Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“He’s dead,” said Rafi, staring down at the body of the man from the Rover.

Holliday slung the loaded rifle over his shoulder. “We’re not.” He headed for the rope and then began to climb.

“Son of a bitch!” Mike Harris stared through the big Steiner binoculars at the road below. He was flat on his belly at the top of the ridge above the bridge. Seeing Holliday getting out of the Land Cruiser was like a nightmare come to life.

“What’s the matter?” said the man with the rifle, lying beside him. His name was Pieter Jonker, an ex-Project Barnacle assassin provided by Faulkener. “I got the krimpie , didn’t I?”

“You missed the woman, you idiot!”

“I wasn’t hired to shoot the dom doos woman, was I, mate?” Jonker said. “I can’t help it if a Good Samaritan comes along.”

Harris kept his eyes glued to the binoculars. He saw Holliday crawl up over the top of the gorge, something slung over his back.

“You want him dead, too?” Jonker asked, his eye up to the rifle scope.

“Shoot!” Harris bellowed.

Jonker squeezed the trigger of the Truvelo CMS rifle. A puff of sand erupted inches from Holliday’s head.

“Mutterficker!” Jonker snarled.

The sound of the rifle hammered painfully in Harris’s ear. He winced. When his eyes opened again Holliday was gone.

“God damn it! You missed again!” Harris yelled.

“Loop naai, pommie,” said Jonker, curling his lip.

Suddenly the top of the sandy ridge exploded an inch away from Harris and his companion. A rock chip tore a gash in Harris’s cheek. A split second later the sound of four or five rapidly fired rounds reached them. In an instant Jonker was wriggling backward down the back slope of the ridge.

“Get back here!”

“I signed on to shoot, not to get shot at,” said Jonker, scuttling backward, leaving the heavy weapon behind. “I did my job. The krimpie ’s dead.”

“I need his briefcase!”

“Not my problem.”

The binoculars shattered into splinters of glass and hard plastic as a shot from below found its mark. A razor-edged piece of glass almost took out Harris’s eye. He followed Jonker down the slope.

Holliday drove, Rafi on the seat beside him with the dead man’s briefcase on his lap. Peggy kept an eye on the road behind them. They’d waited for almost an hour, until Holliday was certain that the shooter had gone. Ten minutes after the first shots, they heard the sound of an engine in the distance, then only silence. Before leaving the bridge Holliday picked up his brass and wiped down the rifle. That done, he’d tossed the weapon back into the gorge. The last thing he needed was to be found with an unlicensed weapon by a roving Sudanese army patrol.

“According to his driver’s permit his name was Archibald Arthur Ives,” said Rafi, going through the dead man’s wallet. “From the papers in his briefcase it would appear that he’s a freelance geologist working for a company called Matheson Resource Industries. There are some maps but I’ll have to give them a closer look when we get to Khartoum.”

“Anything else?”

“A satellite phone.”

“We can check the call list, I guess,” said Holliday.

“You don’t sound too eager, Doc. Aren’t we going to report this?” Peggy asked, still watching the highway behind her.

“I don’t think we can,” answered Holliday. “Not without getting ourselves seriously in the glue.” He shrugged. “What would be the point? We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody wanted this guy Ives dead and I for one don’t have the foggiest idea why.”

“He said something before he died,” said Rafi. “I don’t know what it means.”

“What did he say?” Holliday asked.

“ ‘ Limbani,’ ” said Rafi. “ ‘ Tell Amobe Limbani.’ ”

“So who is he exactly?” Holliday asked.

Peggy looked up from the laptop. She’d been surfing the Net for most of the afternoon, using the Wi-Fi hookup in their apartment suite at the Grand Holiday Villa Hotel amp; Suites in Khartoum. For a hotel built in 1880, it was remarkably up-to-date. It was also remarkably expensive.

“Dr. Amobe Barthelemy Limbani, sixty-three years old when the coup took place. Medical degree from the Universite de Paris, specializing in tropical and infectious diseases. His father was also a doctor and also governor of the Vakaga prefecture, of what had originally been part of French Equatorial Africa. Limbani was part of the Yakima minority. When his father died under mysterious circumstances he ran for the governor’s job and got in.”

“Who are the majority?” Rafi asked.

“Baya and Banda. They’re sixty-five percent of the population. In Vakaga it’s more like eighty-five percent. The Yakima are less than ten percent.”

“If they’re in the majority how did Limbani get the votes to become governor?” Rafi asked.

“The Banda and the Baya are rural tribal villagers without much use for or knowledge of the outside world. The literacy rate is much higher among the Yakima, who are mostly shopkeepers and merchants, or at least they were.”

“Presumably Kolingba’s a Banda or a Baya,” said Holliday.

“Banda. One of the ‘lucky’ ones who got sent to a missionary school. He ran away, joined the army and the rest is history. There’s a story that after the coup one of the first things he did was go back to the missionary school and hack the nuns into pieces.”

“What about Limbani?” Rafi asked.

“Either he died in prison outside Fourandao or he escaped and went into the jungle. There are all sorts of stories about Limbani organizing a rebel army in the jungle a la Castro, but there’s no real evidence of any rebellion. In fact if anything things have gone from bad to worse. In the past two years Kolingba’s power has spread to Bamingui-Bangoran and Haute-Kotto, the two neighboring prefectures to Vakaga. That’s almost a third of the Central African Republic. The borders with Sudan and Chad are wide-open. It’s Wild West time for crooks of all kinds, arms dealers, druggies, terrorists, slavers, conflict minerals, you name it.”

“What about the maps?” Holliday asked, turning to Rafi. The archaeologist had the contents of Ives’s dispatch case spread out on the coffee table in the living room of their suite. Outside the picture window, the White Nile stretched toward the junction with its small sister, the Blue Nile.

“The Kotto River flows out of the Sudan massif. He drew these maps himself. I can’t make heads or tails of the grid references, but it matches exactly with the Google Earth images I took from the geography of the image in the tomb. Three hills and a triple-forked cataract. According to Ives’s maps, he found what he was looking for on the largest of the three hills.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Peggy. “Gold and diamonds. King Solomon’s Mines.”

“He found gold and diamonds, all right,” said Rafi, “but according to this that’s not what he was looking for.”

“Spill it,” said Peggy.

“He was looking for, and found, a gigantic deposit of something called neodymium at a concentration of almost seven thousand parts per million, and the same for something called tantalum.”

“What on earth does that mean?” Peggy asked, bewildered.

“It means that Kolingba’s sitting on something far more valuable than a gold mine, or even a diamond mine,” answered Holliday.

“I guess I’ve been out of the loop too long,” said Peggy. “I don’t get it.”

“I do,” said Rafi. “Most tantalum is mined in Australia, but it’s a lot cheaper to buy it from the warlords in the Congo. Neodymium is mined only in China and they’ve steadily been shutting down the market over the past few years.”