Paul Christopher - Valley of the Templars

“Leonid!” Eddie said sharply. Maximenko didn’t move. “Leonid!” Eddie called again. Holliday saw the man’s eyelids flutter and his snoring changed its rhythm slightly. “Leonid!” Eddie called a third time. One of Maximenko’s hands slipped between his heavy thigh and the side of the chair and came up holding an ancient-looking Tokarev semiautomatic. He sat up, coughing up something nasty and then swallowing it again. “Pochemu vy ne mozhete pozvolit’ starym spat’ chelovek?”

“Because you’re not sleeping-you are drunk,” said Eddie, speaking English for Holliday’s benefit.

“Kto poluslepo odin?” Maximenko growled, looking at Holliday. The Russian expatriate poured half a glass from the green bottle, swallowed it like medicine and lit a cigarette.

Eddie spoke. “He is my friend, Leonid, and be polite. Speak English.”

“Who are you?” Maximenko asked Holliday, wetly clearing his throat.

“A friend of Eddie’s.”

“You sound American.”

“I am.”

“You fought in wars, yes? You look like you fought in wars.”

“A few.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“Afghanistan,” said Holliday, not bothering to explain the idiotic accident that had taken the sight from his right eye. Besides, with the scar from the attack at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, the wound looked much fiercer than it really was.

Maximenko grinned around the fuming cigarette and used one hand to pull the Cuban shirt up over his expansive belly. The Tokarev didn’t waver in his other hand. A thick keloid scar snaked through the wiry gray hair from his navel halfway to his armpit. “Fucking mujahideen and those Stinger missiles you gave them,” he said, smiling. “A piece of the Flying Tank I was sitting in did that,” he said almost proudly. “An illiterate peasant with a goat for a wife shoots down the most sophisticated helicopter gunship in the world.” He pulled down his shirt. “The Taliban are still using them.” He laid the Tokarev on the table beside the bottle as though the comparison of war wounds had made them friends. “What is your name?”

“Holliday. My friends call me Doc.”

Maximenko nodded sagely. “The dentist gunfighter with tuberculosis. Best episode of Star Trek ever. ‘Specter of the Gun,’ twenty-five October 1968, Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon. Very surreal, like a Chekhov play. You see it?”

It was Holliday’s turn to smile. “In reruns a hundred times. I was in Vietnam when it aired originally.”

“Vietnam!” Maximenko said with a barking laugh. “In 1776 the Americans are the guerrilla fighters and the British are the imperialist colonial war machine. Two hundred years later the war is fought again but with the Americans as the imperialists and the Vietcong as the guerrillas. We never learn, do we?”

“It seems that way,” said Holliday.

There was a short silence. Finally Maximenko spoke up. “You didn’t come to this shit hole to talk to me about old war wounds and tell stories. Why are you seeing Leonid Maximenko in his retirement home?”

“Domingo,” Eddie answered.

“Domingo is an idiot,” said Maximenko.

“You were KGB in Cuba until 1989-you know people,” Eddie insisted.

“I defected,” said Maximenko. He poured another glass of Aguardiente and swallowed it down noisily as though he were drinking mouthwash. He butted his cigarette and lit another. “I retired. I saw the handwriting on the wall, but I saw it too late-call it what you want, but I cannot help you now. I’m too old. I’m out of touch.”

“What do you know about the Ten Families, about the Knights of the Brotherhood of Christ?” Holliday asked.

“I know enough not to say their name too loudly,” the Russian answered.

“My brother has disappeared, Leonid. I must find him,” pleaded Eddie.

“Forget Domingo. Forget he ever existed,” said Maximenko. “Believe me, it would be better for all of us.”

“You know I can’t do that, Leonid. I must find him. You worked with him at the Ministry of the Interior. You worked with him at that place in El Cano…you must know something.”

“What were you doing, listening at keyholes? No one was supposed to know about the El Cano unit.”

“I was only a nino . No one paid attention to me, but I had ears. And none of this matters. What matters to me is my brother, Domingo. I must find him.”

“I cannot help you.” The Russian shrugged.

“Can’t or won’t?” Holliday said. Maximenko threw him a dark look, then turned back to Eddie.

“All I can tell you is this-his last job at the ministry was as bodyguard and driver for Deborah Castro Espin.”

Eddie looked horrified. “La madre que te pario!”

“Who’s she?” Holliday asked.

“I tell you later, compadre ,” answered his friend. Eddie turned back to Maximenko. “You still have your motocicleta ?”

“In the courtyard.”

“We need to borrow it.”

“Take it; that much I can do for you.” He dug around in the pocket of his grimy cotton trousers and then tossed Eddie a set of keys. By the time they left his room, he was snoring again.

The motorcycle turned out to be a massive Soviet Ural Cossack with a sidecar. The bike was a nondescript army gray-green and it was so old it still had the mount for the MG42 ShKAS machine gun and a cradle for the sidecar passenger’s Mosin-Nagant rifle.

“We’re really going to ride around in this?” Holliday said, trying not to laugh.

“There are hundreds of these in Havana. Leftovers from la Invasion Rusa . They are very often seen on the streets of Havana. We need something to give us…mobility? As I told you, taking taxis is dangerous.”

“We can’t park this at the Hotel Nacional.”

“I know a waiter there. Give him twenty dollars and he will protect it better than he would his own mother.” Eddie grinned and climbed onto the heavily sprung saddle. He fitted one of the keys Maximenko had given to him into the ignition, stood up on the starter pedal and then slammed down on it. The eight-hundred-cubic-centimeter engine roared into life. “Into the sidecar, my friend, and I will take you for a ride.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Holliday.

The sleek pearl white Piaggio P180 Avanti turboprop landed on the private paved airstrip a mile from Lake Carroll, Illinois, and taxied to a stop. As its two Pratt amp; Whitney engines spooled down, the door behind the cockpit opened, the automatic steps hissed down into place and a uniformed steward silently assisted a thin and aging Katherine Sinclair to the ground, then opened the door of the waiting Escalade and helped the woman inside. The black SUV with the dark-tinted windows quickly pulled away, leaving the steward on the tarmac. A few moments later the Escalade turned behind the rudimentary automated control tower and disappeared. The pilot of the executive aircraft joined the steward on the tarmac, and both men lit cigarettes.

“What a bitch,” said the steward.

“No kidding,” agreed the pilot.

The northern corporate headquarters and training facility for Blackhawk Security Systems was located eight miles from the airstrip. It was a six-thousand-acre parcel of land in the hill country north of Mount Carroll, Illinois, and was almost completely uninhabited.

Officially known as the Compound, the facility comprised five separate shooting ranges, three outside and two enclosed, a live-fire course, three obstacle courses, a rock wall-climbing course, four “conflict reproductions,” including a war-torn urban area, an underground bunker and an Afghani-style hilltop firebase.

There were helipads, an artificial lake, a six-mile defensive driving course and enough accommodation and supplies for twenty-five hundred men. The Compound was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high double chain-link fence fitted with a razor wire core, three hundred and sixty-two surveillance cameras, its own emergency generators and solar power units, a dedicated cell tower and its own radar system.