Paul Christopher - The Templar Legion

There were more explosions coming from the direction of the airport. He rolled down the window and craned his neck, looking back the way he’d come. The sky was on fire.

With the window still open he paused and cocked an ear. He knew the sound. Outboard engines, lots of them.

“Goddamn!” he whispered. They were coming up the river! He stared out through the windshield. Directly in front of him was the entire Kukuanaland navy, the single rigid inflatable defended by an old Russian machine gun. He barely paused to think about what he was doing. He drove the last few yards down to the docks and began humping the suitcases out of the back of the Rover and into the patrol boat, keeping an ear out for the approaching outboards coming from the other direction.

By the eighth suitcase he was sweating and the engine noise was too close for comfort. He abandoned the rest of the cases, untied the boat from the old wooden bollard and hit the ignition button on the engine. It coughed, coughed again and died. The engines from downriver were getting closer.

“Go, you bitch!” he hissed. He hit the button again, there was another greasy cough and then the engine caught. Grinning through the sweat pouring from his brow, he gunned the engine, turned the wheel hard and hauled the boat upriver. There was nothing in that direction but bush and jungle. He’d hide there for a night or two, then slip down the river to freedom. He eased the throttle forward and turned the boat through a large curve in the night-black river.

And saw a nightmare. If front of him, no more than a hundred yards away, there was a monstrous dragonheaded ship coming right at him, oars like the huge legs of some unearthly water bug rising and falling in perfect cadence with a giant cross-scribed sail billowing over everything.

“No,” he said, wide-eyed. How could a Viking ship, of all things, be here, on this river, now? It was impossible. And in that instant he knew he wasn’t getting out of this one alive.

The white-feathered dart caught him at the base of the throat. The neurotoxin hit his brain within two seconds. He had just enough time to raise the Rolex to his face before he died.

Gash didn’t see the Sea Dragon as it swept around the bend in the river; nor did he see Edimburgo Vladimir Cabrera Alfonso standing at the bow with his Fidelito unlimbered in his arms, singing quietly to himself.

Beside him Holliday waited. They made the turn and kept on sweeping downriver, all sixty oars lifted from the water now, carried only by the current. With the first pink light of dawn at their backs they saw the oncoming Zodiacs, twenty of them, spread in an arrogant line across the river almost from bank to bank. In the stern of the Sea Dragon , Loki, standing at the steering oar, gave a single, loudly shouted order.

“Strybord!” Thirty starboard oars hit the water as one and held there, the men on their benches straining at the current as the Sea Dragon turned her broadside to the looming inflatables, each filled with well-armed men.

Holliday and Eddie began to fire, the AK making its distinctive death rattle and the Fidelito sounding like fifty noisy doors slamming.

“Brand ambroster!” Loki yelled. At fifty yards each of the huge ballistas found its mark, ripping into the Zodiacs and their occupants, sinking thirty-five of the rubber boats. The heavy packs worn by most of the men dragged them under the black water to drown. Crocodiles slid silently from their perches on the riverbanks to slaughter the rest. The few Zodiacs managing to escape the initial barrage were slammed into by the Sea Dragon and crushed under her hull. A very few soldiers still in the water were finished off by dozens of blowguns on board.

“ Adios , pioneers,” Eddie whispered, jacking the empty magazine out of the shotgun.

Loki called out the order, the oars dipped and Sea Dragon turned in toward shore.

At first it seemed like a rout. There hadn’t been a single survivor at the airport and Lanz hadn’t lost a man, but he was worried. According to Zodiacs A and B, the two inflatables waiting with the amphibians, everything had proceeded on schedule right up to the time the other half of Lanz’s force was supposed to land and make its way inland to the compound. There had been a few garbled messages, some scattered gunfire and then a single transmission about a Viking dragon that no one understood.

By the time Lanz and his men reached the compound it was clear that all hell was breaking loose. A few crazed townspeople were talking about ghosts and silent death, and instead of having to break through the compound with mortar fire, as they’d expected, the entire compound simply threw open the gates and asked to be taken prisoner, something Lanz hadn’t been prepared for.

He discovered Kolingba asleep in his bed, obviously drugged, and without any orders from Matheson he simply handcuffed the snoring dictator to his bedpost.

He tried to radio Nagoupande’s party, which was being helicoptered in from Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria, but so far he hadn’t been able to raise them. In the end he simply let the garrison go, collecting all their weapons first, then posted pickets and sat back and waited for Matheson and the new dictator of Kukuanaland to arrive.

By five a.m. there was still no sign of the two hundred men coming in from the river, and their mysterious absence was starting to make his own men nervous. They were beginning to talk about pulling back to the airport, which was not a good sign.

Half an hour later the first reports of mysterious deaths began to reach Lanz in the compound, where he was busily digging the rest of the cash out of Kolingba’s office wall and stashing it in his senior officers’ packs as a bonus. Pickets and guards around the square were turning up dead, unwounded except for something that looked like an oversized blowgun dart. At first Lanz didn’t believe it, but one of the few men left outside the compound brought one to him.

“What do you think, Pierre?” Lanz asked, turning to his old friend and colleague Laframboise.

“My honest opinion, Konrad?”

“As always.”

“This is your ghost, Limbani. I sent a patrol down to the river, six men. Two came back-one babbling and feverish from some kind of blowgun dart that had grazed his leg through his trousers, the other one talking about a dragon boat like the Vikings once used.”

“That’s insane,” said Lanz.

“They say there’s a Viking ship on the river and our Zodiac teams have vanished. They say there are ghost walkers, griots and sorcerers in masks, killing our men with darts, and there you are.” He pointed to the dart on what had once been Kolingba’s desk.

“What do you suggest?”

“How much money did you find in that wall? Twenty, thirty million?”

“Something like that.”

“Then we get out while we can, what’s left of us. We make a flag of truce and march out of this compound and hope we aren’t murdered as we go.”

“Matheson? Nagoupande?”

“It’s their bed; let them lie in it.”

When the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter made a pinpoint landing in the center of what had been the Fourandao garrison compound at six thirty a.m., there wasn’t a soul in sight. Brigadier General Francois Nagoupande, dressed in full uniform, and Sir James Matheson climbed out of the helicopter accompanied by eight heavily armed members of Blackhawk Security as bodyguards.

Papers fluttered in the wind, including several dozen American hundred-dollar bills. Several dead bodies littered the ground, but there wasn’t a living human being anywhere.

“Find out what the bloody hell is going on!” Matheson snarled at the Blackhawk Security force. The men ran off in various directions to search the buildings. A moment later one returned.