by Dick Stivers
Luis laughed. "You talk like a missionary."
"Yeah, yeah," Lyons agreed, laughing with the Guatemalan. "But they bring the Word. I bring the Wrath."
They came to a crossroads and took another highway. The hours passed. Cornfields and gardens became vertical hillsides. Winding upward through ravines, switching back every few hundred yards, the narrow road cut through a forest.
At many of the curves, their headlights revealed clusters of small crosses. Names marked the crosses. Rotting flowers indicated frequent visits by mourners. Beyond the guardrails, the wooded mountainside dropped away to darkness.
"Why the graves there?" Lyons asked.
"Not graves. Shrines. That is where they died, so their families believe that is where their spirits wander."
"EGP? The Nazis?"
"No. Buses. Cars."
The switchbacks and curves continued, the highway zigzagging ever higher. Mist swirled in the headlight beams.
Lyons awoke to see a half moon over a town, the whitewashed walls a bluish white against the night. He thought he dreamed. The image of the town surrounded by the mountains and forest seemed impossible, unreal. Then the road angled down a ridge, and they left the view behind. Lyons looked at his watch. Almost dawn.
"Where are we?"
"In the Sierra de Chuacus."
"Great. Where's that?"
"Perhaps another hour to Azatlan."
In the back seat, Senora Garcia slept. Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen a few hundred yards behind them. He keyed his hand-radio.
"How are you two holding up?"
"This is the scenic route," Gadgets bantered, "no doubt about it. But the government didn't send us here to shoot picture postcards."
"The man says another hour to the town."
"Lights! Lights behind me, coming up fast!"
Luis heard the words shout from the hand-radio. As the blond American slipped his Atchisson out of the guitar case, he brought the car to a halt against the hillside. He killed the lights, then took a folded-stock Galil from the floor of the Dodge. Both men stepped into the predawn chill. They took cover behind the car.
"We've stopped," Lyons told his partners. "Make it past us. If they're trying an intercept, we'll blow them away."
"Oh, man! They're gaining on us. And if they don't get us, the next curve will."
Headlights streaked through the network of branches downslope. Bracing his Atchisson's fourteen-inch barrel on the trunk lid, Lyons flicked the fire-selector to full-auto and waited.
An air horn blared. Careening around a hairpin turn below them, tires sliding on the mist-slick asphalt, the Volkswagen van raced what looked like a truck. The second pair of headlights almost touched the van's back bumper, then the vehicle swerved into the oncoming lane to pass. The air horn sounded again.
Squinting against the glare, Lyons aimed at the center of the pursuers' truck. He heard the click of the safety on the Galil that Luis held. But then Luis said: "It is nothing. Only a bus."
"What? Passing on a mountain curve?"
At seventy miles an hour, the Ford thirty-eight-seat bus hurtled past. Lyons saw a teenager sitting on the dashboard next to the driver, leaning back against the windshield, reading a comic book by the beam of a flashlight. Its horn warning downhill traffic, the bus downshifted for the next curve, and took it seemingly on two wheels. They heard the engine roar up the next stretch of road above them, then the warning horn as the bus roared on its way along the up-and-down switchback road.
Lyons set his assault-shotgun's safety. "Take the bus and leave the suicide to us..."
Autofire ripped the quiet. Lyons dropped down and keyed his hand-radio.
"Wizard! Pol! Stop, someone's shooting up there."
The Volkswagen swerved off the asphalt near the Dodge. Jerking the parking brake, Blancanales jumped from the driver's door, his M-16/M-203 over-and-under in his hands. Gadgets followed an instant later, a captured Galil in one hand, a bandolier of magazines in the other.
In the graying darkness, Able Team gathered together and crouched in the roadside brush, listening. Mist glistened on pines and oaks. Drops of moisture fell through the leaves, some falling on the warriors' hands and weapons. But they heard no more shots. Lyons whispered to the others. "I'm going for a look."
