Hubbard, L Ron - Novel 14

by Ai! Pedrito! (v3. 0)

  Yaquita slithered into her own tight-fitting jumpsuit, still only half zipped up. She jumped up and down to cram shut her plaid suitcase stuffed with shoes and changes of clothes, everything from evening wear to coordinated outfits of casual dress.

  Outside, the guns of the armored car pounded round after round of automatic fire into the cantina building, shattering every mirror in turn.

  "Look at all those broken mirrors," the guitar player moaned, tilting his sombrero to keep the spraying glass fi-agments from hitting him in the eyes. "As if we didn't have enough bad luck!"

  "Now they'll have to change the name of the cantina," the trumpet player said.

  Hammered by bullet impacts, tables tilted and toppled, spinning across the floor. The unconscious knife thrower rolled over, oblivious to the bullet impacts that hammered the spot where he had just been.

  On the cobblestoned street beside the lead-armored car, O'Halloran danced about, egging the gunners on. "Kill 'em! Kill 'em! How dare he try to surrender. Slaughter everybody!"

  Colodoran soldiers piled fi-om the two armored cars, fixing bayonets to their rifles. They lined up, falling rapidly into ranks, making ready for charge. The machine guns continued firing, which forced the foot soldiers to step back out of the way, unwilling to move forward until the gunfire paused.

  The band members, including the drummer who had retreated back to his companions, cowered under the protection of the bandstand Up. Plaster and broken glass showered down on them.

  Behind O'Halloran, the line of haphazard troops was finally ready, and the frenzied gunfire had stopped. The CIA commander gesticulated wildly toward the cantina. "Charge!"

  Eager soldiers howled a loud yell, "For Colodor!"

  Inside the cantina, the manager cowered back under the bar, making himself as small as possible in a corner. He propped the bullet-dented stool up to shield him. Taking a huge risk, he reached up to grab a bottle of rum, then brought it down into his hiding place.

  The government troops charged through the door with fixed bayonets, shouting in triumph amid the sulfurous smoke and dust. The soldiers' booted feet crunched across the glass from broken mirrors.

  Kicking chairs aside, they rushed toward the bar and began to loot the liquor supply.

  In the locked room upstairs, Yaquita hauled her overstuffed plaid suitcase in one hand; with the other she dragged Smith toward the tiny bathroom window. "Time to go, my love."

  Smith finally managed to get himself dressed in the safari suit, though his buttons didn't match up with the proper buttonholes. He broke away from her and jumped back to grab his tan suitcase. "All this spy equipment might come in handy."

  In the same instant, Yaquita returned to the closet to grab her guitar case, clutching it to her chest. "You and I might want some music during our romantic evenings." She scooped up the dark rum bottle from beside the white enamel coffeepot. A stray bullet hit the ceiling in a burst of plaster.

  Worming through the opening, Smith slipped out the bathroom window. With a clang he dropped to the corrugated roof of the outbuilding below. Smith turned and reached up to help Yaquita as she leaned out the window. "Catch this first!" She dropped her battered guitar case down to him, then her heavy-plaid suitcase, which nearly knocked him off the building. Carrying their precious baggage. Smith and Yaquita raced along the corrugated rooftops. Their footsteps banged like thunder.

  Inside the cantina the Colodoran troops yanked the fat manager out from under the bar. The forlorn band members stood together, also prisoners. Some still held their instruments, but the soldiers eyed them suspiciously, as if the trumpets or guitars might be potential weapons. The intact drumsticks had already been confiscated.

  The troops herded the manager and band out the front door and into the road. They stood blinking in front of the armored cars, surrendering repeatedly. O'Halloran looked at them, displeased and growling. None of these men was Pedrito Miraflores.

  The band members held their hands up, helplessly gripping their instruments. All of them were terrified. The drummer begged, "I know we are bad musicians, but none of us sympathize with those pesky mapmakers." All of the band members shook their heads earnestly. "Please don't shoot us!"

  Chapter 19

  AS GUNFIRE BLAZED and the two fugitives staggered along at top speed across the rooftops with their baggage, Smith saw an opportunity: at the end of the last outbuilding, a ramshackle stake truck bulged with a cargo hidden by a lashed-down tarpaulin. Its Mercedes-Benz emblem gleamed from the hood, the only part of the truck that looked well maintained.

