With the exception of one large box, the shipment of Glacier binoculars and Condor spotting scopes was loaded onto an Amerijet 747 heading for New York. The last box was opened by the driver’s assistant, who then took the two large Halliburton cases from the Air Cubana flight to the domestic passenger terminal, where he rented a dark blue Chrysler 300 from Avis, placed the two cases in the trunk and began the forty-eight-hour drive to Orlando, Florida, and the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World.
“You have to be kidding,” said Carrie Pilkington. “There’s a tree growing out of the runway!” She stared down at what was left of the old airstrip.
“Not to mention the burnt-out DC-3 and the fact that what’s left of the airstrip runs along an exceedingly narrow ridge, Mr. Laframboise,” added Black. The hulk of an old airliner, propellers bent, the portside wing ripped off at the root and the entire tail section torn off, lay at the far end of the landing strip, most of it overgrown with jungle foliage. A quarter mile to the west, perched on a rocky outcropping, Black could also see what looked like the stone foundations of a building, the roof and walls collapsed into the interior.
“The building was Dr. Gomez’s hunting lodge. The story is that at the last minute he got cold feet and tried to fly the plane out loaded with as much loot as he could hump down from the lodge. Him and about thirty or forty of his Batista buddies got roasted by a lucky shot from an old RPG2 before the plane could go wheels up. Great plane, the DC-3. You still see them around sometimes.”
“You can’t land there,” said Carrie firmly. “There’s not enough room. We’ll hit something, either that tree or the wreck. There just isn’t enough room.”
Laframboise sighed. “At a guess, dear, how high would you say that big shrub you call a tree is?”
“It looks to be about fifteen or twenty feet high,” said Carrie, staring down as Laframboise banked the little airplane, turning it into the wind.
“And how far is the tree from the wreck?”
“Eight or nine hundred feet?”
“You agree, Mr. Black?”
“I’d say you’re just about right.” Black nodded.
“Ya está todo jodido loco,” muttered Arango, shaking his head and staring down through the big side window at what he knew was certain death. “Jodido loco.”
“The stall speed for Miroslava is about twenty-five miles per hour. If I come in over the tree at forty miles per and kill the engine, she’ll glide in over about fifty feet before she touches down like a feather. Landing she needs about five hundred feet, takeoff less than four hundred. Easy-peasy.”
“What about potholes?” Carrie said.
“Missy, now you’re just splitting hairs.”
Laframboise brought the aircraft fully into the wind, then twisted the throttle on the stick to slow them down, simultaneously pushing the stick forward to lower the nose. The Wilga dropped slowly and by the time they reached the far end of the ridge, they were less than a hundred feet above it. Out of the corner of his eye, Black saw the ruins of the house on the knoll flash by and then he was looking down the airstrip at the vision of a young pine tree directly in their path.
I’m about to die because a pinecone blew onto an abandoned dirt airstrip in Cuba in 1996, thought Black. He couldn’t think of a more irrelevant way to end his life. “Killed by a pinecone” was no fitting epitaph for the James Bond of his time.
The Wilga dropped even lower in Laframboise’s remarkably steady hand and the pine tree loomed even larger in the wraparound windshield. Black felt his stomach knot, his bowels loosen and bile rise in his throat as they hurtled toward the tree. He closed his eyes for a second or two, then for some mad reason, opened them again as though his brain was forcing him to witness what was about to tear his body into tiny pieces mixed with chunks of Polish-fabricated metal.
Some small thing managed to intrude into the farthest point of his peripheral vision. Camouflage. The impossibility of seeing the nose and propeller of an old British Spitfire and then the tree was twenty feet in front of them, and then somehow it was below them.
Black was sure he felt the top boughs of the tree scratching the bottom of the fuselage and then they hit the dirt, bounced slightly and slowed as Laframboise waggled the tail to lose even more speed. They finally came to a stop about four hundred feet from the remains of the bullet-ridden wreckage of the DC-3. Off to his right and the edge of the landing strip, Black saw what had caught his eye just before they didn’t hit the pine tree: an Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighter plane under a cleverly designed fly tent of camouflage netting interwoven with enough pine boughs to make it blend in with the trees that covered the ridge.
That was crazy enough, but what he really couldn’t figure out was how they’d managed to land it with the tree in the way. Laframboise had obviously been thinking the same thing. He glanced into the rearview mirror set just above the center of the windscreen.
“Tree’s a phony,” the pilot said. Black followed his glance. The fifteen-foot tree was lying on its side in the middle of the runway. “They stick it into a hole to make the strip look unusable.”
“Senors?” Arango said, his voice nervous as he stared out through the windscreen. Laframboise looked forward.
“Oh dear,” he said.
“Who the hell are they?” Carrie said, frowning.
A dozen men in camouflage fatigues, combat boots and black berets stepped out of the trees behind the DC-3 and were approaching the Wilga. Each of them was carrying a stubby little H&K MP5 submachine gun.
“This is not good,” said Will Black. “This is not good at all.”
17
Holliday, Eddie and Domingo Cabrera stood on the dirt road between the slope of the hill and the wildly rushing river behind them. The river was one of the small tributaries of the Agabama, and for much of their time they had followed its course into the mountains.
Holliday squatted down, examining the deep tread marks in the dirt. “They were big,” he said. “Either two or three of them. I’m not quite sure. Two huge wheels in the front and two sets of double wheels in the rear.”
“There were three vehicles,” said Domingo Cabrera.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I am sure,” said the white-haired man, his voice tense. He turned away from the road and began to climb the scrub-covered hill toward the mouth of a cave high above the river. Following, Holliday noted that it looked as though there had been recent activity on the slope, as well; a few scattered concrete railway ties, a short length of slightly rusty track—some kind of narrow-gauge rail line like the kind you might find in an old gold or silver mine, of which there were quite a number in Cuba.
They reached a small shelf of rock outside the mouth of the cave. Except for the floor of the entrance, it was rough and natural, about forty feet wide and thirty feet high at the peak. The rails and ties were intact as they ran into the dark recesses of the cavern.
“A mine?” Holliday asked, slightly out of breath after making the steep climb. He looked up at the roof of the cave and saw a series of heavy-duty lag bolts deeply rooted in the stone.
The lag bolts held huge U-bolts, and the U-bolts were threaded with the remains of wire cable that had been run through a complicated series of high-tension pulleys. “Not a mine, something else,” he said, answering his own question.