Warlord of Azatlan at-6

by Dick Stivers

  Lyons dashed outside. The captain of police lay dead outside the window. As Lyons arrived, Luis fired a burst through the man's head, disintegrating the skull.

  "You dumb bastard!" Lyons screamed at him.

  "He tried to escape."

  Rushing back to the front entrance, Lyons looked for Gadgets and Blancanales. He did not see their pickup truck. He keyed his hand-radio.

  Blancanales kicked down the door of an abandoned house. He moved to a window and smashed out the nailed-closed shutters. Gadgets carried in the captured M-60 machine gun.

  The window looked out onto the road into town. Blancanales keyed his hand-radio to answer Lyons.

  "We're on the other side of the square. We're..."

  The jeep raced toward the sound of gunfire at the police station. Its fascist force of four leveled their rifles to fire across the square at Lyons. Gadgets sighted the M-60 and pulled the trigger.

  Slugs slammed the jeep. The windshield shattered. The continuous line of high-velocity 7.62 NATO punched through the mercenaries in the front seat and continued through the bodies of the men in the back. Gadgets held the trigger back, the heavy weapon jackhammering in his hands, Blancanales guiding the belt of cartridges. Tracers passed through bodies, ricocheted off steel, streaked into the distance.

  The jeep hurtled out of control through the square, the soldiers aboard dead, their chests and heads masses of torn meat. Gadgets swung the M-60 around and gave the jeep a last burst through the side. Gasoline flamed. The jeep crashed into the square's stone fountain. It burned.

  Blancanales keyed his hand-radio. "Got them."

  Lyons whooped into his radio. They heard his voice simultaneously from their hand-radios and from across the square. "Let's get out of here!"

  Dragging the unconscious woman to the Dodge, Lyons threw her in and slammed the door. Luis ran from the alleyway. He got in and started the engine. Lyons glared at him as he accelerated backward.

  "You could have taken the captain alive."

  "Why should the fascists live?" Luis asked. Whipping the wheel around, he jammed the shift into drive and put the gas pedal to the floor. Tires screeched as the stench of burning rubber filled the car.

  "Not the highway!" Lyons shouted. "West. Take the dirt road to the west."

  The Dodge careered through the narrow streets, bouncing on its heavy-duty suspension. Luis whipped the steering wheel from side to side to swerve around potholes. Rocks gouged at the oilpan and undercarriage. Blancanales and Gadgets followed only seconds behind.

  They left Azatlan at sixty miles an hour. Passing through dry, untended cornfields, the well-maintained dirt road went due west toward the forest. In minutes, they had passed over two hills and left the village far behind.

  Clusters of abandoned houses, their walls scorched, their burned roofs collapsed, dotted the fields. Rutted lanes linked the houses to the road. But Lyons saw that trucks had not followed the lanes. Instead, tire tracks scarred fields hand-tended and nurtured for generations. He spoke into his radio.

  "We're cutting for the tree line. Konzaki said these Nazis have helicopters. We've got to get out of sight."

  "Second the motion," Gadgets answered.

  "There!" Lyons pointed to a narrow dirt lane cutting between two abandoned cornfields.

  Slowing, Luis eased the big Dodge between two walls made of piled volcanic stone. Metal shrieked as rocks scraped the bodywork. Lyons snapped a full magazine into his Atchisson. He thumbed more shells into the spent magazine, then replaced it in the bandolier.

  Blancanales drove straight across the cornfields. Bouncing and slamming over the rows, the pickup overtook the Dodge. Luis maintained the best speed he could without destroying the car. They passed stands of banana and avocado trees. In the yards of abandoned farms, unpicked fruit broke the branches of small trees. The lane meandered from farm to farm. Every group of houses had been burned. Walls were pocked with bullet and grenade-fragment scars.

  They reached the pines. The forest showed the care of generations of woodcutters. No brush or fallen branches tangled the forest. Trees grew in spaced intervals. Near each stump, the peasant foresters had planted saplings to replace the harvested tree.

  With the transmission in first and the accelerator floored, the torque of the Dodge's engine pulled the heavy sedan up the grassy slopes of the forested foot-hills. Luis maintained an angle almost parallel to the hillside. Soon the Dodge tilted sideways at forty-five degrees. Every bump and lurch threatened to roll the car.

