Valley of the Templars

13

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?”

“It’s all we’ve got.”

“There are two and they are one and the same,” said Smith. “The Agabama River divides two ranges of the Escambray Mountains. It flows from a place called La Boca on the Caribbean side and after a series of divisions exits into the Atlantic at a small village called San Francisco. A conquistador named Diego Velazquez de Cuellar landed in Cuba near the mouth of the river on the Atlantic side. He’d been sent by Columbus with specific orders to conquer the island and find places where people could settle. He was also told to keep his eye out for any loose gold or treasure he found lying around since his relationship with Queen Isabella was becoming somewhat strained financially.”

Black wanted to tell the nasal little twit to get on with it, but Carrie was right. To go to Cuba blind was to invite failure. Smith continued with his pedantic little lecture. “At first Velazquez de Cuellar wanted to take some of his small boats up the river, perhaps with an eye to seeing if it was a navigable way to reach the opposite shore, but his local Indio guides said that much of the river was occupied by evil spirits that brought on sickness and sometimes death. The symptoms the Indios displayed were close to what the Spaniards knew as vomito negro, black vomit, which we now know was-”

“Yellow fever,” supplied Black, staring at the blank screen in front of him, waiting for something to appear on it.

“Indeed,” said Smith with another sniff. “Yellow fever. At any rate, the Indios called the whole place the Valley of Death.”

“And this was when?” Carrie asked.

“The early sixteenth century.”

“Anything more current?” Black said.

“During the War of the Bandits between 1959 and 1965, the Agabama River Valley was also known as the Valley of Death. Probably because of the number of bodies floating down it as Castro’s teenage army wiped out the last of the Batistinados.”

“Show us the river…whatever you called it,” said Black.

“The Ag-A-Bam-A,” said Smith, enunciating with painful, condescending care. Suddenly an image appeared on the screen of a topographical map and a river running through it, winding like some enormous twisting worm. From what Black could see, there was a narrow plain, foothills and then the mountains themselves. The topographical map was now overlaid with a satellite shot of the same area. The mountains were covered in dense jungle foliage and there were virtually no population centers beyond a scattering of small villages.

“Anything else?” Black asked.

“This was flagged for interest about two weeks ago,” said Smith. The images were overlain again, this time by an infrared night shot. There were several bright blobs of color high in the mountains. “It was interesting enough for an RQ-170 Flying Wing to be deployed from Creech in Nevada to take a look.”

“And what did it see?” Black asked.

“This,” said Smith. The image changed again. This time it was a daylight shot. While the huge ninety-foot-wingspan stealth drone flew at fifty thousand feet, it could give imagery close enough to see the dirt under a man’s fingernails. It was video data from an RQ-170 that gave the president and his friends the overall shots of the late and unlamented Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani pied-a-terre.

The image on the screen showed a collection of large camouflaged tents, what appeared to be a line of four-wheeled ATVs under more camouflage material and a number of men walking back and forth across a compound that had obviously been cleared from the jungle slopes around it. The image then tightened in on a single figure. He was wearing the black beret and camo gear of the Cuban Tropas Especiales, their version of Delta Force.

“Company strength,” said Smith. “We found a few others like it scattered through the area.”

“Who are they?” Black asked.

“They look like Cuban Special Forces on exercise. That’s the general consensus here.”

“They could be something else,” said Carrie, her voice hesitant and thoughtful.

“Who?” Smith asked, obviously irritated. “The army of Haiti invading Cuba?”

“I’m fairly sure I’ve seen those uniforms before.” She paused. “You can’t get any more detail, can you?”

“A great many countries use black berets and that elm leaf camouflage. And no, I cannot get any more detail,” snapped Smith. “The image is at maximum resolution. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Black was about to say no when Carrie spoke up again. “Has there been any recent activity on the Agabama River?”

Smith sighed and began to enter the query on his keyboard. He had the answer a few seconds later. “River pirates operating close to the mouth of the river. Apparently they go after tourists on sportfishing boats.”

“Can we get real-time coverage on that area?” Carrie asked.

“River pirates?” Smith said. “Hardly a matter of national security, Miss Pilkington. You’re trying my patience.”

“And you’re trying mine,” snapped Black in response. “Bear in mind where the request for your cooperation came from.”

Smith’s small mouth opened for a moment as though he was about to speak, then snapped shut, the thin mustache above his upper lip quivering like a frightened caterpillar. He bent over his console and began tapping keys.

“This is from a low-orbit NROL-49 satellite in geostationary orbit over the Caribbean.” Smith hit a key and an image appeared on the screen. It was a high-angle view of a broad river. “From twenty miles up.”

“Can it look for anomalies?” Black asked. MI6 had its own version of the NROL, so he knew a little about the satellite’s performance.

“Yes.”

“Is it picking anything up?”

“There’s a large oil slick about eight miles upriver.”

“Can we see that?”

“It’s four in the afternoon, Mr. Black. Shadows might present some difficulty.”

“Try.”

“As you wish.”

The image fogged out, shifted and then resolved itself.

“One thousand feet,” said Smith. There was definitely a rainbow-hued slick of oil fanning out on the water trailing off as the current pulled it toward the sea.

“Follow it to the apex of the slick,” Black ordered, any pretense of politeness stripped from his voice. Smith did as he was told. The apex of the slick was two miles upriver.

“There,” said Smith. “Two hundred feet.”

“What could have caused that?” Carrie asked.

“I have no idea,” said Smith primly.

“Either someone spilled a large can of outboard motor fuel or a boat sank,” said Black. “Take us upriver please.” Smith zoomed out and the image angled upriver. The man was right; long shadows fell across the river now. “Check for anomalies,” ordered Black.

“Here,” Smith answered shortly after fingering his console. “Five hundred feet.”

“It looks like a boat,” said Carrie, squinting.

“It is a boat,” said Black. “It looks as though it’s tied up to a tree.” He turned back to Smith. “Closer, please.”

“Fifty feet.”

“There’s someone sitting in the stern,” said Carrie. “And there’s something in front of him on the transom.”

“Closer,” said Black.

The image refocused and resolved again. “Twenty-five feet,” said Smith.

“What is that thing in front of him and what is he doing?” Carrie asked.

“That thing, as you call it, is a Browning fifty-caliber machine gun and he’s cleaning it.” He paused. “Closer please, Mr. Smith.”

The image zoomed in. “Ten feet,” said Smith.

“Are we close enough to use that facial recognition program of yours?”

“No need,” said Carrie, staring at the enormous image on the screen. “I recognize him from his file. “That’s Lieutenant Colonel John ‘Doc’ Holliday.”

After dropping off Animatronics Andy back at the security gate, they headed out onto the highway, Carrie at the wheel of the agency Ford. She hadn’t said a word after identifying Holliday.

“That place gives me the willies,” she said as they moved north against the evening traffic. “So does Mr. Smith.”

“He’s a bureaucrat, Carrie.”

“He’s also a liar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m no military expert, but I know enough about the state of the Cuban army to know that they don’t waste time sending their Special Forces into the jungle for exercises. The Tropas Especiales are almost completely an urban force used to put down dissident demonstrations. Not to mention the fact that their weapon of choice is the AK-47. The men in those images were carrying MK-17 SCAR assault rifles; that’s U.S. Special Forces and most of the private armies like Blackhawk, KBR, Obelisk, Dyncor in the States and Control Risk and Blue Hackle in the U.K. I also know I saw more stacks of ammunition boxes than probably exist in the entire Cuban army inventory. The worst of it is that Smith lied.”

“Why?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea, but I know it means one thing-something’s going on and we don’t know a damn thing about it.”