The Templar Legion t-5

by Paul Christopher

  “He was always more of a scholar than a real Templar Knight,” said Rafi. “When Saladin entrusted the scrolls from Alexandria and the other libraries to the Templars when Jerusalem fell, Roche-Guillaume was one of the men brought in to evaluate them. He was apparently brilliant and could speak and write more than a dozen languages.”

  “Sounds like an interesting guy,” said Holliday. “What does this have to do with Ethiopia?”

  “I found him there,” said Rafi. “I discovered his tomb while I was excavating at Lake Tana last year when you and my dear wife were gallivanting around Washington getting yourselves into all kinds of trouble.”

  “We weren’t gallivanting,” said Peggy, bringing in the plates and setting them down on the table at the far end of the room. “We were running for our lives; it’s an entirely different thing.” She looked at her watch, then turned and used a wooden match to light the twin Shabbat candles on the old Victorian buffet. When they were lit she gently waved her hands over the flames, covered her eyes and said the blessing:

  “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.”

  “Listen to that, would you?” Rafi said proudly as he and Holliday got up and went to the table. “She’s a better Jew than I am. She does the licht tsinden and the blessing like a pro.”

  “And Granddaddy was a Baptist preacher,” said Peggy, sitting down. “Who would have thunk it?”

  “Thirteen twenty-four is more than a decade after the Templar purge by King Philip,” said Holliday. “How did he manage to get away?”

  “He never went back to France,” explained Rafi. “Roche-Guillaume was no fool. He was in Cyprus after Jerusalem fell again and he could see the handwriting on the wall. The Templars had too much money, too much power and they flaunted it to the king of France and to the pope. Not healthy or smart. They were politically doomed. Rather than go down with the ship, so to speak, Roche-Guillaume fled overland to Egypt. Alexandria, to be exact. He became a tutor to the sons of the Mamluk sultans.”

  “Alexandria is a long way from Ethiopia,” said Holliday.

  “You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you, Doc?” Peggy chided, spearing a piece of duck. “It’s a story.”

  “Sorry,” said Holliday.

  “Roche-Guillaume was a historian, just like you, Doc, and a bit of an archaeologist to boot-you could even say he was a little like Peggy, because he documented all his work with sketches. Hundreds of them, mostly on parchment. Among other things Roche-Guillaume was a romantic. He’d become convinced over time that the queen of Sheba really did have a relationship with Solomon, and it was the queen of Sheba who showed Solomon the location of the real King Solomon’s Mines. He was also of the somewhat unpopular opinion that the queen of Sheba was black. Coal black, in fact.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Holliday laughed. “King Solomon’s Mines is a fiction. A story by Rider Haggard from the nineteenth century. The mines are a myth.”

  “Solomon existed; that’s historical fact and so is Sheba. Some people think Sheba was a part of Arabia, perhaps Yemen. Given what I’ve uncovered I’d be willing to bet it was Ethiopia. Or at least it began there.”

  “What makes you say that?” Holliday asked, picking at his food.

  “Because of Mark Antony.”

  “The ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’ Mark Antony? Cleopatra and Mark Antony, that one?”

  “That one.” Rafi nodded.

  “He’s involved?”

  “Instrumental. It’s thirty-seven B.C. and Mark’s running out of cash. Cleopatra’s paid for his wars so far but the cupboard is dry and his enemies are closing in.”

  “Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and his pals. I know the history, Rafi. I taught it at West Point for years.”

  “Mark Antony’s broke. He’s got an army to feed, but like I said, the cupboard is bare and his mistress is nagging him. So what does he do?”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” said Holliday.

  “He sends a legion up the Nile to look for the treasure of the land of Sheba and King Solomon’s Mines.”

  “What legion are we talking about here?”

  “Legio nona Hispana,” said Rafi. He rolled a piece of steamed bok choy around his fork and ate it. “The Ninth.”

  “The lost legion?” Holliday laughed. This was getting more Byzantine by the second. “They disappeared up by Hadrian’s Wall. They were wiped out.”

