Warlord of Azatlan

8

Following the Pan American Highway, they drove into the high central plateau of Guatemala. A starlit landscape of shadowy mountains and black stands of forest extended into the distance. Few vehicles traveled the highway. Opening his window, Lyons put his face into the windrush. The night smelled of pines and dust and wood fires. He thought of the High Sierras of California.

They passed villages bright with lights, electric incandescence creating islands of whitewashed houses, tiled roofs, and dusty rock-paved streets. Other times, as they rounded curves, their headlights revealed fields of tangled dry cornstalks and fire-blackened adobe walls.

"What happened at these farms?" Lyons asked Luis.

"The EGP. El Ejercito Guerilla de los Pobres. The Guerilla Army of the Poor. They needed money for the revolution. They demanded taxes. But the farmers are without money. They have only corn and beans. When the farmers would not pay the war taxes, the guerillas took men from every family and killed them.

"When guerillas came again and demanded taxes, the people paid the few coins they had. I knew one woman, an Indian woman. The EGP killed her father and her husband, so she paid the tax to stop them killing her son.

"It was not guerillas she paid. They were agents of the desconocidos. The unknown men. A gang of the desconocidoscame, raped her, then hacked her to death with machetes. They carved a hammer and sickle on her face as a warning to the other Communists.

"It happened everywhere. There are villages of widows and orphans. The new president stopped it. He gave rifles to the men. Now, when the guerillas or the desconocidoscome, they die.

"But not until all the fascists die," Luis insisted, "will there be peace. We must kill them all. When the new president came, I believed all would be good. But the war continues. The rich still have their armies of desconocidos. The EGP hides in the mountains. Unomundo still lives…"

Luis's voice drifted away as he stared at the highway, his face lit green from the dashboard lights. Mechanically he steered through the curves, maintaining an even speed. Lyons sat in thought. He had read of the terrorism in the remote villages, but the North American newspapers always described the attacks as "Army atrocities." He had read endless diatribes against the government, but Lyons had never really read the truth.

After a minute, Luis spoke of his own sorrow.

"I managed a trucker's cooperative. Many trucks, many drivers. Garages and gasoline stations. But we would not work for Unomundo. So his killers came for me. I was not there. I escaped death. But my wife and baby did not. With machetes…"

Luis went silent. He drove by reflex, his mind trapped in a numbing nightmare. Miles later, he suddenly said: "Now I fight. Why do you fight?"

After what Luis had told him, what could Lyons say? Had he suffered like Luis? Or like Dr. Orozco? Lyons had not lost his family to psychopathic monsters. True, years before, Mafia hoods had beaten and whipped him for a week, but within a few months he had healed. The experience had scarred him, hardened his character, but he had suffered no trauma.

As the landscape of fields and mountains drifted past, Lyons reconsidered his life. Why did he fight? Memories of his years as a police officer in Los Angeles came in a rush: the scenes of felons' mindless cruelty to their victims; the elderly broken for a snatched dollar; the bank clerks with their lives draining through wounds; the workers crippled or murdered for their paycheck; the children tortured and strangled to satisfy lust; the wide-eyed, slashed corpses of women — teenagers, mothers, grandmothers — raped and then murdered, sometimes murdered then raped, and dumped like trash.

He thought of the parole boards that considered the families of victims annoying obstacles to the swift release of convicts. He recalled the courts that gave child-rapists five trials to perfect their defense. And the psychiatrists who excused any atrocity as a product of society's errors. And the Utopians who petitioned the government to disarm society, to leave good people defenseless against the predators. And the industries glamorizing the drug gangs and criminals.

These things explained his rages, his passion for justice. But why did he fight?

Lyons had many excuses not to fight. As a taxpayer, he paid others to fight — police, teenage army recruits, air force pilots. As a robust male, no one personally threatened him. As a worker with skills and income, he could hire security guards to protect his home and office. As a man of some intelligence, he could easily rationalize noninvolvement. Why did he fight?

"Because I can. I'm strong, I'm fast, I get stupid when I'm angry, then I do brave things. I don't think about death except in the middle of the night. That's why." His explanation had come after a long pause.

"You have a wife? Children?" Luis asked.

"She divorced me. Couldn't take going to other policemen's funerals and waiting for mine. Couldn't take me twitching at night when I couldn't forget what I'd seen. Isn't easy for a woman to be married to a policeman."

"Why do you fight here?"

