by Dick Stivers
"What the hell you doin', soldier?"
A cook stood on the walkway. The guy wiped his hands on his stained apron as he looked down at Nate. Lyons stayed flat on the rocks.
"Leak in the joint," Nate told him, pointing to the emergency valve.
"Where?"
"Here. You can smell it."
The gray-haired, overweight cook waddled over to the pipe. "I didn't notice anything."
Nate stood as the cook bent down to look.
"Hey, you're hacksawing the goddamned..."
Grabbing the mercenary's head by the ears, Nate slammed his head into the valve again and again, using the valve handle to crush his forehead. He shoved the body under the mess hall.
"Close," Lyons hissed.
"A few more minutes."
"Cut it. But don't open the valve yet. I want to confirm that he's here, right now, in the cave."
"How?"
"I'll do it." Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Pol. Wizard. Charges are set. He's cutting the line. I'm going to go confirm on the man."
Blancanales answered. "Next bus, we're coming in."
Lyons left Nate sawing at the line. Forcing himself to walk slowly, his eyes swept the vast cavern for the blond, half-German Unomundo. At the executive helicopter, a Hispanic in a tailored Italian suit, gold flashing on his wrist and fingers, supervised the work of a crew of mechanics.
At the steps to the rows of offices, two well-dressed Hispanics with Uzis questioned a mercenary soldier. They would not let him pass. The mercenary shouted past them to one of the fascist leaders leaving an office: "His men won't let me go back to my office."
The mercenary from the office, his fatigues starched and pressed, a badge of rank on one shoulder, called down to the bodyguards: "That soldier's on the staff. He's authorized."
The bodyguard stood aside. Lyons realized that none of the mercenaries he saw on the office walkways carried weapons. He saw no M-16s, no side arms.
Lyons returned to the mess hall. Following the walkway past the kitchens, he saw that the rear of the building butted against the irregular stone of the cavern's south wall. He slipped into the dark space.
The shadows became darkness. He stumbled over pipes and scraps of wood and sheet metal. Light from office interiors shone through ventilator grilles.
A voice came from the ventilators of a second floor. The speaker raved in Spanish. Lyons damned his ignorance of the language. Yet he knew he heard Unomundo. The rhythms, the exclamations, the modulation of the tones indicated the professional rhetoric of a politician. But he had to confirm his guess.
At the end of the office building, he crossed to the barracks. He rushed to the end of the barracks walkway. Twenty feet away, the bodyguards stood at the steps to the offices.
Keeping his right hand on top of his Atchisson's receiver, his left hand in the open, Lyons jogged to them. Their eyes narrowed as the mercenary with the auto weapon rushed to them. Lyons saluted.
"Got a message for Unomundo. The peonesare talking. They are part of a CIA plot. My officer continues the interrogation. Would our commander want to question the Indians?"
The Hispanics listened without speaking. One looked to the other, glanced toward the offices. The second man nodded, then ran up the stairs.
"Wait," the bodyguard told Lyons.
"I'll come back. I must get my colonel."
Flashing another salute, Lyons jogged to the mess hall. He glanced back. The bodyguard watched him. He went around the corner to the kitchens. He saw no one in the area. In a few seconds, he squatted beside Nate.
"He's here."
Only a fraction of a centimeter of steel linked the two sections of pipe. Nate grabbed the valve and wobbled it, attempting to break the pipes apart. Lyons kicked the pipe, once, twice, stood on it and jumped.
The pipe broke. Lyons spoke into his hand-radio.
"We've cut the line. And we've confirmed Unomundo's here. Are you ready?"
"Affirmative," Blancanales answered. "We're in. The men are moving into position."
"This is it. Over."
Nate opened the valve. A colorless gas rushed from the severed pipe. Looking through the spreading gas, they saw the shadowy rocks waver as the flow spread. White frost formed instantly on the valve and pipe and the rocks.
Lyons and Nate ran. At the mess hall walkway, they forced themselves to slow to a quick walk. Lyons pointed to the center of the complex.
