Templar Legion Page 10

  “Memories of better times?” Holliday asked.

  “Old times, not necessarily better ones, señor.” He turned away and addressed his other guests in the crowded little room. “So, mis comandantes, Donny tells me you wish to travel into Señor Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

  “Something like that,” said Rafi.

  “That would make of me the Helmsman.” Eddie smiled.

  “A literate Cuban,” said Peggy with a brittle tone in her voice. Holliday knew that Celia Cruz, one of Peggy’s best friends in high school, had come over on the Mariel boatlift and had lost her mother and her father in the process.

  Eddie slid the cigar from his mouth and gave Peggy a baleful look. “There are many things that Fidel did badly, señorita, but educating his people was not one of them. The country of my birth has a ninety-nine-point-eight percent literacy rate; your country cannot say the same, I’m afraid. There are also no student loans—university in Cuba is free.”

  Peggy frowned and took a pull at her bottle of Mamba.

  “My cousin sometimes has strong opinions,” said Holliday.

  “Perhaps your cousin should judge the man in front of her and not the nation’s politics. I am not Fidel.” Captain Eddie stuck the cigar back into his mouth and once again Holliday saw the twinkle in his eye. “I have a much better tan, yes?”

  Even Peggy couldn’t help laughing.

  “You must not take life so seriously, amorcita,” said Eddie. “After half a century of Fidel, Cubans would have all slit their wrists by now if life was a serious thing. Havana is a city where the flushing of toilets is rationed and it is all the fault of ‘embargo.’ Everything is the fault of ‘embargo.’ Cockroaches are the fault of ‘embargo.’ ” Eddie grinned broadly. “But our prostitutes on the beach at Veradero all have university educations.” Holliday laughed along with the others, but he could see the evening disintegrating into tipsy stories about the ills of the Castro regime.

  “How long will it take us to get to the first cataract?” Holliday asked, getting down to business.

  “A night, a day and another night,” said Captain Eddie, taking a big swallow of the Chinese vodka. “Pevensey is not as swift as she once was.”

  “And from there?” Rafi asked.

  “From there I do not go,” said Captain Eddie. “Beyond the first cataract is the province of the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, their madman leader.” He smiled and sucked on his cigar, then blew a huge cloud of smoke into the air. “It is also said the ghost of Dr. Amobe Barthélemy Limbani walks there as well.”

  “You don’t seem to be the kind of man who’d believe in ghosts,” said Holliday.

  “Travel up and down this river long enough, señor, and you find yourself able to believe anything.”

  “How soon can we get going?” Rafi asked.

  Captain Eddie puffed his cigar thoughtfully and then emptied his glass of vodka. “Give me time to get steam up. An hour.”

  “You travel the river at night?” Holliday asked, surprised.

  Eddie smiled. “It is the best time,” he said. “Sometimes the safest. What you can’t see cannot see you in return. Mostly.”

  True to his word Eddie had the Pevensey fully loaded, boiler hissing, and pulling into the downstream current of the river almost exactly an hour later. Two crew members kept the boiler fueled, while the third member of the crew stood in the bow using a long pole to check for clearance. Peggy and Rafi had taken one of the two cabins, and Holliday stood beside Captain Eddie at the wheel. There was a simple marine telegraph to the right of the wheel with settings for “full ahead,” “dead slow” and “stop,” and a chain dangling down from the ceiling that was connected to the steam whistle on the roof of the wheelhouse. Night had fallen and the only light came from the red glow of Captain Eddie’s ever-present cigar.

  “You’re like Churchill with that cigar,” said Holliday, looking out onto the dark river ahead.

  “He was a connoisseur, that man,” said Eddie. “A man of muy good taste. He smoked La Aroma de Cuba and when they stopped making those he smoked Romeo y Julieta.”

  “You know a lot about Churchill?”

  “I know a lot about cigars. My father ran one of the biggest Habanos factories until the day he died. He knew Churchill personally.” Eddie reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and handed a cigar across to Holliday. “Please, señor, have one. It is a Montecristo No. 3.”

