Valley of the Templars
Page 16
From what he could make out squinting through the open door, they’d pulled the old Wilga off the end of the strip and halfway into the scrub brush beside the burnt-out DC3, then covered it with more of the jungle camouflage.
“I guess there’s no point in making a run for it.” Laframboise grinned, getting to his feet and stretching. “They’ve got poor old Miroslava bound up in a girdle.”
“No point at all,” agreed Black. He and Carrie stood up, as well. They went to the table and sat down. Arango joined them silently.
“Even if they didn’t swat us down like flies, where would we go?” Carrie said sourly. “It really is a jungle out there.”
They took the covers off the food trays. “Roast beef, mashed potatoes with gravy, creamed corn, steamed spinach and green Jell-O,” said Laframboise, ripping open the little package of plastic utensils. “Pretty good grub for a prison cell.”
They ate and drank and fifteen minutes later two men appeared and cleared away the trays, then disappeared. Two minutes after that a new figure appeared in the doorway. He turned away for a moment and barked an order in Spanish before he stepped into the old shack. He was tall, hawk-faced and visibly much older than any of the men Black had seen so far. Unlike any of those men, he also had a rank insignia on his beret—the single silver oak leaf of a bird colonel.
“Su español es muy bueno,” said Black. “Pero usted no es Cubano.”
“Your Spanish is pretty good, too, and you’re not Cuban, either,” said the lieutenant colonel.
“Benefits of a classical education.” Black smiled.
“Brit.”
“Quite right.”
“I’m from Brooklyn.”
“Gee, I never would have guessed,” said Carrie.
“My name is Frank Turturro.” The lieutenant colonel smiled. “Who are you?”
“My name is Carrie Pilkington. I’m an analyst in the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loudly, Miss Pilkington,” said Turturro. “It’s the kind of thing that’ll get you in a lot of trouble in this country.”
“And being a lieutenant colonel in a foreign mercenary army doesn’t?” Black snorted.
“What foreign mercenary army would that be?” Turturro asked.
“BSSI,” responded Carrie emphatically. “Blackhawk Security Services International. The Super Tucanos with all the firepower out there were provided by International Aviation Services, Blackhawk’s air force. Their headquarters is at the old Air Haven Airport in Alhambra, Arizona. You’ve even got half a dozen Lockheed Neptune bombers from the ’sixties that Blackhawk uses to ‘pacify’ natives in your South American operations.”
“You’re very well informed, Miss Pilkington. I congratulate you,” said Turturro.
“It’s my job,” said Carrie. “What’s yours?”
“I follow orders, Miss Pilkington, no more, no less.”
“Where have I heard that before? I wonder,” said Black.
“A Brit who speaks excellent Spanish in the company of a CIA analyst. You must be MI6.”
“Bond, James Bond,” said Black in a terrible Sean Connery brogue.
Turturro smiled and leaned back in his chair. He stared at Pete Laframboise, then reached into the breast pocket of his fatigues and tossed over a package of unfiltered Camels with a matchbook tucked into the cellophane. Laframboise tapped one out of the pack and lit it, taking a deep drag, and then let it roll out from his nostrils and his mouth with a contented sigh.
“So, who are you?” Turturro asked.
“Nobody,” said the pilot. “Just along for the ride.” He took another drag on the cigarette and smiled. “Actually, I am the ride.”
“You own the Wilga?” Turturro asked.
“‘Owned’ isn’t a real word in Cuba, Mr. Colonel, sir,” said Laframboise. “You only own something here until the government or some bigwig gets it into his head that he doesn’t like it or he wants it himself and then, poof, it’s gone. It’s like power, Colonel. It’s an ephemeral thing; it only exists if you can hang on to it and for as long as you can hold on to it.”
“Deep thinking for a crop duster,” said Turturro.
“Before I left the country in a hurry, I was finishing up a postgraduate degree in political science at McGill University in Montreal.” He picked up the Camels from the table. “Mind if I keep these?”
Turturro nodded. “Go ahead.”