Jamming an extra magazine of seven 12-gauge shells in his jacket pocket, Lyons ran uphill along the road. The mist chilled his face as he labored against the incline. His lungs ached as he tried to gulp oxygen from the thin air. The 9,000-foot altitude defeated his sprint. He slowed to a jog, then a panting walk.
After a half-circle curve, the road continued straight. Lyons went flat on the asphalt at the end of the curve. He scanned the straight section. He saw nothing moving. Above the roadway, beyond the overarching pine branches, the sky became gray with dawn.
Lyons did not chance walking on the road. He slung his Atchisson over his back and snaked across the asphalt to the other side. Clutching at roots, his soft-soled shoes finding footholds in the rocks, he went hand-over-hand up the embankment.
The exertion made him gasp. He slowed his climbing. He disciplined his breathing, pulling down long, deep gulps of moist air, matching his breath cycles to his motions. He pulled himself through the roots and ferns and rocks very quietly, only the slight sound of falling pebbles and dirt breaking the silence.
Voices came from above. He froze, listening for the source. In the tangle of pines and oaks growing from the near-vertical mountainside, some of the voices seemed distant, others near. He inched up the slope as if crawling up a wall.
An obstacle stopped him. He made out the rusting, dismantled form of a car — doors and interior and motor gone — propped against a pine. A broken guardrail lay amidst cut branches. He could not continue to the road above without thrashing through the debris. He looked to the sides. More debris blocked him. For years, road maintainance crews had simply dumped trash and tree trimmings downhill.
He looked at the pines. Fifty to sixty to a hundred feet tall, the trees rose high above the road. Branches grew from the trunks in all directions.
Lyons climbed silently up a pine, keeping the trunk between him and the voices. In seconds, he was looking down at the road.
The mist glowed red with taillights. Soldiers in the camouflage uniform of the Army of Guatemala paced the road in front of the stopped bus. Flashlights swept the interior of the vehicle, casting silhouettes against the windows. Soldiers checked identity cards.
Laughter came from the pickup trucks and a troop carrier parked against the side of the mountain. Lyons heard English.
A flashlight revealed a blond soldier. Lyons saw an M-16 in the soldier's hands. Another soldier, this one over six feet tall, his bulk indicating a weight of two hundred pounds, carried an M-60 machine gun. A belt of ammunition went over his shoulder.
Eventually the mercenaries waved the bus on.
Now, at last, Lyons knew why the bus drivers of the Terminal Extraurbanoshated him and Blancanales. They had assumed the two North Americans had come to their country to serve as pro-fascist mercenaries for Unomundo. He keyed his hand-radio and whispered: "We got problems."
Ten minutes later, the sky becoming blue, Blancanales and Luis climbed up nearby trees along the road. Lyons signaled Gadgets.
"Ready."
The Volkswagen's horn answered him. On the road, the mercenaries heard the honking. They flicked away cigarettes. Fanning out across the road, they took positions to block the approaching car.
Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen far below him. The horn sounded twice to alert oncoming vehicles, then the vehicle swept around the curve. The mercenaries waited. As Gadgets neared the next hairpin turn, the horn sounded twice again.
The mercenaries waited. No car appeared.
An officer called out in an American accent. "Mitchell! Run down the road and see what's going on."
Fire from Lyons's Atchisson smashed down mere after mere, each blast sending
double-ought and number-two steel shot ripping through a chest. A 40mm fragmentation round popped at the far end of the line of troop trucks, a thousand high-velocity razors shredding a line of men. Luis fired an instant later.
A blond pro-fascist dodged through the cross fire and dived for cover under a truck. Lyons hit him with a two-shot storm of steel, throwing him sideways in the air. The guy tried to crawl, but one arm flopped uselessly at his side, the humerus bone shattered. The dying mere screamed throughout the remaining seconds of the slaughter, blood frothing from his mouth and chest.
Two men sprinted out of the kill zone, spinning around to spray bursts from their M-16 rifles. Slugs ripped through the branches of the trees. Lyons swung his weapon to sight on the running men but their downhill sprint took them out of his line of fire. A burst from Luis hit one man. He fell, rolled, lost his weapon, scrambled to his feet. Blood spread from a long wound across his back, but the mercenary continued running.
