Scorched Earth at-13 Read online

  Lyons ran to the last helicopter. He saw the gray fatigue pants of someone sitting at the door. A blond man wearing the gray uniform of the Fascist International watched as the crowd of soldiers reassembled the corpse of the drunk.

  The Fascist officer turned as Lyons brought down the heavy Colt autopistol like an ax on the Nazi's skull.

  In seconds the loops of plastic handcuffs secured the Nazi's wrists and ankles. Tape covered his mouth and eyes.

  Lyons kept moving. Voices came from the trail leading up from the pueblo. With a hand signal, Lyons directed a Yaqui to accompany him. They went to the head of the trail. Throwing themselves flat on the hard earth, they waited. Lyons pointed to the silenced Colt autopistol he held, then pointed to the knife in the hand of the Yaqui. The Yaqui nodded his understanding.

  Tailored fatigues and a holstered pistol identified the officer. In the moonlight, Lyons also saw silver insignia of rank flashing from the officer's collar. The officer carried a walkie-talkie. His soldiers carried flashlights and rifles.

  Several of the newcomers ran ahead to the crowd on the far side of the ridgeline. Two soldiers remained beside their officer. They lit the path with flashlights. Striding as if on parade, his beret cocked at the perfect angle on his head, the officer maintained his military decorum.

  Lyons waited until the officer and soldiers passed. Rising from the ground, he rushed up behind the three men and braced the silenced Colt as he fired once into the head of each soldier. He didn't pause in his rush.

  The bodies of the soldiers fell as if their legs had been cut out from under them. The officer stood motionless for a moment of shock as the spray of brains and blood hung in the moonlight. Lyons smashed him in the back of the head.

  The Yaqui watched for other soldiers as Lyons wrapped tape around the officer's head, covering his eyes and mouth. Then Lyons jerked plastic loops tight around the officer's wrists and ankles. Seconds later, the army officer joined the Fascist prisoner in the helicopter.

  At the troopship's door, Lyons holstered the Colt and unslung his Atchisson. Looking to the other helicopters, he saw Vato rushing to him. One Yaqui guided the raped and beaten young woman to safety. The other Yaquis slipped behind the troopships and waited.

  "You want us to kill them?" Vato asked.

  "I have my prisoners. Those..." Lyons looked at the soldiers. He could not think of an obscenity to voice his loathing. "Take them, kill them, whatever."

  "We will take them alive." Vato dashed back to his men.

  Only the shouts of the soldiers broke the silence of the ridge. Lyons waited.

  * * *

  Gadgets heard the Interdynamic slug punch into the sentry's skull. The soldier fell back. Snapping back the autorifle's actuator to chamber the next silent cartridge, Gadgets sprinted to the thrashing soldier and fired a coup de grace directly into the dying soldier's temple. He crouched by the dead man and slung the CAR over his shoulder. Slipping out his Beretta 93-R, he continued to the row of shacks, holding the selective-fire autopistol in both hands.

  He heard voices coming from a house. Looking inside, he saw the single room packed shoulder to shoulder with the captured townspeople. They saw his blackened face in the window. Then a Yaqui appeared beside the North American and whispered urgently to the prisoners.

  Moving on, Gadgets looked between every adobe house, glanced in windows, listened for the authoritarian voices of soldiers. He came to a group of local people tied together. They lay on the dirt outside one house. A woman cried, a wounded man groaned. Yaqui fighters went to them.

  A form moved in Gadgets's peripheral vision. He spun, the Beretta's glowing tritium night sights streaking the darkness. As the autopistol went on line, a hiss stopped him.

  "Wizard! Don't!" Blancanales whispered hoarsely. "Any here?"

  "Most of them went up the trail." Gadgets pointed to the group of soldiers rushing up a switchback trail to the ridge overlooking the village.

  "Any others?"

  "Maybe in there." Gadgets pointed to the house. Inside, they heard crying. "I'll check..."

  "Give me your rifle. Is there a round in the chamber?"

  Gadgets unslung the silenced Colt autorifle in one motion. "An empty shell."

  Blancanales jerked back the actuator.

