Free The Templar Legion by Paul Christopher

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.
    “Too much coincidence,” he said finally. For the first time in a long while he wished he were still smoking. “I’ll buy that we were on the same highway in the Sudan—we were both looking for the same thing—but what was Ives doing in that particular piece of jungle in the first place? Kukuanaland isn’t what you’d call a tourist destination. It can’t be just coincidence that Rafi finds that tomb and Matheson sends in a geologist to the same territory. There has to be some connection.”
    “I’m an archaeologist; Matheson hunts for mineral resources and oil. There is no connection,” said Rafi, shaking his head.
    “Did you tell anyone about the tomb?”
    “He didn’t even tell me, his loving wife and helpmate,” said Peggy.
    “I didn’t tell anyone; I swear it,” said Rafi. “I wasn’t expecting to find anything in Ethiopia except some anecdotal stuff about the Beta Jews or some old church records at best. This all came out of left field. When I found the tomb I was a little freaked-out actually. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t.”
    “How did you figure out that the mural in the tomb was this Kotto River place?”
    “I listed the salient features, the jungle, the three prominent hills and the three-forked waterfall, and we ran a regional African computer model based on Google Earth. I was skeptical, like you, Doc. We weren’t really expecting a match.”
    “We?”
    “A friend of mine in the geology department. A geomorphologist named Yadin Isaacs. He ran the computers.”
    “Did you tell him why you were running the model?”
    “I made a joke about King Solomon’s Mines and the queen of Sheba. He thought it was funny.”
    “Any connection between Matheson and this guy?”
    “Not that I know of.” Rafi shrugged.
    Peggy tapped at the keyboard for a few moments, then sat back, shaking her head. “It’s right there on his CV,” she said. “ ‘ Winner of the Sir James Matheson Grant for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Geology,’ three years running.”
    “Bingo,” said Holliday. “People like Matheson have tentacles into all sorts of places. Your pal doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds him, so he passes on some potentially interesting information and doesn’t think about it again.” Holliday paused. “How long ago was this?”
    “Seven months.”
    “Plenty of time to put Ives into the field,” said Holliday. “It was no coincidence at all.” He shook his head. “It looks like we’ve got some competition. Lethal competition.”
     
     
    Sir James Matheson, Ninth Earl of Emsworth, referred to as Lord Emsworth of Huntington in the annual reports of Matheson Resource Industries, stood in his private office and stared down at the large-scale topographical maps laid out on the granite conference table. Matheson, in his early sixties, had a broad forehead, thinning gray hair swept back, with the leathery face and broken capillaries of a longtime smoker and drinker. When Matheson spoke there was a faint trace of his West Country origins, but that was the only hint of his somewhat less than lordly beginnings. Major Allen Faulkener, Matheson’s director of special projects, stood beside him.
    “What are the transportation options?” Matheson said. “The material is worth nothing in the middle of a jungle.”
    “Only the river at this point,” said Faulkener, tapping a spot on one of the maps. “The Kotto River could take barges of ore all the way down to the Ubangi and from there down to Mbandaka and the Congo River.”
    “Where they’d have to be guarded all the way to Brazzaville and the railway, which we’d probably have to refurbish for the buggers.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And if we had our own refinery and smelter?”
    “We could easily build an