The Templar Legion Read Online Free PDF

Holliday, giving his cousin a playful swat on the back of the head.
    “She’s your relation.” Rafi laughed.
    “She’s your wife,” countered Holliday.
    “Why doesn’t one of you answer my question?” Peggy asked.
    “Herodotus was an ancient Greek. He’s sometimes called the father of history,” answered Holliday. “He traveled all over the ancient world collecting stories about each country he passed through.”
    “He was also called the father of lies,” said Rafi. “He collected fables and legends as much as he did hard facts.”
    “Like King Solomon’s Mines?” Peggy asked.
    “Herodotus was before Solomon’s time,” said Holliday.
    “But he planted the seed,” said Rafi. “He had all sorts of stories about the mysterious land of Punt.”
    “Punt?”
    “Like a football,” said Holliday. “No one’s ever quite figured out where it was.”
    “And the Russian armored personnel carriers?” Peggy asked, nodding out the window at yet another burned-out BTR-60 rusting away beside the road. The highway had been littered with them all the way from Addis Ababa.
    “Remains of the Ethiopian Civil War,” said Holliday. “Almost twenty years of murder and mayhem that accomplished absolutely nothing. Two Marxist groups fighting for power while the arms dealers got fat. All that was left when they were done was wholesale corruption and poverty. That was in 1991. Not much has changed since.” They went past a road sign: BAHIR DAR 20 KM. They had almost reached it: Lake Tana, the source of the Nile.
     
     
    Archibald “Archie” Ives wiped the sweat off his face with a T-shirt he was using as a towel and prepared the single stick of high explosive, carefully fitting the detonator wires into the open, puttylike end of the seveninch tube. A hundred feet down the sloping hill the trickling stream that would eventually become the Kotto River burbled along through the jungle foliage.
    Ives had come into Kukuanaland by the back door, flying in on a helicopter from Chad. He’d been in the tiny hellhole of a country for the better part of a week now, looking for likely locations chosen from the file of aerial shots the company had commissioned more than a year ago. Today was his last day; tomorrow he’d be back at the extraction point and twelve hours after that he’d be having a beer at the Café Khartoum in the Burj Al-Fatah Hotel.
    He rubbed a hand across his leathery, sun-worn jawline and felt the grimy, gray-blond stubble. At sixty-three he was getting far too old to be running around in the jungle like this. On the other hand retirement didn’t come cheap these days, which was why he’d bullied the company into putting a profit-sharing clause into his contract this time. He was sick and tired of making fat cats like Sir James Matheson rich while he worked for peanuts.
    Ives dropped the explosive into the hand-drilled shot hole, tamped the claylike soil on top of it, then ran the detonator wires back up to his position on the top of the hill. He sat down on the ground with his legs crossed and attached the wires to a small USB unit, which he then plugged into his laptop. He set the controls, switched on the recorder and took one last look down the hill. Nothing on the ground and no planes in the sky, not that Kukuanaland had much of an air force: a single aging Soviet Mil Mi-24 attack helicopter from the seventies with no one to fly it. Kolingba, the lunatic leader of the country, had an even older Cessna 170 single-engine he sometimes flew himself but apparently he was terrified of being brought down by ground-toair missiles from one of the adjoining countries, so he rarely took to the air.
    With the laptop balanced on his lap Ives hit “enter.” There was a split-second pause, a distant muffled crumping sound and then the earth beneath him shook briefly. There was another pause and then the data began forming on the screen.
    “Bloody hell,” the geologist whispered. He replayed the data to make