They strode toward the helicopters. Lyons looked back once at the offices. Bodyguards, pro-fascist mercenaries and Guatemalan army officers — the traitors' chests bright with medals — crowded from a door. All the Nazis attempted to speak with one person, a tall, blond man with the sharp sculpted features of an aristocrat. Wide-shouldered bodyguards knotted around him.
"Unomundo," Lyons told Nate.
Nate glanced back at him and smiled. "Soon he burns in hell."
A bodyguard spoke with Unomundo. The Hispanic pointed into the night to the searing light of the welding torch torturing the two Quiche men. Unomundo spoke with a mercenary officer. The officer led Unomundo and a knot of bodyguards down the steps.
Lyons and Nate maintained their stride. They passed Hueys and Cobras. Technicians loaded rocket pods. Other men pumped aviation fuel into the helicopters' tanks. Nate smiled to Lyons.
Leaving the brilliant light of the cavern, they saw a flashlight blink from the top of a parked bus.
The crowd of drunken mercenaries laughed. A scream rose, wavered, faded. Lyons's hand-radio buzzed.
"Give the signal!" Gadgets told him, his voice seething with anger and frustration. "Time to put that goon gang down!"
The rotorthrob of a helicopter approached from the sky. With his thumb on the transmit key, Lyons looked up at the black silhouette of a Huey against the stars. He looked back to Unomundo.
Leaving the cavern, Unomundo and his bodyguards hurried to the horror. The Hispanic bodyguard who had listened to the faked message about the CIA and the Indians pointed to Lyons. Unomundo and all the bodyguards turned.
Lyons hissed into the hand-radio. "Wizard, do it! He's getting out!"
Swinging the barrel of his Atchisson around, Lyons flicked down the safety and sprayed full-auto high-velocity steel at the Nazi warlord.
A great wave of flame churned from the cavern.
17
A roar came, then heat, but no explosion. Uncompressed and too cold to mix with the air, thus lacking the correct oxygen-to-gas ratio, the liquid petroleum gas — unlike a true explosive — failed to flash instantaneously into the heat and combustion wastes. Yet the gas had spread under and beyond the kitchen and mess hall areas, to the command offices, and to the barracks and the helicopters.
In the first milliseconds of the fire, half the cavern was enveloped in a single flame. The initial instant of fire heated the inches-thick layer of cold gas that coated the floor of the cavern, causing the unburned gas to expand rapidly into the flames. As the heat of the flames accelerated the rate of combustion, and the heat produced churning air currents that intermixed the flames and expanding gas with more oxygen, the flames rose still higher. This happened in the first fifteen-hundredths of a second after Gadgets Schwarz detonated the radio-fused plastic explosive.
The exploding charge also tore open the steel tank that held hundreds more gallons of liquid gas. Encountering the superheated atmosphere, the fuel expanded into gas. In the absence of oxygen — the available atmospheric oxygen had been consumed by the first flash of flame — the unburned gas surged outward. When it mixed with the atmosphere, it also flamed.
Though the Nazi personnel did not suffer dismemberment, all of the personnel in the south half of the cave received instantaneous third-degree burns. Then the wave of flame enveloped the helicopters and aviation fuel.
Av-gas became superheated. It burned, radiating a flash-temperature of three thousand degrees Centigrade. Every combustible object or substance — wood, hoses, insulated wires, tires, fuel, clothing, hair, skin
fat — burst into flame.
In the center of the flames, the staff offices became the crematorium of the Nazi commanders and the handful of Guatemalan army officers who had betrayed their country to Unomundo's European doctrine.
The hired commandos sleeping in the steel barracks knew a few seconds of confusion and agony as they woke to red hot walls and superheated air. When they screamed at the shock of their waking nightmare, they scorched their lungs, and died choking seconds later. As the flames and heat continued, the glowing barracks baked the dead men's bodies. Fat flowed and burned, contributing to the inferno.
Mercenaries and technicians in the open felt only an instant of pain before their bodies became ash.
Outside, a few of the mercenaries near the mouth of the cavern turned to the roar. The heat-flash melted their faces. Others threw themselves down. Those near the fire received third-degree burns, their uniforms first smoking, then bursting into flame.
