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  Scorched Earth

  ( Able Team - 13 )

  Dick Stivers

  Guided by a captured gang pistolero, Able Team crashes into the firestorm of the Mexican heroin wars. The three superspecialists blaze a desperate path across a desolate landscape to confront drug armies waging a campaign of atrocity and extermination.

  Betrayed by the American Drug Enforcement Agency, facing the combined forces of the heroin gangs and Mexican traitors, Able Team enlists the Yaqui warriors of the Sierra Madres in their war against the Empire of Heroin. United, they strike.

  War leads to more war, as hot pursuit of the gang lords throws Able Team against a conspiracy that is using billions of dope dollars to finance the Fascist conquest of the Americas!

  Dick Stivers

  Scorched Earth

  1

  Acrid smoke drifted up from the scorched earth.

  Where the farm belonging to the three Yaqui families had marked the dusty, gray slopes of the Sierra Madres with arid fields of corn and squash and beans, only fire-blackened stones remained.

  A man's scream, the voice made animal by pain, came from a smoking tangle of mud-plastered sticks. The man choked, his scream dying to a gasp, then nothing.

  From a ruin that had been a lean-to ramada for sleeping and cooking, a child cried. Lost in blind shock, alone in her seared flesh, she wailed for her dead mother and father.

  The child's pleading pierced the haunting silence that enveloped the scene of devastation like a cloak of death.

  Two army colonels stalked through the ashes.

  Colonel Alfredo Gonzalez of the army of the Republic of Mexico wore the red beret of the elite International Group. The eagle insignia on the collar of his tailored and pressed camo fatigues identified him as a commander.

  The second officer, six-foot-six Colonel Jon Gunther, stood head and shoulders above the Mexican officer. Unlike the Mexican, Colonel Gunther did not need insignia to identify him as an officer. His stride, his straight back, his massive build carried the message of his career as a paramilitary officer.

  Surrounded by ashes, Gonzalez and Gunther evaluated the effects of the splash of flaming avgas-styrene gel.

  In a helicopter a hundred meters away, a soldier laughed. Soldiers in camouflage fatigues and helmets sat at the door of the troopship, smoking cigarettes and tossing rocks. One soldier, his M-16 rifle slung over his back, scanned the nearby mountainsides with binoculars.

  The Sierra Madre Occidentals extended into the distance, a vast wasteland of mesquite and rocks and dust. Rains came twice a year to the range of high jagged mountains paralleling the Pacific coast of Mexico. But the Alaskan storms, after sweeping across the Pacific states of North America, brought only light rain. After a few weeks of green grass and wild flowers, the sun scorched the land dry. Blistering winds tore away soil, darkening the sky with dust. Only cacti and mesquite and sturdy desert trees flourished. Later in this month of August, torrential rains would sweep north from the equator, bringing flash floods and erosion. Every year dry riverbeds suddenly became bottomless channels of churning mud and debris.

  The families of this ejido— a small cooperative farm — had attempted to scratch a living from the rocky soil of the Sierra Madres. After clearing a tiny valley of mesquite and cacti with their machetes, they had made a plow out of a mesquite tree and a piece of scrap iron. The men took turns pulling the plow. They had no money for a mule. Though the Yaqui tribes had lived and died in these valleys and mountains for a thousand years, Yaqui families did not — according to Mexican law — own this land, therefore they could not borrow money from the Mexican banks to rent mules.

  Working in teams, they had pulled the improvised plow through the hard-packed earth. Their skin baked under a hostile sun, and their hands gnarled and calloused from their labor. They put in their crops of corn and beans. The women and children walked a kilometer up the rocky mountainside overlooking the valley to return with buckets of water while the men dug a well. One man sweated in the pit, sometimes digging, sometimes loading the rocks and sand into a bucket on a rope. The other men hauled the bucket to the surface. Two ten-year-old boys dragged the bucket to the edge of the clearing and dumped out the rocks.

