by Dick Stivers
Brazilian soldiers — traitors, worse than mercenaries because they betrayed their uniform and their fatherland — worked at the back of the steamer, jumping from the rear deck to the patrol boats. But no sentry paced the deck.
Starting to the stairs to the upper decks, his knees buckled. He staggered, held himself upright with the banister. He sucked down several breaths, listened for steps or voices above him. But the ringing in his ears deafened him. He looked behind him.
Blood marked his every step on the deck. He looked at his uniform. Glistening red covered the olive drab of his pants. Blood flowed from the piranha wounds on his side and back, mingled with the flows from the other bites and the knife slash on his legs.
He sat on the stairs and looked to the dark riverbank where the North Americans and Indians waited. He had cleared the sentries from only one deck. He could do no more. Slipping the plastic-protected hand radio from his pants’ thigh pocket, he wiped off the blood and water and tore open the bag. He switched on the power, keyed the transmit. “I am not a coward, but I cannot… wounds and blood. Can you see… Can…”
“Lieutenant!” A voice blared from the radio, like a shout on the silent deck. Silveres stared at the radio in his hand, found the volume dial, quieted the voice. “Lieutenant. Are you wounded?”
“Yes. I have killed the mercenaries. The mercenaries on the lowest deck. But I cannot… I cannot go to the other decks.”
“Your deck is clear? You see no one?”
“I killed them.”
“We’ll be there soonest.”
As he watched, the Chicano he knew as the Politico left the reeds, strode through the water, holding his rifle/grenade launcher and radio out of the silt-brown river. The lights on the riverboat illuminated him as if he walked on the beach in midday. He crossed the shallows quickly and climbed over the rail. He waved to the riverbank. A line of men followed, holding weapons and radios above the water. One Indian man jerked sideways, grabbed at something in the water. They ran through the water, scrambled to the deck. The Indians jerked piranha from two of their fellow tribesmen and the gringo who wore the native body-blacking and loincloth. A second line of men hurried through the shallows.
Hands touched the lieutenant’s wounds. The Politico examined the bites and slashes. Men with blood streaming down their bodies passed the lieutenant, their feet silent on the creaky old stairs.
Blancanales’s hand radio buzzed. “Politician here.”
“This is the Wizard. All clear on this side. I count eight dead gooks so far.”
“How’s the soldier?” Lyons said, his silenced Beretta in one hand, his radio in the other.
“No problem. He’ll have a few scars.”
“Is a war like this?” Lieutenant Silveres asked the two North American commandos.
The American he knew as Ironman laughed out loud. “What do you think this is?”
18
Their wet sandals silent on the warped, rotting decking, Lyons and three Xavante warriors slipped past the dark cabins of the first deck. Dripping river water and blood, their blackened bodies glistened in the railings’ brilliant lights. Blood flowed from two piranha bites on Lyons, a deep snip from the flesh of his thigh and twin semicircles of teeth punctures on his left elbow. Other men bled also, their blood spattering the walkway.
Crouch-walking beneath louvered ports, listening for voices or movement inside without pausing, they crept toward the cargo deck. Lyons stopped at the open door to a lighted cabin, took a look inside.
Clothes, shoes, books littered bunk beds. An Asian mercenary sat on a lower bunk, tearing open cardboard boxes, searching through the possessions of a family. Lyons chanced another look into the cabin. He saw no one on the bunk bed against the opposite wall. Gripping his Beretta with both hands, he stepped into the doorway. He sighted through the bunk’s steel frame to the mercenary’s head. He put the bullet in the Asian’s right temple. The body fell sideways on the bed, as if the man slept.
Continuing, they came to stairs. Shouts and cries came from the deck above them. Feet scrambled somewhere, the woodwork of the old steamer creaking. Lyons pointed to a Xavante, pointed to a shadow. He touched his eye, then indicated the flight of stairs. The Xavante nodded, stood in the shadow. Invisible, he guarded the stairs, his black-bladed machete in his hand.
Lyons watched the Brazilian soldier on the first patrol boat. He called to the cargo deck. A voice answered. Boots crossed the deck.
