Valley of the Templars

by Paul Christopher

  When he arrived back at the airfield just after dark, things went from bad to worse as his old friend and master sergeant Anthony Veccione reported the situation regarding the escape of the prisoners.

  “How long ago?”

  “An hour.”

  “How many of our men did they kill?”

  “Just two—the guards at the door, both cut down with a machete. They knocked out a man on picket duty.”

  “Did he see anything?”

  “There were three of them. Two black men, one white. They were all armed with MP5s just like ours. One of the blacks had a sniper rifle. An old one, he said. Russian maybe.”

  Three men, just the way his contact had told him. The MP5s had to belong to Woodward and the ambush team he’d sent out. “Shit.”

  “Who were they?” Veccione asked.

  “The ones the bosses asked me to keep my eyes out for. An old soldier named Holliday and two of his buddies. With those prisoners of ours they could mean big trouble. Have you sent out anybody after them?”

  “In the dark? In the jungle?” Veccione shook his head. “We’d be sitting ducks.”

  “First light, then,” said Turturro. “Just a few men. You and Nick Cavan take the lead. I need guys who’ve had real combat experience on this. No more than four or five men or they’ll hear you coming from a mile off. Report in on the hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is serious, Tony. Catch these sons of bitches or we could really find ourselves in the weeds.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ramiro Valdes, director of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, sat eating dinner in his executive suite at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Caracas, Venezuela. Eight floors below, the evening traffic swirled along the Avenida Principal, while through his dining room window the man with the white, military brush cut could see the looming ranks of the Avila Mountains rising in the distance, blacker shapes against the night sky.

  The chief of the Cuban Secret Police sliced a piece off his lobster tail with surgical precision and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly. As he chewed, he carved a small piece from one side of the blood-rare Kobe beef tenderloin. He looked across the starched white tablecloth at his dinner guest, the sour-faced Brigadier General Luis Perez Rospide, head of Gaviota, the corporation that oversaw every aspect of Cuba’s tourism industry. Between them they had an enormous amount of power, and both the Valdes and Rospide families had long been members of the Brotherhood.

  “I cannot convince Raul to build a cruise ship terminal. The man is impossible,” said Rospide, eating his pabellón criollo, the Venezuelan version of ropa vieja, or “old clothes”—a dish of rice, beans and shredded beef that had once been famous in Cuba but had disappeared over the past thirty or forty years for lack of beef to shred. “I gave him the numbers—three ships a day, two thousand passengers a ship, each spending two hundred dollars. That is one point two million dollars a day, Ramiro. A million dollars a day! The cruise ship season lasts from December to May. That’s billions of dollars being thrown away!”

  “Brother Raul is too old and too sick and too stupid. All he wants to do is retire to that ranch of his in Spain before the people rise up and hang him from a lamppost in Revolución Square. That idea of selling off everything in the museums of Havana last year was the last act of a desperate man,” Valdes said. He sliced himself another piece of lobster meat. “At any rate, we have more important things to think about. That is why I called you here.”

  “I am always glad to get away from Havana these days,” said Rospide. “It is claustrophobic. The Germans laugh and my staff steals chickens from the kitchens.”

  “The American colonel just called me. The CIA agents he caught have escaped. From the description given by one of the guards, there were two blacks and a white man. One of the black men sounds like it was Domingo Cabrera.”

  “Espin’s bodyguard? The one who disappeared?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Why would Cabrera rescue these men? How would he even know about them?”

  “One of the companions of the CIA people was Montalvo Hernandez Arango.”

  “So?”

  “Montalvo Hernandez Arango was Domingo Cabrera’s capitaine during the War of the Bandits. He knew as well as anyone where the Cuevo del Muerte was, the cave where the missiles of San Cristóbal were stored.”

  “Maybe it is just a coincidence,” said Rospide.

  “It might be but I doubt it,” said Valdes. “The American colonel described one of the CIA people as being from England and speaking fluent Spanish. He sent a photo by telephone. The man could well be one of the people who picked up Dr. Sosa in Dublin. He is MI6.”

