by Dick Stivers
"You all right?" Lyons called out.
"Shut up and shoot!" Blancanales shouted back.
Tearing another magazine from his bandolier, Lyons loaded and sighted. He fired a single round at the gunmen firing from the rear seat. The torso of one man exploded.
Lyons glanced at the magazine he had loaded. Not buckshot, but one-ounce slugs. Custom-fabricated by Konzaki, the slugs contained tungsten-steel cores for penetrating steel or Kevlar armor. He aimed next at the front fender as Gadgets's CAR-15 wounded another gunman. Lyons fired again and again.
Huge dents appeared in the fender as the steel-cored slugs hit with the foot-pound impact of express trains. A tire shrieked as impact-deformed sheet metal cut into the sidewall. The driver fought for control of the car. Lyons put another slug through the windshield.
An arm flew from the car. With a dying man at the wheel, the car sideswiped the concrete-and-steel center divider and scraped to an eventual stop.
Gadgets and Lyons reloaded their weapons. Searching the freeway lanes behind them, they saw no pursuers. Victory.
But their attackers had almost destroyed them. Slip wind blew through a hundred holes in the motor home. Every window had been shattered.
In the front, Jefferson reloaded his sawed-off shotgun. Blood trickled from a speckle pattern of tiny wounds on his face and left arm.
Lyons rushed to the young man. He examined the small wounds. A shard of glass protruded from one, a gleaming bit of bullet fragment from another.
"I'm okay, I'm all right," Jefferson told Lyons. He shrugged away Lyons's hands.
Lyons turned to Blancanales. "Where were you hit? You bleeding?"
"Take care of yourself," Gadgets told Lyons. "You're the one who's bloody."
"What?" Lyons wiped his hand across his forehead. His palm felt warm blood.
Blancanales looked to his partners. "I pronounce this vehicle a wreck. Time to get off the highway and find a replacement."
"Second the motion," Gadgets agreed. "Highway Patrol will catch up with us any minute now."
"State park five miles," Blancanales told them. He coasted through the curve of an off ramp.
"Think we can get this past the Rangers?" Lyons looked around at the bullet-destroyed motor home; glass continued falling from shattered windows as urethane dust from the walls' insulation blew in the wind.
"Spray paint, man," Gadgets told them. "What we need is some spray paint."
"What are you talking about?" Lyons demanded, incredulous.
"Vandals, ese," Gadgets jived in mock barrio dialect. "We stopped and we got vandalized. We're just tourists. We go to the wrong neighborhood, see what happen? No bueno."
As farms and roadside vegetable stands flashed past, Lyons leaned from the shattered picture window. High in the sky above them, he saw sunlight glint from the wings of a small plane.
"Wizard, we got a plane over us. Is that transmitter or whatever still on?"
Gadgets waved the electronic transmission detector over the front end of the motor home. The unit buzzed. "Got to stop. Pull that thing off. Either they got a D.F. on us or they're monitoring highway noise."
Lyons shook his head. "We'll leave it on. That way they can find us."
19
Captain Alejandro Madrano of Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista, better known by its acronym, ORDEN, watched the familiar landscape of central California flash past his car. Years before, after his training at Fort Bragg, he had visited his sister at the University of Southern California. He and his sister had toured California and Nevada for a week, visiting San Francisco, Yosemite and Reno. The decadence, the racial impurity, the weakness of the governing forces had enraged him. He had asked his sister:
"Why does this country, this cesspool of socialism and racial chaos, have the arrogance to meddle in the affairs of El Salvador?"
His sister had explained to him, in her innocence and ignorance, that what he saw represented "the freedoms of the North Americans."
But now he returned. With the help of the North Americans, he would battle the cultural sickness of this vast nation so that sickness would not condemn El Salvador to revolution. Today, they would exterminate the negro journalist and the three mercenaries protecting him from justice.
His driver spoke into the radio, communicating with the other drivers in the convoy of three Chevrolet Silverados. The electronics technician in the last truck reported a steady signal from the location device on the enemy's vehicle. Though the spotter plane had returned for refueling, the pilot's last report confirmed the position of the enemy.
Seated around him, his soldiers appeared to be businessmen touring California. They did not fear any encounter with the local authorities.
He and his soldiers carried the correct immigration stamps in their passports. They carried receipts proving they had rented the truck. Garbed in white suits and ties purchased from expensive shops in Miami and Beverly Hills, they only appeared to be tourists. Up until the moment they took their weapons from the packing cases stacked in the back of the Silverado, he and his soldiers would maintain their act as a group of prosperous Hispanics lavishing dollars on a visit to California.
Though his friends in the United States government had provided both material and moral support, Captain Madrano had no confidence in the North American people. Democrats, liberals, technocrats, Christians, Jews, whatever the word: all were Communist sympathizers.
Did not most North Americans belong to unions? Did they not applaud the Marxist movie actors in Hollywood? Did they not abandon General Somoza to the Sandinistas? Did not their corporations solicit business with the Russians and Red Chinese? Did they not contribute to the International Red Cross?
