The Templar Cross t-2

by Paul Christopher

  An hour's flying brought them to Matfur, a small village at the foot of a bleak, treeless hill surrounded by a pancake-flat plain of smallholdings. In the waning moonlight Tidyman found the lake bed without any difficulty and put the plane down in a perfect three- point landing on the long-abandoned airfield, now little more than a slightly raised track through dry, cracked mud. He taxied the plane around, bringing it into the wind, then switched off the engines. The propellers clattered and whined to a stop and for the first time since they'd taken off from the desert camp in Libya there was silence.

  "Now what?" Holliday asked.

  "Now we steal a car," said Tidyman. "And get ourselves to the coast."

  19

  As things turned out, they didn't steal a car. They bought a truck, a World War II-vintage Austin Champ left behind in 1943 and pressed into service on a chicken farm owned by a man named Mahmoud. The truck and five gallons of gas were purchased for fifty dollars American and the ignition key for the Cessna Skymaster they'd left behind on the old airfield. Mahmoud also threw in an early breakfast of freshly slaughtered, plucked and baked chicken with a side dish of couscous and several pots of strong coffee.

  For a few extra American dollars Mahmoud also let them have their pick from his meager wardrobe of Western-style clothes, managing to outfit Rafi and Holliday in well-worn collarless shirts and floppy, outsized trousers that seemed to have been made for someone who had been both short as well as enormously fat. By daybreak, after a revolting and appetite-suppressing tour of Mahmoud's farm and directions to the coast, they were on their way.

  The trip in the old truck took less than two hours but Holliday was sure the stink of chicken guano would be with him forever.

  Tidyman's brief description of the town of Kelibia was entirely accurate. A large fort dating back to the Roman occupation dominated the dusty whitewashed town from a steep hill, and that was about it except for the stink of fish, which immediately began fighting the acid reek of chicken droppings for dominance in their nostrils.

  Most of the town seemed to have grown from an intersection of two major roads spreading out in a thoughtless tangle of narrow side streets that had grown over the passing years like a plaster and whitewash virus with no plan or direction. The real focus of the town beyond the obvious power of the vacant fortress was the harbor with its fleet of fishing trawlers and feluccas. According to Tidyman Kelibia was not one of the sanitized Zones Touristique, which might have accounted for the litter on the streets and the putrid, filthy water in the harbor. The boats, of all sizes and most needing a coat of paint, were moored four or five deep in a helter-skelter mess that defied any logic or order.

  They eventually found the immigration capitanerie and harbor master's office in a small building beside an enormous concrete-roofed open-air fish market right on the waterfront. The office was a cupboard with a desk, a chair, a grimy window and stacks of papers on top of ancient green filing cases. The room smelled of stale tobacco and rotting wood.

  The harbor master's name was Habib Mokaden, a squat little man who wore his pants up to his armpits and had a magnificent head of silver curly hair topped off with a bright green fez. His pouched face was covered with a sandpapery stubble of gray bristles and he smoked endless Mars brand cigarettes, tapping them out of a bright red package and popping them in the exact center of his fat and wet-lipped mouth. He spoke tolerable English.

  "I am aware of this vessel, yes," he said and nodded when Tidyman asked about the Khamsin. Holliday didn't quite believe it considering the mess of shipping in the harbor, most of the boats nameless.

  "Why do you remember it?" he asked.

  "You do not think this harbor master knows every boat large and small that comes into his port every day and every night?" Mokaden asked, his eyes narrowing. "Hosni Thabet's green felucca, Akimi's dinghy with the yellow stripe and the rusty portside hole, Fathi Bensilmane's sardine trawler with the holy words from the Qu'ran on his stack. Zoubir Ben Younes and the dinghy that smells so foully? I know each and every one. They are my children, effendi, my friends, my pets."

  "Why do you remember this one in particular?" Holliday insisted.

  "This boat arrives here once every month or so. It stays a week, then goes. During that week the captain spends his days drinking coffee and playing chess at the Cafe de Borj up on the hill. He stays at the Mamounia, where my sister is a cook, which is how I know this. This time he stayed longer than a week because one of his engines had been damaged and he had lost his engineer of long standing. He waited for parts to come but they did not so he only left this morning and still with only one engine and still no engineer. He left very early and in a great hurry, I am sad to say."

