Red Templar (26 page)
“If you give Eddie to the Cubans they’ll kill him. In the first place he’s a dissident, and in the second place he deserted from their forces in Angola.”
“Not my problem,” said Philpot, sucking on the candy.
“No, it’s my problem, Potsy, but that makes it your problem, too. I testify before a congressional committee, I’ll take you down, and a few dozen others with you. I know that you were a mole for the company at the National Counterterrorism Center, and I know that you’re a mole here—and that’s just the beginning. This is what’s going to happen, Potsy: you’re going to get a diplomatic flight from Sheremetyevo out of Russia and you’re going to put me and Eddie on it. Take us to Ramstein AFB in Germany and we’ll make our way from there. I promise you’ll never hear from us again.”
There was a long pause. Potsy swallowed what was left of the caramel candy and cleared his throat. He stared at the man seated across from him. He’d known Holliday for the better part of thirty years. Twice he’d saved his life. If nothing else Potsy was a good judge of character; he knew that regardless of any past relationship, the one-eyed man would be true to his word. And he knew more than where the bodies were buried—he knew who’d dug the graves. Finally he spoke.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport is enormous; the passenger terminal is the size of a dozen football fields, and although it has been given a rudimentary face-lift since the fall of the Soviet Union, it still has the low-ceilinged, brightly lit, concrete-columned and utilitarian look that was dominant in that era, although the bare concrete columns had now been plastered with liquor company advertisements. On an average afternoon in early November there can be up to fifty thousand people milling around in the enormous space, some arriving, some departing. After several Chechen terrorist attacks the security presence has been increased, and heavily armed police are a common sight. There are hundreds of cameras, and metal detectors have been installed in all the entrance doorways.
Holliday and Eddie arrived at the airport at three fifteen in the afternoon, each of them handcuffed to a U.S. Marine guard from the embassy and flanked by two black-uniformed and helmeted “special” officers. An unmarked U.S. Army VIP Gulfstream V had been arranged to take them to Ramstein Air Force Base, with a flight time of two and a half hours. Both Holliday and Eddie had already been cleared by Russian customs and immigration by special arrangement with Prime Minister Putin’s office in the Kremlin.
John Bone, seated on a plastic bench with his overcoat over his arm, saw the man first. He looked either extremely ill or worse, drunk, and his weaponry was wrong. He wasn’t carrying the standard Czech-made Skorpion submachine gun. His handgun looked like a twenty-year-old Makarov rather than the proper Stechkin APS blowback pistol. On top of that the man’s uniform was dirty and ill fitting, hanging on him like a clown’s outfit. John Bone was a man of many talents, and one of them was knowing when the kill site had been prejudiced. He stood up, walking crosswise across the terminal and out of harm’s way. Maybe some other time.
As Holliday and Eddie headed for the special boarding gate that had been arranged, a uniformed security policeman came out of the crowd almost directly in front of them. His name was Yakov Semenov, and the uniform, weapons and identification allowing him entrance to the airport had been provided by his boss, Yevgeni Ivanovich Barsukov, imprisoned head of the Tambov Gang of St. Petersburg, the assignment done at the request of Pierre Ducos and the other Apostles. Semenov, suffering from metastasized fourth-stage lung cancer, knew there was very little likelihood that he would survive the next thirty seconds—he had been promised that his family in St. Petersburg would be amply rewarded for his sacrifice.
Eddie was the first to see Semenov draw his weapon and he acted instinctively; yanking his marine guard bodily to the right he shouldered Holliday out of the line of fire. He was too late; the assassin had already fired. Falling, Holliday saw rather than felt an enormous white-hot blur of pain in the corner of his right eye, and then there was nothing but the perfect certain blackness of death.
EPILOGUE
The eyewitness statements provided by the two marine escorts agreed that the assassin was definitely aiming for center mass when he fired. If it hadn’t been for Eddie’s quick thinking there was no doubt that had the homemade dumdum round connected it would have blown Holliday’s heart out through his spinal cord. As it was the shot struck Holliday in the empty socket of his right eye, exiting the skull two inches above his ear.