Laframboise slipped the matches back under the cellophane, then put the package of cigarettes into his pocket.
“And you?” Turturro asked, staring at Arango. The Cuban turned his head and spit onto the floor.
“I am the man who cut off your compadres’ cojones fifty years ago. I was also the man who loaded the rocket into the RPG that brought down that airplane out there.”
“A CIA analyst, an MI6 agent, an old Fidelista and a gray-haired grad student from Montreal fly into an armed camp in a piece-of-crap crop-dusting plane. Why?”
“Sounds like the opening to a bad joke,” said Carrie. “We know why we’re here, but what about you?”
“This is the part when the bad guy tells the hero his evil plans for world domination?” Turturro said. “I don’t think so.” He stood up. “You’ll be held here until things…are under way. “After that you’ll be released and you’ll be on your own.”
“Not much of an interrogation,” said Black. “Where are the lasers and the pools full of sharks? Snakes maybe?”
“There are no poisonous snakes in Cuba,” said Turturro. “And I don’t need to interrogate you. For the moment I just need to keep you out of the way. Try to escape and my men will shoot you. Survive that and there’s thirty miles of jungle between here and the next best thing to civilization. So just stay put.” Turturro walked to the doorway, then turned. “Don’t piss me off,” he said, and then he was gone. A guard stepped halfway into the room and shut the door.
“That was a bit weird,” said Carrie. “It wasn’t much of an interrogation, was it?”
“You believe any of that bull-puckie?” Laframboise drawled, still smoking the Camel.
“I don’t think he has the slightest idea of what to do,” said Will Black. “We weren’t part of whatever game plan he’s got in mind. Flies in the ointment, so to speak.”
“So, what does he do with us?” Carrie said.
“He goes up the chain of command until he gets someone who can make a decision.”
“What chain of command?” Carrie asked. “Who is Blackhawk working for? The Pentagon wouldn’t sanction an invasion of Cuba; they wouldn’t dare and neither would the president.”
“I don’t know who his ultimate employers are, but the colonel is in the middle of something very big here. Those men and that equipment aren’t here as some sort of resistance army in the mountains. They’re an assault force.”
“You think this is part of Selman-Housein’s Operación de Venganza?” Carrie asked.
“I think it has to be.” Black nodded.
“Okay, I’m lost,” said Laframboise. He wet his fingers and pinched out the butt of his Camel. “What the hell is Operation Vengeance and what does El Comandante’s doctor have to do with it?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Laframboise. “And neither are you, boss.”
“We’d better be,” said Black, staring at the closed door, his tone ominous.
“Why’s that?”
Carrie answered, “Because pretty soon the colonel’s going to get his orders from on high and he’s going to kill us.”
20
The old man sat in the shade of the avocado tree growing beside the main house and watched his great-grandchildren splashing and playing at the far end of the large swimming pool. Their laughter seemed very far away, almost as if they were living in a different world from his own. In his world the voices were clear and the images were sharp and brightly colored and there was no need for the hearing aids he wore or the bifocal specta
cles that pinched his nose.
He let his head fall forward a little and glanced at his hand on the arm of the old wicker chair. The chair came from the old family finca in Oriente where he and his nine brothers and sisters had spent their early childhood.
Cords of sinew and veins ran like creeping worms beneath parchment, liver-spotted skin, and the nails were thick and ribbed like yellowing horn. The old man lifted the hand and placed the tips of his first and second fingers below his nostrils, hoping to catch some faint scent of the cohibas his man Eduardo Irizarri had rolled for him. There was nothing, not the slightest memory of an odor; not surprising, really. It had been a quarter of a century since he’d given them up, and he chuckled aloud as the thought drifted through his mind like smoke.
He’d had his first cigar with his old friend David de Jongh behind the gymnasium at the Dolores School in Santiago and they’d coughed their lungs out on one of Father Alvarez’s Montecristos. They’d called him Bola de Churre then—“Greaseball.” Not anymore, and he smiled at that thought as well.
