Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  “Like what?” Tidyman asked curiously.

  “Nothing,” said Holliday. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Could those helicopters have come from Italy?” Rafi asked.

  “The range is about nine hundred miles, as I recall,” said Holliday. “Would that do it?”

  “From Sicily it would,” said Tidyman.

  “What’s our best landfall closest to Italy?” Holliday queried.

  “Tunisia,” said Tidyman.

  “Can we make it?”

  “Yes. Alhazred kept the plane fully gassed up at all times, in case of unforeseen events.”

  “I guess he didn’t foresee this particular event,” said Holliday.

  “He was a fool; he should have seen this coming or something like it,” grunted Tidyman. “Gold in such quantities is a magnet for bad luck and death.” The Egyptian adjusted the controls. Holliday watched as the compass needle swerved around the illuminated dial. They were now going sharply north and slightly to the west. “The old airfield at Matfur is still there, just south of Bizerte on the coast. We can refill there if you wish.”

  “Sound good to me,” said Holliday.

  There was a harsh metallic clicking sound from the rear seat. Holliday turned. Rafi had the muzzle of the big Beretta automatic pressed up against the back of Tidyman’s skull.

  “You’re even more of a fool than Alhazred if you think you’re frightening me with that,” said the Egyptian. “You might as well stick the barrel in your own mouth. Shoot me and who flies the plane?”

  “Where’s Peggy?” Rafi demanded.

  “Alhazred shipped her out a week ago.” Tidyman paused. “Now put down the gun.”

  “Do it,” said Holliday.

  Rafi ignored them both.

  “Shipped her out? What are you talking about?” He pushed the muzzle of the automatic a little harder.

  “He has a deal with a man named Antonio Neri.” Tidyman paused. “He operates a criminal organization called La Santa,” continued the Egyptian.

  “Ducos, the Frenchman, mentioned La Santa,” said Holliday, remembering. “So did Japrisot the cop. He said that Valador, the crook with the fishing boat, had hooked up with them.”

  “La Santa trades in pretty girls, among other things. A pretty white girl like Miss Blackstock would be a bonus.”

  “Where would he take her?” Rafi asked angrily.

  “Put the gun down and I’ll tell you,” said Tidyman.

  “Do it,” ordered Holliday sharply.

  Rafi lowered the weapon.

  “Where is she?” Rafi repeated.

  “La Santa has its headquarters in Corsica, that’s all I know for sure.”

  “Is she there or not?” Rafi demanded.

  “Neri sends girls everywhere. They travel to Albania and from there they’re sent all over Eastern Europe. It’s the same with the drugs. There’s a network.”

  “What about the trade in artifacts?” Holliday asked.

  “They go through Corsica to either Marseille or Rome, depending on the final destination,” answered Tidyman. “Beyond that I have no idea.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Rafi said through gritted teeth, “I’ll kill him!”

  “Alhazred?” Tidyman said. “Not if I find him first.”

  “What’s your beef with him?” Holliday said. “I thought you two were partners.”

  “I had no choice,” explained the Egyptian. “He kidnapped my wife and daughter in Cairo, held them hostage.” Tidyman shook his head. “He said I needed an incentive to help him dispose of the gold. When he found out that you were on his trail he threatened to rape and kill Habibah and my Tabia if I didn’t bring both of you to him.”

  “What changed your mind?” Holliday asked.

  In the faint light from the control panel Holliday saw tears forming in the corners of the Egyptian’s eyes.

  “I flew into Bardai, in Chad, yesterday for supplies,” said Tidyman, staring dully out through the windscreen at the star-filled night sky, his mind and his heart somewhere else. Far below them the dunes of the desert unrolled like a landscape in an endless dark dream, lit by the rising moon. “I managed to telephone my neighbor in Cairo. I learned that my wife had been killed trying to escape.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “Al’hamdu’li’Allah, thanks be to God, Tabia managed to get away. My friends have hidden her. She is safe. I was on my way to kill Alhazred in his quarters when the helicopters came. I went to you instead. You did not deserve to die for that man’s perfidy.” The Egyptian cleared his throat but made no move to wipe the tears he was shedding for his wife. “His name is not even Alhazred.”

  “What is it?” Holliday asked.

  “Bobby Ayoub. He was born in Ottawa.”

  “His parents, the doctors?” Rafi asked from the back of the plane.

  “He told you that story?” Tidyman laughed coldly. “His father owned a delicatessen on Elgin Street and his mother was part owner of a bakery. They specialized in pita bread. Both of them died in a traffic accident on New Year’s Eve. A drunk driver. Bobby was an only child. He inherited everything, including the insurance. He went to Lebanon with the money and played the big shot; tried to join Hezbollah and the Abu Nidal group but they didn’t want him. Tried to go to university there but they wouldn’t have him, either.”

  “We figured him for a phony,” Holliday said and nodded.

  “The bit about Trajan being Vespasian’s son was a neat trick,” Rafi said. “Especially since Trajan wasn’t even born until about fifty years after Vespasian died.” Rafi sneered. “He flubbed a lot of other stuff as well, and he couldn’t read hieroglyphics, either. He was no archaeologist.”

