Scorched Earth at-13

by Dick Stivers

  Miguel Coral interrupted the ex-cop. "The opium is not their crime. They have no choice!"

  They talked in a third-level cave in the mountain of the Yaquis. Below them, they heard the voices and sounds of the hidden village. The tent of camouflage cloth glowed with early-morning light.

  Able Team made a meal of freeze-dried beef and vegetables. Lyons gulped his share so that Davis could use the mess kit and spoon. Gadgets set another pot of water boiling over a fuel tablet. Instant coffee cooled in another aluminum pot. The pleasant odor of the village cooking drifted up to them where they ate, the air rich with the smells of frying food and bread baking.

  "Here, in these mountains," Coral continued, "they cannot live if they do not grow opium. There is nothing else."

  "Then why do they stay?" Lyons demanded. "There's work on the coast. There's jobs in the cities. Instead they grow and sell opium. And opium is the raw material of living death. Heroin has killed more people than Vietnam. Just consider the addicts, the teenage whores, the victims of dopers, the millions of dollars a day ripped off from honest people, the wasted dreams. You're asking me to compromise too much."

  Lyons pointed a hard finger at Miguel Coral. "You're helping us, therefore I'll help you. But you're out of the horse trade. By helping these people, I'm helping their gang. I'm not going to work for poppy farmers. I won't. That's it."

  "I think you should go and try working on the coast," Coral suggested. "Not as an American technician or as a manager, but as a campesino."

  Gadgets laughed. "Yeah, Ironman the bracero. Uh-huh, I can see it now. 'Don't like those weeds? Call in an air strike.'"

  "You are right," Coral agreed, laughing with the North Americans. "That is impossible." But he went on. "It is not the work; it is hard, but it is honest and it pays. It is the sickness and death from the chemicals. While the campesinos work in the fields, the planes come to spray the fields. The men die young. The women have babies that cannot live. The children who work in the fields shake and tremble as if they are cold, and their fingers cannot hold pencils. And in the cities? Ten workers for every job. It is hopeless. The sadness kills the people.

  "Here..." Coral gestured to the village outside "...in their mountains, they have their land and they have their traditions..."

  "Yeah, yeah. And their dope," Lyons muttered.

  "It is the only way they can live. Without the money paid by the gangs, there is no food."

  Blancanales interrupted. "I listen to you men argue and you are both right. The argument is a circle. The poverty creates the crime, and the crime cannot stop without the return of the poverty. All this shit about opium and gangs and the wars started in Mexico when Turkey outlawed poppies. If I remember correctly, the United States and Turkey cooperated to encourage alternatives to opium. They funded programs to develop crops the people could grow and support themselves. Why not here? The DEA must spend millions a year on destroying the opium. Why not fund the alternatives?"

  "Uncle Sugar to the rescue," Lyons sneered.

  Coral laughed. "More money for the rich! The money from your government, the foreign aid, do you think it goes to the people? It goes to the rich. Then to the banks of Houston and Miami and Switzerland. Mexico makes billions of dollars from selling oil. Enough to help all the poor of Mexico. But there is no help. I tell you something, Americans. I am a criminal. I am a killer. But there are things I will not do. I have a conscience. I am not like they who steal from people of Mexico to build palaces in Zihuatanejo and Miami and Los Angeles."

  A voice came from the entrance. "You still talk?" The old achaistood silhouetted against the light.

  Blancanales motioned for the old man to enter. "Achai, por favor, pase adelante. Tenemos cafe para usted?"

  "Did he call himself El Chicano when he first came here?" Coral asked the achai.

  The old man laughed. "You know much. Do not remind the boy. He gets angry."

  "El Chicano?" Gadgets asked. "What are you talking about?"

  "When the boy first had business with the Ochoas," Coral explained, "he thought he was El Chicano, from 'Zoot Suit.' He comes from Tucson and he sells opium, and he struts in his fancy clothes. Now he is an idigena. But I like him. I think you North Americans should give your foreign aid to him. He is an idealist. He is too proud to steal."

  "Yes, very idealist," the achaiagreed. "Look at what he did here. With money he could make a city. But I thought you wanted a war."