  “I’m afraid I quit smoking many years ago.” Holliday sighed. “Although it’s very tempting.”

  “If one does not give in to temptation occasionally, how can one appreciate the strength of will it takes to resist it?”

  “You sound like a Jesuit professor I know at Georgetown University.”

  “There, it is God’s will that you smoke this fine cigar,” said Eddie. Holliday took the cigar and rolled it around in his mouth. The Zippo flared between Eddie’s fingers. He let the kerosene smell fade, then applied the flame to the tip of the cigar. Holliday took a light pull. The taste was honey and rich earth. He could almost believe the stories of such cigars being rolled on the thighs of young virgins. “Not only virgins,” said Eddie, reading his mind. “Pretty ones.” Both men laughed and the engine chugged its regular coughing beat. The jungle on either side of them was dense and dark, wetland vines and roots spilling over into the water. Holliday could feel a steady tension rising out of nowhere, and then he realized he was thinking of being nineteen years old and crouching in the belly of a PBR going upriver on the Song Vam Co Dong in the Angel’s Wing, listening to the jungle and knowing he’d never hear the one that killed him.

  “Bad memory?” Eddie said.

  “Old memory,” Holliday replied.

  “In the jungle?”

  “Yes.”

  “The worst fighting is in the jungle, always. I have asked myself many times why that is and I cannot think of an answer.”

  “I think it’s because the jungle has no history,” said Holliday. “Things live and breed and die all in a day in the jungle and no one remembers. I was on patrol once and we found what was left of an old French fighter from the nineteen fifties, a Dewoitine, I think it was called. The jungle had almost swallowed it up completely; there were vines growing out of the pilot’s eye sockets.”

  “What was your rank?” Eddie asked.

  “Then? I was a PFC. I came out of it a lieutenant.”

  “And now?”

  “Lieutenant colonel,” said Holliday.

  “Not very far up the ladder for a man of your years.”

  “I opened my mouth when I should have had it closed.” Holliday laughed. “You don’t get to be a general by having opinions; you get to be a general by following orders. In my army, at least.”

  “Mine, too, I am afraid. I never rose above primer teniente.”

  “More opinionated than me, then,” said Holliday.

  “There is a phrase in English, I think: ‘to suffer fools badly’? I was very bad at this and there were a great many fools among the Cubanos in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, I can assure you.”

  One of the boiler crew, a gray-haired man named Samir, knocked on the wheelhouse door. He rattled off something in Arabic, got the nod from Eddie, then vanished into the darkness.

  “What was that all about?” Holliday asked.

  “Samir is our cook. He was inquiring about breakfast and asking for permission to take a piece of chicken as bait.”

  “Bait for what?”

  “Moonfish, perhaps a turtle if we are very lucky.” Eddie dragged on his cigar, lighting up his dark, laughing eyes. “They only bite on white meat, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Holliday, and they continued down the dark jungle river.

  13

  “. . . This was certainly true in my case, and I can still remember very little of the intervening years until I came to myself once again as Reinhart Stengl Hartmann in this home for the aged overlooking the mountains of the Oberammergau. May I never l
eave it or see Africa again except in my dreams.”

  Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, sat in his London office and closed the old copybook, pushing it to one side of his desk. He reclined in his chair, listening to the distant traffic noise from the Strand. It was this book, with its spidery, old-man’s handwriting, that had introduced the enormous strike—confirmed by the late Archibald Ives—in the first place. The copybook had been lost among the archival files of a minor takeover that had occurred almost thirty years ago, when his father, the eighth earl, was still running the company. Had Matheson Resource Industries not decided to digitize their files, and had a bright junior director not noticed a minor concession within what was once the Ubangi-Shari precinct of French Equatorial Africa, Sir James might have let the opportunity of a lifetime pass him by.

