“You know I can’t do that, Leonid. I must find him. You worked with him at the Ministry of the Interior. You worked with him at that place in El Cano…you must know something.”
“What were you doing, listening at keyholes? No one was supposed to know about the El Cano unit.”
“I was only a niño. No one paid attention to me, but I had ears. And none of this matters. What matters to me is my brother, Domingo. I must find him.”
“I cannot help you.” The Russian shrugged.
“Can’t or won’t?” Holliday said. Maximenko threw him a dark look, then turned back to Eddie.
“All I can tell you is this—his last job at the ministry was as bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin.”
Eddie looked horrified. “La madre que te parió!”
“Who’s she?” Holliday asked.
“I tell you later, compadre,” answered his friend. Eddie turned back to Maximenko. “You still have your motocicleta?”
“In the courtyard.”
“We need to borrow it.”
“Take it; that much I can do for you.” He dug around in the pocket of his grimy cotton trousers and then tossed Eddie a set of keys. By the time they left his room, he was snoring again.
The motorcycle turned out to be a massive Soviet Ural Cossack with a sidecar. The bike was a nondescript army gray-green and it was so old it still had the mount for the MG42 ShKAS machine gun and a cradle for the sidecar passenger’s Mosin-Nagant rifle.
“We’re really going to ride around in this?” Holliday said, trying not to laugh.
“There are hundreds of these in Havana. Leftovers from la Invasión Rusa. They are very often seen on the streets of Havana. We need something to give us…mobility? As I told you, taking taxis is dangerous.”
“We can’t park this at the Hotel Nacional.”
“I know a waiter there. Give him twenty dollars and he will protect it better than he would his own mother.” Eddie grinned and climbed onto the heavily sprung saddle. He fitted one of the keys Maximenko had given to him into the ignition, stood up on the starter pedal and then slammed down on it. The eight-hundred-cubic-centimeter engine roared into life. “Into the sidecar, my friend, and I will take you for a ride.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Holliday.
The sleek pearl white Piaggio P180 Avanti turboprop landed on the private paved airstrip a mile from Lake Carroll, Illinois, and taxied to a stop. As its two Pratt & Whitney engines spooled down, the door behind the cockpit opened, the automatic steps hissed down into place and a uniformed steward silently assisted a thin and aging Katherine Sinclair to the ground, then opened the door of the waiting Escalade and helped the woman inside. The black SUV with the dark-tinted windows quickly pulled away, leaving the steward on the tarmac. A few moments later the Escalade turned behind the rudimentary automated control tower and disappeared. The pilot of the executive aircraft joined the steward on the tarmac, and both men lit cigarettes.
“What a bitch,” said the steward.
“No kidding,” agreed the pilot.
The northern corporate headquarters and training facility for Blackhawk Security Systems was located eight miles from the airstrip. It was a six-thousand-acre parcel of land in the hill country north of Mount Carroll, Illinois, and was almost completely uninhabited.
Officially known as the Compound, the facility comprised five separate shooting ranges, three outside and two enclosed, a live-fire course, three obstacle courses, a rock wall–climbing course, four “conflict reproductions,” including a war-torn urban area, an underground bunker and an Afghani-style hilltop firebase.
There were helipads, an artificial lake, a six-mile defensive driving course and enough accommodation and supplies for twenty-five hundred men. The Compound was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high double chain-link fence fitted with a razor wire core, three hundred and sixty-two surveillance cameras, its own emergency generators and solar power units, a dedicated cell tower and its own radar system.
Both the inner perimeter and the outer perimeter of the Compound were patrolled by armed guards on a twenty-four-seven schedule. In the center of it all, occupying its own hilltop site, was the Grange, a massive four-story log-and-stone “hunting lodge.”
The Grange had offices and sleeping accommodation for all of the Northern Division executives, conference rooms, a huge dining hall and large commercial-scale kitchen and a belowground “War Room,” which was equipped with a direct-link satellite feed to every area of operations currently being run by Blackhawk around the world.
