by Dick Stivers
Crowding around the door, the Indians received crates and packages. Thomas organized the men into a line. Pairs of men lugged rope-handled crates to the sand. Other men carried plastic-wrapped packages. Stenciled words identified the contents: Canned Meat, Vitamins, Medical. In minutes, crates and wooden boxes and packages covered the beach.
Splashing through the shallows, Lyons and Blancanales peered in the side door. Blancanales shouted over the chatter and laughter, “Any special instructions?”
A pilot looked up from unlashing a stack of crates. It was the copilot of the DC-3 from three nights before.
“Well, say. How you all doing here? Looks like you’re making friends and influencing people.” He stared at Lyons. “Looks like you lost your soldier suit.”
“What about messages?” Blancanales repeated.
“Maybe next time. This is the last of it. Now where are my passengers?”
The copilot shoved three more crates to the door. Indians took two, Blancanales and Lyons the third, a box marked Radios. Several Indians heaved the second Cuban into the plane. Then the stretcher men loaded the wounded aboard.
“Those Cubans give you any trouble,” Lyons called out, “tell them to take a walk!”
“Will do!” the copilot laughed. With a salute, he jerked the door closed.
Starters whined inside the engines. All the men retreated from the plane. The engines roared to life, throwing spray as the seaplane maneuvered. In the center of the river, the engines shrieked with maximum rpm and the plane soared away.
Silence returned to the forest. In the distance, birds whistled and cried out. Insects droned. On the beach, Gadgets sorted the cargo. Lieutenant Silveres surveyed the equipment and provisions.
“Weapons. Ammunition. For many more men and much more fighting. You must tell me now what you intend. My country, is only eight or nine kilometers from this place.”
Gadgets called out to his partners. “Hey, over here. The lieutenant wants a briefing.” Lyons and Blancanales joined them.
“Do you continue into my country?”
“What we have to do,” Lyons said, “is to get out of here before the slavers send another plane to gas us. We need to make distance.”
“I ask you again,” the lieutenant’s voice rose with impatience. “Do you continue into my country?”
Able Team did not answer. Biancanales glanced to Lyons and Gadgets, finally nodded an answer. Yes.
“You say you have a directive from thiscountry,” the lieutenant said. “But by what authorization will you invade mycountry?”
“Perhaps,” Biancanales grinned, speaking softly, calmly, “we can speak to your superiors later today. Where do they wait for us? We will meet and discuss…”
“Do not joke with me, gringo!” the lieutenant jerked the G-3 autorifle from his shoulder.
Biancanales had Silveres by the throat in an instant, kicking the officer’s feet from under him to dump him flat on his back in the sand. He put a knee into his chest, screamed down into the young man’s face, “Don’t you ever call me that again! My first language was Spanish. I grew up in the barrio. I had to learn English in school. If it’s anyone here who’s a gringo, it’s you. With your arrogance and petty, pompous macho… You stupid little college punk — you must really think you’re blessed by God.”
“Wow, Lieutenant,” Gadgets laughed, “you live dangerous. I never saw anyone get the Pol pissed. You got life insurance?”
“What are we going to do with him?” Blancanales asked, standing. He helped Lieutenant Silveres to his feet, slapping sand from his uniform. He picked up the G-3 and shook sand from it, then returned it to the young officer. “Really, we have to come to an understanding with you, Lieutenant.”
“I thought we had an understanding,” Lyons stepped up, buckling his Python’s shoulder holster. “We need soldiers, we need allies. We’ll need your help today or tomorrow, but all you’re doing is giving us trouble. Can’t you trust us for a day or two?”
“Do you think it so strange that I defend my country?” the lieutenant asked.
Exasperated, Blancanales shook his head. Finally, he spoke slowly, with fatherly patience. “Lieutenant, if we were the enemies of your country, would you be alive now?”
“The United States said it was the friend of Argentina, then betrayed Argentina to the British Imperialists.”