  “That’s one theory,” said Rafi. “The other is that they suffered heavy losses and changed their name when they were sent to Africa under Mark Antony. They became the Eighteenth Legion Lybica under Mark Antony and a questionable general named Lucius Gellius Publicola, who was inclined to betray you depending on which way the wind blew.”

  “Says what historical source?”

  “Julian de la Roche-Guillaume, the Templar turned rich kids’ tutor,” responded Rafi. “While he was in Alexandria he found the legion’s records detailing their orders, equipment, stores, all kinds of things. The Imperial Romans were like Germans, meticulous about their records, but there’s no record anywhere of their return. They simply vanished up the Nile.”

  “Looking for King Solomon’s Mines.”

  “Apparently.”

  “That’s quite a rabbit hole you’ve got there, Alice,” said Holliday. He dipped a spring roll in a small dish of soy sauce and took a bite. “What’s next, the Mad Hatter?”

  “Better,” said Peggy, grinning. Outside a light breeze gently ruffled the leaves on the olive trees in the courtyard. In the distance they could hear the arthritic creaking of the old stone windmill that had once generated electricity for the neighborhood.

  “Better?” Holliday said.

  “Harald Sigurdsson,” said Rafi.

  “A Viking? The one who became Harald Hardrada, Harald the Hard Man? This is starting to get silly, guys.”

  “Harald Sigurdsson was, among other things, the head of the eastern emperor’s Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He also led the Varangians into battle in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Sicily gathering booty. While he was in Alexandria raping and pillaging he heard rumors about the lost legion and sent one of his best men, Ragnar Skull Splitter, to lead a crew up the Nile looking for them.”

  “When was this?”

  “A.D. ten thirty-nine. About three hundred years before Roche-Guillaume.”

  “So what happened to Ragnar Skull Splitter, or should I ask?”

  “He disappeared, just like the lost legion.”

  “So where is this going exactly?”

  “Ragnar Skull Splitter took a scholar much like Roche-Guillaume with him to record the story of the journey. His name was Abdul al-Rahman, a high-ranking slave from Constantinople with a yen for travel and adventure. He was also useful as an interpreter. He also had his own artist to record what he saw, a court eunuch named Barakah. An eleventh-century version of Peg here.”

  Peggy gave her husband a solid swat on the arm. “I ain’t no eunuch, sweet lips.”

  “And they went looking for King Solomon’s Mines, right?” Holliday asked.

  “Not only did they look for them; they found them. Ragnar died of blackwater fever on the journey home but Abdul al-Rahman survived and made it as far as Ethiopia. While Roche-Guillaume was at Lake Tana he found al-Rahman’s chronicle of the journey at an obscure island on the lake. He copied the parchments, which were buried with him.”

  Holliday shrugged. “Who’s to say Roche-Guillaume didn’t make it all up, a pleasant fiction? A Homeric epic. Where’s the proof?”

  Rafi got up from the table and went to the old Victorian buffet where the Shabbat candles burned. He took out an old, deeply carved wooden box and set it gently down in the center of the table. The carvings appeared to be Viking runes.

  “Open it,” said Rafi.

  Holliday lifted the simple lid of the dark wood box. Nestled inside was a piece of quartz about the siz
e of a roughly heart-shaped golf ball. Threaded around one end of the stone was a thick, buttery vein of what appeared to be gold.

  “That was in Roche-Guillaume’s tomb,” said Rafi. “If the thugs at the Central Revolutionary Investigation Department in Addis Ababa knew I’d smuggled it out they’d probably arrest me.”

  “For a bit of gold in a quartz matrix?” Holliday said.

  “It’s not quartz,” replied Rafi. “It’s a six-hundred-and-sixty-four-carat flawless diamond. VVSI, I think they call it. I asked a friend who knows about such things. According to him it’s the tenth-largest diamond in the world. Fair market value is about twenty million dollars. The historical value is incalculable.”

  “And this supposedly came from King Solomon’s Mines?” Holliday said, staring at the immense stone.