An autoweapon flashed from the curve. Single shots from Gadgets's captured Galil found the mere and dropped him. More slugs tore through the chests of fleeing mercenaries. One man fell down the slope of roadside trash, another died where he crouched behind a truck.
Lyons emptied the second magazine of 12-gauge shells. Slinging his Atchisson, he scanned the road for life. Only Luis fired now, burst after burst raking the dead and dying, silencing the screamers, then killing the dead again.
"Stop firing!" Blancanales shouted.
Silence returned to the mountains.
9
In the uniforms of Unomundo's mercenaries, in captured vehicles, Able Team drove on to Azatlan. Only minutes had passed since they had annihilated the platoon of foreign pro-fascists and Guatemalan traitors manning the roadblock. After gathering an assortment of materiel — four camouflaged uniforms, walkie-talkies, an M-60, an Uzi, a few boxes of 12-gauge rounds, a bandolier of 40mm grenades — they dumped the other weapons, all the corpses and a troop truck off the steep edge of the road. Only bloodstains and cartridge casings marked the site of the slaughter.
Gadgets and Blancanales had abandoned the rented car after transferring their gear from the Volkswagen to a bullet-pocked pickup truck. Now, with a full-powered vehicle, they followed the Dodge at sixty miles an hour through the twists and hairpin curves of the highway, finally reaching the crest of the mountain in full daylight.
They looked down through drifting clouds to Azatlan. In a valley between vertical mountains, surrounded by rolling hills and a patchwork of fields, the village straddled the sun-flashing thread of a stream. The asphalt road came to an end at the central square. A dirt track continued north to the next range of mountains. Another road cut to the west and disappeared into the cliffs and forests. Other than the asphalt highway, Azatlan had no paved streets.
In the morning light, the whitewashed church and rows of houses gleamed. Smoke drifted up from kitchen fires. Azatlan seemed to be a vision of peace and simplicity from another time.
But the long lines that streaked the fields west of the village destroyed the illusion.
Blancanales scanned the fields with binoculars. "See those tire tracks? Cutting across..."
"Yeah," Lyons agreed. "They've been landing planes there."
"Don't see a building big enough to serve as a warehouse." Blancanales swept the eight-power optics over the dirt roads. "But they could be trucking the stuff into the mountains..."
"Question is," Gadgets interrupted, "why would they have an arsenal out here? Ain't exactly a central location."
Nodding, Blancanales returned his binoculars to the case. "And what for?"
Descending the winding road, they left the pine forests. Fields of withered brown corn covered the lower slopes. No one hoed the rows. No families lived in the scattered houses of packed earth and stone. A skeletal dog saw the Dodge and the pickup approaching and fled into the burned ruins of a house. The whitewashed walls of another house showed the scars of bullets. Lyons watched the devastation pass, his mind raging.
This is why he had come. To fight the monsters who murdered families.
Lyons thought of the Manhattan Marxists who had denounced the new president of Guatemala for arming the village militias.
As a result of the American refusal to supply the Guatemalan army with spare parts for their helicopters, the army could not respond quickly to terrorist attacks — Communist and desconocido— against remote towns and villages.
Unlike rural people in the United States, the farmers and workers in the mountain villages had no rifles or shotguns for self-defense against Communist raiders or the death squads. The cost of a good rifle or shotgun exceeded what a subsistence farmer could earn in a year.
The new president confronted the problem directly. Despite the violent opposition of conservatives in his country, the president issued the Guatemalan army's old semi-automatic Garands and M-l carbines to the peasant militias. With the assistance of Army trainers, the people in the isolated villages formed self-defense militias. The violence against the innocent stopped.
But North American Marxists and misguided humanitarians protested. Through international organizations, they attempted to deny the Guatemalans the rights that protected the citizens of the United States, the constitutional right to defend their family and home against marauders, criminal or Communist or fascist.
