by Dick Stivers
Gadgets waited until the light swept past, then put his wire cutters to the filaments. He watched the digital numbers and snipped the three filaments. The cuts did not interrupt the pulses.
With heavier snips, he cut a shoulder-wide hole through the fence. He snapped his fingers to Lyons and Blancanales.
His partners joined him. In whispers, they compared observations.
“Mines.” Lyons pointed to the patterns of depressions in the shaggy grass. The earth over the antipersonnel devices had settled, exposing the location of every mine.
“Those will be no problem,” Blancanales commented. He turned to Gadgets. “Are there others?”
“I’ll go first with the detector.” Gadgets told them. “But if anybody wanders off my path, it’s all over.”
Blancanales slid back through the brush. He hissed to the Lizco brothers and motioned them forward. The two brothers — one on active duty with the government, one fighting the government — joined Able Team at the fence.
“There, mines.” Blancanales pointed to the depressions in the no-man’s-land.
Captain Lizco, the guerrilla officer, laughed softly. “I have seen it before. We have a man who is very good at this. He will lead us through.”
“I’ve got a metal detector,” Gadgets told the captain.
“Very good. You lead, my man will mark the path.”
The captain crawled back to his men. Gadgets slipped a vinyl case from his backpack. He assembled components and flicked on the power switch of a small, hand-held unit. Passing it near the fence, it clicked.
“Ready to go.”
Guerrillas took positions along the chain link fence. Unslinging their autorifles, they prepared to cover the infiltrators. Gadgets whispered to the nearest man.
“No lo toquen ustedes fusiles,” he cautioned, pointing to the fence. The guerrilla nodded and passed the warning down the line. No one touched the fence with his rifles.
The men with Galils snapped down the bipods. The men who carried rocket launchers moved close to the hole in the fence. In case of detection and a withdrawal-under-fire by the infiltrators, the rocketmen would put RPG warheads into the guard towers.
A guerrilla scurried to the North Americans. Like Gadgets, the Salvadoran carried a CAR-15. But instead of electronics, the guerrilla carried a spool of string and a bundle of short, sharpened sticks. Gadgets took the string and examined it closely. The string gave off a faint blue glow.
“Oh, wow,” he murmured to his partners. “Ain’t seen this since Nam. The People’s Army used string and wire to guide their squads to assembly points outside the perimeter. Quien techa usted esto? Los Cubanos? Las Sandinistas?”
“Un norteamericano de los Fuerzas Especiales,” the guerrilla answered. “Cuando yo fui en el ejercito.”
“No wonder these guys are good,” Gadgets said. “The U.S. Special Forces trained them. Vamos…”
Gadgets led the way, waving the metal detector over the muddy earth. After knotting the string to the chain link, the guerrilla followed close behind the North American’s boots. He jabbed a stick into the soil, then looped the string around the stick. The string marked the path through the mines.
The mechanical searchlight swept across the no-man’s-land with the predictability of a lighthouse beam.
In the misting rain, Gadgets and the Salvadoran worked for a minute at a time, then went flat in the mud and weeds until the light passed over them. Soon, Lyons and Blancanales felt their hand-radios click.
Blancanales went first, following the glowing line of the string through the darkness. A few meters inside the fence, the path through the mines zigzagged, veering to the right, to the left, then to the right again. He saw the beam of the mechanical searchlight approaching.
He went flat. As the light swept over him, the diffuse glow illuminated the pattern of mines around him. He saw the shallow sinkhole of a mine only inches from his face. When the light passed, he continued, the line of faint light leading him quickly to another chain link fence.
Beyond the fence, they saw aircraft hangars. A concrete guardwalk curved away into the rain. The walkway crossed broken ground and lakes of muddy rainwater to circle the mountaintop. They saw no sentries pacing the areas between the hangars. From the guard tower fifty meters to the side, a radio played Latin dance rhythms.
Slipping out his Beretta, Blancanales covered Gadgets as he neutralized another line of electronic defense. Gadgets then left the guerrilla to cut the chain link while he went to another device.
