Valley of the Templars

6

Leonid Maximenko lived in Atares, a barrio, or slum, on the western edge of a low hill that overlooked the southeastern end of Havana Harbor. The barrio was named for the stone fort that still stood on the summit of the hill. The bottom of the hill was skirted by the multiple tracks and switch points of the Christina Railway Station.

The barrio itself was enclosed by Avenue de Mexico Cristina on the east, Arroyo Atares on the north, Avenue de Maximo Gomez on the west and Calzada de Infanta to the south. Fifty square blocks or so encompassed some of the poorest and most wretched people of Havana; it was not a district often mentioned in any of the guidebooks.

Maximenko lived on Calle Fernandina, roughly in the center of the area. The residence was a barabacoa, a word originally meaning grill or barbecue, but in the barrios it meant a two- or three-story building subdivided with extra wooden floors and rooms that are invisible from the street. Maximenko’s room was on the top floor of a crumbling building reached by a narrow set of stairs that wound its way upward, past a dark shared toilet with no cover and a pile of torn pieces of newspaper on a bench beside it and an open area that was clearly some kind of communal kitchen. Smoke from a makeshift brick stove and oven went up through a series of rusted stovepipes directly through a rough-sawn hole in the wooden floor, presumably venting outdoors. Several older women were cooking simultaneously while a gaggle of crying, laughing children dressed in scraps of clothing milled around their skirts playing some kind of game. In one corner of the room an old iron bed had been set up with a thin mattress and was occupied by an elderly man in a grayish diaper and nothing else. His eyes were the blind white of cataracts and the right side of his face sagged like putty.

Eddie and Holliday kept climbing.

“Viva la revolucion,” snorted Eddie.

“I thought Fidel made sure everyone was equal in his great society.”

“Some of us were more equal than others,” said Eddie.

“Where do they come from?”

“They’ve always been here, mi colonel,” sighed Eddie.

Maximenko’s room had bare walls, the plaster rotted down to the stone and mortar that had made up the outer shell of the building for two hundred years. The floor was covered in small, cracked and broken diamond-shaped ceramic tiles that were a faded turquoise color. There were four pieces of furniture in the room, a bed like the one on the floor below, a sagging couch with no feet, a wooden card table that held a green-labeled half-empty bottle of Santero Aguardiente, a cloudy plastic drinking glass, a package of Populars, a book of matches and a tin ashtray. Beside the table was an ancient-looking Victorian cracked green leather chair that looked as if it might have belonged in a men’s club a hundred years ago. There was a small window at the far end of the room that looked out on a courtyard crisscrossed with hanging lines of laundry.

Sprawled in the chair, asleep and snoring, his head thrown back and his mouth open, was a large man in his late sixties with the ruddy complexion of a heavy drinker, presumably Maximenko. He was wearing a pair of filthy cotton pants, a stained and equally filthy guayabera and a pair of bright pink rubber flip-flops. His toenails were crusted and thick as horns and his feet were dark with grime. His hair, what Holliday could see of it, was long, stringy and gray. Bad hygiene or not, the man had a barrel chest, bulging biceps and huge ham hands that looked as though he could have cracked walnuts with them. Once upon a time Maximenko had been a powerful man.

“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.

Both the inner perimeter and the outer perimeter of the Compound were patrolled by armed guards on a twenty-four-seven schedule. In the center of it all, occupying its own hilltop site, was the Grange, a massive four-story log-and-stone “hunting lodge.”

The Grange had offices and sleeping accommodation for all of the Northern Division executives, conference rooms, a huge dining hall and large commercial-scale kitchen and a belowground “War Room,” which was equipped with a direct-link satellite feed to every area of operations currently being run by Blackhawk around the world.

The offices of Major General Atwood Swann and his second in command, Colonel Paul Axeworthy, were located on the top floor of the Grange, with several large picture windows looking out over the lake and the forested area beyond.

Swann and Axeworthy met with Katherine Sinclair in the large conference room that separated the two men’s offices. The centerpiece of the room was an immense, curving black granite table polished until it gleamed. In the middle of the table, carved into the native stone, was the aggressive Blackhawk that served as the company’s logo. The table, like the rest of the compound, had been purchased with funds from the Department of Defense, Blackhawk’s major client, and provided by Katherine Sinclair’s untiring lobbying efforts in the hidden halls and private dining rooms of Washington.

Sinclair sat at the head of the table, flipped open the ostrich document case she carried and withdrew a red-covered file, which she opened in front of her. “Tell me about Operation Cuba Libre,” she said.

Swann nodded to Axeworthy, who got to his feet and went to the huge flat-screen that took up most of one wall. He tapped the screen with one expertly manicured finger and instantly a relief map of Cuba appeared. He tapped the screen again and a section in the center of the map enlarged to show a central spine of hills and steep valleys that ran through the middle of the island.

“These are the Escambray Hills. During the ‘revolution within a revolution’ that took place shortly after Castro took power, this was where Batista supporters, major criminal elements and anyone else who defied El Comandante went. It took Castro almost three years to clean them all out, including a team of eighty-five or so CIA advisers. If they’d had any real sense back then, Escambray was where the Bay of Pigs should have taken place-not a swamp.”