The offices of Major General Atwood Swann and his second in command, Colonel Paul Axeworthy, were located on the top floor of the Grange, with several large picture windows looking out over the lake and the forested area beyond.
Swann and Axeworthy met with Katherine Sinclair in the large conference room that separated the two men’s offices. The centerpiece of the room was an immense, curving black granite table polished until it gleamed. In the middle of the table, carved into the native stone, was the aggressive Blackhawk that served as the company’s logo. The table, like the rest of the compound, had been purchased with funds from the Department of Defense, Blackhawk’s major client, and provided by Katherine Sinclair’s untiring lobbying efforts in the hidden halls and private dining rooms of Washington.
Sinclair sat at the head of the table, flipped open the ostrich document case she carried and withdrew a red-covered file, which she opened in front of her. “Tell me about Operation Cuba Libre,” she said.
Swann nodded to Axeworthy, who got to his feet and went to the huge flat-screen that took up most of one wall. He tapped the screen with one expertly manicured finger and instantly a relief map of Cuba appeared. He tapped the screen again and a section in the center of the map enlarged to show a central spine of hills and steep valleys that ran through the middle of the island.
“These are the Escambray Hills. During the ‘revolution within a revolution’ that took place shortly after Castro took power, this was where Batista supporters, major criminal elements and anyone else who defied El Comandante went. It took Castro almost three years to clean them all out, including a team of eighty-five or so CIA advisers. If they’d had any real sense back then, Escambray was where the Bay of Pigs should have taken place—not a swamp.”
“If I wanted historical analysis I would have asked for it. Get to the point,” said the woman at the head of the table.
Axeworthy cleared his throat and went on. “We used the old CIA runway for the Tucanos. So far we’ve managed to bring in four of them. In two weeks we’ll have the full complement of eight, ordnance included.”
“I thought the Cubans had good coast guard radar?” Sinclair asked.
“They do,” said Swann, sitting on Sinclair’s right. “But they go dark when the Colombian cocaine flights come in, and we’ve got good intel about when that happens. The Colombian flights are usually Beechcraft King Airs or other midsize cargo planes; the Tucanos coming in from the Navassa Island Base read like fishing trawlers if they read on the radar at all.”
“Where is Navassa Island?” said the elderly woman. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s a tiny island between Jamaica and Haiti. It’s about a hundred and twenty miles from Cuba.”
“Whose territory is it?”
“Ours.” Swann smiled. “Under the Guano Islands Act of 1890. It’s uninhabited. The island is about two miles long, flat with a lot of scrub brush, an abandoned lighthouse and one palm tree. It was perfect. We burned off some scrub for a runway, camouflaged a refueling station and that was that. The Department of the Interior will never know we were even there.”
“Are eight aircraft enough?” Sinclair said. “It’s not as though they’re fighter jets and you’re taking on the entire Cuban air force.”
“It’s very much like the Soviet Union before the collapse—an illusion; the props are all there, but none of them work. The Cuban air force,
for example,” said Axeworthy. He tapped the screen in three separate places and they blossomed into aircraft symbols. “There are only three operating airfields left—Holguin, which was originally designed to defend against an attack from Guantánamo and which is now almost entirely civilian, San Antonio de los Baños, a little west and south of Havana, and Playa Baracoa, for Havana itself. Recent satellite and drone surveillance shows seven transport aircraft and five helicopters at Playa Baracoa and eleven MiGs at San Antonio de los Baños but only six that appear to be in operation. At San Antonio de los Baños the hardstands for the MiGs were overgrown with grass. I doubt that there are enough spare parts or even aviation fuel to fly more than a sortie or two a month. New storage buildings have sprung up at both Playa Baracoa and Los Baños. It is our opinion that they are using the buildings to cannibalize parts from one MiG to another.”
“How many aircraft do they have officially?” Sinclair asked.