  Reinhart Stengl Hartmann, dead for decades and forgotten long before that, had begun his career as a young man in the goldfields of South Africa’s Witwatersrand. With only minor success, Hartmann decided to try his luck elsewhere, finally settling on the operation of a rubber plantation in what was then the Congo Free State. With the annexation of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium in 1908, Hartmann was forced to move once again, this time to Ubangi-Shari on the other side of the Congo River. He operated as an ivory trader there until the 1920s and then, acting on a tip from a native guide, he traveled into the jungle interior, once again prospecting for gold. According to official reports made by the French governor of the province at the time, Hartmann did in fact find gold, but not in spectacular amounts. With the man branded a failure, the governor and just about everyone else forgot about Reinhart Stengl Hartmann.

  Matheson, on the other hand, had years of experience reading ledgers, spreadsheets and every other sort of business document, and to him Hartmann’s tactics were as transparent as glass. Hartmann’s African concern operated under the name of Kotto Fluss Bergau—Kotto River Mining. On paper it appeared that all the shares of the company had been owned by Hartmann, but a closer look revealed that a majority of stock was held as collateral for large personal loans to Hartmann by a second company, this one operating out of Switzerland under the name Edelstein Malder Genf SA—Gemstone Brokers of Geneva.

  Edelstein Malder Genf did business with only one other company: Makelaar Steen Amsterdam—Gem Brokers of Amsterdam, and they were doing a great deal of business. Matheson had laughed out loud when he made the final connection. Hartmann hadn’t struck gold on the Kotto River; he’d found diamonds, and lots of them, although not quite enough to wake the sleeping bloodhounds of De Beers.

  Over a period of fifteen years Hartmann managed to accumulate a huge fortune, but his only obvious use of the money was the building of a bizarre estate in the middle of the jungle that looked remarkably like the home of a wealthy Bavarian farmer. Called Lowenshalle—the Lion’s Lair—it overlooked the Kotto River and the mist-clouded, three-forked waterfall a mile or so upstream.

  Hartmann’s covert diamond trading practice was interrupted only by World War Two, but by 1950 a series of severe heart attacks made his life in Lowenshalle impossible. Within a few months he had abandoned everything, smuggling his last consignment of diamonds in the false base of an oxygen bottle as he returned to Europe. In Lowenshalle his few native servants drifted away, returning to their villages. The estate was stripped of any obvious valuables and the jungle quickly began to inexorably swallow up everything that Hartmann had built.

  Back in Europe, Hartmann consolidated his holdings into a single limited trust, then settled into a retirement home in the Bavarian village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he spent his last few years writing out the story and the secrets of his life in what would become almost a hundred copybooks like the one on Matheson’s desk. Upon his death, with no heirs, the notebooks became the property of Hartmann’s trust, and the trust in turn became the property of Matheson Resource Industries when, decades later, it purchased Kotto Fluss Bergau from the Swiss bank that managed Hartmann’s interests. At no time, since the initial incorporation of Kotto River Mining and its attendant distribution companies, was there anything mentioned in writing or in rumor of any mining operations on the Lowenshalle estate or anywhere nearby. Like so many other stories hidden in the vaults and safety-deposit boxes of so many banks around the world, it would have probably stayed that way until the end of time if it hadn’t been for a few simple twists of fate.

  “Almost enough to make you believe in God.” Matheson grunted softly to himself. There was a gentle double tap on his door. “Enter,” he said. The door opened and Major Allen Faulkener stepped into the room.

  “Yes?” Matheson said briskly.

  “I thought you’d like to know,” said the security officer, “Harris is in play.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t bugger it up this time,” said Matheson. “If he’d done it right on the Khartoum highway we wouldn’t be in this position now.”

  “He’s got six of the Sinclair woman’s ‘specials’ with him, and they’ve got their orders. If he does bugger it up he knows what’ll happen to him,” said Faulkener.

  “Excellent.” Matheson nodded. “Once we’ve dealt with Holliday and his interfering friends perhaps we could give some thought to President Kolingba’s successor.”

