The Templar Cross t-2 Read online

  "This thing is more than a hundred years old," said Rafi, staring at the oval plate bolted to the deckhouse.

  "They built to last back then," said Holliday. "A thousand storms, a couple of world wars. The British were still occupying Egypt when she was built."

  Rafi was peering through one of the grimy portholes.

  "Looks like the galley," he said. "Nobody there."

  Holliday nodded and turned toward the companionway leading up to the wheelhouse. Rafi followed close behind him. They both turned and looked toward the dock. Still deserted. A noon-time siesta in the heat of the day. The sun blazed down and Holliday felt sweat running down in itchy streams under his shirt. The man in the Citroen had looked cool. The Citroen, unlike Faraj's taxi, was almost undoubtedly air-conditioned.

  They reached the wheelhouse and stepped inside. The interior was almost primitive. There were slatted wooden scuppers on the floor to let water drain, an amateurish welded aluminum dashboard with a few engine controls and a six-spoked mahogany and brass wheel that looked as though it might have been the original. There was a simple engine room telegraph attached to the right-hand bulkhead marked Full, Half, Slow and Stop. A tall iron braking handle came up from the floor to the right of the ship's wheel. There was a marine radio bolted to a bracket in the roof above the front windscreen, a black plastic compass in a glycerin float, a modern GPS unit and an echo sounder. For a hundred-foot-long vessel it was definitely seat-of-the-pants navigation.

  "Whoever drives this bus is either very good at his job or he's insane," said Holliday.

  "Or both," commented Rafi. There was a single bulkhead door at the rear of the wheelhouse. It was unlocked. Holliday and Rafi stepped through into a combination chart room and captain's cabin. The briefcase was sitting on a small table beside a porthole. Holliday snapped the latch and pulled it open. It was filled with nautical charts and nothing else.

  "Looks like he's getting ready to go somewhere," said Holliday.

  "Where?" Rafi asked.

  Holliday opened one of the folded charts and laid it out on the table.

  "As-Sallum to Al-Iskandariyah," he said, reading the chart legend. "The scale is one to three hundred thousand. About a hundred and forty miles from Alexandria. Looks like some sort of harbor."

  "As-Sallum is also the last place anybody heard from Peggy and the expedition," said Rafi. "It was their last staging point before crossing into Libya. It's right on the border."

  "It can't be a coincidence," said Holliday. He folded the chart again and put it back in the briefcase. He closed and latched the briefcase and put it back exactly where he'd found it. "Let's see if we can find out why our knickknack salesman is going to this As-Sallum," he said.

  They left the wheelhouse through the harbor-side door, screening themselves from anyone on the pier. They went forward on the main deck and then carefully down a lower companionway to the foc'sle, listening as they descended. The only sound was the clicking hum of an automatic bilge pump somewhere below and the faint lapping echo of small waves against the hull.

  The foc'sle consisted of two small cabins, six pipe berths against the port and starboard bulkheads, a small galley and a zinc-topped mess table with benches bolted to the floor. Dim pan lights dangled above them, throwing shadows everywhere. The ceiling was low, a forest of cables and conduits hanging on metal brackets. The stuffy little area had obviously been in recent use; there were photographs and pinups above the narrow berths and the unmistakable smell of fried onions in the air.

  "No one home," said Rafi.

  "Let's not stretch our luck," answered Holliday, a nervous edge in his voice. Being belowdecks and blind to possible attack went against all his military experience, not to mention his basic survival instincts. "Five minutes more and then we're out of here."

  They made their way aft down a narrow corridor and then stepped through a bulkhead door into a cargo area between the foc'sle and the engine room farther back. The cargo area was stacked with seventy or eighty long wooden crates. The crates were each secured with lead customs seals and stenciled with arcane numbers and letters. The only clue to their contents was a stenciled logo of a rearing horse and the word DIEMACO.

  "All of a sudden I'm getting a bad feeling about this," said Holliday.

  "What's DIEMACO?" Rafi asked.

  "Die Manufacturing Corporation of Canada. They make machine guns."