  "He left this morning?!" Rafi said.

  "This is what I say, effendi. This morning, with the sun. Even before the fishermen."

  "Where was he going?" Tidyman asked.

  "I was not there for him to tell me," Moukaden said with a shrug. He tugged at his belt to bring his pants up a little higher on his great mound of a belly. "I would expect he was going to his home port."

  "Which is?" Tidyman asked.

  "Calvi, in Corsica," said Moukaden.

  "How fast could he go with only one engine?" Holliday asked.

  "Five, perhaps six knots," answered the harbor master.

  "So we could catch him," said Rafi.

  "Why would you want to do such a thing?" Moukaden said, startled by the idea, his eyes widening. "It is an act of piracy."

  "He has something that belongs to us," said Holliday. "And we want it back."

  "Then he is a thief," said Moukaden thoughtfully.

  "Yes," said Tidyman. Rafi was about to add something but a look from Tidyman kept him silent.

  "A thief," said the harbor master again.

  "Yes," said Tidyman a second time.

  "Who should be apprehended," said Moukaden.

  "Indeed," said Tidyman agreeably.

  "And to apprehend this thief you would need a boat," mused the harbor master.

  "Quite so," answered Tidyman.

  "A fast boat," said the harbor master.

  "Yes," put in Holliday, seeing which way this was going. "A very fast boat."

  "I know of such a boat," said Moukaden.

  "I thought you might," Tidyman said and smiled.

  "It belongs to my cousin Moustafa. He uses it to… move things from place to place."

  "Ah." Tidyman nodded.

  "It might be costly," warned the harbor master. "The boat is very near to my cousin's heart."

  "Do you take Visa?" Holliday asked.

  "Certainly." Moukaden nodded happily, pulling up his pants again. "American Express as well." His smile widened and he reached for the old-fashioned dial telephone on his cluttered desk. "I will make a call, yes?"

  "You do that," said Holliday.

  Moustafa lived a few miles farther up the coast at a tiny beachfront community called Hammam Lekses. His ride turned out to be the marine version of the old Austin Champ they'd bargained for at the chicken farm. In this case it was a seventy-foot Motoscafo Armato Silurante, or MAS boat, the Italian version of the British torpedo boat and the German E-boat.

  She sat at the stone pier on the waterfront of Hammam Lekses like a scruffy, battle-scarred old tomcat, her long deck cluttered with old fishnets and crates, her narrow afterdeck piled with roped and rusty fifty-gallon drums to give her range. Even now her hull was painted in old- fashioned Italian dazzle paint, faded with salt and the passage of time. An old tomcat perhaps, but a tomcat nevertheless, her long sleek lines still showing the hidden speed and deadly power lurking just beneath the surface.

  The boat had been left behind in 1943 when the Germans and the Italians withdrew from Tunisia, and Moustafa's father had managed to steal the craft from under the noses of the British and Americans, hiding her in a cave along the coast, using it to smuggle everything from olive oil to machine guns from Tunisia to Marseille after the war. Moustafa, it seemed, wa
s following in his father's footsteps.

  Moustafa himself was the exact opposite of his cousin Moukaden: rail thin and totally bald. According to Moustafa the seventy-five-year-old boat was good as new and still capable of a tooth-rattling thirty-five knots. By Moustafa's estimation the Khamsin would have made less than sixty miles headway by midafternoon, which meant that his boat, the Fantasma, the Ghost, would catch her in under two hours.

  Even better, the Tunisian was also happy to throw in the use of a Russian RPG for an extra fee. As long as cousin Moukaden the harbor master authorized the high-seas boarding of the Khamsin, Moustafa had no compunction about getting them to their objective.

  He did suggest that they wait for evening before setting out on their expedition. According to him, the Kirogi-class coastal patrols of the Tunisian navy, mostly based in Tunis, didn't like operating in the dark and usually headed home at sunset. Even more important, in Moustafa's experience the boarding of an enemy vessel was usually best accomplished at night. After some discussion and some urgent counterarguments by Rafi, they decided that it was best to follow Moustafa's advice.

