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  Gadgets laughed. "They own Central America. Why do they want Sonora? It's a desert."

  "Heroin," Lyons insisted. "Sonora and Sinaloa and Chihuahua ship billions of dollars of heroin into the U.S. every year. A billion dollars buys armies and helicopters and jets."

  "Man, give it up!" Gadgets refused to accept Lyons's reasoning. "Some local gang thought they'd be bad and take a bad-ass name they read in the papers all the time. Doesn't mean a thing. Besides..." Gadgets laughed "... the scenario you're painting is so scary, I don't even want to think about it."

  Lyons pressed his argument. "But what if it is them? What if the Fascist International isn't satisfied with a few hundred million a year in foreign aid? Heroin means billions a year, without having to endure Congressional debates or worry about human rights."

  "A paranoid nightmare!"

  "Remember the army of Unomundo?" Lyons continued.

  "I don't want to hear it!" Gadgets told his partner. "If that crazy had a billion dollars, he'd buy an armored division. He'd buy an air force. He'd open up a Dachau franchise. High tech S.S. Just talking about it makes me shake."

  Lyons turned to Blancanales. "You trust Coral enough to take him south?"

  "You want to investigate the new gang?"

  Lyons nodded. "If it's local scum, we'll leave it for the DEA and the Mexican federales. If it's the same White Warriors we already know about, we'll do them."

  Gadgets laughed. "Now, that's confidence. Us three go up against a gang that's just wasted the biggest, most organized dope syndicate in Mexico. How about if I put in a call for the 101st Airborne to even up the odds? Maybe we can park the U.S.S. Missourioffshore for fire support."

  "Nothing serious," Lyons suggested. "Just a look-see. Try to make an identification. If it's them, we come back and plan our next move. If we take Coral south, with his contacts, we can get it done quickly. If you trust him, Pol."

  "If the Agency will go along with this," Blancanales began, thinking as he spoke. "They want information from him. To get his long-term cooperation, they plan to offer him a new identity under the Protected Witness Program. If we take him south for a safe and discreet investigation, that goes along with their plans. That's more information for the Agency. If they keep his family and his gold, we can trust him. That's all he cares about."

  "And revenge," Lyons added. "This will be a chance..."

  "Yeah," Gadgets agreed. "Pay-back on the psycho killers. He'll be hep to that."

  "Agency cooperation," Blancanales added. "That will be the central point. Coral will go along. He doesn't have a choice. But the Agency will need persuasion."

  Lyons shook his head. "I don't want them to know anything about what we're doing."

  Blancanales sighed. "Lyons, he's their prisoner. If we want him to escort us on a reconnaissance mission south, we'll need their agreement."

  "Once we get there, we're on our own," Lyons stressed. "Free agents."

  "Standard operating procedure," Gadgets agreed. "We need no shadows."

  Lyons gave Blancanales the nod. "Go to it, Mr. Politician. Promise them anything. But get us what we want."

  "Might take a few days." Blancanales glanced at his watch. "It's after midnight in Washington. Might have to talk about it all day tomorrow."

  "And maybe we'll have to get an Act of Congress," Lyons added. "Just get it."

  With a quick salute, Blancanales left the office.

  His partners heard him speak with agents in the corridor. Then they heard Blancanales enter another office. Gadgets turned to Lyons.

  "Just a look-see? Easy to say, but if we go, I'm taking everything I got and two or three nukes, too."

  Lyons nodded. "Standard operating procedure. Places we go, we always seem..."

  "To kill people," Gadgets finished.

  "It's kill or be killed. We've got enemies out there, Wiz."

  Gadgets smiled nervously. "We've got enemies out there we've never even met. Hell, we've got enemies out there we don't even know about yet."

  "We know about Los Blancos."

  "And they know about us. So I'm packing up. I'm checking my list. I'm checking it twice... because..."

  The office door flew open. Blancanales rushed in. "I didn't even ask them. They asked me if we'd go south. To confirm Coral's statements. At dawn, with Senor Coral in an Agency Lear jet!"