  “According to al-Rahman’s chronicle that Roche-Guillaume copied there’s a mountain of stones just like it. Tons.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “That’s the problem,” said Rafi. “As far as I can figure out the mines are located in what is now the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Holliday. “General Solomon Kolingba.”

  “Kolingba the cannibal,” added Peggy, eating the last piece of lemon chicken. “The only African dictator with his own set of Ginsu knives for chopping up his enemies.”

  2

  Dr. Oliver Gash drove the black-and-yellow-striped Land Rover down the dusty dirt road from Bangui at seventy miles an hour, the air-conditioning going full blast and Little Richard screaming out “Rip It Up” on the eight-speaker Bose. Since crossing the border into what had once been known as the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic and which was now known as the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, Dr. Gash hadn’t seen another vehicle on the road. Every village he drove through seemed deserted, every roadside stall shuttered and dark.

  The young black man behind the wheel wasn’t surprised. In fact, the apparent emptiness made him smile. It was a demonstration of fear, and fear, as he well knew, was power. The bumblebee-striped Land Rover had the Kolingba royal crest on the doors, and news traveled fast in the new Kukuanaland about anything and anyone to do with General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba.

  Dr. Gash was the minister of the interior in the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, as well as the young country’s minister of revenue and secretary of state and director of foreign affairs. Oliver Gash was not the name the man behind the wheel had been born with; nor was he a doctor of any kind. Gash had once been Olivier Hakizimana Gashabi of Rwanda and had left that country with his older sister, Eliane, during the genocide of 1994, traveling across the Democratic Republic of Congo to eventually settle in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

  Three years after their arrival in Bangui, Olivier’s sister had been chosen from an online catalog as a contract e-mail bride by an American named Arthur Andrew Hartman, who lived in Baltimore. Nineteen-year-old Eliane had agreed to the marriage only on the condition that Hartman formally adopt her eleven-year-old brother.

  Hartman was in no position to refuse Eliane’s proposition. As an acne-scarred, introverted, sexually problematic, onetime Section 8 discharge from the United States Army for an unspecified “condition,” and an ex-postal worker now on psychiatric disability, Arthur Andrew Hartman had little or no opportunity for meaningful contact with members of the opposite sex and was far too paranoid about contracting a sexually transmitted disease to purchase relief from his lonely predicament.

  Three years later Arthur Andrew Hartman was found with his pants around his ankles, his genitals mutilated and his throat slit in an alley behind a shopping center in the Gardenville district of Baltimore. For a brief period Hartman’s fifteen-year-old adopted son was suspected in the killing of his “father” but there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the case, and the Baltimore state prosecutor’s office declined to go forward. The successful murder of his despised and adopted father was Olivier Gashabi’s first foray into the world of crime. It was not his last.

  Eliane used her share of Hartman’s postal life insurance policy and the money from the quick sale of his house on Asbury Avenue to purchase half interest in a mani-pedi salon. Olivier Gashabi, his name now legally changed to Oliver Gash, invested the fee paid by his sister for murdering Hartman into two kilograms of cocaine. That was in 2001. Ten years later Eliane Gashabi owned four mani-pedi salons outright and her brother had increased his original investment a hundredfold. He had also developed a number of serious enemies within the state prosecutor’s office, the Baltimore Police Department and the extensive criminal network that ran between Washington, D.C., Baltimore and New York City. The twenty-five-year-old criminal entrepreneur was suddenly consumed by a passion to seek out his roots, and, traveling on his perfectly valid United States passport, he returned to the Central African Republic.

  Criminal enterprise in Bangui was already controlled by a number of tribally centered gangs that enforced their rule with machetes, so Gashabi-Gash decided to travel into his own heart of darkness and went up-country by steamer on the Kottu River to the Kukuanaland town of Fourandao.

  Fourandao had once been a French colonial town best known for its cocoa and tobacco plantations, both crops controlled by the old Portuguese family that had given the town its name. The town, a collection of one-and two-story mud-brick buildings with corrugated iron roofs, sprawled untidily along the banks of the Kottu for half a mile or so, and straggled into the surrounding jungle toward the distant Bakouma hills that marked the border with Sudan and Chad.

