Into the Maze at-14

by Dick Stivers

  Into the Maze

  ( Able Team - 14 )

  Dick Stivers

  A new heroin syndicate, using military weapons and a faction of the Mexican army, has eliminated all the other gangs in Mexico. Their operation now stands invincible.

  Able Team cuts its way into the action, careering into open war against the drug ring. But everyone, even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, is plotting war against Able Team!

  In and above the streets of Mexico City, the world’s most crowded metropolis, the men of Able Team fight for survival from attack on all sides. Over the roar of battle, Blancanales yells at a Mexican army lieutenant, “We have been tricked by your government and by ours! Betrayal is everywhere! How do you expect us to take this insanity?”

  Dick Stivers

  Into the Maze

  1

  Surrounded by death, the colonel lay in the dust, his hands tied behind his back, a rope around his neck. Flies found his open wounds and the blood clotting on his gray uniform. His North American and Yaqui captors stood in a circle around him, automatic rifles in their hands.

  Black, choking smoke drifted from the wreckage of burning helicopter troopships. Here and there, the white fire of magnesium blazed in the hulks. Molten aluminum flowed from the wrecks. In the ashes, the aluminum puddled in shimmering iridescent mirrors.

  A Mexican soldier dying of burns screamed until a single rifle shot silenced him. Only skeletons and charred meat remained of the other Mexican soldiers who had died in the explosions.

  Minutes before, on this ridge in the desert wilderness of the Mexican state of Sonora, Able Team and a group of teenage Yaqui Indians had annihilated two squads of elite airborne commandos. Rosario Blancanales, the Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret, called The Politician by his fellow warriors, triggered set charges of explosives and kerosene to destroy the squads as they left their Bell UH-1 Huey troopships. On a hilltop to the east, ex-LAPD officer Carl Lyons faced a third Huey. Of the squad of soldiers in that troopship, only the colonel survived.

  Carl Lyons asked the first question of the interrogation. “What’s your name, Colonel?”

  “Gunther. I’m Colonel Jon Gunther. I was assigned to help the Mexicans capture you.”

  “Who assigned you?”

  “My commander, General Mendez.”

  “Where is your base?”

  “To the west. There is a place called Rancho Cortez on the coast. It was used by Colonel Gonzalez as his base.”

  “Is General Mendez there?”

  “No. The general issued his instructions by telephone.”

  “Where is General Mendez?”

  “I don’t know. He could have called from Culiacan.”

  “How many soldiers at the Rancho?”

  “Hundreds. There are barracks. There is an airfield. There is…”

  “Can you draw a map?”

  “Yes.”

  Rotorthrob came from the east. Silhouetted against the rising sun, a Huey troopship flew in a slow circle over the ridges. The helicopter had been captured in an action the night before. Piloted by an agent from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the helicopter would carry Able Team and their allies to the next fight.

  The hand-radios carried by Lyons and Blancanales buzzed.

  “Looks like you did it to them,” the voice of Gadgets Schwarz commented.

  As the electronics specialist of Able Team, Gadgets had stayed with the captured helicopter and monitored the radio frequencies of the Mexican army units during the fighting.

  “It’s time to move,” Gadgets told them. “The action’s picking up. A flight of goons…”

  Lyons spoke into his hand-radio to interrupt his partner. “Tell me later. We got a prisoner listening. Any radio calls to out here?”

  “Their base called for a report. But no one answered, and they think that’s strange. I think it’s time to get out.”

  “Ready to go. There’s nothing left here.”

  Rotor wind threw dust and ashes as the helicopter descended to the ridge. Inside, Gadgets Schwarz and Miguel Coral — a Mexican gang pistolerocooperating with the DEA and Able Team — sat on the troop bench with several radios. Coral slipped off his headphones and reached out to help Lyons and Blancanales with the prisoner. Lyons motioned Coral back to the radios.

  “Stay on those radio frequencies,” Lyons commanded. “That’s more important. We’ll load up.”

