Scorched Earth

4

An unmarked panel van ferried Able Team across the sun-baked asphalt of Lindberg Field.

In the first red glow of the day, rows of parked executive jets remained shadows in the morning darkness. Miguel Coral stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the three North Americans riding in the closed van with him. Lyons watched him, trying to read the Mexican's thoughts.

By the light of a penlight, Blancanales studied an operational navigation chart prepared from satellite photographs by the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center. He focused the tiny spot of illumination on the colors and mazes of lines representing the topography of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. He folded and refolded the oversized chart, searching the relief portrayals for elevations and the symbols of airfields and towns.

"There's our plane," Gadgets told his partners. "This is unbelievable. We're traveling like congressmen. A real for-live Lear."

"Confiscated from a dope smuggler," the driver told his passengers.

"Who'd he steal it from?" Gadgets asked. "Why didn't the Agency return it?"

"Steal it?" The driver laughed. "He paid for it, cash. We seized it under the Rico Act."

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allowed the U.S. government to seize the wealth and property of millionaire drug dealers. Passed in 1978, the Act presented a greater threat to the gangs than prison. Gangsters could avoid prison through endless appeals of their convictions. However, the initial judgment of guilt — and not the eventual state or U.S. Supreme Court findings — allowed the DEA or IRS to attack the illicit gains of the gang lords. The U.S. government took their mansions and Cadillacs and private jets, even if the gangsters eventually won reversals of their convictions on technicalities.

The driver braked the van only steps from the Lear. Lyons jerked the sliding door open and pulled out his oversized luggage. He carried his heavy cases — one the size of a shipping trunk, the other long and flat like a guitar case — to the jet's steps. Not waiting for his partners, he went up in a run. He had to crouch to enter the luxurious interior of the Lear.

Sitting on one of the leather passenger seats, the pilot eyed the cases. "Thought this was a day trip. Looks like you're taking up residence in Mexico."

Lyons gave the pilot a wide grin. "Just gifts for my Mexican friends."

"Oh, yeah. Good idea. We won't be going through Customs inspection. I guess there's going to be some people down there who'll be glad to see you."

"And then again," Gadgets added as he set down identical oversized cases, "maybe not."

"Why do you say that?" the pilot asked, not understanding.

Blancanales and Coral came up the stairs and crowded into the cabin. The pilot extended a hand and introduced himself to his passengers. "I'm Pete Davis. I'll be taking you down to Culiacan and bringing you back. Once we're down there, I'll stand by in case you want to go sightseeing in a helicopter. You know, view the beauty of poppy fields in bloom, the romantic charm of mule caravans carrying opium through the mysterious mountains, maybe a sinister gang fortress."

"We won't want any doper tours," Lyons told him.

"Hey, man," Gadgets jived. "We're straight. We don't work for the government or anybody. We're businessmen. We're going down there on business."

"Right!" Davis nodded. "Businessmen. Glad I got that straight. Businessmen on a business trip to the heroin capitol of the Western Hemisphere."

Blancanales and Gadgets laughed. Lyons looked irritated by the joking.

"Just fly the damn plane, will you?" Lyons said to Davis. "If I want entertainment, I'll take a taxi."

Davis glanced briefly at Blancanales and Gadgets and then started toward the pilot's cabin. "On our way! By the way, you gentlemen got names?"

"No," Lyons told him.

"Right," said Davis as he closed the cabin door behind him.

Blancanales spread out the navigation chart on the cabin table. Miguel Coral watched from a corner seat as the Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret traced his team's route along the coast of Mexico, bordering the Gulf of California.

"We'll do a certain amount of sightseeing," Blancanales stated. "This flight will parallel the coast and mountains and give us a chance for an overview of the region."

As the jet's engines whined to life and the plane taxied to take off, Blancanales briefed his partners from memory.

"Last night I read through the history of western Mexico's dope trade, and the only way I can summarize it is, Wild, Wild West. In 1971 the U.S. decided to shut down the Turkish opium trade and the French Connection that refined the opium and shipped the heroin into the United States.

"Turkey has grown poppies for thousands of years. It took the Corsicans and French most of the twentieth century to create the market for morphine and heroin. But Mexico charged into the horse trade in only two years.

"By 1974, after arrests broke the French Connection and Turkey banned the growing of amapola poppies, it didn't matter anymore. Mexico supplied almost all the heroin the needle heads of the United States needed."

The jet accelerated down the runway and soared into the dawn sky. The lights of the city and the shimmering blue mirror of San Diego harbor appeared below them. The Lear banked to the southeast.

"We'll be flying over territory you won't believe," Blancanales continued. "The heroin organizations grow their poppies in mountains and valleys so isolated and removed from the rest of the world that the Mexicans, with the largest fleet of aircraft in Latin America — prop planes, jet planes, bombers, helicopters — can't patrol it. The lands where the poppies grow might as well still be in the sixteenth century."

Lyons had stopped listening. He stared out the port window to the lights and shadows of the city to see into his own memory.