  In December, when they would harvest their corn and beans and sell the crop in the markets of the pueblos, the three families hoped to buy a mechanical water pump and the pipe to bring the deep water to a reservoir. With water, they could grow more crops. Though they would never be as rich as the Mexicans who had seized the ancestral lands of their people to make the vast corporate farms of Los Mochis and Ciudad Obregon, they hoped to feed their children and perhaps save money for books and radios.

  Then the strangers in business suits came.

  The two Mexican strangers walked through the lines of corn and beans without regard for the seedlings they crushed with every step. They spurned the children in ragged clothes who gathered around to see the outsiders.

  Looking down at the Yaqui campesinos who worked in teams in the deep pit that would be the well, the strangers introduced themselves.

  They had come from Culiacan to offer the campesinos wealth, more money than the campesinos could ever earn farming or picking cotton, enough money to buy motorcycles and mescal, even Japanese televisions.

  In return for this wealth, the Mexicans from Culiacan wanted the ejidoto plant red amapola poppies. And to razor the poppies for their white gold: opium. Opium from which the chemists of Culiacan and Hermosillo would make heroin to feed the hungry veins of the needle addicts in the cities of North America.

  The three families refused. As Yaquis, they distrusted Mexicans. They did not know these two Mexicans from Culiacan, who wore the suits of rich men and who drove the expensive four-wheel-drive Silverado.

  The smooth-talking Mexicans repeated their slick promises of easy money. Much easy money. More than the families could earn in a lifetime of selling corn and beans and squash. No more poverty.

  The Yaqui families of the ejidorefused again. One man, a father of five children, said he could not risk prison. The police, or federales, would come, and then he would be in the prison at Mazatlan. Who would feed his children while he rotted in the prison? Who would work with his brother and cousin?

  The families agreed they would not risk their freedom, even if it meant living in poverty.

  Laughing at the ignorance of the campesinos, one of the Mexicans pulled out a wallet thick with American greenbacks. He took out a card and showed it to the men.

  Though they could not read, the men recognized the seal of the Republic of Mexico, the photo of the man who held the card and the dreaded words, Director General de la Policia de Transito.

  This man from Culiacan who demanded they grow the illegal flowers held a card identifying him as a federale. He said the campesinos need never fear arrest. He himself would protect them with all the power of his office.

  The Yaquis spoke for a moment in their own language. They had heard stories of Mexicans who made false papers for workers who went across the border to the cities of the north. If a Mexican could make identity papers that fooled the American Immigration, why not a card to fool campesinos?

  Again, the families refused.

  Finally, in anger, the man took out one of the American greenbacks. He threw it on the dusty earth in front of the Yaqui families.

  One hundred dollars. Cornmeal and beans and milk for months. And clothes for the children. And kerosene for the lantern so they could work at night in the cool air.

  If they grew the blood-red poppies.

  One of the men answered for all of them. Without a word, he took the American greenback with the portrait of Benjamin Franklin from the dust and handed it back to the federale.
<
br />   "We'll make an example of you," the federalethreatened.

  The two men from Culiacan took their American greenback and left in their American truck.

  The families did not forget the threat. They feared the corrupt federales. At dawn the next day, instead of going to work in the fields, one man put on his best clothes and walked all morning to the road, then spent a few pesos on a bus ride to Ciudad Obregon. He went to the garrison of the army of the Republic of Mexico and spoke with a lieutenant. The lieutenant, speaking in university Castilian, assured the campesino that the army would investigate the matter.

  Three days later, the plane roared from the sky and dropped the bombs. In the instant before his cremation, the man who had spoken to the lieutenant saw the markings of the Republic of Mexico on the wings of the plane. Then he died in the fire storm of flaming aviation fuel and molten plastic.

  Colonel Gonzalez and Colonel Gunther observed the effectiveness of the superhigh-octane napalm. A campesino working in the fields had died before he could drop a hoe. The blackened, brittle hands of the man still held the seared hardwood handle of the crude implement.

  Across the field, the child continued to cry. From a place beyond pain, the girl shrieked out for her parents. Over and over, she pleaded out for her mother to come to her.