  "Maybe we can borrow this vehicle," Smith said hopefully. "I'm an American, so they'll trust me."

  "You? An American?" Yaquita laughed. "Then you really aren't the Pedrito I know." Smith didn't know what she found so funny.

  He stepped down from the corrugated metal overhang to the top of the truck's cab. The roof of the vehicle was rough with rust and patched with primer-coat paint. Like a true gentleman, he reached up for Yaquita's bags. "Here, let me help you."

  "What an awful thing! I deserve finer transportation," Yaquita said as she looked over the stake truck from front to back. "Well, I suppose they didn't have much time to provide a getaway vehicle for us."

  On the street outside the cantina, the Colodoran troops lined up the captive band members and the cantina manager. O'Halloran strode down the line, roughing up the prisoners. He waited for no answers as he slapped the first man, the trumpet player. "Where's Pedrito Miraflores? We were tipped off he's in this cantina."

  "Pedrito?" the man asked. "Oh, he's—"

  From somewhere down the Une, the guitarist said, "If you tell him, Yaquita will kill us all. Who would you rather be killed by: the government, or her?"

  The trumpet player suddenly froze, and the beads of sweat that formed on his brow spoke volumes. He'd rather be killed by a government agent ten times over than face this woman Yaquita.

  O'Halloran cuffed the next prisoner. "Where's Pedrito?" The man turned red and shook his head vigorously.

  He slapped the third one. "Where's Pedrito?"

  Hearing the distant roar of a truck engine, O'Halloran stared down the alley. The overloaded stake truck, backfiring and smoking, jerkily moved across the end of the street, picking up speed like a charging rhinoceros.

  Inside the truck was a man with red hair.

  O'Halloran pointed frantically at the ramshackle truck. "That's Pedrito trying to escape! After him, after him!"

  The soldiers piled into the armored cars with a clatter of automatic weapons banging against the sides of the vehicles. O'Halloran leaped onto the sideboard of the first armored car and shook his fist. As the car raced away, the long strand of hair dangled along his sweaty cheek.

  The cantina manager and band members stared after the departing armored cars. The band members still held their instruments and kept their hands in the air, though no soldiers had been left behind to guard them. It seemed the safest course of action.

  "Do you think we should go back in to practice?" the drummer asked.

  "I suppose so," the guitar player said contemptuously. "Those guys were rough, but Yaquita will squash them like mice!"

  Yaquita knocked Smith over to the passenger side and slid behind the wheel. She hot-wired the engine and drove madly, wrestling with the gearshift as if it were a hungry python.

  Smith looked behind, but couldn't see around the bulging tarp on the back of the overloaded truck. The engine backfired and jolted. Yaquita hammered the steering wheel with the heel of her hand as if she could somehow make the truck go faster.

  "This Pedrito doesn't seem to be a very popular guy," Smith said.

  "He isn't!"Yaquita said.

  "I don't think I'd ever like to meet him," he muttered, blinking.

  Yaquita just raised a dark eyebrow at him.

  Armored cars skidded around the corner, appearing from the side street. The truck bucked along, wheezing and sputtering. Dogs barked at it, then fled from the wheels.
Gunshots rang in the air.

  The two-lane highway led into mountainous country outside the city limits. As the truck roared through traffic, three small cars provided a buffer from the armored vehicles in pursuit. Yaquita glanced in her side mirror at the civilian cars, but paid no attention to them.

  "Who are those men, anyway?" Smith asked.

  "CIA."

  "Oh, then I don't have anything to worry about. The CIA is our friend."

  Yaquita snorted, looking at him in disbelief. "Yes, but they're looking for you."

  Smith swallowed hard. His thoughts had been clouded and muzzy all day. Now everything came clear—why they hunted him, why they'd tried to shoot him at the embassy. "They think I'm Pedrito? But then we just have to explain to them—"

  "Shut up, Pedrito!" The knowing look in Yaquita's face pinned him like a wanted poster to the wall. Even she thought he was Pedrito.

