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.
“Coño!” 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?”
“Sí.” 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 Velázquez de Cuéllar 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 Velázquez de Cuéllar 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 vómito 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.”