Scorched Earth at-13 Page 5

  But beyond the plateau a range of cliffs and steep mountainsides walled the horizon. The plane did not have the power to gain altitude. They had only a few more seconds of flight.

  Lyons chanted into the microphone, "Mayday, one hundred miles east of Obregon. DEA plane going down one hundred miles east of Obregon. We were hit by rockets fired by the Mexican army. One hundred miles east of Obregon. Repeat, we were shot down by Mexican army. Repeat, Mexican army."

  In a gorge below, centuries of flash floods raging down from the mountains had formed an alluvial fan of sand and tangled brush. Davis eased the yoke slightly to his left, aiming the nose of the jet for a flat expanse of sand. To the right, a gully cut straight down from the gorge to the desert floor.

  "This is it!"

  "DEA plane going down one hundred miles east of Obregon. Shot down by Mexican army using SAM-7 missiles. We're going down..."

  Davis reversed the power of the remaining engine, jamming the throttle past maximum. The plane lurched and shuddered with the deceleration. The sand and mesquite of the alluvial flat became a blur.

  Metal shrieked. Lyons saw mesquite branches flashing past the nose of the jet at a hundred miles an hour and then he pulled his legs up and shielded his head in his arms. The plane jumped and slammed over the flat for an eternity of noise and shocks.

  Finally it ground to a halt. Silence.

  "Move it!" Davis shouted. "Get everyone out. We've still got fuel in the tanks. Get out!"

  Lyons saw swirling dust beyond the spider-webbed windshield. He took a deep calming breath and checked himself for injuries. No blood, no broken bones. His joints moved. He found hair and bits of bloody skin under his fingernails. His own.

  Davis crowded past him. Lyons unbuckled his straps and followed the pilot into the passenger cabin. Davis leaned over Gadgets and helped him with his seat belt. The Able Team communications and high-tech specialist had blood on his face.

  "I'm okay, I can do it. Why didn't you radio those army guys that we were good guys?"

  "He did," Lyons told his partner. "They knew this was an American DEA plane. They were waiting with SAM-7s. It was an ambush."

  "What a world. Where's my gear?"

  "Don't worry about it!" Davis shoved him toward the door. "Get out of this plane before it burns."

  "Don't panic!" Gadgets said, trying to calm the pilot. "You did great. You're an ace. We lived through it. Now get all the gear out."

  Blancanales and Coral struggled with the door release. Blancanales jerked the handle around, then Coral kicked the door until it swung open. Dust swirled into the cabin. Coral stepped out.

  "No hay fuego!" the Mexican called in to Blancanales. "Alli esta la gasolina pero no prende."

  "Bring everything to me," Blancanales called out to his partners. He passed one of the shipping cases to Coral outside. "Pilot. You go out there. Help Miguel get the equipment away from the plane."

  Working together, Able Team emptied the plane of their gear in less than a minute. Davis shouted from outside, "The wing's leaking fuel! Get out of there! You could burn any second!"

  Gadgets, his face caked with blood and dust, slipped on his aviator-style sunglasses and stepped out into the desert brilliance. He snapped a salute to Davis.

  "Be cool, Mr. Wizard's on the scene."

  Blancanales, then Lyons followed their partner out. They ran with their cases through the tangles of mesquite and desert weeds. Stepping into the gully, they slid down the sand walls and assembled at the bottom.

  "Shot down by the damn Mexican army!" Lyons cursed. The ex-cop turned to Miguel Coral. "Pardon me for what I said to you. I think I just got my first lesson in Mexican reality."

  "Shades of gray," Blancanales told Lyons. Then he spoke with Coral in Spanish.

  Gadgets joked with Davis. "See, man? In moments of crisis, you got to keep your cool. Did you see any smoke? Did you see any fire? Save your adrenaline for when things get serious."

  "Serious? Those wings've got two-hundred-plus gallons of jet fuel in their tanks. One short, one spark and it could've been instant cremation."

  "Pol, you got that map?" Lyons asked, cutting the argument. "Looks like it's time to hike."

  "With all that crap?" Davis pointed to the shipping cases they sat on. "You won't get a mile. While you're dragging your precious luggage through the desert, those Mexicans will be looking for the plane. And all we've got to defend ourselves with is my .38."