  Coral nodded. Only days before, Coral — with his wife and three of his young children, escorted by a truckful of gunmen — had attempted to escape from the drug wars of Northern Mexico by crossing into the United States. Able Team had teargassed his bodyguards, then captured Coral. To gain his freedom from prison and sanctuary for his family, Coral agreed to lead Able Team against Los Guerreros Blancos, a new heroin syndicate using military weapons and Mexican army troops to eliminate the other drug gangs, including the syndicate Coral had served for decades, the Ochoa Family.

  Yaquis helped Lyons and Blancanales push the six-foot-five, two-hundred-twenty-pound Colonel Gunther through the door. Blancanales lashed the prisoner into a safety harness to prevent a suicide dive from the airborne troopship. Yaquis loaded M-60 machine guns and steel cans of ammunition into the helicopter.

  Pete Davis, the DEA pilot, shouted to them, “Now back to the camouflage?”

  Lyons nodded. “Conference time.”

  In seconds, the helicopter — overloaded with men and weapons and equipment — left the ridge line. Lyons looked back to see a line of Yaquis jogging down the mountainside. The group would join them later.

  The helicopter veered to the north. In three directions, the vast panorama of the Sierra Madre Occidental extended to the horizon. To the west, the direction of the Pacific Ocean and the coastal cities, the mountains became foothills and desert plains. Distance and haze denied any sight of the coast.

  Dropping below the ridge lines, the pilot followed a snaking canyon. Panicked birds shot from the mesquite and cactus as the thundering machine flashed past, the rotors throwing dust and leaves to swirl behind the helicopter. After a few kilometers, the helicopter descended to a sandy river bottom shaded by cottonwoods.

  The rotors spun to a stop. Yaquis emerged from the cottonwood dragging screens of lashed-together branches. They quickly covered the helicopter. The camouflage screens concealed the helicopter from airborne observation and shaded the OD-green troopship from the desert sun.

  Lyons dumped Colonel Gunther onto the riverbed’s sand. Then he turned to Gadgets and Coral. He asked them in a whisper, “What about the transmissions you monitored?”

  “One was very interesting. It came in on this black box.” Gadgets touched the radio designed and manufactured by United States National Security Agency. The Mexican army unit used the secure-frequency radio to communicate with their base. Similar to the hand-radios Able Team used, but with more frequencies and range, the radio employed encoding circuits to scramble every transmission, decode every message received. Without a matching radio, anyone scanning the bands would intercept only bursts of electronic noise.

  “A planeful of goons came in from Mexico City. They wanted to report directly to Colonel Gunther. A Mexican army officer said Colonel Gonzalez commanded the operation. The goons said they’d radio their general in Mexico City for instructions. But then the Mexicans said Gunther was with Gonzalez and the goons went ahead and landed.” Gadgets turned to Coral. “I get that right?”

  Coral nodded. “The soldiers from Mexico City would not accept orders from Mexican army officers.”

  “Mexico City? That’s where their general is?” Lyons asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just calls to ones that got wasted.”
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br />   “A general in Mexico City…” Lyons considered the information. He stepped from the helicopter.

  Blancanales watched as Gunther sketched a map of Rancho Cortez. A Yaqui teenager named Ixto stood two steps back from Gunther, an FN FAL rifle pointed at the prisoner’s head.

  “The barracks.” Colonel Gunther pointed to the line of rectangles he had drawn. “The administrative buildings, the landing field, the aircraft hangars. Fuel tanks. The building for the electric generators. The road to the dock. A rifle range. Here is the beach.”

  “And the perimeter?” Blancanales prompted.

  “Outside, a barbed-wire cattle fence. Then a cleared area. Then an eight-foot chain link fence with concertina wire.”

  “That’s the highway?” Blancanales pointed to the edge of the paper. “What’s that other line?”

  “A railroad connection. At one time the Rancho processed sugar cane for Mexico and the United States. That is why there is also a dock for ships.”

  “And what does it process now?” Lyons asked.

  “That was fifty or sixty years ago,” Colonel Gunther answered. “Now the Rancho is only for the army.”

  “There’s no heroin labs there?”

  “I did not see that.”