Unomundo sprawled under the corpses of three of his bodyguards. Stunned by a head wound caused by a .33-caliber steel ball that had punched through the head of one of his bodyguards to tear through his own left cheek and ear, Unomundo saw the diffused glare of the inferno. He did not suffer burns. The bodies of his guards had saved him. He heard screams, then autofire from a dozen rifles.
Knowing that his lifelong dream had been shattered only hours before he made it reality, he lay still. Now he plotted survival.
Heat searing their backs, Lyons and Nate sprinted into the shelter of the parked trucks and buses. A Quiche saw them, mistook them for mercenaries. As he raised his M-16, another Quiche knocked the rifle aside, a single shot ripping through the side of the bus.
"Get the Nazi clothes off, spookman!" Nate shouted at him over the screaming and shooting and the roar of the burning cavern complex. He ripped off his shirt to expose his light skin and bandage of red cloth.
"Politician!" Lyons called out.
"Your armor's up here!" Blancanales answered.
Climbing the side ladder to the cargo rack of a bus, he saw Blancanales on the bus roof, snapping single shots into Nazi mercenaries. Every shot killed. Blancanales sighted on two meres dragging a burned comrade to the cover of a truck, and he triggered a 40mm grenade. Steel-wire shrapnel shredded the three.
"How many still alive?" Lyons yelled, going prone beside his partner. Blancanales had already discarded his own Nazi shirt. He wore his black bat-tie armor and a red Indian shirt whose sleeves would identify him in the firefight.
"Maybe fifty, sixty. Most of the ones doing the torture, some drivers, some officers."
Lyons took grenades and his heavy Kevlar and steel trauma-plate battle armor from the pack. He stripped off his gray shirt, started to put on the armor. He found one of Nate's hand-sewn cotton shirts folded inside the armor, the cotton fabric woven in the design and color of Marylena's Quiche village.
"The shirt's for you," Blancanales told him. He touched the cloth of his own shirtsleeves. "Magic."
"With Kevlar and steel plates, it's magic."
"What about Unomundo?"
"Got him. Put him and his bodyguards down with a full-auto chop job," Lyons grinned. He slapped his Atchisson. "Lyons's Crowd Killing Device."
Lyons pulled on the red shirt, then the battle armor, and he watched the Huey troopship that hovered above the scene. The troopship stayed at a thousand feet, only observing.
Blancanales glanced at Lyons's new uniform — black armor, red sleeves pinstriped with yellow and purple, black nylon bandoliers and gray pants.
"No one's mistaking you for a Nazi, most definitely."
Gadgets came up the ladder. He also wore a red shirt under his armor. "Did we kill that Nazi?"
"The Ironman did."
"Where's the body?"
Lyons pointed. In the light of the inferno, he saw the tangled corpses of the bodyguards. "In that pile."
Blancanales jammed another 40mm round in the M-203 fitted under his M-16. "Now they die again."
The 40mm grenade hit one of the corpses. High-velocity steel tore the bodies a second time.
"War's over, gentlemen," Lyons told his partners. "Now it's payback and bodycount."
With a salute, he went down the ladder. His Atchisson cocked and locked, his thigh pockets heavy with grenades, he jogged between the rows of vehicles, searching for targets.
The body of a mercenary lay in the narrow walk-space. Point-blank autofire had killed him, then machetes had dismembered the torso. At the end of the bus, an Indian fired quick bursts from his M-16. Lyons neared him and called out: "Qui-chay, qui-chay." To identify himself, Lyons spoke the only word he knew of their language.
As he dropped out a spent magazine, the fighter nodded to Lyons. Slugs slammed into the sheet metal of the bus, windows broke above them as a mercenary sprayed auto-fire.
Taking cover behind the double rear wheels of the bus, Lyons dropped flat and peered under the frame. He saw a muzzle flash. More bullets tore through the bus.
The mercenary also had the shelter of heavy-duty wheels. Though return fire from the Indians had flattened the truck tires, the steel-belted rubber and the steel rims stopped the 5.56mm bullets from the M-16s. Lyons had a solution.
Konzaki had included two magazines of one-ounce steel-cored slugs with Lyons's 12-gauge ammunition. Dropping the magazine of shot shells out of his Atchisson, he slapped in the magazine of slugs. Sighting on the muzzle flash, he fired three quick blasts.
