Valley of the Templars

is.”

They ate roasted suckling pig and drank beer in the dying sun, and then Alfonsito found blankets and bedding enough and took them to the big tobacco drying shed, where they bedded down for the night. Tomorrow they would help him gather enough produce in the cool of the morning for him to take to the market in Caibarien and he would be more than happy to give them a ride.

The coastal town had once been known as La Villa Blanca, the White Town, famous for its port, its hotels, its parrandas, or carnivals, and its white-sand beaches arcing around the Bahia de Buena Vista. Now the town had fallen into disrepair, the fine old nineteenth-century hotels crumbling, its two sugarcane mills long closed down and most of the piers and other port facilities rotted, sunk or destroyed by decades of hurricanes sweeping over them.

On the eastern side of the decaying town, there was still a small fishing fleet, specializing in lobster and other crustaceans and a small but active sponge fishery. It was here, suggested Alfonsito, that they might be able to find someone willing to rent out his boat.

The old farmer woke them before the sun had truly risen and they found themselves in a ghostly universe of early mist that hugged the ground and drifted, shredding through the trees on the hillsides all around them. Alfonsito gave them a breakfast of harsh black cafe Cubano, fried eggs and crisp pieces of succulent lechon from the night before and then they went to work in the fields, following the old man’s directions and filling basket after basket with fresh-picked produce and even two or three dozen already ripe pineapples.

By the time they were finished, the mist had burned off and the hot sun was rising in the sky. The baskets were loaded in the truck and then Alfonsito disappeared into the old house. They packed away their weapons among the baskets of food and waited for the old man to reappear.

“Bloody hot work, that,” said Will Black, sitting on the open tailgate. “I really am a city boy, I suppose. Never was one for all that ‘bringing in the sheaves’ silliness.”

“We spent our whole summers doing it,” laughed Eddie, stretching his arms and yawning. “Trabajo voluntario, whether you volunteered or not. Two months gathering tomatoes only to see them rotting on trucks because there was no gasoline.”

“What gets me is the quiet,” said Carrie. “A few birds, the wind in the trees. Nothing. I haven’t heard a car in weeks, it seems. A bit spooky.”

“Is this where I’m supposed to do the John Wayne bit and say, “Yes, ma’am, just a little too quiet?”

Alfonsito appeared in the doorway, a transformed man. His white stubble had been shaved off, he was dressed in a clean white shirt and pants and he sported a clean yellow straw hat on his head and a bright blue sash around his waist. There was an old pistol stuffed into the sash. Alfonsito posed, smiling in the doorway, showing his tobacco-stained teeth.

“Magnifico!” Eddie explained, clapping his hands and grinning.

“Muy guapo!” Very handsome, Will Black said, smiling as well.

“The senoritas will swoon for you, grandfather,” said Eddie in Creole. Alfonsito, despite his years, colored like a beet.

“Why does he carry a gun?” Carrie whispered.

Eddie asked the question in Creole and Alfonsito smiled, hauling the old revolver from his sash. “He says there are pirates on the highways as well as the seas.”

“May I see the weapon?” Carrie asked eagerly.

Eddie asked the question to Alfonsito and the old man looked a little querulous. He responded with his own question in Creole and Eddie translated. “He wishes to know why such a pretty senorita would like to see the old pistola his father gave to him.”

“Because I am interested in such things,” said Carrie. “I shoot pistols as a sport.”

“This is true?” Eddie asked, surprised.

“Of course it’s true,” responded the young CIA employee, a little acid in her tone and perhaps more than a little pride. “I was first in the women’s rapid fire at the European Championships in Belgrade two years ago and second in the Pan American Games in Guadalajara last year. I’m also on the U.S. Women’s Olympic team.”

“Good Lord,” said Black.

“It’s not all sugar and spice and everything nice, you know,” said Carrie.

Eddie spoke in rapid Creole and Alfonsito nodded. He approached Carrie and slipped the revolver out of its place in the sash and handed it to her ceremoniously. She held the weapon reverently in her hands.

“It’s a forty-five-caliber Colt New Service double-action revolver,” she said, turning the weapon over in her hands. “It looks like it’s in perfect condition. It’s got to be at least a hundred years old.”

Alfonsito said something to Eddie with pride in his voice and Eddie translated. “He says his father fought with Teddy Roosevelt at the Battle of San Juan Hill at Santiago de Cuba during the Spanish-American war…when the United States and the Cubans were friends, not enemies.”

“Does it still work?”

Eddie asked and Alfonsito answered.

“He says of course it still works and that you may try it if you wish.”

“Tell him I am honored.”

The screaming of the Super Tucano’s Pratt & Whitney turboprop engine came out of nowhere as Ed Broadbent, the Blackhawk pilot, brought the old-fashioned-looking fighter plane around the hillside, screening Alfonsito’s farm from view.

He’d gone out early from the old landing strip deeper in the mountains, hoping to catch the fleeing group before they broke camp, and he wasn’t prepared to see his targets unarmed and standing in the open. He instinctively realized he was flying too high and moving too fast to get a shot, so he immediately threw the aircraft into a rolling climb to drain off his air speed, flipping the yoke switch for the twin Herstal .50-caliber machine guns in the wings.

He peeled out of the climb and came back on the group from the opposite direction, nose dropping and losing altitude quickly. There were five of them gathered around an old American pickup, all of them staring up at him, their faces a white blur. The Heads Up display was putting them right in his sights and he barely hesitated before his thumb hit the firing button for the twin .50-calibers. The hesitation killed him.

Before he could activate the brutal firepower in the wings, he watched dumbfounded as the five-bladed aluminum propeller seemed to bend, blur and disintegrate right before his eyes. His left hand reached for the ring- pull of the Martin-Baker ejection seat just as the fourth big-caliber round from the revolver gripped by Carrie Pilkington seventy feet below him struck the auxiliary fuel pod directly beneath the cockpit and the eight-million- dollar aircraft turned into a fireball. The solid-fuel rocket charge and the explosive in the ejection seat exploded, hurling the blazing, torchlike stick figure of Ed Broadbent through the glass cockpit cover and into the cool clear air.

“Guete!” Alfonsito whispered in Creole, eyes wide as the flaming twisted remains of the fighter plane roared over his little house and crashed into his tobacco field.

Carrie popped open the cylinder of the big old revolver and started ejecting the spent brass. She grinned at Alfonsito. “Yup, still works.”

29

The fishing fleet in Caibarien was located in a small bay on the eastern edge of the decaying but once vital old town. There was one rotting concrete pier and several short, wobbly wooden docks jutting out into the clear shallow water, but it looked as though most of the fishermen brought their catches to shore in small luggers and dories, which were pulled up onto the stony beach and unloaded there.