“If I wanted historical analysis I would have asked for it. Get to the point,” said the woman at the head of the table.

Axeworthy cleared his throat and went on. “We used the old CIA runway for the Tucanos. So far we’ve managed to bring in four of them. In two weeks we’ll have the full complement of eight, ordnance included.”

“I thought the Cubans had good coast guard radar?” Sinclair asked.

“They do,” said Swann, sitting on Sinclair’s right. “But they go dark when the Colombian cocaine flights come in, and we’ve got good intel about when that happens. The Colombian flights are usually Beechcraft King Airs or other midsize cargo planes; the Tucanos coming in from the Navassa Island Base read like fishing trawlers if they read on the radar at all.”

“Where is Navassa Island?” said the elderly woman. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a tiny island between Jamaica and Haiti. It’s about a hundred and twenty miles from Cuba.”

“Whose territory is it?”

“Ours.” Swann smiled. “Under the Guano Islands Act of 1890. It’s uninhabited. The island is about two miles long, flat with a lot of scrub brush, an abandoned lighthouse and one palm tree. It was perfect. We burned off some scrub for a runway, camouflaged a refueling station and that was that. The Department of the Interior will never know we were even there.”

“Are eight aircraft enough?” Sinclair said. “It’s not as though they’re fighter jets and you’re taking on the entire Cuban air force.”

“It’s very much like the Soviet Union before the collapse-an illusion; the props are all there, but none of them work. The Cuban air force, for example,” said Axeworthy. He tapped the screen in three separate places and they blossomed into aircraft symbols. “There are only three operating airfields left-Holguin, which was originally designed to defend against an attack from Guantanamo and which is now almost entirely civilian, San Antonio de los Banos, a little west and south of Havana, and Playa Baracoa, for Havana itself. Recent satellite and drone surveillance shows seven transport aircraft and five helicopters at Playa Baracoa and eleven MiGs at San Antonio de los Banos but only six that appear to be in operation. At San Antonio de los Banos the hardstands for the MiGs were overgrown with grass. I doubt that there are enough spare parts or even aviation fuel to fly more than a sortie or two a month. New storage buildings have sprung up at both Playa Baracoa and Los Banos. It is our opinion that they are using the buildings to cannibalize parts from one MiG to another.”

“How many aircraft do they have officially?” Sinclair asked.

“Supposedly one hundred and thirty-four,” said Axeworthy, “of which the majority are trainers, cargo planes, VIP flights and transports. They list a total of seven attack helicopters and only six MiG 29s, a fighter which was developed in the midseventies and has a very limited range. I think we could conservatively cut that list in half-I doubt they have more than a dozen fighters in flying condition and most of those will be MiG 21s from the midfifties. At a guess the transports and the helicopters are for counterinsurgency use-the Cuban people rising up against Raul and his brother. They simply don’t have the strength to mount an attack against Tortugas, let alone the continental U.S.”

“And the Tucanos?”

“They’re armed with four Hellfire Air to Ground missiles; a flight of half a dozen Tucanos could take out the MiGs at Los Banos from five miles away.”

“What about coastal patrols, the navy?”

“It barely exists, ma’am,” said Axeworthy. “Most of what they had is at the breakers yards at the old Cienfuegos Naval Base. They used to have a bunch of Osa-class missile boats, but they stripped off the Styx missile platforms and put them on land-based mobile launchers. Most of what they have are a dozen or so Zhuk-class coastal patrol boats mounted with a couple of manually operated machine guns and some even older Soviet P6 torpedo boats with antiaircraft guns bow and stern. The torpedos are long gone and their radar is totally out of date. Useless. The coast guard will take you to Mexico for a fat fee and the Zhuks make regular runs to the twelve-mile limit off Puerto Bolivar in Colombia to pick up product from the go-fasts. Most of the money, minus the Raul and Fidel Tax, finds its way into the pockets of one Rear Admiral Carlos Alfonso Duque Ramos, whose daughter is married to none other than Raul Castro’s bodyguard.” He tapped the screen and a photograph of a handsome man in his midforties appeared.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Sinclair asked.

“His name is Major Raul Alejandro Rodriguez Castro; he’s Raul’s grandson and Fidel’s grand-nephew. It’s like a Cuban version of the Gotti family.”

The elderly woman ignored the comment. “The army?”

“Another joke. They have thirty-eight thousand men and women of all ranks, and half of them are employed as waiters and housekeeping staff for GAESA, the holding company for the Cuban Defense Ministry. Since the death of Julio Reugeiro, the Cuban minister of defense, in 2011, the CEO of GAESA is Major Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Callejas, who just happens to be married to Deborah Castro Espin-Raul Castro’s eldest daughter. It’s organized crime run by the military and all in the family-Castro’s family.”

Katherine Sinclair sat back in her expensive leather executive chair and smiled thinly. For the first time since arriving at the Grange, she seemed impressed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.