Scorched Earth

15

Wiping the blood of the young girl off his fatigue pants, Lieutenant Colomo pushed his way out of the crowd of soldiers. The men of the International Group already cheered on the next man who took his turn in the gang rape.

Flashlights illuminated the atrocity on the packed-dirt floor. The circles of light played on the naked blood-smeared leg of the girl, then on her breast and her face. The dim lights glowed on the polished boots of the soldiers. From time to time, a beam wavered over the crowd, the leering, openmouthed faces of the soldiers leaping from the shack's darkness like disembodied masks in a nightmare. The young girl cried without end, her voice hoarse and cracking from screaming.

Lieutenant Colomo crossed the dirt floor of the shack and stood in front of the girl's father.

Ropes bound the campesino to the rough-hewn wood of a chair. Though he looked sixty, he might have been only thirty years old — decades of searing mountain sun had weathered his face to leather, malnutrition and poverty had taken most of his teeth. He stared at the floor, groaning with shame and sorrow as his daughter cried. Jerking the man's head back by the hair, the lieutenant shouted down into the face of the campesino.

"Who killed the soldiers?" he demanded.

The waving beams of the flashlights, the only lights in the adobe shack, gleamed on the blood and tears streaking the man's face.

"We know nothing of it, please leave us alone, we did nothing to the army..."

The lieutenant slammed his fist into the man's face.

"We have no guns, we have nothing to fight with, we do not kill," the helpless figure went on.

Colomo drove his knee into the man's solar plexus. Choking, gasping, the campesino struggled to breathe. He dragged down a shuddering breath and rattled out the words, "We did nothing..."

Pulling his partner upright, the lieutenant sneered into his face. "Hear me, you half-breed filth. We want the information. You tell us or we will throw what's left of your daughter to the vultures. You understand?"

"Please... for the love of God, we did nothing to you..."

The words enraged the Lieutenant. How dared this half-human, indigenacreature, this ignorant Yaqui, this thing that lived in filth and bred offspring in filth, evoke the holy grace of a white God? Trembling, his Castilian features red with rage, Colomo snatched at the Colt pistol in his belt holster.

His thumb on the safety, the hammer standing at full-cock, the lieutenant stopped. The man headed the village. If anyone knew, he did. The trash must live until he answered the questions. Colomo reholstered his pistol and rushed outside.

Other tied-and-gagged captives lay in the dirt out-side the shack. A kerosene lantern flickered over the prisoners. He saw the sobbing mother of the girl inside, a bleeding man who kept his face pressed to the earth, a woman who held a blood-clotted rag to her child's arm, several other Yaqui campesinos, and a young boy with smooth, fine features.

The lieutenant dragged the boy inside the shack. Dropping the boy on the floor, Colomo taunted the campesino.

"Tell us, peon. Or we rape the boy next."

North of the pueblo, Gadgets followed the Yaquis down the stone face of a mountain. Despite the aspirin, he suffered a thousand aching muscles. Despite the Benzedrine, every movement required concentration and effort. His hands slipped, his boots slipped, pebbles clattered down into the gully below. The Yaquis watched him. He knew they expected him to fall.

But fortunately the Yaquis had anticipated his exhaustion. From the assembly area, they had walked north until a ridge and the curve of the canyon blocked the group from observation by the soldiers. No soldiers at the helicopters or in the pueblo would see the group as they moved through the moonlight. No one would hear the rocks he kicked down the mountainside.

Somehow, he didn't fall. Finally he came to the loose rock with sand at the base. Moving slowly, he stepped through the few inches of water in the streambed. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head. Gadgets did not have the energy to flick them away.

Single file in the moon shadows, the Yaquis moved south. Handfuls of ashes had blackened their clothes and faces. Gadgets stayed close to the Yaqui who spoke English. Without the translator, he would be useless in the infiltration.

Walking quickly for the first few hundred meters, they slowed when they saw the lights. Gadgets heard screams in the village. He looked up to the ridge. Though he could not see the helicopters or the soldiers from where he crouched in the canyon, he heard their voices. And above him, on the opposite mountainside, lights and shadows flashed across the rocks.

He took a deep breath. He checked the earphone plugged into his left ear and the wire leading to his hand radio. Then he clicked the transmit key with his identification code and whispered, "This is the Wizard. We're going in."

Clicks answered. He heard the code for Blancanales. Then Lyons answered. But no voices. They had already closed the distance to the sentries.

Good, the ex-Green Beret, veteran of a hundred "special actions," told himself. The sooner we kill these goons, the sooner I get to sleep.

Drawing back his autrorifle's actuator, he chambered the first subsonic round.

On the west side of the ridge, Lyons clawed up the steep slope. He moved carefully, testing each handhold on brush or rock before pulling himself up. Vato climbed an arm's distance to his left. To both sides, the other Yaquis clung to the mountainside and moved slowly, silently toward the top. Above them drunken soldiers celebrated their victory over the defenseless people of the mountain village. Lyons heard shouts, sometimes the screams of women. With every scream, rage surged through his mind. The fatigue of his body did not numb the anger. His stomach knotted with hatred. The muscles of his jaws ached as he gritted his teeth with frustration.

Only a few more minutes...

His hand radio clicked, then he heard Gadgets's voice in his earphone. Lyons paused to click an acknowledgment with his transmit key. He did not risk a voice response.

The slope rounded as they neared the ridgeline. Moving faster, the infiltrators snaked through the short brush. Moonlight lit their way. Pausing for a moment, Lyons raised his grease-blackened face to check their position.

