Valley of the Templars (31 page)

Daniella gave the young masseuse a smile and left the apartment. When she reached the outside, she made a quick call on her cell phone. Spada would want the news immediately.

Paul Smith was mentally choosing between a Burger King Triple Whopper and Cheese with a side of onion rings and a large Diet Coke and a KFC Big Hungry Box Meal with a large Diet Pepsi when he saw it on screen four of the array on his desk. “It” was just a blob on the screen, but it had put out an anomaly ping, so he zoomed and tightened up the RQ-170 image.

The drone was on the far edge of the pattern and if the pattern hadn’t been just so, the image wouldn’t have appeared and it was doubtful GeoEye 2 would have read it as an anomaly from that height. Eyes bugging out, he slapped the keyboard, throwing the image up on the eighty-inch screen, recalibrated and zoomed in yet again, filling the giant plasma surface with an enlarged version of what he had just seen.

Any ideas of fast food vanished. This one was going to take him right up to the executive dining room
in perpetuity. He grinned; it was also so far above Leticia Long’s head that it was in the stratosphere.

“Holy shit!” Smith whispered reverently. He reached for the telephone, got the operator and gave an order as clichéd in the movies as “follow that car.” Paul Smith said, “Get me the White House.” And the operator did.

The Zhuk-class patrol boat appeared on the aft horizon approximately five hours after the Corazon de Leon had left the lobster grounds around the wreck of the SS
San Pasqual
. By Geraldo’s calculations they had been traveling at an average speed of twelve knots per hour, which put them sixty miles from the wreck and well outside Cuban territorial waters.

“How far?” Holliday asked Eddie, who was staring at the distant shape of the old-style patrol boat.

“Fifteen miles, maybe a little more,” replied Holliday’s friend. “Perhaps twenty.”

“How long?”

“It is hard to say,
mi compadre
. The Zhuk was rated at thirty knots maximum speed, but that was when they were new. The Cuban boats are from the ’seventies. I doubt that they can maintain twenty knots now, if that.”

“What can Geraldo give us?”

“No more than fifteen.”

“That means they’ll gain five miles each hour.” It was three in the afternoon; the patrol boat would be within range by seven in the evening—just about sunset at this time of the year—but it wouldn’t be fully dark until eight thirty or nine. They barely had a chance of getting away in the dark.

Looking to the other horizon, they could all see that dark storm clouds were gathering, high, bruised-looking thunderheads.

“Tell Geraldo to pour it on and tell him to pray for rain. It’s our only chance. Now.”

The tropical dusk was quickly turning to darkness when Colonel Frank Turturro’s forward team reported to him that the burnt-out remains of Broadbent’s Tucano had been spotted smoldering in a farmer’s field forty-five miles east of Caibarien. There was evidence that his prisoners had escaped from the farm in a truck of some kind and had either managed to steal or hire a boat or were now hiding in the town itself. Fifteen minutes after that, he wasn’t surprised to get the Abort code from the Mount Carroll Compound.

“Figlio di puttana,”
he cursed, reverting to the language of his Brooklyn youth. The Abort involved two major operations. First, the retreat of the remaining Tucanos to the fallback position on Isla Guanaja, a nearly uninhabited island a few dozen miles off the sometimes deadly Honduran coast. The individual pilots would then refuel and fly back to the United States and the Blackhawk-owned private airfield in Arizona.

The second part of the Abort mission was
considerably more complicated. Splitting into platoon-sized units, the almost fifteen hundred men scattered around the Sierra del Escambray would make their way to the Caribbean coast, where they would reassemble close to the nearly empty beaches to the north of Playa Inglés, a small run-down resort town. Two refitted freighters would stand offshore for three nights just beyond the twelve-mile limit and when signaled would send in enough inflatables to remove all the troops.

It all sounded well and good, but Turturro had sat through most of the planning sessions for Operation Cuba Libre, and the least attention had been placed on aborting. Apparently failure wasn’t an option for people like Swann and Axeworthy. When push came to shove, Turturro gave fifty-fifty odds if there would be any freighters offshore when the time came.

The whole thing was beginning to sound like a reprise of the Bay of Pigs. Then, as now, air support made all the difference. Without the Tucanos they were a hit-and-run guerrilla force not much bigger than Fidel’s band of brothers in the Sierra Maestre back in ’58 and ’59. Sighing, Turturro got up from behind his desk in the command tent. He went and stood outside, breathing in the sweet-rot stick of the jungle. Desert winds or jungle swamps, failure always smelled the same.

