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  The Ochoa gang controlled the greatest share of the drugs flowing from Sonora north to the U.S. border. The old Ochoa, the patriarch of the gang, the don, managed the gang with the expertise of a corporate president. He directed an army composed of farmers, mule drivers, police and municipal employees. He also employed gunmen. Though he rarely initiated violence — he preferred to be generous with his people and to be reasonable with competitors — when a threat came, his trigger men struck with cold, calculated violence.

  In 1977, if he had openly declared his organization's profits, Ochoa, S.A., would have won a position on the Fortune500.

  Throughout the late seventies, smaller gangs and the syndicates of Mexico, North America and Europe continually challenged Don Ochoa. The don paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits to the families of his slain soldiers. He supported the hospitals of small towns with the continual flow of bleeding and maimed gunmen. He also felt duty bound to contribute when assassinations and wild firefights caught townspeople in the crossfire.

  But Ochoa marketed a substance more precious than gold, something he would fight like a cornered lion to maintain control over. Despite hundreds of assassination attempts on his life, and those of his sons and his gang captains, he never surrendered his market share.

  In this endless war without quarter, Miguel Coral rose from truck driver, to gang soldier, to captain, then finally to the most trusted and esteemed position in the entire organization — second, of course, to the don — the position of personal bodyguard to Don Ochoa and his family.

  Coral stood always at the side of Don Ochoa. He commanded the subordinate soldiers who protected the patriarch's sons and daughters and grandchildren. When the doctors came to examine Don Ochoa's twisted spine — arthritis had made him a hunchback — Coral searched the doctors and minutely examined every instrument in their bags.

  As part of his duties, Coral had also attended every meeting with allied gang leaders. And when politicians and police negotiated payoffs, Coral watched over the transactions.

  As a result, Coral knew the name and face of every criminal associate of the gang and the identity of every corrupt public official who served the gang. He was a dangerous and powerful man.

  In the instructions to Able Team, the DEA had stressed the capture of Miguel Coral would represent the single most important move against the drug trade in western Mexico. If Able Team took Coral alive and the DEA could persuade Coral to cooperate, the DEA could halt the multibillion-dollar river of heroin flooding the tidal basin of American society.

  Though Able Team expected Coral to react with autoweapon fire when they closed the trap on him, they would not return the fire. Gadgets held an Uzi submachine gun loaded with special-purpose slugs for punching holes in tires. Lyons had loaded his 40mm M-79 grenade launcher with a plastic grenade of CS/CN gas. The DEA needed a prisoner. The interrogators could not question a dead man.

  Sweating, breathing the fumes of thousands of cars and trucks, the men of Able Team waited for another hour. When it came, the alert was sudden.

  "He's in line!" Blancanales's voice crackled over the radio's speaker.

  "Which line?" Lyons asked, sweat making the radio slick in his hand. "How far until the gate?"

  "We have at least three minutes. I'm on the way down to the other cars."

  Gadgets wiped the sweat off his hands and checked the canvas tape holding down the Uzi's grip safety. "Ready to bop," he said.

  Looking forward to the driver, Lyons felt the van vibrate as the high-performance engine roared into life. The DEA man called back: "I heard it."

  Under the huge, striped awning of the inspection shed, other undercover DEA men got into an assortment of cars and pickup trucks.

  Gadgets keyed the DEA frequency radio. All the radios had been tested in the morning, but Gadgets called another test.

  "Mr. Wizard to the Apprentices. Roll call before we roll."

  "Unit one, ready."

  "Unit two, warming up."

  "Numero tres. Todos es preparado."

  "Four here. Ready and willing."

  "Supercool, dudes," Gadgets said, and then signed off. "We're gonna do it," he muttered to Lyons.

  Lyons laughed. "If we see that doper abandon his truck, we know he had the frequency."

  "Calculated risk," Gadgets admitted. "Some day, the Agency will get hep. Spend money on good stuff." He tapped the NSA-designed hand radio in the pocket of his sports coat.

