Valley of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  “Have your troops take trucks to Aserradero.”

  “The MiLs can have them there in an hour and a half. Trucks would take at least two days. We need a presence on the ground right now.”

  It made sense. Frias took another spoonful of the avocado mixture and ate it, thinking. After a few moments he nodded. Orozco was smart, he was young and he was tough. And not someone you wanted in Havana when el mierda golpeó el ventilador.

  “Good thinking, Colonel Orozco. Do it, and may you have great success.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Orozco clicked his heels, saluted, then turned on his heels and left the pool enclosure. Frias went back to his avocado. He finished his snack, then took a cell phone out of the pocket of his robe and punched in a number. It only rang once before it was answered.

  “Done,” said Frias. He hung up the phone and lit another cigarette. With a little bit of luck, Orozco and his men would be corpses rotting in the jungle by St. Lazarus Day.

  22

  They moved along the faint jungle trail, Enrique in the lead followed by Domingo, then Eddie and Holliday in the rear. A point man throughout his military career, Holliday did not enjoy the position; militarily being the tail-end Charlie was vulnerable, poorly positioned to respond and able only to react to events farther up the line than to initiate them.

  It was usually the position given to the least valuable member of a team and the most expendable. He was also the most poorly armed; Enrique had his shotgun, Domingo had his rifle and even Eddie had Domingo’s old machete. All Holliday had was Enrique’s bowie knife and a wooden staff sharpened at one end to fend off the wild boars Enrique said lived in these overgrown woods.

  “Where exactly are we going?” Holliday said quietly.

  Eddie turned his head slightly. “Enrique’s village. Las Vegas Grandes. He says it is not far now, perhaps another mile.”

  “I don’t see any meadows around here—it’s all jungle.” Ever since they’d left the winding river more than three hours ago, the terrain had become steeper and more difficult. The trail they were following looked more like an animal track than anything made by humans, and even at that it was no more than three feet wide, the jungle foliage crowding in claustrophobically. Above them a flock of Cuban solitaires scolded them with their earsplitting cries, then took nervous flight, wings beating the air loudly as they rose into the sky.

  All of Holliday’s senses were on high alert; it was too much like Vietnam where the jungles were killing grounds sown with trip wires, homemade land mines made of folded-over tin mess plates and even tiger traps filled with sharpened punji sticks covered in human excrement.

  Villages full of old men and women could be booby-trapped, tunnel-riddled arsenals that could suddenly be full of suicidal enemies appearing out of nowhere and a ten-year-old kid behind the sights of an old Chinese-made RPD machine gun could wipe out a patrol in seconds.

  On top of that, there was also a chance of being blown to atoms by an overenthusiastic artillery officer with an M107 twenty miles away or a kid high on some blotter acid sent to him in the mail by a stateside friend chucking a grenade into your foxhole because he thought you were a bloodsucking zombie demon trying to eat his brains. And none of all that prepared you for the bugs, the snakes, the foot rot and the mud. Vietnam hadn’t been a war; it had been the mother of all nightmares with the jungle as its dark, gloating heart.

  Holliday squinted up the trail. Enrique was out of sight. The line was strung out; too much space between each man. He stopped. For three hours a dissonant choir of birds had screeched, whistled, hooted and rattled in the trees around and above them. Now it was silent.

  “Shit.”

  “What is it?” Eddie turned.

  “No birds singing.”

  “Singao!” Eddie hissed. “Estamos jodidos!” He turned forward and let out an earsplitting whistle.

  Instantly, Domingo turned.

  “Qué!”

  “Emboscada!”

  They rose like the floor of the jungle come to life, four Swamp Things with dangling shreds of foliage and rust-colored and mottled strips sewn and woven into nylon netting that covered them from head to toe, each armed with an MP5 submachine gun or something like it. Holliday’s twitching memories of his teenage horrors in Vietnam and Eddie’s shrill whistle had given the three men on the trail a tenth of a second advantage, but it wasn’t much.