Here, in this remote mountain valley, the Nazis had defeated both the army and the people of Guatemala. Lyons wished he could take the editorial writers of The New York Timeson a drive through this devastation. What would they write when they returned to the comfort of their high-security apartments and police-patrolled streets?
At the outskirts of the village, they came to a checkpoint. Four soldiers in the camouflage of the Guatemalan army lounged in the shade of an avocado tree.
Luis stopped the car at the crossbar. A soldier reading a magazine looked up from the pages, then wandered over to the Dodge. The soldier glanced at Luis and Lyons and Senora Garcia. He leaned on the short end of the crossbar to raise the other end. Lyons saw the lurid cover of the soldier's magazine. Pornography, with the title printed in English.
Seeing the pickup approach, the soldier left the crossbar up for Gadgets and Blancanales. He returned to his magazine, not even looking up as the second vehicle passed.
Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Those soldiers weren't Guatemalan."
Blancanales answered. "Two of them were Puerto Rican or Cuban. I don't know about the others. Quiz the Senora again."
"Definitely an international operation," Lyons added, then clicked off. He turned to the woman in the back seat. "Now you'll take us to your contact."
Her hair was matted from sleeping on the seat. Her face was puffy. She nodded. "The captain of police. I take the messages to him."
"And does he take the messages to Unomundo?" Lyons asked her.
"I don't know."
"Whenever you've come out here, have you seen mercenaries in the village?"
"Yes. No — I see them on the roads. Sometimes in Azatlan."
"There a place where they hang out? A bar? A brothel?"
"I take the messages to the captain of the police. I know nothing of these other things. I know nothing. I tell you a thousand times, but you do not hear."
"Same story," Lyons radioed Blancanales. "She takes it to the police. But if the local cops are any good, they'll know where the place is, even if Unomundo won't tell the police captain. We'll put questions to them."
Low-gearing through the village, they saw boarded-up windows, streets without people. In the central square, no vendors displayed goods or vegetables or meats in the market stalls. A face peered quickly from a window, then a shutter slammed shut.
Patterns of bullet holes dotted the whitewashed church. Sheet-metal doors bore the dents and holes of autofire. Across a dirt street from the church, an Anglo pro-fascist talked with a policeman. The Anglo wore an unfamiliar uniform, not green camouflage like the other mercenaries but gray. The poli
ceman and the mercenary looked up at the approaching car and pickup truck. Lyons turned to Senora Garcia and warned her: "We're walking straight in. You make a problem, you die on the spot."
As Luis parked, Lyons watched the policeman and the mercenary. An M-l carbine leaned against the wall of the police station. The mercenary wore a Colt .45 in a black nylon holster and web belt. The two men returned to their conversation.
Lyons warned Senora Garcia one more time. "We've got your children and your husband back in the city. Walk straight in, help us get the man we want, and you can go home to your family."
Leaning over the seat, Lyons put his knife to the plastic bands looped around her ankles. He freed her ankles, then her wrists.
She threw open the door, screamed. "Comunistas! Ayudeme!The Communists took me prisoner! Kill them!"
A three-round burst from the Atchisson tore the policeman and the pro-fascist apart, spraying blood and shredded flesh over the white wall.
Sprinting after the woman, Lyons caught her in the doorway of the police station. He smashed the rubber-padded steel butt of the assault shotgun down on her head to stun her.
Inside, a policeman grabbed a long-barreled Remington shotgun from a wall rack and pumped the action. A blast of steel ripped his head away. Lyons scanned the room. He saw a heavy locked door with a barred window. A second door had a sign: CAPTAIN.
Kicking the police captain's door, Lyons ducked back. Three pistol shots popped inside. Plaster fell as the bullets punched into the ceiling.
"Give up or die!" Lyons yelled.
No more shots came. Lyons threw a chair into the office. No shots. He snapped a glance inside, and saw an open window.
Autofire suddenly hammered the outside wall, slugs breaking the window glass and punching into the interior of the office. Lyons took another quick look into the room to make sure the captain was not waiting against the wall. No one there.
