Valley of the Templars

was stolen the British government would replace it. Without batting an eye, Will Black solemnly agreed.

“You know what he’s talking about?” Black said to Laframboise. “It all looks like Cambodia down there to me.”

“Sure,” said the pilot, his right hand gently tweaking the stick in front of him. “This whole area is full of sinkholes and caves.”

“Any of them particularly well known?” Carrie asked.

Laframboise laughed. “If this guy’s on the run, dearie, I doubt he’s going to hide out anywhere famous.”

“True enough,” said Carrie, “but is there anyplace local that’s got some kind of story attached to it?”

“What kind of story?” Laframboise asked.

“A ghost story maybe, a kid getting lost. Some old legend.”

“La caverna de los asesinados,” said Arango, crossing himself. “In the time of the bandito war.”

“They murdered men there?” Black said, doing the translation in his head: the cavern of the murdered ones.

“The militiamen trapped them there. The militia were only boys, fourteen, fifteen years old. Edito’s brother, Domingo, was one of them. Their leader made them throw gasoline bombs into the cave. Those who were not burned to death were killed as they tried to escape, then thrown back into the flames. No one will go there for fear of los fantasmas inquietos.”

“The restless ghosts,” said Black.

“Si.” Arango nodded.

“Well, Domingo Cabrera would certainly remember it,” said Carrie, seated beside Black. She glanced down at the rolling landscape below. “The question is, how do we find it?”

“It is sixteen miles east of Aserradero,” said Arango.

“Are you sure?” Black asked the aging man.

“Yes, I am sure,” said Arango.

“Why?” Carrie asked. “I thought you told us Domingo Cabrera didn’t tell you where they were going when they left with his brother and Holliday.”

“There was no need for him to tell me,” said Arango darkly. “I was the militia leader who ordered those young boys to burn the Batistardos out of the cave. I was the one who threw the first coctel Molotova into the cave to show the boys how it was done.”

There was a long silence in the cabin of the little aircraft, the roaring of the engine filling the air. Finally Black leaned forward and spoke to Laframboise. “You know where he’s talking about?”

“Near enough.” The pilot nodded.

“Any place to land?”

“There’s a river but it’s too wild and narrow to put down.”

“Anywhere else?”

“I heard stories about a guy with a hunting lodge and a private airstrip in that area. He was a doctor and a friend of Batista. His name was Martinez, I think.”

“Dr. Enrique Gomez Martinez,” said Arango. “He died in la guerra de los bandidos. He got rich giving the rich women of Habana abortions they did not want their husbands to know about.”

“Can you find the airfield?” Black asked Laframboise.

“No sweat,” said the pilot. “Easy-peasy.” He laughed. “They still say easy-peasy?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Carrie.

“Okay. Just sit back and enjoy the view and I’ll see what I can do.”

Four hours after the Air Cubana flight piloted by Capitaine Julio Ortega Montez landed at Cancun International Airport, a silver-sided truck bearing the familiar blue-and-white starburst logo of the Meade Optical Corporation went through the Matamoros-Brownsville border crossing. After a brief Level II inspection of the driver and his assistant’s documentation, the truck was passed through, then traveled its regular route to the cargo terminal at Brownsville–San Pedro Island Airport.

With the exception of one large box, the shipment of Glacier binoculars and Condor spotting scopes was loaded onto an Amerijet 747 heading for New York. The last box was opened by the driver’s assistant, who then took the two large Halliburton cases from the Air Cubana flight to the domestic passenger terminal, where he rented a dark blue Chrysler 300 from Avis, placed the two cases in the trunk and began the forty-eight-hour drive to Orlando, Florida, and the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World.

“You have to be kidding,” said Carrie Pilkington. “There’s a tree growing out of the runway!” She stared down at what was left of the old airstrip.

“Not to mention the burnt-out DC-3 and the fact that what’s left of the airstrip runs along an exceedingly narrow ridge, Mr. Laframboise,” added Black. The hulk of an old airliner, propellers bent, the portside wing ripped off at the root and the entire tail section torn off, lay at the far end of the landing strip, most of it overgrown with jungle foliage. A quarter mile to the west, perched on a rocky outcropping, Black could also see what looked like the stone foundations of a building, the roof and walls collapsed into the interior.

“The building was Dr. Gomez’s hunting lodge. The story is that at the last minute he got cold feet and tried to fly the plane out loaded with as much loot as he could hump down from the lodge. Him and about thirty or forty of his Batista buddies got roasted by a lucky shot from an old RPG2 before the plane could go wheels up. Great plane, the DC-3. You still see them around sometimes.”

“You can’t land there,” said Carrie firmly. “There’s not enough room. We’ll hit something, either that tree or the wreck. There just isn’t enough room.”

Laframboise sighed. “At a guess, dear, how high would you say that big shrub you call a tree is?”

“It looks to be about fifteen or twenty feet high,” said Carrie, staring down as Laframboise banked the little airplane, turning it into the wind.

“And how far is the tree from the wreck?”

“Eight or nine hundred feet?”

“You agree, Mr. Black?”

“I’d say you’re just about right.” Black nodded.

“Ya esta todo jodido loco,” muttered Arango, shaking his head and staring down through the big side window at what he knew was certain death. “Jodido loco.”

“The stall speed for Miroslava is about twenty-five miles per hour. If I come in over the tree at forty miles per and kill the engine, she’ll glide in over about fifty feet before she touches down like a feather. Landing she needs about five hundred feet, takeoff less than four hundred. Easy-peasy.”

“What about potholes?” Carrie said.

“Missy, now you’re just splitting hairs.”

Laframboise brought the aircraft fully into the wind, then twisted the throttle on the stick to slow them down, simultaneously pushing the stick forward to lower the nose. The Wilga dropped slowly and by the time they reached the far end of the ridge, they were less than a hundred feet above it. Out of the corner of his eye, Black saw the ruins of the house on the knoll flash by and then he was looking down the airstrip at the vision of a young pine tree directly in their path.

I’m about to die because a pinecone blew onto an abandoned dirt airstrip in Cuba in 1996, thought Black. He couldn’t think of a more irrelevant way to end his life. “Killed by a pinecone” was no fitting epitaph for the James Bond of his time.

The Wilga dropped even lower in Laframboise’s remarkably steady hand and the pine tree loomed even larger in the wraparound windshield. Black felt his stomach knot, his bowels loosen and bile rise in his throat as they hurtled toward the tree. He closed his eyes for a second or two, then for some mad reason, opened them again as though his brain was forcing him to witness what was about to tear his body into tiny pieces mixed with chunks of Polish-fabricated metal.

Some small thing managed to intrude into the farthest point of his peripheral vision. Camouflage. The impossibility of seeing the nose and propeller of an old British Spitfire and then the tree was twenty feet in front of them, and then somehow it was below them.