  "Canada?" Rafi asked with a look of surprise.

  "Sixth-largest exporter of small arms in the world. Bigger than Israel."

  "You're kidding."

  "A billion dollars a year. Don't let the maple leaves and maple syrup fool you. The Green Berets can trace their history back to the Devil's Brigade, a Canada-U.S. commando unit. Nobody mentions it much these days, but it was Canadians from the Second Parachute Battalion who trained the Americans, not the other way around."

  "One history lesson after another," Rafi said with a grin.

  "Let's open one of these up," said Holliday.

  There was a short pry bar on a shelf against the portside bulkhead. Holliday used it to twist off the wire customs seal, then slipped it between the crate and its stapled wooden lid. Inside the crate were half a dozen flat, neutral-colored hard cases. Holliday undid the clasps on the top case and opened it.

  "Our man's not smuggling stuff out of Egypt-he's smuggling stuff in," said Holliday, peering into the case. Inside, seated in custom-cut foam niches, was an entire weapons system. The weapon was sand-colored with an odd, flat surface texture.

  "What is it?" Rafi asked.

  "A Timberwolf sniper rifle. Dead accurate at four thousand yards. And I mean 'dead' accurate."

  "That's more than two miles."

  "That's right," said Holliday flatly.

  There were a dozen much smaller cases fitted into the ends of the crates. He took one of the small cases out and dug even deeper, coming up with a dozen or so parcels wrapped in heavy paper. He opened up one of the small cases. Inside was a squat, dead black handgun with a beavertail grip and a snub barrel shorter than his index finger. The entire gun fit into the palm of his hand.

  "A Para-Ordnance Nite Hawg," murmured Holliday. "Another Canadian company. Forty-five automatic." He ripped the paper off one of the smaller packages. Boxes of ammunition. He slipped the handgun into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and stuffed half a dozen boxes of ammunition into the left.

  "You get caught with a handgun in Egypt and we'll both go to jail for a very long time."

  "We get caught by the bad guys without one and we could wind up dead," responded Holliday. He stuffed the empty gun case and the torn paper from the ammunition package back into the wooden crate.

  Suddenly there was an echoing metallic clang as the bulkhead door leading aft crashed open. A thin beardless man wearing a grease-stained light blue boiler suit stepped into the cargo hold, frowning and looking as though he'd just awakened from a nap. He blinked, surprised to find two strange men aboard the tug. He said something in a high, almost girlish voice.

  "Maa fee shay jadeed?" Holliday couldn't understand a word but the intent of the question was clear: Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my ship? The man reached into the deep front pocket of the boiler suit and tried to pull something out of his pocket. It looked to Holliday like an enormous Webley service revolver that was standard issue for the British Armed Forces from the Boer War onward. As the thin man hauled the heavy pistol up the front sight got hooked on a tear in the pocket and snagged.

  Holliday barely hesitated. Heart beating wildly, adrenaline pumping frantically into his bloodstream, he swept up the steel pry bar from the top of the crate, took two steps forward and ripped a vicious curving swipe at the man's head. The hooked end connected with the left temple with a wet crunching sound, stopping him in his tracks. The man shrieked, eyes bulging, and crumpled to the ground, his arm flung out, his hand still gripping the heavy revolver. He didn't move.

  Rafi stared down at the man in the boil
er suit, horrified.

  "Is he dead?"

  Holliday bent down and took the Webley, just in case. He felt for a pulse in the man's neck. There was none. There was no visible blood but the side of the man's head looked like a deflated balloon, the bones crushed like a soft-boiled egg.

  "Yeah, he's dead," said Holliday with a sigh. He'd seen enough combat to know a corpse when he saw one.

  "We've got to go. Now," said Rafi urgently.

  "We can't," answered Holliday, shaking his head. "Not yet."

  "What are you talking about!?" Rafi asked. "The longer we stay here, the more chance there is of our gift shop guy coming back!"

  "That's the point," explained Holliday. "Up to now these people didn't know we were onto them. We leave a dead body lying here it's a whole new ball game."