  O'Halloran's armored cars were a considerable distance behind and following. The soldiers shot their machine guns into the air, but the rest of the traffic reacted indifferently, as if the gunfire was no more significant than a honking horn. Colodoran drivers were probably used to the sound by now.

  "Maybe I should go talk to them," Smith said, "and explain that I'm not Pedrito."

  "They wouldn't let you get within a hundred yards before they'd shoot you dead!" Yaquita laughed.

  "Sure they would," Smith said. "They can't shoot you just because they think you're a criminal. What about due process of law? What about 'innocent until proven guilty'?"

  "That's just for rich white Americans living in their nice houses," Yaquita laughed. "Those rules don't apply to us here in Colodor. If they think you are a Communist, the CIA will shoot you.

  Smith groaned. Obviously she was right. "I wonder what Nelson would do in a case like this."

  "Who's Nelson?" Yaquita asked. "Some U.S. agent?"

  "He was the greatest naval hero of all time."

  "Look around, darling," Yaquita said. "We're on dry land. It doesn't make any difference what a naval hero would do."

  "Wait!" Smith said. "Nelson would jettison his cargo to increase maneuverability."

  It was time to take action—and he experienced the thrill of adventure. He opened the door of the moving truck, holding on to the frame and standing up. Wind blew in his face. Smith climbed back onto the truck bed. "Keep driving, Yaquita. Now we're going to pick up some knots!"

  In hot pursuit, O'Halloran stood up in the armored car. Whipped by the wind, his hair flew aside. The CIA man had been chasing this hard-drinking, bloodthirsty, womanizing revolutionary for years. He could already have retired from the CIA, but he wouldn't rest until he saw the redhead's corpse on the ground, attracting flies.

  Ahead, across the tops of the three civilian cars that separated the armored vehicle from the stake truck, he could see Smith on top of the lumpy cargo, climbing around on the tarpaulin and undoing the lashings.

  O'Halloran peered through a pair of field glasses, focusing on the lieutenant's shock of red hair. "Hah!" he shouted ecstatically. "That's Pedrito, all right." He lowered the binoculars. "Start firing! Get those commuters out of our v/ay."

  The leading car's guns blasted, ignoring the intervening civilian traffic. Explosions kicked up on the right and ahead of the fugitives. The top of a yellow taxicab just behind the fleeing truck exploded. The hapless driver roared off the curve in the road.

  "Correct your targeting!" O'Halloran shouted angrily. "And don't waste ammunition on civilians, unless it's absolutely necessary."

  On the tarpaulin, holding the ropes to keep his balance, Smith stared, incredulous, at the careening wreck behind them. "The CIA shouldn't be doing that—they're the good guys!" He ducked out of sight from the pursuing armored cars, now separated by only two passenger cars. In a sweat, he worked on the lashings. He had to put an end to this crisis right away.

  "Shoot straighter!" O'Halloran shouted.

  The leading armored car's guns fired, and the back of the nearest civilian auto exploded. The vehicle vaulted over the center divider into the opposite lane and blew up. Other cars honked and swerved into crowded buses. The bus drivers just continued to drive as haphazardly as usual.

  "I didn't mean straighter at the car in front of us! Get Pedrito!" O'Halloran pounded on the roof of the vehicle.

  The driver of the remaining civilian car—a timid old man— wrestled with his steering wheel. He swerved madly off the road onto the steep shoulder. The car rolled over and wrecked itself without O'Halloran needing to fire a single shot.

  "That's better. Now we'll get someplace." O'Halloran hung farther out of the top of the assault vehicle, enthusiastic. He looked at the final wreck as he went by, seeing the old man struggling to get free of his mangled car. Then he focused again on Pedrito's lumbering stake truck ahead. "The CIA always gets its man!"

  On top of the truckload. Smith managed to unfasten the forward end of the tarpaulin. He lifted it and let the entire canvas fabric fly into the wind, draping onto the oncoming armored vehicle. The canvas struck O'Halloran in the face, knocking him against the back of the car. He thrashed madly to lift it off while trying not to fall off the vehicle.

  With his windshield covered, the driver swerved from side to side, banging into other cars and buses as he continued at full speed, completely blind. Finally, O'Halloran managed to yank the tarpaulin aside and send it flying back into the second armored car close behind them.