  The smell of cooking fish was mouthwatering. Samir, in his role as chef, had rolled the thick deboned catfish steaks in cornmeal and dropped them into a quarter inch of dark palm oil. The oil seethed in the bottom of a big cast-iron frying pan on one of the two burners on the wood-burning cookstove that stood on a firebrick base on the forward deck of the Pevensey. The other burner was being used to brown thick circles of sweet potato. The elderly Sudanese man deftly flipped the slabs of fish and potatoes with a homemade sheet-metal spatula. A pile of kindling in a sagging wire basket was stacked beside him along with a hatchet in case he needed to feed the stove.

  While Samir cooked, his boiler room partner, Bakri, took over in the wheelhouse and Jean-Paul, the third member of the crew, poled the river, calling out the depth of water under the steam barge’s flat-bottomed keel. It was early and mist still twisted in ghostly trails over the river, the sun a bright hammered bronze disk rising over the ragged fog hanging above the lush jungle trees to the east.

  “We’ll find some shade in a few hours and wait out the worst of the sun,” suggested Eddie. Samir flipped a golden brown catfish fillet and a scoop of sweet potatoes onto a tin plate and gave it to his boss, but Eddie gallantly handed it over to Peggy instead. She ate a tentative morsel of the fish and her eyes widened.

  “It’s delicious,” she said. She speared a fried piece of sweet potato onto her fork and popped it into her mouth. “Wonderful!” Samir smiled happily and began filling the rest of the plates.

  “The giraffe catfish isn’t like the mud-fish bottom-feeders in America,” said Eddie. “It prefers to eat plant material, so the taste is usually fresher.” He laughed. “In Cuba now they think the catfish is an agent of the devil god, Babalu Aye, because he can walk overland on his fins, but they eat him anyway.”

  Holliday sensed it before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. As he took his plate from Samir some instinct and perhaps a fleeting glint seen out of the corner of his eye made him suddenly tense and twist around on the plastic milk crate he was using as a seat. He squinted, looking for something he wasn’t quite sure was there, and then he saw it: a phantom in the mist above the trees, the first flash of sunlight reflecting off the windscreen of a low-flying aircraft. A small plane, maybe a Cessna Caravan, tricked out with floats and painted dark green to blend in with the jungle treetops.

  A split second later he spotted a bright double flash from under the wings followed by a strangely clipped, hollow whoosh, like the abruptly terminated sound of a bullet striking water at high speed. The sound was horribly familiar: a pair of underwing Hellfire air-to-ground missiles being fired—forty pounds of fire-and-forget high explosive coming at them at roughly a thousand miles an hour.

&nb
sp; “Incoming!” Holliday bellowed. And almost before the warning was out of his mouth the Hellfires struck. Used by a skilled operator, the AGM-114 Hellfire could be aimed through the open window of a moving vehicle. In the case of the two missiles aimed at the Pevensey, one struck the rear wall of the lounge behind the wheelhouse and the second exploded in the boiler room simultaneously, putting a ragged hole the size of a car door through the bottom of the old barge.

  Bakri, standing in the wheelhouse, was vaporized on the spot. As the Pevensey suddenly lurched with the impact of the two missiles, Jean-Paul, standing in the bow with his pole, was thrown into the river, and Samir, crouched in front of his frying pans, had his ribs crushed as the stove tipped over on him, then was turned into a human torch as the furiously boiling cooking oil spilled onto his head, neck and chest. Samir’s thin cotton clothing and his hair burst into flame as the blackened, crackling firewood spilled out of the overturned stove and he died, his bubbling scream choked off as his mouth and throat filled with the burning oil.

  Sitting on the starboard side of the barge Holliday instinctively threw himself toward Peggy and Rafi, his outstretched arms bowling them over as a hail of cast iron, glass and wood debris flew over them. Pevensey, helm gone, swung hard into the current, then almost tipped over as the surging water poured into the gaping hole in her bottom.

  Holliday had a brief glimpse of the aircraft as it roared overhead. He hit the river, automatically assessing: a Cessna Caravan 208. Nine passengers, but six or seven was more likely with the Hellfire payload. The water closed over his head as he was pushed down toward the stony bottom, his vision cut in half by the silt-heavy current. Then he remembered.