Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“If one does not give in to temptation occasionally, how can one appreciate the strength of will it takes to resist it?”

“You sound like a Jesuit professor I know at Georgetown University.”

“There, it is God’s will that you smoke this fine cigar,” said Eddie. Holliday took the cigar and rolled it around in his mouth. The Zippo flared between Eddie’s fingers. He let the kerosene smell fade, then applied the flame to the tip of the cigar. Holliday took a light pull. The taste was honey and rich earth. He could almost believe the stories of such cigars being rolled on the thighs of young virgins. “Not only virgins,” said Eddie, reading his mind. “Pretty ones.” Both men laughed and the engine chugged its regular coughing beat. The jungle on either side of them was dense and dark, wetland vines and roots spilling over into the water. Holliday could feel a steady tension rising out of nowhere, and then he realized he was thinking of being nineteen years old and crouching in the belly of a PBR going upriver on the Song Vam Co Dong in the Angel’s Wing, listening to the jungle and knowing he’d never hear the one that killed him.

“Bad memory?” Eddie said.

“Old memory,” Holliday replied.

“In the jungle?”

“Yes.”

“The worst fighting is in the jungle, always. I have asked myself many times why that is and I cannot think of an answer.”

“I think it’s because the jungle has no history,” said Holliday. “Things live and breed and die all in a day in the jungle and no one remembers. I was on patrol once and we found what was left of an old French fighter from the nineteen fifties, a Dewoitine, I think it was called. The jungle had almost swallowed it up completely; there were vines growing out of the pilot’s eye sockets.”

“What was your rank?” Eddie asked.

“Then? I was a PFC. I came out of it a lieutenant.”

“And now?”

“Lieutenant colonel,” said Holliday.

“Not very far up the ladder for a man of your years.”

“I opened my mouth when I should have had it closed.” Holliday laughed. “You don’t get to be a general by having opinions; you get to be a general by following orders. In my army, at least.”

“Mine, too, I am afraid. I never rose above primer teniente .”

“More opinionated than me, then,” said Holliday.

“There is a phrase in English, I think: ‘to suffer fools badly’? I was very bad at this and there were a great many fools among the Cubanos in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, I can assure you.”

One of the boiler crew, a gray-haired man named Samir, knocked on the wheelhouse door. He rattled off something in Arabic, got the nod from Eddie, then vanished into the darkness.

“What was that all about?” Holliday asked.

“Samir is our cook. He was inquiring about breakfast and asking for permission to take a piece of chicken as bait.”

“Bait for what?”

“Moonfish, perhaps a turtle if we are very lucky.” Eddie dragged on his cigar, lighting up his dark, laughing eyes. “They only bite on white meat, of course.”

“Of course,” said Holliday, and they continued down the dark jungle river.

“. . This was certainly true in my case, and I can still remember very little of the intervening years until I came to myself once again as Reinhart Stengl Hartmann in this home for the aged overlooking the mountains of the Oberammergau. May I never leave it or see Africa again except in my dreams.”

Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, sat in his London office and closed the old copybook, pushing it to one side of his desk. He reclined in his chair, listening to the distant traffic noise from the Strand. It was this book, with its spidery, old-man’s handwriting, that had introduced the enormous strike-confirmed by the late Archibald Ives-in the first place. The copybook had been lost among the archival files of a minor takeover that had occurred almost thirty years ago, when his father, the eighth earl, was still running the company. Had Matheson Resource Industries not decided to digitize their files, and had a bright junior director not noticed a minor concession within what was once the Ubangi-Shari precinct of French Equatorial Africa, Sir James might have let the opportunity of a lifetime pass him by.

Reinhart Stengl Hartmann, dead for decades and forgotten long before that, had begun his career as a young man in the goldfields of South Africa’s Witwatersrand. With only minor success, Hartmann decided to try his luck elsewhere, finally settling on the operation of a rubber plantation in what was then the Congo Free State. With the annexation of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium in 1908, Hartmann was forced to move once again, this time to Ubangi-Shari on the other side of the Congo River. He operated as an ivory trader there until the 1920s and then, acting on a tip from a native guide, he traveled into the jungle interior, once again prospecting for gold. According to official reports made by the French governor of the province at the time, Hartmann did in fact find gold, but not in spectacular amounts. With the man branded a failure, the governor and just about everyone else forgot about Reinhart Stengl Hartmann.

Matheson, on the other hand, had years of experience reading ledgers, spreadsheets and every other sort of business document, and to him Hartmann’s tactics were as transparent as glass. Hartmann’s African concern operated under the name of Kotto Fluss Bergau-Kotto River Mining. On paper it appeared that all the shares of the company had been owned by Hartmann, but a closer look revealed that a majority of stock was held as collateral for large personal loans to Hartmann by a second company, this one operating out of Switzerland under the name Edelstein Malder Genf SA-Gemstone Brokers of Geneva.

Edelstein Malder Genf did business with only one other company: Makelaar Steen Amsterdam-Gem Brokers of Amsterdam, and they were doing a great deal of business. Matheson had laughed out loud when he made the final connection. Hartmann hadn’t struck gold on the Kotto River; he’d found diamonds, and lots of them, although not quite enough to wake the sleeping bloodhounds of De Beers.

Over a period of fifteen years Hartmann managed to accumulate a huge fortune, but his only obvious use of the money was the building of a bizarre estate in the middle of the jungle that looked remarkably like the home of a wealthy Bavarian farmer. Called Lowenshalle-the Lion’s Lair-it overlooked the Kotto River and the mist-clouded, three-forked waterfall a mile or so upstream.

Hartmann’s covert diamond trading practice was interrupted only by World War Two, but by 1950 a series of severe heart attacks made his life in Lowenshalle impossible. Within a few months he had abandoned everything, smuggling his last consignment of diamonds in the false base of an oxygen bottle as he returned to Europe. In Lowenshalle his few native servants drifted away, returning to their villages. The estate was stripped of any obvious valuables and the jungle quickly began to inexorably swallow up everything that Hartmann had built.

Back in Europe, Hartmann consolidated his holdings into a single limited trust, then settled into a retirement home in the Bavarian village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he spent his last few years writing out the story and the secrets of his life in what would become almost a hundred copybooks like the one on Matheson’s desk. Upon his death, with no heirs, the notebooks became the property of Hartmann’s trust, and the trust in turn became the property of Matheson Resource Industries when, decades later, it purchased Kotto Fluss Bergau from the Swiss bank that managed Hartmann’s interests. At no time, since the initial incorporation of Kotto River Mining and its attendant distribution companies, was there anything mentioned in writing or in rumor of any mining operations on the Lowenshalle estate or anywhere nearby. Like so many other stories hidden in the vaults and safety-deposit boxes of so many banks around the world, it would have probably stayed that way until the end of time if it hadn’t been for a few simple twists of fate.