  But the pines did not screen them from airborne observation. Lyons called his partners.

  "Think the pickup can keep going uphill?"

  "Not much," Blancanales answered.

  "Time to walk."

  Luis found the best overhead cover and parked. Blancanales stopped beside the Dodge. Able Team assembled their gear. In addition to the gear issued by Stony Man Farm, they now had the weight of captured weapons and ammunition. Gadgets carried a folding-stock Galil rifle. Lyons packed an Uzi captured at the roadblock as a backup assault weapon.

  Unfolding a satellite map of the area, Blancanales showed Luis a safe route back to the highway. "Over this mountain, follow the ridgeline of the next line of hills east. Even with the woman slowing you down, you should reach the road before dark."

  "She will not slow me."

  They knew what Luis intended. Lyons shook his head.

  "Don't you kill her..."

  "Why do you protect the fascist whore?"

  "Let Unomundo take her," Lyons said. "Give us a few hours head start, then let her go where the meres can find her. They'll be searching for us, but they'll find her. People in the town saw her lead us here. Think of it as justice."

  "Tell me of justice! They took machetes to my baby, then to my wife. Her feet, her legs, her hands, her arms. I will not give this whore to Unomundo. She is mine. She will suffer myjustice."

  Lyons went to the Dodge. He jerked the woman from the car. A shove sent her staggering down the hillside. "Run! This is the last chance you get."

  She sprawled in the grass. Blood matted her hair. Her throat was choked with sobs. Crying, she stared around her at the men she thought would kill her.

  But the three men of Able Team shouldered their packs and walked into the trees. Marching through the cool wind-swayed shadows of the pines, Lyons turned.

  He saw Luis open the trunk of the Dodge. The young man took out a machete and a tangle of rope. Luis moved toward Senora Garcia. The Nazi courier staggered to her feet and stumbled away. Luis pursued her down the hill. Lyons turned away and followed his partners into the mountains.

  They heard screams.

  "He's chopping her up," Lyons told Gadgets and Blancanales.

  Rotorthrob drowned out the screams. Instinctively, Able Team dropped into the dusty grass. Each one of them looked up to see a Cobra gunship skim the treetops.

  Blancanales squinted into the branch-broken sky as the throb diminished. "They couldn't have spotted us!"

  But as he spoke, the rotornoise changed. The Cobra was returning.

  10

  Wheeling against the sky, the Cobra gunship dropped down to treetop level. The ripsaw sound of mini-Gatlings firing six thousand rounds a minute of 7.63 NATO struck a particular fear in Gadgets and Blancanales. During the Vietnam War, they had seen the mini-Gatlings of gunships reduce People's Army of Vietnam soldiers into nauseating heaps of chopped flesh and rags. Now, in the Sierra de Chuacus of Guatemala, a Cobra came at them.

  Fire flashed from the gunship's rocket pods.

  But the rockets exploded three hundred yards downslope. Gasoline flames rose into the sky.

  "It's Luis they spotted!" Blancanales shouted out. "Not us. They're hitting the cars."

  "Time to make distance." Lyons broke into a jog.

  Laboring against gravity and thin oxygen, they force-marched uphill. They followed woodcutter trails overgrown with grass. Behind them, the Cobra ripped into the mountainside again and again with
its mini-Gatlings. Flames sent a black column of smoke into the clear morning sky.

  The ridge crest offered a vista of the valley. They dropped their packs and found concealment. Binoculars revealed the Cobra's markings. On the gray-painted fuselage, the black letters stood out: UNO.

  From the mountains to the west, gray troop trucks raced into the valley in a cloud of dust. One truck stopped to offload a platoon of gray-uniformed soldiers. Two other trucks cut across the fields, their wheels leaving deep ruts.

  "The goons on the road are the blocking force," Blancanales told Lyons. "The other two squads will sweep down from the hills. We have to watch for troopships dropping ambush teams up ahead of us."

  Circling the flaming truck and car, the Cobra fired two more rockets. Metallic fire enveloped the hillside.

  Gadgets whistled. "They ain't messing around. White phosphorous."

  "Well, sports fans," Lyons ended their minute of observation, "we're wasting time. Think Luis got away?"

  Blancanales shook his head. "Ashes to ashes."

