JUNGLE WARFARE
There was a harsh swishing sound as a sapling bent back on itself, whipped back into place, and six sharpened bamboo stakes, each eighteen inches long, impaled both Domingo and Laframboise where they stood. Holliday saw that the sapling was weighted at the end by a small, curved rectangular object that he recognized instantly: it was an MMI “MiniMore,” a smaller version of the much larger Claymore fragmentation mine.
“Hit the dirt!”
Holliday dropped, the gentle pinging as the second trip line pulling the ring on the mine tinkling melodically before the main charge exploded and its load of shrapnel exploded in a twenty-foot arc at roughly waist level. It sounded like a small sharp thunderclap followed by an acrid cloud of smoke and then something like the pitter-patter of hail as the projectiles within the mine hit the jungle. Then there was silence….
Also by Paul Christopher
Michelangelo’s Notebook
The Lucifer Gospel
Rembrandt’s Ghost
The Aztec Heresy
The Sword of the Templars
The Templar Cross
The Templar Throne
The Templar Conspiracy
The Templar Legion
Red Templar
VALLEY
OF THE
TEMPLARS
PAUL CHRISTOPHER
A SIGNET BOOK
PART ONE
COUNTDOWN
1
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 20, 2012
Room 212 in the Hart Senate Building was a multimillion-dollar chamber for interrogation people from Enron executives to possible appointees to high positions in government. There was a single massive wall of marble behind the senators’ dais, which stretched around three walls of exotic wood paneling with cutouts for press boxes like some political baseball game; a single long table faced the senators on the carpeted floor and room for two hundred or so spectators behind. There was plenty of room for press photographers to kneel or squat beneath the senators’ dais and a large UNITED STATES SENATE seal 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 and both Iraq wars, as well as Afghanistan. Swann was a big man, square-faced, his marine buzz cut going from blond to gray. Axeworthy was wearing Blackhawk Battle Dress Uniform, or BDUs, consisting of 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 black bird on a gold background that was the Blackhawk logo. 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 committee chair, wore a dusty suit twenty years out of date, a psychedelic tie that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover and 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 and 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, 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 or 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 known as the Pallas Group, which in turn 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 village of San Diego de Tripicano and the village of Cuscatleon, which according to my information simply do not exist anymore. In fact, the only thing left of both places is a scattering of burnt-out ruins and a few charred bones. How did you manage that little trick, General, and what kind of bonus were you paid for slaughtering two hundred and 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 Largo, 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 Caribbean shoreline. Most were uninhabited strips of sand and coral occupied by a few windblown palms, though a few had been turned into sportfishing 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, they would have assumed that the engine sound came from the rock lobster and shrimp fleet that plied the banks of the Bahia del Pedro farther south and were now heading for one of the main fishing terminals like Matanzas or Cienfuegos.
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 they could do to help. Some wit in the head office had decided to name one of the boats Bahia 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 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.