  Gadgets finished his jingle: "Able Team is going... downsouth."

  4

  An unmarked panel van ferried Able Team across the sun-baked asphalt of Lindberg Field.

  In the first red glow of the day, rows of parked executive jets remained shadows in the morning darkness. Miguel Coral stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the three North Americans riding in the closed van with him. Lyons watched him, trying to read the Mexican's thoughts.

  By the light of a penlight, Blancanales studied an operational navigation chart prepared from satellite photographs by the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center. He focused the tiny spot of illumination on the colors and mazes of lines representing the topography of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. He folded and refolded the oversized chart, searching the relief portrayals for elevations and the symbols of airfields and towns.

  "There's our plane," Gadgets told his partners. "This is unbelievable. We're traveling like congressmen. A real for-live Lear."

  "Confiscated from a dope smuggler," the driver told his passengers.

  "Who'd he steal it from?" Gadgets asked. "Why didn't the Agency return it?"

  "Steal it?" The driver laughed. "He paid for it, cash. We seized it under the Rico Act."

  The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allowed the U.S. government to seize the wealth and property of millionaire drug dealers. Passed in 1978, the Act presented a greater threat to the gangs than prison. Gangsters could avoid prison through endless appeals of their convictions. However, the initial judgment of guilt — and not the eventual state or U.S. Supreme Court findings — allowed the DEA or IRS to attack the illicit gains of the gang lords. The U.S. government took their mansions and Cadillacs and private jets, even if the gangsters eventually won reversals of their convictions on technicalities.

  The driver braked the van only steps from the Lear. Lyons jerked the sliding door open and pulled out his oversized luggage. He carried his heavy cases — one the size of a shipping trunk, the other long and flat like a guitar case — to the jet's steps. Not waiting for his partners, he went up in a run. He had to crouch to enter the luxurious interior of the Lear.

  Sitting on one of the leather passenger seats, the pilot eyed the cases. "Thought this was a day trip. Looks like you're taking up residence in Mexico."

  Lyons gave the pilot a wide grin. "Just gifts for my Mexican friends."

  "Oh, yeah. Good idea. We won't be going through Customs inspection. I guess there's going to be some people down there who'll be glad to see you."

  "And then again," Gadgets added as he set down identical oversized cases, "maybe not."

  "Why do you say that?" the pilot asked, not understanding.

  Blancanales and Coral came up the stairs and crowded into the cabin. The pilot extended a hand and introduced himself to his passengers. "I'm Pete Davis. I'll be taking you down to Culiacan and bringing you back. Once we're down there, I'll stand by in case you want to go sightseeing in a helicopter. You know, view the beauty of poppy fields in bloom, the romantic charm of mule caravans carrying opium through the mysterious mountains, maybe a sinister gang fortress."

  "We won't want any doper tours," Lyons told him.

  "Hey, man," Gadgets jived. "We're straight. We don't work for the government or anybody. We're businessmen. We're going down there on business."

  "Right!" Davis nodded. "Businessmen. Glad I got that straight. Businessmen on a business trip to the heroin capitol of the Western Hemisphere."

  Blancanales and Gadgets laughed. Lyons looked irritated by the joking.

  "Just fly the damn plane, will you?" Lyons said to Davis.
"If I want entertainment, I'll take a taxi."

  Davis glanced briefly at Blancanales and Gadgets and then started toward the pilot's cabin. "On our way! By the way, you gentlemen got names?"

  "No," Lyons told him.

  "Right," said Davis as he closed the cabin door behind him.

  Blancanales spread out the navigation chart on the cabin table. Miguel Coral watched from a corner seat as the Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret traced his team's route along the coast of Mexico, bordering the Gulf of California.

  "We'll do a certain amount of sightseeing," Blancanales stated. "This flight will parallel the coast and mountains and give us a chance for an overview of the region."

  As the jet's engines whined to life and the plane taxied to take off, Blancanales briefed his partners from memory.