  Oliver Gash arrived at the Fourandao docks early one morning to find the small city in the midst of a revolution. By the early afternoon, seeing which way the wind was blowing, he had allied himself with the forces of the KNRA, the Kukuanaland National Revolutionary Alliance, led by an upstart lieutenant in FACA, the Forces Armees Centrafricaines, named Solomon Kolingba. The actual governor of the territory, a doctor named Amobe Limbani, a member of the Yakima minority, fled into the jungle, never to be heard from again.

  By late evening Oliver Gash had been made a full colonel by the newly minted General Kolingba, and by midnight Gash and Kolingba were celebrating the birth of the Kukuanaland nation with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne liberated from the bar of the Hotel Trianon in the town’s central square, now grandly renamed the Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba.

  The following day Gash and Kolingba got down to business. Due to various and sundry wars, political upheavals and criminal restructurings around the world, the normal trade routes for heroin at various levels of refinement were no longer available. Using his contacts within the United States, Oliver Gash suggested to Kolingba that Kukuanaland become the new Marseilles, acting as a refinement and distribution center for highgrade narcotics, then branching out into the small-arms trade, contract terrorism, blood-diamond marketing, large-scale money laundering and an assortment of other disagreeable but profitable occupations that would make the open city of Fourandao into the new home of Gangster, Incorporated. A 1930s Chicago for the twenty-first century. The American dream in the middle of an equatorial African jungle.

  It worked beyond Olivier Gashabi’s wildest expectations. Fourandao and the surrounding area had flourished. The airport had been refurbished with extended runways for private jets, and the ragtag army had been issued brand-new uniforms and new weapons, all donated by the General Armament Department of the Chinese government. The Chinese were also putting in a proper filtration plant for Fourandao and paving the surrounding roads. Oliver Gash had discovered a surprising talent for politics and diplomacy; as it turned out they had a lot in common with crime. In Africa, as anywhere else, corruption and greed in the realm of politics was a way of life; the only difference was that in Africa it was expected and accepted.

  Eventually the bumblebee-painted Rover reached the tumbledown docks of the town. A few barges were being loaded with fru
it and bales of rubber for the long trip downriver but they were really no more than protective cover for the loads of drugs, weapons and other illicit goods distributed out of the harsh jungle country. Docked ahead of the barges was the single boat in Kukuanaland’s navy-a donated thirty-five-foot river patrol boat from the Djibouti navy equipped with a fifty-horsepower Evinrude and a leaky cabin. Its only armament was a single Kord heavy machine gun left over from a Russian delegation that managed to offload it to Kolingba in the early days of his regime. When the general was in a particularly sporty mood he and Gash and a quartet of bodyguards would go fishing in the boat and hunt crocodiles with the machine gun.

  The only thing worrying Gash as he drove along the waterfront was a recent meeting he’d had in Bangui with one of the more corrupt bankers in the city. The man had asked Gash what he thought about his future if Kolingba was no longer a factor. The man’s meaning was clear-if Kolingba was removed, would Gash be willing to take his place? At the meeting Gash had been noncommittal-the banker could easily have been a trap set by Kolingba himself-but on another level the question had nagged. Gash hadn’t survived this long by being stupid; he knew perfectly well that African dictators had the life spans of fruit flies, so perhaps now was the time to start considering an escape route if worse came to worst. He bribed everyone worth bribing and continued to do so, giving him an intricate web of ears to the ground within Kolingba’s inner circle, but maybe he should be doing something more.

  Gash turned the truck up the road to the center of town, passing tin-roofed shacks and open-fronted stores selling everything from bicycles to knockoff handbags and long Chicago Bulls T-shirts.

  He finally reached the square and turned toward the compound that had once been home to the Fourandao family and was now the presidential compound. Kolingba had wanted to call it the Royal Compound, but Gash convinced him that although he was king, he was also the president, and calling himself that to the outside world would result in his being taken more seriously.