Legacy

SEPTEMBER 1522, PFÄLZERWALD FOREST, CENTRAL GERMANY

Eberhardt gently slit the soft white flesh on the inside of his forearm with his knife.

He clenched his fist and let the bright red blood run out and drip off his elbow. He aimed the drops so that they splashed richly on a patch of earth on the roadside.

‘Sir!’ Albrecht, his steward, shouted in alarm and tried to restrain him.

Eberhardt was enraged. ‘You swine!’ he bellowed, and angrily brushed the smaller man away. ‘Our blood cannot be separated from the soil that bore us! It will return! It will return again!’

He continued dripping blood, whilst he muttered through gritted teeth, ‘Blood and soil, blood and soil, we will become one again,’ like an incantation.

His hands held out, Albrecht wailed helplessly, ‘Sir, what are you doing?’ He screwed his eyes up and looked away.

‘I am a blood sacrifice for the German nation!’ Spittle flecked Eberhardt’s beard as he shouted through the pain. ‘I will become an oblation poured onto the soil. The soil that raised us, that has cradled us since our inception. Our father, our mother … our land!’

It was mid-morning, three days after the tragedy on the tower. Eberhardt was not sure what had happened to his grandmother. Her broken body had been discovered the next morning, cold and wet in the mud: did she jump or had he thrown her? He was unsure if he had experienced a dream or a spiritual visitation. Either way, his brush with the Deathstone had unsettled him. Why had it returned to him? What mission was it calling him to?

Albrecht had put it about in the village that his master’s grandmother had taken fright at the thunder and leaped to her death, and few had enquired further. He was a middle-aged, worrisome character who peered out suspiciously at the world from under a thatch of brown hair.

In contrast, his master was a big man in his forties, an old roué whose appetites had overrun his frame; his gut bulged out over his hose. He had a mane of silvery hair, with a heavy beard cut off square just under his chin. His eyes were rheumy and the skin of his face sagged like the canvas of an old tent.

Eberhardt was a Raubritter — a Robber Knight — although he preferred just to call himself a knight. He was from an ancient German family, but was really a bandit in charge of a cramped castle, a village and a few square miles of the Pfälzerwald.

The imminent Knights’ War against the Imperial Princes had revived some of his youthful passion.

He shouted at Albrecht, cowering in front of him, ‘The Pope and the Princes are ransacking the German people! The Emperor has banned our right of feud! The Knights won’t stand for it. The German people won’t stand for it!’

‘Yes, but—’

‘The good Dr Luther has raised the clarion call against the papists — Rome is leeching this country dry! We Knights will ride against the Princes. The time for sacrifice has come, Albrecht!’

They were two days’ ride from home in a shady spot in the forest, on the way south towards Landau, where the Knights were rallying. Eberhardt had spontaneously made his blood gesture on a break in their journey, having brooded on their mission as they rode along that morning.

‘Things can’t go on as they are.’

With this statement of fact he calmed down at last and stopped clenching his fist. He held his arm out to Albrecht.

‘Bind it up.’

Albrecht rummaged in the saddlebags of his horse for some spare cloth. He walked back over to Eberhardt and began binding his forearm. He was a simple man who focused on practical arrangements and left matters of national politics and religion to his lord. He was not even sure what Eberhardt meant by the concept of ‘the German people’. The Holy Roman Empire covered the area and was composed of hundreds of states run by Princes, and imperial free cities. Such ideas were beyond him.

The Knights had been able to hold their lands in this strange hotchpotch for centuries because they had the legal right from the Holy Roman Emperor to conduct armed feuds. This was supposed to allow the chivalrous art of war to be practised but was now just an excuse for murder and racketeering.

The new Emperor, Charles V, had tired of such anarchy and triggered the Knights’ War by banning their right of feud. The Knights had been declining for centuries and saw this as their last-ditch attempt to hold on to what little status they had left.

‘We’ll teach them a lesson,’ Eberhardt mused as he watched Albrecht tie off the white cloth.

‘There you go.’ His servant looked at his neat handiwork with satisfaction. Although he was used to his master’s outlandish manner, he was relieved that Eberhardt had calmed down.

He had known Eberhardt since he was a boy and he had always been a romantic. As a student at Heidelberg University he was an enthusiastic Renaissance man: a knight but a scholar as well, one who had joined the German intellectual revival that was shedding light into the Dark Ages. He was so inspired by the new thinkers that he’d begun writing his own magnum opus entitled The Quest for Glory, and had developed his own motto, Lumensfero!

However, these lofty ideas had been undermined when he was caught in bed with a professor’s wife. He had to flee, and travelled south where he fell in with a company of Landsknecht, German mercenaries, heading down to the Italian Wars, where he proved to be a brave soldier.

