Valley of the Templars (29 page)

Alfonsito appeared in the doorway, a transformed man. His white stubble had been shaved off, he was dressed in a clean white shirt and pants and he sported a clean yellow straw hat on his head and a
bright blue sash around his waist. There was an old pistol stuffed into the sash. Alfonsito posed, smiling in the doorway, showing his tobacco-stained teeth.

“Magnifico!”
Eddie explained, clapping his hands and grinning.

“Muy guapo!”
Very handsome, Will Black said, smiling as well.

“The senoritas will swoon for you, grandfather,” said Eddie in Creole. Alfonsito, despite his years, colored like a beet.

“Why does he carry a gun?” Carrie whispered.

Eddie asked the question in Creole and Alfonsito smiled, hauling the old revolver from his sash. “He says there are pirates on the highways as well as the seas.”

“May I see the weapon?” Carrie asked eagerly.

Eddie asked the question to Alfonsito and the old man looked a little querulous. He responded with his own question in Creole and Eddie translated. “He wishes to know why such a pretty senorita would like to see the old
pistola
his father gave to him.”

“Because I am interested in such things,” said Carrie. “I shoot pistols as a sport.”

“This is true?” Eddie asked, surprised.

“Of course it’s true,” responded the young CIA employee, a little acid in her tone and perhaps more than a little pride. “I was first in the women’s rapid fire at the European Championships in Belgrade two years ago and second in the Pan American Games in
Guadalajara last year. I’m also on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team.”

“Good Lord,” said Black.

“It’s not all sugar and spice and everything nice, you know,” said Carrie.

Eddie spoke in rapid Creole and Alfonsito nodded. He approached Carrie and slipped the revolver out of its place in the sash and handed it to her ceremoniously. She held the weapon reverently in her hands.

“It’s a forty-five-caliber Colt New Service double-action revolver,” she said, turning the weapon over in her hands. “It looks like it’s in perfect condition. It’s got to be at least a hundred years old.”

Alfonsito said something to Eddie with pride in his voice and Eddie translated. “He says his father fought with Teddy Roosevelt at the Battle of San Juan Hill at Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American war…when the United States and the Cubans were friends, not enemies.”

“Does it still work?”

Eddie asked and Alfonsito answered.

“He says of course it still works and that you may try it if you wish.”

“Tell him I am honored.”

The screaming of the Super Tucano’s Pratt & Whitney turboprop engine came out of nowhere as Ed
Broadbent, the Blackhawk pilot, brought the old-fashioned-looking fighter plane around the hillside, screening Alfonsito’s farm from view.

He’d gone out early from the old landing strip deeper in the mountains, hoping to catch the fleeing group before they broke camp, and he wasn’t prepared to see his targets unarmed and standing in the open. He instinctively realized he was flying too high and moving too fast to get a shot, so he immediately threw the aircraft into a rolling climb to drain off his air speed, flipping the yoke switch for the twin Herstal .50-caliber machine guns in the wings.

He peeled out of the climb and came back on the group from the opposite direction, nose dropping and losing altitude quickly. There were five of them gathered around an old American pickup, all of them staring up at him, their faces a white blur. The Heads Up display was putting them right in his sights and he barely hesitated before his thumb hit the firing button for the twin .50-calibers. The hesitation killed him.

Before he could activate the brutal firepower in the wings, he watched dumbfounded as the five-bladed aluminum propeller seemed to bend, blur and disintegrate right before his eyes. His left hand reached for the ring-pull of the Martin-Baker ejection seat just as the fourth big-caliber round from the revolver gripped by Carrie Pilkington seventy feet below him struck the
auxiliary fuel pod directly beneath the cockpit and the eight-million-dollar aircraft turned into a fireball. The solid-fuel rocket charge and the explosive in the ejection seat exploded, hurling the blazing, torchlike stick figure of Ed Broadbent through the glass cockpit cover and into the cool clear air.

“
Guete!
” Alfonsito whispered in Creole, eyes wide as the flaming twisted remains of the fighter plane roared over his little house and crashed into his tobacco field.

Carrie popped open the cylinder of the big old revolver and started ejecting the spent brass. She grinned at Alfonsito. “Yup, still works.”

