Valley of the Templars

SW: That’s a complicated question, Senator.

AB: I’ll try to pay attention when you answer it. El Salvador, in particular the village of San Diego de Tripicano and the village of Cuscatleon, which according to my information simply do not exist anymore. In fact, the only thing left of both places is a scattering of burnt-out ruins and a few charred bones. How did you manage that little trick, General, and what kind of bonus were you paid for slaughtering two hundred and thirty people, men, women and children?

SW: I’m afraid the El Salvador mission is a matter of national security, Senator.

AB: El Salvador’s national security? Ask me if I give a tinker’s fart about El Salvador’s national security.

Pause.

SW: My counsel advises me to plead the Fifth Amendment.

AB. I’ll just bet they do. One more question before we break for lunch, General Swann. Have you ever been hired by any U.S. government agency to invade the territory of a sovereign nation?

SW: My counsel advises me—

AB: We get the picture…General. Let’s break for lunch.

Four miles off Cayo Largo, Cuba

Phase of the Moon: New

April 21, 2012

It was midnight and it was raining. The four ancient, rusting fishing trawlers puttered slowly northwest along the coast offshore from the long archipelago of cays and islands that stretched along Cuba’s Caribbean shoreline. Most were uninhabited strips of sand and coral occupied by a few windblown palms, though a few had been turned into sportfishing resorts to entice tourists. But it was the end of the season and even the resorts were almost empty. If anyone was listening that night, they would have assumed that the engine sound came from the rock lobster and shrimp fleet that plied the banks of the Bahia del Pedro farther south and were now heading for one of the main fishing terminals like Matanzas or Cienfuegos.

At ten past twelve the engine of one of the four old boats in the group sputtered and died and the three others stopped their own engines to see what they could do to help. Some wit in the head office had decided to name one of the boats Bahia and another Cochinos— Bay of Pigs—but under the rust and the filth and the piles of empty nets hanging over the derrick and the mast, it was unlikely that anyone was going to notice on a dark rainy night four miles out to sea. Even if Cuban radar was in good enough repair to be working that night, the four boats were wooden and so low in the water they would likely have been invisible.

As soon as the engines stopped, the crews of all four boats surged into action. Instead of shrimp and lobster the trawlers carried ten five-by-six bags, each containing a seven-meter inflatable Zodiac boat, and another set of bags contained their silenced electric motors, hardly neccessary tonight because the tide was rushing strong inshore. Each of the trawlers also carried thirty men, all fully equipped with weapons bags and LAR V Draegar bubble-free rebreathing apparatus, suitable for the shallow depths and warm waters inshore and with a ninety- minute useful breathing time. Within twenty minutes the boats and all one hundred and twenty men had been off- loaded and were heading toward a GPS point between two uninhabited cays sixteen miles northeast of Cayo Largo. The four trawlers continued their journey, their course slowly changing to a more northeasterly one and their staging point on the southern tip of Little Cayman Island.

Ninety minutes later, their Zodiacs sunk in seventy feet of water, the four-hundred-and-eight-man unit landed on a rocky abandoned beach twenty miles west of the town of Trinidad. They stripped off their rebreathing gear and stowed it in the waterproof knapsacks where their camo gear had been kept. The weapons bags were unsealed, each man armed himself according to his role in the mission and at three fifteen in the morning the company- handpicked men from the Blackhawk Special Forces elite Special Boat Unit moved off the beach in double time, and within another hour they had vanished into the deep jungles covering the slopes of the Escambray Hills. They were the third such unit to be landed successfully on the empty beaches of Spiritus Sancti Province, and there were three more to come over the next six weeks. Operation Cuba Libre was in full swing.

2

Holliday’s stay at Ramstein Air Force Base lasted much longer than he’d wanted, and both Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone before he was released along with Eddie. The Cuban had been keeping in erratic touch with his aging mother and father, but there was still no news of the vanished Domingo, Eddie’s older brother, or at least no news her mother or father wanted to share with the listeners at the Signals Intelligence Base just south of Havana.

In early spring, Holliday’s still-healing wound and battered brain pan leaving him unable to drive and Eddie never having been behind the wheel of a car in his life, the two friends took the high-speed ICE train from Mannheim to Amsterdam, then checked into the Hotel Roemer on the Visscherstraat. The snowbanks were melting, the canals were thawing and the first leaves were appearing.

“I have to see a guy about something,” Holliday said cryptically when they had settled in. “I’ll be back in an hour. Order something from room service.”

“I think I will sleep instead,” said Eddie. “I will dream of the beaches near my home in Alamar.”

“Alamar?”

“Fidel’s great gift to the people of Havana.”

“What is it?”

“A slum, built with Russian concrete.” The Cuban smiled. “But very close to the sea.”

Holliday left the hotel and made his way to Nieuwmarkt on the edge of De Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district. The place he was looking for was squeezed in between a sex shop and a bierhaus. A green neon sign in the blacked-out front window read DARBY’S AMERICAN BAR, EST. JUNE 16, 1969—the day its owner, Danny Farrell, finished his second and final tour in Vietnam, Holliday knew. After seeing the way things were upon landing in San Francisco, Farrell slipped into civvies in the toilets, caught the next plane home to New York and then kept right on going, opening the bar in Amsterdam that had always been his dream in-country.

Holliday stepped in and let his eyes adjust to the dim light. The bar was on the right, a row of vinyl-covered booths on the left. A big TV was mounted on the wall behind the bar, playing CNN with the sound turned off. Holliday sat down at the bar and checked the grimy plastic-coated menu. Burgers, fries, BLTs, Denver sandwiches and Reubens on dark rye. All the foods that Farrell had talked endlessly about in the hooch.

The bartender made his way down the bar to where Holliday was sitting. He was thin, no more than five-six, bald, with oversized ears a huge, broad nose, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a wrinkled white shirt with sleeves rolled up, blue jeans and a barman’s short apron. There was a fading tattoo of a skull backed by a parachute and a sword on his right forearm. Holliday would have recognized him anywhere, mostly because of the lumpy, jagged scar that ran from just under his right ear to his chin. It was lumpy and jagged because Holliday only had the needle and thread he used to darn his socks with him when the piece of shrapnel from the tin plate mine opened up Farrell’s face. It wasn’t easy to do a great job of battlefield surgery on the slope of a hill with the enemy popping mortar shells your way and screaming “Yanqui, you die!” over their bullhorns.

“Help you?” Farrell said, his voice bored.

“BLT, easy on the mayo, and a double Maker’s Mark if you wouldn’t mind, Beagle.”

Farrell called out something unintelligible in Dutch toward a closed door at the far end of the bar, then turned slowly back to Holliday, a suspicious look in his eyes. “What did you call me?”

“Beagle, just like everyone else.”

The man involuntarily reached up with one finger and touched an ear. “Am I supposed to know you or something?”

“November 1967, Hill eight eighty-two, Dak To. I was the one who sewed that up,” said Holliday, pointing at