Lyons stopped the argument. “This punk’s a dunce. He does not understand the real world of Mack Bolan. For the sake of the survival of good and gentle people, we have to explain it to him. But let me keep it simple. Here it is. Step out of line again — like last night, like this morning — you die. No talk, no philosophy. A bullet. Understand? No, don’t answer. We don’t have time to hear it. Thomas! Assemble the men!”
They divided their force into two groups. A small group of men escorted the mercenary prisoners back to the tribe. The prisoners marched in a line, a long rope linking their necks. They carried loads of food, medicine and weapons for the people. In a few days, Thomas promised the defeated mercenaries, planes would take them out of the Amazon. Though many of them faced extradition and trial for crimes in other nations of the world, the mercenaries cheered their fate. They preferred any prison in the world to horror and death from Chan Sann.
The main force crossed the river, then camouflaged the cruisers. They continued north overland. Able Team and the Xavante warriors carried loads, also. As they expected to recruit more fighters en route to the slaver camps, every Indian carried extra weapons lashed to their new green-patterned packs. The made-in-Taiwan load-bearing equipment bulged with H&K magazines and boxes of 12-gauge double-ought. A team of Indian warriors carried the group’s only heavy weapon, an M-60 machine gun and a thousand rounds of belted cartridges. Weight and the lack of tripods for the gunboat weapons — the other M-60s and the full-auto 40mm grenade launchers — forced the fighters to leave the other weapons behind.
Zigzagging up a ridge of hills, they reached the crest as the day’s temperature became intolerable. A heat-scorched ridge line viewed the snaking river to the south and west. To the north and east, another river shimmered in the blazing sunlight: the Mamore River, the natural boundary of Rondonia, one of the western states of Brazil. The Mamore coursed northwest and joined the Madeira, the waters of the Andes finally draining into the Atlantic Ocean.
“Take a break!” Gadgets gasped, stooped under the weight of his radios and electronics. He ignored the panorama, collapsing in a tangle of leaves and grasses.
“By the map,” Blancanales told them, “if we push all day, we’ll make the Mamore with one or two hours of daylight left.”
Gadgets jumped up shrieking. A mass of thousand-footed worms covered his pack and clothes. Flailing at the millipedes, he hopped about in distress. Lyons pulled off Gadgets’s backpack and swept the crawling insects from his collar, brushing them out of his hair.
Whipping off his sweat-soaked cameo shirt, Gadgets finally shook off the last of the millipedes. The Indians around them laughed at the North Americans’ antics.
With a glance at the map, Lyons pulled his poncho out of his pack. “Forget it. I haven’t slept in three nights.”
Lyons sat and closed his eyes.
He opened them as someone shook him. He blinked at the afternoon shadows around him. In only an instant, the sun had dropped in the sky, the air cooled. Lyons stared around him in disbelief.
“Ironman, we go,” Thomas told him.
Gathering his equipment and weapons, following Thomas down the Indian trails, Lyons moved in a dream state, his mind not yet awake. Fragments of afternoon light blazed in deep shadows, polishing leaves with sharp brightness. Exotic butterflies fluttered in the rain forest’s tangled growth, their wings in shadow, then suddenly flashing like neon, then lost again in the triple-canopy darkness. Lyons walked through the per fume of flowers and the stink of jungle slime. Ahead of them, he saw the line of warriors.
Another smell drifted to him, the foul stench of
decomposition. In a few more steps, he saw the terrible source.
The Indian men pulled bodies of men and women and children from the dead brush. Around the clearing, every plant and tree had withered, yellowed. Yellow leaves carpeted the earth. The sunlight came unfiltered through the stick-bare branches of dead trees.
“Chlorine gas,” Gadgets told him. “Point man found them a minute ago. We’ve counted fifteen people so far. We found a cookfire, a few pots and pans, one old shotgun. I guess the slavers spotted them.”
Steeling his gut, Lyons glanced at the bodies. Chlorine had seared the eyes and mouths of the Indians, had attacked their lungs. They had died screaming, their faces contorted, their mouths wide, caked with horrible wastes. Death — agony twisted their limbs. Now, after days of heat and humidity, the gases of decomposition ballooned their bodies, stretching taut the chlorine-seared skin.
“What are your men doing?” Lyons asked Thomas.