He journeyed on to Constantinople and fell in love with its exoticism. People of all creeds and cultures passed in front of him in a kaleidoscope of colours, languages and scents.

He felt preternaturally alive. His skin was taut; he could sense his body pushing against it, straining to take in all the new experiences. It was a wild, mad, beautiful time.

With sensations such as these it was no wonder that he had been writing like a fury. Every spare minute he had, he would sit and transcribe his adventures. He accumulated so many books that he had to bundle them up and send them back to Ludwig Fritzler, an old university friend working in the Heidelberg library.

When he thought back to those times, Eberhardt often wondered what had happened to Abba Athanasius, the Nubian mystic who led the Ishfaqi cult. He was such an odd mixture of religions. ‘Abba’ meant Father in Aramaic and ‘Athanasius’ meant immortal in Greek — both came from his background as a Coptic Christian priest. But he had then formed a cult that mixed elements of Islam and Christianity with animism, the worship of spirits. In this case the spirit was inside a large piece of black rock found in the heart of an extinct volcano in central Africa: the Deathstone.

The strange priest was the biggest human being that Eberhardt had ever seen, as forbidding and impenetrable as the Deathstone itself. With his bald head and black flowing robes he had a charisma as powerful and brooding as the volcano that the Stone came from.

He preached that the mountain was the new Mount Sinai and that it held the keys to the gates of death. The people there feared the Stone; those who had worked in mining it had all died of strange diseases.

Eberhardt was enthralled by the cult and took part enthusiastically in its ceremonies. In the Deathstone he was sure that he had discovered the nexus between life and death; an object that had true meaning.

The German had become a trusted follower of Abba Athanasius, with Latin their common language. His curiosity led him to ask the monk for the whereabouts of the holy mountain. Eventually he was given the task of organising an expedition to find the origins of the Stone.

He had set about planning avidly, obtaining directions from the monk and Arab traders that went into the area. Using rivers to mark out his route, he sketched a map along the Nile through the deserts of Egypt and Sudan and then southwest, cutting down right into the heart of the Dark Continent.

It was all planned out and he was getting ready to set off on his new odyssey when he received a letter from his mother. His father had died and he was summoned to return immediately to inherit his sestate before other greedy relatives tried to claim it.

It was a bitter blow; his heart had been set on the journey. In a daze he had walked into Abba Athanasius’ bare cell, clutching the letter, and with great sadness explained that he had to go home.

Eberhardt stared longingly at the sketch map he had drawn before folding it up and tucking it into his journal. Then he took a last look into the heart of the Nubian Deathstone, bade farewell to its mighty keeper and left.

But the Stone remained lodged deep inside him.

Eberhardt had gone back to be lord of his little patch of backwoods Germany. He had donated the remaining notebooks of The Quest for Glory to Ludwig and the library, and then for the past twenty years he had lived the life of a country squire in a damp and crowded castle, forced to stay put to retain his inheritance whilst going quietly mad, dreaming of foreign lands and the freedom of his youth.

Now though, the thrill of the campaign was beginning to awaken him once more as he mounted up and rode on south through the woods.

He could feel his skin tightening, his pulse quickening. The Deathstone was calling him for its purpose; he did not know what it was but he spurred his horse on to the coming war.

PRESENT DAY, 17 NOVEMBER, LONDON

‘OK, so here’s the plan for our war.’

Kalil stepped up to the projector screen and circled an area on the satellite image with his finger. Today he looked even more of a playboy than he had before. His black hair was neatly coiffured and he wore a pearlescent white shirt, designer jeans and expensive loafers.

‘This is the target area for the attack. The extinct volcano where they actually do the mining is here; the blue circle is the caldera lake in the crater.’

He smiled excitedly as he turned back to face Alex and Colin — ‘Col’ — Thwaites, a former sergeant-major from the Parachute Regiment, who were sitting on chairs in the plain meeting room. They watched him attentively, notepads on their knees. Kalil had provided a small rented mews office in Mayfair for them to work from. He apparently lived five minutes’ walk away but still drove to work and parked his silver Porsche Carrera in the basement garage.

‘This shot covers a four-hundred-square-mile area and as you can see there isn’t exactly a lot going on in the neighbourhood.’

Apart from some rivers, the lake was the only thing that broke the green carpet of jungle that filled the rest of the picture; the sharp cone of the volcano stood out from the flat terrain by its shadow.

‘OK, so if we zero in on this you can see some more detail of the actual buildings.’ Kalil clicked the remote and the image zoomed in.

‘These are very good shots.’ Alex nodded appreciatively. ‘Where did you get them from?’

