Lost City of the Templars (5 page)

Eddie spent the next day and a half going up the Rio Negro, then swinging carefully onto the much narrower and much muddier Rio Xeruini. Both sides of the river were covered with dense jungle that reached the banks.

“According to Fawcett the river was full of fish,” said Holliday, standing on the bridge with Eddie as the SS
Amador
steamed slowly upriver heading north, the paddlewheel throwing up a brown-black wake of mud and ooze.

“Our Indian friends seemed to have discovered this already,” Eddie replied, nodding his chin down toward the main deck. Tanaki and Nenderu, his grandfather, were gutting an enormous fish that must have been six or seven feet long before the two men starting slicing it up.

“What the hell is it?” Holliday said.

“Tanaki said it’s an arapaima,” answered Rafi, stepping through the bridge doorway carrying a string bag full of dripping cans of Caracu and Brahma beer. “It’s a living fossil. Nenderu says he’s seen them ten feet long.”

“How did they catch it?”

“Tanaki speared it. He’s says there’s enough for everyone on board with leftovers for breakfast tomorrow.”

They stood, drinking beer and watching the muddy river and the jungle-choked banks moving slowly by.

Rafi took one of the volumes of the photocopied journals out of one of the innumerable pockets in his old Israeli Army fatigue jacket and flipped through it. “This must be the greatest case of misdirection in history. All three of his previous expeditions went south, but the fourth one goes north even though everyone thinks she’s going south again.”

“Initially I don’t think it was misdirection. I think he found something else other than the three ships sent west full of treasure,” said Holliday, taking a healthy sip of the cold beer.

“Such as?”

“He went to three places to do his research: the maritime archives in Spain, the maritime archives in Portugal and the archives in Venice. Most of the ships built, purchased or leased were owned by the Zeno bothers, Antonio and Nicolo. The family had a monopoly on all ships going to the Holy Land.” Holliday took another hit from the can of beer. “He made a notation on the flyleaf of the journal on the page where he describes his trip to Venice, on the Orient Express, no less. I still haven’t figured it out.”

“What volume is it in?” Rafi asked.

“Two.”

“Give me five minutes,” said Rafi, and disappeared. He was back in four. “Is this it?”

“That’s the one,” said Holliday. He took the stapled photocopy from Rafi and flipped through the pages. “There,” he said, pointing. The notation read:

P.D.A.TS 3731

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Beats me.” Holliday shrugged.

“May I see it?” Eddie asked. Rafi handed it over to the Cuban, who read it and then laughed. “No one noticed there was no period between
S
and
T
?”

“What difference would that make?” Rafi asked.

“Read the whole thing backward,” Eddie said. “It is a children’s code.”

“ST.A.D.P. 1373,” Rafi said after a few seconds. “I still don’t get it.”

“That is because you did not have a Catholic mother who dragged her youngest child to Mass even though Fidel forbid it.”

“Tell us, then.”

“San Antonio di Padua, patron saint of lost things, and my mother was always losing me because I was always running away.”

“A Templar ship in 1373? That’s almost seventy years before the treasure ships left Portugal.”

“Was he famous for finding anything in particular?” Holliday asked.

Eddie nodded. “Most often he is associated with the
Arca de la Alianza
.”

“The Ark of the Covenant,” whispered Rafi.

“
Sí,
” said Eddie.

“Holy shit,” said Rafi.

A red speck appeared directly in front of them almost at eye level. Holliday could hear the distant grinding roar of turboprop engines. “A plane, flying low,” he said, squinting ahead. It slowly resolved itself into a high-winged, narrow flying boat. There was suddenly a series of twinkling lights on both wings.

“No! No de nuevo!”
Eddie growled. He turned to Rafi. “Take the wheel!”

Rafi did as he was told as Eddie turned and slammed open the door of the pilothouse cabin. He came out a few seconds later carrying the Stoner automatic rifle, the FN Maximi and two heavy belt ammunition boxes. He dropped the ammunition boxes out from under one arm and handed both weapons to Holliday. Eddie pushed up the trapdoor in the pilothouse roof and boosted himself through.

“It looks like a water bomber,” said Rafi as the bloodred aircraft approached.

“You see any forest fires?” Holliday asked. “And when does a water bomber have machine guns in its wings?”

“What do I do?”

“Head for the shore. Try to run her aground.”

Eddie’s strong black arm appeared through the trapdoor and Holliday handed him the weapons and the ammo boxes one by one, then followed them through the opening. He boosted himself up and took the Maximi from Eddie, who was gripping the automatic rifle. Directly ahead of them the red boat-hulled bomber was almost skimming the water, the double machine guns in each of the high-slung wings now chewing into the bow of the riverboat.

“She comes very low, this aircraft,” said Eddie, feeding a belt into the left-hand receiver of his weapon. Holliday did the same for the Maximi.

“The Canadair has a payload of about six tons. If it drops a load of water and muck directly onto us, it’ll crush this old barge to matchsticks.”

“Then we must not allow this to happen, must we,
compadre
?” grunted Eddie, giving his friend a wink. “Which part of this flying duck would you like to eat first, my friend?”