The chambered shell sprayed the mercenary with double ought and Number Two steel shot. Then the Atchisson's bolt fed the first of the slugs into the chamber. Traveling 1,200 feet per second at four inches off the gravel, the first slug tore through the tire, then continued through the gunman's body. The second punched through the wheel to again rip the Nazi's body. The autofire stopped.
Dashing out, the Indian ran to the other side of the truck. Lyons followed. A burst of fire from the Indian's M-16 shattered the dead merc's skull.
Lyons and the Indian continued, covering one another as they ran from walkspace to walkspace. They passed an Indian with a bullet-torn arm. He sat against a truck wheel, binding the wound with a strip of cloth. Lyons paused to check the man's injury for arterial bleeding. Despite the pain, the Indian smiled and waved Lyons past.
Indians fired at the two trucks in the center of the parking area. The two tortured men still lay on the steel beams. In two groups, mercenaries clustered behind the protection of the trucks. Several autorifles flashed.
Lyons's hand-radio buzzed. "What goes?"
"One of them's radioing that helicopter," Gadgets told him. "Politician's listening now..."
Blancanales's voice came on the frequency. "Unomundo's still alive."
"What?"
"Wounded but alive. The helicopter's coming down for him."
A voice called out from trucks in Spanish. Nate shouted back. Lyons crept down the line of fighters to the North American ex-Marine.
"What do they want?" Lyons asked.
"They say our tortured men are still alive," Nate said. "They'll let them live if we let them go. Or they'll execute them."
"It's Unomundo..."
"I saw you shoot him."
"He's alive." Lyons pointed up at the Huey troopship. "He radioed the helicopter."
The voice called out again in Spanish. Nate listened. Then he spoke to his men in Quiche. The men moved position so they could see their mutilated friends.
One Indian called out in Quiche.
The blinded, scorched boy moved his head, and in a weak, quavering voice called back to his friends. The Indian shouted again. The boy answered, then lay back.
As one, the Quiche men raised their rifles and sighted. Autofire from ten rifles ripped the dying man and boy, ending their suffering.
Lyons jerked the pin from a fragmentation grenade and threw it past the trucks. A second grenade went under the nearest truck. As he pulled the cotter pin from a third grenade, shrapnel from the first one tore into the c
owering mercenaries. The second punched steel through the truck's gas tank.
He threw the third, then a fourth grenade, and shouldered his autoshotgun. A mercenary ran from the flaming truck. He never reached the cover of the second truck. Sighting on the center of his back, Lyons fired.
A one-ounce slug threw the mere forward. Bullets from the Indians' rifles ripped the falling man. Exploding grenades spun the corpse again. The chaos of flames and flying shrapnel drove the other Nazis from cover.
Silhouetted against the flames of the complex that burned behind them, fascists sprinted in all directions. Autofire from the rifles of the Quiche men sprayed the running Nazis.
Rotorthrob drowned out the noise of the firefight. As the gray-painted Huey dropped from the stars, the door gunner strafed the buses and trucks. Glass shattered, slugs hammered steel, ricochets slammed into sheet metal.
"Nate!" Lyons shouted. "Spread them out. The helicopter's coming down for Unomundo."
Directing his friends in Quiche, Nate moved through the line, shoving men, pointing. Broken glass showered his back as he divided the men into groups. The men went to widely spaced positions along the lines of buses and trucks.
Dust that was orange with reflected flame swirled against the orange light of the blazing complex. Gravel pelted Lyons's face as he scanned the sprawled corpses and running men for the blond, fair-featured Unomundo. The Huey moved low along the scraped earth, the door gunner raking the vehicles.
A 40mm grenade missed. It exploded beyond the helicopter. The Huey spun and rose straight up. Tracers from an M-60 hammered the tops of several buses. Gasoline flamed. Autofire from the ground shattered the Plexiglas window of the Huey's side door.
Lyons sighted on the rectangle of the side door and fired a blast of steel shot. The tracers from the door gunner whipped about wildly, an orange line of unaimed slugs arcing into the sky. Lyons emptied the Atchisson, then slammed in the box mag of one-ounce slugs. He sighted on the Huey, and waited.
