Valley of the Templars

Alfonsito parked his truck on the dusty road and told them to wait for him to return. Holliday, seated in the bed of the truck with the others, watched the old man and Eddie go, then looked out over the bay. Most of the dozen or so boats were in the fifty-foot range, old, tubby and in need of paint, single-masted with a squat, flat- roofed wheelhouse set far back in the stern. None of them carried radar dishes and only one or two had rudimentary radio antennas strung up the forward mast and boom. All of them had great folds of brown net hung out to dry over the gunwales. Breathing in, Holliday inhaled a potent aromatic mixture of the fresh produce around him on the bed of the truck, the salt tang of fresh sea air and the bitter grunge of diesel oil. A seabird of some kind swooped down out of the harsh blue sky and settled on the forepeak of one of the boats.

“That reminds me,” said Holliday, turning to Carrie. “I never congratulated you on your Annie Oakley demonstration this morning. Pretty amazing shooting down a fighter plane with a hundred-year-old six-gun.”

“Aw, shucks, Shurrif, ’tweren’t nothin’, really,” she drawled. “It wasn’t. I’m not kidding. There’s more than one military analyst who called the Tucano and the Texan II and the 67 Dragon flying coffins. They don’t have enough armor and probably the first shot at the prop would have been enough. Throw a five-bladed prop even a fraction out of sync and it’ll rip the whole airframe apart. They’re for nostalgia buffs who wished they’d flown Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.”

“It was still pretty impressive,” said Holliday.

“Agreed,” said Will Black.

“Do I detect a little ‘impressive for a girl’ chauvinism in there somewhere?”

“Not a bit of it,” answered Holliday. “Gender doesn’t matter a crap when it comes to having your ass hauled out of the fire. I said impressive and I meant it. We’d all be dead meat if it wasn’t for you.”

“That old double action was what did it. The Tucano’s coming at about a hundred knots; the Colt has a muzzle velocity of about seven hundred feet a second—when that big fat .45 round hit the prop, it was the equivalent of a Canadian goose going through the fan of that jet that went down in the Hudson.”

“Except this time the pilot wasn’t as good,” Holliday said. “Or as lucky.”

“No, I guess not,” said Carrie, a faraway look in her eyes and her tone dark. “It was a horrible way to die. I’ve never killed anybody before; it was always just paper targets and gongs. This was real.”

“That’s right,” answered Holliday. “It was real and you’ll never forget it until your dying day, but it still doesn’t change the fact that you saved five people’s lives and maybe a hell of a lot more than that if we actually get out of this.”

Eddie and Alfonsito reappeared atop the path leading down to the beach. “How did it go?” Holliday asked Eddie as they approached the pickup.

“He will do it. His name is Geraldo Lopez-Nussa. His son, Ricardo, is his partner. The son is his only family. If you can guarantee to speak for him to the people of American Inmigracion, he would be most grateful.”

“I can pretty much guarantee him citizenship for himself and his son if he can get us outside Cuban territorial waters,” said Holliday.

“We meet him on the beach. His boat is Corazon de Leon, the Lion Heart. It is the one with the red stripe.”

Holliday looked quickly out onto the calm waters of the bay. It was the boat with the bird on the forepeak. Maybe it was an omen.

“Got it.”

“It is already late in the day for the lobster boats to head out to sea. Four strange people on Geraldo’s boat will have people talking, especially when three of them are obviously yumas. The police will know quickly. We must move, and fast, if we want to get away cleanly. Geraldo says there has been a Zhuk patrol boat seen in the area.”

“Then we should get a wiggle on,” said Black. He picked up the burlap sack containing the weapons and they followed Geraldo down to the beach. His son, Ricardo, was waiting by a dory already pushed halfway into the water. They climbed in, Ricardo shoving them off and then leaping into the stern to handle the rudder as his father took the oars.

“How many of the patrol boats are there?” Holliday asked. Eddie relayed the question to Geraldo as he pulled at the oars.

“He says they used to be in every harbor in Cuba, but now there are only a dozen or so. Mostly they patrol the Florida Straits looking for people trying to get to Miami.”

“Did you ask him about the other thing?” Holliday asked.

Eddie nodded. “He has some…not very much. Red.”

“Good enough,” said Holliday.

Geraldo rowed while Ricardo steered and a few moments later they arrived at the permanent wooden buoy where the Corazon de Leon was anchored. They scrambled aboard while Ricardo tied off the dory. The deck of the boat was littered with strange-looking boxes made from mangrove branches. The boxes were three feet on a side and open-ended.

“Casas para los langouste,” explained Geraldo. “Nosotros les fuera cosquillas con canas de bamboo.”

“They are little houses for the lobsters. They sink them in the sea and then—how do you say, ‘tickle’?—them out with long bamboo poles into their nets.”

Geraldo took them to the wheelhouse, which was larger than it had seemed from shore. There was a small room behind the wheelhouse itself, which had a set of bunk beds, a table, chairs and some rudimentary cooking facilities including a portable propane stove and some pots and pans. A porthole on either side of the little cubicle provided light. Both portholes had been opened wide and a pleasant cross breeze riffled across the room. Geraldo spoke some rapid-fire Spanish and Eddie nodded.

“Geraldo wants us to stay here until we are beyond the cayos and in the open sea.

“No problem,” replied Holliday. They settled themselves into the small galley. A few moments later they heard the throaty cough of a diesel engine and seconds after that the Lion Heart began to move, heading toward the open sea and perhaps, at long last, freedom.

Bruno, Cardinal Musaro, papal nuncio to Cuba, sat in the dining room of the nunciate in the Miramar District of Havana waiting for the midday meal to be served. He sat at the head of the table, which looked directly out the open French doors onto the beautifully tended Orange Garden. The trees were all valencia, the true Mediterranean Citrus sinensis, not the American hybrid usually associated with the name. Each of the trees was between six and ten meters high and pruned so that it was broad and bushy. Even though it was early in the season, the fruit was already visible among the branches.

As usual he ate alone at the seventeenth-century lyre-legged walnut table. His lunch had begun with half a dozen fresh oysters followed by conch fritters and a lovely avocado salad, and he was now working his way through a satisfying medianoche, or midnight, sandwich consisting of roast pork, ham, mustard, Swiss cheese and dill pickles, served on a soft challah-style bread and pressed in his beloved George Foreman Grill. When the sandwich was finished, he would end the meal with a Flan de Guayaba y Queso, cream cheese and Guava flan with coffee to follow. He liked to eat lightly at luncheon since he was often required to attend lavish dinners given by Havana’s high society, which generally meant the more Catholic members of the military hierarchy. Tonight, for instance, it was a pre–St. Lazarus Day feast being given by Brigadier General Ulises Rosales del Toro, a Hero of Cuba, the vice president of the entire country, the effective head of the sugar industry and one of the men most likely to succeed if Fidel died and Raul abdicated, which was the most likely scenario. Little did Del Toro know how soon that would be.

One of his attendants brought in the flan and after he’d departed a second priest appeared. He wasn’t familiar to Musaro and the papal nuncio frowned. Strangely the man had a limp and carried a heavy, old-fashioned root-wood cane, polished to an almost glassy shine.

“I don’t mean to interrupt your meal, Eminence, but I have an urgent message from the Vatican.”

Musaro’s frown became a grin. This was the news he had been expecting. He’d seen that bastard Spada’s medical files and he knew the timing was perfect. “Yes?”

Father Ronan Sheehan raised the head of the knobkerrie, its large upper handle weighted with an extra ten