“I’ll take the cockpit. You go for the props. Together maybe we can do some damage.”

“Sounds like a plan, boss.” Eddie grinned.

Holliday shook his head. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“
Americana
TV, boss,” Eddie answered, then turned back to the water bomber.

The cockpit of a Canadair water bomber is comfortably fitted with two ergonomically designed leather seats, easy-to-read digital controls and a throttle console dividing pilot and copilot. There is plenty of visibility from the wraparound windows, and flying her empty is a joy, according to most pilots.

The FN Maximi has a rate of fire of eight hundred NATO 7.62 ammunition per minute, and Holliday kept up a continuous earsplitting barrage into the hull, cutting easily through the thin aluminum skin of the fuselage and filling the cockpit with a white-hot enraged swarm of metal wasps while Eddie’s shells from the automatic rifle tore into the portside Pratt & Whitney turboprop.

The pilot, Andy Benson, his copilot, Randy Menzer, and the navigator, Jimmy Salazar, were turned into human steak tartare, Salazar with just enough time to push the pilot’s remains out of the way and haul up on the yoke as another swarm of the same wasps ripped up through the floor and stole away what little remained of Jimmy’s life.

Guns still blazing, the portside engine and propellers disintegrating in a comet’s tail of white-hot aluminum and flames, the water bomber passed over Holliday and Eddie less than fifteen feet over their heads, barely giving them time to read the large letters spelling out FIREBREAKERS in white lettering on the underside of each wing.

“Firebreakers, my ass,” said Holliday as he and Eddie turned to watch the death of the burning aircraft. The nose seemed to rise slightly as though the plane itself were fighting for its life, but then the portside fuel tank and the engine exploded. A wing blew off and spun into the jungle, and the plane turned on its side just as it smashed into the water and went under almost instantly about a hundred yards astern of the riverboat. There was a brief moment of silence and then a huge gout of oily, smoky flame rose out of the water like hell rising from the underworld.

“Napalm,” said Holliday. The last time he’d seen it used was at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. “That was no water bomber—it was a firebomber. And the question is, how did they know exactly where we were?”

“The people of this Firebreaker company will soon be missing their aircraft,” said Eddie, watching the flames carried downstream like a puddle of churning volcanic lava.

“Yeah, and I’ve got a pretty good idea about who they really are.”

•   •   •

Captain Ron Taylor stood above the bank of radar screens in the underground control bunker at what had once been Luke Auxiliary Air Force Base Number 11 not far from the town of Buckeye, Arizona, and which was now owned by Aviation Consultation Enterprises, which owned its own air cargo company, Redwood Air, both of which were owned in turn by White Star Protective Solutions, itself a small part of the Pallas Group. The binders needed to trace ownership of Firebreakers to A.C.E., Redwood, White Star and the Pallas Group would have been twice as thick as the Manhattan phone book.

Taylor turned to the young corporal beside him. “Well?”

“The base in Bolívar hasn’t heard from Red Two for an hour, sir.”

“Could she still be in the air?”

“Unlikely.”

“What else do we have down there?”

“Two Super Tucanos in Colombian livery, supposedly being used for aerial reconnaissance but they’re completely weaponized, sir.”

“Send them both out. My orders are to kill the son of a bitch, and I intend to do just that.”

“Right away, sir.”

“And somebody get me Virginia. The boss is going to want to hear about this.”

Holliday and Eddie pulled a stunned Rafi from the chewed-up, splintered wreck of the wheelhouse, and then they began a frantic search for survivors. Thankfully Peggy was unharmed, having been in the big old claw-foot bathtub in their cabin trying to cool off when the bullets began to fly and having stayed put for the duration.

The majority of the porters who set up housekeeping on the main deck between the side rails and the superstructure of the riverboat hadn’t been so lucky. Most of them had been cooking their breakfasts on tiny portable stoves when the attack began, and more than a dozen had been killed outright and just as many wounded.

The SS
Amador
hadn’t fared much better. Rafi had managed to run her aground on a mud bar close to the right bank, but as the seconds passed the current swung the stern of the ship downstream, giving the machine guns on the water bomber the chance for a raking broadside that ripped through the sternwheeler and the hull, destroying both boilers and mangling the steering mechanism. It was repairable, but it would require days of labor.

“This isn’t going to work,” said Holliday, climbing up the metal companionway from the engine room to the deck.

“Why not,
compadre
?” Eddie asked. “We have the tools and I have the experience. It would simply take a few days’ work.”

“That’s time we don’t have,” said Holliday. “They must have planted a transponder on the boat when we picked her up in São João Joaquin. It’s probably still here, and they’ll be coming back as soon as they figure out their Firebreaker flying boat isn’t. We’ve got to get everything and everybody off the ship, pronto, before they get here.”

Of the nine twenty-foot Zodiac Pros and their two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower outboards, only four were undamaged. The porters who’d survived the attack quit on the spot, and two of the Zodiacs were given to them to take the wounded back to São João.

