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  In most cases the accusations proved to be untrue. But the charges and countercharges disrupted the cooperation between the two governments. The atmosphere of distrust and misunderstanding provided camouflage for the truly corrupt. Those public officials and police on the secret payrolls of the syndicates explained the failed investigations and continuing drug trade on the "gringos brutos."

  Despite continuing problems between the DEA and the federal officials of Mexico, the Mexicans continued the program. Mexico needed the foreign aid. The United States sent millions of dollars south in equipment and cash. American dollars bought aircraft for the Mexican army. Mexican antigang agents trained in the FBI academy. Mexican police chemists received specialized instruction in the laboratories of the DEA. As many as fifty DEA field agents operated in liaison with Mexican law enforcement.

  But in the first five years of the antidrug campaign, the production of Mexican heroin and its transport to the cities of the United States multiplied by a factor of ten. Narcotic agents in the United States succeeded in capturing hundreds of couriers and middle-level gang captains, but the arrests did not break the syndicates. The Mexican federalesreported the imprisonment of thousands of farmers and couriers and gangsters, but the syndicates remained intact and operating.

  Then a series of crimes alarmed then-President Escheverria. At the time when he initiated the most progressive land-reform program in the history of the Republic, Mexican officers found Colt M-16 assault rifles, stolen from Army installations in the United States, in warehouses around Mexico City, only miles from the National Palace. Elsewhere in Mexico, gang leaders broke out of police cordons using LAW rockets and Uzi submachine guns. The hired gunmen of landowners executed campesinos with silenced MAC-10 special-purpose machine pistols.

  Federaleslearned from DEA informants that the drug syndicates wanted military weapons in payment for heroin. When the minister of the interior reported this detail to President Escheverria, the president sensed a link between the weapons and the increasing opposition he faced to his land reforms from the wealthy elite of the nation. He could not prove an association between the right-wing opposition denouncing him as a Communist and the drug syndicates importing thousands of military weapons. He ordered a secret investigation but did not wait for the findings.

  President Escheverria ordered the Mexican army to break the drug trade.

  Operation Condor assaulted the heroin empire of the syndicates. Two thousand elite soldiers entered the vast wilderness of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. They patrolled on foot, they launched airborne assaults against gang strongholds, they employed short-takeoff-and-landing planes in their effort to seize the hidden airstrips of smugglers. The DEA provided vehicles, communications and a hundred field agents. With the aid of American satellites, Mexican planes sprayed poppy fields with defoliant.

  Before the end of President Escheverria's term of office, Mexico forced the syndicates into retreat. Mexican heroin disappeared from the United States. No more military weapons came south to threaten the Mexican democracy.

  Then President Lopez Portillo took office. Lopez Portillo governed a Mexico exuberant with the flush of sudden wealth.

  Mexico had oil.

  The federal government of Mexico no longer needed foreign aid. The administration of President Lopez Portillo had no time for cooperating with the North Americans.

  President Lopez Portillo initiated the most ambitious program of economic development in the history of Mexico. He financed multibillion-dollar industrial— and agricultural-development programs with the petro dollars flooding the Mexican treasury.

  Americans played no part in these programs. However, the DEA reasoned that the rural programs, as the developments reduced rural unemployment and poverty, would undercut the heroin subclass. Fanners with irrigation systems and fertilizers would not need the illicit money earned by the red poppies. Teenagers with good jobs would no longer risk their freedom to earn a few hundred dollars carrying kilograms of heroin north.

  But the next six years became a period of corruption and theft unparalleled in the history of crime. Dollars and gold surged into foreign bank accounts at the rate of millions of dollars a day as the leaders and upper-class elite of Mexico looted their nation of petroleum wealth.

  The construction of mansions became a major new industry. The elite competed with one another in extravagance. The suddenly wealthy joined in the displays.

  The chief of police of Mexico City, appointed to his post by his friend Lopez Portillo, built mansions in Mexico, the United States and Canada. His official salary of sixty dollars a week also bought race horses, discotheques and Cadillacs.

