Warlord of Azatlan

9

In the uniforms of Unomundo's mercenaries, in captured vehicles, Able Team drove on to Azatlan. Only minutes had passed since they had annihilated the platoon of foreign pro-fascists and Guatemalan traitors manning the roadblock. After gathering an assortment of materiel — four camouflaged uniforms, walkie-talkies, an M-60, an Uzi, a few boxes of 12-gauge rounds, a bandolier of 40mm grenades — they dumped the other weapons, all the corpses and a troop truck off the steep edge of the road. Only bloodstains and cartridge casings marked the site of the slaughter.

Gadgets and Blancanales had abandoned the rented car after transferring their gear from the Volkswagen to a bullet-pocked pickup truck. Now, with a full-powered vehicle, they followed the Dodge at sixty miles an hour through the twists and hairpin curves of the highway, finally reaching the crest of the mountain in full daylight.

They looked down through drifting clouds to Azatlan. In a valley between vertical mountains, surrounded by rolling hills and a patchwork of fields, the village straddled the sun-flashing thread of a stream. The asphalt road came to an end at the central square. A dirt track continued north to the next range of mountains. Another road cut to the west and disappeared into the cliffs and forests. Other than the asphalt highway, Azatlan had no paved streets.

In the morning light, the whitewashed church and rows of houses gleamed. Smoke drifted up from kitchen fires. Azatlan seemed to be a vision of peace and simplicity from another time.

But the long lines that streaked the fields west of the village destroyed the illusion.

Blancanales scanned the fields with binoculars. "See those tire tracks? Cutting across..."

"Yeah," Lyons agreed. "They've been landing planes there."

"Don't see a building big enough to serve as a warehouse." Blancanales swept the eight-power optics over the dirt roads. "But they could be trucking the stuff into the mountains..."

"Question is," Gadgets interrupted, "why would they have an arsenal out here? Ain't exactly a central location."

Nodding, Blancanales returned his binoculars to the case. "And what for?"

Descending the winding road, they left the pine forests. Fields of withered brown corn covered the lower slopes. No one hoed the rows. No families lived in the scattered houses of packed earth and stone. A skeletal dog saw the Dodge and the pickup approaching and fled into the burned ruins of a house. The whitewashed walls of another house showed the scars of bullets. Lyons watched the devastation pass, his mind raging.

This is why he had come. To fight the monsters who murdered families.

Lyons thought of the Manhattan Marxists who had denounced the new president of Guatemala for arming the village militias.

As a result of the American refusal to supply the Guatemalan army with spare parts for their helicopters, the army could not respond quickly to terrorist attacks — Communist and desconocido— against remote towns and villages.

Unlike rural people in the United States, the farmers and workers in the mountain villages had no rifles or shotguns for self-defense against Communist raiders or the death squads. The cost of a good rifle or shotgun exceeded what a subsistence farmer could earn in a year.

The new president confronted the problem directly. Despite the violent opposition of conservatives in his country, the president issued the Guatemalan army's old semi-automatic Garands and M-l carbines to the peasant militias. With the assistance of Army trainers, the people in the isolated villages formed self-defense militias. The violence against the innocent stopped.

But North American Marxists and misguided humanitarians protested. Through international organizations, they attempted to deny the Guatemalans the rights that protected the citizens of the United States, the constitutional right to defend their family and home against marauders, criminal or Communist or fascist.

Here, in this remote mountain valley, the Nazis had defeated both the army and the people of Guatemala. Lyons wished he could take the editorial writers of The New York Timeson a drive through this devastation. What would they write when they returned to the comfort of their high-security apartments and police-patrolled streets?

At the outskirts of the village, they came to a checkpoint. Four soldiers in the camouflage of the Guatemalan army lounged in the shade of an avocado tree.

Luis stopped the car at the crossbar. A soldier reading a magazine looked up from the pages, then wandered over to the Dodge. The soldier glanced at Luis and Lyons and Senora Garcia. He leaned on the short end of the crossbar to raise the other end. Lyons saw the lurid cover of the soldier's magazine. Pornography, with the title printed in English.

Seeing the pickup approach, the soldier left the crossbar up for Gadgets and Blancanales. He returned to his magazine, not even looking up as the second vehicle passed.

Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Those soldiers weren't Guatemalan."

Blancanales answered. "Two of them were Puerto Rican or Cuban. I don't know about the others. Quiz the Senora again."

"Definitely an international operation," Lyons added, then clicked off. He turned to the woman in the back seat. "Now you'll take us to your contact."

Her hair was matted from sleeping on the seat. Her face was puffy. She nodded. "The captain of police. I take the messages to him."