  “He was crazy. Delusions of grandeur. According to him he was destined for great things. A Mahdi for the twenty-first century, sent by God to free his people from the yoke of tyranny, et cetera, et cetera. In reality he was a baker’s child and the son of a man who made smoked meat sandwiches.”

  “Hitler’s father was a customs inspector,” said Rafi. “Great oaks from little acorns and all that.”

  “He was a wannabe terrorist who nobody wanted,” said Holliday. “So he made up the Brotherhood of Isis.”

  “Something like that,” Tidyman said and nodded, nudging the yoke a little, watching their course on the compass. “Crazy, just like I said.” The little pressurized plane was flying at twenty thousand feet now, its optimum altitude for long-distance flight. They were flying so high they couldn’t see the flitting batwing moon shadow of their flight across the dunes.

  Tidyman lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

  “The Tuaregs didn’t care; they’d been vandalizing tombs and robbing archaeological sites for years, not to mention raiding the odd caravan. Alhazred, or Ayoub or whatever he calls himself, just made it easier for them to sell their stuff to the smugglers and provided them with better weapons. The lying little bastard brought organized crime to the desert, that’s all.” Tidyman sighed and lifted his shoulders wearily again. “Terrorism isn’t about ideals anymore; Gandhi has been dead too long for that. It’s just ego and money these days, and that’s Bobby Ayoub in a nutshell.”

  “You think he’ll get away?” Holliday asked.

  “Yes,” said Tidyman simply. “He would have had some kind of bolt hole arranged, some kind of plan B. He always did.”

  “And when he finds his airplane gone?” Holliday said. “Will he figure it out and come after us?”

  “Count on it.” The Egyptian nodded. “When he doesn’t find our bodies he’ll know. He had an awful temper when he didn’t get his way. This will put him right over the edge. He’ll come for us with blood in his eye, believe me.”

  Flying at just under one hundred and fifty miles an hour to conserve fuel, the eight-hundred-mile flight over the desert took them until just past midnight to complete. The moon was at its zenith as they crossed the Libyan border, throwing the landscape beneath their wings into sharp relief.

  �
��The only thing I know about modern Tunisia is that George Lucas shot the Tattooine scenes on Luke Skywalker’s home planet in a real place called Tattooine,” said Holliday, looking down at the desert landscape below. It didn’t look any different from most of Libya.

  “That’s here, in the south of the country,” replied Tidyman. “The country’s divided in half: the bottom is barren desert, the top is good farmland, Mediterranean, like the south of Spain or Greece, lots of hills and fertile valleys. They do pretty well for such a small country sandwiched between two big ones.”

  “Carthago delenda est,” said Rafi, half dozing in the seat behind the copilot’s spot. “ ‘Carthage must be destroyed’; first thing I ever learned in Latin.”

  “The Kasserine Pass,” offered Holliday. “The first time American soldiers met up with the Germans in World War Two. We got our asses handed to us on a plate. One of the worst defeats in American military history.”

  “Good thing you were quick learners,” said Tidyman. He eased the yoke forward and the little airplane went into a shallow dive, the sound of the fore and aft engines deepening.

  “Why are we going down?” Holliday asked.

  “Trying to get under the radar,” explained Tidyman.

  “Will they be looking for us?” Rafi asked.

  “Not likely,” said the Egyptian. “But the commercial airport at Tunis or the smaller one at Bizerte might pick us up accidentally; we’re up pretty high for a light plane; they might be a little suspicious if we suddenly pop up on their screens coming out of the desert.”

  “Then take us down by all means,” said Holliday.

  They dropped steadily until they were flying at less than a thousand feet above the dunes and arid plains of the desert. Ahead, visible now in the far distance, the wall of the jagged Atlas Mountains stood like a blank, black shadow blocking out the star-lit skies. Abruptly the landscape changed. The desert vanished, replaced by small farms, roads and scattered settlements. The plains became more undulating, spotted with wooded hills that climbed straight-walled, like fortresses still waiting for an ancient enemy. Slowly but surely Holliday watched as the needle of the illuminated compass on the control panel swung to the east.

  “Where is this airfield?” Holliday asked at the end of their fourth hour in the air.

  “Matfur,” replied Tidyman. “It was a fighter base in a dry lake bed,” he explained. “Both sides occupied it at one time or another during the war. My father called it Muddy Matfur. Originally German, I think. Nobody uses it anymore, of course, it’s just a line in the dirt really.”

  “And why exactly are we going there?” Rafi asked.

  “If we put down at one of the big airports someone will almost certainly ask questions,” answered Tidyman. “If Alhazred or Ayoub or whatever his name is does come after us, we’ll be harder to find. It’s closer to Kelibia than anywhere else.”

  “Kelibia?”

  “A little coastal town on the Cape Bon peninsula, the other side of the Bay of Tunis,” said Tidyman. “A dusty little place with hardly any tourists. There’s an old fort but that’s about it. It’s where they ship the women out. It’s where the Khamsin docks.”

  “Get us there,” said Rafi.

  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 Café 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?”