  The government salary paid to President Lopez

  Portillo reportedly paid for a mansion of thirty-two hundred square meters, containing theaters and libraries and swimming pools, valued at fifty million U.S. dollars.

  In the last year of the Lopez Portillo administration, Mexico collapsed under the burden of international debts. Inflation robbed the Mexican people of their savings. Millions of unemployed and underemployed Mexicans fell into desperate poverty. Hunger and malnutrition became common.

  As President Lopez Portillo left office, he stated, "I have nothing to be ashamed of."

  Starving poor seized towns. Wage earners, working double shifts for pesos that could not buy food for their families, organized strikes, seizing factories and closing down the cities. The destitute farmers, the workers, the hungry middle classes threatened class warfare. The wealthy fled to their estates in Spain.

  The new president of Mexico, Harvard trained and receptive to the guidance of economic advisors — Mexican and American — saved Mexico from chaos. He asked the people of his nation for patience and courage. The forces calling out for revolution granted the new president time to purge the criminals and renegotiate the foreign loans.

  But poverty and hunger remained.

  Soon Mexican heroin returned to the United States.

  6

  Leaving the blue mirror of the Gulf of California behind, the jet passed over the agricultural projects spread around Ciudad Obregon. Black ribbons of asphalt roads and silver lines of irrigation canals divided hundreds of square miles of green into rectangles. Company installations — worker dormitories, equipment sheds and warehouses — clustered at the intersections of roads. Trucks and worker buses marked fields where lines of laborers hunched over the rows, harvesting cotton and vegetables. To the north, a dirty smear of smoke marked Ciudad Obregon.

  Throughout the flight, Miguel Coral had remained silent except when asked a question. He responded in monosyllables and short sentences, speaking Spanish if Blancanales questioned him, answering Lyons and Gadgets in English. Now he stared down at the fertile lands.

  "That is why I became a drugerro," he told the North Americans.

  Lyons looked down on the fields. He saw only endless rows of crops glittering with water. "What are you talking about?"

  "Water and land," the gang soldier explained. His words came slowly, with resignation. "The rich and the foreigners get the land and the water. Mexicans only work."

  "So you killed some cops. Did that get you the land you wanted?"

  Coral looked at Lyons, not with anger, but studying him, as if attempting to understand the blond man who sneered at him. Before Lyons could speak again, Blancanales spoke to the Mexican. "Yesterday you told me you wanted to buy a rancho outside Hermosillo. Is the land there like this?"

  "There is the land of the companies. That land is always green. Then there is the desert. My father had twenty acres of sand and cacti. He drilled for water, but they did not find water. He borrowed money from the bank for a deeper well, but he did not find water. The bank took his land. The bank and the government brought water, and now a foreign company grows tomatoes there. I wanted green land, so I ran the drugs to the border. I made money, but never enough to buy land with water. Then the police wanted to take my marijuana for their own gang, and then my dreams were over
."

  Blancanales nodded, then said, "But I thought foreigners couldn't own land in Mexico."

  "They make corporations with the banks. Sociedades anonima. Anonymous societies. The campesinos have no hope."

  "The socialist explanation of the dope gangs!" Lyons said with a laugh. "The heroin gangs are poor down-trodden peasants trying to improve their lives. Explains everything. Dead cops, all the murders, the corruption, a million addicts."

  "Be cool, will you?" Gadgets interrupted.

  "When we make it to the City of Dope, our continued existence might depend on Senor Coral. So be cool, all right? Until you know what you're talking about."

  Gadgets stared at Lyons, and the Ironman turned away and looked out the window. The Wizard knew that something had been eating away at his friend's mind like a cancer since the beginning of the Coral bust. He knew of only one thing that could be driving the load of anger Lyons was carrying. Flor.

  Coral continued quietly, without anger. "It is different here. It is not like North America. If you had walked with me through my life, through the lives of my people, you would know. Do not judge me until you know."

