Valley of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  Some small thing managed to intrude into the farthest point of his peripheral vision. Camouflage. The impossibility of seeing the nose and propeller of an old British Spitfire and then the tree was twenty feet in front of them, and then somehow it was below them.

  Black was sure he felt the top boughs of the tree scratching the bottom of the fuselage and then they hit the dirt, bounced slightly and slowed as Laframboise waggled the tail to lose even more speed. They finally came to a stop about four hundred feet from the remains of the bullet-ridden wreckage of the DC-3. Off to his right and the edge of the landing strip, Black saw what had caught his eye just before they didn’t hit the pine tree: an Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighter plane under a cleverly designed fly tent of camouflage netting interwoven with enough pine boughs to make it blend in with the trees that covered the ridge.

  That was crazy enough, but what he really couldn’t figure out was how they’d managed to land it with the tree in the way. Laframboise had obviously been thinking the same thing. He glanced into the rearview mirror set just above the center of the windscreen.

  “Tree’s a phony,” the pilot said. Black followed his glance. The fifteen-foot tree was lying on its side in the middle of the runway. “They stick it into a hole to make the strip look unusable.”

  “Senors?” Arango said, his voice nervous as he stared out through the windscreen. Laframboise looked forward.

  “Oh dear,” he said.

  “Who the hell are they?” Carrie said, frowning.

  A dozen men in camouflage fatigues, combat boots and black berets stepped out of the trees behind the DC-3 and were approaching the Wilga. Each of them was carrying a stubby little H&K MP5 submachine gun.

  “This is not good,” said Will Black. “This is not good at all.”

  17

  Holliday, Eddie and Domingo Cabrera stood on the dirt road between the slope of the hill and the wildly rushing river behind them. The river was one of the small tributaries of the Agabama, and for much of their time they had followed its course into the mountains.

  Holliday squatted down, examining the deep tread marks in the dirt. “They were big,” he said. “Either two or three of them. I’m not quite sure. Two huge wheels in the front and two sets of double wheels in the rear.”

  “There were three vehicles,” said Domingo Cabrera.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I am sure,” said the white-haired man, his voice tense. He turned away from the road and began to climb the scrub-covered hill toward the mouth of a cave high above the river. Following, Holliday noted that it looked as though there had been recent activity on the slope, as well; a few scattered concrete railway ties, a short length of slightly rusty track—some kind of narrow-gauge rail line like the kind you might find in an old gold or silver mine, of which there were quite a number in Cuba.

  They reached a small shelf of rock outside the mouth of the cave. Except for the floor of the entrance, it was rough and natural, about forty feet wide and thirty feet high at the peak. The rails and ties were intact as they ran into the dark recesses of the cavern.

  “A mine?” Holliday asked, slightly out of breath after making the steep climb. He looked up at the roof of the cave and saw a series of heavy-duty lag bolts deeply rooted in the stone.

  The lag bolts held huge U-bolts, and the U-bolts were threaded with the remains of wire cable that had been run through a complicated series of high-tension pulleys. “Not a mine, something else,” he said, answering his own question.

  Holliday stepped into the cave and followed the rails into the interior. It was dark, but there was still enough light coming from the entrance to let him see. He was at least two hundred feet along the track when the cave opened up enormously.

  Not quite Carlsbad but large enough—at least five hundred feet long, six hundred wide and a hundred and fifty feet high, the ceiling lost in permanent darkness. In a limestone cave of any size, there are usually stalactites hanging from the ceilings and their twin stalagmites rising from the floor. Both were caused by water seepage taking excessive minerals from the stone over a period of thousands of years, accreting them into the spiky formations. Here there was nothing except the sawn-off remains of where stalagmites had once been, the work clearly done by some sort of circular concrete saw.

  Off to his left Holliday saw an air mattress raised on a bed of pine boughs, the remains of a campfire, a stockpile of dry wood and kindling, a knapsack, a very old-looking kerosene lantern, a pair of Soviet-era KOMZ binoculars in their leather case, a military-style collapsible canvas bucket for water, a machete and all the other necessities of survival in the wild, including a Russian Saiga .308-caliber hunting rifle. Domingo Cabrera had clearly been living in the cave ever since his disappearance.