  "What are you saying?"

  "We get rid of the body."

  It took them almost half an hour and it was an object lesson in the concept of deadweight. They manhandled the limp, dragging corpse up the companionway stairs, arms and legs flopping, head lolling and banging gruesomely up each step. They brought him up on the windward side, the deckhouse shielding them from the pier. Out in the harbor brightly painted fishing trawlers bobbed easily in the shining water like a rustic postcard from the Mediterranean: "Arrived Abu Qir. Hotel not quite five-star, harbor wonderful, wish you could be with us. Love, Alice."

  Panting from their exertions, chests heaving, they reached the deck and stopped to catch their breath, the body hidden below the sight line of the gunwales of the old tug. Rafi peered over the side. Thick oily water banged listlessly against the scarred black hull. A rime of harbor muck covered the surface, a mixture of floating garbage, dead fish, plastic, and long dark mats of seaweed.

  "Do bodies float or sink?" Rafi asked.

  "They sink for a while but gasses bring them up eventually," said Holliday.

  "How long?"

  "I don't have the faintest idea."

  "Then we need something to weigh him down," said Rafi.

  At the stern of the tug they found an old skiff turned bottom up and half covered by a rubberized canvas tarpaulin. The little boat didn't look like it had been used in decades. Originally it must have served as a lifeboat or to inspect the hull, something that clearly hadn't been done for a very long time. Hidden underneath the dinghy was a very old British Seagull 1.5-horsepower engine that looked as though it had been designed by a mad prewar inventor in his shed at the end of the garden. Along with the spindly little outboard they found a half-rotted coil of rope that had once been the skiff's painter.

  They hauled the engine back to the foredeck and used the rope to bind it as securely as they could to the body of the man in the boiler suit. When they were done they checked to make sure no one was watching from one of the fishing boats in the harbor, then heaved their unwieldy burden over the side. He landed on the surface with a huge splash. The surface muck parted, then swallowed the body whole. Ten seconds later the muck was a single undulating layer of flotsam, the body having vanished without a trace.

  "The engineer wasn't being paid enough and he deserted," said Rafi.

  Holliday looked down at the placid surface of the water.

  "Sounds reasonable enough," he said and nodded.

  "Now what?" Rafi asked.

  Holliday thought about Peggy and the task that lay ahead.

  "We get to As-Sallum before the good ship Khamsin does."

  9

  After discharging Faraj, they took the midnight train from Alexandria to Mersa Matruh by way of El Alamein, the small Egyptian seaside town where Montgomery held the line against Rommel's tanks and began the drive to the west that eventually pushed the German general out of Africa altogether.

  The terrain, what little they saw of it, was a mixture of dreary, splintered desert, raw, low dunes and scrubby patches of dusty green farmland trying to survive in an arid ocean of sand. In the distance, on the right-hand side of the train, with the dawn light creeping up behind them, the ocean appeared like an enormous mirage of the water the desert could see but never vanquish.

  By the time they'd boarded the train in Alexandria there were no sleeping compartments available so they'd spent the night in the surprisingly elegant wood-paneled bar car, drinking from fat silver cans of Luxor Beer and discussing their situation. By dawn, still awake, they were alone in the car except for the bartender, asleep on his stool in the far corner. The cold fury of the sunrise turned the sky around them a thousand shades of pink and gold and the wheels chattered monotonously over the endless track beneath their feet.

  "Tell me everything you know about this German, Walter Rauff. There must be some clue in his history in North Africa that could help us track down the gold."

  "Find out where the gold came from and we find Peggy?" Rafi said.

  "Something like that."

  Rafi thought about it for a long moment, assembling his thoughts. At the far end of the car the bartender woke up briefly, saw that he wasn't needed and instantly was asleep again.