  Snapping his cavalry crop against his leg, Colonel Gonzalez turned to Colonel Gunther. "One moment. Let me shut up that little bitch."

  Gonzalez pointed to the suffering child and shouted in the direction of the helicopter. "Tronatela luego vos con la ametralladora!"

  The helicopter doorgunner snapped back the cocking handle of an M-60 machine gun. The auto-weapon hammered away the quiet. The slugs raked the tangle of sticks and burning plastic where the child suffered, throwing cans into the air, chopping the blackened wood, spraying ashes. He fired three long bursts. The heavy 7.62mm slugs stopped the screams.

  "Finally..." Gonzalez muttered.

  Colonel Gunther nodded. "It is the speed of combustion. The fuel burns so quickly it does not disrupt the circulation or penetrate the internal organs. The chemical companies make standard military napalm using less volatile fuel and a greater percentage of plastic in the solution. Military napalm burns deep into the body."

  "I will do as you suggest, Colonel Gunther. The technicians will change the formula again."

  Smiling, Gunther shook his head. "That is not necessary. I believe this compound better serves our purpose. Military napalm must incapacitate soldiers inside of vehicles, and under protective cover. But these peons?"

  With a sweep of his arm, the foreign colonel directed Gonzalez's gaze to the blackened ejidoin the desert. The blond, blue-eyed East German continued in his excellent Spanish.

  "This was no military operation. Our purpose here was to make an example of peons who will not work. The present formula serves the purpose of our organization."

  2

  Sweat dripped onto the steel and plastic of the M-79 grenade launcher Carl Lyons held. Sweat ran from his hair and down his face. He shifted in the seat and felt sweat flow down his back.

  Under his short-sleeved shirt, Lyons wore Kevlar body armor. The rectangle of a steel trauma plate shielding his heart and central chest showed through his shirt. Hours before, when the summer sun had risen to its zenith and begun to beat down on the roof of the Drug Enforcement Agency surveillance van, the first streams of sweat had flowed from under the Kevlar. Now, sweat soaked the waist and pockets of his slacks.

  Gadgets Schwarz set down his Uzi submachine gun. He pulled off his sunglasses and wiped sweat off the lenses for the tenth time in an hour. He also wore body armor. As he pushed the sunglasses back on, a drop of sweat hit the right lens. He wiped his sunglasses for the eleventh time in that hour.

  "Can't the government afford an air conditioner?" Schwarz asked heatedly. "Summertime in Kevlar is cruel and unusual."

  The young DEA agent who had volunteered to drive the van answered Gadgets in a bored monotone. "We've got one. It's in the director's car."

  "Then let the director take over this fucking watch," Gadgets answered impatiently.

  "Can't do it. He's in D.C., romancing Congress for funding. Money for the air conditioner."

  Lyons didn't take his eyes off the long lines of cars and trucks waiting to cross the United States-Mexico border. Beyond the multicolored ribbons of autos, the sprawl of Tijuana faded into the gray distance. With Gadgets and the DEA driver, he watched from a van parked on the San Ysidro side of the border, less than a hundred feet from Mexico.

  "Think your main man will get enough money," Gadgets continued, "so maybe next time we'll have an air conditioner?"

  "No problem with a cooler next time..." the DEA agent replied.

  "Far out. Feels good already."

  "But next time," the agent said with a laugh, "we'll need a heater."

  Twenty steps away, at the San Ysidro port of entry, U.S. Customs officers in inspection booths processed sixteen lanes of incoming traffic. The officers took stock of every driver, looking for nervousness, sweating, forced expressions, then checked the license plate of every vehicle with the aid of federal computers. Each officer — at the rate of one examination every ten to fifteen seconds — waved cars past. Then the vehicles entered the promised land, the United States, accelerating past the van in an unending, monotonous blur of color and glass and faces.