  The intercom blared. "Mountains coming up. That's the River Mayo down there, if you want to check your map. Three or four minutes to the scene of the action."

  Looking down, they saw brush and trash heaps smoking from a hundred fires. The jet passed over a highway and railroad. To the south, villages and small farms lined the banks of a muddy stream winding through rocky flood plains and tangles of cane. Cottonwood trees and cornfields identified the farms that had year-round water. But they left the green oases behind in only another minute of flight.

  Their jet traveled over mesquite and cacti. Cattle paths and motorcycle tracks scarred the flatlands. The plane banked slightly to follow a dirt road into the foothills.

  They saw the undulating folds of the dry mesquite-pocked hills. Beyond the hills, mountains rose against the horizon like an unforgiving wall of gray stone, range after range fading into the distance and glare.

  "Here's where we are." Blancanales pointed out their approximate position on his chart.

  "But where are we going?" Gadgets wondered out loud. "All I see is nadaland."

  "I'll ask the driver," Lyons said, going to the pilot's cabin. He slid the door open. "You spot the action?"

  "Not yet." Davis motioned Lyons to the copilot's seat. He took binoculars from a map compartment and passed them to Lyons. "Look for dust. This time of year, if a truck's on a road or they're using helicopters or planes, you can see the dust plumes from miles away."

  With the high-powered optics, Lyons searched the wasteland. To the east, directly ahead, he saw rock and sand and desert brush, but no roads or farms. Several miles to the south, he saw a village — a patchwork of green cut by the straight khaki line of a dirt road.

  Davis scanned the Mexican army radio frequencies. A burst of static indicated a distant transmission. A squawk answered. Davis fine-tuned the frequency and listened to the Spanish words.

  "That could be them," Davis said.

  "You going to radio for their location?" Lyons asked.

  "Not if I can avoid it."

  "Is this checkout secret?"

  "Not really. But it might offend them if they thought..."

  "They're spending U.S. taxpayer's money and you're worried about offending them?" Lyons challenged.

  Davis laughed. "You're one guy who won't make friends and influence people in Mexico."

  "We could be up here all day looking for them." Lyons pointed to the vast expanse of the desert and mountains. "If they are out here, and we miss them, you'll be taking back a report that could make for some problems. Unjust accusations and all that."

  "You talked me into it." Davis took the transceiver microphone and spoke in Spanish, identifying himself and mentioning the magic initials, DEA.

  A voice answered immediately, and Davis spoke with an operator. After a further few seconds of static, a man identifying himself as an officer came on the frequency. Davis talked with the officer, exchanging numbers and compass headings, then signed off.

  "That's them. They're in trucks, busting a mule train loaded with opium. They want us to overfly and try to spot any other mules in the hills. It'll take a few minutes, then we'll be back on track to Culacan."

  Following the coordinates, Davis veered to the northeast. Lyons kept the binoculars focused on the wasteland. He saw only eroded gullies and cattle tracks. There were no roads, no farms, nothing green but the mesquite.

  After three or four more minutes, they spotted the OD trucks. Tire tracks led from the west.

  Soldiers milled about in the mesquite trees and rock spurs. Tarps covered the cargo beds of the stake-sided trucks.

  But Lyons saw no mules.

  "You said they busted a mule train?" he asked Davis.

  "Yeah, that's what he told me." Davis leaned to the compartment door and spoke to the others. "Take a look. Condor Group commandos down there. Searching the unmapped wilderness of the Sierra Madres for doper desperados."

  Davis put the jet into a wide turn to circle the trucks. Lyons kept the binoculars on the soldiers. He saw a soldier snap back the cocking handle of an FN-FAL rifle. Suddenly the tarps on the backs of the trucks flew open.

  "Get us out of here!" Lyons screamed. "It's an ambush!"

  Davis recoiled from Lyons's shout in his ear. Lyons shoved the control yoke and the jet lurched. Something slammed the fuselage and then wind shrieked through the interior of the passenger cabin, sending papers swirling. Gadgets and Blancanales shouted to Lyons.