A patrol boat’s motor rumbled. Behind the windshield on the open bridge, a soldier cranked a steering wheel, then called out. A soldier stepped over the paddle-wheeler’s rail, carefully extended one leg to the gunwale of the patrol boat, shifted his weight to step across the gap.
Whipping up the Beretta, Lyons sighted with both hands. He waited an instant. At the moment the soldier transferred his weight to his forward leg, a 9mm subsonic slug shattered the knee. The soldier fell into the river, screaming for help.
Brazilian soldiers crowded the railing. A man ran to the rail with a rope, threw one end to the man thrashing in the water. Lyons dashed to the end of the walkway. He looked around the corner, saw no other soldiers on the cargo deck, squinted past the blazing lights on the rail, saw soldiers at the helms of the second and third patrol boats.
Taking five silent strides across the deck, Lyons raised the Beretta. He jammed the titanium suppressor against the head of the first soldier, sent a slug through his skull. The men leaning against the railing turned at the sudden movement, saw a black-painted six-foot-one wild man. The Beretta snapped three-shot bursts into their chests and faces. The fourth soldier grabbed at the G-3 slung over his shoulder. A Xavante stepped past Lyons and swung his machete with both hands. The severed head fell into the river.
A three-shot burst through the head dropped the nearest helmsman. Lyons stepped over corpses, sighted on the chest of a soldier on the second patrol boat. The soldier raised an autorifle. Lyons slipped in blood, sent a burst through the boat’s windshield.
Waving the muzzle of the G-3 at Lyons’s chest, the soldier pulled the trigger. Nothing. He jerked back the cocking lever even as three 9mm steel-cored slugs tore through his heart. A dead man’s auto-fire slammed into the deck and gunwale of the patrol boat as the man fell.
On the third boat, the helmsman took cover. Passing a stack of head-high wooden crates, Lyons heard the scuff of boots. A dying soldier fell at his feet, the back of his head spraying blood. He saw a Xavante dodge through the cargo, his bloody machete held high.
Auto-fire slammed into the crates. Lyons fell back, scrambling for cover. High-velocity .308 NATO slugs splintered wood, smashed through five-gallon cans of motor oil. Holstering his Beretta, Lyons slipped the Atchisson from his back and pulled back the actuator to strip the first round from the magazine.
Firing broke out on the upper decks. A Brazilian soldier flew backward over the third deck railing, crashing down on the crates, tumbling to the deck in front of Lyons. Alive, but badly wounded and disoriented, the man struggled to his feet. Lyons shoved him into the open. Auto-fire from the patrol boat spun the Brazilian.
Sighting on the muzzle-flash, Lyons fired three blasts. The 1200-feet-per-second steel balls disintegrated the fiberglass and plywood of the patrol craft’s gunwale. Lyons crouch-walked to another row of stacked boxes and fifty-gallon drums and checked out the deck of the craft.
In the glare of the aft rail’s electric lights, he saw a battered and impact-pocked G-3, a hand caught by a finger in the trigger guard. The rifleman thrashed ten feet away, his eyes and forehead gone, his right forearm gone, a hideous cry choking from his throat. Lyons raised the Atchisson to fire a mercy blast into the man’s brain but did not.
A Xavante with a Remington 870 crouched beside Lyons. Lyons hand-signaled for the warrior to cover him, then dashed to the rail and vaulted to the patrol boat. Holding the Atchisson at his hip, he stepped over the blinded and dying soldier, stole a glance inside the craft’s small cabin, whipped hi
s head back fast. A pistol shot flashed.
Stepping back three paces, Lyons put two blasts through the bulkhead, darted in as a wound-riddled Brazilian lurched toward him, a pistol rising. The Atchisson roared. The suddenly headless soldier bounced off a radio console, his one remaining shoulder and arm whipping about.
Lyons looked out the impromptu window in the craft’s cabin. Through the shredded plywood and hanging wires, he scanned the second patrol boat. A Xavante searched the boat. On the prow, concealed behind a canvas-covered, pedestal-mounted M-60, an Asian waited in ambush with a pistol. Lyons sighted on the mercenary’s head and blew it away. The Indian saw the headless corpse splash into the river. He looked up, his eyes searching the patrol boat for whoever had saved him.
“Xavante!” Lyons called out as he changed mags on the auto-shotgun. The Indian waved.
