Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“Mr. Black is as American as you or me. His mother spent most of her working life at the agency.”

“But…”

“Done a lot of fieldwork, have we, Rufus?” Patchin said.

“No, sir, none.”

“Speak any Spanish?”

“Not much, sir. I’ve been to Cancun two or three times.”

Patchin turned to Black. “You’ll be a journalist for the London Times . Miss Pilkington, as well. She’s an expat Canadian. Can your people in London arrange a backstory?”

“Not a problem,” said Black.

“Fly to the Bahamas tonight and catch a flight from Nassau to Havana as soon as you can. We need answers, and we need them fast.”

The bow of the Tiburon Blanco pounded up and down on the wind-ruffled water of the Rio Agabama as Eddie threw the wheel around, guiding the old cruiser downriver toward the oncoming pirate flatboats. They were firing again, but either the range was too long or they simply had bad aim.

Above him on the flybridge, Holliday squinted into the bright sun reflecting off the river in almost blinding shards of light. He held on to the old wooden traversing handles, both thumbs resting on the long “wishbone” trigger. The Browning M2 had a range of better than a mile, but Holliday wasn’t taking any chances. At a hundred and fifty yards he saw the man with the RPG on his shoulder stand in the bow of one of the oncoming flatboats. Holliday traversed slightly to the left, then pressed on the spoon-shaped ends of the trigger.

The effect was almost instantaneous. In the first five seconds, sixty-five rounds chattered loudly out of the old gun. Shell casings flew while the massive bullets chewed through the bow of the starboard flatboat like a monstrous invisible buzz saw. The man standing with the RPG vanished in a puree of blenderized blood, flesh and bone, the rocket in his now nonexistent hands firing wildly, leaving a smoking trail into the jungle, where it exploded in a furious geyser of plant growth and rich, dark soil.

With his thumbs still on the trigger Holliday put forty rounds along the length of the flatboat, killing the man in the middle seat. The third man flung himself overboard an instant before the last of the rounds hit the gas tank and blew the remains of the boat into splinters. The man who’d jumped overboard swam quickly toward shore doing a frantic Australian crawl to get out of the line of fire. Unfortunately the flatboat’s engine, an old, hundred-and-twenty-pound Shovelhead Harley engine, as well as the twelve-foot driveshaft and the still-whirring prop, fell out of the fireball and the mushrooming cloud of black smoke, striking the base of the swimmer’s back. His spine was shattered and he drowned simultaneously.

“ Cono! ” Arango said, staring. “You shoot pretty good for a yuma .”

Holliday took his thumbs off the trigger, and the chattering death from the ancient machine gun stopped. The second flatboat had turned away long before and was hiding somewhere in the heavy screening foliage that overhung both banks of the river. Holliday released the grips of the machine gun and checked the belt. There was still more than half of it left.

“You have more ammunition belts?”

“ Si. ” Arango nodded, still staring at the remains of the flatboat as they swirled downriver in the current. “Six or seven.”

“You’d better bring them up here,” suggested Holliday. “Those guys will be back.”

“ Bastardos, ” said Arango. He took the fuming cigar stub out of his mouth and spit a throatful of tobacco-colored phlegm over the side.

“I’m afraid we might have gotten ourselves in over our heads,” said Will Black as they left Joseph Patchin’s seventh-floor office. “I’m not sure where we should start.”

“That’s where I come in,” said Carrie. “Remember I said it was like looking for clues in a crossword puzzle? Well, I think I just remembered one.”

“What is it?” Black asked. They pushed the elevator button, and the doors slid open.

“It’s not what-it’s where,” said Carrie as they stepped into the elevator.

“All right, I’ll play along,” said Black. “Where?”

“Just down the road in Fairfax County,” she answered. “Fort Belvoir, to be precise.”

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s main mission is collecting, analyzing and distributing visual intelligence gathered from surveillance satellites operated by all of the U.S. armed forces, as well as surveillance material from the hundred or more daily sorties of spy planes, drones and high-altitude electronic-intelligence-gathering aircraft. The agency can also determine, from quite a distance, what an object or a building is made of, or conduct sophisticated pattern analysis of human characteristics, like gait and body size. It also possesses some of the most sophisticated facial recognition software on earth.

The NGA was also responsible for the data gathered and the real-time video for Operation Neptune’s Spear, which led to the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was the NGA that provided the video link watched so intently by the president, the secretary of state and various other guests invited to the show in the famous photograph released by the White House. It also has mastered “all weather” imagery analysis, and the sensors on its satellites, and drones can see through heavy overcast and thick clouds.

Although it has a number of facilities spread around the country, NGA’s main “campus” is a two-million-square-foot building just outside Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The structure is both large enough and high enough to hold the Statue of Liberty in its atrium.

Black and Carrie sat in one of the agency’s theaters on some unnumbered, underground level of the top-secret complex. From the time they’d rolled through the first security gate outside the building, they’d been under escort by a blank-faced man who looked as though he could put Black across his knee and crack his spine in a single movement. He was dressed in a dark, well-cut suit that wasn’t quite tailored enough to hide the lump under his left arm. He never introduced himself, smiled or made any pretense of interest in either one of them. He belonged in Disney World’s Hall of Presidents as an Animatronics Secret Service Agent.

The theater was built like a studio screening room. Thirty comfortable leather armchairs were arranged around a fourteen-by-eight-foot plasma screen hanging on the far wall. A riser behind the seats contained a podium and control console. The tall, thin man with receding dark hair and a beak nose standing at the console was Paul Smith, senior analyst and interpreter for the Central American Division, which included Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. As well as the nose and the thinning hair, he had a thin, perfectly trimmed mustache only very vain men consider growing. Except for Animatronics Andy standing silently by the door Smith, Black and Carrie Pilkington were the only people in the room.

“Apparently you have some sort of clout,” said Smith, his voice adenoidal as though he suffered constant sinus congestion. “The request came directly from the White House.” The thin man sniffed. “This is very short notice.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Black. “This is new information and we’re on a very strict timeline.”

Smith sniffed again. “What precisely are you looking for?”

Carrie answered, “Some topographical feature in Cuba known as La Valle del Muerte, the Valley of Death.” Smith’s mustache twitched in annoyance and he began tapping keys on his console. Carrie leaned over and whispered into Will Black’s ear, “The doctor mentioned it just before he clammed up.”

“I remember,” Black replied with a nod. “But it’s a bit thin, don’t you think?”