  Gadgets went to the door of the house. The door stood open an inch. Peering inside, he saw a man lashed to a chair. A flashlight on the floor lit the interior. Gadgets pushed open the door.

  On the floor, in the light of the flashlight beam, a soldier grunted on the body of a girl. Totally involved in the rape, he did not see Gadgets step up to him with the Beretta.

  Yaquis pushed past Gadgets. Tearing the soldier away from the crying semiconscious girl, the Yaquis threw the soldier against the adobe wall. One fighter pushed a hand over the panicked rapist's mouth. Another fighter grabbed a torn scrap of the girl's clothing from the floor and jammed it into the mouth of the soldier to stop his screams as they put their scalpel-sharp knives to his body.

  Staggering back two steps, Gadgets did not turn away in time. He saw what he could never forget.

  * * *

  On the ridge, the Mexican soldiers of the International Group tired of the gruesome puzzle of the drunk's body. They drifted back to the bonfire. Lyons and the Yaquis waited.

  Lyons heard his hand radio click. The pistol grip of the selective-fire shotgun in his right hand, he keyed his radio with his left.

  "This is the Ironman. I'm still here."

  "What's the situation up there?" Blancanales asked.

  "We're ready to hit them. You got the town?"

  "It's secure."

  "Then come up here. They outnumber us three to one."

  "On our way."

  Soldiers joked and laughed around the roaring fire. One of the soldiers went to a Huey and climbed inside.

  "Puta... puta... Donde esta mi pequena puta?"

  Instead of finding the young girl, he found death. A blade slashed his throat. Hands pulled him to the shadowed side of the helicopter and held him down as he thrashed, his blood draining into the dirt.

  Another soldier went to the first troopship. As the soldier approached, Lyons slipped out his silent Colt. Lining up the tritium night sights on the man's head, Lyons waited for him.

  "Capitan. Donde esta el Teniente Colomo?" the soldier called out.

  The soldier saw Blancanales and a line of Yaquis running behind the line of helicopters. Turning suddenly, a silent .45-caliber hollowpoint whisked by his head.

  "Yaquis! Ellos atacan! Ellos..." he shouted out.

  Breath and blood exploded from the soldier's mouth as a slug shattered his spine and tore through his right lung. As the dying man flopped on the earth, Lyons fired a third time, tearing away the top of the soldier's head.

  Soldiers ran for the helicopters. Yaquis butt-stroked them with the stocks of their heavy FN-FAL rifles.

  In the open, illuminated by a leaping bonfire, soldiers turned and looked. One jerked his rifle to his shoulder. M-16 and FN-FAL rifles fired from the line of helicopters. The impact of high-velocity bullets threw the soldier back, spinning him through the air. Single accurate shots killed the other soldiers before they could unsling their rifles.

  Around the bonfire, soldiers died almost before they could scramble for their rifles. A soldier jerked a pistol from a shoulder holster and fell flat on the rocks and hard earth. His revolver popped twice, and slugs shattered the Plexiglas windscreen in the helicopter. Full-auto fire from several rifles answered, and the earth around the soldier exploded. Hits in his shoulders, head and arms arched the soldier backward. He knelt there for an instant, already dead, until another burst threw him to his god.

  Soldiers ran from the ridge, seeking escape in the darkness. Two claymore mines boomed as scurrying soldiers fell over trip lines. Dust and shredded mesquite rose in a wave as thousands of lethal steel balls tore into the slope, shredding flesh and pulping bone.

  A few survived to surrender. Vat
o shouted out to halt the rifle fire. Silence came. Somewhere in the darkness of the mountainside, a soldier maimed by a claymore screamed in agony.

  Standing at the first helicopter, Lyons watched the Yaquis herd the soldiers together.

  Defeat had come quickly to the airborne commandos of the International Group.

  Lyons analyzed the action by the doctrines of Sun Tzu. He realized Able Team and the Yaquis owed this victory to deception: the self-deception of undisciplined criminals who thought automatic rifles and helicopters made them an elite airborne force.

  Arrogant with easy victory, the International Group had deceived themselves. They thought that the murder of defenseless people proved power. They thought that gang rape proved them invincible.

  But a group of brave people — with captured rifles, with ashes for camouflage, with a paperback book of Chinese philosophy for guidance — had destroyed the gang of murderers.

