Scorched Earth

12

"I cannot stomach the idea of helping poppy farmers," Lyons told his partners. "I've seen too many people destroyed by heroin. My first thought is to call in an air strike on these farmers and..."

Miguel Coral interrupted the ex-cop. "The opium is not their crime. They have no choice!"

They talked in a third-level cave in the mountain of the Yaquis. Below them, they heard the voices and sounds of the hidden village. The tent of camouflage cloth glowed with early-morning light.

Able Team made a meal of freeze-dried beef and vegetables. Lyons gulped his share so that Davis could use the mess kit and spoon. Gadgets set another pot of water boiling over a fuel tablet. Instant coffee cooled in another aluminum pot. The pleasant odor of the village cooking drifted up to them where they ate, the air rich with the smells of frying food and bread baking.

"Here, in these mountains," Coral continued, "they cannot live if they do not grow opium. There is nothing else."

"Then why do they stay?" Lyons demanded. "There's work on the coast. There's jobs in the cities. Instead they grow and sell opium. And opium is the raw material of living death. Heroin has killed more people than Vietnam. Just consider the addicts, the teenage whores, the victims of dopers, the millions of dollars a day ripped off from honest people, the wasted dreams. You're asking me to compromise too much."

Lyons pointed a hard finger at Miguel Coral. "You're helping us, therefore I'll help you. But you're out of the horse trade. By helping these people, I'm helping their gang. I'm not going to work for poppy farmers. I won't. That's it."

"I think you should go and try working on the coast," Coral suggested. "Not as an American technician or as a manager, but as a campesino."

Gadgets laughed. "Yeah, Ironman the bracero. Uh-huh, I can see it now. 'Don't like those weeds? Call in an air strike.'"

"You are right," Coral agreed, laughing with the North Americans. "That is impossible." But he went on. "It is not the work; it is hard, but it is honest and it pays. It is the sickness and death from the chemicals. While the campesinos work in the fields, the planes come to spray the fields. The men die young. The women have babies that cannot live. The children who work in the fields shake and tremble as if they are cold, and their fingers cannot hold pencils. And in the cities? Ten workers for every job. It is hopeless. The sadness kills the people.

"Here..." Coral gestured to the village outside "...in their mountains, they have their land and they have their traditions..."

"Yeah, yeah. And their dope," Lyons muttered.

"It is the only way they can live. Without the money paid by the gangs, there is no food."

Blancanales interrupted. "I listen to you men argue and you are both right. The argument is a circle. The poverty creates the crime, and the crime cannot stop without the return of the poverty. All this shit about opium and gangs and the wars started in Mexico when Turkey outlawed poppies. If I remember correctly, the United States and Turkey cooperated to encourage alternatives to opium. They funded programs to develop crops the people could grow and support themselves. Why not here? The DEA must spend millions a year on destroying the opium. Why not fund the alternatives?"

"Uncle Sugar to the rescue," Lyons sneered.

Coral laughed. "More money for the rich! The money from your government, the foreign aid, do you think it goes to the people? It goes to the rich. Then to the banks of Houston and Miami and Switzerland. Mexico makes billions of dollars from selling oil. Enough to help all the poor of Mexico. But there is no help. I tell you something, Americans. I am a criminal. I am a killer. But there are things I will not do. I have a conscience. I am not like they who steal from people of Mexico to build palaces in Zihuatanejo and Miami and Los Angeles."

A voice came from the entrance. "You still talk?" The old achaistood silhouetted against the light.

Blancanales motioned for the old man to enter. "Achai, por favor, pase adelante. Tenemos cafe para usted?"

"Did he call himself El Chicano when he first came here?" Coral asked the achai.

The old man laughed. "You know much. Do not remind the boy. He gets angry."

"El Chicano?" Gadgets asked. "What are you talking about?"

"When the boy first had business with the Ochoas," Coral explained, "he thought he was El Chicano, from 'Zoot Suit.' He comes from Tucson and he sells opium, and he struts in his fancy clothes. Now he is an idigena. But I like him. I think you North Americans should give your foreign aid to him. He is an idealist. He is too proud to steal."

"Yes, very idealist," the achaiagreed. "Look at what he did here. With money he could make a city. But I thought you wanted a war."

Blancanales turned to Lyons. "We could get a DEA appropriation for a war. We'll list these people as mercenaries. That's a start on a foreign-aid program. There's always money for war. What do you say?"

Lyons nodded. "They earned some money yesterday."

"No doubt about it!" Gadgets told the others. "We were on the killing floor and the boot was coming down."

"You admit it!" Davis interrupted. The DEA pilot pointed at Gadgets with a mess-kit spoon. "Mr. Cool freaked out. You just said it."

"I did not freak out," Gadgets stated solemnly. "I remembered to say my prayers."

"Cut the jokes!" Lyons told them. "We're here to work, and we're not working. We're here for information. Either we grab some Blancos in the mountains here or we go to Culiacan to get some."

"There it is," Gadgets agreed. "We've got to get some. But where are they?" Gadgets looked inside the pot of freeze-dried beef stroganoff and shrugged. "None in there."