  "Last night I read through the history of western Mexico's dope trade, and the only way I can summarize it is, Wild, Wild West. In 1971 the U.S. decided to shut down the Turkish opium trade and the French Connection that refined the opium and shipped the heroin into the United States.

  "Turkey has grown poppies for thousands of years. It took the Corsicans and French most of the twentieth century to create the market for morphine and heroin. But Mexico charged into the horse trade in only two years.

  "By 1974, after arrests broke the French Connection and Turkey banned the growing of amapola poppies, it didn't matter anymore. Mexico supplied almost all the heroin the needle heads of the United States needed."

  The jet accelerated down the runway and soared into the dawn sky. The lights of the city and the shimmering blue mirror of San Diego harbor appeared below them. The Lear banked to the southeast.

  "We'll be flying over territory you won't believe," Blancanales continued. "The heroin organizations grow their poppies in mountains and valleys so isolated and removed from the rest of the world that the Mexicans, with the largest fleet of aircraft in Latin America — prop planes, jet planes, bombers, helicopters — can't patrol it. The lands where the poppies grow might as well still be in the sixteenth century."

  Lyons had stopped listening. He stared out the port window to the lights and shadows of the city to see into his own memory.

  In the few minutes of flight, their Lear jet had already flown the length of the San Diego Bay. Below the jet, streaking lights of traffic speeding north and south marked Interstate 5 and Interstate 805, the freeway where Able Team had arrested the Mexican assassin now returning to Culiacan with them.

  Beyond the Interstates, the lights of the suburbs become individual and random as the urban monster sprawled into the desert. There, in the vague folds and shadows of the undeveloped lands, a blinking strobe light marked Brown Airport.

  Flor had died there.

  Less than a year before, during a helicopter pursuit of a truck loaded with a Soviet-made synthetic drug intended to create panic and flame a racial war in American society, the woman Lyons loved died.

  While he watched from another helicopter, her chopper took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. After the eighty-mile-per-hour crash and the explosion of the helicopter's aviation fuel, the coroner's aides had not even found enough of Flor to bury.

  The horror and the sorrow of her death had wounded him in a way he still did not completely understand.

  Some nights, he would wake and find himself bathed in sweat, his pulse beating in his ears, his throat hoarse and knotted. His neighbors in the condominium complex where he lived complained to the condo management of noises coming from his unit. He received citations for loud parties, for loud television, for loud stereo — he never argued, he paid the twenty-five-dollar fines immediately. He didn't attempt to deny or explain the noises.

  Some nights when he woke, his body drenched with sweat, images remained in the darkness: a desert flowing with blood, bones in the sand, blood flaming, his hands reaching into flames to touch her and coming away bloody.

  He did not understand the injury to his soul. But there was one thing he did know: Flor died to stop a shipment of Soviet-synthesized terror drugs, and the truck carrying the shipment of chemical horror had left Culiacan the day before.

  The truck left Culiacan a day after a Soviet freighter docked in the port of Mazatlan, a city that was three hours south of Culiacan by truck.

  The White Warriors had begun their takeover of the Culiacan drug industry a year before. The beginning of the takeover coincided with Flor's death.

  He had read the official reports. He had the documents and the black-and-white photographs taken by surveillance teams. He knew the secondhand stories told by informers and interrogated suspects — like the stories told by Miguel Coral. He knew the rumors and he knew how psychopathic killers operated.

  Questions screamed through his mind as he attempted to rationally analyze impossible contradictions.

  Why did white gunmen work for Black Nationalist terrorists?

  Did the White Warriors somehow play a role in the death of Flor?

  Did the black racist gang bringing Soviet-synthesized terror drugs into the United States use a gang of Fascist International drug smugglers as couriers?

  Did the strange politics of the Soviets and the Fascist International interweave?

  Did an alliance of Stalinists and Nazis prepare a terror assault against their common enemy, the United States, the world's strongest democracy?

  Tons of heroin, billions of dollars, the gang wars of Culiacan — those things diminished to nothing when he thought of Flor destroyed in that desert outside San Diego.

  The image of his woman falling flaming from the sky was burned into his mind forever.

