trail of sand. Holliday tried to imagine what this place would have looked like when man first walked here a hundred thousand years ago. Probably paradise; in huge areas of Libya and Egypt the weather ran in cycles, drying and wetting, the desert expanding and contracting like a gigantic lung. As recently as the time of the pharaohs much of the landscape they were traveling through had been home to waving fields of grain, tumbling rivers and streams and forests and veldts alive with herds of wandering animals and their predators. The riverbed they were working their way along was easily as wide as the Mississippi and had probably been much faster. It was all very hard to imagine.

  They reached the top of the escarpment and left the sand-filled riverbed as darkness fell, and by the time they pitched camp for the night they had traveled a good distance along it. The next day was spent moving across the top of the plateau, traveling more west than south now. Every now and again they passed the abandoned ruins of mud- and salt-brick villages and once something that had to have been an old colonial fort, Italian or French. At noon they actually crossed a road lined with electrical transmission towers and in late afternoon they crossed another.

  By Holliday's rough calculations they had traveled at least six hundred miles from the wreckage of Your Heart's Desire. That put them closer to the border of Algeria, Niger, and Chad than anywhere else. From one frying pan into another, he thought. Algeria was a corrupt semidictatorship and a hotbed of ethnic Berber al-Qaeda terrorists, Niger was in the midst of a Tuareg insurrection and Chad had their UFDD rebel alliance. Who was it who said that God had forgotten Africa? A very bad place for an American to be, worse for a woman and suicide for an Israeli. Getting out of this was going to be some piece of work.

  The sixteenth day turned out to be the last. Late in the morning they reached another, much narrower wadi and instead of crossing it they turned abruptly, following it almost due north. By midafternoon the wadi petered out and they climbed up out of the ancient watercourse. They were at the edge of the escarpment, two thousand feet above a giant tract of rolling desert that reached the horizon. The small caravan came to a momentary stop.

  To their left, along a precipitous goat track that angled down the face of the cliff, there was a sand rift between the main escarpment and a long extrusion of sandstone. It looked like the space between a person's thumb and forefinger. From where Holliday sat perched on his camel the sandy rift looked to be ten or twelve miles long. Big enough to hide an entire army if you wanted. To the right, in the far distance, was a large blot of green shimmering like a mirage in the light of the burning sun. Something that looked suspiciously like a paved road ran directly through it, angling along at the foot of the escarpment.

  Civilization.

  Holliday felt a single small surge of hope and exhilaration. He saw what the men from Your Heart's Desire had not: a way out of their predicament. He yelled to the man on the camel in front of him.

  "Hey!"

  The man in the Tuareg robes turned in his saddle, the lethal automatic rifle clutched in his hands. When he spoke his muffled voice was harsh and dry; he was a man who had spent his life in the parched desert.

  "Matha tureed?" the Tuareg said, dark eyes peering out over the masklike veil over the lower half of his face. Holliday pointed toward the oasis in the distance. The turbaned man looked.

  "Where are we?" Holliday said, his arm extended, finger still pointing. The man called to his companion on the camel ahead of him and the other Tuareg turned in his own saddle and replied in a long string of guttural Tamasheq. The man in front of Holliday nodded, then turned again.

  "Wadi el Agial, sadiqi. Zinchechra. Germa."

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  They edged down the goat path for several hours, the unprotected drop only a gut-clenching foot or so away from their camels' slapping hooves, every lurching, swaying step threatening to be their last. Holliday had never had a problem with heights, but after twenty minutes or so he was forced to look the other way and finally simply shut his eyes against the nauseating vertigo.

  They reached the bottom at about four o'clock and spent another hour crossing the flat hardpan of the little valley, heading for the fingerlike extension of the escarpment that separated them from the expanse of desert beyond.

  Th
e surroundings included scrub bushes, thornbushes, the occasional desert beetle, and a great deal of hard, crusted white sand. Then they began to see small herds of goats being herded by Tuareg men in their traditional turban, and some children playing. Eventually they saw what appeared to be a permanent camp of some kind in the distance.

  The closer they got, the larger the encampment became. The goat-and-camel-skin tents were much larger than the pup-sized ones they and their captors used and there were thornbush enclosures of goats and picket lines of camels everywhere. Taking a quick count as they passed, Holliday estimated that there were at least five hundred men in the camp. Interestingly the location of the tents and corrals was such that except at high noon it would be perpetually in the shadow of either the escarpment or its extension, making it next to invisible from the air. Up-to-date tactics for an ancient people against a modern enemy: the airplane and the satellite.

  At the far side of the camp the group stopped in front of a moderate-sized tent and gestured for Holliday and Rafi to dismount. One of the armed men gave a harsh command and rapped the camels on the nose with a little stick. The animals obediently dropped down on the knees of their front legs and Rafi and Holliday climbed down. The guard gestured to the tent opening and they went into the stifling interior.

  It was luxurious in comparison to what they'd seen in the last two weeks. The walls were set out with heavy pillows and the floors were covered with woven rugs in a dozen different vivid patterns. A small cast iron grill stood in the middle of the tent and there was a ventilation hole in the ceiling to let out the smoke. Their guard turned and spoke.

  "Sa arje'o halan," he said.

  Holliday nodded even though he didn't know what had been said. So did Rafi. The man in the turban and robe turned on his sandaled heel and walked out of the tent. Outside they heard an exchange and then the sound of the camels moving off. Both Holliday and Rafi dropped down onto the pillows.