Feet thudded on the deck of the patrol boat. The wounded Brazilian’s hideous crying was cut off with the sound of a machete chopping meat. A warrior peered cautiously into the cabin, smiled to Lyons, motioned him out.
“Shadowman!” Gadgets called out from the rail of the third deck. “Did we make it?”
Lyons glanced back to the craft’s console. Steel double-ought and number two shot had smashed the metal and plastic and torn away a panel to expose circuitry. He stepped closer to check the power switch. Off. Lyons called back to his friend.
“No messages out.”
“Yeeeaah! Victory party time!”
*
Coarse featured, their hands gnarled by decades of working in the fields, the grandfathers spoke for family clans. Their wide-shouldered sons and grandsons stood behind ‘them. A barrel-bellied merchant spoke for another group of families. They argued and shouted, interrupting each other, some men leaning to within inches of Gadgets’s face to make their statements, all shouting Portuguese. Gadgets understood nothing.
“They want to avenge themselves on Gomez and the soldiers who are alive,” Lieutenant Silveres translated. A nurse, wife to one of the settlers, stitched the slashes in the young officer’s legs. The lieutenant spoke to the group of elders. They turned their shouting to him.
Blancanales cleaned Lyons’s piranha bites. He pulled back a flap of skin on Lyons’s upper leg to spray the wound with alcohol. Lyons went rigid with pain. The alcohol dissolved the genipap, leaving a splotch of Southern California tan surrounding the gaping tear.
“Looks like the fish liked that lizard lotion, too,” Gadgets joked to Lyons. Lyons ignored him, his eyes closed, his face set against the pain of the disinfectant. “But it could have been worse, you walking around in that water with only a jockstrap on…”
“Any of our men get hit?” Lyons gritted through clamped jaws.
“Hit by fish. But we took these slavers cold. No firefight here. We came in the side doors fast, caught them in across fire…”
Gadgets pointed to the wide doors on each side of the passenger lounge. “They had the passengers jammed in here, everyone down on the floor. Only the Gomez-men and the gooks standing up. Gomez saw his men dropping, saw us, went down on his knees begging. Mucho macho bad man.”
Now the lounge served as a hospital. Wounded men lay on the floor, tended by their families. Women comforted women assaulted by the slavers. A knot of grim-faced men stared at a door guarded by Indian warriors. Inside, ropes lashed Gomez and two soldiers to chairs. Of all the slavers, only Gomez, one of his Brazilians and a Cambodian mercenary survived.
Pale with blood loss, the lieutenant slumped. The nurse braced him, kept him from falling to the floor. Blancanales finished with Lyons, then eased the lieutenant down. Blancanales and the nurses eased the crowd of shouting elders back.
“Civilians! They talk without end, I cannot argue more with them,” the lieutenant sighed. “They want the traitors… They will not listen to the law.”
“First we interrogate the three of them,” Lyons said, “then the settlers can have them.”
“No!” The lieutenant bolted upright. “Gomez betrayed his country and his uniform. He will be judged and executed by the armed forces.”
“He take our women!” A young man shouted in broken English. “He kill my cousin. His wife alone now. With five children. We hang the colonel, cut off his balls and hang him!”
“I say give him to the people,” Lyons commented.
“No!” The lieutenant countered. “Military justice.”
Blancanales’s low, resonant voice interrupted the shouting. “If the settlers want revenge, good. But it will not feed the children or help the women who lost their husbands. If they kill Gomez, — they will only kill one slaver. They must still fear all the others out there.”
“What others?” the young farmer demanded. “We see all dead.”
“Gomez and the soldiers were only one patrol. There are many more soldiers in this region. Mercenaries. Killers. They take Indians to be slaves. They wanted you for slaves. Soon we go to attack them. If you want revenge, come. Then your families will be safe.”
“More soldiers? Of Brazil?”
“No!” the lieutenant shouted. “Traitors. Mercenaries in the uniform of the army of Brazil,” he explained in Portuguese.
Fear and hatred and rage pulsed in the faces of the men. Some of them rushed away to tell the others in the lounge. Women shrieked. All the men, even a few of the injured, crowded around Lieutenant Silveres and the foreigners, shouting, waving their fists.