In the few minutes of flight, their Lear jet had already flown the length of the San Diego Bay. Below the jet, streaking lights of traffic speeding north and south marked Interstate 5 and Interstate 805, the freeway where Able Team had arrested the Mexican assassin now returning to Culiacan with them.

Beyond the Interstates, the lights of the suburbs become individual and random as the urban monster sprawled into the desert. There, in the vague folds and shadows of the undeveloped lands, a blinking strobe light marked Brown Airport.

Flor had died there.

Less than a year before, during a helicopter pursuit of a truck loaded with a Soviet-made synthetic drug intended to create panic and flame a racial war in American society, the woman Lyons loved died.

While he watched from another helicopter, her chopper took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade. After the eighty-mile-per-hour crash and the explosion of the helicopter's aviation fuel, the coroner's aides had not even found enough of Flor to bury.

The horror and the sorrow of her death had wounded him in a way he still did not completely understand.

Some nights, he would wake and find himself bathed in sweat, his pulse beating in his ears, his throat hoarse and knotted. His neighbors in the condominium complex where he lived complained to the condo management of noises coming from his unit. He received citations for loud parties, for loud television, for loud stereo — he never argued, he paid the twenty-five-dollar fines immediately. He didn't attempt to deny or explain the noises.

Some nights when he woke, his body drenched with sweat, images remained in the darkness: a desert flowing with blood, bones in the sand, blood flaming, his hands reaching into flames to touch her and coming away bloody.

He did not understand the injury to his soul. But there was one thing he did know: Flor died to stop a shipment of Soviet-synthesized terror drugs, and the truck carrying the shipment of chemical horror had left Culiacan the day before.

The truck left Culiacan a day after a Soviet freighter docked in the port of Mazatlan, a city that was three hours south of Culiacan by truck.

The White Warriors had begun their takeover of the Culiacan drug industry a year before. The beginning of the takeover coincided with Flor's death.

He had read the official reports. He had the documents and the black-and-white photographs taken by surveillance teams. He knew the secondhand stories told by informers and interrogated suspects — like the stories told by Miguel Coral. He knew the rumors and he knew how psychopathic killers operated.

Questions screamed through his mind as he attempted to rationally analyze impossible contradictions.

Why did white gunmen work for Black Nationalist terrorists?

Did the White Warriors somehow play a role in the death of Flor?

Did the black racist gang bringing Soviet-synthesized terror drugs into the United States use a gang of Fascist International drug smugglers as couriers?

Did the strange politics of the Soviets and the Fascist International interweave?

Did an alliance of Stalinists and Nazis prepare a terror assault against their common enemy, the United States, the world's strongest democracy?

Tons of heroin, billions of dollars, the gang wars of Culiacan — those things diminished to nothing when he thought of Flor destroyed in that desert outside San Diego.

The image of his woman falling flaming from the sky was burned into his mind forever.

Lyons went south with only one thought: revenge.

A half hour into the flight, their briefing was interrupted when a voice came over the intercom.

"Businessmen, this is your pilot. The Culiacan office requests an overflight of the mountains east of Ciudad Obregon. Mexican officials report a significant antidrug operation in progress in the Sierra Madres on the border of Sonora and Chihuahua. The office requests that I overfly the area and report — just a second..."

The door to the pilot's den slid open, and Davis leaned into the passenger cabin.

"What the office wants is a confirmation of the action. They want us to count the trucks, count helicopters, get the actual coordinates. You mind if we take the detour?"

"Is this sightseeing or what?" Lyons demanded.

"It's official sightseeing. The office ordered me to sightsee, even if it delays your arrival time."

"There will be no problem with fuel?" Blancanales asked.

Davis shook his head. "No problem. It's only a few flying minutes out of the way. And it will give you a chance to see the Condors — that's the Mexican army antidrug task force — in action. If they are in fact in action."

"If?" Blancanales refolded the navigation chart to look at the Sonora-Chihuahuan sector east of the coastal city. "Is there some doubt..."

"Man," Davis said with a laugh. "Don't you know what goes on with the Mexicans? The U.S. of A. pays for the truck and helicopter fuel, and sometimes underwrites the salaries of the federalesand the expenses of the army. So the Mexicans tell us about such-and-such operation and present the bill for the expenses. But sometimes, they're..."

Gadgets smirked. "Invisible!" he said.

Davis nodded agreement. "It has happened. The new administration in Mexico City is different from the last one. They threw out most of the criminals and changed the laws, but laws don't mean anything when there's money to be made. La Mordidais forever. Everyone wants their bite of the action."

"You mean the people the DEA works with are corrupt?" Lyons asked the pilot.

"If they're Mexican," the pilot told him.

Lyons turned and commented to his partners, "We don't want any liaison, right?"

Blancanales looked to Miguel Coral. "We brought our liaison."

Their pilot laughed. "You can't even worry about it. Down south here, you buy your friends. It's a tradition."

"No!" Coral shouted at the pilot. "It is a crime. You know nothing of my country or its traditions."

"I know corruption is a Mexican tradition that will never change."

"North American, you misunderstand..."