Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

"What the hell is he doing?" Rafi said urgently, his voice tense.

Holliday didn't bother responding. His hand hovered over the knob. He panicked for a moment, wondering if the knob pulled out or pressed in. He finally decided it pulled out and prayed that he was right. A wrong decision and he and Rafi would be blown to kingdom come.

Tidyman reached the other truck. Above the sound of the idling engine Holliday could hear the Egyptian's voice speaking in deliberately loud Arabic, his hands still high above his head. Someone in the truck responded. Tidyman did a slow pirouette.

"Checking him for weapons," said Holliday.

Tidyman completed his turn, then stopped, hands still high. There was a curt order from inside the other truck. Tidyman walked over to the driver's side and bent down slightly, talking with whoever was inside.

Holliday tensed, sensing something in Tidyman's movement.

The Egyptian's hands dropped abruptly, something glinting as it slid out of the sleeve of his jacket.

Holliday hit the lights.

The blinding beams lit up the other truck and Holliday had a brief impression of Tidyman's hand sweeping in the side window of the vehicle. A split second later a gun appeared in his other hand and there was the barking sound of a single shot being fired. The man at the machine gun didn't even have an instant to respond; he simply crumpled into the bed of the truck as Tidyman's other hand withdrew through the driver's-side window, the dripping blood on the long blade of the knife he held black in the headlights. The whole thing was over in the blink of an eye.

"Dear God!" Rafi whispered, horrified.

Tidyman walked away from the truck, wiping the blade on the leg of his pants. He came back to the Goat and leaned through Rafi's open window. The young archaeologist recoiled in horror.

"You killed them!"

"Of course I killed them," snapped Tidyman, sounding angry for the first time since they'd met. "As they would have killed you. This is the real world, my friend, not some theoretical position argued in a debate. There is no morality in this business. They were the enemy." He looked across at Holliday. "I'm going to drive their vehicle off the track and behind that group of rocks on the left. I'll need some help with the bodies. If they're not buried the birds will come and lead anyone to them. If we are lucky the search parties won't find them for a while."

"I'll come," said Holliday.

Tidyman opened up the back of the Goat and took out his pack as well as something that looked like a paint roller and a mop handle. He screwed the handle onto the roller.

"What's that for?" Holliday asked.

"Cleaning up tire tracks," answered Tidyman. "Got the idea from stories my father used to tell me."

"Is that really necessary?" Holliday said. "Won't the wind do it for us?"

"In 1927 a man named Ralph Bagnold crossed the Libyan desert by automobile. He was the first commandant of the LRDG. You can still see the tire tracks from his expedition if you know where to look." He shook his head. "The sand crust has a great deal of salt mixed with it and is quite friable. Some parts of the desert are very unforgiving." The Egyptian put the roller device over his shoulder and headed off into the darkness. Holliday followed.

It was almost midnight by the time they finished. When they were done they trudged back to the Goat, where Rafi awaited them. Before reentering the truck Tidyman took a flashlight from his pack and turned it on. He swept the beam around the area. The tracks were gone; there was no sign that the other truck had even existed.

"Not perfect; they'll tumble to it eventually," said Tidyman. "But it will do for now." He tucked the flashlight into his pack and got behind the wheel again. This time Rafi sat by the door rather than rub shoulders with the Egyptian. Tidyman started up the truck and headed onward again. They drove on in silence, the steep sloping walls of the sand hills gathering around them. The moon began to rise.

"How soon?" Holliday asked finally.

"Not long," said Tidyman. "Almost there."

And suddenly they were there. Coming through a narrow passage between two rearing slabs of wind-carved sandstone they saw the town of Al-Jaghbub in the distance far below them, looking like a child's clay model, the bleached houses and walls smoothed by time, some crumbling and some no more than ancient foundation stones. In the middle of the town, like a jewel in the center of a crown, the dome of a mosque and its accompanying minaret rose above the buildings around it. Holliday was astounded to see that kind of sophisticated architecture in such an out-of-the-way location.

"The mosque of Muhammad bin Ali As Sanusi. He is buried there," said Tidyman, reading Holliday's thoughts. "This was the capital of the Sanusi movement and he was its founder. It is little known now but some scholars mark it as the birth-place of Radical Islam, precursor to the creatures who brought us 9/11."

To the north they could see the oasis itself, a dense green shadow of date palm trees and small fields of grain. On the south side of the old walled town, separated by a distinct end to any vegetation at all, was the Great Sand Sea, an endless vista of elegant waves, frozen by some celestial wizard, never breaking on the shore, creeping forward inch by inexorable inch through the millennia. The moon stood high in the late-night sky, turning everything to shades of cold black shadow and golden sand.

"It's beautiful," said Rafi, speaking for the first time since the death of the two men in the other truck.

"And to us it's very dangerous," warned Tidyman.

"Then why are we here?" Rafi asked belligerently.

"We're not," answered Tidyman.

"Then where the hell are we going?"

"Nowhere," answered Tidyman obscurely. He put the Goat in gear again and turned southeast, heading out into the sea of dunes following the snaking line of troughs, working directly away from the town.

"Where exactly are we going?" Holliday asked.

"Exactly?" Tidyman answered. "We're going to twenty-eight degrees forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds north by twenty-three degrees forty-six minutes and ten seconds east." He paused. "Exactly."

"And what, exactly, are we going to find there?" Rafi asked.

"I told you," answered Tidyman with a secretive smile. "Your heart's desire."

They drove on through the night, stopping every now and again for toilet duty and once to gas up. They ate on the run, chewing their way through cheese and pita sandwiches wrapped in foil, made up for them by the hotel in Siwa. Holliday kept an eye on the GPS unit in his hand and finally, with the sun rising on their right, they reached the coordinates the Egyptian had described.

"We're here, give or take a hundred yards or so," said Holliday. There was nothing to see but the undulating sand and a single spine of sandstone directly in front of them. Tidyman drove ahead, then turned around the base of the stone obstruction.

"Holy crap," said Holliday, borrowing one of Peggy's favorite expressions.

There in front of them, like a giant's favorite toy that had been cast aside, was the broken remains of an airplane, the tail section at right angles to the fuselage. It had a bubble nose, the Plexiglas clouded by the passage of time, and a second turret just behind the cockpit. Holliday knew there would be a bottom ball turret in the sand below. It was a World War II B-17 bomber, the star and bar of the United States Air Force still just barely visible on the portside wing. There was a unit identification number on the tail section: a boxed letter G, a line of numbers and then an open letter E below. The numbers were still clearly visible: 230336.

As they neared the wreckage of the old aircraft the sun climbed above it and they could make out the faded nose art on the fuselage just beneath the cockpit: a finned bomb shaped like a valentine heart with the italicized name curved below the design-Your Heart's Desire.