  “Then we are ruined!” Rospide said, pushing his plate of food away as though it had been poisoned.

  “Ruined, no, but we must be careful. As you well know we have powerful Americans on our side. The question is, how much can we trust them? One of my surveillance agents in Florida reported to me that the woman who owns Blackhawk was seen in the company of none other than Julio Lobo.”

  “Maldita sea!” Rospide exclaimed. “She wants to put him in power instead of us?”

  “I would not be surprised.” Valdes dipped another morsel of lobster into the silver bowl of garlic butter. “The woman is a two-faced bitch, and worse, she is an American two-faced bitch.”

  “Is it too late to stop all of this? To abort the operation?”

  “No, it has gone much too far for that, I am afraid.”

  “Then what do we do, compañero?”

  “We kill them,” said Ramiro Valdes. “We kill them all.”

  Cardinal Spada and Father Thomas Brennan walked slowly through one of the old sections of the Vatican Gardens that covered most of the Vatican Hill. The early-summer sun was at its zenith and Spada wore a wide-brimmed red felt “galero” to give himself shade. Brennan was bareheaded and smoking one of his inevitable cigarettes.

  Spada liked the quiet here; the tourists generally went to the Belvedere Gardens at the Vatican Museums, and only the gardeners and people going to and from their offices at the Vatican Radio Station and the Academy of Sciences used these old paths.

  He liked the herb gardens especially; the smell of thyme and marjoram, oregano and sage brought him memories of the country and innocence and youth, none of which he had anymore except here as faint tastes on his palate and breaths in his nostrils. They walked past a lilac bush and it rushed back like warm summer rain on his upturned face.

  He sometimes thought it strange that lives could be condensed into such small sensory things, but it was true; the smell of lilacs reminded him inevitably of the first girl he had kissed and that would never change, nor did he ever want it to.

  Her name had been Lucretia and her lips had tasted as sweet as the grapes her father grew in his vineyards. Every summer his family vacationed in her district and they had great plans for a life together, all of which came crashing down at the age of fourteen when his father deemed it politically wise for his oldest son to join the Church. But even more than half a century later, lilacs spoke of her, and a grape fresh-picked from the vine burst with the flavor of her cool, soft mouth.

  “Cardinal?” Brennan asked.

  “Yes, Thomas, I beg your pardon. An old man’s mind wandering.”

  “I was speaking of Cuba.”

  “What about it?”

  “It is becoming more and more like the last days of Rome in the times of Caesar, I’m afraid. It is not simply a case of betrayal but a question of who is betraying whom.”

  “It sounds like the Vatican,” said Spada. “There are more sharpened daggers here than in any cutlery shop, I can assure you.” The cardinal secretary of state sighed, thoughts of Lucretia gone. “Is this about Ortega and Musaro?”

  “There are faint rumors that our jet-setting nuncio Musaro will denounce you to the Holy Father as the man behind the assassination of Castro and will also quietly denounce Ortega to the Cuban Secret Pol
ice just before the event happens.

  “Ortega will be ruined or perhaps worse. You will be removed as secretary of state, leaving the position open for Musaro. The Holy Father would have no real choice if he wanted to avoid a great bloody internal scandal. You’d just quietly go away to your estates in Tuscany and never be heard from again. I’d probably end up having a suitable ‘cardiac event’ in my bed one night.”

  “You think he’d dare?”

  “I do, indeed.”

  “Then perhaps we should dare first, Father Brennan.”

  “Which means?”

  “You have your man in Havana now?”

  “Yes. He’s waiting for orders.”

  “Have him deal with Musaro before the event and Ortega afterward. That solves a multitude of problems, don’t you think?”

  “You mean kill both of them?” Brennan asked, a little surprised at Spada’s ruthlessness. He was well aware of the cardinal’s illness and thought it might have softened him. Apparently it had not.

  Spada reached down and plucked a few leaves from a knee-high plant on the edge of the path and crushed them between his fingers. He held the crushed leaves in his palm and breathed inward deeply, his eyes closed, then offered the palm to Brennan, who took a tentative sniff.

