Chapter 53

“OKAY, I’LL MAKE IT EASY for you. I’m Pedrito Miraflores!” Smith took the lead. He tilted his head under the fluorescent lights of the secret base, cocking an eyebrow and showing off his red hair.

“Hey, I’m Pedrito Miraflores!” Pedrito said, outraged.

The black guard looked from one redhead to the other. “We got orders to send only one Pedrito Miraflores to Havana to be shot as a traitor as soon as the gunboat arrives. We can’t send two!”

“Okay, then he’s the real Pedrito,” Pedrito said, pointing.

Smith blinked. “Hah! Only the real Pedrito would think so fast to turn the tables on a situation.”

Both guards scratched their heads. Pedrito scowled, and his shoulders slumped. “All right, you’d better call your comandante,” he said in a flat voice. “We wouldn’t want such an important decision on your heads.”

“Good idea!” The black guard sighed with relief and turned to walk briskly away. As he brushed past, Smith seized the guard’s rifle barrel and thrust it up toward the ceiling. The guard yelped, the rifle fired and the bullet ricocheted from the concrete ceiling.

In the same instant, Pedrito grabbed the lemon-faced soldier around the neck and wrestled the man in front of him, relieving him of his weapon.

Recovering from the firing of his rifle, the black guard snapped about and leveled his weapon. Pedrito threw the lemon-faced soldier at him, and the black guard instinctively fired. The rifle shot struck the soldier full in the chest and knocked him back against the wall.

“Hey! That was self-defense!” the black guard cried.

Smith, meanwhile, snatched the rifle from the fallen lemon-faced soldier and shot the black guard, who stumbled twice, then fell on top of his dead partner.

His face flushed, Pedrito bent down to snatch up the black guard’s rifle, chambering another round as he snarled at Smith. “I can’t believe it! What did you do to get me condemned by my own side? Sentenced to death in Cuba! That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Shadows bobbed along the corridor as other soldiers ran to investigate the gunfire. Smith chambered a round in his own rifle and fired down the corridor. The approaching soldiers yelped and dove for cover in side alcoves.

Smith spoke angrily at Pedrito. “What did I do? Excuse me, but what did you do to the U.S. Navy? I had a reputation to uphold!”

Pedrito made a gagging sound. “Your reputation! I’m well acquainted with your miserable reputation, thank you!”

A scrawny arm whipped around the corner and rolled a grenade, which bounced down the cement floor toward them. Pedrito darted forward to grab the grenade like a fumbled football. “Damn you, Smith, you loused me up!”

More interested in arguing with his look-alike than in paying serious attention to their attackers, he hurled the grenade underhand back around the corner where it had come. “I had a good, fine plan for stealing U.S. secrets.”

He motioned for Smith to hunker down into shelter. The two of them crouched back in the corridor, covered their ears and squeezed their eyes shut.

An orange belch of flame burst from the side corridor. Soldiers shrieked, and mangled bodies flew from one side of the corridor to the other.

The two redheads let go of their ears, and Smith shouted, “Yeah, well, I was a fine, upstanding naval officer. You wrecked my whole career! What do you have to say about that?”

Pedrito shrugged. “Wasn’t much of a career.”

With Smith leading the way and stumbling in his wet-suit flippers, they ran along the corridor in search of an escape route. When he came upon the first cross-corridor, Smith dropped on one knee and fired the rifle to the left. “Face it, Pedrito — you bungled the whole thing!”

Pedrito dropped on one knee, aiming down the corridor in the other direction. “Don’t blame me for your incompetence, Smith!”

In the radio room the Cuban operator frantically worked his equipment. He glanced in terror in the direction from which the furious sounds of battle erupted. “Havana, Havana! Rush up that frigate you were sending for Pedrito Miraflores! He’s shooting the place to bits! We’ve got a war going on here.”

* * *

Pedrito rushed to an ammunition bunker with a huge red sign on the door, EXPLOSIVES. He yanked the bunker open and grabbed sticks of dynamite, which he shoveled at Smith.