  Gadgets exchanged glances with his partners. Lyons gave a quick cynical laugh. Blancanales pulled the wadded navigation chart from his sports coat. As Coral and the ex-Green Beret searched for the correct sector of the chart, Blancanales suggested, "Give our pilot friend a demonstration."

  "Observe, my friend, and you will learn the way of the Wizard."

  Throwing open the lid of the trunk, Gadgets revealed several plastic boxes. He took out box after box, stacking them on the gravel of the dry stream-bed. A step away, Lyons emptied his trunk. Through the thin translucent plastic, the pilot saw tools and equipment in some boxes, cartridge magazines in another, clothing in one. Stenciled words identified the contents: Electronic, Survival, 5.56MM/9MM/EXP, Armr, Socks and Underwear, Money, Junk Food. The last box had a red cross and First Aid stenciled on the lid.

  Gadgets pushed up the sleeves of his bloody sports coat and showed the pilot his empty hands. Then he reached to the bottom of the trunk. He pulled out an OD internal-frame backpack, complete with shoulder and hip straps, compression straps and Velcro seals. Gadgets zipped open the compartments. He pulled out green-and-black splotched camo fatigues. Then he slipped the plastic boxes inside the pack. Each plastic box fit perfectly.

  "I mean, do we got our act together? El perfecto..." He pointed to his OD pack and his green-and-black camo suit. "Except that I've got the wrong color camouflage."

  To the side, Lyons stripped off his sports coat, shoulder-holstered Colt Python and white shirt. He threw the street clothes into the empty trunk and put on a black long-sleeved fatigue shirt and black fatigue pants. He slipped into the shoulder holster and pulled the strap tight. He left on his gray slacks but changed from his neoprene-soled street shoes into black canvas-and-nylon boots. Like his clothes and boots, he also preferred black nylon for his backpack.

  Then they opened their "guitar cases." Lyons strapped on a black web belt and a bandolier. He took out his Atchisson full-auto assault shotgun. He checked the weapon, then snapped in a magazine. An extra barrel for the Atchisson — a fourteen-inch "urban environment" barrel — and a Colt Government Model .45 automatic disappeared into the backpack.

  From his case, Gadgets took almost identical web gear, but his belt carried a Beretta 93-R fitted with a silencer. He slung a Colt Automatic Rifle, with a short barrel and telescoping stock over his shoulder.

  "Presto chango!" Gadgets exclaimed. "Convertible luggage for convertible dudes. From businessmen to hardcore tourists. Let those Mexicans come. They find us, it's their problem."

  Davis stared. "What exactly were you going to do in Culiacan?"

  "It's not whatwe were going to do," Lyons said laughing. "It's whowe were going to do."

  Gadgets laughed also. "We always carry this, maybe more. Boy Scout motto..." Gadgets looked to Lyons.

  They spoke simultaneously, "Always be prepared."

  Blancanales pointed to a position on the map. "We're here. The Mexicans are between us and the nearest road back to the coast. Senor Coral suggests we walk to here..." He pointed to a line cutting through the mountains. "That's the Chihuahua al Pacifico. We'll walk there, then ride the train down to Los Mochis."

  "How far?"

  "A day. Two days."

  Lyons shook his head. "Forget it. I only packed a liter of water. Let's kill those soldiers and take a truck."

  "It's a one-day walk the other way," Blancanales countered. "And if we don't get a truck, we'll be walking through their territory. If we take the train back, our return will be a complete surprise."

 
"All right, we take the long walk. Time to move." Lyons glanced at his watch. "We've been on the ground seven minutes. We burn the jet?"

  "Why?" Davis asked. "There's a chance it can be salvaged."

  "That plane's a wreck. And when the Mexicans get here, they'll know we got out. I want to throw all this luggage..." he pointed to the empty shipping trunks and the guitar cases "...inside the plane and torch it."

  "What a waste," Davis said, shaking his head.

  "Waste or be wasted," Lyons told him.

  Blancanales emptied his equipment cases. As he assembled his gear, Lyons returned to the shattered Lear. The area stank of spilled jet fuel. He threw the cases inside, one by one.