  They left the ridge crest. Following overgrown sheep trails along the south face of the mountain, they left the Cobra and the burning forest miles behind. The pines grew thicker. Clouds swept over the mountain slopes. Able Team walked from brilliant midday sunlight to swirling mist to cool shadowy forest. Like flames in the half-light, the red and pink and soft purple of the orchidlike flowers called Bromeliad graced branches above the trail.

  Walls of black volcanic stone stopped them. Hiking north, they returned to the ridge crest that overlooked the valley of Azatlan. They crouched in a tangle of ferns to consider their next move.

  Lyons pointed to the valley below them. "If we follow that road..."

  "Unomundo's meres will spot us," Blancanales told him.

  Lyons offered another idea. "If we can find a trail up those cliff faces, we might come down behind the base. It only took a few minutes for his troops to show up once they got the alarm. I figure the base is maybe five miles to the west. What's the vote? We climb?"

  Gadgets nodded. "Beam me up, Scottie, I'm tired of walking."

  Laughing, Able Team searched for a trail. When they found the pathway leading up the cliffs, what they saw stopped their jokes.

  A macabre display faced them.

  An M-16 rifle with a twisted, corroded receiver had been jammed butt-down into the rocks. A skull and arms had been wired to the foresight, the wire securing the upper arm bones together like the horizontal of a cross. The bones of the lower arms and hands dangled down. The skull and hanging arms created a crab creature with a grinning face and empty, staring eye sockets. Cloth torn from gray fatigues added a bow-tie beneath the skull. Shreds of sun-withered flesh and sinew still clung to the bones.

  "Oh, man…" Gadgets shook his head. "Mucho, mucho weirdo."

  "One of Unomundo's goons," Lyons decided. He stepped closer.

  "DON'T!" Blancanales shouted out. The ex-Green Beret pulled Lyons back. "Stand back, just stand back."

  While Gadgets and Lyons watched Blancanales surveyed the dust and rocks. The rifle and bones stood a few steps to the side of the trail. Blancanales circled around the rocks that held the rifle's plastic stock. He nodded to himself. Pointing into the rocks, he told them: "Don't move. Look around for any sinkholes in the trail."

  "Booby traps?" Gadgets asked.

  "Probably not on the trail. People with sandals have walked the path in the last day or so. But there's a land mine in front of Mr. Bones here and a grenade attached to the rifle."

  "Someone around here," Gadgets said, circling a gaze at the pine forest and volcanic cliffs, "doesn't like Nazis…"

  "And they're willing to do something about it," Lyons mused, playing with the philosophy, with his recent thoughts.

  "Schwarz, look at this," Blancanales said. "Doesn't this look like something the Rhade would do?"

  "What a flash! A freaked-out Montagnard spook show to make the 'Pavin' jump and twitch." Gadgets meant the People's Army of Viet Nam. "Most definitely indigenous ju-ju."

  "Hate to break up this trip down memory lane," Lyons interrupted, "but us foreigners are standing out here in the open. Just like Mr. Bones there did, once upon a time."

  "Yes, Mr. Lyons," Blancanales agreed. "That is a point. We go."

  Grunting with the weight of their gear and weapons, they climbed high above the valley. A cool wind chilled the sweat that soaked their camouflage fatigues.

  Sometimes clouds touched the sheer cliffs, like huge surges of white water breaking against a seawall.

  The mist concealed them for minutes, shaded them from the searing tropical sun, then swept past as the gentle wind carried the clouds away.

  Far below, through their binoculars, they saw trucks on the road. Even with the eight-power optics, Azatlan remained only a pattern of white specks. Lyons scanned the panorama of valley and hills and forest. He grinned to his partners.

  "No matter what happens, this is great. I'd pay to come here."

  Gadgets nodded. "Government work has its advantages."

  Steel clinked on stone. In an instant, the three men disappeared into the jagged rocks. They waited, their weapons ready, off safety, their trigger fingers outside the trigger guards.

  Three Indians — a young boy, a girl, and their mother — descended the trail. The woman, with a basket of fruit balanced on her head, wore a resplendent huipileof iridescent purple and red, the purple shoulders zigzagged with electric lines of red and pink and sky blue. She had a plastic mesh shopping bag tucked into the red and purple sash around her black skirt. Like the mother, the girl wore the same purple and red huipileand black skirt.