“Supposedly one hundred and thirty-four,” said Axeworthy, “of which the majority are trainers, cargo planes, VIP flights and transports. They list a total of seven attack helicopters and only six MiG 29s, a fighter which was developed in the midseventies and has a very limited range. I think we could conservatively cut that list in half—I doubt they have more than a dozen fighters in flying condition and most of those will be MiG 21s from the midfifties. At a guess the transports and the helicopters are for counterinsurgency use—the Cuban people rising up against Raul and his brother. They simply don’t have the strength to mount an attack against Tortugas, let alone the continental U.S.”
“And the Tucanos?”
“They’re armed with four Hellfire Air to Ground missiles; a flight of half a dozen Tucanos could take out the MiGs at Los Baños from five miles away.”
“What about coastal patrols, the navy?”
“It barely exists, ma’am,” said Axeworthy. “Most of what they had is at the breakers yards at the old Cienfuegos Naval Base. They used to have a bunch of Osa-class missile boats, but they stripped off the Styx missile platforms and put them on land-based mobile launchers. Most of what they have are a dozen or so Zhuk-class coastal patrol boats mounted with a couple of manually operated machine guns and some even older Soviet P6 torpedo boats with antiaircraft guns bow and stern. The torpedos are long gone and their radar is totally out of date. Useless. The coast guard will take you to Mexico for a fat fee and the Zhuks make regular runs to the twelve-mile limit off Puerto Bolívar in Colombia to pick up product from the go-fasts. Most of the money, minus the Raul and Fidel Tax, finds its way into the pockets of one Rear Admiral Carlos Alfonso Duque Ramos, whose daughter is married to none other than Raul Castro’s bodyguard.” He tapped the screen and a photograph of a handsome man in his midforties appeared.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Sinclair asked.
“His name is Major Raúl Alejandro Rodriguez Castro; he’s Raul’s grandson and Fidel’s grand-nephew. It’s like a Cuban version of the Gotti family.”
The elderly woman ignored the comment. “The army?”
“Another joke. They have thirty-eight thousand men and women of all ranks, and half of them are employed as waiters and housekeeping staff for GAESA, the holding company for the Cuban Defense Ministry. Since the death of Julio Reugeiro, the Cuban minister of defense, in 2011, the CEO of GAESA is Major Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, who just happens to be married to Deborah Castro Espin—Raul Castro’s eldest daughter. It’s organized crime run by the military and all in the family—Castro’s family.”
Katherine Sinclair sat back in her expensive leather executive chair and smiled thinly. For the first time since arriving at the Grange, she seemed impressed.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
7
Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa was desperately frightened. His blood pressure was rising into dangerous numbers, his pulse rate was at least a hundred and thirty beats per minute and his breath was coming in short, painful gasps. If he wasn’t careful he was going to go into ventricular fibrillation and drop dead on the front step of Dublin’s Shelburne Hotel.
As Cuba’s senior cardiologist, Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein knew this was no exaggeration, and at seventy-seven years of age he was painfully aware that one incidence of VF would probably be his last.
He cursed silently. If only he’d taken the two days he needed at the Swiss conference two years ago, he would have had the cardioverter-defibrillator implanted at the Lindenhofspital in Bern and he wouldn’t be in this situation. Dear God, if only he hadn’t decided to walk back from the Trinity College campus, he wouldn’t be in this situation.
The doctor composed himself as best he could, nodded to the top-hatted doorman in the red frock coat and stepped into the front lobby and confronted the staircase that led up to reception. He forced himself to climb without relying on the old-fashioned double wooden banister and made his way up to reception. He picked up his key, climbed into one of the refurbished cage elevators and waited as the white-gloved operator took him up to the top floor.
By the time he reached his room and stepped inside, he was gasping for air. He made his way to one of the upholstered club chairs in the sitting room of his one-bedroom suite, picked up his medical bag and dropped it into his lap. He found his bottle of bisoprolol, swallowed a ten-milligram tablet of the beta blocker dry and waited for his adrenaline levels to drop. At the same time he took out his portable battery-operated blood pressure machine, fitted on the cuff and hit the START button. He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. He was carrying around the most terrifying secret in the world and it was literally killing him.