  “What army?”

  “The army of Mexico.”

  Lyons pointed to the gray fatigues and black web gear and boots Gunther wore. At his collar, a silver eagle clutching lightning bolts in its claws identified Gunther as a colonel. “You’re not wearing a Mexican uniform. Who hired you?”

  “General Mendez.”

  “General Mendez of the International?”

  “That is what they call themselves.”

  “Who are they?”

  “The International? I don’t know. Rich men. I know only General Mendez. He paid me. He issued instructions. I know only him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you contact him?”

  “I don’t. He called me.”

  “Is he in Culiacan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is the base in Culiacan?”

  “There is no base in Culiacan. There is only the Rancho, near Obregon.”

  “Where are you based?”

  “At the Rancho…”

  “Before the Rancho?”

  “In New York and Washington. The capital of your country.”

  “Where are the bases?”

  “I don’t know. We worked in hotels.”

  “This general lives in hotels?”

  “The general never took me to his home.”

  “The International does business from hotels?”

  “For security. They rent conference rooms for the meetings. Then no one needs to go outside the hotel during the meetings.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I was born in Paraguay.”

  “You look German.”

  “My family came from Germany.”

  “Before the war or after?”

  “At the beginning of the century. Before the First World War.”

  “How many soldiers at that base?” Lyons pointed to the map of Rancho Cortez.

  “I saw hundreds. I don’t know the number.”

  “He’s telling you nothing!” Standing beside Lyons, a young man from Tucson, Arizona, known by the Chicano name of Vato, stared down at Gunther. This leader of the Yaqui warriors had proven himself a relentless, merciless enemy of Los Guerreros Blancos in his fight beside Able Team. “Let us question him…”

  “No. We need him alive.”

  “He may die,” Vato admitted. “But he will answer our questions.”

  “Tie him,” Lyons told the Yaquis guarding the colonel. “His hands, his elbows, his feet. I don’t want him trying to escape. He’s too valuable to kill.”

  Lyons motioned to his partners. “Vato, too. And you, pilot. Outside. Bring that map.”

  Thrashing through tangled branches, they followed him away from the camouflaged helicopter. They crossed the stream bed to the shade of the cottonwoods. Lyons scanned the sky for spotter planes. He saw only a hawk soaring in the infinite blue of the sky above the canyon.

  Gadgets ran through the sand to Lyons. “We ain’t hitting that base. No way. So don’t even talk about it.”

  “I remember Honduras,” Lyons told his partner. “No more banzai attacks.”

  “You just keep remembering. I still don’t know how we lived through it back then. That night was extremely insane!”

  They sat on the bank of the dry stream. The arching branches of the cottonwoods screened them from airborne observation. Cicadas whined behind them, the rising and falling noise of the desert grasshoppers the only sound in the stillness of the narrow canyon.

  “Do you believe what he said?” Blancanales asked.

  Lyons shook his head. “He’s lying.”

  “I don’t think he’s lying about the base.” Blancanales held up the map of Rancho Cortez. “Look at the details. Who would imagine an army base would have a dock for freighters?”

  “He wants us to hit that base.” Lyons took the map and studied it. “Maybe he thinks we’ll try to infiltrate. Use him to get inside…”

  “No!” Gadgets interrupted. “You try any shit trick like that, you’re going alone.”

  “Not smart, Ironman.” Blancanales shook his head at the thought of an assault on the Mexican army installation.

  Vato spoke. “In three days, I could gather fifty men and women with rifles.”

  Miguel Coral nodded. “I have many friends in Sonora and Sinaloa. We could gather all those who hate…”

  “No!” Gadgets cut the discussion. “No talk. No plans. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Lyons looked to the group of men. “Notice he didn’t say anything about Mexico City? Nothing at all. Not a word.”

  “He talked about New York and Washington,” Blancanales said.

