Rafi was already on the rope, the first-aid kit from the Land Cruiser dangling from his shoulder on its strap. Holliday didn’t wait. He crossed the cracked-mud surface of the bottom of the gorge and approached the overturned Rover. The driver’s-side door hung open, twisted and bent. Smoke and steam were coming up out of the crumpled engine compartment.
He reached the door and squatted down. The windshield was shattered, covering the driver in a glittering shroud. The man’s eyes were closed and there was blood coming out of his mouth and nose. There was also a large bloodstain on the front of the man’s tan shirt. The stain went from the left center of the man’s chest and spread down his shirt to the belt of his shorts.
The man was still breathing, but only barely. Holliday gently eased him out of the vehicle and onto the sand. It was at that point that Holliday saw the ragged hole in the back of the seat and the matching entry wound in the man’s back.
“We’ve got trouble,” he said as Rafi joined him. “He’s been shot, whoever he is. Large-caliber through the back of the seat and into his lungs.”
“Bandits?” Rafi asked. He paled and looked back up to the top of the gorge. “Peggy!”
“Not bandits,” said Holliday. “Bandits aren’t that accurate. This was an assassination. There’s a pro out there somewhere.”
“We’ve got to get him to some kind of hospital.”
“Move him and he’s dead,” said Holliday. There was a cold distance in his voice. He’d seen this kind of thing too often to disguise it with platitudes. The bullet had probably chewed up the man’s insides like a Weedwacker.
“Why this guy?” Rafi asked, stunned. He stared at the man, listening to the bubbling, ragged breath.
“Get his wallet; find out who he is.”
Holliday ducked back into the overturned truck; he’d seen two things of interest when he dragged the body out: an old, well-worn leather dispatch case and the familiar shape of a canvas rifle case. He tossed the dispatch case out through the open doorway, then clambered farther into the interior of the truck and grabbed the rifle case. He wriggled backward, hanging on to the gun case, and ducked out into the open. Rafi was leaning over the wounded man, listening intently. As Holliday opened the back flap of the gun case he heard a shouting voice echoing from above.
“What’s going on down there?”
Holliday looked up to see Peggy, camera slung around her neck, peering over the bridge rail.
“Get down!” Holliday yelled.
“Peggy!” Rafi yelled, still crouched over the dying man.
There was a clanging sound and the whine of a bullet ricocheting off one of the bridge stanchions less than a foot from where she was standing. A split second later echoed the cracking sound of the gunshot. Peggy screamed and jerked back.
“Get behind the truck!” Holliday yelled. Peggy didn’t need to be told twice. She dropped out of sight. Holliday pulled the gun out of its case. The weapon was an old-fashioned Winchester 76 complete with a modern Swift 687M telescopic sight and a canvas sling. Holliday rummaged around in the case and came up with a fistful of rounds. The original caliber had been 45.40 but these shells looked like .357 magnums. He took a long, desperate minute to slide the rounds into the loading port.
“He’s dead,” said Rafi, staring down at the body of the man from the Rover.
Holliday slung the loaded rifle over his shoulder. “We’re not.” He headed for the rope and then began to climb.
“Son of a bitch!” Mike Harris stared through the big Steiner binoculars at the road below. He was flat on his belly at the top of the ridge above the bridge. Seeing Holliday getting out of the Land Cruiser was like a nightmare come to life.
“What’s the matter?” said the man with the rifle, lying beside him. His name was Pieter Jonker, an ex–Project Barnacle assassin provided by Faulkener. “I got the
krimpie
, didn’t I?”
“You missed the woman, you idiot!”
“I wasn’t hired to shoot the
dom doos
woman, was I, mate?” Jonker said. “I can’t help it if a Good Samaritan comes along.”
Harris kept his eyes glued to the binoculars. He saw Holliday crawl up over the top of the gorge, something slung over his back.
“You want him dead, too?” Jonker asked, his eye up to the rifle scope.
“Shoot!” Harris bellowed.
Jonker squeezed the trigger of the Truvelo CMS rifle. A puff of sand erupted inches from Holliday’s head.
