The Templar Legion

“Why not?”

“He’s white, for one thing. I seriously doubt that the government of Chad would hire a white mercenary, not to mention the fact that they’ve got too much to lose internationally. The same is true of the Congo-to be seen as an aggressor now would be all the excuse the U.N. would need to send in troops. Cameroon doesn’t have the money to launch a serious invasion and they’d have to go through the rest of the country to get to us. It doesn’t make sense.”

“What does?”

“He came here from Mali, but he wasn’t hired there. He also mentioned a man named Archibald Ives. I asked a few questions. Ives was a geologist.”

“Was?”

“He’s dead. Murdered in the Sudan.”

“There’s no oil in the CAR is there?” Gash asked.

Saint-Sylvestre shook his head. “Not a drop. They gave up looking for it years ago.”

“What, then?”

“He was a primarily a mineral geologist, a prospector. If he was in Kukuanaland there’s no record of it, so that means he came in illegally, probably through the Sudan.”

“Looking for what?”

“I spent some time thinking about that,” said Saint-Sylvestre, leaning back in his chair. “Any geologist in his right mind wouldn’t come into Kukuanaland on a whim. He must have known what he was looking for. The only way he could have known that would be through remote sensing, probably from a satellite.”

“The Americans? The CIA?”

“No, they wouldn’t risk the political blowback if they were found out, and we don’t have anything they want anyway. Kukuanaland is hardly strategic.”

“They’d like to wipe us off the map; I know that much,” said Gash. “That creepy secretary of state keeps on making all these war-criminal claims about the general.”

“You don’t need a geologist for that,” said Saint-Sylvestre. He shook his head. “No, somebody was looking for something and they found it. This Ives fellow was sent in to corroborate whatever their remote sensing told them. Lanz is here because the only way these people can get what they want is by getting rid of General Kolingba.”

“A mining company?” Gash said.

“A big one.” Saint-Sylvestre nodded. “Big enough to have access to a remote sensing satellite. Big enough to finance a small war.”

“So we bring Lanz in and you interrogate him.”

“To what end?” Saint-Sylvestre said. “We’d find out who the company was, but not what they’re looking for, because I guarantee that Lanz doesn’t know. If Lanz fails in his mission they’ll just send in someone else.”

“So what do you propose?”

“We continue surveillance; let him think he’s getting away with it.”

“And?”

“Eventually he’ll pack his bag and go. And I’ll be right behind him.” Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre sat back in his chair and smiled.

12

Peggy sat in the copilot’s seat of the Catalina’s skeletal cockpit and stared down at the mottled green landscape three hundred feet below. Doc and Rafi were asleep on the piles of equipment in the rear of the big amphibian. “You never think of the Sudan as being green,” she said. “It’s all about Darfur and droughts.” She tripped the shutter release on the Nikon and took a half dozen more shots.

“Southern Sudan is a whole different thing,” said Mutwakil Osman, the Catalina’s pilot. “Twice the size of Texas and about a third of the population-less than seven million people.”

“It looks beautiful,” said Peggy.

“Not for long,” said Osman. “When big corporations have their way it’ll be clear-cut, strip-mined and turned into an oil field within ten years.” He glanced over the side. “There’s the river.” Directly in front of them the sun was beginning to slide out of sight, turning the horizon into a flaring line of golds and reds that stretched into darkness on either side. “Just enough light to put her down.”

Osman gently pushed the oversized wheel forward, then toed the left foot pedal. The plane went into a long sliding turn down the wide expanse of the silvery river snaking beneath their wings.

There was a faint vibration throughout the hull as the aircraft touched the surface of the river, slicing into the dark water and sending up a rooster-tail spray that rose up on both sides of the cockpit like a curtain that dropped away as Osman throttled back on the engines. Peggy noticed a half dozen dugouts on the water, the men slapping at the surface of the river with their paddles.

“A welcoming committee?” Peggy asked.

“Croc beaters.” Osman grinned. “Hit one when you land and it could flip the old girl on her ass.”

Osman guided the plane toward a narrow wooden pier. Docked there was an ancient river barge steamer that made the African Queen look like a speedboat. The steamer was about sixty feet long, twenty-five feet wide and had shrouded paddle wheels on either side of the deck. Rising above the tarred hull was a squat engine house and above that was a rickety-looking wheelhouse. At one time or another someone had attempted to paint the superstructure of the steamer white but the sun and the rain had steadily done their work and where any paint was left the color was a dejected gray. The entire vessel seemed to sag in the middle like a tired old horse.

“What on earth is that?” Rafi said, poking his head through the bulkhead door.

“That’s the Pevensey,” said Osman. “She delivers supplies up and down the river. You’ll be taking her to the first cataract.”

“I’m surprised she floats,” said Rafi.

Osman killed the engines and they coasted the last hundred feet, sliding up on the shallow, sloping mud beach beside the pier. “Welcome to Umm Rawq,” Osman said. He reached out and slipped a CQ radio frequency card out of a holder beneath the fuel gauge. He handed it to Peggy. “Hang on to that. If you ever need a lift sometime, just give me a call.” He gave her a grin, then went off to speak to the captain of the Pevensey while Peggy, Rafi and Holliday began to explore the village.

Umm Rawq was a sordid little place with a single street of mud-brick hovels and a sheet-metal shanty selling banana beer and Batman Forever glasses from Mc-Donald’s. The whole village smelled of fish. An unseen radio boomed out tinny Afropop, and children played in the muddy, rubbish-littered road. None of the children were older than three or four, and the only male in the village was the gray-haired old bartender. The only other adult males they’d seen since landing were the crocodile beaters.

“Not the most hospitable place in the world,” Doc said.

“It looks like the Lord’s Resistance Army has been through here,” said Peggy. “They take all the children over eight or nine and the able-bodied men. All in the name of God. Rape, murder, mutilation.”

“I thought they were in Uganda?” Rafi said.

“They’re spreading all over central Africa now. Here and the Congo as well.”

“I’ve seen enough of Umm Rawq,” said Holliday. They returned to the dock just in time to see Osman before he headed back toward Khartoum. The crocodile beaters had landed their long, narrow dugouts and were busy taking supplies from the Catalina on board Pevensey.

“I had a talk with Eddie,” said Osman. “He was only going as far as Am Dafok this trip but he’s willing to take you as far as the first cataract.”

“Eddie’s the captain?”

“Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso, to be precise,” said Osman with a smile.

“Edimburgo Vladimir?” Peggy said.

“He’s Cuban. His mother liked the name Edinburgh, as in Scotland, so she called him Edimburgo, but when she went down to the registry office the official said Edimburgo was an ‘enemy’ name, so she had to tack