"Unomundo killed Federal agents in the United States. I wish my government had not waited for them to die. If we had come years ago, maybe they'd still be alive. Maybe your family would still be alive. There's a hundred places I wish I'd gone to fight when I had the chance. North America. South America. Here. Some nights I think of what I could have done and didn't and I'm ashamed."

Luis laughed. "You talk like a missionary."

"Yeah, yeah," Lyons agreed, laughing with the Guatemalan. "But they bring the Word. I bring the Wrath."

They came to a crossroads and took another highway. The hours passed. Cornfields and gardens became vertical hillsides. Winding upward through ravines, switching back every few hundred yards, the narrow road cut through a forest.

At many of the curves, their headlights revealed clusters of small crosses. Names marked the crosses. Rotting flowers indicated frequent visits by mourners. Beyond the guardrails, the wooded mountainside dropped away to darkness.

"Why the graves there?" Lyons asked.

"Not graves. Shrines. That is where they died, so their families believe that is where their spirits wander."

"EGP? The Nazis?"

"No. Buses. Cars."

The switchbacks and curves continued, the highway zigzagging ever higher. Mist swirled in the headlight beams.

Lyons awoke to see a half moon over a town, the whitewashed walls a bluish white against the night. He thought he dreamed. The image of the town surrounded by the mountains and forest seemed impossible, unreal. Then the road angled down a ridge, and they left the view behind. Lyons looked at his watch. Almost dawn.

"Where are we?"

"In the Sierra de Chuacus."

"Great. Where's that?"

"Perhaps another hour to Azatlan."

In the back seat, Senora Garcia slept. Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen a few hundred yards behind them. He keyed his hand-radio.

"How are you two holding up?"

"This is the scenic route," Gadgets bantered, "no doubt about it. But the government didn't send us here to shoot picture postcards."

"The man says another hour to the town."

"Lights! Lights behind me, coming up fast!"

Luis heard the words shout from the hand-radio. As the blond American slipped his Atchisson out of the guitar case, he brought the car to a halt against the hillside. He killed the lights, then took a folded-stock Galil from the floor of the Dodge. Both men stepped into the predawn chill. They took cover behind the car.

"We've stopped," Lyons told his partners. "Make it past us. If they're trying an intercept, we'll blow them away."

"Oh, man! They're gaining on us. And if they don't get us, the next curve will."

Headlights streaked through the network of branches downslope. Bracing his Atchisson's fourteen-inch barrel on the trunk lid, Lyons flicked the fire-selector to full-auto and waited.

An air horn blared. Careening around a hairpin turn below them, tires sliding on the mist-slick asphalt, the Volkswagen van raced what looked like a truck. The second pair of headlights almost touched the van's back bumper, then the vehicle swerved into the oncoming lane to pass. The air horn sounded again.

Squinting against the glare, Lyons aimed at the center of the pursuers' truck. He heard the click of the safety on the Galil that Luis held. But then Luis said: "It is nothing. Only a bus."

"What? Passing on a mountain curve?"

At seventy miles an hour, the Ford thirty-eight-seat bus hurtled past. Lyons saw a teenager sitting on the dashboard next to the driver, leaning back against the windshield, reading a comic book by the beam of a flashlight. Its horn warning downhill traffic, the bus downshifted for the next curve, and took it seemingly on two wheels. They heard the engine roar up the next stretch of road above them, then the warning horn as the bus roared on its way along the up-and-down switchback road.

Lyons set his assault-shotgun's safety. "Take the bus and leave the suicide to us..."

Autofire ripped the quiet. Lyons dropped down and keyed his hand-radio.

"Wizard! Pol! Stop, someone's shooting up there."

The Volkswagen swerved off the asphalt near the Dodge. Jerking the parking brake, Blancanales jumped from the driver's door, his M-16/M-203 over-and-under in his hands. Gadgets followed an instant later, a captured Galil in one hand, a bandolier of magazines in the other.

In the graying darkness, Able Team gathered together and crouched in the roadside brush, listening. Mist glistened on pines and oaks. Drops of moisture fell through the leaves, some falling on the warriors' hands and weapons. But they heard no more shots. Lyons whispered to the others. "I'm going for a look."

Jamming an extra magazine of seven 12-gauge shells in his jacket pocket, Lyons ran uphill along the road. The mist chilled his face as he labored against the incline. His lungs ached as he tried to gulp oxygen from the thin air. The 9,000-foot altitude defeated his sprint. He slowed to a jog, then a panting walk.