"I'll go with the mercenary idea," Lyons told the others. "That's honest work. Maybe they can buy good land with the money. And the money will go straight to the people. Not to the army of the politicos. Yeah, make meres out of a dope gang. I can live with that."

"Go to Vato," the achaitold Lyons. "He is the wi'koijaut. The war chief. I came only for coffee. We have no coffee in mountains since war."

"Going." Lyons gulped down the last of his coffee and left the cave. As he scanned the village for Vato, he glanced up and saw the sentries at the uppermost point of the camouflage tent watching him.

"Vato? Dinde es?" Lyons called out in his bad Spanish.

"Alla," a young woman with an M-16 told him, pointing with her left hand. Her right hand did not leave the grip of the assault rifle.

Vato sat with a group of young men and women in the center of the village. As Lyons went down the steps, he saw Vato reading aloud from a book, speaking in Spanish and Yaqui, then the group discussed what he had read. Some nodded agreement, others differed.

Putting down the book as Lyons approached, Vato asked, "When do we go?"

Only when he squatted down in the group did Lyons see the title of the book. He laughed. "Whenever you're done reading your paperback, we can talk the next move."

"Why do you laugh? Is it this book?"

Lyons pointed to the worn paperback, The Art of War. "There is no art to it," he said. "Only fear and blood and suffering."

Now Vato laughed. "True and not true. You are describing defeat. Even though Sun Tzu wrote more than two thousand years ago, he guides us to victories. Like yesterday."

"What do you read in the book about tomorrow?"

"To learn the future, I must go to other books. But what you want to know is not the future but the past. Who organized the White Warriors and where did they come from. Correct?"

"And what they intend to do with the money from the dope trade. To get that information, we need to get to the leaders."

"The leaders do not come into the Sierra Madres. The highest ranking we have seen are Mexican officers and one foreign officer."

"Who was the foreigner?"

"We saw them. We got no names. He was blond, his hair lighter than yours. Almost white. Our people saw him with a Mexican colonel."

"What uniform did he wear? What country?"

"The distance was too great. The scout could only describe it as gray."

"With black boots? A black pistol belt?"

"And a black beret. You know who we saw?"

"I know, but I don't want to believe. The only way to answer our questions is to take those officers and interrogate them. We've got to get those Mexicans and the foreigners."

"But is this for the DEA?"

"You'll be paid as mercenaries with Agency money..."

"I do not fight for the Drug Enforcement Agency. I fight for my people."

"So they can grow opium?"

"So they can be free of the opium and the gangs and the Mexicans. So they can live in these mountains like free people again."

"Sounds good. Our money will help."

"But we will not be mercenaries."

"We'll tell the DEA we hired you as soldiers. You can tell your people the money's a gift for helping us against the Blancos."

"No. We do not fight for you. It is our war. You came to our mountains and joined us. I will tell my people you fight for us."

"Forget the semantics!" Exasperated, Lyons cut off the argument with a salute. "Anything you want. You're the boss, yes, sir."

"It is agreed. I ask you again. This information, will it go to the DEA?"

"Depends. If the Blancos are only another dope gang, the information goes to the Agency. But no matter what, no information goes to the Agency until we're finished. We made the mistake of taking a DEA jet south, and they sent us into an ambush."

"Oh," Vato said, nodding. "That is why the trucks waited. They knew your plane would come."

"They waited?" shouted Lyons. "How long?"

"A lookout saw their headlights before dawn. They waited until your plane came. That is why we were ready. We thought they would come into the mountains, and they did. But what if the Blancos are not only a drug gang? I tell you they are not. Yes, they move the heroin to the United States, but they operate with the army. The army and the DEA never cooperated with the Ochoa Family. What if the Blancos are not a drug gang? What do you do?"

Lyons almost hated to think how far into the DEA gutter he was going to have to crawl to get to the slime who had set up the ambush.

"If they are who I think they are," the Ironman said, "we destroy them."

"Four North Americans and a Mexican against Los Guerreros Blancos and the army?"

Lyons gestured to the fighters in the mountain village. "The five of us and all your fighters. We can do it."

"I will not waste the lives of my fighters in stupid attacks." Vato passed Lyons The Art of War. "Look in the index. You will not find Courage or Heroism. But you will find Recklessness."

Lyons examined the worn paperback. It was translated from the Chinese by a U.S. Marine Corps general. The pages showed the wear of hundreds of readings. Sweat and oil and blood had stained pages. Then he looked through the index. He found an entry and turned to a page.

As Lyons silently read the pages, Vato opened a bottle of pills. He took one and passed the bottle to the circle of men. Every man took a pill, swallowing it dry. A boy took the bottle to other men in the area. Every man or woman who carried a weapon got a pill.

Lyons looked up from the book. "What're those?"

"Megavitamins. So that the fighters will have night vision."

"You are a leader," Lyons said, nodding with admiration. He returned his eyes to the book and read aloud.

"Here, I read from the section on the use of guides. 'We should select the bravest officers and those who are most intelligent and keen, and using local guides, secretly traverse mountain and forest noiselessly, concealing our traces... we listen carefully for distant sounds and screw up our eyes to see clearly. We concentrate our wits so that we may snatch an opportunity...'"

Vato translated the reading to the others. When all the men understood, Lyons looked at them.

"That is what we will do," he said.