It was decided that the surgeons at the trauma center at Ramstein AFB could do a better job, and he arrived there two hours later. The surgeons put him into an induced coma for three days until his brain swelling subsided, and then he was awakened, not much the worse for wear but suffering from the mother of all concussions and the grandmother of all headaches.
Holliday woke from his first good night’s sleep since arriving at Ramstein and opened his eyes. Eddie, sitting in the big visitor’s chair by the window, looked up.
“You are awake,
compadre
. You still have the headache?”
“It’s starting to fade.”
Eddie brought the rolling table and pushed it so it was across Holliday’s lap. Holliday used the control on the bed and raised it into a sitting position, and Eddie brought him his breakfast tray. He sat down at the edge of the bed.
Holliday looked at his friend; something was clearly bothering him. “What’s the matter?”
Eddie sighed. “I spoke with my mother in Habana last night. My brother Domingo, who works for the Ministry of the Interior, has vanished, disappeared. She is very worried . . . how do you say it in English . . . frantic?”
Holliday could see from his expression that Eddie wasn’t too far from being frantic himself. He thought about Eddie and what they had been through, both in Africa and in Russia. Holliday had never had a brother and rarely a close friend, but he had one now, and the kind of friendship he and Eddie had together had obligations and responsibilities.
“Okay,” said Holliday quietly. “As soon as they let me out of here let’s go find him.”
Read on for a special preview of
Paul Christopher’s next thriller,
Valley Of The Templars
Coming from Signet in June 2012.
Room 212 Hart Senate Building,
Washington, D.C.
Committee Investigating the Use of Paramilitary Corporations, Private Armies and Private Police Forces Both Within and Without the Continental United States, Senator Fulton J. Abernathy (Dem.), Wisconsin, Chairman
February 19, 2012
Room 212 in the Hart Senate Building was a multimillion-dollar interrogation chamber, where people from Enron executives to possible appointees to high positions in government testified. A massive wall of marble stood behind the central section of the senators’ dais. The other two sections on either side stretched before walls of exotic wood paneling, with cutouts for press boxes like some political baseball game. A single long table faced the senators, with room for two hundred or so spectators behind. The carpeted floor featured plenty of room for press photographers to kneel or squat beneath the senators’ dais, and a large United States Senate seal hung on the marble wall, with a convenient swing door beneath it to allow for a television camera to get reaction shots.
The two men and their several lawyers being spitted that particular day were Major General Atwood Swann, president of Blackhawk Special Forces Corporation, and his second in command, Colonel Paul Axeworthy. Swann was dressed in the uniform of a U.S. Marine major general, his chest resplendent with medals from Vietnam, both Iraq wars and Afghanistan. Swann was a big man, square-faced, his Marine buzz cut going from blond to grey. Axworthy was wearing Blackhawk battle dress uniform, or BDUs, consisting of a green-on-green camouflage blouse and trousers tucked into spit-shined combat boots, a bright blue scarf at his throat and a dark green beret bearing the Blackhawk logo: a black bird on a gold background. The beret was tucked into the left epaulette of his blouse. He wore an identical gold-and-black patch on both shoulders. The two men’s five lawyers were dressed like lawyers.
Senator Fulton J. Abernathy, the committer chair, wore a dusty suit twenty years out-of-date and a psychedelic tie that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the
Sgt. Pepper’s
album cover. He had a face like a wrinkled apple. His eyes were bright blue and extremely alert behind a pair of bright green half-framed bifocals. The grilling had already been going on for two hours but Abernathy was still in top form and Swann hadn’t flinched once.
AB: What is your annual salary at Blackhawk, General Swann?
SW: I was informed that there would be no questions regarding personal matters.
AB: Well, I’m telling you otherwise and I’m the boss here, so answer the question.
SW: One million seven hundred eighty-five thousand plus bonuses.
AB: What kind of bonuses?
SW: Bonuses for successful missions.
AB: Such as.
SW: Katrina, for one.
AB: Katrina, as in the hurricane?
SW: Yes.
AB: What, pray tell, was your mission there?
SW: We were hired as an adjunct to local forces to maintain order.
