by Dick Stivers
Static-distorted clicks answered. Blancanales keyed out a series of clicks. A series of clicks answered.
“The mountain and the electrical storm are breaking up the signal,” Blancanales explained. “But he knows we’re okay.”
“What happens when we go in?” Lyons asked.
“You suggested this. Don’t you have a plan?”
“Haven’t had the time to think that far ahead.”
Blancanales laughed softly. “Then give it some thought. You’re running out of time.”
“The radio down there. This is the gang the Wizard monitored, right?”
“Most likely.”
“So I figure their radio’s the same as the black box we found in the jeep. We’ll send out a call to Gadgets and the lieutenant. They’ll monitor it on the jeep’s radio.”
“But if it’s like the one we captured, it has a coded digital lock.”
“Oh, yeah… Ah, I don’t know what…”
“Face it, Carl. We’ll be on our own. Consider that before you open fire.”
“Yeah, yeah. But this ride is our ticket into the plantation. We got the chance to grab Quesada and drag him out.”
“Remember what the lieutenant told us. Concentric rings of defenses, electronic security, mines, bodyguards and militia on the inside, army react-units on call. Against two of us.”
“All those defenses face out,” Lyons said pointedly. “We’re going in quiet. If we can take Quesada, they won’t know what’s happening until it’s too late.”
“We… shall… see…” Blancanales pronounced.
Taillights flashed ahead. Simultaneously, Lyons and Blancanales went flat, pressing themselves against the bundles of cargo. Brakes squealed.
The bus sounded its airhorn. Soldiers shouted back. Downshifting with a lurch, the bus slowed to a crawl. Lyons looked over the side.
A rush of black water surged against the side of the bus. Branches and forest flotsam struck the sheet metal. The engine revved and the bus tilted upward. The taillights lit a wash of rocks and broken concrete.
With a roar of engines, the troop trucks ahead picked up speed. The clouds of diesel soot stank even in the continuing downpour. The bus driver floored the accelerator and slammed through the gears.
Bouncing and shuddering on the flooded road, the bus raced the trucks. Lights appeared to one side. Lyons saw a lantern on the steps of a turquoise cantina. Headlights revealed whitewashed buildings and a narrow street paved with stones.
The bus swerved and accelerated. Lyons pressed himself to the roof and watched with one eye as the bus paralleled the troop trucks.
Quesada’s assassins shouted from the bus windows, laughing and jeering at the soldiers. In the backs of the open trucks, with only plastic tarps around their shoulders to shelter them from the storm, the soldiers returned the jeers. Like two competing sports teams, the militiamen and the soldiers cursed one another and urged their drivers faster. The bus passed one truck, then the other.
Headlights illuminated the back of the bus. Belching diesel smoke, the bus pulled ahead of the trucks. The bus shook and rattled as it hurtled downhill. The tires sprayed mud higher than the windows. Careering through curves, the bus left the trucks far behind.
But other taillights appeared. Lyons raised himself to look ahead. In the headlights of the bus, he saw a jeep with M-60 machine guns mounted on pedestals, one in the front seat aiming forward, the other in the back. Four soldiers rode in the jeep.
The jeep’s brake lights flashed. The bus slowed. The jeep whipped through a turn, the bus following a moment later. Now the vehicles traveled on a paved road.
Kilometers away, the lights of a small city shimmered through the rain and wind. Lyons heard rumbling and squeaking. He looked back to see the troop trucks pass the turnoff without slowing. He nudged Blancanales to rise.
“Can’t be San Francisco Gotera,” Blancanales told him. “The town hasn’t had electricity for years.”
“Ricardo!” Lyons hissed.
The teenager spoke quickly to Blancanales. Blancanales turned to Lyons.
“That’s the plantation,” he said. “What happened back there on the road?”
“They had a race. That’s a jeep up front there. I think it’s the army officers. The troop trucks went straight. Going back to the garrison, I guess.”
“Like at the farmhouse.” Blancanales considered what he had observed. “The soldiers stay in the trucks, the officers work with the militia leaders. Perhaps the officers will be meeting with Quesada.”
