Scorched Earth

2

Sweat dripped onto the steel and plastic of the M-79 grenade launcher Carl Lyons held. Sweat ran from his hair and down his face. He shifted in the seat and felt sweat flow down his back.

Under his short-sleeved shirt, Lyons wore Kevlar body armor. The rectangle of a steel trauma plate shielding his heart and central chest showed through his shirt. Hours before, when the summer sun had risen to its zenith and begun to beat down on the roof of the Drug Enforcement Agency surveillance van, the first streams of sweat had flowed from under the Kevlar. Now, sweat soaked the waist and pockets of his slacks.

Gadgets Schwarz set down his Uzi submachine gun. He pulled off his sunglasses and wiped sweat off the lenses for the tenth time in an hour. He also wore body armor. As he pushed the sunglasses back on, a drop of sweat hit the right lens. He wiped his sunglasses for the eleventh time in that hour.

"Can't the government afford an air conditioner?" Schwarz asked heatedly. "Summertime in Kevlar is cruel and unusual."

The young DEA agent who had volunteered to drive the van answered Gadgets in a bored monotone. "We've got one. It's in the director's car."

"Then let the director take over this fucking watch," Gadgets answered impatiently.

"Can't do it. He's in D.C., romancing Congress for funding. Money for the air conditioner."

Lyons didn't take his eyes off the long lines of cars and trucks waiting to cross the United States-Mexico border. Beyond the multicolored ribbons of autos, the sprawl of Tijuana faded into the gray distance. With Gadgets and the DEA driver, he watched from a van parked on the San Ysidro side of the border, less than a hundred feet from Mexico.

"Think your main man will get enough money," Gadgets continued, "so maybe next time we'll have an air conditioner?"

"No problem with a cooler next time..." the DEA agent replied.

"Far out. Feels good already."

"But next time," the agent said with a laugh, "we'll need a heater."

Twenty steps away, at the San Ysidro port of entry, U.S. Customs officers in inspection booths processed sixteen lanes of incoming traffic. The officers took stock of every driver, looking for nervousness, sweating, forced expressions, then checked the license plate of every vehicle with the aid of federal computers. Each officer — at the rate of one examination every ten to fifteen seconds — waved cars past. Then the vehicles entered the promised land, the United States, accelerating past the van in an unending, monotonous blur of color and glass and faces.

Auto exhaust and diesel soot hazed the crossing, and heat rose from the asphalt in an undulating, vision-distorting curtain. Motionless on the bench seat of the surveillance van, the tinted windows concealing him from the traffic, Lyons watched the thousands of cars and trucks shimmer in the heat and engine fumes. On the Mexican side, peddlers went from car to car, offering painted plaster figures of Jesus and Montezuma and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Other peddlers offered sandals and black flocked bulls and tropical fruit-flavored sherbets.

Lyons glanced to his partner. "Check with the Politician."

Slipping out his hand radio, Gadgets keyed the transmit button. "Hot Box calling Mr. Cool. Qui pasa? Donde esta Senor Pistolero?"

A customs officer in a booth signaled a driver to stop for a search. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic man with two young Mexican girls in his Mercedes, argued. Lyons watched as other customs officers motioned the driver toward a parking place. Finally the driver steered the Mercedes under the awnings. Officers on each side of the expensive sedan thumped the fender panels while a third officer waited for the big Hispanic to open the trunk. Another customs official walked a drug-sniffing German shepherd around the Mercedes.

"Hey, Politico!" Gadgets keyed his hand radio again. "Digame. What's going on?"

"Relax," Rosario Blancanales answered, his voice coming without tone or inflection through the National Security Agency encoding-decoding circuits of the hand radio. "Nothing's going on."

"Any word from Fantasyland East? What's the D.C. scam on our man?"

"The teletype printed out quite a biography." Blancanales spoke from the DEA offices only a few steps away. The windows of the office overlooked the thousands of cars crawling into the United States. "Our man is most definitely a killer. I'll give you a copy of the bio when I bring down some food."

"Forget the food. I want ice."

"Hot down there?"

"I'm the incredible melting man."

"You might be down there all night again."

"Yeah, I'm a regular owl," Gadgets said, and then he signed off.

Able Team had received the directive the day before: Go to the San Ysidro port of entry. Wait for Miguel Coral. Suspect known to kill without hesitation. Capture for interrogation.

The directive included — courtesy of a DEA informer in Culiacan — the license number of the truck and the name appearing on his valid California driver's license. But the informer did not supply the time Coral would cross the border. Able Team had waited through the night, watching the endless stream of traffic. Perhaps Coral would come today, perhaps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow.

But they knew he would come.

Miguel Coral had fought on the losing side of a gang war. A few days ago, the informant said, Coral deserted the defeated gang. With a hundred kilos of Mexican heroin, Coral intended to start a new dope gang in Los Angeles.

He could never return to Mexico. His desertion from the Ochoa gang meant his death if his former compatriots ever found him. And his murders of innumerable gunmen and captains of other gangs marked him as the target of a hundred vendettas.