  A large skeletal structure appeared out of the gloom. It looked like the underpinnings of a set of bleachers from a baseball stadium minus the seats and the floor. It went up in three tiers, each tier twenty feet above its neighbor, angled back in a zigzag and covered with the ubiquitous Cuban corrugated iron roof sixty feet above the floor of the cave.

  The roof was sloped toward the back of the bleachers and was beginning to develop its own sets of small stalactites and stalagmites, gluing it firmly to the curved sidewall of the cavern. Give it five thousand years and the bleachers would have turned into a cave within a cave—an enormous mound of accreted minerals.

  As Holliday approached he saw that the bleachers were a set of curved metal cradles, eight for each level, and that there were even more U-bolts and turnbuckle-pulley arrangements in the iron roof of the three-tiered unit and that there was also some sort of chain mechanism.

  He also saw that the rail line ran the length of the bleacher unit and then dead-ended at a wedge of concrete with a steel bumper bolted to it. Holliday stared for a long time, then finally shook his head.

  “All right,” he said, turning to Domingo and Eddie, who had followed him down the tracks. “I give up. What the hell is it?”

  “It is a very long story, Colonel Holliday. It goes back many, many years; more than five hundred years if you want to hear all of it.”

  “I know about the Brotherhood, Los Hermanos. Start from after that.”

  Domingo Cabrera looked around the cave, his eyes taking on the appearance of someone remembering the past and not enjoying it at all. He shook his head, then closed his eyes for a moment, his lips moving silently as though he was praying. Holliday looked over at Eddie. Holliday’s friend made the sign of the cross over his chest and nodded toward his older brother. Finally Domingo opened his eyes again and spoke.

  “Do you know about the War of the Bandits?”

  “Batista supporters in the hills, CIA weapons drops. Sort of a counterrevolution after Fidel.”

  “The hills, Colonel Holliday. It went on from just after the Comandante took power until 1963 or 1964, but really it was over before the Bahía de Cochinos.”

  “The Bay of Pigs.”

  Domingo Cabrera nodded slowly, gathering his thoughts. “The Comandante was fighting people who fought like he had fought in the Sierra Maestre—guerrillas, fighting, running, fighting, running. In the end he had to use Batista’s own tactics against these guerrilla fighters. He used numbers, mostly young militia like me. Thousands of us to fight perhaps six or seven hundred of them. We knew very little about real fighting then. Almost none of us had ever fired a weapon except in practice, and many of us died. Many of my childhood friends died.”

  “What does this all have to do with that?” said Holliday, pointing toward the metal framework beside them.

  “Let him speak,” said Eddie softly. It was the first time Holliday had heard Eddie speak about his brother with any sort of kindness or compassion.

  Domingo made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. “On May the seventeenth, 1961, just after the invasion at the Bahía de Cochinos, one hundred and eighty-seven died in this cave. They were burned to death, most of them.”

>   “You seem very sure about the numbers.”

  “I am.” Domingo nodded back over his shoulder. “I helped take out the remains and throw them into the river down there. Your friend on the boat, Capitaine Montalvo Arango, was our leader and taught us how to throw los cócteles Molotov. At first we thought it was muy divertido, very funny, but then they started running from the cave covered in fire and screaming and then it was not so funny anymore.

  “After that the local people began calling this place la Caverna de los Asesinados, the Cave of the Murdered Ones. The people of the Escambray are very religious—Santeria of the very old kind. They said the cave was the home of Eshu, the orisha of el Infierno. Hell. From then on the cave was tabú. You know this word?”

  “Yes.” Holliday nodded.

  “Because of this, El Comandante and the other members of the Brotherhood thought it would be an excellent place, especially since Eshu’s number is three.”