On the paved road, the jeep and bus maintained a steady hundred kilometers per hour. Only a few minutes after they left the mountain road, they saw the lights of a guard tower. The jeep slowed. Taking a last look, the two men of Able Team saw a sentry open a chain link gate topped with razor wire.
Praying that the guard in the watchtower could not distinguish their forms among the bundles and boxes of gear, Lyons and Blancanales and the teenage Ricardo pressed themselves flat on the roof of the bus. The vehicle slowed to a crawl as it lurched over a series of speed bumps. Voices called out, then the bus accelerated again, following a hundred meters behind the jeep.
They sped through the defenses of the Quesada family. When distance reduced the lights of the watchtower to a smear in the rain, Lyons moved to the edge of the roof. Below, the rain-polished asphalt blurred past at a hundred kilometers per hour.
“Pol! Ready to jump? First chance we get.”
Blancanales spoke quickly with Ricardo. The teenager crawled to the edge and looked down. He looked at the two North Americans. “Este es loco…”
“Si, mucho loco,” Blancanales answered. “Pero no hay otro cosa a hacer.”
Mercury-arc lights on poles lit the road. Chain link and barbed-wire fences flashed past. Beyond the fences, a few lights shone from the shanties of lumber and tar paper that housed the plantation’s field workers. Aluminum prefabs sheltered the overseers guarding the campesinos. But none of the miltiamen in the guard posts braved the storm.
On the other side of the road, rows of coffee bushes extended to the distance. Lyons pointed to the coffee fields.
“In there.”
“If you jump now,” Blancanales warned him, “with those lights, at this speed, you’re dead twice.”
“They’ve got to slow down sometime. First time there’s enough darkness to cover us…”
The jeep and the bus continued at a hundred kilometers per hour on the brightly lit service road. Ahead, they saw a cluster of prefab buildings. Lights blazed over an asphalted area crowded with parked trucks and farm equipment.
Lyons cursed. “Slow down! Give us some shadows!” he hissed.
As if the driver had heard, the bus slowed. Lyons braced himself to jump. Blancanales pulled him back, and down.
“Guards, there!”
Two militiamen in yellow raincoats opened the chain link and razor-wire gates to the vehicle yard. The jeep went through the gate. The bus slowed, but too late. It entered the vehicle yard.
The three intruders on the cargo rack went flat. Around them, they saw garages and parked trucks. Sentries paced the asphalt. The hammering of an air ratchet stopped as mechanics watched the returning squad from open-sided service buildings. In the brilliance of thousand-watt lights, nothing in the vehicle yard went unobserved.
As the bus slowed to a stop, men from the death squad stepped out of the passenger door. They called out to the militiamen. The army officers in the jeep drove on to one of the prefabs.
Lyons and Blancanales and Ricardo waited. The militiamen had stowed equipment on the bus roof. The militiamen would unload the equipment.
Flat on their bellies, Lyons and Blancanales unslung their assault weapons. They waited for the sound of boots on the steel rungs of the ladders.
15
Another rattle of static came from the hand-radio. Gadgets Schwarz listened for code-clicks or the voices of his partners. But the electronic noise obscured any message. Gadge
ts keyed a response. The bursts of static continued.
As rain beat on the plastic tarp sheltering him, Gadgets strained his ears to decipher a message within the static. He fought panic as his imagination created a thousand horrors his partners could have suffered in the hours since they left.
On the captured black radio, he and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored Quesada’s cancellation of the ambush and the order for the squad to return to the finca.
Then Quesada warned his squad of assassins of the North American paramilitary agents.
How did Quesada know? Gadgets and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored not only the encoded Quesada communications but also the army frequencies. There had been no transmissions from the army react-force sent to collect the casualties and survivors of the guerrilla ambush. Only those soldiers had seen Able Team. Furthermore, Quesada’s warning to his militiamen never mentioned “North American mercenaries en route to Honduras.”
Had one of Quesada’s units captured or killed Gadgets’s partners?
Blancanales and Lyons had checked in several times.
When they had reached the crest of the mountain. After they had warned the journalists. And when they spotted the death squad.
