Kill School

15

Another rattle of static came from the hand-radio. Gadgets Schwarz listened for code-clicks or the voices of his partners. But the electronic noise obscured any message. Gadgets keyed a response. The bursts of static continued.

As rain beat on the plastic tarp sheltering him, Gadgets strained his ears to decipher a message within the static. He fought panic as his imagination created a thousand horrors his partners could have suffered in the hours since they left.

On the captured black radio, he and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored Quesada's cancellation of the ambush and the order for the squad to return to the finca.

Then Quesada warned his squad of assassins of the North American paramilitary agents.

How did Quesada know? Gadgets and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored not only the encoded Quesada communications but also the army frequencies. There had been no transmissions from the army react-force sent to collect the casualties and survivors of the guerrilla ambush. Only those soldiers had seen Able Team. Furthermore, Quesada's warning to his militiamen never mentioned "North American mercenaries en route to Honduras."

Had one of Quesada's units captured or killed Gadgets's partners?

Blancanales and Lyons had checked in several times.

When they had reached the crest of the mountain. After they had warned the journalists. And when they spotted the death squad.

No more messages came after that. Only a brief and uncertain exchange of static and clicks. Gadgets had responded to the noise by keying clicks in Morse code. But he received no return message or even a confirmation of his Morse signals.

Now more static-blurred clicks came from his radio, in no code or intelligent sequence.

He did not want to believe what his imagination told him about the transmissions: Blancanales or Lyons lay bleeding in some tangle of brush, too badly wounded to put out a coherent message…

Or someone played with the radios. The death squad had captured, maybe killed his partners and now the Salvadoran fascists experimented with the high-tech equipment,

Logically, he knew of many reasons for the breakdown in communication. Distance. The electrical interference of the storm. Damage to the radios.

The distance and lightning had not disrupted the check-in transmissions. Blancanales's voice had come through clear. And too much time had passed since Quesada recalled his death squad. With the help of Ricardo to guide them, Gadgets and Lyons should have reached the top of the mountain, with or without a prisoner. Only the possibility of damage remained. But both radios damaged? Or one destroyed and the other damaged? Unlikely.

He had to know.

In the makeshift tent made by throwing a plastic tarp over the jeep and the pedestal-mounted M-60, he put his feet up on the jeep's dashboard and considered the problem. He had few options. He and the lieutenant could not leave this position to search for his partners.

That left him with an electronic option. Boost the signal strength of his hand-radio. Could he use the longdistance transmitter with which they would signal Jack Grimaldi, the ace Stony Man pilot, in Honduras? No. That radio only transmitted digital code pulses on an ultra-high frequency. But Gadgets had other radios available. Pushing aside the tarp, he called into the rain and darkness.

"Lieutenant!"

The Salvadoran appeared. He had stood guard in the rain since nightfall. "Another radio message?"

"Nada. And man, that suggests a mucho bad problem."

Gadgets hooked a penlight to the dash. In the weak light, he searched through his kit and pulled out rolled metallic tape antenna. The antenna went with the ultra-high-frequency, long-distance transmitter. He kept one end and gave the lieutenant the roll. "This is an antenna. It has to go up the mountain."

Lieutenant Lizco nodded and disappeared into the downpour.

Opening the army radio console, Gadgets spliced the tape antenna's wires into the radio's antenna leads. Then he opened the case of his hand-radio. In the next few minutes, working carefully and exactly in the dim light, he wired the hand-radio's output with the microphone inputs of the army radio.

The army radio now served as a signal booster for the small hand-radio. The radio's encoded milliwatt output would be amplified by the high-wattage circuits of the army transmitter. With the jeep's whip antenna and the hundred feet of wire serving as a second antenna, Gadgets had a chance of overcoming distance and the storm's electrical interference to reach his partners' radios.

Looking into the darkness again, he called out: "Lieutenant! You got that antenna up there?"

Cold metal touched his ear. He knew what touched him even as he turned, infinitely slowly, to look.

The muzzle of an autorifle.