Though a responsible administration now ruled in Washington, the Communists controlled the news media. Inundated with lies, the North American people—already in sympathy with the international communist conspiracy—opposed their leaders' efforts to battle the agents of the conspiracy.
If a North American policeman became too inquisitive, Captain Madrano's soldiers had orders to neutralize the threat immediately.
If a North American witnessed their attack on the Communists, his soldiers would eliminate the witness.
Although he did not have the express approval of the American president or the State Department officials who had processed his entry into the United States, Captain Madrano knew they would not disapprove. Had the administration prosecuted the killers of North Americans in El Salvador?
After three years, the "investigation" into the murder of three nuns and a church worker continued. After two and one-half years, the "investigation" into the murders of two American lawyers continued. After a year, the "investigation" into the murder of an American tourist continued.
With the cooperation of the United States government, attorneys and private investigators and family members visited El Salvador to demand justice. With the cooperation of the United States government, the Salvadoran "investigations" into the rapes and tortures and murders continued. The "investigations" would continue forever…
Without convictions.
In fact, when Captain Madrano visited the Miami home of Colonel Quesada, the commander of Los Guerreros Blancos, the colonel introduced him to two officers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Two years before, Colonel Quesada had walked into the dining room of a San Salvador hotel and pointed out two North American labor lawyers—actually Communist agitators—sitting at a table with a Salvadoran Communist traitor. The colonel's soldiers then executed all the Communists.
After unrelenting agitation on the part of the Communist media and the Communist sympathizers in the American Congress, Captain Madrano had had to issue warrants for the arrest of Colonel Quesada and his officers. The colonel then took sanctuary in Miami, under the protection of friends in the Administration.
As an officer in the Salvadoran Army and ORDEN, Captain Madrano had fought the enemy in all its forms. He had become aware of th
e insidious nature of subversion at the party celebrating his sixteenth birthday. He and several friends from his military academy had taken one of his family's maids into a back room and had amused themselves for an hour. The teenage maid died during the rape. Concealed by darkness, he and his friends had dragged the body to a car and dumped it outside the city.
The next day, the maid's father attempted to break through the gates of the family estate. Madrano knew he had been betrayed. Despite the privilege of working for one of the best Spanish families in San Salvador, despite the family's generosity, one of the servants had betrayed the boys to the old Indian.
He had often heard his father rave about the impertinence of the Indians and ladinos campesinos who labored on the family's coffee plantations. On his birthday, because a worthless girl died during a game, the family's trusted domestic servants had betrayed him. Fortunately his father always posted soldiers at the gate or the Indian might have injured the young Madrano. The senior Madrano laughed at the incident. "Finally you are a man!"
Wealth guaranteed Alejandro Madrano a commission in the army of El Salvador. After graduating from a private academy, he entered the officers' school for training in command and protocol. However, he received his actual training in the mountain provinces, serving with army battalions fighting Communist bandits.
Why bother searching the mountains for the bandits when the campesinos who fed the Communists camped near the roads? His superior officers showed the young lieutenant how to simultaneously deny the bandits information and support: kill the campesinos. Kill anyone who saw the bandits and did not report what they saw to the authorities. Kill anyone who might have seen the bandits and not reported. Kill anyone in the area where the bandits operated.
As his commanders told him: Communism spreads like a disease; kill the carriers, and the disease dies.
Later, Lieutenant Madrano volunteered to fight with ORDEN. Thus he learned how to fight Communism in the fetid breeding grounds of the slums.
When the Communists and their sympathizers—the union agitators, the schoolteachers, the health workers—met to discuss their radical plans for taking power and wealth from the government, informers noted every name and memorized the faces.
In the night, with a few trustworthy men, Lieutenant Madrano cruised the avenues in one of the high-powered Dodges donated by the United States. They took the Communists from their homes and made examples of them.
Somehow, the death squads never succeeded in eradicating the contagion, even as vultures feasted at garbage dumps stinking with rotting human flesh, and roadside ditches buzzed with iridescent green carrion flies, and unrecognizable masses of bloated gray flesh floated in the shallows of Lago de Ilopango.
The voices of the scum continued in their demands for democracy, opportunity and justice. So the escuadrones de muerte organized into larger units. As army companies sealed off the barrios, the lieutenant and his compatriots used troop trucks to seize entire families.
In the barracks, the squad members' sexual amusements with the youths often proved to be the most effective interrogation technique. The screams of a youngster receiving first the lust of his soldiers, then the penetration of their knives would win names of co-conspirators from the parents when pliers and welding torches failed. Then the families joined the anonymous dead in the pits.
For his distinguished record in breaking a conspiracy among a union of truck drivers, teachers and nurses to create a meeting hall disguised as a children's health-care center, Lieutenant Madrano received his promotion to captain. His new duties included the administration of the land-reform program of the junta.
In the jeans and T-shirt of a student radical, he visited the new cooperatives dictated into existence by the much-publicized land-reform acts. With smiles and smooth words, he persuaded the farmers to elect leaders. He posed with the leaders while North American and European journalists photographed the scenes for their newspapers, magazines and television programs.