  The canvas blanketed the windshield of the second armored car, which swerved into a bus before running off the road and into an embankment. O'Halloran looked back. "Incompetents," he snorted.

  Now that he had finally removed the tarpaulin. Smith looked down at his feet. "Okay, now to jettison the cargo."

  The truck carried a brimming load of huge green bananas, freshly cut and still on the stalk. Piles of oversized bananas, unfit for export, dotted the pastures in the country as feed for the livestock. Smith grabbed a heavy stalk, then tossed the bananas onto the road behind them.

  The assault vehicle had to swerve to miss the bananas.

  "Fire!" O'Halloran shouted. "We're under attack!"

  The armored car's gun muzzles blazed. Bullets exploded into the bananas in the back of the stake truck, spraying yellow-green mush everywhere.

  Smith lifted a second stalk high over his head and pitched it off the rear of the truck, then grabbed another. The bananas were heavy, and deadly. Stalks of green fruit landed on the road in front of O'Halloran's armored car. The driver veered to avoid them, but the speeding wheel hit a clump of bananas that squirted slime like ice on an oil-slick road. The vehicle spun sideways, struck the ditch and rolled to its side. Its guns continued to fire, punching holes into the roadside mud.

  A few moments later, O'Halloran wrestled himself free of the smoking wreck and stood in front of the crashed vehicle. He shook his fist after the banana truck.

  Down the road, meanwhile, the second armored car had managed to free itself from the embankment, pulled back onto the road and approached with great speed.

  O'Halloran did a dance of rage aimed at Pedrito's truck now receding into the distance. He stomped forward as if he could catch the redheaded fugitive with his own fury.

  On top of the fleeing banana truck. Smith cupped his hands to shout a warning back at O'Halloran: "Hey! Look out!"

  Behind him, the second armored car skidded on the bananas and plowed into the first vehicle with a huge explosion. Both armored cars burst into flame. Leftover ammunition detonated, making white trails like fireworks in the sky.

  O'Halloran looked down at himself in disgust, not even glancing at the exploding vehicles. He picked yellow mush off his uniform, tasted banana.

  His superiors wouldn't want to hear that two million dollars' worth of armored assault vehicles had been destroyed because Pedrito Miraflores had lobbed a bunch of bananas at them.

  Thinking quickly, he snarled, "I'll have to call them Soviet missiles in my report."

&nbs
p; Chapter 20

  IN NEW YORK CITY, meanwhile, the real Pedrito Miraflores sat behind Tom Smith's desk in the Office of Naval Intelligence, uncomfortable in the strange and formal uniform of a lieutenant junior grade. He flicked his gaze from side to side, always uneasy at being confined within walls for too long a time. At least he didn't have to sit with his back to the door.

  In his time, Pedrito had spent many days in rundown and dirty prisons, held captive by competing guerrilla groups, terrorists, and South American police departments. He had survived by the skin of his teeth, clung to life by his fingernails, beaten impossible odds in dire situations.

  But this—working eight hours a day in a bustling and clean government office—seemed the worst of all! He didn't know how much more of it he could stand.

  He wanted excitement so badly that for the last two nights he had gone out and wandered in Central Park, beating up would-be muggers. Now the place was so safe that this morning the park was full of old ladies, walking their dogs.

  Sprawled on the drafting table beside his desk lay stacks of meticulous blueprints for new missile systems. The U.S. Navy was constructing them in secret at remote industrial facilities that ostensibly manufactured exotic plumbing supplies. Though he had no engineering knowledge at all, Pedrito studied the plans, drooling over the information he could bring back to his superiors. He was the perfect spy here, and he could pass along incredibly useful intelligence information to Cuba and Russia.

  Even uneducated, Pedrito was astonished to find so many fundamental design flaws. The weapons seemed to have been reverse-engineered by committees so that they could not possibly work, yet the blueprints were so complex that the designers must have hoped no one would notice.

  Pedrito noticed, though. He smiled with great relish as he located Smith's red rubber stamp in the top desk drawer and happily stamped APPROVED on every single blueprint. Colonel Ivan and Colonel Enrique were going to love this!