“They want the rifles of the dead soldiers,” the lieutenant translated. “To defend themselves. Some of them want to know where the other soldiers are. To attack them. Others want the army to come. Others fear the army, because of Gomez.”
“Will you come with us?” Blancanales asked the crowd in Portuguese. “To attack the slavers?”
“Yes. We attack!”
Lyons grinned to Blancanales. “Okay, recruiter. Make a deal with these people.”
*
In the next half hour, Blancanales and Lieutenant Silveres negotiated an agreement with the settlers. Balancing the blood lust of the men against the concern of their wives, Blancanales stated that he needed boat pilots and dependable men to fire heavy weapons, machine guns and grenade launchers, at a distance from the actual fighting. He would not risk the lives of the family men in close fighting.
As payment, and to help the families of men murdered on the riverboat, the settler community would receive all equipment captured from the slavers — boats, weapons, radios and whatever the settlers found at the camp, except for equipment stolen from the government of Brazil.
A work party with lights and power tools left immediately on one of the PT boats. They would strip the heavy weapons and their mounts from the several slaver cruisers and airboats on the other river. Able Team wanted the weapons to be mounted on the fast PT boats.
Other settlers smeared black paint on the riverboat’s dinghies. The small aluminum boats and an aluminum canoe found in the cargo would take the assault force ashore. A blacksmith wired sheets of steel together to protect the men who would stay in the patrol boats, to machine-gun and bombard the camp from a distance.
Activity and war spirit replaced the settlers’ grief as the refloated riverboat, its lights and windows blacked out, steamed downstream. At the fork where three rivers met — the one from Bolivia, the Mamore and the river leading to the nuclear complex — the riverboat would go no farther.
Gadgets assembled his electronic gear in the mahogany-and-polished brass bridge of the old paddle-wheeler. First, he swept out the shattered glass, then wiped the captain’s blood from the walls and floor. The sixty-year-old white-haired immigrant from Zaire had died with a pistol in his hand, defending his ship and his passengers.
Switching on the recorder playback, Gadgets listened to the tape of slaver frequencies during the assault. While he worked, he heard static, the pops and squeaks of over-the-horizon transmitters disrupting the slaver radio frequencies, electronic noise from space. Then came the Asian voice, the words in textb
ook English, yet alien and macabre when Chan Sann spoke.
No. Gadgets shook away the thought. That’s superstition. It’s not in his voice. It’s what I’ve seen in the last three days. Now I can’t hear that Cambodian talk without thinking about dead people.
Chan Sann relayed a curt announcement of the capture of the steamboat to Abbott — an American, Gadgets judged from his Massachusetts accent. Other transmissions announced numbers of workers captured and the departure of Chan Sann by helicopter. But during the time of the assault, nothing. No clicking of a transmit key, no emergency call words, no voices cut off by rifle fire, nothing.
We did it. Took them out without a sound.
Spreading out his shortwave and scrambler on the captain’s chart table, he carefully positioned the units. He set a note pad precisely where his right hand would rest. Then the tape antenna went up the flagpole.
Keying codes, receiving automatic coded replies, Gadgets taped a burst of Stony Man intelligence transmitted from Virginia, relayed by satellite. He replayed it through the scrambler as he wrote out his own message on the yellow pad.
His writing stopped. He listened another moment, then rushed out to find Lyons and Blancanales. Replaying the tape, they heard a conspiracy of depravity and assassination beginning before they were born.
Now, that conspiracy threatened every living man and woman and child in the Free World, and unknown generations of the unborn.
19
Born the eldest son of a Chinese warlord, Wei Ho enjoyed the vast wealth of his clan. The Wei clan had ruled Jiangsu province from the time of his greatgrandfather, a puppet for the British invaders of China. After the English introduced opium and addiction to millions of Chinese, the Wei controlled the drug trade in their region. They reaped an unending harvest of gold. The family maintained an army of mercenaries to enslave the people of the province, enforcing their sovereignty through assassination and atrocity.
The first-born son knew only palaces, European tutors and luxury. After an education in the finest English prep schools and universities, Wei Ho traveled the capitals of Europe, tasting the life and vices of royalty and the very wealthy before returning to China to assume control of his clan’s drug trade in Shanghai.