Headlights illuminated the back of the bus. Belching diesel smoke, the bus pulled ahead of the trucks. The bus shook and rattled as it hurtled downhill. The tires sprayed mud higher than the windows. Careering through curves, the bus left the trucks far behind.

But other taillights appeared. Lyons raised himself to look ahead. In the headlights of the bus, he saw a jeep with M-60 machine guns mounted on pedestals, one in the front seat aiming forward, the other in the back. Four soldiers rode in the jeep.

The jeep's brake lights flashed. The bus slowed. The jeep whipped through a turn, the bus following a moment later. Now the vehicles traveled on a paved road.

Kilometers away, the lights of a small city shimmered through the rain and wind. Lyons heard rumbling and squeaking. He looked back to see the troop trucks pass the turnoff without slowing. He nudged Blancanales to rise.

"Can't be San Francisco Gotera," Blancanales told him. "The town hasn't had electricity for years."

"Ricardo!" Lyons hissed.

The teenager spoke quickly to Blancanales. Blancanales turned to Lyons.

"That's the plantation," he said. "What happened back there on the road?"

"They had a race. That's a jeep up front there. I think it's the army officers. The troop trucks went straight. Going back to the garrison, I guess."

"Like at the farmhouse." Blancanales considered what he had observed. "The soldiers stay in the trucks, the officers work with the militia leaders. Perhaps the officers will be meeting with Quesada."

On the paved road, the jeep and bus maintained a steady hundred kilometers per hour. Only a few minutes after they left the mountain road, they saw the lights of a guard tower. The jeep slowed. Taking a last look, the two men of Able Team saw a sentry open a chain link gate topped with razor wire.

Praying that the guard in the watchtower could not distinguish their forms among the bundles and boxes of gear, Lyons and Blancanales and the teenage Ricardo pressed themselves flat on the roof of the bus. The vehicle slowed to a crawl as it lurched over a series of speed bumps. Voices called out, then the bus accelerated again, following a hundred meters behind the jeep.

They sped through the defenses of the Quesada family. When distance reduced the lights of the watchtower to a smear in the rain, Lyons moved to the edge of the roof. Below, the rain-polished asphalt blurred past at a hundred kilometers per hour.

"Pol! Ready to jump? First chance we get."

Blancanales spoke quickly with Ricardo. The teenager crawled to the edge and looked down. He looked at the two North Americans. "Este es loco…"

"Si, mucho loco," Blancanales answered. "Pero no hay otro cosa a hacer."

Mercury-arc lights on poles lit the road. Chain link and barbed-wire fences flashed past. Beyond the fences, a few lights shone from the shanties of lumber and tar paper that housed the plantation's field workers. Aluminum prefabs sheltered the overseers guarding the campesinos. But none of the miltiamen in the guard posts braved the storm.

On the other side of the road, rows of coffee bushes extended to the distance. Lyons pointed to the coffee fields.

"In there."

"If you jump now," Blancanales warned him, "with those lights, at this speed, you're dead twice."

"They've got to slow down sometime. First time there's enough darkness to cover us…"

The jeep and the bus continued at a hundred kilometers per hour on the brightly lit service road. Ahead, they saw a cluster of prefab buildings. Lights blazed over an asphalted area crowded with parked trucks and farm equipment.

Lyons cursed. "Slow down! Give us some shadows!" he hissed.

As if the driver had heard, the bus slowed. Lyons braced himself to jump. Blancanales pulled him back, and down.

"Guards, there!"

Two militiamen in yellow raincoats opened the chain link and razor-wire gates to the vehicle yard. The jeep went through the gate. The bus slowed, but too late. It entered the vehicle yard.

The three intruders on the cargo rack went flat. Around them, they saw garages and parked trucks. Sentries paced the asphalt. The hammering of an air ratchet stopped as mechanics watched the returning squad from open-sided service buildings. In the brilliance of thousand-watt lights, nothing in the vehicle yard went unobserved.

As the bus slowed to a stop, men from the death squad stepped out of the passenger door. They called out to the militiamen. The army officers in the jeep drove on to one of the prefabs.

Lyons and Blancanales and Ricardo waited. The militiamen had stowed equipment on the bus roof. The militiamen would unload the equipment.

Flat on their bellies, Lyons and Blancanales unslung their assault weapons. They waited for the sound of boots on the steel rungs of the ladders.

15

Another rattle of static came from the hand-radio. Gadgets Schwarz listened for code-clicks or the voices of his partners. But the electronic noise obscured any message. Gadgets keyed a response. The bursts of static continued.

As rain beat on the plastic tarp sheltering him, Gadgets strained his ears to decipher a message within the static. He fought panic as his imagination created a thousand horrors his partners could have suffered in the hours since they left.

On the captured black radio, he and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored Quesada's cancellation of the ambush and the order for the squad to return to the finca.

Then Quesada warned his squad of assassins of the North American paramilitary agents.

How did Quesada know? Gadgets and Lieutenant Lizco had monitored not only the encoded Quesada communications but also the army frequencies. There had been no transmissions from the army react-force sent to collect the casualties and survivors of the guerrilla ambush. Only those soldiers had seen Able Team. Furthermore, Quesada's warning to his militiamen never mentioned "North American mercenaries en route to Honduras."

Had one of Quesada's units captured or killed Gadgets's partners?

Blancanales and Lyons had checked in several times.

When they had reached the crest of the mountain. After they had warned the journalists. And when they spotted the death squad.

No more messages came after that. Only a brief and uncertain exchange of static and clicks. Gadgets had responded to the noise by keying clicks in Morse code. But he received no return message or even a confirmation of his Morse signals.

Now more static-blurred clicks came from his radio, in no code or intelligent sequence.

He did not want to believe what his imagination told him about the transmissions: Blancanales or Lyons lay bleeding in some tangle of brush, too badly wounded to put out a coherent message…

Or someone played with the radios. The death squad had captured, maybe killed his partners and now the Salvadoran fascists experimented with the high-tech equipment,

Logically, he knew of many reasons for the breakdown in communication. Distance. The electrical interference of the storm. Damage to the radios.

The distance and lightning had not disrupted the check-in transmissions. Blancanales's voice had come through clear. And too much time had passed since Quesada recalled his death squad. With the help of Ricardo to guide them, Gadgets and Lyons should have reached the top of the mountain, with or without a prisoner. Only the possibility of damage remained. But both radios damaged? Or one destroyed and the other damaged? Unlikely.

He had to know.

In the makeshift tent made by throwing a plastic tarp over the jeep and the pedestal-mounted M-60, he put his feet up on the jeep's dashboard and considered the problem. He had few options. He and the lieutenant could not leave this position to search for his partners.