Amazon Slaughter

8

"Lyons is zonked. Put that in the report."

In the shade of the patrol cruiser's canvas awning, Blancanales disassembled and cleaned his Beretta auto-pistol. He shared the top of a shipping crate with a tape recorder. Gadgets paused in the report he dictated to reply, "He didn't know what it was. Said something about 'indigenous operations.'"

Blancanales laughed. "I don't know about that guy sometimes. For an ex-cop, he is strange."

"He's beautiful. But being a cop makes a man strange. It's the people he meets. The public."

"Put some Thorazine on the list. Isn't that what they use when PCP crazies hallucinate?"

"Don't worry about him. I asked Thomas about it. He told me Lyons'll be all right tonight or tomorrow."

"Sane or not, Lyons travels tonight. We leave here at dusk. We shouldn't be here now. The slavers lost a patrol and three boats. Today or tomorrow, they'll send another patrol."

"Gringos!" Lieutenant Silveres called from the cabin door. "Am I your prisoner, also?"

"No, sir," Blancanales told him. "You are not. In fact, we need your help as liaison with the officials of your country."

The lieutenant sat on the bench with them. "Why do you make a recording?"

"A report to our superiors," Blancanales replied.

"In the Central Intelligence Agency?"

"Why did you assume those Cubans were CIA?" Blancanales asked.

As the other men continued talking, Gadgets packed up his recorder and took it back to his electronics kit. He prepared the radio and tape unit for a transmission.

"Does not the CIA use Cubans?"

"There are many Cubans in the world. Millions."

"And many Americans, also," the lieutenant countered. "In countries where they do not belong. Where are my pistol and rifle, gringo? If I am not a prisoner, I want my weapons returned."

"Certainly," Blancanales answered, his voice smooth, smile lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. "We will return your weapons when we cross the border. Right now, however, you are in Bolivia. And it's not proper that you carry a weapon in a country where you don't belong, isn't that correct?"

"What? And by what authorization do you operate here?"

Giving his Beretta a last wipe with an oil rag, Blancanales snapped in the magazine, reholstered the auto-pistol. "This is Bolivia. We operate by the authorization of the government of Bolivia."

"Pol! Over here," Gadgets called out. "You got to help me run up this antenna. It has to go up this boat's radio mast."

"Show me the authorization!" the lieutenant demanded.

Blancanales went to the railing and pointed south. "You have to ask the man who issued the directive. You go upriver about five hundred miles, hop over the Andes, make a right turn at La Paz and go straight to the Minister of the Interior. He'll tell you all about it."

Over four thousand miles away, in the corn-room of the Stony Man complex in Virginia, the identification signal from Gadgets's radio squawked from the wall-mounted monitor:

"Good morning! This is Mr. Wizard, calling from far, far away. Stand by for transmission."

As the machines automatically recorded the message, Aaron Kurtzman returned to his makeshift desk with coffee and lunch. Unwilling to wait in his own office for the overdue transmission from Able Team, Kurtzman had brought his briefcase to the corn-room. Now he heard the voice of Gadgets Schwarz. Dropping his lunch on the table, spilling half his coffee, Kurtzman hit the interoffice button on his telephone.

"April! Able Team reporting!"

"There in a second," the young woman called.

Electronically scrambled, transmitted to an orbiting satellite, relayed to the National Security Agency in Washington, then relayed to Stony Man and decoded, the voice of Gadgets sounded toneless and mechanical, as if synthesized. Yet his friends recognized his idiomatic phrases and oblique humor. Kurtzman recorded the report. April dashed in, took notes.

"We're about ten miles southeast of the Brazilian border. Not that that means anything — everywhere out here is nowhere. We have made contact..."

Throwing open the outer door to the pistol range, April grabbed a pair of ear protectors and jammed them on her head. She fumbled a page of notes, picked it up. Before she had properly fitted the plastic and foam phones over her ears, she elbowed through the inner door. She saw Mack Bolan sighting his .44 Auto-Mag on a fifty-foot target. Andrez Konzaki, standing on his aluminum canes, watched from a step away.

Bolan was committed to constant practice with all his weapons.

The muzzle-shock of the AutoMag in confined space hit April's left ear like a hammer. She staggered slightly, and cupped her hand over her ear.

"Mack!" she cried out, her ear throbbing. "Why bother with bullets? Just point that thing at the bad guys, and let the noise knock them down."

Bolan smiled. He saw the papers in her hand. "What goes on?"

"Able Team finally reported." She passed the notes to the commander of the three blazing counterterrorists now in the Amazon.

Holstering his auto-cannon, Bolan speed-scanned the first page of notes, passing the page to Konzaki. The men read the pages for pertinent details. Konzaki took a microcassette recorder from his coat pocket and verbally listed the weapons and equipment requested by Able Team, "Twenty-five Remington 870s, Parkerized, plastic stocks and foregrips. Mag extensions. Luminescent sites. Twenty-five hundred double-ought buckshot rounds. Three thousand rounds of .308 NATO in H & K magazines. Fifty sets of load-bearing equipment, size small through medium. Ten hand radios. Rations, vitamins, medicine for one hundred people..."

Bolan sat back on the shooting bench, shook his head. "Leave it to Able Team to find the weird action."

"What did you say?" Konzaki slipped off his ear protectors.

"Cuban slave raiders — what do you think of that?"

"I think we should reserve an interrogation room at Langley. Put some questions to those animals."

"I've put out a call for Grimaldi," April told them. "When he calls back, if he can make it, he'll go south."

"We can't wait for him. If he's not available immediately, find a pilot down there who'll land a seaplane on that river."

"And what about the inquiry to the Brazilian authorities?" April asked.

Bolan shook his head. "We have no reason to believe it isn't their reactor down there. They could be running the operation with mercenaries and crazies so they could deny it if it's discovered. Until we know for sure, I won't risk betraying our guys. How quick can you get those shotguns, Andrez?"

"One call for the shotguns and ammunition. One call for the LBEs, one for the radios. I can have it all by the end of the business day."

"I thought they're on a reconnaissance mission," April commented. "But this sounds like they're assembling an army down there."

"Well, it's like this," Mack Bolan, veteran of hundreds of missions himself, told his favorite lady. "It's one thing to give a good man instructions and send him out to do a job. But once he gets there, sometimes he has to do what is necessary. We've got three of the best down there. Three times over if need be, they will do what must be done."

He looked at April penetratingly, yet affectionately, then shifted his eyes to the targets down-range as if contemplating the eternal shapes and moves of his war everlasting, and picked up the AutoMag again to blast some more holes with all the purity and precision of the cosmic balance itself.

That was Mack Bolan. Staying hard. The soul muscle behind Able Team's pulsebeat. Forever.

Your move, Able.