  17

  The rotor throb of an approaching helicopter thundered above the pueblo. The three men of Able Team startled awake in one of the adobe houses.

  In thanks for the liberation of the pueblo, the people had provided the North Americans with a room and beds made of dry cornstalks covered with woven mats. Now, the soft blue light of morning came through the branches roofing the house.

  Cornstalks crackled as Gadgets sat up and reached for his CAR. Lyons opened his eyes, but did not lift his head from the pack he used as a pillow. Staring up at the hundreds of points of predawn blue shining through the thatched ceiling, their eyes followed the noise of the helicopter from the west to east. As the ear-shattering noise of the rotors faded, Gadgets turned to his partners.

  "The army? "he asked.

  Lyons yawned and shook his head. "There's no alarm," Blancanales answered. "The people would come to alert us."

  "Must be Davis," Lyons said. "Unless one of the army pilots escaped. Time to get organized."

  Standing, Lyons slapped dust and bits of cornstalk from his sweat-stiffened, filthy fatigues. Powdery earth from the ridge had shaded his fatigues a two-tone — the back of his shirt and pants faded black, the fronts, especially his knees and elbows, dirt brown. He unscrewed the cap of his canteen, poured water into one of his cupped hands, and washed his face.

  "I don't think any of those goons are going to escape," Gadgets told his partners as they assembled their equipment and weapons. "Pol, you see what happened to that rapist shit, the one the Yaquis caught in the act?"

  Blancanales didn't reply. Lyons laughed, the sound sharp and cynical. "Didn't live through it, did he?"

  "You had to see it to believe it." Gadgets shook his head, as if attempting to clear his mind of the images. "I have seen some bad shit, but it's always been what's already happened, after the fact. But this, man oh man, right there in front of me, in living color..."

  "What? They castrate him?" Lyons didn't pause as he broke down his silenced Colt and checked the mechanism. "Makes sense to me."

  "More than just that. They took his skin off like a shirt. They unzipped him with their knives. His shirt and pants and... his skin... they just stripped it off him. If it hadn't been so horrible, it would've been flat out amazing."

  Through the small window they heard crying and voices. Blancanales pushed aside a burlap curtain and looked outside. He watched for a moment, then spoke to his partners. "The people are preparing their dead. And it looks like everyone's leaving. They're all packed."

  "Any minute the army could show up with napalm. You packed?" Lyons asked. "We're going, too."

  "Where?" Gadgets asked.

  "Wherever the goon squad came from," Lyons told him. "Now we've got transportation."

  Shouldering their packs, they left the adobe house and walked into a crowd of townspeople gathering on the road. Men and women carrying bundles of possessions on their backs trudged north, followed by lines of children. Older children pulled goats along by ropes. Other children carried baskets of chickens. A few families shouldered heavier burdens: cloth-wrapped dead.

  Townspeople gathered around the three North Americans, thanking them for their help. Blancanales acknowledged in Spanish; Gadgets and Lyons nodded. Children stared at the strangers. Finally, Able Team marched away to find the fighters.

  Walking to the ridge trail, they saw that only furniture remained in the houses of the pueblo. The walls had been stripped of photos, shelves and tables were bare of utensils, the windows denuded of curtains. Before the sun rose over the eastern hill, the pueblo would be deserted.

  "Think these people are opium farmers?" Lyons asked his partners.

  "If they are, it doesn't look like they got rich," Gadgets said.

  Blancanales indicated the pueblo with a sweep of his arm, taking in the mud-plastered adobe houses, the pole and tree-branch ramadas, the people with ragged clothes and bundles of possessions.

  "Do you begin to understand why they would grow opium?" he asked Lyons. "Someone comes out here and promises them a few dollars. It's the difference between food or no food, shoes or no shoes..."

  "But what they got was a gang war..." Lyons replied as he looked up. Vultures circled the village.

  "Opium and death," Lyons said. "Heroin and gang wars. Billions of dope dollars and international fascism. Hell, it's time to move. We've got questions to put to those prisoners."