  Blancanales turned to Lyons. "We could get a DEA appropriation for a war. We'll list these people as mercenaries. That's a start on a foreign-aid program. There's always money for war. What do you say?"

  Lyons nodded. "They earned some money yesterday."

  "No doubt about it!" Gadgets told the others. "We were on the killing floor and the boot was coming down."

  "You admit it!" Davis interrupted. The DEA pilot pointed at Gadgets with a mess-kit spoon. "Mr. Cool freaked out. You just said it."

  "I did not freak out," Gadgets stated solemnly. "I remembered to say my prayers."

  "Cut the jokes!" Lyons told them. "We're here to work, and we're not working. We're here for information. Either we grab some Blancos in the mountains here or we go to Culiacan to get some."

  "There it is," Gadgets agreed. "We've got to get some. But where are they?" Gadgets looked inside the pot of freeze-dried beef stroganoff and shrugged. "None in there."

  "I'll go with the mercenary idea," Lyons told the others. "That's honest work. Maybe they can buy good land with the money. And the money will go straight to the people. Not to the army of the politicos. Yeah, make meres out of a dope gang. I can live with that."

  "Go to Vato," the achaitold Lyons. "He is the wi'koijaut. The war chief. I came only for coffee. We have no coffee in mountains since war."

  "Going." Lyons gulped down the last of his coffee and left the cave. As he scanned the village for Vato, he glanced up and saw the sentries at the uppermost point of the camouflage tent watching him.

  "Vato? Dinde es?" Lyons called out in his bad Spanish.

  "Alla," a young woman with an M-16 told him, pointing with her left hand. Her right hand did not leave the grip of the assault rifle.

  Vato sat with a group of young men and women in the center of the village. As Lyons went down the steps, he saw Vato reading aloud from a book, speaking in Spanish and Yaqui, then the group discussed what he had read. Some nodded agreement, others differed.

  Putting down the book as Lyons approached, Vato asked, "When do we go?"

  Only when he squatted down in the group did Lyons see the title of the book. He laughed. "Whenever you're done reading your paperback, we can talk the next move."

  "Why do you laugh? Is it this book?"

  Lyons pointed to the worn paperback, The Art of War. "There is no art to it," he said. "Only fear and blood and suffering."

  Now Vato laughed. "True and not true. You are describing defeat. Even though Sun Tzu wrote more than two thousand years ago, he guides us to victories. Like yesterday."

  "What do you read in the book about tomorrow?"

  "To learn the future, I must go to other books. But what you want to know is not the future but the past. Who organized the White Warriors and where did they come from. Correct?"

  "And what they intend to do with the money from the dope trade. To get that information, we need to get to the leaders."

  "The leaders do not come into the Sierra Madres. The highest ranking we have seen are Mexican officers and one foreign officer."

  "Who was the foreigner?"

  "We saw them. We got no names. He was blond, his hair lighter than yours. Almost white. Our people saw him with a Mexican colonel."

  "What uniform did he wear? What country?"

  "The distance was too great. The scout could only describe it as gray."

  "With black boots? A black pistol belt?"

  "And a black beret. You know who we saw?"

  "I know, but I don't want to believe. The only way to answer our qu
estions is to take those officers and interrogate them. We've got to get those Mexicans and the foreigners."

  "But is this for the DEA?"

  "You'll be paid as mercenaries with Agency money..."

  "I do not fight for the Drug Enforcement Agency. I fight for my people."

  "So they can grow opium?"

  "So they can be free of the opium and the gangs and the Mexicans. So they can live in these mountains like free people again."

  "Sounds good. Our money will help."

  "But we will not be mercenaries."

  "We'll tell the DEA we hired you as soldiers. You can tell your people the money's a gift for helping us against the Blancos."

  "No. We do not fight for you. It is our war. You came to our mountains and joined us. I will tell my people you fight for us."

  "Forget the semantics!" Exasperated, Lyons cut off the argument with a salute. "Anything you want. You're the boss, yes, sir."

  "It is agreed. I ask you again. This information, will it go to the DEA?"