  Able Team did not fear the interception of their radio transmissions. They used hand radios designed and manufactured to the specifications of the National Security Agency. Micro electronic circuits coded and decoded every transmission. Without one of the three radios Able Team carried, a technician scanning the bands would intercept only bursts of static.

  Blancanales checked in. "We're ready to go. Loading up a tear-gas round."

  Lyons took Gadgets's radio. "What's his car look like?"

  "Red Chevrolet pickup with a white camper shell. I didn't see the license plate, but the vehicle's exactly as the informer indicated."

  "The Agency seems to have got it's money worth. We'll know for sure in about..."

  Gadgets interrupted the talk. "Red Chevy!"

  "Get ready, Politico." Lyons clicked off and passed the radio back to Gadgets.

  Their driver eased into traffic. Lyons sat in the van's third seat, over the rear wheels. Gadgets scrambled into the second seat. Lyons watched cars through an oversized viewing port. Gadgets looked out through smaller standard windows. They watched for the red pickup as their driver maintained a very gradual acceleration away from the Customs and Immigration Center.

  Cars blocked their line of sight for a few seconds, then they saw the red pickup accelerate through traffic. Their driver moved the van over two lanes and accelerated to follow the truck.

  "It's the truck!" he called back to the two men of Able Team. "License plate matches exactly."

  Gadgets relayed the information to the other five cars. Smoothly, inconspicuously, the DEA units slipped through the traffic on the northbound 805 Interstate.

  The red Chevy pickup maintained a steady speed in the middle of the three northbound lanes. Lyons saw DEA cars move into blocking positions in the inside lane. Other cars eased past the pickup and took positions in front of it. Behind the van, Lyons saw the DEA car that carried Blancanales.

  Three sides of the rat trap were in place.

  Lyons nodded to Gadgets, and the Wizard spoke into his DEA-frequency radio. "This is it."

  Their driver slid easily into the express lane. Slowly the van gained on the driver's window of the Chevy truck. Lyons peered through the side window of the camper shell. He saw someone move inside.

  Instinctively Lyons's hand moved to the Velcro closures of his body armor. He adjusted the trauma plate.

  "This could be a point-blank," Gadgets said, laughing.

  "That's not the mission. Prisoners for information."

  "How could they miss your head? You need a Kevlar and steel-plate face mask. With bulletproof shades."

  Lyons only nodded to Gadgets. Gadgets activated the DEA radio and shouted out two words, "Lights! Sirens!"

  Gadgets slammed back the van's sliding cargo door. Lyons released the catch holding the van's oversized viewing window in the frame. The window fell away to shatter into thousands of tiny cubes of tempered glass on the freeway's concrete pavement, and a chorus of sirens wailed from the DEA vehicles.

  As Lyons and Gadgets aimed their weapons, a sudden impact threw the van into a side skid.

  With smashed steel screaming and tires smoking, a DEA sedan pushed in the back doors of the van. Able Team's driver struggled with the wheel and accelerated.

  A four-wheel-drive pickup rammed the sedan again, sending it out of control. Hauling himself upright, Lyons saw three Mexicans in the front seat of the four-wheeler.

  Gunmen from the Ochoa gang, Lyons thought. Battling the DEA while the gang leader Miguel Coral accelerated
away. They were buying their leader time to escape the law-enforcement trap.

  The Mexican driver pulled his steering wheel to the side and the oversized steel bumper of the four-by-four rammed into the van.

  Bracing himself against the sheet-metal body panel, Lyons pointed the M-79. The Mexican in the four-wheeler attacked again. Lyons wasn't about to give him another chance.

  A low-velocity plastic canister streaked across the arm's distance of space between the two vehicles and shattered inside the cab. CS/CN gas sprayed the Mexicans, instantly incapacitating the gunmen with tear and nausea gas.

  The four-wheeler drifted into the freeway's express lane. Behind the careering truck, other motorists slowed. Traffic jammed.

  Sheet steel shrieked against concrete as the four-wheeler creased its skin along the center divider. Lyons and Gadgets raced ahead in the van.

  "Catch the pickup truck!" Lyons shouted to the driver as he broke open the breech of the M-79 and flipped out the spent 40mm casing. He pushed in another plastic CS/CN grenade.