  “But nothing about Mexico City,” Lyons insisted. “A gang of millionaire fascists, with private armies everywhere in Central and South America, starts a billion-dollar-a-month heroin operation in Mexico. They wipe out or take over the Mexican drug gangs. They set up their own military base. They use corrupt politicians and corrupt army officers. An emergency comes along and they’ve got help flying in from Mexico City the next day. But our prisoner tells us the leaders run the operation from New York and Washington. Maybe if he’d said Miami, I’d almost believe him. But he didn’t.”

  “Mexico City is big,” Blancanales cautioned. “The biggest city in the world. I doubt if the offices of the Fascist International will be listed in the phone book.”

  “This is it.” Lyons pointed to the map of Rancho Cortez. We can go up against this army base…”

  “No!” Gadgets interrupted again.

  Lyons continued. “Hundreds of soldiers, reinforcements arriving all the time, a double security perimeter with all kinds of surprises, helicopters, planes, heavy weapons, napalm…”

  “I think he’s seen the light,” Gadgets marveled. “Ironman thinks, Ironman reasons. I don’t believe it… Ahggh…”

  Lyons caught his partner in a headlock to silence his sarcasm. While Gadgets struggled against the hold, Lyons continued. “Or we can fly down to Mexico City. Make like tourists and maybe hit them where they’d never expect.”

  Breaking Lyons’s hold, Gadgets gasped, “Second the motion.”

  “Could we take the helicopter that far?” Lyons asked Davis.

  “Twelve or thirteen hundred miles? And without maintenance? Might make it. We’d need at least four refuelings.”

  “What do you think, Vato?” Lyons asked the Yaqui leader.

  “Exploit confusion. Move secretly. Strike where unexpected.”

  Lyons nodded. “Will you come with us?”

  “If we cut off the head, the body will die,” Vato answered. “I will go. Perhaps a few of the others.”

  Lyons turned to Coral. “And you, M
iguel?”

  “You give me the opportunity to kill those who murdered my friends, who murdered the son of my patrde.I thank you for the opportunity.”

  “Then it’s unanimous,” Blancanales concluded. “We go to Mexico City.”

  *

  Colonel Gunther lay in the sand, immobilized by ropes, guarded by teenagers with automatic rifles, his mind calculating how he could survive. His intelligence had already saved his life once that day.

  Suspecting an ambush, Gunther had directed his helicopter pilot to land on another hilltop. But the petty-pompous Mexican officer commanding the other two troopships of Mexican airborne soldiers disregarded Gunther’s suspicions. The Mexican commander took his men and helicopters blindly into the killzone.

  But bad luck also condemned Colonel Gunther and his squad of soldiers. As explosions and waves of flame decimated the Mexicans, a second group of North Americans and Yaquis struck. Gunther lost his soldiers, his pilots, his UH-1 troopship.

  Now, a prisoner of a group of North Americans and Yaqui campesinos wearing stolen army of Mexico uniforms, Gunther faced interrogation by torture, then death.

  Gunther put his thoughts beyond the fear of death. Fear could not save him. Only his intelligence and experience could gain him the time he needed.

  When the Americans had questioned him, he answered their questions. He drew the map of the Rancho. He had even revealed details about the operations of the International in the United States. The answers had gained time.

  Time for thought. Time for cunning.

  And if, in ignorance or overconfidence, the North Americans attempted to use Gunther or his information in their assault against the International…

  Then he would reverse this defeat. He would regain his freedom.

  And they would die.

  2

  Below them, the shadow of the troopship skipped over hills and desert, the silhouette of the fuselage circled by the shadow of the spinning rotors. The shadow flashed over pale, windblown sand and colorless earth. Sometimes the shadow disappeared when the helicopter passed over canyons, the shadow lost within shadows for an instant. Once they passed over a road, but they saw no trucks, no farms, no villages.

  Four Yaquis — Vato, Ixto, Jacom and Kino — sat in the doors, their feet dangling into space, a rope across the door serving as a safety restraint. They pointed out landmarks to one another as they passed over the familiar territory. Behind them, Able Team struggled to read a map as the slipwind from the open doors flapped and tore the map. Colonel Gunther — tied, blindfolded, wads of rags taped over his ears — sat in a doorgunner’s seat, the safety harness buckled around him.