"Any of the soldiers alive?" Lyons asked.

The others all answered, no.

Lyons shouted out again. "We've got riflemen downstream. One on each side, with heavy rifles. We can't move until we get them. Everyone shift positions and on three, pop up and fire. Got it? Answer me, Davis!"

"I can handle it."

"No hay problema," Coral answered. "I have seen them."

"Shift and fire, shift and fire," Blancanales repeated.

"One... two... three!"

The five men lurched up and fired in a tearing burst. Dropping down, they heard a rifle firing back. They shifted positions in the rocks. One by one, they fired bursts, then dodged down before the rifleman could find them in his sight.

Staying flat on the sand and exposing only one eye, Lyons peered up at the canyon wall. He saw a rifleman pressing a field dressing against a bloody arm. Sighting on the wounded man, Lyons squeezed off a burst. The rifleman's body rolled down the slope.

A second rifleman broke for the safety of the streambed, running a few steps, then sliding down the steep canyon wall. Blancanales and Gadgets and Coral fired simultaneously, the slugs from three rifles tearing through the man's head and chest.

"That's it," Gadgets announced.

"Stay down!" Lyons shouted. "Gather up whatever equipment we can use and then crawl out. There could be another one out there."

"Ironman, put the binocs on that ridge," Gadgets told him. "Something's going on up there."

Focusing on the mountain overlooking the can-yon, Lyons saw figures moving. They did not wear the green uniforms of the Mexican army. Light flashes came from mirrors.

"Wizard, what's their code say?" Lyons called out.

"F-i-n-i...fini..."

10

In the last hour of morning, they met the Yaquis.

After the firefight Able Team had bandaged Davis, then outfitted themselves with weapons and gear from the dead Mexican soldiers. Lyons and Davis and Coral found folding-stock FN-FAL paratrooper rifles. Davis and Coral stripped the dead of knives and packs and clothing. They had marched for the rest of the morning and afternoon, watching signal mirrors flash from the cliffs and mountainsides above them.

Following the streambed north, they left the gorge and climbed trails cutting across the sides of mountains. Animal prints marked the trails, but they saw no human footprints. Yet they knew others walked in these mountains. The others watched them from ridgelines, signal mirrors flashing from mountain to mountain.

The introduction came abruptly. Lyons, sweating under his load of gear and weapons, had walked point for the preceding hour. He looked down to check the trail for tracks, then looked up to see the three young men.

Two of the young men carried M-16 rifles. The third carried what looked like a .30-06 Springfield rifle with a custom stock featuring a pistol grip.

Lyons knew that rifle, or a rifle like it, had saved them from the trap in the gorge.

Lyons let the FN-FAL rifle in his hands hang by the strap over his shoulder. He crossed his hands over the top of the receiver. He stood without moving as the others caught up with him.

Blancanales spoke first in Spanish. "Buenas tardes."

"We will speak English," the young man with the Springfield told the foreigners.

"Thanks for helping us," Lyons said. "Without you, we'd be dead now."

"Why are you in our mountains?"

"The Mexican army," Lyons explained, "or a gang dressed in the uniforms of the Mexican army, shot down our plane. We're walking to the railroad. We'll take the train down to the coast. Who are you?"

"Are you with the Ochoa family?"

Behind Lyons, Blancanales whispered quickly with Miguel Coral.

"Don't talk about it," the young man with the Springfield told them. "Answer."

Coral stepped forward. "I served Don Ochoa. But he is gone now."

"Do you serve now with Los Guerreros Blancos?"

"Those assassins!" Coral spat on the trail. "They killed my friends, they killed the children of my friends, they mutilated one of the sons of mi Padrino Ochoa. Juntarme con esos? Jamas primero muerto!"

"Who are you?" Lyons asked again. "Why are you asking about Los Blancos?"

The young man answered. "We are Yoeme. The Mexicans call us Yaquis. We also fight the White gang. Come."

"Yaquis?" Blancanales asked, incredulous. "Yaqui Indians?"

"I said, Yoeme. Yaquis. The Yoeme do not come from India. We are the people of this land."

The three Yaquis led the way.

"Broncos..."Miguel Coral told the North Americans. "Wild ones. The old men used to talk about Yaquis and Mayos and Tarahumaras who still fought in the Sierras, but that was when I was a boy. Even then no one believed it and that was thirty years ago."

"We go?" Lyons asked.

"Why not?" Gadgets answered. "We're here, let's make the scene."

Blancanales looked to the Yaquis striding away. "They said they're fighting the White gang, Los Guerreros Blancos. I think we have a lot to talk over with them."

"We came for information," Lyons said, nodding. He started after the young men. "And they've got it."

To keep pace with the Yaquis, Lyons forced himself to jog. He realized why he had not seen tracks. The Yaquis wore rags over the soles of their boots. Their footsteps were only vague smears on the sand. His boots, stamping into the trail with the combined weight of his body and the equipment and weapons, left deep imprints.

They walked for kilometers, over the crest of a ridge, through a canyon. The Yaquis led them through the zigzags of a switchback trail weaving up the slope of a mountain. Sweat soaked Lyons's fatigues and rained into the dust of the trail.

On the last switchback before the top, the young Yaquis disappeared. Lyons looked up to the ridge. He did not see them.

Lyons stopped and studied the mountainside. Thoughts raced through his mind. Ambush? No. The Yaquis had saved them. Had the Yaquis abandoned them? He followed the vague smears of the Yaquis's tracks to a rock formation of vertical slabs. He found a shoulder-wide space in the rocks. The tracks led through the space. Inside the mountain, he saw what appeared to be the interior of a cave, highlighted by late-afternoon sunlight that came through the ceiling.

Taking a step back, Lyons studied a patchwork that stretched over the mountainside. The color of the cloth matched the sand. Splotches and patterns of gray matched the rocks and stone formations. Green plastic created the illusion of weeds. Planes or helicopters — or photo-recon satellites orbiting the earth — would see this mountain as no different from all the others in the Sierra Madres.

Lyons looked back. His partners and Davis and Coral struggled to catch up with him. Behind them, Yaqui children ran along the trail with mesquite branches, sweeping away the boot prints of the foreigners. A child laughed at a question from Blancanales, answering with a point to where Lyons stood.

Stepping through the gateway of stone, Lyons entered the shadowy interior. A fissure cut through the stone of the mountain. Along the sides of the fissure, three levels of caves had been cut into the stone. Stone steps led to the entrances of the caves. In addition to screening the interior of the mountain from airborne observation, the tent of camouflage, reinforced with spider works of rope inside, protected the village of caves from the sun and the wind.

Inside, Yaquis waited for the foreigners. Lyons saw young men and women, a few children, a few older people. Perhaps fifty people. Their faces showed neither welcome nor hatred, only interest. As Gadgets, Blancanales, Coral and Davis filed into the hidden village, Lyons noted details.