  "Depends. If the Blancos are only another dope gang, the information goes to the Agency. But no matter what, no information goes to the Agency until we're finished. We made the mistake of taking a DEA jet south, and they sent us into an ambush."

  "Oh," Vato said, nodding. "That is why the trucks waited. They knew your plane would come."

  "They waited?" shouted Lyons. "How long?"

  "A lookout saw their headlights before dawn. They waited until your plane came. That is why we were ready. We thought they would come into the mountains, and they did. But what if the Blancos are not only a drug gang? I tell you they are not. Yes, they move the heroin to the United States, but they operate with the army. The army and the DEA never cooperated with the Ochoa Family. What if the Blancos are not a drug gang? What do you do?"

  Lyons almost hated to think how far into the DEA gutter he was going to have to crawl to get to the slime who had set up the ambush.

  "If they are who I think they are," the Ironman said, "we destroy them."

  "Four North Americans and a Mexican against Los Guerreros Blancos and the army?"

  Lyons gestured to the fighters in the mountain village. "The five of us and all your fighters. We can do it."

  "I will not waste the lives of my fighters in stupid attacks." Vato passed Lyons The Art of War. "Look in the index. You will not find Courage or Heroism. But you will find Recklessness."

  Lyons examined the worn paperback. It was translated from the Chinese by a U.S. Marine Corps general. The pages showed the wear of hundreds of readings. Sweat and oil and blood had stained pages. Then he looked through the index. He found an entry and turned to a page.

  As Lyons silently read the pages, Vato opened a bottle of pills. He took one and passed the bottle to the circle of men. Every man took a pill, swallowing it dry. A boy took the bottle to other men in the area. Every man or woman who carried a weapon got a pill.

  Lyons looked up from the book. "What're those?"

  "Megavitamins. So that the fighters will have night vision."

  "You are a leader," Lyons said, nodding with admiration. He returned his eyes to the book and read aloud.

  "Here, I read from the section on the use of guides. 'We should select the bravest officers and those who are most intelligent and keen, and using local guides, secretly traverse mountain and forest noiselessly, concealing our traces... we listen carefully for distant sounds and screw up our eyes to see clearly. We concentrate our wits so that we may snatch an opportunity...'"

  Vato translated the reading to the others. When all the men understood, Lyons looked at them.

  "That is what we will do," he said.

  13

  Carrying only weapons and water, they ran the mountain trails. Vato set the pace for the main group, his custom Springfield rifle slung muzzle-down over his back, the sling drawn tight to hold the heavy rifle against his body. Yaquis and the men of Able Team followed. Miguel Coral, physically fit but unaccustomed to long-distance running, slowed them. Vato stopped the group from time to time to allow the Mexican to catch his breath. Davis had stayed behind.

  Able Team and Coral wore dust-colored cloaks over their fatigues. Wads of rags masked their boot-prints as they ran, and the lightweight cotton cloth of their desert camouflage flagged behind them.

  Two formations of scouts preceded and followed the group. When the main group jogged through a valley, the scouts ran along the ridges to both sides, watching for ambushes or distant helicopters. When the group approached a mountainside, Vato waited for the flash of a forward scout's signal mirror before starting to the top. As they zigzagged up mountains, mirrors flashed behind them.

  Despite the rest stops, they covered kilometer after kilometer in the clear, cool morning air. The long shadows of the mountains shielded them from the blinding desert sun. But as the sun rose higher, the oppressive heat slowed them to a quick march.

  In one canyon, they passed a black scene of horror. Where several families had attempted to farm, using water from a hillside spring to irrigate the deep sand of a streambed, only ashes and scorched poles remained. An adobe wall showed bullet pocks. Blackened rows of corn stood in the fields. The people had been buried under a pile of stones marked with crosses.

  "The army. Or Los Guerreros Blancos," Vato spat out. "A plane came with napalm. Without warning, they all died."

  "Why?" Lyons asked.

  "Who knows?" Vato answered.

  As he surveyed the grim scene that lay before him, Lyons began to understand what motivated Vato and his Yaqui warriors.

