by Dick Stivers
Once they had entered the darkness of the subterranean passages, Nate finally spoke.
"You have been in the jungle before. Where?"
Blancanales numbered the wars and countries on his fingers. "Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia..."
"Bolivia, Brazil..." Gadgets added.
"Los Angeles," Lyons added.
Nate smiled at Lyons's joke. "I wish I had ten friends like you. We could have killed all the mercenaries."
"Doesn't say much for the quality of Unomundo's men."
Leading Able Team through the darkness of the caves, the ex-Marine answered with a sneer. "They are the best money can buy."
"What about you?" Lyons asked him. "Why aren't you working for Unomundo? Won't he pay your price?"
Lyons's question offended even the tolerant Gadgets Schwarz. "What an idiot thing to ask," he said. "Leave it to a cop to ask a question like that. Why don't yousign up with that Nazi warlord, Lyons?"
Nate spat out an answer. "Unomundo has a bounty on me. Ten thousand quetzales. That is ten thousand dollars, United States. And this is for me. A man with no country. But you, you are special.
Tres huevos de la Cia. I think he will pay a hundred thousand dollars for you. What do you think? Should I take top price? I take quick hundred thousand Q. I will never again need to cut wood or plant corn or shear sheep. My wife will not live in a cave, my son will have school..."
Blancanales interrupted with soothing words. "Our friend asked the wrong question. It's just that we can't understand your one-man war against these invaders."
Despite the questions and the argument, Nate never broke pace. He led them relentlessly upward through the cold darkness of the caves. "What is there to understand? I live in this beautiful place, these mountains, in the forest. If a thousand murderers and rapists with machine guns came to your home, you would fight, yes?"
"I'm sorry," Lyons apologized. "Sometimes I don't understand the obvious. I only wondered why you hadn't just left like all the other people."
"Someone must fight." Nate ended the talk by striding far ahead. From time to time, he flashed his light back to guide them.
Gadgets hissed to Lyons: "Be cool, will you? He's got real sensitive feelings. Besides, I think he's got a grudge against the CIA."
"I cannot figure him. He's an American, but he's been up here for years. Maybe he'sCIA. Maybe he's an agent who went crazy and disappeared."
"I don't care who he is," Gadgets snapped back. "He's our ticket to a quick hit. Don't piss him off."
"Until I know what his game is, we aren't secure. We don't know who he's working for."
"Dig it, dude, I too am a paranoid, but there is a limit." Gadgets jogged away from Lyons, leaving him to walk alone.
A few minutes later, they saw daylight.
"Wait here," Nate told them. "I check for men watching the cave, then I come back. It has happened before." He left the cave for the open air.
Lyons unholstered his silent autoColt. "I'm following him. He could be putting an ambush together."
Gadgets stared at Lyons for a moment, then turned to Blancanales. "Think we could kick his brain straight?"
Blancanales shook his head, no. "He was a policeman too many years. Go, Lyons. Go out there. Satisfy your suspicions."
Pistol in hand, Lyons slipped from the narrow cave mouth. Blinking against the afternoon glare, he pushed a wall of pine branches.
Rotorthrob shattered the quiet. Squinting against the light, Lyons looked up.
A gunship swooped down on him.
13
As the Cobra descended on him, as he sucked down the last desperate gasp of his life, Lyons pointed the silenced Colt at the gunship's armored underbelly. He knew the slugs would not even scratch the armor, but he would not die without...
A hand knocked the weapon aside, the burst of .45-caliber hollowpoints flying harmlessly into the distance. Nate pushed the autoweapon into the dust and rocks. With the weight of his body, he held Lyons motionless as the Cobra dropped past them. He shouted through the rotor roar, a storm of dust and leaves flying around them: "It is nothing! They do not see us!"
Waiting until the noise and rotorstorm faded, they crawled through a tangle of brush and pine branches. The mountainside dropped away. Looking over the cliff, they saw trucks.
Hundreds of feet below them, gray-uniformed soldiers loaded heavy military trucks. The Cobra floated down. But the soldiers did not clear the area. As the gunship's skids seemed to touch the trucks, it veered sideways into the cliff face.
"What the..." Lyons started.