The fishing fleet in Caibarien was located in a small bay on the eastern edge of the decaying but once vital old town. There was one rotting concrete pier and several short, wobbly wooden docks jutting out into the clear shallow water, but it looked as though most of the fishermen brought their catches to shore in small luggers and dories, which were pulled up onto the stony beach and unloaded there.

Alfonsito parked his truck on the dusty road and told them to wait for him to return. Holliday, seated in the bed of the truck with the others, watched the old man and Eddie go, then looked out over the bay. Most of the dozen or so boats were in the fifty-foot range, old, tubby and in need of paint, single-masted with a squat, flat-roofed wheelhouse set far back in the stern. None of them carried radar dishes and only one or two had rudimentary radio antennas strung up the forward mast and boom. All of them had great folds of brown net hung out to dry over the
gunwales. Breathing in, Holliday inhaled a potent aromatic mixture of the fresh produce around him on the bed of the truck, the salt tang of fresh sea air and the bitter grunge of diesel oil. A seabird of some kind swooped down out of the harsh blue sky and settled on the forepeak of one of the boats.

“That reminds me,” said Holliday, turning to Carrie. “I never congratulated you on your Annie Oakley demonstration this morning. Pretty amazing shooting down a fighter plane with a hundred-year-old six-gun.”

“Aw, shucks, Shurrif, ’tweren’t nothin’, really,” she drawled. “It wasn’t. I’m not kidding. There’s more than one military analyst who called the Tucano and the Texan II and the 67 Dragon flying coffins. They don’t have enough armor and probably the first shot at the prop would have been enough. Throw a five-bladed prop even a fraction out of sync and it’ll rip the whole airframe apart. They’re for nostalgia buffs who wished they’d flown Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.”

“It was still pretty impressive,” said Holliday.

“Agreed,” said Will Black.

“Do I detect a little ‘impressive for a girl’ chauvinism in there somewhere?”

“Not a bit of it,” answered Holliday. “Gender doesn’t matter a crap when it comes to having your ass hauled out of the fire. I said impressive and I meant it. We’d all be dead meat if it wasn’t for you.”

“That old double action was what did it. The Tucano’s coming at about a hundred knots; the Colt has a muzzle velocity of about seven hundred feet a second—when that big fat .45 round hit the prop, it was the equivalent of a Canadian goose going through the fan of that jet that went down in the Hudson.”

“Except this time the pilot wasn’t as good,” Holliday said. “Or as lucky.”

“No, I guess not,” said Carrie, a faraway look in her eyes and her tone dark. “It was a horrible way to die. I’ve never killed anybody before; it was always just paper targets and gongs. This was real.”

“That’s right,” answered Holliday. “It was real and you’ll never forget it until your dying day, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you saved five people’s lives and maybe a hell of a lot more than that if we actually get out of this.”

Eddie and Alfonsito reappeared atop the path leading down to the beach. “How did it go?” Holliday asked Eddie as they approached the pickup.

“He will do it. His name is Geraldo López-Nussa. His son, Ricardo, is his partner. The son is his only family. If you can guarantee to speak for him to the people of American
Inmigración
, he would be most grateful.”

“I can pretty much guarantee him citizenship for himself and his son if he can get us outside Cuban territorial waters,” said Holliday.

“We meet him on the beach. His boat is Corazon de Leon, the
Lion Heart
. It is the one with the red stripe.”

Holliday looked quickly out onto the calm waters of the bay. It was the boat with the bird on the forepeak. Maybe it was an omen.

“Got it.”

“It is already late in the day for the lobster boats to head out to sea. Four strange people on Geraldo’s boat will have people talking, especially when three of them are obviously
yumas
. The police will know quickly. We must move, and fast, if we want to get away cleanly. Geraldo says there has been a Zhuk patrol boat seen in the area.”

“Then we should get a wiggle on,” said Black. He picked up the burlap sack containing the weapons and they followed Geraldo down to the beach. His son, Ricardo, was waiting by a dory already pushed halfway into the water. They climbed in, Ricardo shoving them off and then leaping into the stern to handle the rudder as his father took the oars.

“How many of the patrol boats are there?” Holliday asked. Eddie relayed the question to Geraldo as he pulled at the oars.

“He says they used to be in every harbor in Cuba, but now there are only a dozen or so. Mostly they patrol the Florida Straits looking for people trying to get to Miami.”