  With Gadgets's blood-ruined sports coat, Lyons ran a few hundred meters from the plane. He dropped the bloody coat on the sand. He ran another hundred meters to a gully where insects buzzed around a stagnant pool of water seeping out of the sandbanks. Sliding down the side of the gully, Lyons ran downstream, through swarms of horseflies and turquoise-blue dragonflies. A hundred meters to the south, he scrambled up a rock slope.

  He broke off a mesquite branch and swept away his bootprints as he returned to the plane. When he neared the wreck, he walked backward. The Mexicans would find two different false tracks leading away from the plane. Then he swept away his tracks to and from the gully where the others waited.

  "Wizard!" Lyons called out as he slid down the embankment.

  Gadgets Schwarz braced his CAR on the lip of the gully. "Ready?"

  "Light it," Lyons barked.

  The CAR popped once in the emptiness of the high desert. A rifle flare arced across the hundred meters of sand and mesquite, the magnesium charge an intense white for an instant. Then the fuel flashed and a ball of flame churned into the sky.

  Leaving the column of flame and black acrid smoke behind, the survivors marched north, following the gully through the alluvial fan. A kilometer ahead, the sheer volcanic stone walls of the gorge towered above the desert.

  * * *

  From the mountains, three men watched the strangers and the burning jet. They sprawled in the rocks and windblown sand of a ridgeline. Their clothes matched the dust: simple hand-sewn cotton pants and shirts, colored first with dye, then stained again every day with sweat and dust and sometimes blood. They also wore boots taken from the Mexican army. Rags had been wrapped around the soles and secured with strings.

  All of the young men carried rifles. Two wore Mexican army-issue M-16 rifles slung over their backs. The third carried an antique Springfield 1903-A3 bolt-action rifle with a stock carved from wood.

  The young men had skin the color of the old rifle's stock, dark like rich walnut or mahogany. Their dark hair fell to their collars. Knives had cut their hair square at their shoulders.

  The man with the Springfield watched the foreigners through Mexican army-issue binoculars. The other two waited for his instructions.

  A rotor throb came from the south, distant and faint, heard, then gone, then heard again. The men searched the horizon for the helicopters. One man shielded his eyes from the glare and stared into the distance. He pointed.

  Raising the binoculars, the third man found two OD Bell UD-1D military helicopters. The three young men watched for the next few minutes as the helicopters circled the burning jet.

  One helicopter landed on the sandy flat while the other continued circling overhead. Like shadows in a storm of rotor-thrown dust, a skirmish line of soldiers in the green uniforms of the Mexican army searched the alluvial fan for survivors of the crash.

  A soldier signaled to an officer. The officer and a radioman went to where the soldier stood. The three Mexicans thrashed through the mesquite to the gully cutting through the alluvial fan.

  Above the search group, the command helicopter broke off its orbit of the wreck. The helicopter spiraled down to an altitude of a hundred meters from the desert, then followed the streambed south, in the direction of the road to the Pacific coast.

  The Mexican soldiers re-formed into a skirmish line and swept south through the mesquite. In a rotor storm of sand, the second helicopter lifted away from the crash site and took a slow, hovering course parallel to the streambed.

  The command helicopter flew to the south, the direction from which it had come, as if returning to base.

  On the high ridgeline, the three young men watched the search. The watcher with the binoculars looked down to the base of the mountain. Through the high-powered optics, he saw the five foreigners, three in fatigues and carrying weapons, quick-marching to the north.

  The watcher lost sight of the foreigners when they gained the concealment of the shadows and rocks of the gorge.

  "Brujo, mira aquello," one of the young men said, pointing to the southwest.

  El Brujo, the young man with the old Springfield rifle and the binoculars, scanned the horizon. He saw the speck of the command helicopter returning. But the helicopter came by a circuitous route, staying far in the distance. From time to time, El Brujo lost sight of the helicopter behind the mountains, but he continued to track the helicopter as it completed a half circle around the plateau where the private jet had crashed.

  Finally, the helicopter disappeared into the mountain ranges in the north.