“Mutterficker!”
Jonker snarled.
The sound of the rifle hammered painfully in Harris’s ear. He winced. When his eyes opened again Holliday was gone.
“God damn it! You missed again!” Harris yelled.
“Loop naai, pommie,”
said Jonker, curling his lip.
Suddenly the top of the sandy ridge exploded an inch away from Harris and his companion. A rock chip tore a gash in Harris’s cheek. A split second later the sound of four or five rapidly fired rounds reached them. In an instant Jonker was wriggling backward down the back slope of the ridge.
“Get back here!”
“I signed on to shoot, not to get shot at,” said Jonker, scuttling backward, leaving the heavy weapon behind. “I did my job. The
krimpie
’s dead.”
“I need his briefcase!”
“Not my problem.”
The binoculars shattered into splinters of glass and hard plastic as a shot from below found its mark. A razor-edged piece of glass almost took out Harris’s eye. He followed Jonker down the slope.
Holliday drove, Rafi on the seat beside him with the dead man’s briefcase on his lap. Peggy kept an eye on the road behind them. They’d waited for almost an hour, until Holliday was certain that the shooter had gone. Ten minutes after the first shots, they heard the sound of an engine in the distance, then only silence. Before leaving the bridge Holliday picked up his brass and wiped down the rifle. That done, he’d tossed the weapon back into the gorge. The last thing he needed was to be found with an unlicensed weapon by a roving Sudanese army patrol.
“According to his driver’s permit his name was Archibald Arthur Ives,” said Rafi, going through the dead man’s wallet. “From the papers in his briefcase it would appear that he’s a freelance geologist working for a company called Matheson Resource Industries. There are some maps but I’ll have to give them a closer look when we get to Khartoum.”
“Anything else?”
“A satellite phone.”
“We can check the call list, I guess,” said Holliday.
“You don’t sound too eager, Doc. Aren’t we going to report this?” Peggy asked, still watching the highway behind her.
“I don’t think we can,” answered Holliday. “Not without getting ourselves seriously in the glue.” He shrugged. “What would be the point? We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody wanted this guy Ives dead and I for one don’t have the foggiest idea why.”
“He said something before he died,” said Rafi. “I don’t know what it means.”
“What did he say?” Holliday asked.
“ ‘ Limbani,’ ” said Rafi. “ ‘ Tell Amobe Limbani.’ ”
7
“So who is he exactly?” Holliday asked.
Peggy looked up from the laptop. She’d been surfing the Net for most of the afternoon, using the Wi-Fi hookup in their apartment suite at the Grand Holiday Villa Hotel & Suites in Khartoum. For a hotel built in 1880, it was remarkably up-to-date. It was also remarkably expensive.
“Dr. Amobe Barthélemy Limbani, sixty-three years old when the coup took place. Medical degree from the Université de Paris, specializing in tropical and infectious diseases. His father was also a doctor and also governor of the Vakaga prefecture, of what had originally been part of French Equatorial Africa. Limbani was part of the Yakima minority. When his father died under mysterious circumstances he ran for the governor’s job and got in.”
“Who are the majority?” Rafi asked.
“Baya and Banda. They’re sixty-five percent of the population. In Vakaga it’s more like eighty-five percent. The Yakima are less than ten percent.”
“If they’re in the majority how did Limbani get the votes to become governor?” Rafi asked.
“The Banda and the Baya are rural tribal villagers without much use for or knowledge of the outside world. The literacy rate is much higher among the Yakima, who are mostly shopkeepers and merchants, or at least they were.”
“Presumably Kolingba’s a Banda or a Baya,” said Holliday.
“Banda. One of the ‘lucky’ ones who got sent to a missionary school. He ran away, joined the army and the rest is history. There’s a story that after the coup one of the first things he did was go back to the missionary school and hack the nuns into pieces.”
“What about Limbani?” Rafi asked.