“We bury families.”
Lyons shook his head. “No time.”
“Then we burn…”
“Can’t risk the smoke. The slavers are looking for us now, no doubt about it.”
“Evil to leave the people for animals and birds.
“The longer the slavers live, the more people they gas, the more Indians they take for slaves. If we stay to bury these dead, more people die. That, surely, is the greater evil. I’m sorry. Please explain to the men. We must continue.”
Thomas went to the men and told them what Lyons had said. To a man they protested, waving fists toward Lyons. But after another minute of talking, Thomas persuaded the men to leave the dead. One of the Xavantes pulled a feathered amulet from his neck and dropped it on the bodies. The line of men left the scene of mass murder.
Jogging forward, Lyons paused beside Lieutenant Silveres. “You saw that back there? We’re after the scum who gassed those people. And we’re going to waste them. I don’t care if they’re in Bolivia, or Brazil, or France. So if we have to cross your sacred national boundary, don’t give me any crap.”
“The defense of Brazil is the responsibility of the Brazilian army. We don’t need meddling foreigners to protect our people.”
“Don’t need our help? Then why didn’t youprotect those people?”
Without giving the proud young officer time to reply, Lyons ran forward and took his place behind the point man.
16
As punishment for gas-bombing the gunboat, Chan Sann crucified the pilot. He did not listen to the French pilot’s explanations about Williams’s reported coordinates. He did not allow the pilot the mercy of suicide.
The French mercenary hung on a cross of planks, spikes driven through his forearms and feet. Flies and carrion beetles feasted on the raw flesh of his wounds. From time to time, the man returned to consciousness as the insects attacked his eyes. Incoherent with shock and agony and sunstroke, the dying pilot thrashed his head to shake away the insects, crying out in French and English. Sometimes he raved in Latin, intoning Catholic prayers, snatches of old hymns. As the sun sank, his motions slowed. They became spasmodic as blood and strength drained from him. Before he died, the beetles would eat his eyes.
Chan Sann sat in the shade of a rubber tree and watched the pilot suffer. Other Cambodians crowded around him, taking cold bottles of Brazilian beer from an ice chest. They chattered in their language, talking of the war against the bourgeoisie during the rule of their Communist master, Pol Pot. They had killed — with torture, Kalashnikov slugs, shovels, or starvation — all opposition to their regime. The opposition included doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil clerks, businessmen, shop owners, farmers, mechanics, laborers, Catholics, Buddhists, soldiers, officers. All educated Cambodians had died. All Cambodians who could read had died. All Cambodians who would not murder their neighbors, parents or children had died. Any failure to demonstrate unquestioning joy in the creation of the perfect Marxist state meant death.
During the three-year rule of Pol Pot, three and a half million of the counterrevolutionaries died, one-half of the population of Cambodia.
Now the Communist exiles joked of the extermination, describing tortures and mutilations that had amused them. They placed bets on when the pilot would die. Chan Sann did not participate in their game. He watched the French pilot with calm disdain.
“Tay!” Chan Sann spoke suddenly.
“Yes, Commander!” One of the Cambodians sprang to attention.
“He is a weakling. He will die soon. We will make him suffer more. Your knife, here…” Chan Sann made a motion.
“Yes, Commander!”
Running across the clearing, the soldier unsheathed his knife and slipped the blade into the abdomen of the naked Frenchman. With the skill of practice and experience, he dragged the tip of the knife across. The pain brought consciousness to the prisoner. The gash yawned, spilling out intestines. Flies descended in a cloud. The Frenchman looked down at the horror inflicted on him. He shrieked and he wailed.
Chan Sann smiled.
A walkie-talkie interrupted their game. Stopping his soldiers’ giggles and chatter with a wave, Chan Sann pressed the radio’s transmit key. “This is Chan Sann. Why do you disturb me?”
A voice blared. “Colonel Gomez has captured a river boat of workers. Wei Ho wants them for labor.”
“Ready the helicopter.”
