Templar Legion Read online

  “I thought you believed in your own god, Allah,” said Ragnar.

  “I believe in the teachings of his great prophet Muhammad, may he be blessed, but Allah is not for man to know or pretend he understands. The Hebrews will not even speak their own god’s name for the same reason.”

  “And kuffār, like us. Infidels?” Ragnar smiled, remembering the word al-Rahman had taught him.

  Al-Rahman smiled back at the burly Dane. “Muhammad commands us to pity you and teach you the True Way.”

  The two men left the pool and strolled through the stand of palms. The grass grew long here, and where rotted dates had fallen more sprigs of greenery grew. Ragnar realized that it was the first time he had relaxed in days. On the edge of the little grove of trees, with nothing but the open desert sands before them, they discovered a great slab of rock jutting from the soil. It was black and smooth as glass except where it had been deeply etched with lines and figures. Some of the figures were clearly meant to be men but others were pictures of strange, fantastic animals: huge horned bulls, some sort of gazelle with a neck so long it looked over all the other figures and additional, smaller creatures: a cat with enormous fangs, and something with gigantic ears and legs like tree stumps, two horns jutting from between its lips. Smaller lines had been scratched to indicate fields of grass and below everything was a thick black snake that could only be the great river behind them.

  “Some man’s fever dream from long ago?” Ragnar said, letting his fingers trail over the lines.

  “Or a memory,” said al-Rahman. “Perhaps this place was once a paradise of green grass and trees and hunters’ game. Perhaps the pool your men are bathing in is nothing more than rain that fell ten thousand years ago and now springs up here and there to remind us of the past.”

  “How can paradise become a desert?” Ragnar asked.

  “How can the civilization that built the great pyramids and the ancient temples we passed have vanished?” al-Rahman responded. “Nothing is impossible; everything fades away.”

  Ragnar turned back and stared through the stands of trees at the river.

  “Is our quest possible? Will we really find the Mines of Solomon?”

  “The Romans thought it was real enough.” Al-Rahman shrugged. “There are other stories.” The black man paused. “There was once a great king named Sogolon Djata who could have been mistaken for Harald’s Solomon. His children grew very rich and it is said their very houses were made of gold. There are also tales of their great city in the desert, called Timbuktu, a place of vast wealth and a storehouse of even greater knowledge.”

  “Could such a place really exist?” Ragnar said.

  Al-Rahman laughed loudly, then clapped Ragnar on the shoulder. “I think we shall find out, Ragnar Skull Splitter, the two of us, and perhaps even return to tell the tale.”

  1

  “Except for that one unfortunate trip we made into Libya to rescue cousin Peggy, Africa isn’t really my thing,” said Colonel John “Doc” Holliday. “I’m more of a knights-in-shining-armor or Roman Empire kind of guy.”

  “This is different,” said Rafi Wanounou. They were sitting in the living room of the archaeologist’s bright, spacious apartment on Ramban Street in the Rehavia district of Jerusalem. From the kitchen Holliday could smell the aroma of almond mushroom chicken, beef kung pao and soya duck as Peggy plated their take-out dinner of kosher Chinese food. According to Peggy the art of knowing which restaurant to order from was even more important than knowing how to cook, a philosophy she’d practiced since high school.

  “All right,” said Doc. “I’ll bite. Why should I give up six months of my life to run around Ethiopia, the deserts of Sudan and the jungles of the Congo with you and Peggy when I’ve got a perfectly good job offer from the Alabama Military Academy and a chance to write my book on the Civil War?”

  “Because Mobile is a sauna in the summer,” called Peggy from the kitchen.

  “And the last thing the world needs is another book on the Civil War.” Rafi grinned.

  “Okay, what do you have to offer besides malaria, fifty kinds of poisonous snakes and blood-crazed rebel hordes?”

  “His name was Julian de la Roche-Guillaume,” said Rafi. “He was a Cistercian monk, and he was a Templar.”

  “Never heard of him,” said Holliday.

  “I’m not surprised; he was pretty obscure,” said Rafi, popping a dumpling into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “He’s usually referred to as the Lost Templar if he’s referred to at all. He’s basically been forgotten by history, and if he is referenced in some obscure footnote he’s remembered as a coward who deserted his holy brothers.”

  “Sounds like Indiana Jones material, doesn’t it?” Peggy said.

  “What is this thing you have for Indiana Jones?” Rafi said. “He certainly doesn’t use the appropriate field technique for a proper archaeologist.”

  “You don’t get it.” Peggy grinned. “It’s not Indiana Jones I have a thing for; it’s Harrison Ford.”

  “Tell me more about this Lost Templar of yours,” said Holliday.

  “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 size 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 fro
m 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.