  Acting on nothing but old instincts and adrenaline, Holliday’s thought process was: “ghillie suit—Interceptor body armor—neck-groin.” He thrust the sharpened staff in low and just to the left of the crotch. The lower flap of the Interceptor vest covered the genitals well enough, but it didn’t do much for the femoral arteries running up the inner thighs on both sides.

  The staff cut through the camouflage ghillie suit, glanced off the Kevlar groin flap and went a good three inches into the Swamp Thing’s leg. The creature gave a high-pitched screech, dropped his weapon, grabbed his leg and toppled over.

  Ahead of Holliday a high, sweeping slash from Eddie’s machete had decapitated one man and a whirling backswing had taken off the right arm of a third. A single round from Domingo’s .308 had taken the fourth man in the chest and even with a vest the hydrostatic shock had blown the man six feet back into the jungle. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.

  “Madre de Dios,” said Eddie, staring down at the one-armed man as his blood pumped out onto the ground. Hundreds of small red ants were already climbing over the wound, and a long, thick trail of them was marching out of the jungle’s interior for the alfresco feast.

  “Where the hell is Enrique?” Holliday asked. He pulled back on the slide of the MP5 he’d collected from the man bleeding out at his feet.

  “Enrique se ha ido, el hijo de puta,” said Domingo. He stepped into the undergrowth and began hauling the man he’d hit back onto the jungle path. “El bastardo nos traicionó.”

  “He betrayed us,” said Eddie. “He knew they were waiting here.” He picked up one of the MP5s and frowned. “The weapon has the safety on.”

  “Estupido,” grunted Domingo, heaving his victim onto the path. The man was still alive, groaning in pain.

  “Maybe they weren’t supposed to kill us,” ventured Holliday, thinking.

  “They were not here to welcome us,” said Eddie.

  “No, but they might have been here to take us prisoner.”

  “Enrique must have told them we were coming,” said Eddie. “That much is muy evidente, but how could they know who we were?”

  Having bad memories about a past time and place was bad enough, but having those old nightmares spring to life in front of your face and make you take yet another life to save your own had torn something deep within Holliday that he thought had been dead and buried forever, and now it was back and he was angry. “Someone must have told them,” he said, his expression grim. He unsheathed the bowie knife at his side and stepped up the trail to Domingo’s prisoner. “Let’s find out who.”

  Kate Sinclair walked down the long dock toward the seventy-two-foot Grand Banks Aleutian yacht berthed at its end. The name on the yacht’s transom was Rey Azucar—King Sugar. They were on the inside passage side of the wealthy community and she could see West Palm Beach half a mile away on the mainland side of the channel

  Sinclair was escorted by a young man wearing a faux nautical officer’s uniform, but there was no doubt from his demeanor, his dark glasses and the slight bulge on the left side of his pure white jacket that he was in fact a bodyguard to the boat’s owner, Julio Lobo, the so-called Sugar King of Florida.

  Lobo’s monstrous two-story wedding-cake mansion stood behind her with its arched colonnades, bell towers that contained no bells, sculptured topiary gardens tended to by an army of black groundskeepers, most of them Dominican, and the requisite turquoise swimming pool that no one ever used but which was a nice focal point for over-the-top cocktail parties.

  The elderly woman reached the end of the dock and allowed the b
odyguard to help her up the companionway ladder to the open afterdeck of the yacht. She sat down on the long white leather banquette that ran around the stern of the yacht. Two things happened almost immediately.

  The engines fired off and they began to ease away from the pier and a white-jacketed steward appeared with a plate of hors d’oeuvres, which he set down in front of her, and then he took her drink order.

  Just to be irritating, she ordered a Bloody Caesar, a mixture of Clamato juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and vodka rimmed with celery salt—a drink almost unknown in the United States. Three minutes after placing the order, her drink appeared over ice in a tall glass garnished with a stalk of celery just as it was supposed to be. She gave it a sip and found that it was perfect.