After a half-circle curve, the road continued straight. Lyons went flat on the asphalt at the end of the curve. He scanned the straight section. He saw nothing moving. Above the roadway, beyond the overarching pine branches, the sky became gray with dawn.

Lyons did not chance walking on the road. He slung his Atchisson over his back and snaked across the asphalt to the other side. Clutching at roots, his soft-soled shoes finding footholds in the rocks, he went hand-over-hand up the embankment.

The exertion made him gasp. He slowed his climbing. He disciplined his breathing, pulling down long, deep gulps of moist air, matching his breath cycles to his motions. He pulled himself through the roots and ferns and rocks very quietly, only the slight sound of falling pebbles and dirt breaking the silence.

Voices came from above. He froze, listening for the source. In the tangle of pines and oaks growing from the near-vertical mountainside, some of the voices seemed distant, others near. He inched up the slope as if crawling up a wall.

An obstacle stopped him. He made out the rusting, dismantled form of a car — doors and interior and motor gone — propped against a pine. A broken guardrail lay amidst cut branches. He could not continue to the road above without thrashing through the debris. He looked to the sides. More debris blocked him. For years, road maintainance crews had simply dumped trash and tree trimmings downhill.

He looked at the pines. Fifty to sixty to a hundred feet tall, the trees rose high above the road. Branches grew from the trunks in all directions.

Lyons climbed silently up a pine, keeping the trunk between him and the voices. In seconds, he was looking down at the road.

The mist glowed red with taillights. Soldiers in the camouflage uniform of the Army of Guatemala paced the road in front of the stopped bus. Flashlights swept the interior of the vehicle, casting silhouettes against the windows. Soldiers checked identity cards.

Laughter came from the pickup trucks and a troop carrier parked against the side of the mountain. Lyons heard English.

A flashlight revealed a blond soldier. Lyons saw an M-16 in the soldier's hands. Another soldier, this one over six feet tall, his bulk indicating a weight of two hundred pounds, carried an M-60 machine gun. A belt of ammunition went over his shoulder.

Eventually the mercenaries waved the bus on.

Now, at last, Lyons knew why the bus drivers of the Terminal Extraurbanoshated him and Blancanales. They had assumed the two North Americans had come to their country to serve as pro-fascist mercenaries for Unomundo. He keyed his hand-radio and whispered: "We got problems."

Ten minutes later, the sky becoming blue, Blancanales and Luis climbed up nearby trees along the road. Lyons signaled Gadgets.

"Ready."

The Volkswagen's horn answered him. On the road, the mercenaries heard the honking. They flicked away cigarettes. Fanning out across the road, they took positions to block the approaching car.

Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen far below him. The horn sounded twice to alert oncoming vehicles, then the vehicle swept around the curve. The mercenaries waited. As Gadgets neared the next hairpin turn, the horn sounded twice again.

The mercenaries waited. No car appeared.

An officer called out in an American accent. "Mitchell! Run down the road and see what's going on."

Fire from Lyons's Atchisson smashed down mere after mere, each blast sending double-ought and number-two steel shot ripping through a chest. A 40mm fragmentation round popped at the far end of the line of troop trucks, a thousand high-velocity razors shredding a line of men. Luis fired an instant later.

A blond pro-fascist dodged through the cross fire and dived for cover under a truck. Lyons hit him with a two-shot storm of steel, throwing him sideways in the air. The guy tried to crawl, but one arm flopped uselessly at his side, the humerus bone shattered. The dying mere screamed throughout the remaining seconds of the slaughter, blood frothing from his mouth and chest.

Two men sprinted out of the kill zone, spinning around to spray bursts from their M-16 rifles. Slugs ripped through the branches of the trees. Lyons swung his weapon to sight on the running men but their downhill sprint took them out of his line of fire. A burst from Luis hit one man. He fell, rolled, lost his weapon, scrambled to his feet. Blood spread from a long wound across his back, but the mercenary continued running.

An autoweapon flashed from the curve. Single shots from Gadgets's captured Galil found the mere and dropped him. More slugs tore through the chests of fleeing mercenaries. One man fell down the slope of roadside trash, another died where he crouched behind a truck.

Lyons emptied the second magazine of 12-gauge shells. Slinging his Atchisson, he scanned the road for life. Only Luis fired now, burst after burst raking the dead and dying, silencing the screamers, then killing the dead again.

"Stop firing!" Blancanales shouted.

Silence returned to the mountains.