"Hey, man, no booze."

The lieutenant apologized with a smile. "It seems to have 'disappeared.'"

"Where d'you think that shooting was?" Lyons asked him.

"In the hills. Perhaps higher on the road."

The dirt lane switchbacked across the mountainside. Overarching pines hid the sky. Rivulets of clear water splashed from rocks above the road, causing areas of mud. Lyons motioned to the lieutenant.

"Stop!"

Ahead of them, the road passed over a gentle hillside. Cleared ground on both sides of the road had once been planted with corn; a few withered stalks still stood. A burned-out house overlooked the road. Bullets had pocked the adobe walls. As the Cadillac slowed to a stop, Gadgets leaned forward. Blancanales scanned the upslope hillsides.

"What do you see?" Gadgets asked Lyons.

"Mines!" the lieutenant shouted as he jammed the shift into reverse.

Several round depressions in the road had filled with water. A shovel lay at the side of the road. As the Cadillac's tires spun backward in the sand and gravel of the road, they saw a man step out of the brush.

He wore dark green fatigues and a beret. A red star on the beret identified him as a guerrilla with the Stalinist Popular Liberation Forces. But the four men in the Cadillac ignored the ideological identification. Their eyes fixed on the weapon he held.

An RPG-7 rocket launcher.

Dropping to one knee, the guy shouldered the launcher. He took his hand off the pistol grip and removed the warhead's safety cap. He cocked the hammer.

The Cadillac shuddered and rocked as it hurtled backward. As if in a nightmare, they all saw the man aiming the rocket at the center of the windshield. Lieutenant Lizco had the accelerator to the floor, but it would not save them.

As the guerrilla's finger pulled the trigger, Lyons grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it toward him. The change in direction gave greater traction to the tires. The Cadillac whipped through a two-wheeled backward turn, the rear end bumping uphill, smashing through bushes and pine saplings.

The rocket shrieked over the hood and into the distance. The explosion came an instant later.

"Forward now!"

With the rocking Cadillac tilted backward up the hillside at forty-five degrees, the lieutenant accelerated. He whipped the steering wheel all the way to his left.

For a sickening instant, the out-of-control Coupe de Ville again balanced on two wheels. Then Gadgets and Blancanales threw themselves against the inside of the rear door to shift the weight of the car. With a crash, the Cadillac fell onto all four wheels and fishtailed across the dirt road.

"And I always thought the rebels liked reporters," Gadgets commented.

"Perhaps they can't read," Blancanales said as he took out his M-16/M-203.

"You remember the expression?" Gadgets asked. He held his CAR-15 and scanned the mountainsides. " 'The pen is mightier than the sword'? I tell you, a rocket puts down any typewriter."

"Where now?" Lyons asked the lieutenant as he took his Atchisson from its case.

"There is another road," the grim-faced man at the wheel replied. "Actually only a trail. Perhaps we will take it. It is beyond the landing strip."

"But the firefight we heard..."

"Yes. That is also beyond the landing strip."

Blancanales leaned forward. "The Commies must have set a one-two ambush. The one up ahead, then that one back there. They hit the army up there, and then if a react-force comes up the road, they hit it too. Or if the unit up there broke out, they'll run into the second ambush on the way down. Standard procedure, straight out of the book."

"What's the book say about our situation?" Lyons asked the ex-Green Beret.

"Said to cover your ass," Blancanales answered.

"Hide out," Gadgets added. "Make them find you. And when they do, ambush them."

"Tough to hide a Cadillac Coupe de Ville," Lyons commented. "Lieutenant, how about we ditch this monster and cut overland?"

"That is also very dangerous. The road comes soon. Let us chance it."

"You're the driver." Lyons buckled on a bandolier of Atchisson magazines. "But I'd rather walk than play tag with RPGs."

"Second the motion," Gadgets told his partners. "When the Ironman says he's afraid, it's time to shake."

"Not afraid," Lyons corrected. He kept his eyes on the hillsides as he spoke. "We just don't have time for this nonsense."

They passed the airstrip. Pushing the overweight luxury car to its limit, the lieutenant continued into the hills. Over the rattling of gravel and rocks in the fenders, they heard no more rifle fire.

"The road comes soon," Lieutenant Lizco stressed. "Very soon. All will be okay."

At one hundred kilometers an hour, the Cadillac lurched across the gravel. A straightaway led over the crest of a low hill.

Bouncing over the top, they drove into the wreckage and death of the ambush.

6

As their hands closed on their weapons, the men of Able Team saw this scene: The road widened. Engineers had graded flat the low slopes of a hill to provide a service area for road maintenance. At the downslope edge of the area, trucks had dumped loads of gravel and broken stone. Pine trunks had been stacked a few meters away. To the north, the road went over a low rise to continue into the mountains.

A steep hillside overlooked the road and service area. High brush and pine saplings had concealed the guerrillas.

The ambush had evidently been quick and efficient. The first truck burned at the far side of the clearing, only ten meters short of the exit to the north. Corpses of soldiers indicated that gunfire had come from the hillside above them and from the rise ahead of the truck. The autofire had driven the survivors back from the truck and into the center of the kill zone.

The second and third trucks had been hit with RPGs as they attempted to back out. More sprawled corpses of soldiers indicated that the guerrillas had closed a circle around the unit. Running from the infernos of the trucks, the soldiers had run into the rifle fire of guerrillas waiting behind the piles of gravel and stacked pines.

Now the guerrillas, wearing workshop-stitched uniforms, tennis shoes and black nylon web-gear, herded captured soldiers through the smoke and flames of the killground. Guerrillas with red stars on their berets stripped uniforms from the living, and from the dying and dead soldiers. Other guerrillas gathered the captured uniforms, weapons and boots.

On the far side of the ambush site, where the road headed north away from Able Team, two jeeps with pedestal-mounted M-60 machine guns parked, the drivers pulling on the handbrakes. A guerrilla officer with an Uzi left the second jeep. Unlike the others in the ragged platoon of mountain fighters, the leader appeared military. Clean-shaven and short-haired, he wore clean fatigues and polished black boots. Guerrillas moved to the jeeps with their loads of captured equipment.

The freedom fighters of the Popular Liberation Forces made no secret of how they would dispose of their prisoners.

Two Communists forced a naked teenage soldier to his knees as a third Communist put a pistol muzzle to the boy's face.

The pistol flashed, the corpse flopped back as the Coupe de Ville hurtled over the rise.

Lyons thumbed his Atchisson's fire-selector to semi-auto. "The one with the Uzi — the officer — we take him alive!"

"Lyons, no!" Blancanales leaned from the back seat. "We can race through! We got the speed..."

A Communist sentry turned at the sound of the on-rushing car, the AK-47 he held rising to his shoulder.

Lyons fired. At 1200 feet per second, a spray of steel balls crossed the ten-meter distance to tear through the guerrilla's chest. The other Communists heard the boom of the assault shotgun and whirled as their dead comrades flew back.