Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“Almost enough to make you believe in God.” Matheson grunted softly to himself. There was a gentle double tap on his door. “Enter,” he said. The door opened and Major Allen Faulkener stepped into the room.

“Yes?” Matheson said briskly.

“I thought you’d like to know,” said the security officer, “Harris is in play.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t bugger it up this time,” said Matheson. “If he’d done it right on the Khartoum highway we wouldn’t be in this position now.”

“He’s got six of the Sinclair woman’s ‘specials’ with him, and they’ve got their orders. If he does bugger it up he knows what’ll happen to him,” said Faulkener.

“Excellent.” Matheson nodded. “Once we’ve dealt with Holliday and his interfering friends perhaps we could give some thought to President Kolingba’s successor.”

The smell of cooking fish was mouthwatering. Samir, in his role as chef, had rolled the thick deboned catfish steaks in cornmeal and dropped them into a quarter inch of dark palm oil. The oil seethed in the bottom of a big cast-iron frying pan on one of the two burners on the wood-burning cookstove that stood on a firebrick base on the forward deck of the Pevensey . The other burner was being used to brown thick circles of sweet potato. The elderly Sudanese man deftly flipped the slabs of fish and potatoes with a homemade sheet-metal spatula. A pile of kindling in a sagging wire basket was stacked beside him along with a hatchet in case he needed to feed the stove.

While Samir cooked, his boiler room partner, Bakri, took over in the wheelhouse and Jean-Paul, the third member of the crew, poled the river, calling out the depth of water under the steam barge’s flat-bottomed keel. It was early and mist still twisted in ghostly trails over the river, the sun a bright hammered bronze disk rising over the ragged fog hanging above the lush jungle trees to the east.

“We’ll find some shade in a few hours and wait out the worst of the sun,” suggested Eddie. Samir flipped a golden brown catfish fillet and a scoop of sweet potatoes onto a tin plate and gave it to his boss, but Eddie gallantly handed it over to Peggy instead. She ate a tentative morsel of the fish and her eyes widened.

“It’s delicious,” she said. She speared a fried piece of sweet potato onto her fork and popped it into her mouth. “Wonderful!” Samir smiled happily and began filling the rest of the plates.

“The giraffe catfish isn’t like the mud-fish bottom-feeders in America,” said Eddie. “It prefers to eat plant material, so the taste is usually fresher.” He laughed. “In Cuba now they think the catfish is an agent of the devil god, Babalu Aye, because he can walk overland on his fins, but they eat him anyway.”

Holliday sensed it before he heard it, and heard it before he saw it. As he took his plate from Samir some instinct and perhaps a fleeting glint seen out of the corner of his eye made him suddenly tense and twist around on the plastic milk crate he was using as a seat. He squinted, looking for something he wasn’t quite sure was there, and then he saw it: a phantom in the mist above the trees, the first flash of sunlight reflecting off the windscreen of a low-flying aircraft. A small plane, maybe a Cessna Caravan, tricked out with floats and painted dark green to blend in with the jungle treetops.

A split second later he spotted a bright double flash from under the wings followed by a strangely clipped, hollow whoosh , like the abruptly terminated sound of a bullet striking water at high speed. The sound was horribly familiar: a pair of underwing Hellfire air-to-ground missiles being fired-forty pounds of fire-and-forget high explosive coming at them at roughly a thousand miles an hour.

“Incoming!” Holliday bellowed. And almost before the warning was out of his mouth the Hellfires struck. Used by a skilled operator, the AGM-114 Hellfire could be aimed through the open window of a moving vehicle. In the case of the two missiles aimed at the Pevensey , one struck the rear wall of the lounge behind the wheelhouse and the second exploded in the boiler room simultaneously, putting a ragged hole the size of a car door through the bottom of the old barge.

Bakri, standing in the wheelhouse, was vaporized on the spot. As the Pevensey suddenly lurched with the impact of the two missiles, Jean-Paul, standing in the bow with his pole, was thrown into the river, and Samir, crouched in front of his frying pans, had his ribs crushed as the stove tipped over on him, then was turned into a human torch as the furiously boiling cooking oil spilled onto his head, neck and chest. Samir’s thin cotton clothing and his hair burst into flame as the blackened, crackling firewood spilled out of the overturned stove and he died, his bubbling scream choked off as his mouth and throat filled with the burning oil.

Sitting on the starboard side of the barge Holliday instinctively threw himself toward Peggy and Rafi, his outstretched arms bowling them over as a hail of cast iron, glass and wood debris flew over them. Pevensey , helm gone, swung hard into the current, then almost tipped over as the surging water poured into the gaping hole in her bottom.

Holliday had a brief glimpse of the aircraft as it roared overhead. He hit the river, automatically assessing: a Cessna Caravan 208. Nine passengers, but six or seven was more likely with the Hellfire payload. The water closed over his head as he was pushed down toward the stony bottom, his vision cut in half by the silt-heavy current. Then he remembered.

Crocodiles.

The Nile version, up to twenty feet long and sometimes weighing as much as a ton-bronze, the green-yellow-and-dirty-purple prehistoric horrors-could travel up to forty miles an hour if they were hungry enough. They had sixty-eight cone-shaped teeth and a bite force of five thousand pounds per square inch. They sometimes hunted in packs of five or more and had been known to take down a four-thousand-pound black rhinoceros. An average-sized human being would be little more than a hors d’oeuvre.

Holliday flailed his way frantically back to the surface. He was being swept along with the current along with the remains of the Pevensey . He shook the water out of his eyes and spotted Rafi struggling to drag an unconscious Peggy toward the shore. Captain Eddie was already there, hauling himself up the muddy bank. The half-submerged wire kindling basket whirled by and Holliday reached out and levered the hatchet out of the top piece of firewood. On the shore Captain Eddie yelled out a warning.

“ ?Detras de usted! Behind you!”

A huge, surging creature was powering its way toward him, massive armored tail swirling, its dead dinosaur eyes barely breaking the surface of the swiftly flowing river. Almost immediately Holliday realized that the grotesque creature had its attention elsewhere-it was racing toward Peggy as Rafi and Captain Eddie tried to haul her out of the water.

Holliday twisted away to one side like a matador playing a bull and backhanded the blade of the hatchet into the creature’s eye. The crocodile reared up, making a terrible, deep-throated bellowing sound. Holliday managed to jerk the hatchet out of the animal’s eye and struck out for the shore as the wounded creature rolled away from him. He reached the shallows and staggered to his feet as Captain Eddie came back down the bank and held out one hand.

“I would advise you to be a little quicker, senor,” said the Cuban. He jerked Holliday up onto the muddy shore, sweeping the big bowie knife out of its sheath. As Holliday stumbled up the bank he turned and saw Eddie lunging forward and driving the heavy blade up to the hilt high between the eyes of the already half-blinded giant that had been seeking its revenge.