  Bent under the unwelcome weight of their packs and weapons, they climbed up the steep trail to the ridge. Only two of the Huey troopships remained. Soldiers worked inside the helicopters. On the north end of the ridge, where Lyons and Vato had hidden and plotted the infiltration, soldiers dug ditches.

  Vato, standing in the center of the ridgetop plateau, directed the soldiers. The old achaistood beside him. As Able Team approached the helicopters, the North Americans recognized Yaquis in the green camouflage fatigues. The Yaquis wore the fatigues, berets and boots of the Mexican army. They all wore army web gear. With the M-16 and FN-FAL rifles they had captured from the Mexicans, they looked like soldiers.

  "What's going on?" Gadgets wondered out loud.

  They saw that nothing remained of the killing the night before. No blood or flesh marked the spots where Mexican soldiers had died. Yaquis swept the earth clean with branches.

  In one of the troopships, Miguel Coral worked with Yaquis to secure a chain of three claymore mines to the engine housing of a troopship. Taped together in a band, linked by a line of det-cord, the claymores faced them.

  "I wouldn't stand in front of amateurs playing with claymores," Gadgets advised from a distance.

  Lyons and Blancanales stepped back ten paces.

  "What are they doing?" Blancanales asked.

  "Vato!" Lyons called out.

  The achaiand the young leader walked to them. Of all the Yaquis, only they wore dust-colored clothing. Vato had his Springfield rifle slung over his back.

  "What's happening over there?" Gadgets pointed to the troopship where Coral had set up the claymore mines.

  "The army is coming. With their officers. When they come, we kill them."

  "How do you know?" Lyons demanded.

  "This will be known as the Hill of Death," the achaiadded. With a salute to the foreigners, the old man walked away. "The boy will instruct you en su trabajo aqui."

  "In the other helicopter, the one that Davis took away, there is a special radio..."

  "Where's he now?" Lyons continued.

  "My men hide the helicopter. He will wait with it."

  "What kind of special radio?" Gadgets asked. He shrugged off his pack and set it on the earth.

  Blancanales stopped the interruptions. "Gentlemen! The man's trying to brief us."

  Vato continued. "I told the Mexican lieutenant to report that he had trapped the Yaquis and North Americans, but he needed more soldiers and weapons. The Mexican colonel immediately took command. I know the vanity of my enemy. He flies here now to lead the final assault. And we will kill them.

  "There..." Vato pointed to the first helicopter "..
.we have the bombs in place. Claymore mines. In front of the bombs are barrels of gasoline from the helicopters. Senor Coral told me the arrangement would be very terrible..."

  "Oh, yeah..." Gadgets agreed. "If the blast and shrapnel don't get them, the flash will toast them righteously."

  "And now Senor Coral prepares the second bomb. When the helicopters land, my soldiers will go down the trail, then explode the bombs."

  "But what a waste of helicopters," Gadgets interrupted again. "Those Hueys cost a million each."

  "There is only one pilot," Vato countered. "The men there..." he pointed to the soldiers digging ditches on the hill overlooking the plateau "...they have the machine guns from the helicopters. They will fire down. And there on that mountain..."

  Across the canyon, three hundred fifty meters away, Yaquis wearing their dust-colored uniforms dug more ditches. "From there, we will shoot with rifles and machine guns. When they come, they die."

  Blancanales nodded. "A classic 'X' ambush."

  "We will need one of you here," Vato continued. He looked to Blancanales. "You, you speak Castilian. You will be here with your radio. And you..." he looked to Lyons "...you will be with me on the other mountain."

  "How will you trigger the claymores?" Gadgets asked. "Maybe I can work out something slick. And that other helicopter's got radios. I can monitor the frequencies."

  Vato pointed to the helicopter. "I know nothing of that. Talk to Senor Coral. When he is done, he will take you to where the other helicopter is hidden."

  "What happened to our prisoners?" Lyons demanded.

  "The officers?" Vato asked. "Nothing."

  "And the other soldiers?" Blancanales asked.

  Not taking his eyes from Lyons, Vato ignored the question, as if Blancanales had not spoken. "Come. I go now to the other hill to wait. I will take you to the officers. You can question them. But we must hurry. We talk too much and the Mexicans come."

  "We want in on this?" Lyons asked his partners.