Valley of the Templars

Daniella said to Mai in passable Vietnamese. She handed the woman an envelope containing the twenty-five- thousand-dollar fee requested.

“Tt nhien.” Mai nodded.

Daniella gave the young masseuse a smile and left the apartment. When she reached the outside, she made a quick call on her cell phone. Spada would want the news immediately.

Paul Smith was mentally choosing between a Burger King Triple Whopper and Cheese with a side of onion rings and a large Diet Coke and a KFC Big Hungry Box Meal with a large Diet Pepsi when he saw it on screen four of the array on his desk. “It” was just a blob on the screen, but it had put out an anomaly ping, so he zoomed and tightened up the RQ-170 image.

The drone was on the far edge of the pattern and if the pattern hadn’t been just so, the image wouldn’t have appeared and it was doubtful GeoEye 2 would have read it as an anomaly from that height. Eyes bugging out, he slapped the keyboard, throwing the image up on the eighty-inch screen, recalibrated and zoomed in yet again, filling the giant plasma surface with an enlarged version of what he had just seen.

Any ideas of fast food vanished. This one was going to take him right up to the executive dining room in perpetuity. He grinned; it was also so far above Leticia Long’s head that it was in the stratosphere.

“Holy shit!” Smith whispered reverently. He reached for the telephone, got the operator and gave an order as cliched in the movies as “follow that car.” Paul Smith said, “Get me the White House.” And the operator did.

31

The Zhuk-class patrol boat appeared on the aft horizon approximately five hours after the Corazon de Leon had left the lobster grounds around the wreck of the SS San Pasqual. By Geraldo’s calculations they had been traveling at an average speed of twelve knots per hour, which put them sixty miles from the wreck and well outside Cuban territorial waters.

“How far?” Holliday asked Eddie, who was staring at the distant shape of the old-style patrol boat.

“Fifteen miles, maybe a little more,” replied Holliday’s friend. “Perhaps twenty.”

“How long?”

“It is hard to say, mi compadre. The Zhuk was rated at thirty knots maximum speed, but that was when they were new. The Cuban boats are from the ’seventies. I doubt that they can maintain twenty knots now, if that.”

“What can Geraldo give us?”

“No more than fifteen.”

“That means they’ll gain five miles each hour.” It was three in the afternoon; the patrol boat would be within range by seven in the evening—just about sunset at this time of the year—but it wouldn’t be fully dark until eight thirty or nine. They barely had a chance of getting away in the dark.

Looking to the other horizon, they could all see that dark storm clouds were gathering, high, bruised-looking thunderheads.

“Tell Geraldo to pour it on and tell him to pray for rain. It’s our only chance. Now.”

32

The tropical dusk was quickly turning to darkness when Colonel Frank Turturro’s forward team reported to him that the burnt-out remains of Broadbent’s Tucano had been spotted smoldering in a farmer’s field forty-five miles east of Caibarien. There was evidence that his prisoners had escaped from the farm in a truck of some kind and had either managed to steal or hire a boat or were now hiding in the town itself. Fifteen minutes after that, he wasn’t surprised to get the Abort code from the Mount Carroll Compound.

“Figlio di puttana,” he cursed, reverting to the language of his Brooklyn youth. The Abort involved two major operations. First, the retreat of the remaining Tucanos to the fallback position on Isla Guanaja, a nearly uninhabited island a few dozen miles off the sometimes deadly Honduran coast. The individual pilots would then refuel and fly back to the United States and the Blackhawk-owned private airfield in Arizona.

The second part of the Abort mission was considerably more complicated. Splitting into platoon-sized units, the almost fifteen hundred men scattered around the Sierra del Escambray would make their way to the Caribbean coast, where they would reassemble close to the nearly empty beaches to the north of Playa Ingles, a small run- down resort town. Two refitted freighters would stand offshore for three nights just beyond the twelve-mile limit and when signaled would send in enough inflatables to remove all the troops.

It all sounded well and good, but Turturro had sat through most of the planning sessions for Operation Cuba Libre, and the least attention had been placed on aborting. Apparently failure wasn’t an option for people like Swann and Axeworthy. When push came to shove, Turturro gave fifty-fifty odds if there would be any freighters offshore when the time came.

The whole thing was beginning to sound like a reprise of the Bay of Pigs. Then, as now, air support made all the difference. Without the Tucanos they were a hit-and-run guerrilla force not much bigger than Fidel’s band of brothers in the Sierra Maestre back in ’58 and ’59. Sighing, Turturro got up from behind his desk in the command tent. He went and stood outside, breathing in the sweet-rot stick of the jungle. Desert winds or jungle swamps, failure always smelled the same.

“Tha-tha-that’s all, folks,” he whispered to himself, wondering if he was going to get off this island alive.

Max Kingman and Kate Sinclair sat in the study of the ex-ambassador’s Georgetown house discussing recent events in Cuba. Kingman was drinking too much. By Sinclair’s estimation he was at least three Scotches ahead of her one. He wasn’t pleased by the way Operation Cuba Libre was going at all.

“It’s starting to smell bad, Kate, I’m warning you. This Holliday is more than a monkey wrench in the works. He’s a mother-humping Sherman tank.”

The elderly woman smiled. “You’re showing your age now, Max; nobody’s used Sherman tanks since Castro at the Bay of Pigs.”

“Very funny. We’ve got everyone on our side now. Lobo, Bacardi, DuPont, all the hotel chains. We’ve made promises, Kate, and if we can’t pay the piper we’re going to be in some very hot water.” The ruddy-faced man took a long pull at his drink.

“Come, now, Max, the country is imploding. Its economy is a black hole, for God’s sake. How long can Raul survive by selling off the contents of the State Museum to keep the country stumbling along? He’s released a crowd of criminals along with the dissidents from his prisons because he simply couldn’t afford to feed them. The country’s being run by Alzheimer’s patients.”

“Worked for Reagan,” grunted Kingman. “For a little while, anyway.”

“Relax,” said Kate Sinclair. “Tomorrow Fidel dies. Raul and his family will be on his jet to Spain within hours of his brother’s demise and the Brotherhood will be in charge.

“And try to remember, Max—Lobo, Bacardi and all the rest are paying us huge sums of money for a chance to reclaim their properties, and with the Brotherhood’s agreement they’ve also hired Blackhawk Security as a counterinsurgency force during the period of ‘transition.’ Relax, Max. We’ve just won the lottery.”

“We’re killing a lot of people to do it, Kate.”

“Having second thoughts, Max?”

Kingman shrugged. “I never did like Orlando much.”

“They’re suitcase bombs. Nuclear firecrackers. The estimate if both of the bombs go off is less than two