The Templar Cross

by Paul Christopher

  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-thr
ee 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.

  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 exactl
y 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 armed 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.