AB: What about your mission in El Salvador?
SW: I’m not sure I understand the question.
AB: Were you not hired by the government of El Salvador to “relocate” several villages and their occupants in the interior for the purposes of a major gold mining corporation owned by the same person who controls the multinational corporation that in turns owns both Blackhawk Security as well as Blackhawk Special Forces—one Kate Sinclair, mother of the late Senator William Pierce Sinclair, who recently took his own life?
SW: That’s a complicated question, Senator.
AB: I’ll try to pay attention when you answer it. El Salvador, in particular the villages of San Diego de Tripicano and the village of Cuscatleon, which according to my information simply do not exist anymore. In fact, the only things left of both places are a scattering of burned-out ruins and a few charred bones. How did you manage that little trick, General, and what kind of bonus where you paid for slaughtering two hundred thirty people, men, women and children?
SW: I’m afraid the El Salvador mission is a matter of national security, Senator.
AB: El Salvador’s national security? Ask me if I give a tinker’s fart about El Salvador’s national security.
[Pause]
SW: My counsel advises me to plead the Fifth Amendment.
AB. I’ll just bet they do. One more question before we break for lunch, General Swann. Have you ever been hired by any U.S. government agency to invade the territory of a sovereign nation?
SW: My counsel advises me—
AB: We get the picture. . . . General. Let’s break for lunch.
Four miles off Cayo Coco Cuba
Phase of the Moon: New
April 21, 2012
It was midnight, and it was raining. The four ancient rusting fishing trawlers puttered slowly northwest along the coast, offshore from the long archipelago of cays and islands that stretched along Cuba’s Atlantic shoreline. Most were uninhabited strips of sand and coral occupied by windblown palms. A few, like Cayo Coco, had been turned into resorts to entice tourists, but it was the end of the season and even the resorts were almost empty. If anyone was listening that night, he would have assumed that the engine sound came from the rock lobster and shrimp fleet that plied the banks of the Bahía de Buena Vista farther south and that the boats were now heading for one of the main fishing terminals, such as Matanzas.
At ten past twelve, the engine of one of the four old boats in the group sputtered and died, and the three others stopped their own engines to see what thay could do to help. Some wit in the head office had decided to name one of the boats
Bahía
and another
Cochinos
—Bay of Pigs, but under the rust and the filth and the piles of empty nets hanging over the derrick and the mast, it was unlikely that anyone was going to notice the names on a dark, rainy night four miles out to sea. Even if Cuban radar was in good enough repair to be working that night, the four boats were wooden and so low in the water, they would likely have been invisible.
As soon as the engines stopped, the crews of all four boats surged into action. Instead of shrimp and lobster, the trawlers carried ten five-by-six bags, each containing a seven-meter inflatable Zodiac boat and another set of bags holding the vessel’s silenced electric motors, hardly neccessary tonight because the tide was rushing ashore. Each trawler also carried 120 men, all fully equipped with weapons bags and LAR V Draegar bubble-free rebreathing apparatus, suitable for the shallow depths and warm waters ashore and with a ninty-minute useful breathing time. Within twenty minutes the boats and all 480 men had been offloaded and were headeding toward a GPS point between two uninhabited cays sixteen miles northwest of Cayo Coco. The four trawlers continued their journey, their course slowly changing to a more northeasterly one and their staging point on the southern tip of Andros Island in theBahamas group.
Ninety minutes later, their Zodiacs sunk in seventy feet of water, the 408-man unit landed on a rocky abandoned beach twenty miles west of the town of Yaguajay. They stripped off their rebreathing gear and stowed in the waterproof knapsacks, where their camo gear had been kept. The weapons bags were unsealed, each man armed himself according to his role in the mission.
At three fifteen in the morning, almost five hundred handpicked men from the Blackhawk Special Forces elite Special Boat Unit moved off the beach in double time, and within another hour, they had vanished into the deep jungles covering the slopes of the Escambray Hills. They were the sixth such unit to have been landed successfully on the empty beaches of Sancti Spíritus Sancti province, and there were four more to come over the next six weeks. Operation Cuba Libre was in full swing.