No more messages came after that. Only a brief and uncertain exchange of static and clicks. Gadgets had responded to the noise by keying clicks in Morse code. But he received no return message or even a confirmation of his Morse signals.
Now more static-blurred clicks came from his radio, in no code or intelligent sequence.
He did not want to believe what his imagination told him about the transmissions: Blancanales or Lyons lay bleeding in some tangle of brush, too badly wounded to put out a coherent message…
Or someone played with the radios. The death squad had captured, maybe killed his partners and now the Salvadoran fascists experimented with the high-tech equipment,
Logically, he knew of many reasons for the breakdown in communication. Distance. The electrical interference of the storm. Damage to the radios.
The distance and lightning had not disrupted the checkin transmissions. Blancanales’s voice had come through clear. And too much time had passed since Quesada recalled his death squad. With the help of Ricardo to guide them, Gadgets and Lyons should have reached the top of the mountain, with or without a prisoner. Only the possibility of damage remained. But both radios damaged? Or one destroyed and the other damaged? Unlikely.
He had to know.
In the makeshift tent made by throwing a plastic tarp over the jeep and the pedestal-mounted M-60, he put his feet up on the jeep’s dashboard and considered the problem. He had few options. He and the lieutenant could not leave this position to search for his partners.
That left him with an electronic option. Boost the signal strength of his hand-radio. Could he use the longdistance transmitter with which they would signal Jack Grimaldi, the ace Stony Man pilot, in Honduras? No. That radio only transmitted digital code pulses on an ultra-high frequency. But Gadgets had other radios available. Pushing aside the tarp, he called into the rain and darkness.
“Lieutenant!”
The Salvadoran appeared. He had stood guard in the rain since nightfall. “Another radio message?”
“Nada. And man, that suggests a mucho bad problem.”
Gadgets hooked a penlight to the dash. In the weak light, he searched through his kit and pulled out rolled metallic tape antenna. The antenna went with the ultra-high-frequency, longdistance transmitter. He kept one end and gave the lieutenant the roll. “This is an antenna. It has to go up the mountain.”
Lieutenant Lizco nodded and disappeared into the downpour.
Opening the army radio console, Gadgets spliced the tape antenna’s wires into the radio’s antenna leads. Then he opened the case of his hand-radio. In the next few minutes, working carefully and exactly in the dim light, he wired the hand-radio’s output with the microphone inputs of the army radio.
The army radio now served as a signal booster for the small hand-radio. The radio’s encoded milliwatt output would be amplified by the high-wattage circuits of the army transmitter. With the jeep’s whip antenna and the hundred feet of wire serving as a second antenna, Gadgets had a chance of overcoming distance and the storm’s electrical interference to reach his partners’ radios.
Looking into the darkness again, he called out: “Lieutenant! You got that antenna up there?”
Cold metal touched his ear. He knew what touched him even as he turned, infinitely slowly, to look.
The muzzle of an autorifle.
16
With the silenced Colt Government Model cocked and off safety in his hand, Lyons waited. Blancanales held his Beretta 93-R in one hand, his radio in the other. He desperately clicked the transmit key again and again, whispering into the microphone on the wild hope that he could raise Gadgets,
Blancanales and Lyons and Ricardo needed help. They needed a diversion. Anything.
They lay flat on the roof of the bus, waiting. Below them, the militiamen left the bus. They talked and joked with the sentries.
The bus had stopped in the center of the vehicle yard. Thirty meters of naked pavement surrounded the bus on all sides. A blacktop killing ground.
Lyons hoped to silently kill the men who came up to unlash the gear on top of the bus. But any noise or shout of alarm would trigger the firefight. And with the first burst of shots, Able Team lost any possible chance to kidnap Colonel Quesada.
Let alone live.
Waiting for the sound of boots on the steel rungs of the ladders, Lyons eased the MU-50G controlled-effect grenades out of his thigh pocket with his left hand. The tiny grenades, designed for the close-quarter combat of anti-terrorist actions, had a forty-six gram charge of TNT to propel 1400 steel balls. The reduced charge of explosive limited the hundred percent kill diameter to ten meters.