"There is a cave under here. A big cave. Many helicopters and trucks in there. Many buildings."
"And nothing's visible from the air." Lyons's mind raced ahead. "Munitions?"
Nate understood. He shook his head. "Separate cave. Very secure. Bring your friends out. They must see."
When Blancanales and Gadgets joined them on the ledge, Nate continued the briefing. "There is no way in through the mountain. Walls of concrete block the caves."
Blancanales nodded. "Have you been in there?"
"At first, before they had so many mercenaries. Not since."
"We could walk straight in," Lyons suggested. "Pass as mercenaries."
"There are many guards. Identity cards. Very difficult to… fake it."
"Time for air strikes," Gadgets suggested. Lyons and Blancanales knew he meant Jack Grimaldi, the Stony Man ace pilot.
Staring down at the mercenaries and assembled trucks, Nate shook his head. "In Laos, in the Co Roc mountains, there was a cave like this. The NVA put one hundred fifty-two mikemike guns inside, hit Khe Sahn every day for months. We tried B-52s, fighter bombers, Laotian mercenaries. Nada, only noise and dead men. Then us. Twenty-four Marines in, one Marine out. Me. The guns still hit Khe Sahn."
He looked to the three men of Able Team. "I tell you this, Secret Agents. If you want to hit this place, I will help you. Nothing you can think of will do it. But I can. It costs you one hundred thousand dollars. What do you say?"
"Maybe," Lyons answered.
"Yes or no?"
"The money's no problem," Blancanales told Lyons.
"That's not it. We don't know the options. Let's go get our prisoners. Put some questions to them before we talk plans."
"There is a lookout on the top." Nate glanced toward the peak. "We go there."
* * *
Sheep trails crisscrossed the near-vertical slopes. Guiding them through the pines and ferns, Nate paused often to peer at the soft grasses.
Then he found a rectangle of discolored moss. He motioned Able Team back. He took a bit of wire and string from his knitted bag.
He hooked the moss and stretched out the string. Twenty feet away, he went flat. He pulled the string. Nothing happened.
Leaving cover, they saw that a square of moss had flipped over to expose a small land mine. Blancanales recognized it instantly.
"Bouncing Bettie."
"They have many. They have killed many sheep."
Taking only a few more seconds, Nate found the safety pin and slipped it through the housing. He checked the underside for secondary detonators, then pulled the mine from the hole. He concealed it a hundred yards farther along the trail, where he could retrieve it later.
Continuing to the top, they heard shots. Nate directed them to an animal trail running under the bushes and small trees. They covered the last two hundred yards on their bellies. The shooting — single shots, sometimes an auto-burst — continued.
The observation post overlooked the valley. Plastic bags filled with dirt, stacked waist high, formed a rectangle. A camouflage-patterned canopy protected a squad of mercenaries from the sun.
The mercenaries sprawled in the shade, drinking beer and playing cards. One man scanned the late afternoon panorama of the valley, the road, and the far mountain with a telescope on a tripod. Another man with an M-16 sniped at birds soaring in the thermal updrafts.
Somewhere else on the mountaint
op, another rifle — a large-caliber weapon — boomed. The distant rifleman fired single shots, sometimes three quick semi-auto shots.
"These guys," Lyons whispered to the others, "are definitely jack-offs."
Blancanales and Gadgets nodded. Nate pointed toward the sound of the other rifle. Leaving his partners to watch the squad at the observation post, Lyons followed Nate along the ridge line. They crawled, then walked silently through the lengthening shadows.
They found two mercenaries in aluminum lawn chairs. A stack of sandbags supported the shooter's exotic Walther sniper-rifle as he squeezed off shots at a target over four hundred yards away. A spotter with a telescope sat beside him, calling his hits.
Lyons put his binoculars on the target. He saw a black-and-white life-size photograph of the president of Guatemala. As he watched, the rifle boomed three times. Three holes appeared in the photograph, all in the center of the president's chest. Lyons passed the binoculars to Nate.
The spotter spoke into a walkie-talkie. Down-range, a blond soldier left cover to change targets. He stapled another life-size photo of the President to a splintered sheet of plywood.
"This fellow is a serious shooter," Lyons told Nate. "He's bound to have some interesting information. Like why he's using that particular target."
