Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

A football field away, hidden by the mangroves, a pair of eighteen-foot flatboats appeared, each equipped with some sort of long-shaft mud motor. There were three men in each of the two boats and they were coming fast. The engines of the boats had a familiar growl and it only took a few seconds for Holliday to identify the noise. It was the same roar made by the Ural motorcycle Maximenko had lent to them back in the baracoas of Havana.

The men at the throttles of the boats were both standing; their passengers were seated, weapons across their laps. From where Holliday stood they looked depressingly like AK-47s.

“Can we outrun them?” Eddie asked, coming forward from the cockpit.

“We can try,” said Arango. He reached out and pushed the twin throttles as far as they would go. The Tiburon Blanco shivered like a Thoroughbred coming out of the starting gate, and the bow lifted upward, hard.

Holliday looked back as they left both boats behind. The man in the bow of the lead boat put down the AK-47 in his lap, then picked up something equally familiar.

“Oh, shit,” said Holliday. The man in the boat stood up, the RPG tank killer mounted on his right shoulder. There was no time for explanations. Holliday pushed the old man out of the way and spun the Tiburon Blanco ’s wheel hard to starboard. There was an echoing boom from the lead boat and a trail of smoke as the warhead roared across their stern within a foot of hitting them. The warhead hit the river behind them and exploded, sending up a fifty-foot geyser of stinking mud and water.

“ Esos cabrones intento matar a mi barco! ” Arango roared furiously. Cigar fuming, he went down into the forward cabin, muttering under his breath and leaving Holliday at the wheel without another word.

“Where are they?” Holliday yelled, looking back over his shoulder.

“Getting closer!” Eddie responded, raising his voice above the roar of the engines and the pounding of the hull as they hammered up the river.

“Tell me if you see the guy with the RPG again!”

“ Si, mi colonel! ”

Ahead of him Holliday saw the river widening. The mangroves were gone and he could have been back in the jungles of Vietnam along the Mekong. Huge ferns bowed over the banks, and the water was thick with the flat green pads of water lilies. Behind them crowds of cedars, ebony, kapok, giant figs, mahogany, oaks, pine and royal palm trees made a dense jungle.

Suddenly Arango appeared carrying something across his narrow shoulder. Holliday couldn’t quite believe his eyes; it was an ancient-looking Browning.50-caliber machine gun. Across the old man’s other spindly shoulder hung a long, trailing belt of gleaming ammunition. The old man paused, squinting at Holliday.

“You know how to use this puta madre , American?”

“Yes.”

“Then help me.” The old man turned. “Cabrera! Tomar el volante! ”

Eddie nodded and came forward, taking over the wheel from Holliday. Holliday then took the heavy machine gun off Arango’s shoulder. The old man went nimbly up the ladder to the flybridge. “Follow me!”

Holliday did as he was instructed, shouldering the big gun and climbing up the ladder. He heaved the gun onto the deck of the flybridge and clambered after it. Arango stood under the flapping canvas, digging into an old wooden toolbox. He hauled out three lengths of tapped steel pipe and screwed them together into one long piece. He then took the completed pipe and dropped it into a socket on the deck. Then he added an old pintle mount he took from the pocket of his ragged cotton pants and screwed that into the top of the pipe.

“The gun,” he instructed.

Holliday nodded and staggered across the bouncing, heaving deck with the Browning in his arms. Together the two of them manhandled the machine gun onto the pintle and Arango locked it in place.

“You shoot,” said Arango. “My eyes, they not so good anymore.”

“All right.” Holliday nodded, taking his place behind the gun. He slid the bolt forward and flipped open the top of the weapon. Arango fed the first shell of the belt into the receiver and Holliday reversed his previous actions, closing the top and pulling the bolt all the way back. There was a double click announcing that the belt was locked into place. “What now?” Holliday asked.

Arango gave him a gap-toothed grin. “We attack!”

Will Black, Carrie Pilkington and Rufus Kingman sat in the seventh-floor office of the CIA director of operations and waited for Joseph Patchin to speak. Patchin was staring at his ego wall. He allowed himself a nostalgic smile. There were pictures of him with agency directors from Bill Casey to Leon Pinetta and presidents from Carter to Baby Bush, and he’d outrun them all. He’d had a career to be proud of in the intelligence business, and now he could feel it coming down around his ears. He turned back to face the other people in his office.

“He didn’t say anything else?” Patchin asked, looking at Will Black, the MI6 liaison.

“No, sir, nary a word,” said Black.

“Did we threaten him, Miss Pilkington?”

“Yes, sir. Guantanamo and letting him go in Little Havana in Miami with a sign around his neck. We even threatened to send him back to Havana.”

“Didn’t work?” Patchin asked glumly.

“No, sir. He clammed up entirely.”

“What about Guantanamo, Kingman?”

“The president would have our balls, I’m afraid, sir.”

“Never been a fan of bowdlerizing,” murmured Black. Carrie smiled.

“What?” Kingman asked.

“Nothing,” said Black. “Just thinking out loud.”

“What about a black house-somewhere really unpleasant?”

“There’s still one in operation in Albania, sir.”

“What do you think, Black? A little boarding, sensory deprivation, that kind of thing?”

“I seriously doubt that it would do any good, Mr. Patchin.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I don’t think he has anything more to say.”

“You believe Miss Pilkington’s ‘messenger’ theory, too?” Kingman sneered.

“I do. I also believe that Selman-Housein was given just enough information by the Brotherhood to get you to react exactly the way you are now. You’ve got half the threat analysts at Counterintelligence wetting their pants and looking for exactly what sort of terrorist threat from Cuba could cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people, and you’ve got everyone at Homeland Security running around defenestrating themselves.”

“De what?” Kingman asked.

“Defenestration,” said Carrie, “a fourteen-letter word meaning to be thrown out of a window. It’s what happened to Jezebel, the false prophet from the Old Testament who used too much makeup. You see it every now and again in the New York Times crossword puzzle.”

Black smiled. Kingman was silent, staring. Patchin raised an eyebrow.

“The president isn’t about to throw himself out of an Oval Office window, even if he could, which he can’t, but he would like some suggestions about the direction we should take.”

“Holliday and Cabrera, his Cuban friend, are the key to all this. They’re looking for Cabrera’s brother, Domingo. Domingo fled because he knew too much. Find Holliday and we find Domingo Cabrera.”

Patchin thought for a moment. “It’ll do until we think of something better. How’s your Spanish, Black?”

“Fluent,” he answered.

“Yours, Miss Pilkington?”

“High school and a course in conversational Spanish at university.”

“We can’t send either one of them!” Kingman protested. “He’s not one of ours and she’s just an…analyst.” Kingman looked shocked at the very thought.