  "I don't know if this is completely accurate, but as I recall he was in the navy and got thrown out over some sex scandal-sleeping with an admiral's wife, or daughter or maybe both. Anyway, he managed to get into the SS, the death's-head battalion in charge of the camps. He figured out a scheme of gassing people using mobile extermination units and on the basis of that he was sent to North Africa with Rommel. His job was to come in behind Rommel's units exterminating North African Jews from Morocco to Palestine. He was also in charge of sweeping up their assets-the source of all the gold. In 1942 and 1943 Rommel got stopped in El Alamein, right around here actually." Rafi glanced out the window at the barren landscape.

  "Anyway, he fell back to Tunisia to round up the Jews with his Einsatzkommando Tunis for a while, then beat it out of Africa altogether. Italy, I think. That was 1944. After the war he was captured by the Americans, escaped and used Bishop Hudal's 'ratline' to escape via the Vatican, first to Syria for a while, then to Chile." Rafi shrugged. "He ran a crab-packing plant for several years, then started working in intelligence for the Chilean government. He used to travel back to Germany all the time but he was never caught."

  "Did this Rauff have any contingency plan for escaping if Rommel was killed or captured?" Holliday asked.

  "Most of the SS units had secret plans for escape if they started losing the war. The Vatican had their whole ratline system set up as far back as 1942, taking SS men first to Syria, then to South America."

  "Any alternate routes?" Holliday asked.

  Rafi nodded, then took a last swig from his warm can of beer.

  "Down through Libya by air to a desert air base in Vichy-controlled Niger, then across the ocean to Brazil or Chile."

  "This is beginning to make a little sense now," said Holliday. He took a large-scale folded map of Egypt and Libya from the little overnight bag on the seat beside him. He spread the map out on the table. "Any idea where the air base in Libya was?"

  "The name Al-Jaghbub sticks in my head, but I'm not positive."

  Holliday found it on the map.

  "There's an oasis town called Al-Jaghbub halfway down the map."

  "Wait a minute," said Rafi, excited now. "Didn't Ducos mention it when we were talking to him?"

  "I can't remember," said Holliday, "but it fits. It would make a perfect staging base for a long-distance flight to Niger."

  "So the Nazis get freaked out by Rommel losing and put the gold on a plane for Brazil?"

  "And it gets lost somewhere between point A and point B," Holliday said, nodding.

  "And that fits, too," said Rafi. "Hudal was a bishop with connections and insiders both in the SS and at the Vatican."

  Holliday sat back in his seat.

  "Now I see," he said. "The monk from Biblical Archaeology School in Jerusalem, this Brother Brasseur or whatever his name is, he wasn't searching for Templar texts in the Archives; he was trying to find Hudal's records. They were looking for the
SS gold right from the beginning."

  They arrived in Mersa Matruh at six thirty in the morning. It was a city of two hundred thousand or so, a miniature Alexandria, the sea masked by a line of hotels and resorts along the Corniche, all new and all modern, with the old city of its real Berber inhabitants behind the high-rise facade, selling the produce grown on the little desert farms they'd seen from the train. They booked into the Beausite, a moderately priced five-story hotel with its own sand beach. A single phone call to the concierge presented them with an insurmountable problem. They took their complimentary continental breakfast out onto the balcony of their narrow room to discuss the situation.

  "We're screwed," said Rafi abjectly, looking out over the ultramarine ocean in front of the hotel. He tore off a corner of his croissant and buttered it. "It'll take you weeks to get a visa for Libya with an American passport and I probably couldn't get one at all."

  "So then we do it without visas," said Holliday, sipping his strong coffee.

  "How do we manage that?" Rafi asked.

  "Look on the map," said Holliday. "The closest place on the Egyptian side is Siwa Oasis. That's only a couple of hundred miles from here. Siwa is less than fifty miles from Jaghbub."

  "Across an impenetrable border," grunted Rafi. "They've got something like two million land mines planted. Fences, cameras, the whole deal. Egypt and Libya were at war back in the seventies."

  "That's LRDG territory," said Holliday. "I guarantee it's like a sieve."

  "LRDG?"

  "Long Range Desert Group," explained Holliday. "The Brits and the Germans chased each other back and forth across the border for years. There has to be dozens of caravan trails through there."