Valley of the Templars ts-7

by Paul Christopher

  “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.

  30

  After rounding Punta Brave, the Corazon de Leon puttered slowly southwest heading for the shallow channel between tiny Cayo Boca Chica at the end of its much larger brother, Cayo Fagoso, on the port side and Cayo Frances to starboard. Beyond was the open sea. Geraldo and his son, Ricardo, stopped the engines briefly beside an old wreck of a molasses ship, the SS San Pasqual, blown onto the reef in 1939.

  The crystallized molasses still threw off a terrible odor, but the old concrete ship was exactly the kind of place where you caught the best lobster and it took less than twenty minutes for the father-and-son team to bring up several dozen of the enormous creatures. It also gave them a chance to see if anyone had shown any interest in their leave-taking.

  Eddie and the two Cuban lobstermen met briefly on deck, and then Eddie reported back to the little galley aft of the wheelhouse. “They say that from here we can go two ways: to Key West or to Billy’s Cay in the Bahamas. If we go to Key West we have to travel along the coast for more than seventy miles, but Billy’s Cay is one hundred and seventy miles and almost due north. They are suggesting Billy’s Cay and ask for your thoughts on this.”

  “How long before we’re beyond the twelve-mile limit?”

  “From the wreck…perhaps forty-five minutes.”

  “No sign of the Zhuk patrol boat?”

  “Nothing. The sea is ours.”

  “I agree with Geraldo and Ricardo. We head for Billy’s Cay.”

  “Bueno.” Eddie nodded. He turned and left the galley.

  “Time to get to work,” said Holliday.

  Paul Smith, senior analyst and interpreter for the Central American Division of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, sat in his small office in the new Fort Belvoir complex. It was Saturday, Smith’s usual day for golf, but here he was, at the express order of Mrs. Leticia goddamn Long, director of the agency, to repurpose the new GeoEye 2 satellite as well as run a series of four overlapping and continuous RQ-170 drones over Cuba. The RQ-170 was tasked to fly at mid altitudes, but it was felt that although one had been recently brought down by the Iranians, the Cuban electronic defenses were not sophisticated enough to cause any problems. He had six computers running simultaneously on his workdesk and a huge eighty-inch monitor on the wall giving him a larger, high-definition view from GeoEye 2.

  To make matters worse, not only was he to retask the satellite and oversee the drone flights out of Creech, but he was to personally maintain twenty-four-hour surveillance and see to it that there was always someone watching the screens. Under no circumstances was he to leave the gigantic building, which meant some kind of hideous dinner in the food fair mall in the Atrium and a night in one of the “suites” the agency maintained for just this kind of situation. The “suites” were som
ewhere short of a room at a Motel Six. It was worse than being an on-call intern in a hospital. Smith yawned and let his eyes flicker back and forth across the screens with an occasional glance at the big screen on the wall. His headache was getting worse by the minute. It was going to be a long day and an even longer night.

  Father Thomas Brennan sat at one of the small tables outside the Osteria Dell’Angelo on the Via G. Bettolo, eating a small plate of ciambelline aniseed doughnut-style biscuits and enjoying a glass of sweet Vin Santo dessert wine after a pleasant dinner. Finishing the last of the biscuits, he lit a cigarette and watched the traffic squeeze down the narrow roadway a few blocks from the Holy City.

  All in all, the Irish priest was feeling quite content. He had photocopied Spada’s personal medical file to those concerned and was now waiting for the almost certain results.

  Spada had less than a year, and probably no more than six months, left to live, which would give Musaro plenty of time to establish himself to take over the position. He chuckled to himself; the pope was primed, so to speak. With Musaro in position—a much more aggressively active man in the role of Vatican secretary of state Soladitum Pianum and the entire Vatican intelligence apparatus would finally be used to assert its real potential.

  The endless sex scandals, the Vatican Bank scandal and the cloud that still hung over the death of John Paul I—a plan Brennan had advised against from the beginning—had all conspired to lower the Vatican’s prestige and political power. Now, with Spada gone and the Holy Father seriously thinking of resigning, perhaps that would change. Within the next year or so, there was going to be a shift in power in the Vatican and Brennan was assuring himself a position on the winning side.

  Finishing his cigarette, Brennan lit another, waved to Angelo, the retired rugby player and owner of the restaurant, and walked back to his little apartment on the Via Mazzini. He stopped off at the Caffè Della Rosa for a final espresso and made a quick call on his cell phone. Twenty minutes later he reached his building and trudged up the three flights of stairs to his apartment.

  He quickly stripped off his clothes, took a quick shower and put on the old velvet robe and slippers that were his usual form of dress when he was at home. Fifteen minutes later, there was the shrill sound of his doorbell and without even switching on the intercom he buzzed the downstairs door open. A few moments later, there was a quiet knock at his door and he let his guest in. As usual it was Mai Phuong Thúy, his favorite, the compact portable massage table almost as big as she was.

  “Bui ti cha tôt,” she said politely.

  “And a good evening to you, as well, my dear,” the priest answered. He stepped aside to let her pass, then followed her down the short hall to his comfortable book-lined living room. She set up the massage table, draped a sheet over it, then helped Brennan remove his robe and slippers.

  He climbed up onto the table, facedown, while Mai took her oils out, and then he gave in to forty-five minutes of her excellent ministrations. At the end of the forty-five minutes, the massage stopped and Mai disappeared into the one-bedroom apartment’s kitchen. Brennan heard the pinging of the microwave oven that meant she was heating her small towels. It was his signal to roll over on his back, which he did.

  The microwave pinged again and a few seconds later the Irish priest heard the small sound of Mai’s feet on the living room rug. He closed his eyes and she laid one of the towels over his face. A few seconds after that, her hand began to massage his flaccid organ, magically arousing it to all of its five-and-a-half-inch hooded length.

  “Không cm thy ngi cha tt?” Mai asked.

  “Wonderful,” wheezed Brennan, his voice thick with pleasure.

  “Jak to cítí, zrádce?” said Daniella Kay Pesek, the widow of Czech assassin-for-hire named Antonin Pesek, the man who had been hired by Brennan less than a year ago to kill John Holliday and who had failed, dying in the process. Daniella slipped her usual weapon, a seven-inch hard plastic hairpin, into Brennan’s right ear, penetrating the outer ear, then penetrating the middle ear and finally through the temporal bone to the brain via the internal auditory nerve canal.

  The movement was almost surgical in its precision, and it killed Thomas Brennan instantly. She gave the hairpin a swift circular twist and then withdrew it quickly. There wasn’t even a drop of blood. “Can you clean up?” Daniella said to Mai in passable Vietnamese. She handed the woman an envelope containing the twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee requested.

  “Tt nhiên.” Mai nodded.

  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.

  31

  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.”

  32

  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 t
he 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.