In the gleam of the sweeping searchlight, Blancanales saw Gadgets snip wires, then jerk something from an upright pipe. Gadgets crept back to him.
“Guess what I got,” he whispered, showing the flat object to his partner. “Might come in useful…”
Blancanales touched the object’s casing. He read the raised letters with his fingertips: FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.
A claymore. Blancanales felt a cut piece of wire trailing from an electrical fuse. Gadgets went to disarm another of the electrically triggered antipersonnel weapons. Designed for the defense of perimeters, a claymore sprayed hundreds of steel pellets to saturate a fifty-meter kill zone.
Gadgets returned with the second claymore. Blancanales saw him slip it in a thigh pocket. He realized his partner carried a claymore in each of his nightsuit pants’ thigh pockets.
“Get rid of those!” Blancanales hissed. “They’re fused!”
“Throw this good stuff away?” Gadgets laughed softly. “I got plans for these.”
Blancanales let Gadgets continue in his work. He scanned the walkway and the darkness, the Beretta ready, while Gadgets and the Salvadoran pulled out a rectangle of chain link.
First signaling Lyons and the others, they went through the inner fence. Blancanales went flat on asphalt and braced his Beretta in both hands. He watched the expanse of roads and runway for sentries. Gadgets faced the opposite direction, watching the walkway and the windows of the guard tower. Nothing moved.
Behind them, exploiting the periods of darkness between the sweeps of the searchlight, the squad negotiated the mine field. They slipped through the chain link and formed a wide half circle.
Lyons came last. Black clad, his gear smeared with mud and grass, the narrow band of his exposed skin darkened with grease, he looked like soil in motion. He pointed to himself and Blancanales, then to the tower.
Blancanales shook his head no. He pointed to the center of the mountaintop military base. Lyons crawled close to his Puerto Rican partner.
“Straight in?” he asked in a whisper.
Blancanales paused. “Except that we can’t expect to go out this way,” he brooded. “This will probably be another Carl Lyons exit.”
“No more crashes tonight for me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I hurt. Oh, man, do I hurt.”
“Too late to medevac.”
“Did I ask for it?” Lyons glanced to the lights of the buildings. “If we can’t take Quesada out alive, we snuff him, right?”
“Can’t put a dead man on trial,” warned Blancanales.
“You actually think Washington would let it go that far?” Lyons sneered. “He’d just get another ticket back to Salvador. The most I hope for is to put some questions to him. Everything else is dreaming…”
Lyons slithered away, his silent auto-Colt in his right hand. He paralleled the walkway, his left shoulder to the concrete. The cast concrete stood a few inches above the mud. He stopped when the mechanical searchlight approached, pressing himself against the edge of the walkway, becoming only a shadow. He gained a hundred meters, the squad following in a line behind him. They left the aircraft area.
Ahead, Lyons saw another chain link fence. Topped with concertina wire, the fence separated the airstrip from the main area of buildings. Lights bathed the fence in daylight bright glare. On high poles, videocameras scanned the area.
Two guards patrolled the fence. At the far side of the asphalt, several hundred met
ers away from where the infiltrators lay in the mud and shadows, the guards walked the fence with a Doberman. Lyons keyed his hand-radio.
“No quiet way through this.”
“A diversion?” Blancanales suggested.
Gadgets broke in. “You guys want a diversion? It means we can’t go out through those holes in the fences.”
“We decided a silent exit is unlikely,” Blancanales whispered through the radio.
“Who decided? No one told me that. I got an electronic backup squad prepositioned back there.”
“What do you mean?” Blancanales asked.
“You want a diversion? Yes or no? I’ll make that guard tower… disappear!”
Lyons watched the sentries pace to the end of the fence. They turned. “Okay. Do it.”
“Stand by for a big bang…” Gadgets laughed.
The Doberman barked. On the far side of the hangars, another dog barked. In seconds, dogs barked and wailed everywhere in the darkness.
Behind the squad of North Americans and Salvadorans, a second searchlight blazed from the guard tower. A guard swept the searing xenon beam along the outer perimeter.
A flash. The guard tower disintegrated in a spray of glass and wood and flesh. Where there had been lights and a tower, only darkness remained.