  As Davis drove the plane into a hard turn, Lyons strained against the G-force to jam the binoculars to his eyes. He saw a flame streak from the back of a truck, then another, then another. His gut knotting, he recognized the launchers they shouldered. Soviet SAM-7 antiaircraft rockets.

  * * *

  Following the DEA jet through his field glasses, Lieutenant Colomo saw the flash of impact. His soldiers cheered, their rifle fire dying away as they saw the rocket slam into the plane of the gringo assassins. The sound of the exploding warhead came an instant later. Lieutenant Colomo kept his binoculars focused on the plane.

  Bits of metal fell from the fuselage. Smoke came from the right engine, the line of black tracing the descent of the plane toward the mountains. The wings of the plane wobbled as the doomed pilot struggled for control. Only when the plane fell behind a distant ridgeline did the lieutenant lower his binoculars.

  The radio man called out to him. "Colonel Gonzalez wants the coordinates. He has the helicopters ready."

  Lieutenant Colomo ordered his soldiers to the trucks, and they scrambled up the bumpers to congratulate the men who had launched the rockets. He allowed them their few minutes of celebration as he spoke with the colonel on the secure-frequency radio. The radio had been provided by their Argentine advisors to prevent the monitoring of communications between units on "special assignments."

  "Sir! The plane is down."

  Through the coding and decoding circuits of the radio, the colonel's voice sounded electronic, inhuman. "What are the map coordinates?"

  "I do not have the exact coordinates yet. The plane crashed in the mountains."

  "Are they all dead?"

  "I do not know. One missile hit the plane and it went down burning. I will report again when we locate the wreckage."

  "I am dispatching the helicopters immediately. What was the compass heading of the crash from your location?"

  Lieutenant Colomo plotted the direction on his map and gave his commander the bearing.

  "Is there any possibility," Colonel Gonzalez asked, "of a crash landing? Are there landing strips in that area?"

  "No, sir! They went into the mountains. There is no hope for them."

  "And you saw no parachutes?"

  "No, sir!"

  "And no radio calls, no distress calls?"

  "They had no time for that. One moment they were flying, and the
next moment they fell from the sky. They died alone and lost. Perhaps they will never be found. Planes disappear in those mountains."

  The colonel laughed, the sound electronic and strange. "We will find them. Or what remains of them. We will burn what is left and bury the ashes. Then they will truly be the lost, the disappeared."

  7

  Fuselage shuddering, an out-of-balance turbine disintegrating in a continuous screaming, shattering roar, the Lear lost altitude. Automatic alarms whined from the instrument panel. Davis struggled with the yoke in one hand while he threw switches in a desperate effort to somehow compensate and maintain control for a few more seconds. The sky disappeared, a rocky mountainside loomed ahead. Lyons turned in the copilot's seat to shout back to his partners, "Strap yourselves in! We're going down!"

  "No shit!" Gadgets shouted back. "Glad you told me! Put out a Mayday! A Mayday!"

  As Lyons fastened his own safety harness, the disintegrating turbine died. The drone of the other engine continued, but with the damaged engine shut down, the plane seemed suddenly quiet. Lyons heard wind rushing through the plane. He felt the descent slow.

  "Where's the radio?"

  Davis didn't answer, didn't take his eyes from the desert and mountains. The mountainside went horizontal as Davis managed to bank the jet through a slow left turn. He jerked an emergency lever and leaned against the windshield to look back. Lyons looked back and saw jet fuel stream from a wing, the fuel instantly becoming a mist, then vaporizing.

  Flipping a switch, Davis jerked the microphone from the instrument panel and passed it to Lyons.

  "Just say 'Mayday, one hundred miles east of Obregon.' Keep repeating until we hit."

  The plane maintained a slow controlled descent parallel to the mountain. They flashed over a ridge-line and Lyons saw the mountain curving away into the distance. Ahead lay a wide, flat plateau covered with mesquite and yucca and dry brush.