Once the journalists left, ORDEN executed the peasant leaders.
However, as the Communists stepped up the guerrilla war in the provinces, Captain Madrano refused any more assignments outside of San Salvador. He had no interest in the dirt and danger of combat. Let the draftees and North American soldiers fight in the remote fields and mountains. The captain continued his night war against subversion, drinking and dancing in the discos of the capital, then cruising the slums to find teenage Communist girls to interrogate.
Now he had the honor of carrying the war to the North American Communists. His duty in the United States offered him new opportunities. Today, as ordered, he would kill the journalist and his bodyguards. When would he receive orders to interrogate student radicals?
He thought of the blond co-eds of USC and UCLA. As he shopped for gifts to send his mother in Spain, he had eyed the beautiful young girls strolling the campus in their shorts and tight jeans and miniskirts. Obviously whores. The posters announcing rallies against the United States intervention in El Salvador excited him. He hoped his commanders—in alliance with the American FBI—would assign him to the eradication of Communist subversives from the universities. He knew the pleasures of torturing and degrading Salvadoran girls. What pleasures would the American blondes give him?
Already he had launched a campaign that was highly unusual by any standards of international assassination. He had devised and executed a series of hits against targets the American public despised. Thus his mystery kill squads had earned a measure of tacit popular support, the better to let them continue their real work against refugees in the barrios and intellectuals in the universities.
With the help of smuggled-in troops from El Ejercito de los Guerreros Blancos and Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista, and some of the more determined hit men from El Falange and La Guardia—and with funds supplied by the American rich, transferred from the Treasury to Swiss bank accounts—Madrano had engineered the executions of rapists, murderers, other criminal targets who wandered into the fire zone from the revolving door of America's "bleeding heart" justice system.
Throughout the United States the executions had continued unchecked. In recent days the assassinations had included two tv news personalities who had spoken out against the earlier killings, plus a black nationalist and two other black agitators who were known to be independently investigating the presence, according to witnesses, of "Panthers" and "Muslims" in the mystery death squads.
Reaction in the United States had ranged from horror at the wave of killings, to relief that the killings did in fact dispose of more career criminals than obvious innocents; this because the high-profile murders leached all the public's attention away from the vastly more extensive killings of unknown and uncared-about targets in the slums.
Madrano relished the uniqueness of the enterprise, ran over the details again in his mind.
His death squads had appeared to be intent on blowing away known psychos and troublemakers. They had carved a deliberate and bloody path through the hopeless bureaucratic garbage that clogged the U.S. courts. The American people appreciated such a task, though they might not want to admit it. And so a crisis of sorts was brewing in this so-called democracy, this festering Communist "free world"; law and order had been hijacked to work against the state. America was about to be turned against itself…cop against cop… leader against leader…The laws and the law courts were being turned on their collective asses, just so that the killings could continue. Ha!
A change in speed jarred him from his fantasies. His driver left the freeway. The three-truck convoy passed fields and orchards. After a few miles, the flat landscape became hills covered with winding rows of fruit trees. Pines grew on the higher slopes. Finally his driver turned to him.
"Captain. The Communists are ahead. The plane reports their vehicle parked on a side road in the hills. We approach the road. What are your orders?"
"Load weapons. The pilot gave you precise directions?"
"Yes. He circle
d the area to confirm every detail. He saw them attempting to repair—"
"Then we speed to the Communists. We take them by surprise."
"Yes, Captain!" The driver relayed the instructions to the other two trucks.
Minutes later, the driver pointed to a dirt lane intersecting the highway. The road cut through orchards, then twisted into the foothills. Captain Madrano, an Uzi submachine gun in his hands, told the driver:
"The other trucks go first. Tell them to speed."
Following the driver's directions, two Silverados accelerated through the orchards, dust clouding behind them. Captain Madrano's driver followed a moment later. Hurtling through the swirling dust at fifty miles per hour, the trucks wove along the road.
Steep hills rose on both sides. Cattle trails cut the dry weeds. Here and there, green brush dotted the hillsides. A voice squawked from the walkie-talkie.
"Captain. We see the truck."
"Park and then surround it! Soon we execute the Communists!"
Captain Madrano saw the two leading trucks swerve, one to the right, the other to the left. They both came to a halt, and then his men rushed from the trucks.
Their enemy had parked in a fold of the hillsides. Earth movers had levelled an area. To one side, ramps constructed of heavy timbers provided for the loading of produce trucks. Around the scraped area, trucks had flattened the weeds. Tire-rutted mud had hardened under the sun. Beyond, the hillsides rose at a forty-five-degree angle. Captain Madrano knew he had the journalist and his Communist guards trapped. There could be no escape.
As his driver stopped the Silverado, Captain Madrano waited for the first shots. His men climbed from the truck and joined the other Salvadorans circling the motor home. The captain stayed to the rear, his Uzi in one hand, the walkie-talkie in the other.
His men closed the circle. A soldier called out, "Putos comunistas. Venimos con muerte!"
Then came the first shot. The soldier who promised death dropped dead.