  With the engine whining with RPM's, the van came up beside the red Chevy pickup.

  Simultaneously Gadgets pointed his Uzi at the front left tire of the pickup truck and Lyons aimed the gaping muzzle of the grenade launcher at the face of Miguel Coral.

  "Alto! Policia!" Lyons shouted out in his bad Spanish.

  Only then did Lyons see who rode in the cab of the truck with the middle-aged, square-faced gang captain.

  A woman and two young children clung desperately to each other. Fear haunted their faces. Then a teenage boy leaned from the camper shell to the cab of the truck.

  A family. A middle-aged man, his wife and their three children.

  The wrong truck? The right truck but the wrong man? How could they explain terrorizing this family on their way home from a visit with friends?

  The man driving the Chevy truck closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps for an instant of prayer, perhaps to admit defeat. Then he moved both hands high on the steering wheel. He called out through the open window to the hard-faced North American with the grenade launcher. "I surrender! I surrender! For the love of God, don't shoot. My family is innocent."

  3

  "The White Warriors? In Sonora, Mexico?"

  Gadgets looked out the window of the office. He stared at the lights of San Diego as if he expected the explanation to the mystery to rise from the darkness in flashing neon script.

  Four floors beneath the men of Able Team, cars sped through the warm summer night. Strollers walked arm in arm on the sidewalks, passing the high-rise federal prison without a thought.

  After capturing the Ochoa gunmen and the Coral family, Able Team and the officers of the Drug Enforcement Agency had escorted the group of prisoners a few miles north to San Diego. They questioned them in the high-security interrogation room of the prison.

  The truck belonging to the Mexicans went to the federal impound garage to be searched. Only minutes later, DEA technicians had found heroin concealed in the frame of the four-wheel-drive truck driven by the gunmen. They quickly weighed and tested the Mexican white death, then telephoned the interrogating officers with the results: two hundred kilos, seventy-five-percent purity.

  "And in Coral's truck we found toolboxes full of Mexican fifty-peso gold pieces. Each coin is ounces. We counted five hundred, four hundred pounds by weight. Over two hundred thousand dollars in 99.95-percent gold."

  Even before the call had come, Coral knew he faced a lifetime in the concrete hell of a penitentiary. Only through complete cooperation could he ever hope to be a father to his children again, to sleep with his wife, to know the simple pleasures of freedom.

  Coral had answered all their questions. Throughout the afternoon and into the night, Coral talked. He told his story, the story of the Ochoas family, and the story of the destruction of the Ochoa empire.

  Now Able Team attempted to make sense of the interrogations. Overwhelmed by thousands of names and places, Gadgets stared into space, thinking. Finally the Wizard snapped out of his trance. He shook his head as if trying to wake himself from a dream, a bad dream.

  "Everything clicked until he mentioned the White Warriors. I can believe that a gang of ultrahard-core psycho killers with military weapons and high-tech commando gear totally demoralized and wasted the Ochoa gang. But the White Warriors taking over the Mexican heroin trade? Mucho muy loco..."

  Contrary to the report of the informer, Coral did not desert Don Ochoa in a time of crisis. He remained loyal to the end. He left only after Don Ochoa admitted defeat.

  In the first weeks of the war, the White Warriors disrupted the Ochoa empire with terrorism. In that time of assassination and atrocity, no Ochoa employee worked without fear. Assassins murdered entire families of opium farmers. Couriers disappeared. Chemists found all their laboratory technicians executed. On isolated stretches of Mexican highway, drivers died in their flaming trucks. The bloodletting was unceasing and unrelenting.

  When the Ochoa mobilized their army of gang soldiers to protect the growing, refining, and transport operations, the Warriors escalated to the second phase of their campaign. The loyalty and bravery of the Ochoa soldiers were like sand in the wind against the military weapons and lightning-strike tactics of the White Warriors.

  Utilizing massive fire superiority, including machine guns, rockets and radio-triggered claymore mines, the Warriors annihilated squads of Ochoa soldiers in bloody ambushes. Light planes dropped canisters of napalm on strongholds.