Sirens screamed. Headlights appeared on the far side of the airstrip. A Land Cruiser raced across the runway, spotlights on its roof revolving to illuminate the darkness in slow circles.
Other headlights stopped at the interior security fence. A remote-controlled gate rolled aside for an open truck crowded with soldiers. Some wore yellow raincoats, other black slickers. Others wore only gray fatigues. One man stood on the passenger-side cab step. Holding on to the door, he buckled on web-gear as the truck raced to the attack.
Lyons braced his silenced auto-Colt in both hands.
He sighted on the nearest of two videocameras surveilling the gate. As the truck accelerated through the gate, Lyons squeezed off a shot. He heard the slug skip off the camera housing and whine into the night. He adjusted his aim, fired again. The slug smashed the camera. Then he destroyed the second camera.
Sighting on the electric motor controlling gate, Lyons smashed it again and again with slugs. The gate jammed open. He keyed his hand-radio.
“Politico! The lights with your Beretta.”
A light went dark. One by one, the nearest lights broke. Lyons heard tires squeal on asphalt. He turned to see the Land Cruiser and troop truck brake to a stop at the hole in the fence. Gray uniformed soldiers crowded from the truck.
Then a flash wiped them away. The battered, windowless hulks of the Land Cruiser and the truck rocked on their springs, surrounded by ruptured, smoldering flesh. Screams rose from the dismembered.
Blancanales sighted his M-16/M-203 and fired a high-explosive 40mm frag. The shell popped in the midst of the wreckage, gasoline flashing. The fireball rose into the darkness.
Lyons shouted out, “The gate!”
Other voices shouted in Spanish. Moving in one rush, the fourteen men sprinted through the flame-lit night.
24
Dropping down through the clouds in the borrowed DC-3, Grimaldi saw the flames. He eased into a wide circle around the mountaintop and watched the desperate firefight. From three thousand feet, he could see only the flashes of grenades and rockets. Streams of tracers streaked through the darkness. But he knew how many men — Able Team and their allies-of-expedience — he had dropped on a Honduran pasture. Those men now fought hundreds. When he returned with the Huey, he knew he would not take fourteen men out.
Grimaldi unplugged his headset. He slipped off the headphones and spoke into a Stony Man hand-radio.
“Able Team, this is the Eagle. Able Team, this is the Eagle. I’m up here with a surprise. Able Team, this is the…”
Lyons answered. Noise and autofire almost drowned out his voice. “What took you so long?”
Grimaldi glanced back to the cabin door before speaking again. No one had entered the pilot’s cabin. “I got Agency people with me. They think we’re over Ocotal, Nicaragua. How’s it going?”
“Not too good. Had to shoot our way in. Still haven’t found our man.”
“Find him quick. I’m up here with five thousand liters of av-gas high-octane in plastic bladders. Give me a target. Won’t make any bangs, but believe me, that place is going to be gone!”
“Stand by,” Lyons told him. “We got to get organized. Over.”
Replacing his headset, Grimaldi spoke into the intercom. “Gentlemen, prepare to crisp those Commie critters.”
*
On his back behind the concrete foundation of a prefab barrack, Lyons hooked his hand-radio onto his web belt. Autofire continued from the offices across the wide asphalt traffic circle. A Toyota Land Cruiser sat on its rims, its tires shot flat, its windows shot out, the bullet-ripped bodies of the soldiers jerking as crisscrossing autofire from both sides of the lane smashed it again and again.
The School had been constructed around the central lane. Branching out from the center lane, side streets led to auditoriums and classrooms and service buildings. In the center, offices clustered around the traffic circle. Beyond the offices, rows of barracks occupied the other half of the mountaintop.
Fighting past the classrooms, the squad of North Americans and Salvadorans met the concentrated fire of hundreds of gray-uniformed soldiers pouring from the barracks. The surprise attack had killed scores of the surprised soldiers, but the attack had failed. Alerted by the airfield alarm, the fascist officers had gathered their troops to annihilate the few infiltrators.