The remark was well meant but Kalil reacted uncomfortably. ‘The cartel has … connections.’ He looked evasive and turned back to the screen.

Alex had not meant to be intrusive; he was just grateful to be back in work and was trying to show willing. He was in a much better mood than he had been lately. His restless mind needed to be constantly engaged, and sitting around at home fretting about bills had been driving him mad. With his first two months’ pay in advance in his bank account, and the promise of a lot more to come, he had been able to arrange for some builders to do the roof. Lavinia, his neighbour, was speaking to him again and had called off her lawyers.

However, he had also had a call from the bailiffs in Herefordshire saying that his father would be evicted in a month if bills for services and debt interest weren’t paid. Alex had handed over enough cash to fend them off for a while but he was anxious to get the project completed so that he could pay them in full. Despite everything, he was not going to see his father turned out onto the street and, strangely, now that the responsibility was his, he didn’t want to see his ancestral home lost either.

Apart from helping with his domestic problems, the project was also his chance to prove himself; to throw something to the dark wolves of self-doubt that had been biting him for so long. I can’t be a failure if I am responsible for all this? he thought.

It was the biggest thing he had been called on to organise — his own private army. Finally, his own independent command, the chance that had been denied him by the army. He furrowed his dark brows and concentrated on what Kalil was saying.

‘So, the mining goes on up here in the volcano. They have also built a little hydroelectric plant here, in this break in the crater wall, where the lake overflows. Smart way of getting power. The mine seems to be a pretty primitive setup, though: just shafts dug into the side of the crater by hand. We assume they must be using slave labour from somewhere as there is almost no local population in the immediate area apart from some Pygmies.

‘The ore from the mine gets dumped into a system of chutes down the side of the volcano here.’ Kalil traced a blurry line cut through the dense jungle on the mountainside. ‘Alongside them there seem to be ladders that they use to get the slaves up and down the slope. They then truck the ore along the road about a mile west to this complex here on the flat ground. This will be the actual focus for the attack.’

The photo showed a collection of buildings on the south shore of a small lake, which was fed by the stream flowing from the hydroelectric plant.

‘We’re not quite sure what all these buildings are — probably barracks for the slaves and soldiers.’ Kalil pointed to a series of evenly spaced long buildings. ‘There are two key areas for the assault — this factory structure here is where the power line comes in from the volcano plant and is presumably where the ore refining goes on.’ He turned back to face the two soldiers and raised an index finger for emphasis. ‘It is essential that this is seized intact at the first opportunity.’

Alex and Col nodded and noted this on their pads.

‘The second focus of the assault must be on these houses along the lake shore, where we guess the command and control element live.’ Kalil paused. Then:

‘I must emphasise to you that the cartel requires that you neutralise this command and control element permanently.’ He looked at Alex for a long moment.

Alex looked him straight in the eye and then nodded.

There was no point in being squeamish about it; killing people was his job. What else did he expect if he agreed to start an illegal private war?

Alex stood up and tapped the map with his Biro. ‘It’s got to be a helicopter assault.’ He stepped back and crossed his arms. The three of them looked at the detailed satellite photograph.

‘Hmm, I don’t fancy dropping into that lot with a parachute.’ Col pointed at the dense jungle foliage around the mine. ‘Might catch me bollocks on a palm tree.’

Col Thwaites was in his mid-forties and had been working with Alex through all his operations in Africa. Sharp, tough and a stickler for military professionalism, he was the mainstay of the group of freelancers that Alex was currently assembling for the job.

Like many Paras he was short, stocky and wiry; aggressive energy making up for what he lacked in size. He was balding on top, with close-cropped grey hair, a coarse-boned face with gimlet eyes, and a small moustache. Tattoos of Blackburn Rovers on his right forearm and the Parachute Regiment badge on his left completed the picture of a Northern hard man. Wry comments and an endless stream of poor-taste jokes were delivered in a harsh Lancashire accent.

He had been born on a council estate in Blackburn with a restless natural intellect that failed to achieve anything at school. Drifting into a life of glue-sniffing and petty crime, he had signed up for 2 Para with a mate one day because they had been watching The Professionals the night before and knew that the lead hard man, whom they worshipped, was a TA Para.

As with many wastrels before him, the strictures of army discipline had provided the channel to focus his energies. He had fought in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War and Bosnia. He had risen to be a sergeant-major in the Pathfinders, the Para’s élite reconnaissance unit, and done stints all over the world, training and advising Special Forces.

Alex and Col had been through a lot of combat together in Africa. Ordinarily toff officers from posh cavalry regiments were not respected by hardened Paras; ‘Ruperts’ was the standard dismissive name they used for them.