  “Very nice,” said the Irish priest, being diplomatic since he couldn’t smell anything at all.

  “Ocimum basilicum,” Spada said. “Sweet basil, the herb of Italy. Cloves, earth, sweet tomatoes, all the good things of the countryside.” He took a last sniff of the leaves in his cupped hand and then let them fall to the ground, crushed and forgotten. “There have been a great many holy events in gardens,” the cardinal said mildly. “Eve’s betrayal of Adam in Eden, Christ’s agonies in the Garden of Sorrows, his betrayal by Judas Iscariot in the Garden of Gethsemane.” Spada stared at the hillside gardens all around them. “I wonder how many betrayals there have been on this bloody soil in the past two thousand years.”

  “Bloody soil?” Brennan said, looking down at the gravel beneath his scuffed old lace-up shoes.

  “Oh yes.” The cardinal nodded, continuing down the pathway. “Long before the time of Christ, this place was a temple to Vaticanus. God only knows how many spring lambs and newborn calves bled to death in the light of the full moon for that unholy creature. The Vatican Hill on which we now stand was once the site of Nero’s Circus, the place where the first Christians were martyred. Somewhere near here St. Peter himself was crucified upside down by his own instruction. Historically the blood of the three crucifixions on Golgotha by St. Helena, as well. Truly a bloodstained place.” Spada smiled pleasantly at his companion.

  Brennan, a man who had never quite given up the strange superstitious soul that is threaded into the DNA of every Irishman, despite a thousand canings by the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock College, stared back at his master and suddenly had the queasy feeling that the dying old bastard could actually read his thoughts. Thank bloody feckin’ Jesus that he’d chosen Cardinal Moisint, the deaf old bugger, as his confessor and not Spada.

  “Well, isn’t that an interesting bit of history?” said Brennan. “But I have my duties, so I should be off, if you’ll beg my pardon, Cardinal.”

  “You have it, Father Brennan,” said Spada. “And may you go with God, for in Him the world is saved, man is reborn and the dead rise again to life.” The opening words of a Catholic funeral Mass, as Brennan well knew. Perhaps he’d heed the warning.

  “Thank you for the blessing, Your Eminence, and if that’ll be all I’ll be on my way.”

  “Certainly,” said Spada. Brennan hustled off, looking over his shoulder only once. Spada gave him a little three-fingered wave—a blessing at a distance, or perhaps a curse. He waited until the Irishman was out of sight before he took the encrypted cell phone from his pocket. He tapped a number on speed dial that was answered immediately.

  “Luca? I want a watch put on Brennan, day and night. I think he has gone over to Musaro. The little bastardo worm has turned at last, just as I knew he would.”

  Holliday and the others made good time through the dense forests of the Escambray during the night of their escape. Laframboise and Eddie had both studied celestial navigation academically for their work, and Holliday knew his stars, both above and below the equator, simply for the sake of survival: there is no moss growing on the north side of trees in the jungles of Vietnam, and the hills and valleys of Afghanistan look pretty much alike in the dark when the battery to your GPS has run out, your radio can’t get a signal and your compass needle keeps on whirling around with all that cobalt and nickel ore all around you. Knowing your ass from Polaris had helped all three men from time to time.

  They kept moving, always a little east of north, hoping to reach the Atlantic coast of the country with a two or three days’ march. From there Eddie and Domingo were almost certain they could steal a boat or bribe a fisherman to take them either to the Dominican Republic or, better yet, the Bahamas.

  Holliday and the others paused for a few hours of sleep just before dawn, and as early-morning light cut weakly through the ghostly, drifting mist, he thought he might have heard a small helicopter in the distance, but it could just as easily have been the remnants of a dream, so he put it out of his mind. He woke before the others and found a small stream tumbling through the forest. He drank his fill, then splashed his face and neck. Eddie joined him and knelt down by the stream.

  “Arango has gone. El culo mierde took Domingo’s rifle.”

  “I hope your brother hasn’t gone after him.”