The files of the Drug Enforcement Agency held hundreds of pages of information on the career of Miguel Coral Valencia. According to the DEA, Coral started as an independent operator smuggling marijuana and heroin from Hermosillo in the Mexican state of Sonora, north to Tucson, Arizona. After murdering two Mexican policemen, he sought the protection of the Ochoa gang.

Like the other gangs, the Ochoa organization operated in alliance with the politicians and police departments of the remote Mexican towns. The drug gangs supported the ambitions of the politicians, financing their campaigns for mayor or governor or senator.

The mayors of cities learned to take bids on the position of police chief. Then, like the regional director of a high-profit enterprise, the police chief managed the income and disbursed the profits, distributing wads of cash to each patrolman and suitcases of American dollars to the politicians in higher government posts.

Gang money maintained the life-styles of the police, augmenting their small monthly salaries with thousands of American dollars a week. Police chiefs drove Corvettes and Cadillacs. Policemen who received salaries of only a hundred dollars a month drove Mustangs. Families of police officers enjoyed backyard pools and spending sprees in San Diego, Tucson and El Paso.

The integration of the drug gangs into the municipal and political structures of the western states of Mexico ensured hassle-free operations for the gangs and uninterrupted income for their protectors, despite unending assaults by the American DEA and the federal police of Mexico.

The Ochoa gang controlled the greatest share of the drugs flowing from Sonora north to the U.S. border. The old Ochoa, the patriarch of the gang, the don, managed the gang with the expertise of a corporate president. He directed an army composed of farmers, mule drivers, police and municipal employees. He also employed gunmen. Though he rarely initiated violence — he preferred to be generous with his people and to be reasonable with competitors — when a threat came, his trigger men struck with cold, calculated violence.

In 1977, if he had openly declared his organization's profits, Ochoa, S.A., would have won a position on the Fortune500.

Throughout the late seventies, smaller gangs and the syndicates of Mexico, North America and Europe continually challenged Don Ochoa. The don paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits to the families of his slain soldiers. He supported the hospitals of small towns with the continual flow of bleeding and maimed gunmen. He also felt duty bound to contribute when assassinations and wild firefights caught townspeople in the crossfire.

But Ochoa marketed a substance more precious than gold, something he would fight like a cornered lion to maintain control over. Despite hundreds of assassination attempts on his life, and those of his sons and his gang captains, he never surrendered his market share.

In this endless war without quarter, Miguel Coral rose from truck driver, to gang soldier, to captain, then finally to the most trusted and esteemed position in the entire organization — second, of course, to the don — the position of personal bodyguard to Don Ochoa and his family.

Coral stood always at the side of Don Ochoa. He commanded the subordinate soldiers who protected the patriarch's sons and daughters and grandchildren. When the doctors came to examine Don Ochoa's twisted spine — arthritis had made him a hunchback — Coral searched the doctors and minutely examined every instrument in their bags.

As part of his duties, Coral had also attended every meeting with allied gang leaders. And when politicians and police negotiated payoffs, Coral watched over the transactions.

As a result, Coral knew the name and face of every criminal associate of the gang and the identity of every corrupt public official who served the gang. He was a dangerous and powerful man.

In the instructions to Able Team, the DEA had stressed the capture of Miguel Coral would represent the single most important move against the drug trade in western Mexico. If Able Team took Coral alive and the DEA could persuade Coral to cooperate, the DEA could halt the multibillion-dollar river of heroin flooding the tidal basin of American society.

Though Able Team expected Coral to react with autoweapon fire when they closed the trap on him, they would not return the fire. Gadgets held an Uzi submachine gun loaded with special-purpose slugs for punching holes in tires. Lyons had loaded his 40mm M-79 grenade launcher with a plastic grenade of CS/CN gas. The DEA needed a prisoner. The interrogators could not question a dead man.

Sweating, breathing the fumes of thousands of cars and trucks, the men of Able Team waited for another hour. When it came, the alert was sudden.

"He's in line!" Blancanales's voice crackled over the radio's speaker.

"Which line?" Lyons asked, sweat making the radio slick in his hand. "How far until the gate?"

"We have at least three minutes. I'm on the way down to the other cars."

Gadgets wiped the sweat off his hands and checked the canvas tape holding down the Uzi's grip safety. "Ready to bop," he said.

Looking forward to the driver, Lyons felt the van vibrate as the high-performance engine roared into life. The DEA man called back: "I heard it."

Under the huge, striped awning of the inspection shed, other undercover DEA men got into an assortment of cars and pickup trucks.

Gadgets keyed the DEA frequency radio. All the radios had been tested in the morning, but Gadgets called another test.

"Mr. Wizard to the Apprentices. Roll call before we roll."

"Unit one, ready."

"Unit two, warming up."

"Numero tres. Todos es preparado."

"Four here. Ready and willing."

"Supercool, dudes," Gadgets said, and then signed off. "We're gonna do it," he muttered to Lyons.

Lyons laughed. "If we see that doper abandon his truck, we know he had the frequency."

"Calculated risk," Gadgets admitted. "Some day, the Agency will get hep. Spend money on good stuff." He tapped the NSA-designed hand radio in the pocket of his sports coat.