"And does he take the messages to Unomundo?" Lyons asked her.

"I don't know."

"Whenever you've come out here, have you seen mercenaries in the village?"

"Yes. No — I see them on the roads. Sometimes in Azatlan."

"There a place where they hang out? A bar? A brothel?"

"I take the messages to the captain of the police. I know nothing of these other things. I know nothing. I tell you a thousand times, but you do not hear."

"Same story," Lyons radioed Blancanales. "She takes it to the police. But if the local cops are any good, they'll know where the place is, even if Unomundo won't tell the police captain. We'll put questions to them."

Low-gearing through the village, they saw boarded-up windows, streets without people. In the central square, no vendors displayed goods or vegetables or meats in the market stalls. A face peered quickly from a window, then a shutter slammed shut.

Patterns of bullet holes dotted the whitewashed church. Sheet-metal doors bore the dents and holes of autofire. Across a dirt street from the church, an Anglo pro-fascist talked with a policeman. The Anglo wore an unfamiliar uniform, not green camouflage like the other mercenaries but gray. The policeman and the mercenary looked up at the approaching car and pickup truck. Lyons turned to Senora Garcia and warned her: "We're walking straight in. You make a problem, you die on the spot."

As Luis parked, Lyons watched the policeman and the mercenary. An M-l carbine leaned against the wall of the police station. The mercenary wore a Colt .45 in a black nylon holster and web belt. The two men returned to their conversation.

Lyons warned Senora Garcia one more time. "We've got your children and your husband back in the city. Walk straight in, help us get the man we want, and you can go home to your family."

Leaning over the seat, Lyons put his knife to the plastic bands looped around her ankles. He freed her ankles, then her wrists.

She threw open the door, screamed. "Comunistas! Ayudeme!The Communists took me prisoner! Kill them!"

A three-round burst from the Atchisson tore the policeman and the pro-fascist apart, spraying blood and shredded flesh over the white wall.

Sprinting after the woman, Lyons caught her in the doorway of the police station. He smashed the rubber-padded steel butt of the assault shotgun down on her head to stun her.

Inside, a policeman grabbed a long-barreled Remington shotgun from a wall rack and pumped the action. A blast of steel ripped his head away. Lyons scanned the room. He saw a heavy locked door with a barred window. A second door had a sign: CAPTAIN.

Kicking the police captain's door, Lyons ducked back. Three pistol shots popped inside. Plaster fell as the bullets punched into the ceiling.

"Give up or die!" Lyons yelled.

No more shots came. Lyons threw a chair into the office. No shots. He snapped a glance inside, and saw an open window.

Autofire suddenly hammered the outside wall, slugs breaking the window glass and punching into the interior of the office. Lyons took another quick look into the room to make sure the captain was not waiting against the wall. No one there.

Lyons dashed outside. The captain of police lay dead outside the window. As Lyons arrived, Luis fired a burst through the man's head, disintegrating the skull.

"You dumb bastard!" Lyons screamed at him.

"He tried to escape."

Rushing back to the front entrance, Lyons looked for Gadgets and Blancanales. He did not see their pickup truck. He keyed his hand-radio.

Blancanales kicked down the door of an abandoned house. He moved to a window and smashed out the nailed-closed shutters. Gadgets carried in the captured M-60 machine gun.

The window looked out onto the road into town. Blancanales keyed his hand-radio to answer Lyons.

"We're on the other side of the square. We're..."

The jeep raced toward the sound of gunfire at the police station. Its fascist force of four leveled their rifles to fire across the square at Lyons. Gadgets sighted the M-60 and pulled the trigger.

Slugs slammed the jeep. The windshield shattered. The continuous line of high-velocity 7.62 NATO punched through the mercenaries in the front seat and continued through the bodies of the men in the back. Gadgets held the trigger back, the heavy weapon jackhammering in his hands, Blancanales guiding the belt of cartridges. Tracers passed through bodies, ricocheted off steel, streaked into the distance.

The jeep hurtled out of control through the square, the soldiers aboard dead, their chests and heads masses of torn meat. Gadgets swung the M-60 around and gave the jeep a last burst through the side. Gasoline flamed. The jeep crashed into the square's stone fountain. It burned.

Blancanales keyed his hand-radio. "Got them."

Lyons whooped into his radio. They heard his voice simultaneously from their hand-radios and from across the square. "Let's get out of here!"

Dragging the unconscious woman to the Dodge, Lyons threw her in and slammed the door. Luis ran from the alleyway. He got in and started the engine. Lyons glared at him as he accelerated backward.

"You could have taken the captain alive."