All so long ago, and that long life, a life without great love or change or real happiness, had been haunting him for some time now. What had he missed except to outlive all his enemies and watch presidents of the United States come and go like the turning of their leaves in autumn? There was no fall or winter here; it was always summer, it was always the twenty-sixth of July and he and his brother and Camilo, Huber Matos and Che were young again and attacking the Moncada Barracks with nothing but hope and bursting hearts and a few old weapons. Siempre Veintiséis!
“Papa?”
It was his son Antonio, the handsome one who traveled with the baseball team.
“Yes, Antonio?”
“You looked very sad, Papa.”
“I was thinking about snow,” the old man said, remembering.
“Has it ever snowed here?” Antonio laughed at the idea of snow in this place.
But the old man remembered it clearly. It had been Christmas Eve, 1976, and a blizzard in Montreal diverted them to the old airport in Gander, Newfoundland. He’d had Nitza and Margot prepare papa rellena and lechon in the airport kitchens for everyone, and then a reporter from the newspaper took him for a drive around the town. Behind the local hospital he’d seen some children with their trineos, their toboggans, sliding down a hill and he’d tried it for himself. He fell off, of course, and he and everyone had laughed except his bodyguards, but the children showed him how to make los ángelas in the snow and he’d lain there in the darkness, staring up into the night, the snowflakes falling on his beard and then his tongue.
“They were all different,” said the old man. “They were all different and that was the problem.” The great constant that Marx had overlooked in his squalid Soho garret in London—that there are no constants and that every man was as individual as his fingerprints…or a snowflake.
“What was different, Papa?”
“The snowflakes…they were all different.” To bend eleven million minds to yours and hold them for fifty years was just like catching snowflakes on your tongue—impossible.
There was a long silence, broken only by the children in the pool and the wind spinning the leaves above his head.
“The doctor is here for your checkup, Papa.”
The old man blinked and came back to the present. He stared at his son, letting his mind put itself together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. A jet lumbered overhead on its way toward the airport, its muted turbines like the rolling sound of distant thunder. A sound that didn’t even exist in the world of the twenty-sixth of July.
“Eugenio has returned from Irlanda?”
“No, Papa, this is a new doctor for you.”
“I don’t want a new doctor,” he said, his voice suddenly suspicious. “Where is Eugenio?”
There was a long pause. Finally the old man’s son spoke again. “He may have…defected. He was last seen at his hotel in Dublin, but he disappeared in the big park they have there.”
“Perhaps he was abducted.”
“No, Papa, they do not think so.”
“They?”
“MININT, Papa.”
“Ibarra?” General Abelardo Colome Ibarra was minister of the interior, but Antonio Castro knew the seventy-three-year-old man had been showing clear signs of dementia for some time now. The only thing keeping him in his position was his longtime friendship with his teo, and even with that most of his responsibilities had been put onto other, younger shoulders.
“Yes, Papa.”
“Ibarra is insane, you know,” murmured the old man. “An old American hand grenade exploded too soon and he had a sliver of shrapnel in his brain. At Cuevo, near the old house in Biran.”
“Papa,” said Antonio gently. “You must let the doctor examine you. We want to make sure you are well enough for the festivities next week.”
“Festivities?”
“The feast of St. Lazarus, Papa. Everyone will be here for you. You must see the doctor to see if you are well enough.”
“No doctor!”
The sound of the old man’s voice rang out like a pealing bell. It was enough to startle the yellow-breasted zapatas in the avocado tree into hurried, noisy flight. It was the voice of a man who had ruled a generation. Even the children stopped playing in the pool for a moment. The young man sighed. He knew that tone. “Yes, Papa,” said this son meekly. He placed his hand on his father’s shoulder and together they silently watched the children playing in the swimming pool. There were some things that you just didn’t argue with Fidel Castro about, and this was obviously one of them. The doctor could wait.
Holliday sat with Eddie in the shadows of the cave entrance. Through the Russian binoculars, Holliday watched as two men climbed up the hill toward them. The man in the lead was Domingo Cabrera, but the withered old man behind him was a stranger.