It took the better part of an hour. When his pulse had slowed to a more tractable eighty beats per minute, he called down to the Horseshoe Bar and ordered a bottle of Pyrat Cask dark rum. When it arrived he poured three fingers of the expensive liquor into a Scotch glass and drank it slowly. He poured a second drink, then picked up the telephone. It was time. To carry the secret any longer was to invite death, and not just from ventricular fibrillation. Two bullets from El Tuerto, the One-Eyed’s famous silver-plated Type-92 Chinese semiautomatic, was just as likely. The phone rang twice and a somewhat nasal voice with a distinctly London accent answered.
“British embassy. How may I direct your call?”
William Copeland Black walked down the carpeted hallway of the principal floor of the British embassy on the Merrion Road in the Ballsbridge suburb of Dublin, home to most of the diplomatic missions in Ireland. He turned into the cultural attaché’s office, a small room with two desks and a tiny window that looked out onto the low-profile embassy’s courtyard, the last place on the property you were allowed to smoke. The only other person in the office was Anabel Bonet, who had supposedly been seconded to the cultural attaché’s office from Scotland Yard’s Art Theft and Forgery Squad to deal with the rash of art thefts that had been plaguing Ireland for the last few years.
The truth of it was that Anabel Bonet had never seen the inside of New Scotland Yard and anything she knew about art came from a first-year course she took at Cambridge. William Copeland Black was no cultural attaché, either, and everyone who was anyone in the embassy knew it, right down to Eva Burden, the woman who answered the telephone. Both Anabel Bonet and William Black were MI6, tasked with keeping track of any potential terrorist action against the United Kingdom originating in or passing through the Republic of Ireland.
Black sat down behind his desk, pulled open the middle drawer and stared at the yellow packet of Carrol’s Sweet Afton cigarettes. He closed the drawer and looked across at Anabel. “I’ve just had the most intriguing telephone call.”
“Not here, you haven’t,” said Anabel.
“No, it came through the inquiries desk. When he gave them my name, they patched it over to my cellular while I was coming in to work.”
“After a very long lunch, I might add.”
“I went into Dubrays on Grafton Street to hear that writer.�
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“Which writer?”
“Simon Toyne, the one with the funny hair. He’s rather good.”
“The phone call?”
“Right. It was from someone named Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein Sosa. He’s staying at the Shelbourne. He wants to defect, of all things. I didn’t think anyone did that sort of thing anymore. Cold War stuff, you know?”
“Who on earth is Dr. Eugenio Selman et cetera, et cetera?”
“He’s Fidel Castro’s personal physician.”
“Bloody hell!” Anabel frowned. “What’s he doing in Dublin?”
“He’s a cardiologist. There’s a big convention at Trinity this week.”
“And he wants to defect?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Tell him to get into a cab, then.”
“He’s being watched, or so he says.”
“Do you believe him?”
“It’s possible. The Cuban DGI has a very long arm and he’s a VIP.”
“You can’t authorize this on your own.”
“I know. He’s only here until Friday. That’s three days. I’ll have to get on my trolley and visit Babylon tonight.”
“Good luck, mate.” Anabel grinned.
“I should be able to catch the diplomatic flight. No sense in traveling with the great unwashed on Ryanair or something equally disgusting.”
“No sense at all,” said Anabel somberly, then laughed.
At seven p.m. Black climbed into the waiting BAE 125 executive jet and settled back into one of the six cream-colored high-backed leather chairs in the narrow passenger section. Except for the diplomatic bag, he was the aircraft’s only passenger. He felt a little foolish, but under the circumstances time really was of the essence. If Selman-Housein was serious about his intentions, it meant that something big was up. With Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez’s bowel cancer metastasizing to his liver and his lungs, the thought of one or the other of the two elderly Castro brothers casting off this mortal coil was the kind of thing that precipitated coups and revolutions. The world was in enough trouble without the Caribbean being hit by a political hurricane.
Valley of the Templars Page 5
