31

Leaving the freeway, Able Team had pulled into a closed service station. Security lights bathed the asphalt surrounding the sheet-metal garage in blue white glare. Wire mesh covered all the windows of the garage and station office. A body shop adjoined the gas station. Behind the chain link and razor-wire enclosing the smashed or primer-red cars, guard dogs paced.

Gadgets parked behind the blue Dodge Prescott was driving and surveyed the area, the wire-mesh station windows, the guard dogs, the boulevard of boarded-over windows and abandoned cars.

"Not a good neighborhood," he said to Lyons.

"Understatement of the year," Lyons told him. "You're in cannibal territory here."

Gadgets laughed as he took his counterelectronics wand from his equipment case. "You got a weird sense of humor, Ironman. Do all cops make jokes like that?"

"Who's joking? The world we live in, I only tell the truth. People don't believe it, so they laugh."

"The district sure looks bad," Gadgets countered as they left the car, "but it can't be thatbad."

"Hey, Wizard, this is Lennox. There really is a gang here called 'The Cannibals.' When I was with the LAPD, we never were able to get an informer into the club. Seems the initiation rite is..."

"You're jiving!" Gadgets passed the wand under Prescott's car.

"No jive," Lyons insisted.

Blancanales passed the car keys to Lyons. "You telling more cop jokes?"

Opening the trunk, Lyons threw the keys back to Blancanales. "No jokes," Lyons continued. "To join the gang, a punk had to murder somebody and then eat them. No jive. I am serious."

"Man, I can't believe that." Gadgets laughed. "Your arm wound's infecting your head. How is your arm, by the way."

Lyons went flat on his back and directed a flashlight beam at the undercarriage of the car. "It's cool," he said.

Gadgets searched the interior of the trunk with a flashlight and the counterelectronic wand; slamming the trunk closed, he opened the rear passenger-side door.

The wand buzzed. Gadgets swept it over the rear seat and over Prescott. The tone faded. He waved it toward the dashboard. The tone became loud. Then Blancanales opened the glove compartment. Gadgets touched the wand to the walkie-talkie. The device shrieked.

Blancanales and Gadgets glanced to one another. Gadgets signaled his partners to be silent with a finger over his lips. He pointed to the walkie-talkie, then sat in the seat and disassembled it. Lyons continued searching the undercarriage.

Headlights swept the gas station. A lowered Olds-mobile pulled up beside Able Team's cars. A tape unit blasted soul music. Red light illuminated the interior of the Olds.

Two black men — one man in a purple satin turban, the other with a vast cloud of ratted "natural" hair-looked over at the three men in the Dodge. The music cut off.

"Well, say, honkies, What you doin' on our side a' town?"

"We're just tourists," Blancanales answered. "Reading a road map."

"Got any money?" the driver — the man with the cloud of ratted hair — demanded.

Gadgets looked up as he deactivated the minimike, shook his head. Slowly, Blancanales reached under his coat.

"Keep your hand where it is, mother!" the driver shouted. The second man threw open the Olds's passenger-side door.

Lyons stood up with his silenced Colt held at assault height, his right hand braced against his gut, his left hand gripping the Colt's fold-down lever.

Glass exploded as he swept the interior of the Olds-mobile with bursts of silent .45 ACP hollowpoints. The first burst exploded the driver's head. Hunks of hairy skull plastered the inside of the shattered windshield. The second burst caught the man in the turban as he twisted in the seat to point a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The three slugs tore away his left arm and his jaw. A horrible whine bubbled from his devastated face as his right hand spasmed, pulling both triggers of the shotgun. His left leg disintegrated in the flash.

In motion as the first man died, Blancanales put his Beretta 93-R on line. He ripped the front seat with bursts of subsonic 9mm steel-cored slugs, ending the agony of the half-faced, maimed felon. Blancanales "killed" the headless driver again, the corpse jumping and twitching as it fell to tangle with the mangled corpse of his partner in terror.

Lyons fired two bursts into the back seat. He glanced inside, saw only the two dead men.

"Time to go!" he shouted to his partners.

Already in motion, Gadgets ran to the other car. Able Team accelerated with smoking tires. In seconds, they left the scene of sudden death far behind. They continued west on Century Boulevard. Gadgets looked over to Lyons. He broke the silence.

"One question, Ironman."

"What?"

Gadgets followed the taillights of the rental Dodge as it turned off the boulevard. Several blocks short of the location marked on the map, the two cars stopped.

Fire-gutted and vandalized houses lined the streets. Many houses had been moved from the lots, leaving only foundations where families had lived.

Blancanales threw Prescott into the back seat and cuffed his wrists and ankles behind him, linking the cuffs to pull Prescott's ankles up to his wrists.

The three warriors of Able Team assembled their weapons, and slipped into their Kevlar and steel-plate battle armor. Bandoliers crisscrossed the black armor.

The laughter of only a minute ago had gone. Now they talked quietly as they armed themselves.

"Prescott didn't have any prearranged signal," Blancanales told the others. "Not even a code on the walkie-talkie..."

"So he wouldn't freak the family," Gadgets added.

"Right," Blancanales agreed. "He was to drive up slow and the Blancoswould take them. So they'll be waiting curbside. What I thought is we could drive up with the high beams on to blind them. Second car stays a block back, no lights. When they step out, I'll floor it."

"I'll ride shotgun," Lyons volunteered. "In the back seat, with the Atchisson, I'll have 180 degrees field of fire to the rear. Forget the windows and roof posts. I'll put down everything in the street."

"They'll scramble to chase us," Blancanales continued. "But I'll kill the lights after about a block and wait..."

"And I'll come up behind them with the Beretta," Gadgets told them. "Man! Wish I had a cassette tape of the girls and the mother and father talking in Spanish. Would have been perfect with that minimike. El ultimo perfecto."

"Too bad." By touch, Lyons checked the number of tiny MU-50G grenades in the thigh pockets of his night-black fatigues. "But it ain't a perfect world."

Blancanales put his hands on his partners' shoulders. He spoke in sober, sincerely felt words. "But we're doing what we can, right? For a better world?"

"Don't get ideological," Gadgets told him with a straight face. "I'm only doing this for a pension. Doing what they tell me, punching that time card, till the day I can retire to a life of luxury."

The three men laughed at Gadgets's standard put-on.

A roar of auto-fire stopped their laughter.

In the gray luminescence of the Los Angeles night, the bullet-torn Dodge lurched to a stop on flattened tires. Slugs from the Uzis of the Guerreros Blancoscontinued to hammer the pocked doors. Ricochets slammed into the stucco of the deserted houses across the street. Captain Madrano emptied his second magazine of cartridges into the driver's door, then reloaded his scorching hot Uzi.

Surveying the street, Madrano watched as his soldiers continued raking the wrecked Dodge. He had fired a total of sixty rounds into the car. Certainly, he and his soldiers had killed the "specialists from Washington" riding inside. He shouted out to his men: "!Alto! !Alto!"