  “Three what?” Holliday asked. The tracks of three vehicles in the dirt road outside, three tiers to the massive metal structure in the cave. He looked at the structure again, then down at the tracks at his feet. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about the whole thing.

  “By October of 1962 our Soviet comrades had delivered thirty-two Dvina missiles to Cuba. What you call SS-4 or Sandal type. They were supposed to send forty more of the larger SS-5 missiles at a later time.

  “Your U-2 overflights detected the missiles at San Cristóbal and that was the beginning of what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis ended when Khrushchev and Kennedy came to an agreement and the SS-4 Sandal missiles were removed. This is when the Brotherhood’s idea was born.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to like this,” sighed Holliday.

  Domingo continued. “What Kennedy and the rest of the people involved did not know was that several dummy SS-4 missiles without warheads had been sent to Cuba months before so that the Cuban technical crews could practice on them. These dummy missiles were sent back to the Soviet Union in place of a number of the real ones.”

  “Three of them,” said Holliday, seeing it all with a sudden, terrible clarity.

  “Three of them.” Domingo Cabrera nodded. “The three nuclear missiles which were brought here, away from the prying eyes of your U-2s and later your spy satellites. The missiles are very simple, almost laughably so compared to the missiles of today. Their guidance systems are no more than gyroscopes. They have been here for fifty years, the warheads in mothballs at a hidden location close to Havana.”

  “And now the missiles have gone.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “If this is part of the Brotherhood’s Operación de Venganza, I would think that they have been returned to their original sites in Pinar Del Rios, San Cristóbal to be exact. The hidden silos were built in a place well away from the mobile sites—a small area known as the Valle del Templete; it marked the route of the first explorers who discovered Havana. When the deal was struck between Khrushchev and Kennedy, nobody mentioned the silos, so they are probably still there.”

  “What exactly is Operación de Venganza?” Holliday asked.

  “On the day following Fidel Castro’s death, three nuclear missiles will be launched at the United States, one aimed at what is now Orlando International Airport, but which in 1962 was McCoy Air Force Base. McCoy is where the U-2 that discovered the missiles landed and where all further U-2 flights over Cuba originated. The other two missiles will be aimed at Miami. The warheads are one megaton each.”

  “How could the Brotherhood know when Fidel was going to die? You can’t keep missiles like that ready to launch indefinitely.”

  “They know because one of their number is going to assassinate him, Jaime Cardinal Lucas Ortega y Alamino, the archbishop of Cuba. He always celebrates the Feast of St. Lazarus with El Comandante. His death will look natural, a stroke or seizure of some kind.”

  “How did you discover all this?” Holliday quizzed.

  “I worked for the ministry all of my adult life, always in low-level positions. I never was given even a bicycle for transportation to the ministry from my home, let alone an automobile.” The white-haired man shook his head. “My last job was as a driver and part of the security detail for Deborah Espin.” Domingo Cabrera smiled sadly. “In Cuba the one thing more invisible than a chauffeur is a black chauffeur; people speak of things they should not, as though you were not even there. And Deborah Espin is a very heavy drinker, as well. Her tongue gets very loose when she has been drinking. My mistake was to listen.” He shrugged. “In the end someone discovered that I knew too much and I had to disappear. My only other choice would have been to die peacefully in my bed with a bullet in my brain like many others at the ministry before me.”

  “I still don’t understand the purpose of it all,” Holliday said after a moment’s thought. “Wiping out Orlando and Miami is going to kill a lot of people, but for what? It’s a horrible, meaningless gesture.”

  “The Brotherhood knows that on the death of Fidel, Raul and his family will flee the country. Raul keeps una jet ejecutivo at Ciudad Libertad Airport in the Atabay District of Havana for just this purpose. It is only ten minutes away from his home. With Raul gone, the country will descend into chaos.

  “Eventually a military dictator will rise above the rest, but it is unlikely to be one of the Brotherhood’s choosing, and between the death of Fidel and the rise of this new strongman a great deal of damage will be done. The only way to stop this, at least according to the Brotherhood, is to enact Operación de Venganza and force the United States to invade Cuba.

