Red Templar

silence interrupted only by the sounds of waterbirds by the shore taking to the air. After the constant clatter of the train it was a peaceful change. Holliday vaguely remembered a scene from The Great Escape, one of his favorite movies from the early sixties. Charles Bronson and John Leyton casually pick up a rowboat on the shores of the Danube and calmly row to safety. If it were only that easy.

They switched positions every hour or so and, taking the current into consideration, by noon Holliday figured they’d moved about fifteen miles or so downriver.

“How far to Kazan?” Holliday asked, getting behind the oars once again. Eddie settled by the transom, looking downriver.

“Perhaps fifty kilometers. I’m not really sure.”

Holliday rowed, his tired muscles already complaining. The mists were gone and a chilly breeze was blowing across the river, setting up little storms of ripples that he had to fight against to stay in position. After fifteen minutes or so Eddie suddenly told him to pull for shore.

“Why?” Holliday asked.

“I saw something,” said Eddie.

Holliday looked back over his shoulder, but all he could see was a stubbled field that had long since been harvested and a large, well-worn barn with an equally worn sign in large, flaking white letters on the side. The rowboat nudged the muddy bank.

“We may be in luck, I think,” said Eddie. A straight dirt road led directly to the barn’s big double doors. The Cuban pointed to the sign on the barn at the edge of the farmer’s field.

“I don’t get it.” Holliday shrugged, staring at the incomprehensible assortment of Cyrillic letters.

“Yuriya kul’tur pyli sluzhby,” said Eddie, grinning from ear to ear.

“You got me. I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“The sign says, ‘Yuri’s Crop-dusting Service,’” Eddie replied. He grabbed the hammer from the box of fishing tackle and stepped out of the boat. He climbed up the riverbank, heading for the barn. Holliday was right behind him.

Reaching the barn, Holliday saw that what he thought had been a dirt road was actually a short runway, less than two hundred yards long. Eddie stood at the barn doors. They were locked securely with a large brass padlock. The hasp, however, was screwed on the outside of the door, and it took only a few whacks with the hammer before the hasp had splintered away from the door. Holliday looked around. There was a cluster of farm buildings in the distance but they were a good mile or so away.

Eddie hauled open the barn doors and stared. “?Absolutamente perfecto!”

To Holliday it looked like a biplane left over from the First World War. The rust-colored primer and mottled brown paint on the aluminum hull were worn down to the metal in some places, and the fat rubber tricycle tires were totally bald. Spray nozzles lined the trailing edge of the lower wings, and there was an even larger nozzle directly behind the single, four-bladed rotary engine.

“What is it?” Holliday asked.

Eddie stepped up to the aircraft, running his big hand over the engine nacelle like a man examining a racehorse. “She is a Kukuruznik, a Maize Worker. Her real designation is an Antonov An- 2. They used to use them a lot in Cuba but now there are only a few. There is even one of them in the Air Force Museum in Habana.”

“I’ll bet,” said Holliday. “Can you fly it?”

“Pero por supuesto, mi amigo-of course I can fly it.”

24

Holliday followed Eddie around the biplane’s sturdy, stumpy wings to the midsection of the fuselage. The more of the plane he saw, the more he realized that the mottled paint job was probably done that way on purpose. It was camouflage. There was a large, upward-hinged cargo door with a smaller passenger door inserted within it. Eddie pulled the simple twist handle on the passenger door and boosted himself up into the plane. Holliday followed.

“?Hijo de puta!” Eddie breathed. “?Es un mal olor!”

The Cuban was right: the inside of the aircraft smelled, and it wasn’t crop-dusting chemicals. Holliday recognized the rubbery, earthy stink immediately: baled, processed Afghani opium. Yuri was no farmer’s friend; he was a drug smuggler, and apparently on a fairly large scale. Instead of insecticide tanks there were a pair of large fuel tanks just behind the wings. Holliday tried to visualize a map of Asia. It was probably about fifteen hundred miles from here to one of the northern towns of Afghanistan, Herat, maybe. With the two extra fuel tanks, an old plane flying low, under the radar and following the mountain passes, would have an easy time of it.

They made their way forward to the cramped cockpit. The glass in the windows was flat, and the cockpit was so heavily tilted Holliday couldn’t see the ground.

Eddie settled into the left-hand pilot’s seat and let his fingers wander over the controls. He reached into the side pocket of his seat and pulled out a folder full of charts and began going through them.

“These will take us to Yekaterinburg.” He nodded.

“You’re the pilot,” said Holliday. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Go to the back of the plane. See how much fuel is in those tanks. When you have done that go outside and take away the calzos, the. . how do you call it, chocks. Then come back and sit yourself beside me, okay?”

“Okay.” Holliday nodded. He went back to the tanks and tapped them; they appeared to be about half-full. That done, he jumped down from the doorway, pulled out the wooden chocks that stood against the wheels and then climbed back into the plane. He closed the passenger door, twisting the handle firmly, and went back to the cockpit. He sat down across from Eddie, staring at a hundred dials and switches in front of him. It was impossibly complicated.

“You can really fly this thing?”

“Yes. She is una vaca, a cow, but she will do as I tell her, I think.”

Eddie reached down and fiddled with some kind of push-pull button low on the dashboard, the fingers of his right hand easing forward a small throttlelike handle on the console between the seats. A sharp coughing noise followed and the four-bladed propeller spun through a few rotations. Eddie pushed the lever a little farther forward and the propellers began to whirl, gouts of black smoke blasting out into the inside of the barn. Eddie pushed the throttles forward a little more, the sound of the engine roaring almost painfully.

Holliday caught motion from the corner of his good eye and he turned, peering out through the windshield. In the distance off to their right he could see a rooster tail of dust or smoke.

“We’d better get moving,” said Holliday. “I think Yuri’s onto us.”

“I cannot,” said Eddie, pushing the throttles even farther forward. He hauled back on the half-wheel yoke directly in front of him. “I must run the engine up to clear the oil from the pistons. If I do not do this the cow will die, yes?”

“Do what you have to do, but hurry it up,” said Holliday. The plume of dust had resolved itself into an old GAZ-67, the Russian knockoff of a jeep crossed with a tractor. Holliday could make out at least four people in the vehicle. One of them was standing up and gripping the handles of what looked like a mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. “How long?” Holliday asked, raising his voice over the phlegm-rattling noise of the engine.

“A few seconds more!” Eddie called out. A few seconds more and the fifty-cal was going to be within killing range. The five-inch-long shells would go through the skin of the old plane like a rat through cheese. Holliday watched as the truck bounced closer on the invisible track through the fields. Another thirty yards and it was going to be too late.

“Go! Now!” Holliday yelled. The first ranging burst from the truck was chewing up the dirt runway a few yards ahead. Eddie released the yoke and pulled the throttle all the way back. The Antonov jumped forward like an overweight greyhound chasing a rabbit. Holliday and Eddie were thrown back into their seats as the first burst of machine-gun bullets struck the plane, clipping the undercarriage and the belly of the fuselage only seconds before