"Why should the fascists live?" Luis asked. Whipping the wheel around, he jammed the shift into drive and put the gas pedal to the floor. Tires screeched as the stench of burning rubber filled the car.

"Not the highway!" Lyons shouted. "West. Take the dirt road to the west."

The Dodge careered through the narrow streets, bouncing on its heavy-duty suspension. Luis whipped the steering wheel from side to side to swerve around potholes. Rocks gouged at the oilpan and undercarriage. Blancanales and Gadgets followed only seconds behind.

They left Azatlan at sixty miles an hour. Passing through dry, untended cornfields, the well-maintained dirt road went due west toward the forest. In minutes, they had passed over two hills and left the village far behind.

Clusters of abandoned houses, their walls scorched, their burned roofs collapsed, dotted the fields. Rutted lanes linked the houses to the road. But Lyons saw that trucks had not followed the lanes. Instead, tire tracks scarred fields hand-tended and nurtured for generations. He spoke into his radio.

"We're cutting for the tree line. Konzaki said these Nazis have helicopters. We've got to get out of sight."

"Second the motion," Gadgets answered.

"There!" Lyons pointed to a narrow dirt lane cutting between two abandoned cornfields.

Slowing, Luis eased the big Dodge between two walls made of piled volcanic stone. Metal shrieked as rocks scraped the bodywork. Lyons snapped a full magazine into his Atchisson. He thumbed more shells into the spent magazine, then replaced it in the bandolier.

Blancanales drove straight across the cornfields. Bouncing and slamming over the rows, the pickup overtook the Dodge. Luis maintained the best speed he could without destroying the car. They passed stands of banana and avocado trees. In the yards of abandoned farms, unpicked fruit broke the branches of small trees. The lane meandered from farm to farm. Every group of houses had been burned. Walls were pocked with bullet and grenade-fragment scars.

They reached the pines. The forest showed the care of generations of woodcutters. No brush or fallen branches tangled the forest. Trees grew in spaced intervals. Near each stump, the peasant foresters had planted saplings to replace the harvested tree.

With the transmission in first and the accelerator floored, the torque of the Dodge's engine pulled the heavy sedan up the grassy slopes of the forested foot-hills. Luis maintained an angle almost parallel to the hillside. Soon the Dodge tilted sideways at forty-five degrees. Every bump and lurch threatened to roll the car.

But the pines did not screen them from airborne observation. Lyons called his partners.

"Think the pickup can keep going uphill?"

"Not much," Blancanales answered.

"Time to walk."

Luis found the best overhead cover and parked. Blancanales stopped beside the Dodge. Able Team assembled their gear. In addition to the gear issued by Stony Man Farm, they now had the weight of captured weapons and ammunition. Gadgets carried a folding-stock Galil rifle. Lyons packed an Uzi captured at the roadblock as a backup assault weapon.

Unfolding a satellite map of the area, Blancanales showed Luis a safe route back to the highway. "Over this mountain, follow the ridgeline of the next line of hills east. Even with the woman slowing you down, you should reach the road before dark."

"She will not slow me."

They knew what Luis intended. Lyons shook his head.

"Don't you kill her..."

"Why do you protect the fascist whore?"

"Let Unomundo take her," Lyons said. "Give us a few hours head start, then let her go where the meres can find her. They'll be searching for us, but they'll find her. People in the town saw her lead us here. Think of it as justice."

"Tell me of justice! They took machetes to my baby, then to my wife. Her feet, her legs, her hands, her arms. I will not give this whore to Unomundo. She is mine. She will suffer myjustice."

Lyons went to the Dodge. He jerked the woman from the car. A shove sent her staggering down the hillside. "Run! This is the last chance you get."

She sprawled in the grass. Blood matted her hair. Her throat was choked with sobs. Crying, she stared around her at the men she thought would kill her.

But the three men of Able Team shouldered their packs and walked into the trees. Marching through the cool wind-swayed shadows of the pines, Lyons turned.

He saw Luis open the trunk of the Dodge. The young man took out a machete and a tangle of rope. Luis moved toward Senora Garcia. The Nazi courier staggered to her feet and stumbled away. Luis pursued her down the hill. Lyons turned away and followed his partners into the mountains.

They heard screams.

"He's chopping her up," Lyons told Gadgets and Blancanales.

Rotorthrob drowned out the screams. Instinctively, Able Team dropped into the dusty grass. Each one of them looked up to see a Cobra gunship skim the treetops.

Blancanales squinted into the branch-broken sky as the throb diminished. "They couldn't have spotted us!"

But as he spoke, the rotornoise changed. The Cobra was returning.