Over the brush and rocks, he saw only the rotor-stabilizer assemblies of the helicopters. Light reflected from the undersides of the rotor blades. Smoke from a bonfire wisped into the moonlight.

The fire confirmed his position.

Ahead of them and to the left, he would find the shallow gully cutting through the perimeter. Lyons hissed quietly to the others, then started toward the erosion ditch.

Boots crashing through the mesquite stopped him. Motionless, Lyons waited, hearing breaking sticks, rocks kicked. The boots walked through the weeds a few more steps, then stopped.

Had a sentry spotted them?

Lyons heard a zipper, then a stream of water splashing. Keeping his head low, he looked up to see a soldier only a few steps away. Urinating. Lyons watched the drunken soldier sway. Finally, the soldier staggered away.

Another hiss from Lyons signaled the Yaquis. They continued forward, inching closer to the perimeter.

South of the pueblo, twenty-five meters from the last house, Blancanales saw the pale-blue line scratched across the darkness. He turned to the Yaquis behind him and hissed a warning. The soft, almost inaudible scratching of dry grass on hands and cloth stopped. They lay motionless in the weeds beside the pathway as Blancanales continued forward.

The ex-Green Beret paused to snap off about eighteen inches of dry, rigid stem from the wild grasses around him. As he continued, he waved the stem ahead of him like an insect's antenna.

When he came to the blue line stretched across the pathway, he paused. At waist height, the line of clear monofilament extended from the rocks of the mountainside to a thicket of cacti at the edge of the gully. He touched the line with the grass stem and found it taut.

In the moonlight, he scanned the grasses and brush of the area. He saw a path of crushed grass to the cacti. Another path led to the rocks. Blancanales peered at the hard packed earth of the path. He saw no turned dirt, no erect trigger prongs, nothing to indicate a mine or booby trap buried in the path.

Blancanales crawled under the monofilament line. He went to the crushed weeds leading from the pathway toward the rocks. Snaking through the brush and dry grasses, he felt the dirt ahead of him with his left hand. He waved the long grass stem in front of him to check for other trip lines.

He stopped at the rocks and watched the pueblo. Cries and voices came from the shacks. Through a window he saw soldiers. At the last house of the village, its whitewashed adobe blue in the moonlight, a man leaned against the wall. Blancanales saw the line of a rifle.

With his hands, Blancanales felt through the gravel at the base of the mountainside. He crawled closer to where the nylon trip line disappeared into the shadow under an overhang. With the grass stem, he checked for other lines. Finally, the stem scratched plastic.

Blancanales eased into the shadow. Waiting for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness, he looked for the end of the monofilament. But his eyes could not distinguish details within the darkness.

Turning his body, he sat up. He knew the mono-filament line passed over his right shoulder. He knew the line ended at the detonator. That placed the detonator and the explosive charge of the bomb directly in front of his face.

He would have to defuse the bomb by touch.

He reached out and touched rock. Lightly, slowly, he moved his fingertips over the boulder. He found something slick, the width of a belt. The slick band covered the texture of the rock. He traced the band to the center. It flexed under his fingertips. He touched the edge, felt his fingertip stick.

Tape. They had looped tape around a rock. He continued to the center. He came to a shape. He traced the outline of the shape, a rectangle. He found raised letters: Front — Toward Enemy.

It was a claymore mine. Face to face with the kilogram of high explosive and the thousands of steel ball bearings, Blancanales closed his eyes. It made no difference in the darkness. And if he triggered the claymore, his life would be gone before he saw the flash.

His fingers traced the upper edge of the claymore. A length of det-cord entered the detonator well. Tape secured the det-cord and a pull-firing striker to the rock.

The safety pin hung by a length of cord. Touching the striker assembly with the small finger of his right hand to maintain the position of his hand, he searched for the safety pin's hole. The tip of the pin scratched on the firing device's tube, then slipped home.

Taking a moment to breathe, Blancanales calmed his mind, then pushed the pin through the striker housing.

He put his left index finger through the pull ring and held the spring-driven striker shaft. Then he pulled the monofilament, releasing the striker shaft, and eased the striker down. It stopped against the safety pin.

Blancanales did not cut the monofilament. If the' soldier who placed the mine specialized in anti-infiltration devices, there would be a second claymore at the opposite end of the line. If intruders stumbled into the trip line, the double explosion would rake the kill zone with thousands of high-velocity steel balls from both sides.

But the second claymore mine would have a release-type striker. A release firing device detonated a mine when the trip line went slack. If an intruder spotted the trip line and cut the taut line, the release of the tension allowed the second striker to fall, detonating the claymore.

The Special Forces instructors at Fort Bragg had taught Blancanales to never underestimate the intelligence and professionalism of his enemy. He had survived Vietnam, Laos, Los Angeles, New York, and a hundred other hellgrounds because he remembered his training.

Wiping sweat off his face, Blancanales left the darkness and crawled through the dry weeds. Now he would check for that second claymore.

A sudden explosion shattered the night. Autorifles fired wild. Looking up to the ridgeline where the helicopters were parked, Blancanales saw dust and smoke billowing upward. Tracers streaked in all directions. In the pueblo, he heard shouts and men running.

The group infiltrating the helicopters had tripped a mine.

Disregarding the risk, Blancanales put his hand radio to his lips.

"Lyons! Lyons!" he hissed.

No answer came.