  Two minutes after the drink appeared, a stocky man in a business suit stepped out of the salon and onto the afterdeck. He had a deeply tanned face carved from granite, a square jaw, high cheekbones and an aquiline nose beneath a broad forehead creased vertically with four deep worry lines. The eyes were black under heavy brows and he had a head of snow-white hair in a widow’s peak swept straight back in the old-fashioned way. He was clean shaven except for a perfectly trimmed mustache as white as his hair. He had to be in his later seventies, but he looked as fit as a man of forty.

  Approaching the place where Kate Sinclair sat, he paused, gave an almost military bow, then eased himself down into a chair across from her. He extended a hand across the table. The hand belonged to a butcher or a prizefighter. The fingers were short and thick, the knuckles scarred over, the nails short and blunt. The watch on his thick left wrist was an old Stauer Graves with a sweat-stained leather band. Somehow the look didn’t fit with the huge yacht and the Baskin-Robbins McMansion. Kate Sinclair knew that somewhere half-hidden in his past, Julio Lobo had been a hardworking simple man. She took the extended hand and Lobo shook it, careful not to squeeze her old bones too hard or for too long. He released his grip just as carefully and sat back in his chair.

  “Senor Lobo,” she said.

  “Senora Sinclair,” he replied. His voice was as dark and deep as his eyes, the Cuban accent strong even though he had not set foot in his native land for more than fifty years.

  “You are a great traveler,” said the elderly woman. She sipped her drink and placed it back on the table. “You have homes in New York, London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, even Geneva. I was lucky to find you here.”

  The steward reappeared with a tall glass of something clear and bubbly on the rocks. Perrier or Pellegrino or perhaps just soda water. The steward placed the glass in front of Lobo, but he ignored it.

  “I was born in Colombia, raised on a sugar plantation in Cuba, went to school in England and returned to Cuba only to be exiled once again. I am the archetypical Wandering Jew, senora; I am a stateless man, a restless soul with no home.” He paused and released a small grim smile. “And you are a woman of great power with resources enough to find me no matter where I was. The real question is, why were you looking for me in the first place?”

  Kate Sinclair knew that Lobo was descended from Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. She also knew that he had not set foot in a synagogue since 1959 when Fidel Castro entered Havana.

  “I came to offer you a job, Senor Lobo,” said Sinclair. She took a long swallow of her drink and lit a cigarette.

  The steward appeared out of nowhere with an ashtray as well as a small humidor, a cutter and a lighter for Lobo. He chose an H. Upmann Number 2 Torpedo, sliced off the pointed tip and lit it, all the while keeping his eyes on the aristocratic woman across from him.

  Kate Sinclair felt a small shiver of fear at the look. She knew that Lobo’s name translated as “Wolf” and she knew he lived up to his name in more ways than one. It was well known that his father, Alonzo “Pepe” Lobo, had been in league with the Camorra in Naples, and who was to say that his son didn’t have equally sinister connections? She was certainly well aware of the truth of the Balzac quotation that “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” when it came to her own family, so why not Lobo’s?

  “I am an old man and I am a billionaire several times over,” said the Cuban expatriate. “What job could you offer me that I could possibly be interested in?”

  Kate Sinclair paused. It wasn’t a question to answer lightly. “I want you to become the minister of economic development for the Republic of Cuba.”

  Lobo studied her for a long moment, puffing on his cigar. The yacht reached Peanut Island and followed the channel markers around it. Ocean Point and the passage to the sea stood on their right.

  “I will tell you a story, Senora Sinclair. On the morning of January the second, 1959, the day following Fidel Castro’s entry into Havana, I had to go to the National Bank to get some papers my father needed. Che Guevara was sitting in the president of the bank’s office. I was twenty-four years old. Guevara asked me the same question.

  “What he really wanted to know was if I would be willing to run my father’s fourteen sugar mills and refineries after they had been nationalized and my father exiled or worse. I could either become a comunista or remain a capitalist pig. Do you know what I told Ernesto Che Guevara, the great hero of the revolution, Senora Sinclair?”

  “I can guess.”

  “I told him to go fuck himself, senora. So who are you to waste my time with such foolish questions? Such offices within the República de Cuba are not yours to give.”