“Tha-tha-that’s all, folks,” he whispered to
himself, wondering if he was going to get off this island alive.

Max Kingman and Kate Sinclair sat in the study of the ex-ambassador’s Georgetown house discussing recent events in Cuba. Kingman was drinking too much. By Sinclair’s estimation he was at least three Scotches ahead of her one. He wasn’t pleased by the way Operation Cuba Libre was going at all.

“It’s starting to smell bad, Kate, I’m warning you. This Holliday is more than a monkey wrench in the works. He’s a mother-humping Sherman tank.”

The elderly woman smiled. “You’re showing your age now, Max; nobody’s used Sherman tanks since Castro at the Bay of Pigs.”

“Very funny. We’ve got everyone on our side now. Lobo, Bacardi, DuPont, all the hotel chains. We’ve made promises, Kate, and if we can’t pay the piper we’re going to be in some very hot water.” The ruddy-faced man took a long pull at his drink.

“Come, now, Max, the country is imploding. Its economy is a black hole, for God’s sake. How long can Raul survive by selling off the contents of the State Museum to keep the country stumbling along? He’s released a crowd of criminals along with the dissidents from his prisons because he simply couldn’t
afford to feed them. The country’s being run by Alzheimer’s patients.”

“Worked for Reagan,” grunted Kingman. “For a little while, anyway.”

“Relax,” said Kate Sinclair. “Tomorrow Fidel dies. Raul and his family will be on his jet to Spain within hours of his brother’s demise and the Brotherhood will be in charge.

“And try to remember, Max—Lobo, Bacardi and all the rest are paying us huge sums of money for a chance to reclaim their properties, and with the Brotherhood’s agreement they’ve also hired Blackhawk Security as a counterinsurgency force during the period of ‘transition.’ Relax, Max. We’ve just won the lottery.”

“We’re killing a lot of people to do it, Kate.”

“Having second thoughts, Max?”

Kingman shrugged. “I never did like Orlando much.”

“They’re suitcase bombs. Nuclear firecrackers. The estimate if both of the bombs go off is less than two hundred thousand people dead, maybe less—Lake Buena Vista or whatever it’s called is twenty miles away from town.”

“And the one in the Everglades?”

“Backup. The point is the bombs are the key that opens the door. It’s going to make nine-eleven look
like a house fire.” Sinclair raised her glass. “The bombs are the rationale for an invasion that should have succeeded fifty years ago.

“They’ll rewrite the Patriot Act; they’re going to be hiring private police forces, shoot-to-kill border patrols. Think of it as one big business opportunity. Those bombs are the keys to the magic kingdom, Max, and we’ll be the ones sitting on the royal thrones.”

“No, you won’t,” said Joseph Patchin, entering the study. A nine-millimeter Glock 19 was held firmly in his right hand.

“How the hell did you get in here?” Kingman said, half rising from his leather chair.

“I’m the director of operations at the CIA, you fat old bastard,” answered Patchin. “I’ve still got a few chops.”

It was clear to Kate Sinclair that Patchin was at least as drunk as Kingman. She calmly opened the bag on her lap, took out her lighter and cigarettes and lit one. “Perhaps you could enlighten us on the reason for your presence here.”

“Sure, Ms. Psycho Sinclair, you crazy bitch.” Patchin closed his eyes for a second or two and swayed slightly. “There’s been a Pinnacle Nucflash alert for Orlando. Where do you think that came from? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. It’s your old goddamn pal Holliday—that’s who. The
president, in all his great fucking wisdom, has asked for NEST teams to descend on Florida like locusts. The signal traffic between the American Interests Office at the Swiss embassy in Havana is burning up the airwaves. The jig is up, as they used to say. I think what it really means is we’re screwed. We’re all going down.”

“NEST?” Kingman asked, his face slack and his brow furrowed, not quite getting it.

“Nuclear Emergency Support Team,” said Kate Sinclair. “They find lost atomic bombs and the like.”

“Full marks, sweetie.” Patchin grinned drunkenly.

“But…but there must be something we can do!” Kingman said.

“Sure there is,” said Patchin. “We can die.” He fired two quick shots, one into Kingman’s chest and another into his throat, killing him instantly and blowing him back even more deeply into his chair.