“Either he died in prison outside Fourandao or he escaped and went into the jungle. There are all sorts of stories about Limbani organizing a rebel army in the jungle à la Castro, but there’s no real evidence of any rebellion. In fact if anything things have gone from bad to worse. In the past two years Kolingba’s power has spread to Bamingui-Bangoran and Haute-Kotto, the two neighboring prefectures to Vakaga. That’s almost a third of the Central African Republic. The borders with Sudan and Chad are wide-open. It’s Wild West time for crooks of all kinds, arms dealers, druggies, terrorists, slavers, conflict minerals, you name it.”
“What about the maps?” Holliday asked, turning to Rafi. The archaeologist had the contents of Ives’s dispatch case spread out on the coffee table in the living room of their suite. Outside the picture window, the White Nile stretched toward the junction with its small sister, the Blue Nile.
“The Kotto River flows out of the Sudan massif. He drew these maps himself. I can’t make heads or tails of the grid references, but it matches exactly with the Google Earth images I took from the geography of the image in the tomb. Three hills and a triple-forked cataract. According to Ives’s maps, he found what he was looking for on the largest of the three hills.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Peggy. “Gold and diamonds. King Solomon’s Mines.”
“He found gold and diamonds, all right,” said Rafi, “but according to this that’s not what he was looking for.”
“Spill it,” said Peggy.
“He was looking for, and found, a gigantic deposit of something called neodymium at a concentration of almost seven thousand parts per million, and the same for something called tantalum.”
“What on earth does that mean?” Peggy asked, bewildered.
“It means that Kolingba’s sitting on something far more valuable than a gold mine, or even a diamond mine,” answered Holliday.
“I guess I’ve been out of the loop too long,” said Peggy. “I don’t get it.”
“I do,” said Rafi. “Most tantalum is mined in Australia, but it’s a lot cheaper to buy it from the warlords in the Congo. Neodymium is mined only in China and they’ve steadily been shutting down the market over the past few years.”
“So what?” Peggy shrugged.
“You can’t make cell phones, computer hard drives, nuclear reactors and most electronic gadgets without them. Tantalum is used in the guts of jet engines. If Kolingba found out he was sitting on a pile of the stuff, Kukuanaland would become the most strategically important nation in the world.”
“The fairy dust of the twenty-first century,” Peggy said.
“Steve Jobs probably thinks so. Bill Gates, too,” Holliday added.
“What if Limbani found out about it first?” Rafi said slowly.
“The odds are Kolingba had him killed years ago,” said Peggy, nodding toward the laptop. “That’s what most people seem to believe.”
“Not Ives,” said Rafi.
“Rafi’s right,” said Holliday. “Somebody breathing his last doesn’t mention a fantasy. He was obviously out there in the jungle. Maybe he
knew
Limbani was still alive. Maybe he met up with him, or someone who’d seen him.”
“And we’re supposed to warn him?” Peggy said.
“Something like that.” Rafi nodded. “If Kolingba finds out about the deposits there’s going to be hell to pay all over the world. If Limbani was the man to control it instead . . .”
“So who killed him?” Holliday said after a moment. “It wasn’t Sudanese bandits armed with flintlocks. Whoever killed Ives was potshotting at us with a high-powered sniper rifle with a scope. We’re lucky not to be vulture food right now.”
“Matheson Resource Industries has to be behind it somewhere,” said Peggy. “That’s who he was working for, and according to what Google’s giving me that kind of thing isn’t exactly out of line with Matheson’s background. In the seventies he bought a couple of old World War Two bombers and napalmed the local Yavaro Indians so they’d get off an oil patch he was developing in Brazil, all in the name of progress. There’ve been a few weird things between him and the Russians, too.”
Holliday stared out the window at the majestic river flowing past. Did Vikings really make it this far, and farther, a thousand years ago? Did a Templar Knight follow in their footsteps, just as they were following in his? For a moment he had that strange sensation of the past and the future sliding together, just like the White Nile and the Blue Nile joined together a mile or so downstream. He’d had the same feeling back on that little island on Lake Tana. Like being on a ship in rough seas and having someone walking over your grave at the same time. Once again he tried to shake the feeling off.