Valley of the Templars ts-7

by Paul Christopher

  And there was the age-old question of course, thought Federico. Bad men never thought they were bad, but everyone thought they were good. “And how am I to know that you are not the bad men and the people pursuing you the good?”

  “You are a wise man, old grandfather, to ask such a question, but the answer is an easy one.”

  “And what is the answer?”

  “If we were the bad people, we would have blown you off your old burro by now and butchered his stringy old flesh for our dinner.”

  The black man smiled.

  Federico smiled. “That is a good answer,” he said. “Come with me to my home and we will talk and I will give you some food.” He put the willow switch lightly to Graciano’s neck and the burro moved slowly off again. Eddie and the others fell in behind him.

  “That didn’t sound like any Spanish I ever heard,” whispered Carrie.

  “That’s because it wasn’t Spanish—it was Cuban Creole,” said Black. “It’s the second language here and it goes back a long way.”

  “Could you understand what Eddie was saying?”

  “No, but it was obviously all the right things.”

  28

  Alfonsito’s finca, or farm, was located at the very end of the narrow little road in the mountains. There was a small cluster of plaster-covered single-story buildings that looked as though they had been a work in progress for a hundred years or so, a broken-backed small wooden barn and a pigpen with half-built walls of concrete blocks. The house was roofed with loose squares of rusted sheet metal, and the barn was thatched with woven banana leaves and cane.

  Several small fields climbed up the slope behind the house and outbuildings. Holliday could see tobacco, tomatoes, potatoes, something green like spinach and even a spiky field of pineapples.

  There were a pair of avocado trees ripe with fruit giving shade to the doorway of the farmhouse, and underneath one of the trees was a 1941 half-ton Dodge pickup that looked as though it might have been black at one point but which was now covered with a coat of uniform mud gray house paint.

  The old Dodge was in excellent shape except for the frighteningly bald tires, and with a little work Alfonsito could probably get more money for the truck than for his entire farm. A dozen chickens poked about in the front yard, pecking at nothing. Off to the right was an adobe fire pit with a grease-encrusted grill. Heat was rising from it, which meant the coals had been lit some time ago.

  Alfonsito slid off the burro, tying it to a low branch of one of the avocado trees. He led them into the main room of the house and threw open the shutters of the two windows to let in some light. There was a homemade table, four wooden chairs and a small bed in the corner.

  Alfonsito spoke to Eddie. “Take the table and chairs outside. We will eat under the tree where it is cooler.”

  “Certainly,” said Eddie. He explained what the old man had said and they began moving everything outside. Alfonsito stepped into a back room, disappearing from view.

  “You think we can trust him?” Carrie asked.

  “He’s offering his hospitality,” said Eddie. “That is trust enough for me.”

  They took the table and chairs outside into the shade of the avocado and Alfonsito appeared a few moments later with a split and eviscerated suckling pig, which he laid on the grill.

  Alfonsito disappeared again and came back in a few moments with a burlap sack and five tall plastic cups held in his spread fingers. The cups were old McDonald’s Batman Forever giveaway cups with the images mostly faded and scratched off.

  He opened the burlap sack and ceremoniously removed five cool bottles of blue-labeled Mayabe beer. He set one bottle and one cup before each of his guests. He found an old wooden crate beside the door, upended it for a stool and then passed an old rusted bottle opener around the table. When all the beer had been passed around, he stood and lifted his bottle.

  “Bweson zanmis!”

  “It means ‘Drink, my friends,’” translated Eddie. The others all raised their bottles “Onè Respè!” said Eddie, toasting Alfonsito. The others all followed suit without having any idea what it meant, but whatever they’d said, it made the old man smile. Behind them on the grill, the smoky sweet smell of barbecuing pork began to fill the air.

  By early evening the team of scouts sent out by Turturro had returned with Veccione in tow, exhausted and suffering slightly from exposure but otherwise intact. Broadbent the Tucano pilot had searched until the light began to fail, but all he could find was an abandoned campsite and a clear trail heading northwest.

  “They’re heading for the coast,” said Veccione. “I’d bet on it.” The “Therapist” gave a little wince of pain and his face darkened. “I’d like to get my hands on the savage son of a bitch who did that to Nick and the others.”