He passed the grenades to Ricardo. They had not allowed their teenage prisoner to carry a rifle. Lyons wished they had issued him one of the M-60s from the jeeps, with a thousand rounds of 7.62mm NATO. When the action started, it would be the Atchisson and the M-16/M-203 against every weapon of the Quesada militia.
They felt the bus shudder. Spewing diesel soot, the engine started again. The driver put the bus in gear and eased it toward a line of trucks. The squad of militiamen walked toward the prefab buildings.
“We got a chance,” Lyons whispered to his partner. “We got a chance.”
“Perhaps…” Blancanales answered.
The driver maneuvered the bus into a space between another bus and a truck. As the brakes squeaked with the stop, the intruders on the cargo rack felt the bus rock.
Now, boots came up the ladder.
As the militiaman’s yellow rain hat appeared, Lyons lunged out and grabbed the man’s raincoat. He jerked the militiaman’s face against the suppressor of the auto-Colt and pulled the trigger.
The 185-grain slug smashed through the militiaman’s eye socket at 1000 feet per second, liberating 400 footpounds of shockforce within the cranium. Blood and gray matter sprayed Lyons, bits of brain and bone and hair exploding into the rain. Lyons and Blancanales pulled the corpse onto the cargo rack.
“His raincoat, the hat, his uniform,” Lyons hissed. “All of it. Get it on the kid.”
Blancanales nodded. After explaining to Ricardo in Spanish, they stripped the corpse. Blood from the shattered skull colored their hands. Rain washed away the blood.
Ricardo took the dead man’s web-gear and bandolier of autorifle magazines. Then the gray fatigue shirt. Then the boots and pants.
“Mario!” a voice called from below.
“Get the kid into that uniform!” Lyons whispered urgently.
The boots did not fit. Ricardo pulled on the gray pants. In the gray uniform and black web-gear, Ricardo looked like a Quesada militiaman.
Slipping out his Beretta 93-R, Blancanales returned to Lyons at the cargo rail. He pointed to his Beretta. Lyons nodded and put away the auto-Colt. They waited.
The voice called out again.
“Mario!”
Another pair of boots came up the ladder. Lyons waited until the militiaman started over the rail, then clutched him simultaneously at the collar and the belt. The death squadder knew only an instant’s panic before Blancanales put the Beretta to the side of the man’s head and punched a 9mm hole through his temple.
The militiaman, one of the assassins from the mountain ambush, wore a black raincoat and hat over his gray uniform. His boots fit Ricardo. Blancanales put on the black slicker and hat to cover his nightsuit and weapons.
“You take the yellow raincoat and hat,” Blancanales told Lyons.
A minute later, they climbed down the ladders to the blacktop. Across the service yard, the sentries stood with the mechanics in the shelter of the open-sided garage buildings.
An M-16 leaned against the bumper. Blancanales reached to the militia web-gear Ricardo now wore. The bandolier held M-16 magazines. He passed the rifle to the teenager.
With the hesitance and great care of someone recently trained, Ricardo double-checked the safety and the seating of the magazine, then eased back the bolt to peek at the round in the chamber. Lyons and Blancanales nodded their approval of this novice’s good sense.
Lyons walked along the side of the bus, the yellow raincoat covering his slung Atchisson and gear. He also held the silenced auto-Colt under the raincoat. Glancing through the windows, he saw el jefeworking by a battery lantern’s light.
Coiling a microphone cord, the death-squad leader returned the “black box” radio to its aluminum-and-foam carrying case. Lyons saw no one else in the bus. Looking back, Lyons motioned to Blancanales.
“What?” Blancanales asked, joining him beside the passenger door of the bus.
“The number-one goon,” Lyons whispered. “With the NSA radio.”
Blancanales snatched a look through the window. “How convenient. We take him.”
“And he takes us to Quesada,” Lyons added.
Metal squeaked. Footsteps crossed the bus. Lyons and Blancanales pressed themselves against the side. Blancanales pointed to Lyons, closed his hand into a fist. He touched his chest, then pointed to the Beretta he held. Lyons nodded and holstered his auto-Colt.