Able Team did not fear the interception of their radio transmissions. They used hand radios designed and manufactured to the specifications of the National Security Agency. Micro electronic circuits coded and decoded every transmission. Without one of the three radios Able Team carried, a technician scanning the bands would intercept only bursts of static.

Blancanales checked in. "We're ready to go. Loading up a tear-gas round."

Lyons took Gadgets's radio. "What's his car look like?"

"Red Chevrolet pickup with a white camper shell. I didn't see the license plate, but the vehicle's exactly as the informer indicated."

"The Agency seems to have got it's money worth. We'll know for sure in about..."

Gadgets interrupted the talk. "Red Chevy!"

"Get ready, Politico." Lyons clicked off and passed the radio back to Gadgets.

Their driver eased into traffic. Lyons sat in the van's third seat, over the rear wheels. Gadgets scrambled into the second seat. Lyons watched cars through an oversized viewing port. Gadgets looked out through smaller standard windows. They watched for the red pickup as their driver maintained a very gradual acceleration away from the Customs and Immigration Center.

Cars blocked their line of sight for a few seconds, then they saw the red pickup accelerate through traffic. Their driver moved the van over two lanes and accelerated to follow the truck.

"It's the truck!" he called back to the two men of Able Team. "License plate matches exactly."

Gadgets relayed the information to the other five cars. Smoothly, inconspicuously, the DEA units slipped through the traffic on the northbound 805 Interstate.

The red Chevy pickup maintained a steady speed in the middle of the three northbound lanes. Lyons saw DEA cars move into blocking positions in the inside lane. Other cars eased past the pickup and took positions in front of it. Behind the van, Lyons saw the DEA car that carried Blancanales.

Three sides of the rat trap were in place.

Lyons nodded to Gadgets, and the Wizard spoke into his DEA-frequency radio. "This is it."

Their driver slid easily into the express lane. Slowly the van gained on the driver's window of the Chevy truck. Lyons peered through the side window of the camper shell. He saw someone move inside.

Instinctively Lyons's hand moved to the Velcro closures of his body armor. He adjusted the trauma plate.

"This could be a point-blank," Gadgets said, laughing.

"That's not the mission. Prisoners for information."

"How could they miss your head? You need a Kevlar and steel-plate face mask. With bulletproof shades."

Lyons only nodded to Gadgets. Gadgets activated the DEA radio and shouted out two words, "Lights! Sirens!"

Gadgets slammed back the van's sliding cargo door. Lyons released the catch holding the van's oversized viewing window in the frame. The window fell away to shatter into thousands of tiny cubes of tempered glass on the freeway's concrete pavement, and a chorus of sirens wailed from the DEA vehicles.

As Lyons and Gadgets aimed their weapons, a sudden impact threw the van into a side skid.

With smashed steel screaming and tires smoking, a DEA sedan pushed in the back doors of the van. Able Team's driver struggled with the wheel and accelerated.

A four-wheel-drive pickup rammed the sedan again, sending it out of control. Hauling himself upright, Lyons saw three Mexicans in the front seat of the four-wheeler.

Gunmen from the Ochoa gang, Lyons thought. Battling the DEA while the gang leader Miguel Coral accelerated away. They were buying their leader time to escape the law-enforcement trap.

The Mexican driver pulled his steering wheel to the side and the oversized steel bumper of the four-by-four rammed into the van.

Bracing himself against the sheet-metal body panel, Lyons pointed the M-79. The Mexican in the four-wheeler attacked again. Lyons wasn't about to give him another chance.

A low-velocity plastic canister streaked across the arm's distance of space between the two vehicles and shattered inside the cab. CS/CN gas sprayed the Mexicans, instantly incapacitating the gunmen with tear and nausea gas.

The four-wheeler drifted into the freeway's express lane. Behind the careering truck, other motorists slowed. Traffic jammed.

Sheet steel shrieked against concrete as the four-wheeler creased its skin along the center divider. Lyons and Gadgets raced ahead in the van.

"Catch the pickup truck!" Lyons shouted to the driver as he broke open the breech of the M-79 and flipped out the spent 40mm casing. He pushed in another plastic CS/CN grenade.

With the engine whining with RPM's, the van came up beside the red Chevy pickup.

Simultaneously Gadgets pointed his Uzi at the front left tire of the pickup truck and Lyons aimed the gaping muzzle of the grenade launcher at the face of Miguel Coral.

"Alto! Policia!" Lyons shouted out in his bad Spanish.

Only then did Lyons see who rode in the cab of the truck with the middle-aged, square-faced gang captain.

A woman and two young children clung desperately to each other. Fear haunted their faces. Then a teenage boy leaned from the camper shell to the cab of the truck.

A family. A middle-aged man, his wife and their three children.

The wrong truck? The right truck but the wrong man? How could they explain terrorizing this family on their way home from a visit with friends?

The man driving the Chevy truck closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps for an instant of prayer, perhaps to admit defeat. Then he moved both hands high on the steering wheel. He called out through the open window to the hard-faced North American with the grenade launcher. "I surrender! I surrender! For the love of God, don't shoot. My family is innocent."