  After three hours of running and walking, following an animal trail through shoulder-high mesquite, a signal mirror flashed a coded message from the ridgeline. Vato turned to Lyons. "We go to there..." the young man pointed to the ridge "...and stop. Tell the others."

  Lyons passed the word back to his partners. When they reached the mountainside, Vato turned again. "Very quickly now. We are close to the army."

  The Yaquis ran up the trails. Coral and Gadgets straggled behind. Lyons slowed to keep the Yaquis ahead of him in sight while watching Blancanales behind him. Lyons also watched the scouts on the ridgelines for signals.

  A shrill whistle alerted them. Lyons saw the mirror on the ridge behind the group flashing. His hand going to the radio clipped to his web belt, he tapped the transmit key quickly as he crouched down. Clicks answered him, then Gadgets's voice came on. "Que pasa?" asked the Wizard.

  "Get down!" Lyons suddenly yelled.

  The unmistakable pulse of a helicopter pounded out its tattoo as it thundered over the ridge. Lyons pressed himself flat in the brush of the mountainside. He arranged his dust-colored camouflage, pulling the hood over his head, flicking the cloak over his legs. Only the bottom of his faded black fatigue pants and his boots remained uncovered.

  A hundred feet above them, the chopper chewed its way across the desert sky. The noise of the rotors faded as the helicopter continued far into the distance. Then the rotor noise died down as the Huey troopship disappeared over a ridge in the east. Lyons searched the infinite blue dome of the sky for other aircraft.

  "Just a commuter flight," Gadgets's voice whispered from the hand radio Lyons held.

  "Can spy cameras work in Hueys?" Lyons asked his tech-specialist partner.

  Gadgets gave it a moment's thought. "I've seen video cameras in helicopters. But the vibrations degrade the image."

  "What about the super-close-ups at football games? They shoot from helicopters."

  "Are you talking about Monday-night football or high-altitude ultraresolution surveillance? They ain't the same. Putting a spy camera in a chopper is a waste of time. But if they have a spy plane up there, we won't even see it before it snaps fifteen different close-ups of us."

  Vato called out to the North Americans. "Quick! To the top!"

  Lyons sprinted to the top and crouched. He had to study the ground to spot the Yaquis, flat on their bellies in the rocks and sand, their clothing th
e color of the dust. Behind him, he heard the others gasping and cursing as they crawled the last few meters to the crest. Lyons crept forward to join the Yaqui warriors.

  They watched a scene over a thousand meters away. On the rocky ridgeline overlooking the gorge, the same ridge from where the Mexican riflemen and mortar team had fired down on Able Team the day before, dust swirled around the speck of a helicopter. Vato surveyed the scene through binoculars.

  Snaking up beside Vato, Lyons opened his binocular case. A Yaqui stayed his arm, and Vato passed his own binoculars to Lyons.

  "These will not reflect the sun," he said.

  Lyons glanced at the front of the binoculars. Tubular extensions hooded the objective lenses. Like a sunshade on a camera lens, the extensions allowed only straight-line light to strike the front elements. The tin sheet and plastic tape extensions increased the length of the binoculars, but prevented the lenses from betraying their position with glints of sunlight.

  Focusing on the distant scene, Lyons saw the vultures first. The black specks circled and swooped high over the ridge. Then he saw the helicopter rising from the dust of its rotor storm. A cargo net hung under the Huey troopship.

  Though the binoculars could not define the image, Lyons knew dead soldiers filled that net. He gave the ridge a last scan. No soldiers remained behind to patrol the area. He saw only the returning vultures. He passed the binoculars to Blancanales.

  The troopship and its load of corpses flew to the southwest. Lyons mentally calculated the direction of the Huey that had passed over them a few minutes before. That helicopter had gone to the east.

  "All that running for nothing," Gadgets called out to his partners. "Too late to do anything here but get a suntan!"

  "Brujo!" one of the Yaquis interrupted. The man pointed to a ridgeline behind them.

  A signal mirror flashed the rapid code of an alert. Vato read the message.

  "A helicopter comes. Be ready," he warned.

  "Could it have seen us?" Lyons asked as he un-slung his FN-FAL paratrooper rifle.