El Lider nodded curtly as he swaggered into the breathtaking crystalline sumptuousness of the salon.
He heard the muffled gunshots and turned, cigar dropping from his mouth.
The stewards had each put a bullet into the brains of his two closest bodyguards. They were crumpling to the floor as, from places of concealment behind gleaming white ventilators, others opened up on the remnants of his protective contingent.
"Mierda!" he raged.
And the doors were clapped shut in his bearded face.
"Welcome," a voice said.
The Cuban leader whirled, eyes stark.
Across the room, a captain in a starched white uniform sat quietly at the head table.
Making fists with his hands, El Lider stormed toward the man. If necessary, he would break this dandy's neck with his bare hands.
Out from under the tables, soldiers appeared. They wore white jumpsuits and carried AR-15 automatic rifles with ludicrously white stocks. There was an insignia on each stock. The same insignia was on patches stitched to their shoulders.
It was the world-famous silhouette of Monongahela Mouse, he saw.
The rifles were all pointing toward him. He came to a stop.
"I see, I see," he grumbled. "This is, how jou say, a 'Troyan Horse'?"
"Not exactly," came a cool voice from behind him, a voice with a kind of gravelly twinkle in it. "Although this ship is just filled with young lads just waiting for the signal to march into Havana. But you might say what we have here is more of a kangaroo court."
The Maximum Leader of Cuba turned. And beheld the last face in the world he had expected to see.
"Uncle Sam?"
The Cuban helicopter pilot was only too happy to give the Anglo and the old man from the East a ride to Habana. There was only one problem.
"There is no petrol, senores!"
"There enough to get us in the air?" asked the Anglo, holding him up as the waves of pain continued to converge on his poor heart.
"Si. But how far, no one can say!"
"Let's take this one step at a time," said the Anglo.
And then, because the Anglo had been good enough to relocate his shoulders, the Cuban pilot happily lifted the helicopter into the air.
They had to stop twice for fuel. Petrol was a precious thing in the Cuban Revolutionary Army, and hoarded zealously. The Cuban pilot had told the pair of this, but they had seemed strangely unconcerned.
The pilot at last understood why, when they settled down next to a disabled T-64 tank and the two made the stranded tank crew perform the difficult act of siphoning the gas into the helicopter.
It was amazing, the things men could do even with their shoulders dislocated.
On the last leg of the trip the Anglo turned to the old man and, over the rattly clattering of the laboring helicopter, shouted, "Teach me some Spanish, Little Father. "
"Why?"
"Because when I meet Castro, I want to give him a piece of my mind in his own tongue."
The President of Cuba wore the expression of a poleaxed zebu.
A figure stood up from behind a long banquet table. It was a ludicrous figure, dressed in the frock coat and top hat of the mythic symbol of American imperialism, Uncle Sam. Even his eye patch matched his costume. It was blue, and sprinkled with white stars.
But this Uncle Sam was not the graybeard of cartoons, but a cartoonist renowned throughout the world.
"But, jou . . . jou are dead, Uncle Sam Beasley!" The man smiled under his frosty brush mustache. It was a reflective smile, if chilly.
"You know," he said thoughtfully, "when I first explained my ideas for Beasley Isle, a lot of my people thought I had been in the freezer too long."
" 'Beasley Isle'?"
" 'Cuba' sounds too ethnic. People don't want ethnicity in their leisure activities. That's why I had them call my French base EuroBeasley. Sounds more palatable. Anyway, I first got the idea after they pulled me out of that damn icebox."
"Icebox?"
"Everything had changed. Including our tax base. Revenue was down. Attendance off. But taxes were through the roof. I had bases all over the world, and the host countries were sucking every operation dry of operating capital through value-added taxes and every other kind of damn tax you could think of. So I asked myself, how can I be sure that the Beasley Corporation will survive into the next century, since it looks like I'm going to?"
"I do not know," El Lider said thickly, his mind still processing the impossibility of Uncle Sam Beasley standing before him, in the flesh.
"I'll tell you what came to me," said the star-spangled apparition. "I said, Beasley's too big now to be a corporation. It should be a nation. Think of it! An entire island that is also a theme park. It'll be bigger than all the other Beasley parks combined. Folks will flock from all over the world! And when they do, I'll just shut down the other parks. No more taxes. No more minimum-wage laws. No more government regulations. And maybe down the road when the fuss is over, after we're admitted into the U.N., I'll wrangle a seat on the Security Council and do really big things."
"Jou are going to turn my Cuba into a park!" El Lider roared.
The frost-tipped brush mustache quirked over snowy teeth. "I thought you'd be impressed."
"This will never happen! Never!"
"Thanks to Leo Zorilla, it will."
El Lider narrowed his eyes.
"That name sounds familiar," he mumbled, scratching his beard.
"Deputy Commandant, Cuban Air Force. Diabetic. He was picked up by this very vessel some months back. Unfortunately, the INS got to him before I could. But we got together. I offered him a job in return for whatever military secrets he cared to divulge."
"That traitor! I will have him shot!"
"Too late. He's history. Just as you, my friend, will be."
"Jou are loco!"