Remarkably his drink stayed firmly gripped in his hand. Blood began to spread across his starched white shirt and bubble from his mouth in little pops and burbles as the life drained out of his body. Patchin watched for a moment, fascinated, then swung around to face Kate Sinclair. “Your turn now, Lady Crazy, and then I’ll join you in hell myself.”

“I’ll take a rain check, Mr. Patchin.” She slid her little Khar PM45 pocket pistol from her purse and shot Patchin once, taking out his left eye and blowing
his brains out through the door and into the hall outside the study. Patchin collapsed like an empty suit of clothes.

Sinclair stood, walked over to Patchin and took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of the man’s suit jacket. She wiped off her own handprints from her pocket pistol, then went and placed the weapon in Max Kingman’s dead right hand, squeezing his index finger into the trigger guard and pressing his other fingers around the grip.

She took the Scotch glass from his other hand and put it on the table beside him. She finally retrieved her own glass, emptied its contents back into the Scotch decanter, then wiped and dried the glass before putting it into the bar cabinet with a dozen or so others just like it.

Sinclair looked around the room, nodded once, then left the room, careful to step over the mess Patchin’s brains had left in the front hall. She paused at the front door, took out her cell phone and made a quick call.

“File a flight plan for Zurich. I’ll be there in half an hour.” She closed the cell phone, put it back into her purse. Using Patchin’s handkerchief, she turned the doorknob and stepped out into the muggy evening air. She closed the door, put the handkerchief into her purse.

“Goddamn it to hell,” she said quietly, then
headed for M Street and a taxi to take her to the South Capitol Street Heliport.

So far the growing storm had kept the Zhuk at bay, the high, choppy waves throwing both the patrol boat and the Corazon de Leon around like a kid’s bath toys. She had come abreast of them but was standing about a mile away, the red, angled stripe on her hull occasionally visible as she rode the crest of a wave.

Every ten minutes or so, there would be the popping, tearing sound of the twin forward and aft machine-gun turrets, but so far they hadn’t done much more than blow off the upper portion of the mast and boom and splinter a few of the piled lobster traps on deck.

Eddie was at the wheel while Geraldo and his son were belowdecks checking out the boat’s sluggish response to the helm. Will Black was in the galley trying to prepare them something to drink and eat while Holliday stood beside Eddie, staring through the binoculars.

Carrie was clutching a bulkhead and trying to keep her feet under her as the bow of the lobster boat smashed into a wave, then rose to the crest and then dropped into the trough on the other side. The sky was black and what they could see of any horizon was
dark gray. The rain beat down furiously, drumming on the deck and the roof of the wheelhouse.

“I don’t understand,” yelled Carrie, raising her voice above the bluster of the storm. “She’s been over there for an hour. Why haven’t they blown us out of the water?”

“The machine guns can only traverse to a certain angle. If she got any closer she’d be shooting over our heads,
comprendez
?” Eddie said. “And they probably have very little ammunition.”

Eddie hauled over on the wheel as they hammered into another wave, then rode it upward. On the downward slide he hauled in the other direction, trying to keep the Corazon de Leon from slewing broadside into the next wave. “Besides, they are probably afraid, as well. They are a long way outside Cuban waters.”

“Pretty soon they’ll figure out that the only way they can deal with us is to ram us, and that’ll be that,” said Holliday, lowering the binoculars.

“Brew up!” Will Black called as he staggered out of the wheelhouse, somehow managing to balance a tray of mugs in one hand. He began handing them out. “Coffee, strong, hot and sweet.”

“Shit,” said Holliday.

“That bad?”

Holliday shook his head and pointed to the windscreen of the wheelhouse. The rain was streaked with
shades of pink. “The paint is coming off the roof. We’re done.”

Geraldo stumbled into the wheelhouse through the starboard-side hatchway. He spoke to Eddie in rapid-fire Cuban.

“Well?” Holliday asked.

“The boat is leaking badly,” translated Eddie. “Ricardo is trying to make repairs, but we’re taking on a lot of water.”

“Double done,” said Holliday.

Suddenly the storm clouds above them split wide, casting down a huge, golden swath of dying sunset light and blue sky like something out of a Rembrandt painting or one of the apocalyptic horrors of a John Martin canvas. It was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying at the same time.