“Tell me if you see the guy with the RPG again!”
“Sí, mi colonel!”
Ahead of him Holliday saw the river widening. The mangroves were gone and he could have been back in the jungles of Vietnam along the Mekong. Huge ferns bowed over the banks, and the water was thick with the flat green pads of water lilies. Behind them crowds of cedars, ebony, kapok, giant figs, mahogany, oaks, pine and royal palm trees made a dense jungle.
Suddenly Arango appeared carrying something across his narrow shoulder. Holliday couldn’t quite believe his eyes; it was an ancient-looking Browning .50-caliber machine gun. Across the old man’s other spindly shoulder hung a long, trailing belt of gleaming ammunition. The old man paused, squinting at Holliday.
“You know how to use this puta madre, American?”
“Yes.”
“Then help me.” The old man turned. “Cabrera! Tomar el volante!”
Eddie nodded and came forward, taking over the wheel from Holliday. Holliday then took the heavy machine gun off Arango’s shoulder. The old man went nimbly up the ladder to the flybridge. “Follow me!”
Holliday did as he was instructed, shouldering the big gun and climbing up the ladder. He heaved the gun onto the deck of the flybridge and clambered after it. Arango stood under the flapping canvas, digging into an old wooden toolbox. He hauled out three lengths of tapped steel pipe and screwed them together into one long piece. He then took the completed pipe and dropped it into a socket on the deck. Then he added an old pintle mount he took from the pocket of his ragged cotton pants and screwed that into the top of the pipe.
“The gun,” he instructed.
Holliday nodded and staggered across the bouncing, heaving deck with the Browning in his arms. Together the two of them manhandled the machine gun onto the pintle and Arango locked it in place.
“You shoot,” said Arango. “My eyes, they not so good anymore.”
“All right.” Holliday nodded, taking his place behind the gun. He slid the bolt forward and flipped open the top of the weapon. Arango fed the first shell of the belt into the receiver and Holliday reversed his previous actions, closing the top and pulling the bolt all the way back. There was a double click announcing that the belt was locked into place. “What now?” Holliday asked.
Arango gave him a gap-toothed grin. “We attack!”
Will Black, Carrie Pilkington and Rufus Kingman sat in the seventh-floor office of the CIA director of operations and waited for Joseph Patchin to speak. Patchin was staring at his ego wall. He allowed himself a nostalgic smile. There were pictures of him with agency directors from Bill Casey to Leon Pinetta and presidents from Carter to Baby Bush, and he’d outrun them all. He’d had a career to be proud of in the intelligence business, and now he could feel it coming down around his ears. He turned back to face the other people in his office.
“He didn’t say anything else?” Patchin asked, looking at Will Black, the MI6 liaison.
“No, sir, nary a word,” said Black.
“Did we threaten him, Miss Pilkington?”
“Yes, sir. Guantánamo and letting him go in Little Havana in Miami with a sign around his neck. We even threatened to send him back to Havana.”
“Didn’t work?” Patchin asked glumly.
“No, sir. He clammed up entirely.”
“What about Guantánamo, Kingman?”
“The president would have our balls, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Never been a fan of bowdlerizing,” murmured Black. Carrie smiled.
“What?” Kingman asked.
“Nothing,” said Black. “Just thinking out loud.”
“What about a black house—somewhere really unpleasant?”
“There’s still one in operation in Albania, sir.”
“What do you think, Black? A little boarding, sensory deprivation, that kind of thing?”
“I seriously doubt that it would do any good, Mr. Patchin.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I don’t think he has anything more to say.”
“You believe Miss Pilkington’s ‘messenger’ theory, too?” Kingman sneered.
“I do. I also believe that Selman-Housein was given just enough information by the Brotherhood to get you to react exactly the way you are now. You’ve got half the threat analysts at Counterintelligence wetting their pants and looking for exactly what sort of terrorist threat from Cuba could cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people, and you’ve got everyone at Homeland Security running around defenestrating themselves.”
“De what?” Kingman asked.
“Defenestration,” said Carrie, “a fourteen-letter word meaning to be thrown out of a window. It’s what happened to Jezebel, the false prophet from the Old Testament who used too much makeup. You see it every now and again in the New York Times crossword puzzle.”
Black smiled. Kingman was silent, staring. Patchin raised an eyebrow.
“The president isn’t about to throw himself out of an Oval Office window, even if he could, which he can’t, but he would like some suggestions about the direction we should take.”
“Holliday and Cabrera, his Cuban friend, are the key to all this. They’re looking for Cabrera’s brother, Domingo. Domingo fled because he knew too much. Find Holliday and we find Domingo Cabrera.”
Patchin thought for a moment. “It’ll do until we think of something better. How’s your Spanish, Black?”
“Fluent,” he answered.
“Yours, Miss Pilkington?”
“High school and a course in conversational Spanish at university.”
“We can’t send either one of them!” Kingman protested. “He’s not one of ours and she’s just an…analyst.” Kingman looked shocked at the very thought.
“Mr. Black is as American as you or me. His mother spent most of her working life at the agency.”
“But…”
“Done a lot of fieldwork, have we, Rufus?” Patchin said.
“No, sir, none.”
“Speak any Spanish?”
“Not much, sir. I’ve been to Cancún two or three times.”
Patchin turned to Black. “You’ll be a journalist for the London Times. Miss Pilkington, as well. She’s an expat Canadian. Can your people in London arrange a backstory?”
“Not a problem,” said Black.
“Fly to the Bahamas tonight and catch a flight from Nassau to Havana as soon as you can. We need answers, and we need them fast.”
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.