*
As the forest shadows became enfolding darkness, the warriors neared the river. They had left behind the hills and ridges two hours before. The trail wove through swamplands and hardwood groves. Lyons drove Gadgets and Blancanales to the limits of their endurance. Even the Indian warriors moved slowly in the heat and humidity. Swarms of insects followed the line of men.
“Lyons!” Gadgets gasped, stumbling under his heavy backpack of electronics. “Where the hell are we racing to?”
“The river.”
“It’s less than an hour until sundown,” Blancanales reminded him. “If we don’t make camp, we’ll have to put out lookouts and sentries in the dark.”
“We’ll camp at the river. Keep moving.”
Using the forced march as a training exercise, Able Team had issued the new hand radios to Thomas and several Indians. Spreading out ahead of the main group, the Indians scouted parallel trails, looking for the easiest path, always watching for signs of slaver patrols. After the novelty of the “far-speaking boxes” wore off, the point men provided both security and speed. Marshes or dead ends never forced the heavily loaded main group to double back. Lyons rotated the point men, giving all the Indian warriors the opportunity to experiment with the twentieth-century devices.
Thomas received a radio message and translated it for Lyons, “One man smells the river.”
“Great, pass the word along. We rest at the river.” Lyons called back to Gadgets and Blancanales. “Ten or twenty more minutes.”
“Joy to the world!” Gadgets gasped.
Another radio report came in. Thomas listened, then told Lyons, “There is fighting. He hears machine guns.”
“How far?”
Thomas keyed his new hand radio to question the scout.
“He thinks it might be on the river.”
“Tell him to keep going until he can see who’s shooting at who.”
Another scout buzzed Thomas. He listened for a moment. “It is steamer boat on the river. They fight with the army.”
“With the army? Brazilian army or what?”
Thomas shrugged. “We go see.”
An aerial sound cut off their talk. The line of men stared up at the dark branches above them. The distant rotor-whap of a helicopter came to them, then faded away. The warriors double-timed for the river.
Calling Lieutenant Silveres forward, Lyons briefed him as they followed Thomas. Despite his heavy pack, Lyons moved fast, striding up rises, jogging down. Breathless and sweat drenched, the young officer stumbled under his load of weapons and ammunition. But he never asked for rest.
“The river’s a few minutes ah
ead,” Lyons told him. “The point men have it in sight. They told us there’s a steamer boat fighting with the army. They don’t know who’s on the steamer. They don’t know what army it is. But we know who’s in the helicopter. If it’s your people up against the slavers, they might need help mucho pronto. So be prepared to introduce us. And do us a big favor, will you? Say something good. I mean, lay off about the CIA and gringos and the invasion of Brazil. Please? Por favor?”
“I will tell…” the lieutenant gasped out words as he struggled to keep up with Lyons “…my superiors… what I have seen. You have… risked your lives… to help these Indians. I respect that. You rescued me from the foreigners. You fought the foreigners… But the Mamore marks the boundary of Brazil. Only the army of Brazil… will fight in Brazil. It is not my decision or the decision of my superiors. It is the law. Because you come from a rich… military power… does not give you the right to fight in other countries. We are not cowards like the Europeans. The army of Brazil… and not the United States Army… defends our people.”
“Hey, kid, that’s reasonable. But understand, we’re Colonel John Phoenix’s men from the United States of America and we’re wiping out slave-takers. If you can help us do it, great. But to me, that river’s only water.”
“Armed foreigners entering Brazil become the enemies of Brazil. When you cross the Mamore, you become my enemy. I will do my duty.”
They heard the fire of automatic weapons. Lyons halted the line. A scout ran to Thomas. Thomas translated the report to Lyons and Lieutenant Silveres, “It is ended. The army take steamboat, take many farmers. We can do nothing.”
“What army? You mean slavers? Could your man see what’s going on?”
Thomas looked Lieutenant Silveres straight in the face, sneered. “I mean Brazilian army take steamboat. You go see what goes on. It happens now.”
Advancing another hundred yards they came to a steep riverbank. Eroded by the flood current in the rainy season, a sheer dropoff overlooked a beach ten feet below and the river beyond. The line of men fanned out and crawled to the edge of the drop.