Chapter 28

GRIPPING THE STALLION’S MANE for dear life, Smith rode into the night as though devils were after him. As he heard thundering hoofbeats of another horse coming closer, he shouted over his shoulder, “Is that you, Bonita?”

Lit by the moonlight, another rider drew alongside him. Smith looked around, and his jaw dropped. Dark-haired Yaquita was mounted on a dun horse with heavy saddlebags behind the cantle. She wore Bonita’s riding habit and top hat with the white scarf. Her radio-guitar was strapped to her back, bouncing as she rode along.

“Oh, uh, hi, Yaquita.”

She turned her head to him in a rage, raised her riding crop and brought it down across his back with a vicious whack. “That’ll teach you to cheat on me! And with a green-eyed blonde yet!”

Though Smith could hear the thunder of cavalry troops close behind, right now, Yaquita seemed the more dangerous enemy.

“Wait, Yaquita, I can explain!” Smith said. “She was my childhood sweetheart — I mean Pedrito’s childhood sweetheart. . . .”

She whipped him with the riding crop again.

Smith held up a forearm in an attempt to defend himself. “I know! I knew it was a mistake. I, uh, wasn’t myself.”

Yaquita looked at him, far from mollified, but reading her own meaning into his words. “Does that mean you’re not going to marry her after all?” Yaquita seemed more concerned about her matrimonial prospects than their impending death at the hands of the cavalry.

“No!” he spluttered. “I never wanted to marry her.” And he doubted the real Pedrito had, either.

“Oh, you darling,” Yaquita purred, “you are so attractive!”

As the stallion continued to gallop, Smith turned around and saw the snarling approach of the cavalry under the silvery moonlight, their pistols glistening. Every one of the cavalrymen was out for his blood.

Captain Xavier, riding like fury, yelled back to his troops: “Draw your sabers! Get ready to cut them into fajitas!”

As one, the cavalrymen drew their sabers, the metal blades ringing from their sheaths.

Yaquita and Smith thundered across the plain, side by side, dodging hummocks of grass. They neared a treacherous ravine cut by a river at the edge of the cloud forest. The horses showed no sign of slowing. Behind them the main cavalry force held glinting sabers and pistols high as they fanned out to keep their victims from turning aside. Smith saw they were trapped, and Yaquita seemed to be paying no attention to their danger.

“Charge!” Xavier yelled. The squat sergeant kicked his mount in the sides, but the nag could barely stumble ahead under its burden.

Smith looked back, then faced ahead toward the ravine, a split in the escarpment with wooded slopes on both sides. Tall eucalyptus trees covered the slopes, muffled by thick shrubs around their bases. What would Admiral Nelson have done in a case like this?

Clutching the saddle with white-knuckled hands, he saw the sack of firecrackers dangling on the pommel, and he realized it definitely wasn’t Bonita’s cosmetics bag. Then he snapped his fingers. In one instance, he remembered Nelson had won a victory by pouring oil on the water and setting fire to it. He could do something similar here.

Yaquita took the lead as the horses reached the ravine. Smith rode into the thick bushes, refusing to let his stallion turn aside. Riding flat out, he threw the bag of firecrackers behind a bush, and it snagged on a thorny branch. “Bull’s-eye!” He laughed aloud.

The cavalry was two hundred yards away and coming fast, shooting their pistols in the air, waving their sabers like machetes. “Don’t let them hide in the bushes!” Xavier bellowed. “Trap them in the ravine! We’ll run them off the cliff.”

Smith wheeled his stallion and fumbled in the saddlebag. “I know I put it in here.” He and Bonita had just been out that afternoon for a bit of target practice. With a shout of delight, he pulled out one of the bizarre high-tech laser pistols he had found in the suitcase’s secret compartment.

Yaquita pulled up just beyond him on the steep edge of the ravine. “A pistol? You can’t pick them off. They’re too many!” she cried. “Even the great Pedrito Miraflores could not shoot them all one at a time!”

“I’m not Pedrito,” he said again, knowing it was a lost cause. She would just be worried that his amnesia or his brain damage had returned. As the two horses picked their way down the rugged slope, Smith tried to aim the laser pistol despite his cavorting mount. The nozzle-tipped barrel danced around from his target.

Smith fired the laser pistol at the bush. The grip throbbed in his hand; the weapon thrummed. A scarlet laser streak slashed into the bag of firecrackers. The black sack glowed, then firecrackers exploded just as the cavalrymen thundered into the bushes.