Now, NATO-caliber slugs from G-3 rifles and M-60 machine guns smashed through the plywood-and-aluminum wall only inches above Lyons’s face. He felt the slap of slugs impacting the concrete foundation. Staying flat, he snaked along the foundation to Blancanales.
The Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret, working flat on his belly, taped a field dressing to a Salvadoran’s bullet-smashed ribs. He spoke loud encouragement to the guerrilla as he worked to tape the man’s arm against his torso. Lyons shouted to be heard.
“The Eagle’s up there! He’s got a thousand-something gallons of aviation gas in fuel bladders to drop.”
Blancanales raged with anger. “Don’t even thinkabout another assault on those offices! He won’t have any accuracy! We can’t expect any kind of control. Grimaldi will burn us alive with that gas. You understand! Mister John Wayne hero motherfucker and your goddamned revenge!”
“Ease off,” Lyons answered. He had never seen Blancanales this angry before. “I hereby vote for a withdrawal. No more of this, we’re up against hundreds of them.”
“What? Lyons the Brave recognizes a limit? Gracias a Dios!”
“Really, this is too much. Pass the word. The Eagle will drop that gas to cover the retreat. How’s this Salvo?”
“Shattered ribs. Maybe bone fragments in his lung. But he can move. I’ll pass the word to the others.”
Blancanales spoke quickly to the wounded man, then went to Floyd. The two men spread word to the others. The survivors of the squad began a staggered retreat.
Lyons understood that he could not hope to search the base for Quesada. His bravado and daring had failed. He no longer thought of revenge, or of tearing information out of Quesada. He thought of getting his partners and friends out alive.
Counting by touch the Atchisson magazines in his bandolier, he found only three. Twenty-one rounds, plus three in his autoshotgun. He checked the setting of his fire-selector. Semiauto. Gripping the weapon, he joined the retreat.
He crabbed to the corner of the office building’s foundation. A bloody Salvadoran with a Galil aimed single shots at the flashing muzzles of fascists across the street. But Lyons knew the lightweight 5.56mm slugs from the Galil might not penetrate the walls of the prefabs. Not like the 7.62 NATO slugs punching through the building above them.
Blancanales and Captain Lizco gathered their men. Scattered riflemen aband
oned isolated positions. Darting from one building to another, throwing themselves flat behind the cover of the concrete foundations, the fighters assembled to continue the retreat.
Blancanales loaded one of his last 40mm shells. He aimed carefully at a window across the traffic circle. Captain Lizco braced his Galil, then shouted to his men.
The 40mm grenade flew through the window as the captain sprayed slugs through another window. The flash silhouetted fascists firing from inside. The firing stopped instantly as spring-steel shrapnel killed the fascists. The Salvadorans sprinted across the open ground.
Firing from other enemy positions now doubled. The prefab wall above the crawling men exploded with slugs and splintering wood. A rifle grenade burst in front of the building. Captain Lizco moved his men to the other end.
Lyons saw the men gathering behind him. He pointed out one window to the Salvadoran beside him, then pointed to himself and pointed to a second window. The Salvadoran nodded. Captain Lizco shouted out the signal.
The group bolted across the space. Lyons triggered quick semiauto blasts, punching steel shot into the faces of fascist gunners as the Salvadoran sprayed out a magazine of light 5.56mm slugs into other gunners.
All of the Salvadorans and North Americans made the dash untouched. They fired at the fascist line of autoweapons as Lyons and the remaining Salvadoran made their run.
Grimaldi radioed again from the DC-3 circling overhead. “Give me a call, you crazies! You can’t do it all yourself.”
“We got to break out,” Lyons answered. “We got wounded. We’re up against hundreds of them. And they ain’t just goons with guns. We busted into a military base.”
“Mark their position! I’ll heat up the situation.”
“Okay, I’ll mark it with a burning car. Stand by…”
Blancanales listened in on his radio. Lyons pointed for Blancanales and Gadgets to continue. Then Lyons reloaded his Atchisson with slugs.
Gadgets shouted into his hand-radio. “Do it right, wingwipe. We’re in the shit so deep we need a periscope.”
