by Dick Stivers
“I have my ideals.”
“We all do. A thousand a week, paid in gold. A starting salary.”
“Paid into a numbered account?”
“Automatically. Are you interested?”
Lyons nodded.
5
Twenty miles from the center of Washington, District of Columbia, in an electronics theater at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency, two officers studied a computer-enhanced video projection of the topography of the Sierra Madres Occidental. The senior NSA officer, a white-haired man with a face weathered by tropical sun, touched a key on a control panel.
The black-and-white satellite image expanded, the fracture patterns of lines and shapes becoming individual hills and canyons. A black mark broke the mottled grays of one area. When the senior officer touched the keys of the controls again, the image shifted to center on the black spot. Then the image expanded again.
Light reflected from the metal and glass in the wreckage of the Lear jet. The image expanded until the outline of the burned jet filled the screen.
The younger officer spoke. “Now follow the line of approach back.”
The image shifted to reveal the scar where the crash-landing jet had plowed through the desert brush.
“It landed intact,” the young officer continued. “It went in under the pilot’s control. After the plane got hit by the rockets, the pilot maintained control long enough to put the plane down. If we had the resolution, we could probably see their footprints going into the brush. I’m willing to bet they torched the plane themselves to confuse the ground forces.”
“Did they get any messages out?”
“There was a Mayday call. They even said, ‘We’re going down. We are hit by rockets from the Mexican army.’ We erased the tapes. No inquiry will ever hear that.”
“Any messages to their superiors?”
“Didn’t have the time or the transmission power. And they don’t work that way. On their missions, they go in, they make their hit, they come out. Sometimes they hit targets of opportunity. Usually no one knows what they’ve done until the debriefing. Stony Man is a very special operation. Very loose.”
“Impossible to anticipate.”
“That’s it. Punch in those other coordinates.”
The older man touched the keyboard. The screen flashed and another satellite image appeared. On the whorls and lines of this image, they saw a cluster of wrecks. The senior officer touched a key and the image expanded.
They saw a flat hill littered with the wreckage of four helicopters. The senior man shook his head at the sight.
“Millions of dollars of the International’s equipment. What exactly did those hotshots carry in with them?”
“Rifles, pistols.”
“They didn’t do that with rifles.”
“They seem to be operating with indigenous forces. That’s the report from Mexico.”
“What indigenous forces?”
“Indians.”
“What?”
“That’s what Mexico says. Seems Indians are growing opium in the mountains. There have always been gang wars for the control of the production, so the farmers had their own militias, men with shotguns and rifles to protect the crops. Then, when the International sent in the Mexican army to organize the opium farmers, things went crazy. The militias wiped out army patrols and took their weapons. Now the militias have got automatic rifles, machine guns, mortars. Their armament matches the army, because it is the army’s…”
“Including a helicopter.”
“They believe so. The army sent in six helicopter troopships and a light plane. They’ve only found the wreckage of the plane and five troopships. Now they’ve got reports of the Able Team hotshots in Culiacan trying to buy fuel.”
“What’s the range of that model of helicopter?” asked the senior man.
“It could make Culiacan. The locals had agents at the airport and the doper landing strips around the city. Nothing. So I pulled a computer analysis of both areas. Visual spectrum and infrared of the mountains around the fighting and the desert around Culiacan. No helicopter. Not that that means anything, of course. They could have it covered. But it’s a spooky situation. They could show up anywhere.”
“Why wouldn’t they go north to the border?”
“Oh, let’s hope they get that stupid. If they fly for the border, they’ll come into our radar. Or if they put out a transmission and identify themselves, no matter where they are, we’ll zap them so fast they won’t know what hit them.”
*
Lieutenant Soto of the 5th Army Division of the republic of Mexico turned from Highway 15 and guided his jeep through the ruts and flooded sinkholes of the pueblo’s road. The previous day’s storm had flooded the fields and washed soil and branches into the road, but the jeep’s low gear powered through the mud and debris.
He consulted the map that a local policeman had drawn for him. Passing the row of houses lining the road, he turned down the intersecting road, not actually a road but two deep ruts cutting through the thick grass.
He saw the grove ahead of him. The tires of a heavy truck had flattened the grass. He saw places where the truck had bogged down and spun its tires, digging holes in the ruts and spraying the roadside with mud.
He thought this odd. His map showed another road that trucks utilized to take produce to market. No truck driver would take his vehicle through mud and soggy grass when he could use a gravel road.
Unless the driver had been unfamiliar with the area.
In his duties as an investigative assistant in the division’s antidrug and anticontraband office, Lieutenant Soto had driven through all the back roads of the state of Nayarit. And he had encountered all the tricks and mistakes of the smugglers. He had found airstrips planted with corn. He had arrested North American surfers in San Bias as they refueled seaplanes from boats. He had found the wreckage of a plane, stinking with corpses and bloody marijuana, that crashed after torrential rain had doused the fires marking their landing field.
But smugglers using an army of Mexico helicopter?