The old man was wearing an old straw cowboy hat, an old-fashioned wifebeater undershirt, a pair of jeans and worn-out high-laced combat boots. He had a weapon in his hands, a canvas bag on his hip and something that looked like a bowie knife in a leather sheath hanging from his belt. From where Holliday sat, the old man’s weapon looked like an old Remington 1912 shotgun with a homemade leather sling, but the man was clearly no threat to Eddie’s brother. Domingo strode on ahead, his own Saiga .308 carelessly slung over one shoulder, his knapsack over the other.
According to Domingo, there was a tiny farming village six or seven miles from the cave where he sometimes went for supplies, but he never mentioned bringing one of the villagers back with him. The runaway MININT officer had told the villagers he was a dissident hiding from the police, but how would he explain his brother and a man who was clearly a yuma?
The two men finally reached the cave and Holliday, and Eddie stood and stepped out of the shadows. The old man with Domingo looked at them carefully, and Holliday saw his right index finger curl against the trigger of the old shotgun. The man was as black as tar, his face cut with lines and wrinkles so dense that it looked like darkly grained ebony. His eyes were a startling and very clear blue.
“Está bien, Enrique,” murmured Domingo. “Ellos son amigos.” Domingo slipped the rifle off his back as well as the bulging knapsack. “No hay leña y el cubo es en la cueva.”
Enrique nodded. He slung the shotgun over his shoulder on its homemade sling and went inside the cave, giving Holliday and Eddie a still-suspicious glance as he went past them. Domingo began gathering rocks and putting them in a circle. Some kind of fire pit. A few moments later Enrique reappeared with an armload of kindling as well as the canvas bucket. He dropped the firewood beside Domingo and then went back down the hillside with the bucket. Domingo began building a fire.
“We must leave here very quickly,” he said, arranging kindling.
“Why?” Holliday asked. “Not that I have any objection.” What he really wanted was to get the hell away from Cuba as fast as he could and tell someone in authority what the hell was going on.
“Emiliano Zapata from the Mexican War?” Holliday asked. “That’s nuts.”
“Presumably the message referred to Orlando Zapata, a dissident who died during a hunger strike several years ago,” said Domingo. He lit the fire with a kitchen match and it caught almost instantly.
“There’s a bunch of dissident guerrillas running around in the mountains?”
“I do not think so,” said Domingo. “Enrique has a mule. He was taking some eggs to the market when he heard the explosions at the checkpoint, and when everything was quiet he went down and checked. This is what he found.” Domingo turned away from the fire and opened his knapsack. He took out the expended tube of an M72 LAWS rocket, a dirt-stained black beret and a handful of brass shell casings. The shell casings were huge—at least two and a half inches long. Holliday recognized them instantly.
“Winchester .300 Magnums,” he said, picking one up and twisting it in his fingers. “Sniper rifle ammunition. Definitely not for amateurs.”
“Or dissident guerrillas,” said Domingo. “Look at the beret.”
Holliday picked it up. It was a standard military-style beret with a peak where a unit badge had been; he could even see the small, ragged stitching holes where it had been removed. He flipped it over and looked at the sweatband. Half worn off on the leather insert, stamped in gold, were the words MADE FOR BSSI, BY PARKHURST HAT CORPORATION.
“Oh, shit,” said Holliday. “Not again.”
“Who is this BSSI?” Eddie asked.
“Blackhawk Security Systems International,” said Holliday.
“Ah.” Eddie nodded. “The fools who blew up my Pevensey and attacked us in the jungle,” he said angrily. Pevensy was the battered old riverboat Eddie had piloted up the Kotto River into the Central African Republic. It was aboard Pevensey that Holliday had met Eddie for the first time.
Enrique came trudging back up the hill, the pail heavy in his hand. He reached the top of the hill and the cave entrance and gratefully lowered the pail. Holliday had assumed he was going for water, but at first glance it looked as though the pail was full of mud.