  “Why didn’t he get you?”

  “I was getting some kindling for a fire. I heard the commotion, so I bellied down and got as close as I could. It was too late. One against three and he took them all out. There was nothing I could do.”

  “You had a sidearm.”

  “It was holstered. He would have heard.”

  “So you just watched him kill my men?”

  “Fuck you, sir. They were already dead with their guts pouring out and their heads on poles. I didn’t think getting myself killed was going to be particularly useful.”

  “So you bellied away?”

  “I didn’t move a muscle until they were gone.”

  “They?”

  “The guy with the eye patch showed up about half an hour later. The black guy went off with him. I split.”

  “Why do you think they’re headed for the coast?”

  “Where else would they go? They know we’re after them. They flew in here with a crop duster, for Christ’s sake! They’re not equipped to get through army checkpoints on the highway, so they sure as hell aren’t going back to Havana.”

  “The guy with the eye patch and the black came by boat up the Agabama River. What’s to stop them from doubling back?”

  “They’d have to double back. They gotta know they’d run into us. Not to mention the fact that it’s almost a hundred miles downriver to the south coast. With this Viva Zapata shit we’ve stirred up, every Cuban patrol is going to be on edge.” Veccione winced again and moved on his cot to get more comfortable. He shook his head. “They have to be heading for the north coast. By now they’re not more than twenty-five or thirty miles from the Atlantic side.”

  “Where?”

  “Caibarien,” said Broadbent, the pilot, speaking for the first time. “I was studying the maps and charts when I got back. It’s the only place they could find a boat.”

  Turturro looked at his watch. Forty-eight hours now before Point Zero, the code name for their operation, to begin in force. Holliday and the others had to be caught before then. “All right,” he said finally, “Caibarien it is.”

  They ate roasted suckling pig and drank beer in the dying sun, and then Alfonsito found blankets and bedding enough and took them to the big tobacco drying shed, where they bedded down for the night. Tomorrow they would help him gather enough produce in the cool of the morning for him to take to the market in Caibarien and he would be more than happy to give them a ride.

  The coastal town had once been known as La Villa Blanca, the White Town, famous for its port, its hotels, its parrandas, or carnivals, and its white-sand beaches arcing around the Bahia de Buena Vista. Now the town had fallen into disrepair, the fine old nineteenth-century hotels crumbling, its two sugarcane mills long closed down and most of the piers and other port facilities rotted, sunk or destroyed by decades of hurricanes sweeping over them.

  On the eastern side of the decaying town, there was still a small fishing fleet, specializing in lobster and other crustaceans and a small but active sponge fishery. It was here, suggested Alfonsito, that they might be able to find someone willing to rent out his boat.

  The old farmer woke them before the sun had truly risen and they f
ound themselves in a ghostly universe of early mist that hugged the ground and drifted, shredding through the trees on the hillsides all around them. Alfonsito gave them a breakfast of harsh black café Cubano, fried eggs and crisp pieces of succulent lechon from the night before and then they went to work in the fields, following the old man’s directions and filling basket after basket with fresh-picked produce and even two or three dozen already ripe pineapples.

  By the time they were finished, the mist had burned off and the hot sun was rising in the sky. The baskets were loaded in the truck and then Alfonsito disappeared into the old house. They packed away their weapons among the baskets of food and waited for the old man to reappear.

  “Bloody hot work, that,” said Will Black, sitting on the open tailgate. “I really am a city boy, I suppose. Never was one for all that ‘bringing in the sheaves’ silliness.”

  “We spent our whole summers doing it,” laughed Eddie, stretching his arms and yawning. “Trabajo voluntario, whether you volunteered or not. Two months gathering tomatoes only to see them rotting on trucks because there was no gasoline.”

  “What gets me is the quiet,” said Carrie. “A few birds, the wind in the trees. Nothing. I haven’t heard a car in weeks, it seems. A bit spooky.”

  “Is this where I’m supposed to do the John Wayne bit and say, “Yes, ma’am, just a little too quiet?”

  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.”

  29

  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.”