Valley of the Templars

Black was sure he felt the top boughs of the tree scratching the bottom of the fuselage and then they hit the dirt, bounced slightly and slowed as Laframboise waggled the tail to lose even more speed. They finally came to a stop about four hundred feet from the remains of the bullet-ridden wreckage of the DC-3. Off to his right and the edge of the landing strip, Black saw what had caught his eye just before they didn’t hit the pine tree: an Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighter plane under a cleverly designed fly tent of camouflage netting interwoven with enough pine boughs to make it blend in with the trees that covered the ridge.

That was crazy enough, but what he really couldn’t figure out was how they’d managed to land it with the tree in the way. Laframboise had obviously been thinking the same thing. He glanced into the rearview mirror set just above the center of the windscreen.

“Tree’s a phony,” the pilot said. Black followed his glance. The fifteen-foot tree was lying on its side in the middle of the runway. “They stick it into a hole to make the strip look unusable.”

“Senors?” Arango said, his voice nervous as he stared out through the windscreen. Laframboise looked forward.

“Oh dear,” he said.

“Who the hell are they?” Carrie said, frowning.

A dozen men in camouflage fatigues, combat boots and black berets stepped out of the trees behind the DC-3 and were approaching the Wilga. Each of them was carrying a stubby little H&K MP5 submachine gun.

“This is not good,” said Will Black. “This is not good at all.”

17

Holliday, Eddie and Domingo Cabrera stood on the dirt road between the slope of the hill and the wildly rushing river behind them. The river was one of the small tributaries of the Agabama, and for much of their time they had followed its course into the mountains.

Holliday squatted down, examining the deep tread marks in the dirt. “They were big,” he said. “Either two or three of them. I’m not quite sure. Two huge wheels in the front and two sets of double wheels in the rear.”

“There were three vehicles,” said Domingo Cabrera.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I am sure,” said the white-haired man, his voice tense. He turned away from the road and began to climb the scrub-covered hill toward the mouth of a cave high above the river. Following, Holliday noted that it looked as though there had been recent activity on the slope, as well; a few scattered concrete railway ties, a short length of slightly rusty track—some kind of narrow-gauge rail line like the kind you might find in an old gold or silver mine, of which there were quite a number in Cuba.

They reached a small shelf of rock outside the mouth of the cave. Except for the floor of the entrance, it was rough and natural, about forty feet wide and thirty feet high at the peak. The rails and ties were intact as they ran into the dark recesses of the cavern.

“A mine?” Holliday asked, slightly out of breath after making the steep climb. He looked up at the roof of the cave and saw a series of heavy-duty lag bolts deeply rooted in the stone.

The lag bolts held huge U-bolts, and the U-bolts were threaded with the remains of wire cable that had been run through a complicated series of high-tension pulleys. “Not a mine, something else,” he said, answering his own question.

Holliday stepped into the cave and followed the rails into the interior. It was dark, but there was still enough light coming from the entrance to let him see. He was at least two hundred feet along the track when the cave opened up enormously.

Not quite Carlsbad but large enough—at least five hundred feet long, six hundred wide and a hundred and fifty feet high, the ceiling lost in permanent darkness. In a limestone cave of any size, there are usually stalactites hanging from the ceilings and their twin stalagmites rising from the floor. Both were caused by water seepage taking excessive minerals from the stone over a period of thousands of years, accreting them into the spiky formations. Here there was nothing except the sawn-off remains of where stalagmites had once been, the work clearly done by some sort of circular concrete saw.

Off to his left Holliday saw an air mattress raised on a bed of pine boughs, the remains of a campfire, a stockpile of dry wood and kindling, a knapsack, a very old-looking kerosene lantern, a pair of Soviet-era KOMZ binoculars in their leather case, a military-style collapsible canvas bucket for water, a machete and all the other necessities of survival in the wild, including a Russian Saiga .308-caliber hunting rifle. Domingo Cabrera had clearly been living in the cave ever since his disappearance.

A large skeletal structure appeared out of the gloom. It looked like the underpinnings of a set of bleachers from a baseball stadium minus the seats and the floor. It went up in three tiers, each tier twenty feet above its neighbor, angled back in a zigzag and covered with the ubiquitous Cuban corrugated iron roof sixty feet above the floor of the cave.

The roof was sloped toward the back of the bleachers and was beginning to develop its own sets of small stalactites and stalagmites, gluing it firmly to the curved sidewall of the cavern. Give it five thousand years and the bleachers would have turned into a cave within a cave—an enormous mound of accreted minerals.

As Holliday approached he saw that the bleachers were a set of curved metal cradles, eight for each level, and that there were even more U-bolts and turnbuckle-pulley arrangements in the iron roof of the three-tiered unit and that there was also some sort of chain mechanism.

He also saw that the rail line ran the length of the bleacher unit and then dead-ended at a wedge of concrete with a steel bumper bolted to it. Holliday stared for a long time, then finally shook his head.

“All right,” he said, turning to Domingo and Eddie, who had followed him down the tracks. “I give up. What the hell is it?”

“It is a very long story, Colonel Holliday. It goes back many, many years; more than five hundred years if you want to hear all of it.”

“I know about the Brotherhood, Los Hermanos. Start from after that.”

Domingo Cabrera looked around the cave, his eyes taking on the appearance of someone remembering the past and not enjoying it at all. He shook his head, then closed his eyes for a moment, his lips moving silently as though he was praying. Holliday looked over at Eddie. Holliday’s friend made the sign of the cross over his chest and nodded toward his older brother. Finally Domingo opened his eyes again and spoke.

“Do you know about the War of the Bandits?”

“Batista supporters in the hills, CIA weapons drops. Sort of a counterrevolution after Fidel.”

“The hills, Colonel Holliday. It went on from just after the Comandante took power until 1963 or 1964, but really it was over before the Bahia de Cochinos.”

“The Bay of Pigs.”

Domingo Cabrera nodded slowly, gathering his thoughts. “The Comandante was fighting people who fought like he had fought in the Sierra Maestre—guerrillas, fighting, running, fighting, running. In the end he had to use Batista’s own tactics against these guerrilla fighters. He used numbers, mostly young militia like me. Thousands of us to fight perhaps six or seven hundred of them. We knew very little about real fighting then. Almost none of us had ever fired a weapon except in practice, and many of us died. Many of my childhood friends died.”

“What does this all have to do with that?” said Holliday, pointing toward the metal framework beside them.

“Let him speak,” said Eddie softly. It was the first time Holliday had heard Eddie speak about his brother with any sort of kindness or compassion.

Domingo made a sweeping gesture with his right arm. “On May the seventeenth, 1961, just after the invasion at the Bahia de Cochinos, one hundred and eighty-seven died in this cave. They were burned to death, most of them.”