  The sun was no more than a memory on the western horizon as Moustafa engaged the proud old Isotta Fraschini engines, lovingly maintained first by Moustafa's father and now by Moustafa himself. The sea was utterly flat and the evening air was just beginning to cool as the lights of the houses and villas along the beach faded behind them. Tidyman stayed in the tiny deckhouse with Moustafa while Holliday and Rafi remained below in the big belowdecks wardroom.

  Beneath their feet the engines roared loudly as Moustafa brought the boat up to speed, small waves rhythmically banging against the Fantasma's flanks. The entire hull began to vibrate as they accelerated, the bows lifting as the boat began to plane. Within five minutes the Fantasma was cutting through the ocean at close to forty miles an hour.

  "Are you sure we can trust him?" Rafi asked, seated at the wardroom table.

  "Tidyman or Moustafa, or his cousin the harbor master?" Holliday asked with a shrug. "Who knows? Moukaden, the fat one, could be on the radio right now, talking to the Khamsin, warning them that we're on the way. We don't have much choice, do we? This is our only lead, our only path to Peggy."

  "Moustafa and his fat cousin are in it for the money-that's easy enough to understand. It's Tidyman I'm still not sure of."

  "Alhazred had his wife killed. That's reason enough to trust him. Revenge is the best motive of all."

  "And if Peggy's not on board the Khamsin?" Rafi asked. "What then?"

  "We cross that bridge when we come to it," answered Holliday.

  They plowed on through the night, the ocean a desert of rolling water as barren as the desert of sand they'd crossed the night before. Holliday went up on deck once or twice to survey the sea and the star-lit sky, but mostly he dozed on one of the narrow V-bunks once used by the ten-man crew of the old Italian torpedo boat. It was well past two in the morning when Tidyman shook him awake.

  "Something's wrong," the Egyptian said without preamble. "We think we have the Khamsin on the radar but she's stationary, dead in the water."

  "Maybe the other engine broke down," Holliday said, yawning as he stumbled after Tidyman. They reached the small forward wheelhouse. Moustafa stood at the wheel. Rafi was already there, staring at the sweep of the modern radar unit bolted onto the control panel. From the sound of the engines and the feel of the boat in the water Holliday could easily tell that the Fantasma had slowed considerably. He stared down at the radar screen. The sweep illuminated a small bright blip in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, their own marker an even brighter mark that pulsed kitty-corner to the one in the upper right. The distance between the two markers steadily closed as Holliday watched, but the upper one was stationary.

  "What's the distance?" Holliday asked.

  Moustafa leaned across the wheel and adjusted a knob on the radar set. The image jumped, then re-formed.

  "One mile," he said. "Less. A thousand meters."

  "Are we sure it's the Khamsin?" Holliday asked. "Maybe it's a rock or something."

  "No rock. Boat," said Moustafa, staring out into the darkness, guiding the old gunboat through the smooth swells.

  "It's where the Khamsin should be," said Tidyman.

  "All right," murmured Holliday, thinking hard as they moved slowly forward toward the bright blip on the screen. They had a few weapons, some handguns they'd brought with them from the camp in Germa and Moustafa's RPG. Moustafa also had a World War II-vintage Breda bipodmounted light machine gun, but as Holliday recalled the weapon had been bad news during the war. He wasn't about to trust it more than sixty years later. Not only was it out of date, but the wooden buttstock was cracked and pale with salt stains after years at sea, and the barrel was thick with grime and spotted with rust. It would almost certainly blow up in your face if you tried to fire it.

  "You're the soldier," said Rafi to Holliday. "What do we do now?"

  Holliday shrugged. "There's two ways, fast and hard or slow and careful. Personally I favor slow and careful." He grinned. "But I'm getting a little old for this kind of thing."

  "I am, too," said Tidyman.

  "Well, I'm not," Rafi said with a scowl. "Peggy could be on that boat."

  "Which is why slow and careful might be the best option," responded Tidyman. "We have no idea who is aboard the ship. We could easily be outnumbered. Your friend could well forfeit her life for a rash action."

  "The Khamsin is old, with a wooden hull," said Holliday. "One shot from that RPG is easily capable of sinking her."