"And the others at the lookout?"
"We'll take these two, and we'll get out without those lizards even knowing we were here."
Nate grinned. "We go, spook man."
Lyons dusted off his gray uniform. He slung his Atchisson behind him. The silenced .45 went into his belt at the small of his back. He left his Python in his shoulder holster. He left cover.
He made no effort at silence as he walked up behind them. As the rifle boomed three times, the spotter turned.
"Now what?"
"Special interrogation session," Lyons told him, smashing him in the side of the head with his heavy-barreled Python. The other man grabbed at a flap-holstered Colt. The Python came down on his skull.
Nate rushed to the stunned men. In seconds, they tied the hands of both men behind them, then linked their prisoners together with ropes around their necks. Nate ripped off one man's shirt, tore it in strips, used it for blindfolds and gags.
"And the man there?" Nate pointed to the soldier changing the target.
Glancing to the western horizon, Lyons guessed they had an hour until dusk. "We got two prisoners."
"Can't leave him. He has a radio. He will..."
Lyons took the rifleman's chair. He examined the Walther 2000 semi-automatic rifle. The bulky, ultramodern weapon utilized the "bullpup" configuration; the designers had placed the receiver group and the magazine in the buttstock, behind the grip and trigger housing. Looking at a box of cartridges, he saw that the rifle fired not 5.56mm or 7.62 NATO slugs, but Winchester .300 Magnum. He found the safety and magazine release, then dropped out the box magazine to check the cartridges. He slapped back the magazine.
Taking the walkie-talkie, he pressed the transmit, said only: "Ready?"
"Yes, sir."
He put the rifle to his shoulder. As the spotter moved away from the new photo of the president of Guatemala, Lyons put the reticle of the Leatherwood 3x-9x ART scope on the center of the man's back.
Three slugs bounced the soldier off a tree. He died before he fell.
"That'll teach him to hang around in the line of fire."
A few seconds later, after gathering up all the ammunition and packing the Walther rifle into its fiberglass and foam case, Lyons and Nate dragged their prisoners off. Nate slung his crossbow. They cut away from the lookout and followed a trail through the deep shadows of pines and chest-high ferns. Lyons walked point with his Atchisson. He buzzed Blancanales and Gadgets and whispered into his hand-radio.
"Pol, Wizard. Pull out. We got our prisoners."
Shouts came from the lookout post. Automatic fire ripped through the pines. They jerked the tied and blindfolded mercenaries to cover. Lyons spoke again into the hand-radio.
"What's going on?"
No answer. Pulling the groggy, gagged prisoners along by the rope, Nate crouch walked to Lyons.
"To the trail!"
"Moving."
Forcing the prisoners to run blind, the four men thrashed through the ferns. As the prisoners fell, Nate dragged them to their feet and kicked them on. Lyons dropped to one knee and scanned the tree lines fifty yards away.
Nothing moved in the half-darkness of the pines. The autofire died to sputters, then single shots.
Using the prisoners as a shield, Nate ran into the open ground. Jerking at the rope linking their necks, beating them with his G-3, Nate staggered across the rocks while Lyons watched the tree line over the sights of his Atchisson.
Two mercenaries ran from the tree line. They looked behind them as they stumbled into the open. His back to the clearing, one mercenary fired a quick burst into the pines. He did not turn until Lyons killed the first man.
Whirling, the second mercenary emptied his M-16's magazine in one sweeping burst. His rifle's action locked back as high-velocity steel from Lyons's Atchisson punched a pattern of wounds through his body.
Nate and the prisoners had dropped to the ground. One man had managed to get a hand free of the bindings. Lyons saw the prisoner beat at Nate.
Autofire came from the tree line, the high-velocity slugs shrieking across the clearing. The half-free prisoner jerked the other to his feet. They stumbled for the trees.
His gray uniform bright with blood, Nate tried to rise to his feet. Aimed fire puffed dust around him. Falling on his face, Nate lost his G-3. He tried to roll to cover, screaming as he rolled onto the crossbow.
Lyons sprayed the tree line with steel, changed magazines as he sprinted to Nate. High-velocity slugs zipped past him. A slug slammed into the fiberglass rifle case slung across his back. His shoulder hit the rocks. He rolled, ran again.