In return for the boats, Eddie insisted the healthy porters transfer as much of the supplies as they could to the remaining Zodiacs. If Sinclair’s people were behind this, they’d most likely be using Super Tucanos. If so they had two hours, three at the most, to get the hell away from the riverboat before one or more of the waspish little fighter planes arrived to do their damnedest to blow them all to hell.

“We head upstream slowly,” said Holliday as they prepared to climb into the Zodiacs. “The planes will be looking for us, so we’ll keep close to the bank of the river. If we move too fast we’ll leave a muddy wake a blind man could follow. We hear the planes, we get ourselves into the undergrowth that hangs over the water and hope like hell they don’t see us.”

They had barely moved three hundred yards upstream from the wreck of the sternwheeler when they again heard the drone of approaching aircraft. Holliday guided the first Zodiac into the overhanging jungle of the starboard bank, and Eddie, piloting the second inflatable, was right behind him.

Holliday prayed they were both well enough hidden and far enough away from the riverboat. He looked over his shoulder; there was a faint muddy turbulence from the prop wash of the Evinrude, but it would be hard to see from the air.

As Holliday had suspected, the planes were Super Tucanos like the ones Blackhawk Security had used in Cuba. These two were dressed up in Colombian Air Force livery with sharks’ mouths painted onto the nose and the blue, gold and red roundels of the Colombian flag.

They flew in a simple one-forward, one-back-and-above formation, and they came in low. As the first plane tilted its nose slightly, it released a pair of Shrike missiles from the hard points beneath its wings, both of which howled off toward the already ravaged riverboat.

The first Tucano peeled up and away to the right while the second came in firing its wing cannons and machine guns. The second Tucano barely had time to peel left before the Shrikes hit their target and a fireball roared up from the wreck, obliterating what was left of the ship. The two aircraft droned off into the distance.

“Can we make it in the Zodiacs?” Peggy asked as the aircraft disappeared.

“According to Fawcett’s journals, they were about a hundred and eighty miles upriver from here before they headed into the jungle. I don’t want to travel at night, so that means at least three days.”

“How will we know where to get off the river?”

“The notebooks mention steep cliffs and rapids. On his diagram he called them the Falls of Babylon; there were tiers of rocks beside the rapids with cascades of foliage and giant red hibiscus flowers.”

“Let’s hope they’re still blooming,” said Peggy.

“And let’s hope we get there first,” answered Holliday.

•   •   •

Dimitri Rogov, Steven Cornwell, so-called project manager of the Excalibur Marine Exploration Corporation, and Tashkin Akurgal, head of Excalibur’s security division, sat around the table in the suite at the Hotel Quinto in Barcelos and stared down at the large topographical map of the Rio Negro area.

Cornwall was ex–Special Boat Squadron, his gray hair in a military cut, his hard square face tanned and seamed by a life spent in climates other than that of his native England. Akurgal was in his fifties and built like a wrestler, which he’d been in his youth, with a shaved head, dark eyebrows, a thick salt-and-pepper mustache and a long wormlike scar along his right cheek from temple to chin that he never talked about.

“Lord Grayle sent this by courier. It arrived today; it’s a blowup of a map that was found in one of Fawcett’s notebooks,” said Rogov.

“How the hell did he get them?” Cornwell asked. “I thought you said the Blackstock woman wouldn’t sell them.”

“She didn’t know what she had at that point.” Rogov smiled. “Then she showed them to Holliday and that was that, but when they took them to London to put them in a safe-deposit box, they got a copy of all of them made at the Colour Company on Curzon Street. Grayle had a tail on them and he bribed one of the employees to make copies. Simple.”

“Maybe it was simple to get, but what the hell does it mean?” Cornwell said, staring down at the map. It clearly showed the Xingu and Negro rivers and the land beyond it but very little more except a superimposed diagram of a dotted line with a letter at each end and beneath that a phrase. Beneath the phrase was a symbol:

N . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . .  . . . R

by the Compass and the Square

Rogov explained, “According to Grayle, the phrase is a coded Masonic greeting, among other things. The compass and the square are two of the three ‘Great Lights.’ The third Great Light was originally the Ark of the Covenant but is now generally thought to be the Old Testament.”

“And the line with the two letters?”

“Grayle has a theory about that. His grandfather backed Fawcett’s last expedition, but in the end Fawcett never returned. The symbol was a clue meant for a fellow Mason, which both Fawcett and Grayle’s grandfather were. The compass forms two sides of an equilateral triangle, the base of which is the line with the two letters. Fawcett’s Lost City was the third point of the triangle—the hinge on the compass.”

“But what good does that do us?” Cornwell asked. “You have to know what the two letters stand for and how long the line really is in geographical terms.”

“And that’s the problem we have to solve before Holliday does. We must first of all get ahead of him. The transponder is still operating. He’s heading in a northerly direction. According to the notebooks, Fawcett entered the jungle at a place he called the Falls of Babylon, a large set of rapids and cliffs . . . here.” He pointed to a written notation on the enlarged copy of the map. “We get there first and ambush them.”

“We kill them, yes?” Akurgal the Turk asked, a glint in his eye.

“First we talk. Then we kill,” said Rogov.