  "What are you suggesting?" Tidyman asked quietly. On the radar screen the two blips were getting closer and closer.

  "Five hundred meters," said Moustafa. "The moon is rising. You will see her at any moment now."

  "We have to make a decision. Now," demanded Rafi.

  "There's a spotlight up in the bow. We come in fast with a lot of light, blind them," said Holliday. "We hail them. Act like we're official. Customs or coast guard or something. Mr. Tidyman is in the bow with the RPG. We threaten them. Hand over Peggy or we sink her."

  "Sounds good to me," said Tidyman. He smiled. "But please, in the future you must call me Emil."

  "Let's go," said Rafi. "We're running out of time."

  "Two hundred meters, dead ahead," said Moustafa.

  They came in at flank speed, engines thundering, bow wave foaming up almost to the gunwales. Tidyman was braced against the forward winch, the RPG balanced on his shoulder, the weapon loaded and primed, his finger curled around the forward trigger mechanism.

  Holliday and Rafi crouched behind the Egyptian, half hidden by a stinking pile of fishnet, handguns drawn and ready. Standing in the wheelhouse Moustafa waited until the very last second, then snapped on the floodlight in the bow, wrenching the wheel around at the same time, then hauling back the throttle, throwing the old torpedo boat into a sliding turn that left the Fantasma broadside to its quarry as it came to a roaring stop in a crashing welter of spray.

  "Dear God in heaven," whispered Tidyman, staring at the terrible vision before him, the horror of it etched by the floodlight in bright and grotesque detail against the night sky. "What awful thing has happened here?"

  20

  The weary old tugboat Khamsin rolled on the dark sea, broken and adrift. Her entire superstructure, including the main deckhouse and the wheelhouse above, looked as though it had been swallowed up by some hellish piece of machinery that had flailed and chewed the vessel into small pieces. The smokestack had completely torn away from its supports and now sagged down on the starboard side, riddled with holes the size of softballs.

  The wheelhouse had almost completely vanished, windows demolished, bulkheads destroyed, the companionway stairs nothing but twisted wreckage. It was clear that the boat was taking on water; the portside list was so severe that the deck was awash. The deck itself was a splintered ruin, stitched with dozens more of the fist-sized openings that had turned the wheelhouse in
to a sieve.

  There were several bodies, or at least parts of them, on deck. None was recognizable. There were smears of blood everywhere, great sprays of it against the whitework and more running down in broad streams into the scuppers.

  Bizarrely, in the bows, a hand clutched a machine gun, but beyond the shoulder there was no body. Next to the arm a headless corpse hung out of an open hatch, a long ugly tongue of bone scraps and blood and brains spattering back along the decking.

  "Peggy!" Rafi moaned, climbing to his feet.

  "Wait," said Holliday, standing and putting a cautioning hand on his friend's shoulder.

  "What could have done this?" Tidyman asked, standing beside them and surveying the wreckage as they rocked gently on the night waves.

  Holliday knew exactly what had done it. He'd first seen it used from a C-47 Spooky in Vietnam and then the Russian version in the early days back in the eighties as an advisor with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

  The Russians called it a Yak- B12, the U.S. Air Force called it a Minigun-a chain-drive, electrically powered modern-day version of a Gatling gun with a rate of fire somewhere around four thousand rounds a minute. Enough to grind a human body to bloody shreds in the blink of an eye.

  "Helicopters," said Holliday, staring at the nightmare scene. "Like the ones that attacked Alhazred's camp last night. They hit the boat on the return flight."

  "But why?" Rafi said, stunned and horrified by the awful vision in front of them.

  "Revenge?" Tidyman said.

  "Or cleaning up after themselves," said Holliday coldly. "Silencing their enemies. Maybe our man from the gift shop in Alexandria knew too much."

  "You think the Church did this?" Rafi said, staring.

  "I think Sodalitium Pianum, the ones who call themselves La Sapiniere, might have done it," answered Holliday. "They're cold-blooded enough; look what they did in the desert last night."

  "Terror in the name of God." Tidyman shrugged. "Not so hard to believe these days."

  "We have to go aboard," said Rafi, his voice dull. "I have to find out if Peggy…" He stopped, swallowing hard. "I have to find out if Peggy was on the boat."