The Templar Legion

here and there in front of him it really was no more than a video game; he was flying some exotic version of Microsoft Flight Simulator and was barely aware that he was actually flying a weapons platform that would have taken out all the pilot’s competition in south Baltimore in a single twenty-minute session with a stop at the nearest New York Fried Chicken to top things off.

“How long you been flying this?” Gash yelled into his microphone. The kid’s eyes stayed glued to the controls.

“Two hundred hours on a flight simulator and another two hundred hours on the full-sized simulator at the Ukhtomsky factory outside Moscow.”

“How much time actually flying?”

“Thirty hours with the instructor. Fifteen hours here. I do a two-hour patrol of the western border once a week. That’s all we have gas for.”

“What about weapons?”

“The missiles are dummies, but the Shipunovs are real.” Ozegbe squeezed one of the buttons on the control stick and the helicopter seemed to shudder as the twin cannons pulsed. From his seat Gash could see the rounds impacting the left-hand bank of the river, sending up huge gouts of mud and water.

A pair of rounds caught a dozing alligator and tore it to shreds before it had time to move. In front of them the Kazaba Falls rose like a wall split by the three tumbling, mist-shrouded cascades of water.

Gash gripped the edges of his seat but the young pilot just twitched the control handle, the nose came up and they rode above the falls to find themselves hurtling along barely twenty feet over the water.

“I’ve seen enough,” said Gash. “Take me back.”

“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He twitched the control handle to the left and they went into a long swinging turn over the jungle. For a split second Gash thought he saw something out of place, a shape that wasn’t quite right among the canopy trees, but he wasn’t about to ask his teenage pilot to go back for a look.

“How often do you patrol this sector?” Gash asked instead.

“Only once in a while. Everybody thinks that Banqui’s eventually going to try to take us out from the west but I don’t think so.”

They headed back downriver, leaving the falls behind them.

“Did he see us?” breathed Holliday, drenched by the spray coming up from the base of the waterfall closest to the village side of the river. Limbani crossed the slippery slabs of slick black slate ahead of him while Eddie came behind.

“The spray hid us, I think,” said Limbani, raising his voice above the pounding of the falls. Directly beside them the sheer cliff rose a good two hundred feet straight up with only a ten- or fifteen-foot path between the edge of the cliff and the roiling whirlpooling water at the foot of the falls.

“Do they patrol often?” Eddie called out.

“Almost never,” yelled Limbani. “That is why I am worried. That and the new moon. They’re getting ready for something.”

“Does that have anything to do with us getting soaked?” Holliday asked.

Limbani didn’t answer. He turned slightly, took a step or two and simply vanished.

“What the hell?” Holliday said.

“Poof,” said Eddie, just behind him. “This guy is a magician, yes?”

“Apparently,” said Holliday. He was glad Rafi and Peggy were back at the main camp taking pictures and taking their first steps at understanding a new civilization. If there was one thing Peggy hated it was small, dark tunnels. He took another two steps, stumbled in sudden darkness and then took a third step. Everything had become silent; the sound of the waterfall had become nothing more than a dull throbbing. “You with me, Eddie?”

“Right behind you, companero,” said the Cuban. “This is the way to el infierno, I think.”

“Pretty damp for hell,” answered Holliday.

“Maybe el diablo has a sense of humor,” Eddie said. “Gets you wet and cold before he roasts you for eternity.”

There was a scratching sound on rough metal and the flame of an old glass chimney oil lamp blossomed. The lamp was being held by Limbani only a few feet ahead of them. Behind the doctor was a large rusted metal hatchway studded with rivets.

“So where exactly are we, Doctor?” Holliday asked.

“The doorway to the past.” The older man smiled. He spun the wheel on the hatchway and pushed it open, stepping aside to let Holliday and Eddie go through first.

“Mierda!” Eddie whispered, stunned.

“No way.” Holliday grinned, suddenly finding himself laughing. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. “You really are full of surprises, Limbani.”

They were standing in an immense cavern behind the waterfall, the sides of the cave a football field or more apart, the stalactite-studded rock more than a hundred feet overhead. The rock was streaked with thick, threading seams of what could only be gold, those veins in turn surrounded by even thicker strands of what appeared to be quartz but which Holliday knew were not.

“Gold?” Holliday asked.

“In quartz and diamond matrices. The caves are the far end of the mother lode back at the three hills. King Solomon’s Mines, a greedy man’s Shangri-la.”

Dozens of torches illuminated the sight as at least a hundred of the Pale Strangers worked on the giant object resting in its cofferdam, cradled by more than a score of heavy tree trunks on each side.

“Unbelievable,” said Holliday. “It’s a Viking snekkja. What the British called a dragon ship. What the hell are you up to, Limbani?”

The boat behind the cofferdam was sixty or seventy feet long, clinker built from fresh planks, the planks overlapped, sewn, riveted and the spaces stuffed tightly with moss. The workers were almost finished now, thirty rowing benches installed between the gunwales and a raised platform for the helmsman at the rowing oar. The gunwales seemed higher than ones Holliday had seen on replica ships but it didn’t take long to see why. Between the rowing benches were firing positions for rows of ballista, outsized crossbows used in medieval siege warfare, capable of piercing stone walls, killing dozens at a time and even casting enormous fireballs.

“Roche-Guillaume’s idea?” Holliday said.

“Presumably.” Limbani nodded. “The ship itself goes back to Ragnar Skull Splitter, who remained here until his death. According to Roche-Guillaume’s manuscripts the local people had already intermarried with the Romans who came here first. It is as though each explorer who came this way left something of his culture behind. Ragnar’s own vessel was used to bury him when he died of fever, but the design for the pirogues my people used for travel and fishing were of much the same design. This ship, which is called Havdragoon in the old language-Sea Dragon-was nothing more than those small piroques scaled upward.”

“But why have you built her?” Holliday asked. “Why now?”

“Because war is coming.”

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“As a matter of fact I can. I’ve told you that I had my own spies and the battle is to be very soon. It doesn’t matter who the winner is between Kolingba and his enemies. Either way we will be sought out and slaughtered. We have hidden long enough. With the dark of the moon we strike.” He waved toward the ship. A group of kilted workers were fitting a bloodred curling snake figurehead on the high, delicate stem of the ship.

“This cavern stretches the length of all three sections of the falls. When the cofferdam is opened the cavern floor will fill and the ship will be thrust out into the stream with sixty men at her oars. And sixty more at the crossbows. A hundred pirogues will join us on the downriver journey, each paddler armed with a blowgun and a hundred killing darts.”

“You’re mad!” Holliday burst out. “You’re leading your people to suicide!”

“We never asked for war. We never wanted war. But we will not run from war. I know Kolingba and his mind. Just as I know the kind of men who will be fighting him. It may well be suicide to fight, but is it better to wait like