More bullets tore past him. He dived into the grass. Ricocheting bullets hummed away as he searched for Nate's wound, pulling aside the tangle of shattered crossbow and straps and torn uniform.
He saw a long, curving slash in Nate's back. "You're okay, you're all right. It's not a bullet, you're just bleeding. Just a cut..." He grabbed the G-3 and pushed it into Nate's hands.
Nate grunted and tried to rise. Bullets threw dust and stones. Lyons saw a gray uniform in the tree line. He sighted his Atchisson. He fired a single shot, but too late. The form dodged back.
Taking Nate by the collar, Lyons jerked him from the ground with his left hand while his right hand pointed 12-gauge blasts at the muzzle flashing in the trees.
"Take cover, spook!" Nate gasped. "I can walk..."
"Then move it!"
Nate swore in Quiche as pain twisted his face. He staggered and fell. Lyons jerked him to his feet.
"Big bad Marine," he said. "Bet you're calling for your momma. Can't even walk."
Slugs tore past. Lyons saw a long, low fold in the grass and rocks. Still holding Nate's collar, Lyons threw himself forward, almost wrenching his arm from the socket as he jerked Nate into the shallow gully. The two men rolled in the dust. Disentangling himself from Nate and the G-3 and the fiberglass Walther case, Lyons looked for targets in the tree line.
A long burst of auto fire ended the firelight. Blancanales called out.
"It's all over here."
Lyons sprinted into the trees. He saw the sniper and spotter still running. Coughing dust, his shoulder aching, he pursued them. Still linked by the rope around their necks, one man's hands still tied behind his back, they stumbled through the undergrowth. He caught them in thirty seconds. He dragged them back to the others.
Blancanales and Gadgets tended to Nate's wound. Gadgets looked up at the returning captives.
"Great. Two of them." He pointed toward the lookout position. "Nothing up there's alive. It got dangerous."
"What happened?" Lyons asked him. "When I buzzed you..."
"Everything cut loose." Blancan
ales ripped open Nate's blood-soaked shirt. "Another platoon came up the trail. They joined up with the observation detail. I'm about ten yards away, hoping I'm in-visible under a bush. One of them comes over and makes like a dog just as you buzz me. He heard the radio."
"No wounded?"
Gadgets shook his head. "All the wounded are dead. Then I gave their telescopes and binocs the gravity test. Over the cliff. The radio set, too. I kept some walkie-talkies for electronic countermeasures, maybe."
"How bad am I hit?" Nate asked.
"The bullet killed your crossbow." Blancanales held up the bullet-splintered stock. "But the bullet didn't get you. It's this..."
Blancanales touched a four-inch shaft of wood protruding from Nate's back. "It's a splinter from your crossbow, jammed in under your shoulder blade, maybe into your ribs. You want some morphine before I jerk it out?"
Lyons stopped Blancanales as he slipped out a syrette of painkiller. "We don't have time. Besides, we can't have him stumbling around stoned."
As he spoke, Lyons put his knee on Nate's back. He grabbed the splinter. As he pulled, Nate screamed, convulsed with pain: "Goddaaaaaaaaaaamn you! You torturing bastard!"
Lyons laughed. He gazed at the bloody blade of hardwood. "I don't know what you're screaming about, didn't hurt me at all."
"Here, take some antibiotics." Blancanales passed Nate a palmful of pills.
"Forget the post-operative care," Lyons snapped. "We got to move."
Despite his injuries, Nate walked point down the mountain pathways. Only he knew the trail. He pointed his tiny 9mm Ingram ahead of him, his right arm bound against his body with strips torn from a dead merc's uniform. Lyons stayed close behind with his Atchisson.
"Thanks, spook man," Nate told him. "For helping me."
"Then stop calling me 'spook man.' We're not with the Agency."
"I know. No CIAwould have helped me. But I call you anything I want. Don't like it, go home."
"Anything you say, Geronimo."
Nate laughed. "You and me, we could be friends."
The captured sniper and spotter slowed them as they raced against dusk to the crack in the stone above the cave-fortress of Unomundo. Finally, Nate found the entrance by moonlight.
