Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

“Yes,” said Faulkener. “We have done so already.”

“And his response?”

“Anything that can remove the Kolingba threat and promises a uniform with lots of medals, and he’s your man. Rather like an Idi Amin in the rough.”

“He wants money, too, I presume.”

“By his standards a great deal, but to MRI it would be pocket change. We also have to promise him an escape route and a bank account in Switzerland when the inevitable revolution arrives. He’s an idiot, but he’s no fool, if you know what I mean.”

“We’ll have to strike a special company. Something with a very large initial offering that has long since fallen into decline. One of the early copper mines in the Philippines. Preferably something suitably colonial. Dutch or Belgian. I want us to have absolute control and no transparency.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” said Faulkener. “What about Nagoupande?”

“I’d like to meet with him as soon as possible,” Matheson said.

“Easy enough to arrange, I should think,” said Faulkener.

“Send him the private jet,” said Matheson. “That should impress him.” His smile broadened. “Perhaps we should get him fitted up at Gieves and Hawkes, then bring him to the meeting when Lanz is ready.”

“Medals?”

“As many as you can find. Make him look like a bloody king.”

There was a good reason for the logo of Blackhawk Security being the proud carved bow figurehead of a Viking longboat: Lars Thorvaldsson, the founder of Blackhawk, had considered himself a modern-day Viking. Lars had made billions over the years, and had always said he’d found inspiration from his Viking ancestors. According to him, he was directly related to Leif Erikson, through his father, Erik Thorvaldsson, otherwise known as Erik the Red.

It was Lars who came up with the motto, “We founded America; now we keep her safe,” and as the company grew so did the Viking tradition. Blackhawk’s first television advertisement aired during the halftime break for the Super Bowl VI in 1972, showing a wooden ship with a Blackhawk figurehead landing on the Duluth waterfront, along with a Viking in a horned helmet blowing the traditional Gjallarhorn, the calling horn of the traditional Norse sagas.

With the death of Lars Thorvaldsson in 1989 and the subsequent purchase of the company by the multinational corporation owned by Kate Sinclair combined with the beginning of the elder Bush’s Iraq war, Blackhawk Security grew even larger, and so did the Viking tradition. There were seminars on Viking core values of strength, honor and pride for senior executives, Viking workshops of various kinds for midlevel employees, Viking reenactments for the whole family and Viking summer camp for the kids. Kate Sinclair even built the World of the Vikings theme park near the Mall of America, not far from Lars Thorvaldsson’s original office in Bloomington, Minnesota.

In light of their heavy Viking indoctrination, it was hardly surprising that the seven-man Blackhawk intrusion team, led by Michael Pierce Harris, had decided that they would approach their objective in the “old Viking way.” Perhaps they even saw themselves as the mythical “gray ghosts,” the dusk trolls who came out of the fading light wearing their Galdrastafir, the runish emblems that made them invisible. Whatever it was they were thinking, it didn’t work.

They came in two dugouts, three in one, four in the other, with Harris the last man out of the second canoe. The light was failing, just as Holliday had hoped. At a glance the clearing looked empty, although it was obvious from the tracks up the muddy bank and the salvaged wreckage that this was where the survivors of the Hellfire attack had climbed out of the water.

All seven men, Harris included, were wearing full jungle camouflage BDUs, paratrooper boots and jungle camo slouch hats. They were armed with Heckler amp; Koch MP5s, Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistols and eight-inch KA-BAR knives. Several also carried M67 hand grenades on Sam Brownes looped over their shoulders. Harris carried a Glock 9 instead of a Browning.

The seven men came up the muddy riverbank yelling loudly. The quickest one up the slope died first. A two-foot-long arrow shot from Holliday’s rudimentary English longbow caught him just left of the heart and penetrated to his spine. The arrow had been fletched with duct-tape feathers and the point was just fire-hardened wood. Nevertheless at one hundred and eight foot-pounds per square inch of force it was just as lethal as the MP5 he never got to fire.

Numbers two and three stepped on muddy cardboard packing laid out on the riverbank, dropping down into a shallow pit onto twenty-four Ginsu steak knives.

The fourth man made it to the top of the bank, where Holliday’s second homemade arrow pierced his groin, slicing into his bladder and intestine. Lying flat in the jungle foliage a few yards to the right, just out of the clearing, Captain Eddie saw that the man was still alive and dangerous. He hurled himself forward out of the bushes in a diving tackle, hitting the wounded man waist high. He drove the bowie knife underhanded into the man’s belly, then sawed upward under the ribs, slicing into the right lung and finally piercing the heart.

Seeing the odds so drastically reduced within less than a minute, Harris veered into the jungle, trying to put as much distance between the clearing and himself as quickly as possible. The remaining members of Harris’s team were right behind him, the Viking code forgotten. With an arrow already notched and drawn Holliday let fly. The hardened point of the arrow struck Harris between the first and second cervical vertebra and without the cutting point of a steel head the arrow slipped sideways and punctured the internal carotid artery before jerking upward and piercing the tongue. Harris was paralyzed instantly, fell to his knees and watched mutely as his lifeblood poured from his mouth onto the dark rich earth of the jungle floor.

In the clearing Holliday tossed the longbow aside and pulled the MP5 out of one dead man’s loosened grip. He fired a burst in the direction of the fleeing men, but managed only to clip the foliage above their heads.

There was a sudden, stunned silence. Rafi and Peggy stared at the bodies, paying particular attention to their own grisly handiwork. Captain Eddie went from dead man to dead man, stripping their weapons, their floppy slouch hats and finally their paratrooper boots.

“Their shoes?” Rafi queried, stunned at the Cuban’s methodical concentration.

“The floor of the jungle can be very dangerous for your feet,” said Eddie.

“He’s right,” said Holliday, who was pulling the bodies from the hidden knife pit. Each knife came out of the dead flesh with soft, almost obscene sucking noises. Holliday began stripping both men. “Give us a hand,” he instructed. “The quicker we get this done the sooner we can get out of here.”

They gathered up anything useful, left the bodies and headed down the riverbank to the two dugouts. As they climbed into the crudely built canoes it began to rain.

“Wonderful.” Holliday grunted, pushing his dugout away from the shore. “Just what we needed.”

Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre sat in his bedroom and stared through the viewfinder of the Canon EOS 5D at the hotel across from him. The Ali Pasha Hotel was on Clapham Street, just off the Brixton Road in south London.

The policeman could imagine the interior: six floors of tiny rooms and toilets the size of cupboards. Narrow stairways, peeling wallpaper and groaning pipes. Bedbugs, roaches and mice. Ten thousand places in London just like it. Anonymity defined.

The whole area was unofficially known as the capital of Afro-Caribbean England and it was easy enough for Saint-Sylvestre to fit in as long as he kept a check on his university-educated accent.