However, Col had grown to respect Alex as an intelligent and focused commander. He realised that he had some personal demons, whatever they were — and Col had never asked — but they never got in the way of his work. Rather they were controlled by his upper-class English reserve, so that they fulminated under his black brows only emerging through his vigour and intense looks.

The Lebanese turned to Alex now. ‘You think helicopters would work?’

The tall major nodded. ‘Hmm, we’ll probably need about a hundred men altogether. Insert them here, here and here.’ He pointed to landing sites around the complex.

He looked at Col, who stood next to him with his arms folded, staring hard at the photo.

‘Aye, it’s double all right. Yeah, get some Mi-17s, twenty-two blokes in each, say …’ he cocked his head on one side, ‘… five? Bit of an air force but …’ he shrugged.

Kalil turned to Alex. ‘Whatever you think is necessary to get the job done, Alex — the cartel will pay for it. We just want that mine.’

‘Hmm,’ Alex nodded thoughtfully. ‘We’ll need a gunship as well to suppress ground fire when the troops land.’

‘I’ve heard there’s a Shark going in Transdneister,’ said Col chirpily.

‘A what?’ Kalil frowned.

‘A Kamov Ka-50 Black Shark — NATO codename Hokum. Fooking beast of a thing: 30mm cannon, rocket pods, automatic grenade launcher, you name it — it’s got it. Evil-looking, an’ all. It’s got two contra-rotating main rotors on top of each other so it don’t need a tail rotor.’ Col made excited twisting actions with one hand over the other. ‘Russian Army uses ‘em. Heard about it from Arkady — a mate of ours what works for a Russian transport outfit. The Fourteenth Army Group in Transdneister …’

Kalil had obviously lost him here so Col broke off, realising that the enclave was not well known outside the mercenary community. ‘It’s a little strip of land on the border between Ukraine and Moldova — the Russkies have been there since some dodgy deal that Yeltsin did, and sort of run the area as a criminal country, like. They don’t get paid much so the general keeps “losing!” kit.’ He wagged his fingers to indicate the irony.

‘Anyway, Arkady reckons he could get it for one and a half mil US, plus parts and ammo — fooking bargain. He ships stuff out of there the whole time to Africa in them big Ilyushins — no questions asked. They’d sell their granny for a pack a fags, they would.’

‘OK, sounds good.’ Kalil nodded uncertainly; he could only understand half of the words in the heavy Lancashire accent, and his American English meant he was confused by the expression ‘pack a fags’. However, at the same time he was impressed by the detail.

‘Yeah, you’ll have to come shopping with us there sometime. It’s sorta like a military Dubai really,’ said Col enthusiastically.

Kalil laughed nervously.

Alex chipped in, ‘Pretty much all the kit we’ll use is Russian.’

‘How so?’ Kalil asked.

‘Because it’s cheap, it’s robust and it kills people. It’s the standard equipment used in Africa, so we won’t need to train the soldiers to use it. But we’re going to need to do a CTR first,’ he continued, before they got too carried away; he knew it was not going to be that simple.

‘A what?’

‘A close target recce, mate,’ Col filled in for the Lebanese’s lack of British Army jargon. ‘That means me and ‘im doing the sneaky-beaky bit on foot round the mine.’ He made wiggly motions with one hand to indicate creeping about. ‘You know, like carrying our own shit and not farting for a week in case we make a noise. Fooking love that, me.’

Kalil looked at him confused; he didn’t get the standard-issue British Army sarcasm either. ‘Erm …’

‘We’ll have to do it.’ Alex folded his arms authoritatively. ‘There’s no way we can stake this much on some maps and satellite shots.’

‘Well, they’re pretty good, aren’t they? It took a lotta trouble to get them for you guys, you know.’

‘I’m sure it did, but success in these operations is all in the detail. I mean, what’s this?’ He traced a blurry line around the edge of the complex with his finger.

‘Perimeter fence?’

‘Yes, but is that all? There’s a large cleared area either side of it that could contain a lot of nasties. There are also these checkpoints on the approach roads and these little covered huts dotted around the perimeter; we don’t know what’s under the cover. I’m not going to risk this many blokes on it; we’re going a hell of a long way from anywhere safe and if we mess up we’re all dead.’ He paused. ‘Plus you said you wanted to come on the op,’ he smiled.

‘OK, OK. You’re the experts; I’ve never been to Africa. You do the C-whatever,’ Kalil smiled and capitulated. ‘Just don’t get fucking caught! I don’t think they like visitors.’

He picked up the projector remote control again. ‘Right, so that’s the target set up then. Let me just take you through some of the background on Central African Republic.’