  Lyons went south with only one thought: revenge.

  A half hour into the flight, their briefing was interrupted when a voice came over the intercom.

  "Businessmen, this is your pilot. The Culiacan office requests an overflight of the mountains east of Ciudad Obregon. Mexican officials report a significant antidrug operation in progress in the Sierra Madres on the border of Sonora and Chihuahua. The office requests that I overfly the area and report — just a second..."

  The door to the pilot's den slid open, and Davis leaned into the passenger cabin.

  "What the office wants is a confirmation of the action. They want us to count the trucks, count helicopters, get the actual coordinates. You mind if we take the detour?"

  "Is this sightseeing or what?" Lyons demanded.

  "It's official sightseeing. The office ordered me to sightsee, even if it delays your arrival time."

  "There will be no problem with fuel?" Blancanales asked.

  Davis shook his head. "No problem. It's only a few flying minutes out of the way. And it will give you a chance to see the Condors — that's the Mexican army antidrug task force — in action. If they are in fact in action."

  "If?" Blancanales refolded the navigation chart to look at the Sonora-Chihuahuan sector east of the coastal city. "Is there some doubt..."

  "Man," Davis said with a laugh. "Don't you know what goes on with the Mexicans? The U.S. of A. pays for the truck and helicopter fuel, and sometimes underwrites the salaries of the federalesand the expenses of the army. So the Mexicans tell us about such-and-such operation and present the bill for the expenses. But sometimes, they're..."

  Gadgets smirked. "Invisible!" he said.

  Davis nodded agreement. "It has happened. The new administration in Mexico City is different from the last one. They threw out most of the criminals and changed the laws, but laws don't mean anything when there's money to be made. La Mordidais forever. Everyone wants their bite of the action."

  "You mean the people the DEA works with are corrupt?" Lyons asked the pilot.

  "If they're Mexican," the pilot told him.

  Lyons turned and commented to his partners, "We don't want any liaison, right?"

  Blancanales looked to Miguel Coral. "We brought our liaison."

  Their pilot laughed. "You can't even worry about it. Down south here, you buy your friends. It's a tradi
tion."

  "No!" Coral shouted at the pilot. "It is a crime. You know nothing of my country or its traditions."

  "I know corruption is a Mexican tradition that will never change."

  "North American, you misunderstand..."

  5

  "You misunderstand..."

  The words summarized the history of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency alliance with the Mexican federal authorities in the war against heroin. From the first years, when the DEA established and guided the war, the North Americans ignored the beliefs and traditions of Mexico.

  Mexicans believed only the lowest, most vile subclass of criminals dealt in drugs. Therefore Mexican investigators and prosecutors did not believe North Americans with their wealth and opportunities would waste their lives in the drug subculture. They considered the heroin trade and American addicts beneath their concern.

  Nationalism also played a part. When the DEA traced heroin seized in the tenements of Los Angeles and Detroit and San Antonio to the western states of Mexico, the drug-enforcement officers expected the same cooperation they demanded and received from state officials in the United States. The officers reasoned that heroin represented a threat to both the U.S. and Mexico.

  The demands of the DEA officers offended the national pride of the Mexicans. The Americans did not speak Spanish. The Americans presented documents in English and expected immediate comprehension. When Mexican prosecutors and field agents with no experience whatsoever with drug syndicates required detailed briefings, in Spanish, to understand the complex networks of heroin transport and distribution operating in the United States, the DEA presented only cursory and incomplete overviews.

  Finally, Mexico had a fundamentally different justice system. In the United States, courts presume innocence until the proof of guilt. In Mexico the police prove guilt to a prosecutor who then orders the arrest. To win release, the Mexican suspect must then prove innocence. DEA officers went to Mexican prosecutors with stacks of files on suspects who had fled to Mexico. When the Mexican prosecutors expressed disbelief at the American system of justice that arrested criminals, released them, allowed the criminals to flee the country, then expected other countries to arrest them, the Americans called the Mexicans corrupt, in the pay of the gangs.