  The young man the others called El Brujo returned his binoculars to their case. He issued quick instructions to one of the others. The young man nodded. He cinched the sling of his M-16 tight, then ran north along the ridgeline, his rag-wrapped feet kicking up puffs of dust as he ran, but leaving no tracks.

  El Brujo and the other young man took a trail leading down the mountainside. For the next hour, on trails and ledges several hundred meters above the rocky riverbed of the gorge, they paralleled the foreigners who were attempting to escape into the mountains.

  8

  As the pilot held the Huey troopship in a hover, Mexican soldiers stepped down to therocks of a mountain ridgeline. The NCO leading the ambush squad turned and saluted Colonel Gonzalez. The colonel returned the salute, then the helicopter sideslipped away and descended into the canyon. The helicopter stayed low in the canyon, the pilot weaving the million-dollar ship between the cliffs and mountainsides, using the topography to conceal its rotor throb from the North Americans somewhere in the mountains.

  Sergeant Mendoza called his men together, and briefed them quickly, touching the map to indicate the location of the gorge.

  At the site of the wreck the searchers had found the false tracks leading south. Colonel Gonzalez believed the North American drug agents who survived the wreck had fled north, into the mountain gorge. The colonel's helicopter had placed Sergeant Mendoza and his squad more than ten kilometers north of the crash site. Now, only a mountain ridge and a march of a few kilometers separated the soldiers from the North Americans.

  "We think four escaped the crash and ran into the mountains. Some are bleeding. The colonel will send the other squad into the gorge. The gringos will run from them..."

  His blunt calloused finger traced the path. The squad would go uphill to the first ridge, proceed north to a second, then travel east along a third. "We will take positions here, above them, and kill them. Or force them to surrender to the others. It should all be over before nightfall."

  He led his men west up to the first ridge. They grunted against the weight of the weapons and munitions they carried. In addition to their heavy FN-FAL folding-stock paratroop rifles and two hundred rounds of 7.62mm cartridges in magazines, each man carried rifle grenades and mortar rounds. The mortar crew, burdened with the components of the 81mm mortar, carried lightweight Uzi submachine guns. Every soldier carried four one-liter canteens of water.

  At the mountain ridge, as the soldiers caught their breath, their rasping throats and coughs loud in the silence of the mountains, Sergeant Mendoza surveyed the terrain.

  To the south, he saw the foothills and desert. A smear of gray smudged the sky, but smoke no longer rose from the crash site. To the other points of the compass, Mendoza saw o
nly the Sierra Madres, the thousands of canyons and ridgelines and peaks continuing into the distance.

  With his binoculars he searched the mountainsides for signs of Indian bandits. His brigade had lost men in these mountains before. Though soldiers with dogs searched for the lost squads, they never found the missing men. The dogs found the scent of blood and a few cartridge casings buried in the sand, but nothing else.

  Legends told of Indians who still fought in the Sierra Madres. Sergeant Mendoza searched every rock and shadow and form of the mountains, focusing his binoculars on scrub brush and wind-gnarled trees. He did not want his death to contribute to the legends.

  The sergeant ordered his squad to move. Leading the way, he followed the ridge to the north, his men behind him groaning and complaining about the weight of their weapons. Automatically his eyes searched the sand for signs of Indian bandits.

  Mendoza consulted his map at every turn of the ridgeline. Prepared from satellite photos, the topographical map had been provided to the Condor Group by the DEA for use in operations against the opium farmers.

  In the recent months, Mendoza had used the map to find and force the cooperation of the farmers in the mountains. Now he used it to find and kill American DEA officers.

  The squad followed the ridgeline, slipping and scrambling across the steep slope until they came to a sheer drop. Hundreds of meters of void separated the squad from the opposite mountain. A hawk floated in the updrafts, watching the canyon and mountainsides for prey.

  Mendoza crawled to the edge and looked down into the cleft between the mountains. Two hundred meters below, stagnant water pooled in the sand of the streambed. A thin stream snaked around slabs of fallen stone. Twisted cottonwood and mesquite trees grew from the walls of the gorge, but at the bottom, where countless flash floods had scoured the stones, only brush and grasses would provide cover for the Americans.