  Auto exhaust and diesel soot hazed the crossing, and heat rose from the asphalt in an undulating, vision-distorting curtain. Motionless on the bench seat of the surveillance van, the tinted windows concealing him from the traffic, Lyons watched the thousands of cars and trucks shimmer in the heat and engine fumes. On the Mexican side, peddlers went from car to car, offering painted plaster figures of Jesus and Montezuma and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Other peddlers offered sandals and black flocked bulls and tropical fruit-flavored sherbets.

  Lyons glanced to his partner. "Check with the Politician."

  Slipping out his hand radio, Gadgets keyed the transmit button. "Hot Box calling Mr. Cool. Qui pasa? Donde esta Senor Pistolero?"

  A customs officer in a booth signaled a driver to stop for a search. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic man with two young Mexican girls in his Mercedes, argued. Lyons watched as other customs officers motioned the driver toward a parking place. Finally the driver steered the Mercedes under the awnings. Officers on each side of the expensive sedan thumped the fender panels while a third officer waited for the big Hispanic to open the trunk. Another customs official walked a drug-sniffing German shepherd around the Mercedes.

  "Hey, Politico!" Gadgets keyed his hand radio again. "Digame. What's going on?"

  "Relax," Rosario Blancanales answered, his voice coming without tone or inflection through the National Security Agency encoding-decoding circuits of the hand radio. "Nothing's going on."

  "Any word from Fantasyland East? What's the D.C. scam on our man?"

  "The teletype printed out quite a biography." Blancanales spoke from the DEA offices only a few steps away. The windows of the office overlooked the thousands of cars crawling into the United States. "Our man is most definitely a killer. I'll give you a copy of the bio when I bring down some food."

  "Forget the food. I want ice."

  "Hot down there?"

  "I'm the incredible melting man."

  "You might be down there all night again."

  "Yeah, I'm a regular owl," Gadgets said, and then he signed off.

  Able Team had received the directive the day before: Go to the San Ysidro port of entry. Wait for Miguel Coral. Suspect known to kill without hesitation. Capture for interrogation.

  The directive included — courtesy of a DEA informer in Culiacan — the license number of the truck and the name appearing on his valid California driver's license. But the informer did not supply the time Coral would cross the border. Able Team had waited through the night, watching the endless stream of traffic. Perhaps Coral would come today, perhaps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow.<
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  But they knew he would come.

  Miguel Coral had fought on the losing side of a gang war. A few days ago, the informant said, Coral deserted the defeated gang. With a hundred kilos of Mexican heroin, Coral intended to start a new dope gang in Los Angeles.

  He could never return to Mexico. His desertion from the Ochoa gang meant his death if his former compatriots ever found him. And his murders of innumerable gunmen and captains of other gangs marked him as the target of a hundred vendettas.

  The files of the Drug Enforcement Agency held hundreds of pages of information on the career of Miguel Coral Valencia. According to the DEA, Coral started as an independent operator smuggling marijuana and heroin from Hermosillo in the Mexican state of Sonora, north to Tucson, Arizona. After murdering two Mexican policemen, he sought the protection of the Ochoa gang.

  Like the other gangs, the Ochoa organization operated in alliance with the politicians and police departments of the remote Mexican towns. The drug gangs supported the ambitions of the politicians, financing their campaigns for mayor or governor or senator.

  The mayors of cities learned to take bids on the position of police chief. Then, like the regional director of a high-profit enterprise, the police chief managed the income and disbursed the profits, distributing wads of cash to each patrolman and suitcases of American dollars to the politicians in higher government posts.

  Gang money maintained the life-styles of the police, augmenting their small monthly salaries with thousands of American dollars a week. Police chiefs drove Corvettes and Cadillacs. Policemen who received salaries of only a hundred dollars a month drove Mustangs. Families of police officers enjoyed backyard pools and spending sprees in San Diego, Tucson and El Paso.

  The integration of the drug gangs into the municipal and political structures of the western states of Mexico ensured hassle-free operations for the gangs and uninterrupted income for their protectors, despite unending assaults by the American DEA and the federal police of Mexico.