Valley of the Templars

Lieutenant Colonel Frank J. Turturro returned from his mission to Aserradero still shaken by the slaughter he had seen in that mountain meadow. He was no stranger to death in war, but his conflicts had come in places where men died in ones and twos, not by the hundreds. The fight at the police post a few days before had been one thing, but he knew the wholesale slaughter he’d seen today would give him nightmares worse than he had ever known. A warrior was a man who fought other men and where the better warrior vanquished the lesser; it wasn’t a farmer slaughtering sheep. Blackhawk was paying him a fortune to lead this unit, but no amount of cash was going to help him carry this stone that now rested so heavily in his heart.

When he arrived back at the airfield just after dark, things went from bad to worse as his old friend and master sergeant Anthony Veccione reported the situation regarding the escape of the prisoners.

“How long ago?”

“An hour.”

“How many of our men did they kill?”

“Just two—the guards at the door, both cut down with a machete. They knocked out a man on picket duty.”

“Did he see anything?”

“There were three of them. Two black men, one white. They were all armed with MP5s just like ours. One of the blacks had a sniper rifle. An old one, he said. Russian maybe.”

Three men, just the way his contact had told him. The MP5s had to belong to Woodward and the ambush team he’d sent out. “Shit.”

“Who were they?” Veccione asked.

“The ones the bosses asked me to keep my eyes out for. An old soldier named Holliday and two of his buddies. With those prisoners of ours they could mean big trouble. Have you sent out anybody after them?”

“In the dark? In the jungle?” Veccione shook his head. “We’d be sitting ducks.”

“First light, then,” said Turturro. “Just a few men. You and Nick Cavan take the lead. I need guys who’ve had real combat experience on this. No more than four or five men or they’ll hear you coming from a mile off. Report in on the hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is serious, Tony. Catch these sons of bitches or we could really find ourselves in the weeds.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ramiro Valdes, director of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, sat eating dinner in his executive suite at the Hotel Inter-Continental in Caracas, Venezuela. Eight floors below, the evening traffic swirled along the Avenida Principal, while through his dining room window the man with the white, military brush cut could see the looming ranks of the Avila Mountains rising in the distance, blacker shapes against the night sky.

The chief of the Cuban Secret Police sliced a piece off his lobster tail with surgical precision and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly. As he chewed, he carved a small piece from one side of the blood-rare Kobe beef tenderloin. He looked across the starched white tablecloth at his dinner guest, the sour-faced Brigadier General Luis Perez Rospide, head of Gaviota, the corporation that oversaw every aspect of Cuba’s tourism industry. Between them they had an enormous amount of power, and both the Valdes and Rospide families had long been members of the Brotherhood.

“I cannot convince Raul to build a cruise ship terminal. The man is impossible,” said Rospide, eating his pabellon criollo, the Venezuelan version of ropa vieja, or “old clothes”—a dish of rice, beans and shredded beef that had once been famous in Cuba but had disappeared over the past thirty or forty years for lack of beef to shred. “I gave him the numbers—three ships a day, two thousand passengers a ship, each spending two hundred dollars. That is one point two million dollars a day, Ramiro. A million dollars a day! The cruise ship season lasts from December to May. That’s billions of dollars being thrown away!”

“Brother Raul is too old and too sick and too stupid. All he wants to do is retire to that ranch of his in Spain before the people rise up and hang him from a lamppost in Revolucion Square. That idea of selling off everything in the museums of Havana last year was the last act of a desperate man,” Valdes said. He sliced himself another piece of lobster meat. “At any rate, we have more important things to think about. That is why I called you here.”

“I am always glad to get away from Havana these days,” said Rospide. “It is claustrophobic. The Germans laugh and my staff steals chickens from the kitchens.”

“The American colonel just called me. The CIA agents he caught have escaped. From the description given by one of the guards, there were two blacks and a white man. One of the black men sounds like it was Domingo Cabrera.”

“Espin’s bodyguard? The one who disappeared?”

“It would seem so.”

“Why would Cabrera rescue these men? How would he even know about them?”

“One of the companions of the CIA people was Montalvo Hernandez Arango.”

“So?”

“Montalvo Hernandez Arango was Domingo Cabrera’s capitaine during the War of the Bandits. He knew as well as anyone where the Cuevo del Muerte was, the cave where the missiles of San Cristobal were stored.”

“Maybe it is just a coincidence,” said Rospide.

“It might be but I doubt it,” said Valdes. “The American colonel described one of the CIA people as being from England and speaking fluent Spanish. He sent a photo by telephone. The man could well be one of the people who picked up Dr. Sosa in Dublin. He is MI6.”

“Then we are ruined!” Rospide said, pushing his plate of food away as though it had been poisoned.

“Ruined, no, but we must be careful. As you well know we have powerful Americans on our side. The question is, how much can we trust them? One of my surveillance agents in Florida reported to me that the woman who owns Blackhawk was seen in the company of none other than Julio Lobo.”

“Maldita sea!” Rospide exclaimed. “She wants to put him in power instead of us?”

“I would not be surprised.” Valdes dipped another morsel of lobster into the silver bowl of garlic butter. “The woman is a two-faced bitch, and worse, she is an American two-faced bitch.”

“Is it too late to stop all of this? To abort the operation?”

“No, it has gone much too far for that, I am afraid.”

“Then what do we do, companero?”

“We kill them,” said Ramiro Valdes. “We kill them all.”

Cardinal Spada and Father Thomas Brennan walked slowly through one of the old sections of the Vatican Gardens that covered most of the Vatican Hill. The early-summer sun was at its zenith and Spada wore a wide- brimmed red felt “galero” to give himself shade. Brennan was bareheaded and smoking one of his inevitable cigarettes.

Spada liked the quiet here; the tourists generally went to the Belvedere Gardens at the Vatican Museums, and only the gardeners and people going to and from their offices at the Vatican Radio Station and the Academy of Sciences used these old paths.

He liked the herb gardens especially; the smell of thyme and marjoram, oregano and sage brought him memories of the country and innocence and youth, none of which he had anymore except here as faint tastes on his palate and breaths in his nostrils. They walked past a lilac bush and it rushed back like warm summer rain on his upturned face.

He sometimes thought it strange that lives could be condensed into such small sensory things, but it was true; the smell of lilacs reminded him inevitably of the first girl he had kissed and that would never change, nor did he ever want it to.

Her name had been Lucretia and her lips had tasted as sweet as the grapes her father grew in his vineyards. Every summer his family vacationed in her district and they had great plans for a life together, all of which came crashing down at the age of fourteen when his father deemed it politically wise for his oldest son to join the Church.