  “Less than a week from now, on June the twenty-first, St. Lazarus Day, at some time in the afternoon, Fidel Castro will die at his estate in Punta Cero at the hands of the Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ, of which your father was a member. It is a fact that through the Brotherhood and your father’s connections to it, you have managed to rebuild his empire, an empire that now spans continents. If a man sugars his coffee in Moscow, Madrid or Mumbai, he is probably using your product.”

  They had come around Peanut Island now and were heading home again. Peanut Island is a local Palm Beach park with campgrounds, a marina and beaches. It was also the location for JFK’s fallout shelter during his winter visits to the family estate in Palm Beach. They even gave ten-dollar guided tours.

  “Even if this was true and Fidel was to die when you say, why do you think anything would change?”

  “Because it will be made to change.”

  “By the Brotherhood?” Lobo laughed around the stub of his cigar.

  “By the Brotherhood and outside interests that would like to see Cuba’s transition from being a pseudosocialist military dictatorship to a true democratic republic be accomplished as bloodlessly as possible. As I am sure you are aware, the Cuban military is effectively impotent and we have taken…steps to see that its remaining counterinsurgency is otherwise occupied.”

  “These outside interests. Your interests, Senora Sinclair?”

  “America’s interests, Senor Lobo.”

  “Given that this ‘change’ as you call it were to take place, what would my interests be, senora?”

  “All properties and land holdings owned by your family before 1959 would be returned to you, including the fourteen refineries you operated. At one time your family controlled more than half the sugar output of Cuba; if those refineries were operated by anyone other than yourself, it would be disastrous for the sugar industries of Florida, Louisiana, the Dominican Republic and Hawaii. Under your guidance, that could be prevented. That is roughly eight million tons of sugar annually under your control. Effectively you would control the world cane sugar industry.”

  “If such a radical and at this time completely hypothetical event was to occur, I would need further incentives,” Lobo said.

  “Such as?”

  “As you are probably aware, I own a majority interest in both Royal Tropicana and Tropic Sun Cruise Lines, both of which are based out of Fort Lauderdale. I also own several large construction companies here in Florida. When this ‘change’ of yours occurs, one of those compan
ies will be hired to build a cruise ship terminal in Havana Harbor and my ships will be given the first licenses to dock there.

  “Furthermore I wish to be made chairman of the first gambling commission in Cuba when it is established, and to be given ten licenses to be distributed as I see fit. If I am minister of economic development, it will also be a fundamental part of my mandate to control any and all resource development in Cuba, including agriculture, mining and tourism. None of this is negotiable.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Lobo.”

  “My father used to play poker with Meyer Lansky back in the ’fifties. I had excellent role models.”

  “I thought perhaps that I might have caught you unawares with my offer, Senor Lobo, but I see now that you have given this a great deal of thought.”

  “Senora, for many years now Cuba has been a ripe plum ready to fall from the tree. I knew someone would come along eventually and I would make my deal with the devil. You are simply the first devil to come along.”

  “No patriotism to stir your heart? No revenge for the indignities done to your family?”

  “Wave your flags elsewhere, senora. Patriotism is a sickness only bloodshed will cure. It is nothing more than men putting real estate above principle, and revenge is for idiots. This is about money, Senora Sinclair. Cuba has always been about money, nothing more, I’m afraid.”

  “So we have a deal?”

  “Why not?” Lobo said. “I’ve never owned my own country before.”

  23

  The flight of six MiL 8 transport helicopters hammered over the jungle and wildwood-covered hills and valleys of the Sierra del Escambray on their way to the town of Aserradero. Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Marquez Orozco sat in the cockpit of the lead helicopter, scanning the ground five hundred feet below them. Nothing to see but treetops, rock crags and the glitter of a meandering mountain stream. Behind him in the rear of the transport, twenty men in full gear sat huddled in jump seats against the bulkheads. Orozco’s helicopter swept over the Habanabilla Reservoir and into the Aserradero Valley. The town and its eight thousand peasant inhabitants lay dead ahead, the single thread of a narrow highway cutting the town in half.