“You could never handle this lifestyle, Smith. I bet you brought the troubles down on yourself with women—” Pedrito grumbled, “probably the same women I’d already learned my lesson with.”

Smith frantically tied the sticks of dynamite together. “Me? You’re the womanizer! They fell all over me because of your reputation. Yaquita, Bonita — they were only interested in getting married.”

“Don’t forget Joan Turner,” Pedrito snorted. He fired three shots at a group of approaching guards. “Same story there. It’s like they’re all brainwashed.” He shook his head in disgust.

Smith lit a long fuse stuck into the dynamite. “You’re the one who doesn’t know how to handle yourself, Pedrito. I bet you brought it on yourself with drink!” he snapped back. “Be honest: you boozed it up and wrecked my nice apartment in New York. Didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t a very nice apartment to start with.”

Pedrito ducked a hail of bullets from inside the corridor, then fired his rifle again. “Besides, I don’t drink anymore!” he snarled. “I gave it up.”

“From what I hear, you’re a sot!” Together, they sprinted up the passageway.

“Your bartender wouldn’t give me anything but milk.” Pedrito spat. “Vile-tasting stuff. Comes from cows!”

Smith hurled the package of dynamite with the burning fuse. Ahead, a mob of sentries barged into the ammunition bunker through the splintering outside door. They opened fire without even looking for targets.

Kneeling, Smith and Pedrito shot repeatedly, aiming carefully. The sentries went down in a tumble. Smith and Pedrito rose and dashed for the outside door. “My bartender is a good judge of character. He probably took one look at you and could tell you weren’t to be trusted, Pedrito.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Pedrito said.

They charged through the bunker’s outside door and dove for cover behind a nearby sand dune. The dynamite fuse burned down.

“Yes, I’m calling you a liar!” Smith sneered, buckling his flippers tighter around his ankles in case he had to run again. He glanced at the Russian chronograph on his wrist. “Get down!”

The whole bunker exploded in a towering pillar of flame and debris that rolled up into the clear Caribbean sky.

The sand dune offered little protection from the blast. Pedrito and Smith covered their heads. Debris pattered and thunked all around them, chunks of fused sand, smoking plywood and smoldering Spanish fashion magazines.

Pedrito balled his fists. “Then I’ll have to challenge you to a duel, Smith!”

A huge slab of concrete fell next to them like a bomb, spraying sand. “You’re too yellow to fight me, Pedrito,” Smith said with scathing contempt.

They hauled themselves to their feet and stood face to face. Pedrito’s cheeks turned purple with rage. “I’ll kill you, Smith!”

“Big talk!” Smith said. “You couldn’t even swat a fly!”

“I won’t swat him — I’ll shoot him. Pistols!” Pedrito said.

“Suits me!” Smith agreed. “Dueling pistols!”

Pedrito hesitated, then frowned. “Well, we haven’t got any dueling pistols. But you can’t get out of it like that — we’ll use rifles instead!”

Smith swung down his gold-heavy backpack. “Wait, I’ve got these fancy laser pistols —”

“You’ve got my laser pistols?”

“They were in the false bottom of my suitcase. I mean, your suitcase. Say, whatever happened to my own suitcase?”

“Forget the suitcase — you won’t need it after I kill you. And forget the laser pistols, too,” Pedrito said. “Not messy enough. I want to watch you bleed.”

Smith slung his rifle. “All right, rifles it is.” Grim and businesslike, he gestured toward the hill in the center of the island. “There’s a level place on top of the key. We’ll duel there, where you can’t duck into any holes.”

Pedrito held his rifle at his side, and Smith gave him a push toward the indicated spot, but the other redhead walked directly beside him. “Don’t try to get behind me,” Pedrito said. “You’d shoot me in the back!”

“Look who’s talking! The back-shooter of all time! You can trust me — I work for the U.S. Navy.”

“Oh, is that why you blew up the CIA installation in Colodor?”

“Stop giving me reasons to shoot you, Pedrito.”

They marched grimly toward the rise, where one of them would die. Smith’s wet-suit flippers made him look like a duck.