The squat sergeant looked up in dismay, covering his head and dropping his saber. “Ambuscade!” He hauled frantically on his reins. The nag screeched to a halt, nearly collapsing from the weight.

Tiny explosions went off with flashes of light, one after another, like machine-gun fire. The whole troop wheeled in terror.

“Ambush! Ambush!” the CIA soldiers cried. “Pedrito’s men! They’ll kill us all!”

Captain Xavier stood in his stirrups. “Come back, you cowards!” Then his horse also turned and ran, knocking him back heavily in his saddle. “Oh, hell.” He grabbed the reins to keep himself mounted. “The boss isn’t going to like this.”

Smith and Yaquita raced down the ravine, far from the fading crackle of tiny explosions.

“Well,” Xavier sighed in exasperation as he watched the fugitives race away. He used the sergeant’s infrared field glasses to watch as they reached a line of trees. “The CIA didn’t bribe me with very much anyway.”

* * *

At the office and tearoom of the official U.S. ambassador to Colodor, a jowly, sallow-faced man sat at his desk, tapping his fingers on the newest page in his day planner.

O’Halloran, across from him, clutched the radio he had just yanked out of his pocket. He half rose from his seat and stared at the jowly man. “Mr. Ambassador! Captain Xavier just called in. I think we’ve caught up with that goddamned Pedrito!”

“Oh, dear! I thought Pedrito was out of the country,” the ambassador said, frightened. He flipped to the previous page in his day planner and scribbled hurriedly, Did NOT meet with O’Halloran. “Please don’t involve me in spy matters. It’s against protocol for me to know anything about them! Plausible deniability, you know.” Then he scribbled, Do not even know who O’Halloran IS!

O’Halloran hunched over the radio microphone and tried to be secretive out of long force of habit. “Maintain security in your open transmissions, Agent 234.996. Now tell me, did you kill the bastard? When can I come look at his corpse?”

* * *

“Oh, you mean Pedrito?” Xavier said hesitantly.

“You know goddamned well I mean that goddamned Pedrito!” O’Halloran snarled. The trim cavalry officer held the radio away from his ear, wincing at the storm of words.

“Uh, just checking.” Xavier swallowed. “Pedrito was heading for the Rio Meta with his latest lady friend . . . but . . . well, I guess he kind of just . . . well . . . got away. We were ambushed by his men — a whole army. A firestorm of bullets — we barely escaped alive.”

The radio speaker hissed sparks at him, unable to contain the CIA man’s undisguised roar of fury.

“I guess I just got fired,” Xavier mused, glancing at his watch. “I wonder if that Russian colonel will pay better?”

* * *

In the ambassador’s office and tearoom, the jowly man cowered as O’Halloran went on a tirade. “Oh, dear,” the ambassador said, “If Pedrito Miraflores got away, should I burn my secret papers?” He covered his ears to keep from hearing the details of O’Halloran’s interchange on the radio.

The CIA man threw the radio to the floor and stomped it into fragments with his left boot. He scowled at the tangle of broken plastic and twisted wires. Then he grabbed a requisition form from the top of the ambassador’s desk and began filling out the blanks, requesting a replacement walkie-talkie, Priority One.

O’Halloran ground his teeth, glaring at his ruined radio before he looked up at the ambassador. “This is a national crisis! I need you to authorize a half-a-million-dollar price on Pedrito’s head — and a new radio for me. Then we can solve this problem once and for all.”

The ambassador shivered at the sheer dollar amount of the reward. “Half a million? But the Colodorans make only fifty cents a day! Why, I should think a thousand dollars would thrill one of these peons!”

O’Halloran glared at him across the desk, his horrible stare became fixed and purposeful. “I know where Hoffa’s body is,” the CIA man growled. “Want to join him?”

The ambassador loosened his collar, suddenly feeling very hot. “Uh, half a million isn’t really so much, I guess. I mean it all just comes out of the taxpayers’ pockets, right? It’s not like we’re spending real money.” He wrung his little mousy hands. “Yes, anything to serve the national interest!” he offered more forcefully.

O’Halloran’s shade of red began to lessen, and his horrible stare was suddenly averted.

“Good decision, sir.” O’Halloran picked up the ambassador’s telephone and contacted his radio operator back in the embassy. “Get me the Meta River Gunboat Patrol! If we can’t catch him in the air, on the plains, in the city or in the jungle — then we’ll get him on the water.”