  To shock and demoralize the faithful soldiers of Don Ochoa, Warrior assassins infiltrated family compounds and hacked defenseless children and women apart, leaving grotesque puzzles of limbs and heads for the fathers to reassemble for burial.

  Finally, the aged patriarch released all the surviving soldiers and employees of the gang from their oaths of loyalty. A chartered jetliner carried Don Ochoa into exile in the South Pacific with what remained of his family and his wealth.

  After the victory, the White Warriors granted amnesty to the soldiers and employees of their former opponent. The new gang lords needed the farmers and soldiers and technicians to maintain the flow of heroin to the hungry north. Many were eager to march to the drumbeat of the new commanders.

  Even though the Warriors offered him a high post in their organization, Coral refused.

  "I will not torture. I will not murder campesinos. I will not murder children," he had said.

  Coral took his family and drove for the United States border. But the DEA captured him before he could gain the sanctuary of the world's second largest Mexican city, Los Angeles.

  "What about the rest of his story?" Lyons asked his partners.

  Gadgets continued talking. "I can believe that the new gang had military weapons and high-class communication equipment. Money can buy anything."

  "What about his refusing to work for the new gang?" Lyons asked.

  Blancanales nodded. "It checks out against the information on file. He's a killer. He admits it. But none of the information in the DEA files mentions a civilian murder. He never killed anyone but gangsters. He never committed atrocities."

  "Cops don't count?" Lyons snapped. As an ex-LAPD detective, he had gut-level hatred of cop killers. Coral had started his career as a gang gunman after killing two Mexican officers.

  "I don't know if he's telling the truth," Blancanales added, "but he said those two hijacked his load of marijuana. They pistol-whipped him and dragged him off the highway to shoot him. He fought, and they got killed."

  "I was in there," Lyons said, pointing toward the interrogation room. "I didn't hear that."

  "This was one of the stories he told me in Spanish on the way from San Ysidro. Coral said, 'It's finally over,' and we started talking..."

  "You informed him of his rights?" Lyons demanded.

  "They read him his rights while they had him spread-eagled against the truck. But what does that matter? You think the Feds will subpoena my testimony?"

  "Total
ly impossible," Gadgets said with a laugh. "You weren't even there."

  "We never are," Lyons added with a smile.

  Blancanales laughed with his partners. "Coral told me that all he ever wanted out of the smuggling operation was money for a ranch. But after he killed the two cops, it was down, down, down. Only the Ochoas could protect him from prosecution. Only the Ochoas paid him enough money so that he could send his kids to school and have a better life. He made the best of a bad situation."

  "Pass out the handkerchiefs, Politician. This scum is a cop-killing dope soldier who got paid in gold," Lyons snapped. "Why didn't he come north and make a better life for himself in the land of opportunity? Half the Mexicans in the U.S. are illegal. They get phony papers and presto, a new life. Nobody held a gun to his head and told him he had to work in the dope business."

  "It wasn't the gold. Not at first," Blancanales continued. "Think of it from his viewpoint. One, if he gets deported and the federalesrecognize him, he goes straight into a Mexican prison, for life. Two, if he works in the United States, what does an illegal alien fugitive with a grade-three education do for a living? He digs ditches, he washes dishes. All the time watching for la migra— the Immigration and Naturalization Service — at the door. Or he could be a bodyguard for a gangster. Did you know that he's got two teenage daughters at the University of California? He never could have done that digging ditches."

  "You make the shit sound like a working man's hero," Lyons grunted.

  "He's bad from the hair down, all right," Blancanales conceded. "But I think he'll cooperate with the Agency."

  "Cooperate?" Gadgets asked, incredulous. "El Pistolero in there's a one-man data bank. Too bad the printout's all past tense."

  "Past tense?" Lyons asked.

  "Yeah, the Ochoa gang is history. From what he says."

  Lyons laughed cynically. "Forget the Ochoas! Now we have the White Warriors organizing a billion-dollar dope operation in Sonora. That's only driving distance from the border."

  Blancanales shook his head. "Only a name. Doesn't mean there's any connection with the White Warriors down in El Salvador and Guatemala."