  “He wanted to,” said Eddie, “but I convinced him against the idea. We have the MP5s and the pistols we took from those men who tried to ambush us and two of those rather nice rifles we took from the guards at the airfield.”

  “The M4s.”

  “Yes, more than enough to start our own bandito war.” Eddie grinned.

  “You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” laughed Holliday.

  “Goddamn too right, I am enjoying this, my friend, and so are you, Doc. Don’t lie to me about it!”

  Eddie bent over the little stream and began scrubbing his face, singing as he splashed water:

  When a man’s an empty kettle

  He should be on his mettle

  And yet I’m torn apart

  Just because I’m presumin’

  That I could be a human

  If I only had a heart.

  “What on earth was that?” Holliday laughed, stunned.

  “It is from El Mago de Oz, of course,” said Eddie, coming up for air. “When it rained, El Hombre de Hojalata got rusty and could not move. That is us, compadre, tin men who are rusted. This is oil for our squeaking joints. No estamos en Kansas, Toto, esto es Cuba, mi amigo,” added Eddie.

  “Edito! Venir aquí ahora!” Domingo’s voice rang out urgently. Eddie sprinted toward the sound of the voice. Heart pounding, Holliday followed on his heels.

  A hundred feet from the small clearing where they had made their rough little camp, Pete Laframboise was standing statue still, his legs slightly spread, his hands in front of his crotch and his back to them. Domingo was kneeling in the grass, his fingers gently following an almost invisible strand of nylon fishing line to a sapling on Laframboise’s left.

  “Oh, shit,” whispered Holliday. It was an old Vietnamese trick; tie the line to the lever of a hand grenade, pop the pin and put the grenade into a tin can that it just fit into. Hit the line the grenade pulled out of the can, the lever popped and say adios. Sometimes if the path was wide enough they’d put a can at each end of the line. Simple, cheap and deadly. Laframboise had obviously gone to empty his bladder and felt the line against his legs just in time.

  Holliday could see that all Domingo had to cut the line was the machete. He could also see Laframboise’s knees shaking. “Domingo,” Holliday said calmly but loudly enough to hear. The white-haired Cuban cautiously turned his head. Holliday took the bowie knife from its sheath and flipped it deftly t
o land beside the older Cuban’s right foot, the long, razor-sharp blade cutting into the dark earth like butter.

  “Bueno,” said Domingo, laying down the machete. “Le doy las gracias, amigo.” Domingo slid the big-bladed knife out of the dirt and sliced through the fishing line with a single downward swipe. Holliday held his breath and he felt Eddie stiffen beside him, but nothing happened. Laframboise’s knees stopped shaking and he zipped up his fly.

  “That was a close one,” he said, half turning toward the others. Domingo took a step toward him and then his eyes widened with horror.

  “Ay no!”

  There was a harsh swishing sound as a sapling bent back on itself, whipped back into place, and six sharpened bamboo stakes, each eighteen inches long, impaled both Domingo and Laframboise where they stood. Holliday saw that the sapling was weighted at the end by a small, curved rectangular object that he recognized instantly: it was an MMI “MiniMore,” a smaller version of the much larger Claymore fragmentation mine.

  “Hit the dirt!”

  Holliday dropped, the gentle pinging as the second trip line pulling the ring on the mine tinkling melodically before the main charge exploded and its load of shrapnel exploded in a twenty-foot arc at roughly waist level. It sounded like a small sharp thunderclap followed by an acrid cloud of smoke and then something like the pitter-patter of hail as the projectiles within the mine hit the jungle. Then there was silence and the smoke began to clear.

  Holliday stood up. “Anybody hurt?”

  Will Black and Carrie Pilkington, coughing as they appeared out of the smoke, shook their heads. Eddie was already at his brother’s side, huge tears running down his cheeks. The MiniMore had missed Domingo’s face but had blown off much of his left arm below the elbow. Four of the six bamboo stakes had found their mark, taking the older Cuban through the belly and the midriff, but he was still alive—barely. The MiniMore had decapitated Laframboise. Blood and tissue were splattered everywhere.