  The boy wore white pants and a black hand-woven shirt. He ran along the trail, chasing lizards with a machete. Weaving through the rocks, he came face-to-face with Lyons.

  Laughing at the boy's surprise, Lyons lowered his Atchisson. The boy swung the blade with both hands at Lyons's head.

  Lyons rolled back. He deflected the blade with the muzzle of his autoshotgun. The boy pressed the attack, raising the blade high above his head to chop down on the camouflage-clad foreigner.

  Kicking the boy in the chest, Lyons knocked him down. The little girl screamed, the mother whipped a Colt Government Model from under her huipile.

  Blancanales voice boomed: "Alto! Par favor! No estamos soldados de Unomundo! Amigos! Amigos de Guatemala, venimos aqui con ayuda para ustedes!"

  Cajoling the woman in Spanish, Blancanales finally persuaded her to lower the Colt. A four-way interrogation developed as he questioned the three Indians, the Indians questioned Blancanales, and the Indians questioned one another in their language.

  Lyons and Gadgets watched as their partner displayed a bullet hole in his captured uniform. Blancanales pointed out the tiny entry hole, the rinsed-out bloodstain, then the tear where the exiting slug and flesh had exploded outward. He stepped over to the other two North Americans in camouflage uniforms, and pointed out the holes and bloodstains to the Indians. He explained to his partners: "These people know all about Unomundo. He's been using the local men for forced labor. Sometimes for target practice. The boy thought you were one of the mercenaries because of your blond hair. He thought you were alone, so he tried to kill you. Nothing personal."

  "Will they help us?" Lyons asked.

  "Most definitely," Blancanales smiled. "All these bullet holes make us guests of honor."

  "Ask them who did Mr. Bones," Gadgets suggested.

  Blancanales asked the woman. She made a nasal-guttural Indian sound in her throat and shook her head. He translated: "I don't think she knows."

  The Indians led them up the path. Gadgets struck up a friendship with the boy when he demonstrated his silent Beretta on a lizard. The boy had started after the creature with his machete. Gadgets stopped him. Slipping out the autopistol, Gadgets gripped the weapon with both hands and shot off the lizard's head. The only sound was the rush of the subsonic bullet through the air, and the noise of the bullet hitti
ng the rocks and whining away.

  The boy laughed. He held out his hand for the pistol. Gadgets shook his head as he returned it to his shoulder holster. The boy looked downcast. Gadgets held up one finger, the boy nodded.

  Checking the fire-selector, Gadgets helped the boy grip the pistol. He fired a shot at the rocks. They heard only the ricochet. Gadgets took the pistol back as the boy laughed and jumped with joy.

  He and the boy continued ahead of the others.

  Together they walked point. The trails cut along the vertical face of the cliff, angling always upward. Once, Gadgets peered over the edge. He looked down on the others' heads a hundred feet below him. If he kicked a rock off the edge, they would be in danger.

  Despite the climb, the miles passed quickly. The cool mountain air, the beauty of the valley and mountain, made the march a pleasure for the ex-Green Beret.

  Gadgets and the boy reached the top before the others. On the mountain crest, the ever-present moisture of the drifting clouds created a paradise of green, knee-high grass, wild flowers, and dense pine forest. Gadgets went to the cliff edge and keyed his hand-radio.

  "Shangri-la calling. All is cool."

  "On our way."

  The boy whistled. Following the sound, Gadgets walked along the cliff. The boy waved to him from the incomplete frame of a house. Built only a few steps back from a sheer thousand-foot drop, the front window — framed but with no glass — had a hundred-mile view.

  Sitting down on the weathered flooring and piles of hand-sawn planks, Gadgets saw three mountain ranges. Smoke from the burning forest where Luis had died grayed the valley of Azatlan. But the next valley had clear air. He saw green patchworks, the thin line of a highway. Perhaps thirty miles away, smoke rose from a village, only the smoke visible, the houses and streets and churches lost in the hills and forest.

  The horror of Unomundo seemed so far away, beyond possibility. Yet Gadgets knew what he saw was the illusion, and that the terror of Unomundo was the reality. He looked at the unfinished house. Apparently, Unomundo had driven them out.

  You'll get yours, Mr. Nazi, Gadgets muttered to himself. I'm gonna sic the Ironman on you. You'll never forget him. But then again, maybe you'll get lucky and just drop dead of fright.