Paul Christopher: The Templar Legion

Criminal enterprise in Bangui was already controlled by a number of tribally centered gangs that enforced their rule with machetes, so Gashabi-Gash decided to travel into his own heart of darkness and went up-country by steamer on the Kottu River to the Kukuanaland town of Fourandao.

Fourandao had once been a French colonial town best known for its cocoa and tobacco plantations, both crops controlled by the old Portuguese family that had given the town its name. The town, a collection of one-and two-story mud-brick buildings with corrugated iron roofs, sprawled untidily along the banks of the Kottu for half a mile or so, and straggled into the surrounding jungle toward the distant Bakouma hills that marked the border with Sudan and Chad.

Oliver Gash arrived at the Fourandao docks early one morning to find the small city in the midst of a revolution. By the early afternoon, seeing which way the wind was blowing, he had allied himself with the forces of the KNRA, the Kukuanaland National Revolutionary Alliance, led by an upstart lieutenant in FACA, the Forces Armees Centrafricaines, named Solomon Kolingba. The actual governor of the territory, a doctor named Amobe Limbani, a member of the Yakima minority, fled into the jungle, never to be heard from again.

By late evening Oliver Gash had been made a full colonel by the newly minted General Kolingba, and by midnight Gash and Kolingba were celebrating the birth of the Kukuanaland nation with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne liberated from the bar of the Hotel Trianon in the town’s central square, now grandly renamed the Plaza de Revolution de Generale Kolingba.

The following day Gash and Kolingba got down to business. Due to various and sundry wars, political upheavals and criminal restructurings around the world, the normal trade routes for heroin at various levels of refinement were no longer available. Using his contacts within the United States, Oliver Gash suggested to Kolingba that Kukuanaland become the new Marseilles, acting as a refinement and distribution center for highgrade narcotics, then branching out into the small-arms trade, contract terrorism, blood-diamond marketing, large-scale money laundering and an assortment of other disagreeable but profitable occupations that would make the open city of Fourandao into the new home of Gangster, Incorporated. A 1930s Chicago for the twenty-first century. The American dream in the middle of an equatorial African jungle.

It worked beyond Olivier Gashabi’s wildest expectations. Fourandao and the surrounding area had flourished. The airport had been refurbished with extended runways for private jets, and the ragtag army had been issued brand-new uniforms and new weapons, all donated by the General Armament Department of the Chinese government. The Chinese were also putting in a proper filtration plant for Fourandao and paving the surrounding roads. Oliver Gash had discovered a surprising talent for politics and diplomacy; as it turned out they had a lot in common with crime. In Africa, as anywhere else, corruption and greed in the realm of politics was a way of life; the only difference was that in Africa it was expected and accepted.

Eventually the bumblebee-painted Rover reached the tumbledown docks of the town. A few barges were being loaded with fruit and bales of rubber for the long trip downriver but they were really no more than protective cover for the loads of drugs, weapons and other illicit goods distributed out of the harsh jungle country. Docked ahead of the barges was the single boat in Kukuanaland’s navy-a donated thirty-five-foot river patrol boat from the Djibouti navy equipped with a fifty-horsepower Evinrude and a leaky cabin. Its only armament was a single Kord heavy machine gun left over from a Russian delegation that managed to offload it to Kolingba in the early days of his regime. When the general was in a particularly sporty mood he and Gash and a quartet of bodyguards would go fishing in the boat and hunt crocodiles with the machine gun.

The only thing worrying Gash as he drove along the waterfront was a recent meeting he’d had in Bangui with one of the more corrupt bankers in the city. The man had asked Gash what he thought about his future if Kolingba was no longer a factor. The man’s meaning was clear-if Kolingba was removed, would Gash be willing to take his place? At the meeting Gash had been noncommittal-the banker could easily have been a trap set by Kolingba himself-but on another level the question had nagged. Gash hadn’t survived this long by being stupid; he knew perfectly well that African dictators had the life spans of fruit flies, so perhaps now was the time to start considering an escape route if worse came to worst. He bribed everyone worth bribing and continued to do so, giving him an intricate web of ears to the ground within Kolingba’s inner circle, but maybe he should be doing something more.

Gash turned the truck up the road to the center of town, passing tin-roofed shacks and open-fronted stores selling everything from bicycles to knockoff handbags and long Chicago Bulls T-shirts.

He finally reached the square and turned toward the compound that had once been home to the Fourandao family and was now the presidential compound. Kolingba had wanted to call it the Royal Compound, but Gash convinced him that although he was king, he was also the president, and calling himself that to the outside world would result in his being taken more seriously.

Essentially the compound was a high-walled fort, cement and straw under a layer of yellowing stucco with a wooden parapet and a pair of heavy oak doors. Inside the compound there was the presidential residence along one side, a barracks along the other and a mess hall, armory and jail cells along the back wall. Two guards who stood outside the gate carried stubby little Chang Feng submachine guns. Gash knew that the magazines in the weapons were empty, as were the weapons within the compound-all except those belonging to Kolingba and his two personal bodyguards, both of whom were his younger brothers.

Seeing the Rover come into the square, the two guards snapped to attention and the gates magically opened as he approached. A quick phone call from one of the dockside warehouses would have warned the gate guards of his approach and they would have been ready and waiting. A guard who had failed to open the gate quickly enough had been placed in the wooden strangling scaffold that had replaced the bronze statue of Ambrosio Fourandao in the center of the square, while the rest of the townspeople were forced to watch. A rope was threaded through holes in the neck piece of the scaffold, then twisted around a metal pole at the back, slowly and very painfully choking the life out of the man.

Kolingba had watched from the parapet of the compound as the executioner drew out the process over more than an hour, choking and releasing until a nod from Kolingba finally put the man out of his misery. It was the kind of thing that gave Oliver Gash the creeps but the money was too good to complain. Another year and he’d have enough to slip out of the madman’s clutches and disappear forever. Like it or not, the king of Kukuanaland was as crazy as a box of crackers and, like any wild beast, he was capable of turning on you at any time. Dealing with the man was like walking a high wire over Niagara Falls. But the money just was so damned good.

Gash parked the Land Rover in front of the presidential residence, then went up the three wide steps to the covered veranda. There was a distinct colonial flavor to the porch, complete with wicker armchairs for the plantation owners to sit on in the cool of the evening with their tall gin drinks as they complained about the heat and the lack of civilized pursuits.

The two guards at the front doors snapped to attention as Gash went by, their eyes wide with terror. Gash went up the stairs to the second floor of the building and found his way to Kolingba’s study, which overlooked the compound.