“Did you ask him about the other thing?” Holliday asked.

Eddie nodded. “He has some…not very much. Red.”

“Good enough,” said Holliday.

Geraldo rowed while Ricardo steered and a few moments later they arrived at the permanent wooden buoy where the Corazon de Leon was anchored. They scrambled aboard while Ricardo tied off the dory. The deck of the boat was littered with strange-looking boxes made from mangrove branches. The boxes were three feet on a side and open-ended.

“Casas para los langouste,”
explained Geraldo.
“Nosotros les fuera cosquillas con cañas de bamboo.”

“They are little houses for the lobsters. They sink them in the sea and then—how do you say, ‘tickle’?—them out with long bamboo poles into their nets.”

Geraldo took them to the wheelhouse, which was larger than it had seemed from shore. There was a small room behind the wheelhouse itself, which had a set of bunk beds, a table, chairs and some rudimentary cooking facilities including a portable propane stove and some pots and pans. A porthole on either side of the little cubicle provided light. Both portholes had been opened wide and a pleasant cross breeze riffled across the room. Geraldo spoke some rapid-fire Spanish and Eddie nodded.

“Geraldo wants us to stay here until we are beyond the
cayos
and in the open sea.

“No problem,” replied Holliday. They settled themselves into the small galley. A few moments later they heard the throaty cough of a diesel engine and seconds after that the
Lion Heart
began to move, heading toward the open sea and perhaps, at long last, freedom.

Bruno, Cardinal Musaro, papal nuncio to Cuba, sat in the dining room of the nunciate in the Miramar District of Havana waiting for the midday meal to be served. He sat at the head of the table, which looked directly out the open French doors onto the beautifully tended Orange Garden. The trees were all valencia, the true Mediterranean
Citrus sinensis
, not the American hybrid usually associated with the name. Each of the trees was between six and ten meters high and pruned so that it was broad and bushy. Even though it was early in the season, the fruit was already visible among the branches.

As usual he ate alone at the seventeenth-century lyre-legged walnut table. His lunch had begun with half a dozen fresh oysters followed by conch fritters and a lovely avocado salad, and he was now working his way through a satisfying
medianoche
, or
midnight
,
sandwich consisting of roast pork, ham, mustard, Swiss cheese and dill pickles, served on a soft challah-style bread and pressed in his beloved George Foreman Grill. When the sandwich was finished, he would end the meal with a Flan de Guayaba y Queso, cream cheese and Guava flan with coffee to follow. He liked to eat lightly at luncheon since he was often required to attend lavish dinners given by Havana’s high society, which generally meant the more Catholic members of the military hierarchy. Tonight, for instance, it was a pre–St. Lazarus Day feast being given by Brigadier General Ulises Rosales del Toro, a Hero of Cuba, the vice president of the entire country, the effective head of the sugar industry and one of the men most likely to succeed if Fidel died and Raul abdicated, which was the most likely scenario. Little did Del Toro know how soon that would be.

One of his attendants brought in the flan and after he’d departed a second priest appeared. He wasn’t familiar to Musaro and the papal nuncio frowned. Strangely the man had a limp and carried a heavy, old-fashioned root-wood cane, polished to an almost glassy shine.

“I don’t mean to interrupt your meal, Eminence, but I have an urgent message from the Vatican.”

Musaro’s frown became a grin. This was the news he had been expecting. He’d seen that bastard Spada’s
medical files and he knew the timing was perfect. “Yes?”

Father Ronan Sheehan raised the head of the knobkerrie, its large upper handle weighted with an extra ten ounces of lead, and struck Musaro hard on the right side of his forehead at his temple, instantly crushing both the frontal and the sphenoid bones. He caught the dying cardinal by the scruff of the neck and dragged him to his feet. He gently kicked the man’s ankles out from under him, then let go of his collar. Musaro dropped heavily to the floor, striking the right side of his head against the corner of the table before he hit the Persian-carpeted floor. The hit on the edge of the table had opened the wound nicely so that blood from the corner of the table began dripping down on the body, more fluid, brains and blood oozing out onto the rug. Sheehan paused just long enough to take a breath of the ripening oranges outside, then turned and left. Half an hour later he was back at the Marina Hemingway, guiding the late Des Smith’s boat in the general direction of Key West.