  “The embargo would disappear overnight, the old Cuban families would take back what was theirs fifty years ago and so will the American companies that Fidel nationalized. It will begin a new era of prosperity for our country without bloodshed. Cuban bloodshed at least.”

  Holliday stared at Eddie’s white-haired older brother. The plan made a terrible, mad kind of sense. Under any other circumstances an American invasion of Cuba would have seen the United States vilified and ostracized around the world, but with a million or two dead by nuclear fire in a sneak attack worse than Pearl Harbor, an invasion would not only have just cause, but it would be politically correct, as well. Swift retribution. With that scenario in play, any president would be guaranteed four more years, no matter how low his polling numbers were.

  “Dear God,” whispered Holliday.

  Domingo Cabrera smiled sadly. “I am afraid God has not visited Cuba in many years, Colonel Holliday.”

  “When is the Feast of Lazarus?”

  “The twenty-first day of this month. Seven days from now.”

  “So there’s nothing we can do to stop this thing.”

  “No, Colonel, I am afraid there is nothing we can do at all.”

  The man who had carried the two oversized Halliburton suitcases on the Air Cubana flight booked into the Disney Contemporary Resort and used his Amex card to prepay his two-week reservation. With that done, he gave the single dark blue Samsonite case he’d purchased in Houston to a bellboy, picked up his room key and went back outside.

  He turned down the offer of one of the half dozen or so valet parkers, then took the Chrysler out into the enormous complex of parking lot that served the Contemporary Resort as well as several other Disney facilities. After he ensured that no one was watching, he removed two local New Orleans plates from the trunk, removed the rental Texas plates and screwed on the ones from Louisiana.

  He’d spent an hour in New Orleans looking for the same model of Chrysler just to confuse things if it came to that. Finally he put the fourteen-day permit on the dashboard, locked the car and walked back to the hotel. He asked the concierge to get him a cab, tipped the man and rode to Orlando International Airport in time to catch a one-ten JetBlue flight to Nassau, which arrived an hour later.

  In Nassau he switched from his authentic but bogus American passport to his Cuban diplomatic passport and caught the three-fi
fteen Compañía Panameña de Aviación Airlines flight to Havana via Panama City. The flight took a little less than five hours all told and he arrived back in Havana in time for a late dinner in the Comedor de Aguiar dining room at the Hotel Nacional.

  With his dinner completed, he took out the pocket-sized Inmarsat satellite phone, pulled out the blade antenna and dialed the suitcases in Orlando. The suitcases immediately demanded his authorization code, which he sent. Following that, he ran a series of test numbers to the suitcases, which then informed him that everything was in order.

  He ended the data communication function, folded away the blade antenna and then had a look at the dessert menu. He chose the Copa Lolita crème caramel with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a rum and raisin sauce. He ate his dessert slowly, savoring each bite, then had the waiter fetch him a Bolívar Petit Belicosos and a Havana club on the rocks. He lit the cigar and blew a swirl of the rich aromatic smoke into the air. He took a sip of his drink and leaned back against the banquette. He smiled happily. All in all, it had been an excellent day.

  PART THREE

  LIFTOFF

  18

  Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Antonio Niccolo Spada contemplated the remains of his breakfast on the lap table lying over his thighs and wondered how it was that Thomas Brennan, a lowly parish priest, always found some way to disturb his digestion.

  At his age the cardinal’s breakfast was not what it used to be—which had once been asparagus spears topped with two fried eggs, crumbled pancetta and bread crumbs seasoned with Parmesan, followed by sfogliatelli stuffed with ricotta and/or cannoli along with several cups of strong espresso.

  Now it was what lay before him: a single soft-boiled egg, a piece of dry, whole-grain toast and tea with lemon. On occasion when he felt like living dangerously, he would add a small glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, more for the irony of the fact that the Vatican kitchen’s oranges were inevitably Jaffas imported from Israel than for the flavor. In fact, he’d developed a taste for powdered Tang in the ’60s and still much preferred it.