When he first received the report of the helicopter down in an orchard, he had thought it could only be as told: an army troopship had been caught in the storm and had landed. But when he called the sergeant responsible for the scheduling of helicopter flights, the sergeant told him all the division’s helicopters had been grounded by the weather.
Grounded at the division base.
Then he called the federal offices. No helicopters missing. Calls to the army units in the states of Jalisco and Zacateca found no missing helicopters.
Now the lieutenant would see whether the policeman’s report had been true in the first place.
Glancing to the penciled map from time to time, he followed the lane, and the truck tracks, to the avocado grove. He saw deep marks in the mud where the truck had cut between the rows of trees. The lieutenant followed the tracks.
He saw the caretaker’s house. A few hundred meters farther he came to another house. He stopped the jeep. Stepping through the thick mulch of matted leaves and red mud, he went to the door and knocked. The door swung open.
A dog ran out. The lieutenant looked inside. The single room of the house had been recently swept. Looking down at the concrete step, he saw chicken feathers and the smears of rain-soaked droppings.
Inside, he saw only cardboard boxes of trash: The dog had overturned the boxes to gnaw on chicken bones and stale tortillas. Beer cans had rolled everywhere.
Bootprints marked the floor. He stepped into the dirt. The prints of his army-issue boots matched the prints on the floor.
The lieutenant paced through the interior, looking for any other sign of an army squad — ration cartons, broken equipment, initials carved in the whitewashed walls — but he found nothing. Only the bootprints and the boxes of trash remained of the strangers that the policeman had reported stayed the night here.
He did not return to his jeep. Instead, he
followed the bootprints into the grove. He noticed the prints of other boots, different from the army-issue boots. Some of the prints indicated men of normal size, other prints suggested very large men. He attempted to estimate the number of men by counting the bootprints, but the boots crossed and recrossed and obscured one another. He could determine only that there had been several soldiers and two large men.
Following the prints to a clearing in the grove, he saw the cut leaves and branches. He looked at the branches above his head and saw that the branches had been trimmed off in an approximate circle. As if by rotor blades.
The bootprints led to the center of the clearing, where they stopped.
The tire tracks of the truck cut through the mud to the center of the clearing, then stopped too.
Rainwater filled the parallel marks of helicopter skids. He paced the marks and finally confirmed the policeman’s report.
A helicopter, of the type used to carry troops, had parked there overnight.
Witnesses had reported the landing of a military helicopter. But the Mexican army and the federals reported no helicopters in service during the storm.
Who had a UH-1 troopship painted with the insignia of the army of Mexico?
Why had they avoided the airport, only twenty kilometers away, to park for the night in an avocado orchard?
And what had they transferred from the truck to the helicopter?
Lieutenant Soto did not know. But he would know soon.
*
In a cow pasture outside the city of Morelia, Lyons negotiated with Colonel Gunther.
In the chill high-altitude air, the others crowded around the warmth of a small fire. Wind swept down the mountainsides above them, swaying the pines that concealed them. No one had a coat or shelter except Davis, who slept in the pilot’s compartment of the Huey.
That afternoon, after they had landed in the concealment of the pines, Blancanales and Coral left to buy aviation kerosene at the Morelia airport, thirty kilometers away. Until they returned with fuel for the helicopter and food for the passengers, Lyons and Gunther could talk without interruption.
“It would be a waste of your potential to actually leave your unit and join us,” Gunther told him. “You have proven yourself to them. You are trusted. You could contribute invaluable information to the International. And perhaps without compromising your missions.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your superiors do not limit your unit’s missions to only actions against the International, correct?”
“Right. We go up against problems as they come along. Sometimes Communist terrorists, sometimes criminals, right-wing groups, whoever.”
“You could keep us informed, but we would only communicate with you when your missions threatened our operations. Then we would issue instructions to you.”
“Like what?”
“To overlook an individual. To lead the mission to a false conclusion. These things could be arranged so that your unit appears to always succeed. Yet the International’s operations would continue untouched. We have similar arrangements with others.”
“Who? The FBI, the CIA?”
Gunther nodded. “And the other services. Some work with us directly, others work as you will, others work in complete ignorance of who actually receives the assistance they furnish. It is an excellent system. The divisions and departments maintain security and greatly expand our areas of operation.”
“How do I know you won’t just have us wiped out sometime? It would be easy. I tell you we have an op coming up, you put out a unit to off us. Or you let the Libyans or the Soviets know and they do it.”
“That would not be in our interest.”
“But how would I protect myself against that?”
“You have information to use against me,” Gunther reminded the American.
“Maybe. All I know is what you told me about your operations in the United States. Nothing to act on. Like you say, you’re departmentalized. If it’s true.”
“What I told you is true. That information bought me time. I had to prove my value to you. I had no other hope of survival.”
“And how do I prove myself to your organization?”
“My freedom. And immediate information.”
“What information?”
“Why are you going south? You could have flown north to the American border.”
“We wouldn’t have made it to the border. The Mexicans and the U.S. have downward-looking radar covering the approach to the border. No matter how low we flew, the radar or the satellites would have tracked us. The DEA already arranged to have us shot down once. We can’t push our luck.”
“But why Mexico City?”
“Coral has friends from the Ochoa gang there.”
Hearing that information, Gunther nodded.
“They can arrange for a charter flight north,” Lyons continued. “We figured that was the only way to get a prisoner north.”
“But once we arrive in Mexico City, that problem is over, correct?”
“If you escape, do you have people who can help you get out of Mexico?”
Gunther nodded.
Lyons looked around, then spoke. “Then that’s when I start earning my gold,” he said.
*
Later in the night, Coral returned. He discussed the questioning of Gunther with Lyons and Blancanales, then he went to question the prisoner himself. But he did not question him about the International.
“What has the blond one said?” Coral asked.
“He said he wants the gold.”
“He’ll turn against the others?”
“Perhaps it is the truth. But I think he is lying. He will not join the Reich. Not for the victory. Not for the gold. Americans have their ideals.”
6
Forested mountainsides stood like a wall against the clouded sky. Davis took the helicopter higher and higher, the turbine whine becoming a shriek, the rotor blades slashing thinner atmosphere with every meter of elevation. The helicopter entered the clouds, mist swirling through the interior, the forest suddenly gone. For a moment, enveloped in the clouds, the noise of the turbine overwhelming their thoughts and senses, they floated in a cold, gray void.
Flashes of daylight came, then the helicopter broke from the clouds. A brilliant blue sky domed the Valley of Mexico. Vato shouted over the turbine noise and pointed to the southeast.
“There.” He pointed to the two snow-topped volcanoes. “Popocatepetl. Iztaccihuatl. We are near la ciudad.”
But a gray pall denied any sight of the world’s largest city. In the center of the valley, a point of light flashed as sunlight blazed from the polished metal of an airliner descending into the pollution generated by millions of autos and trucks and factories in the distant Mexican capital.
Lyons spoke into the intercom. “How much farther?”
“We’re there,” Davis replied.
“But it looks like we’re still thirty or forty miles away.”
“We are, specialist. But I know Mexico City. Take my word for it, this is as close as we’ll get with the Huey. As soon as I spot a road, I’m putting this thing down.”
“Make it somewhere isolated,” Lyons told him. “We might have to leave it parked for days.”
Blancanales spoke through the intercom. “This is it for the helicopter. Miguel and I will go into the city and rent cars.”
“We can’t abandon this helicopter,” Lyons argued. “It could be our ticket out if we fall into a bad situation down there…”
Davis interrupted. “Then you fly it. This thing’s done fifteen hundred miles without servicing. Flying it one more minute than we need to is chancing a very sudden descent. I want to park it and walk away.”
“This is a million-dollar machine!” Lyons protested.
“Yeah?” Davis retaliated. “Isn’t that what I said when you burned the Lear jet? Listen to me. This million-dollar machine is trashed. The joyride is over. Let the Mexicans repossess it. There’
s our road — no villages, no farms, just canyons and trees. Looks good.”
Below them, trees covered steep hillsides. A gravel road followed the curves and folds of a mountainside. They saw a trail along a ridge line. On another ridge line, tire ruts led from the gravel road to a wide clearing. The mature trees had been harvested, then the cleared ground replanted with seedlings among the stumps.
“Miguel!” Gadgets called out. He plugged a second set of headphones into the NSA secure-frequency radio captured from the International Group. Coral slipped on the headphones. He listened as Gadgets plugged in a cassette tape recorder.
“What’s going on?” Lyons asked him.
Gadgets motioned for him to wait.
The helicopter banked. Gaining altitude, they flew over the ridge crest. The road disappeared in the trees. They saw flat stone slabs and low brush on a hilltop.
“What do you think of that place, the rocks down there?” Davis asked through the intercom.
“You’re driving,” Lyons told him.
“One last look,” Davis said.
Davis took the helicopter in a quick orbit of the hilltop. Lyons and the Yaquis sat in the door. In the valley beyond, more than three kilometers from the hilltop, they saw the geometry of farms: rectangular fields, the lines of cornstalks, the circles of ponds. Smoke drifted from trees concealing houses. But they saw no fields or trails near the flat hilltop itself.
Seconds later, the skids scraped rock. Dust and leaves swirled around the helicopter. Davis shut down the turbine. Only the rush of the slowing rotors broke the silence. Then the rotors stopped.
Wind carried away the odor of burned kerosene. The Yaquis straightened their uniforms and stepped from the gaping doors. Glancing at Gadgets, Miguel and Blancanales listening to the NSA radio, Lyons followed the Yaquis out.
Birds and insects broke the silence with their sounds. FN FAL paratroop rifles slung over their backs, the Yaquis walked into the forest. Jacom and Kino searched downhill, Ixto uphill. Lyons followed Vato. Staying two steps behind the slight young man, Lyons watched him move silently through the brush, listening for every sound, his head pivoting to scan the trees and lush foliage for any sign of observers.
