"No one radios for help. No one escapes. No one lives."

"Only the officers."

They crawled back through the brush. Pausing at the rocky crest of the ridge, Lyons rose to a crouch. He looked downhill to where the three Huey troopships were parked on a wide, flat plateau like huge somnambulant insects. He watched for a minute as silhouettes crossed the glaring lights. Other forms stood around fires.

From the height of the crest, he searched the ridge for an avenue of infiltration. Directly in front of him, to the north of the helicopters, open ground denied access. To the east, any soldier looking up from the pueblo could have spotted Lyons and the Yaquis on the cliff face below the helicopters.

He saw a crease in the ridgeline. A shallow gully, erosion-carved during the torrential tropical rains of the summer, cut through the center of the camp, running southwest from the helicopters to the darkness of the mountainside. That erosion ditch would be his avenue through the perimeter.

Squinting against the lights and the leaping fire, Lyons searched for sentries. He saw one form pacing in the darkness.

Then a uniform took his attention. A soldier was squatted at the door of a Huey. Unlike the other soldiers, who wore the camouflage greens of the Mexican army, he wore a gray uniform. Silver insignia flashed like sequins from his collar. Lyons saw the gray-uniformed soldier raise a bottle and drink.

Lyons noted the soldier's helicopter, then followed Vato through the moonlit darkness. They scrambled down the mountainside to a trail that paralleled the ridgeline. In minutes they rejoined the group of Yaquis.

As Lyons cleaned and checked his silenced Colt Government Model, more Yaquis led in Gadgets and Blancanales.

For minutes the two ex-Green Berets walked in circles and stretched as their muscles cooled. With the arrival of the foreigners, Vato divided the Yaqui fighters into three groups. He began the detailed explanations of the upcoming action and the role of each of the three groups, sketching the action in the sand.

Gadgets found his backpack and sprawled against it, only one hand moving slowly to pull open the Velcro closures. His words came in a dry rattle from his throat. "Twinkies... I must have Twinkies..."

"What are you talking about?" Lyons demanded.

Gadgets pulled out a plastic box and eased off the lid. "Been thinking about this good stuff all day long. How long we been running today?"

"It's already tomorrow." Blancanales gasped. "I'm getting too old for this..."

Cellophane crinkled. Lyons heard the tear of a pop top and the soft hiss of escaping pressure as his partner opened a can.

"Orange soda and some Twinkies, man. This is it. I am now ready. Mr. Wizard reporting for duty. Here, here's some quick energy for you dudes."

Lyons shook his head. "I don't want any of that junk-food shit."

"This ain't food. These are bennies. And aspirin. If you feel like me, you could pass out on your feet any second now."

"Benzedrine? Forget that! I'm good for another hour or so."

Blancanales accepted a tablet of each. He gulped them down with water. "Take it, Ironman. Dr. Politician says so. You've been running for sixteen hours straight. Consciousness at this moment is a medical impossibility. Take it."

Gadgets laughed. "Proven effective in highway tests by two million truck drivers."

"It could affect my judgement," Lyons said as he swallowed a tablet of the Benzedrine with two tablets of aspirin. If Blancanales, the ex-Green Beret medic, thought the stimulant necessary, Lyons would take it. But he didn't like any drugs, for any reason.

Gadgets laughed as he dug through his pack. "Maybe it'll make you extremo dien cai dau loco. Me, boppin' along packed with bennies and Twinkies... there's no hope for those goons, I'm gonna be one totally murderous dude."

"They deserve it." Lyons briefed them on the situation and the positions of the soldiers. As he detailed the infiltration, Blancanales and Gadgets checked their silenced Beretta 93-R autopistols.

Then Gadgets prepared his CAR for the silent attack. Popping open his munitions kit, he took out a Parkerized black silencer tube and two Colt magazines. He dropped the 30-round magazine out of the CAR and snapped in one of the replacement mags of twenty Interdynamic 5.56mm cartridges. The Interdynamic cartridges contained reduced powder charges that propelled 85-grain slugs at the subsonic velocity of two hundred and ninety-five meters per second. The silencer slipped down over the flash suppressor and locked. The reduced charges of the cartridges did not generate the chamber pressure to cycle the bolt, therefore totally eliminating mechanical noise. Together, the Interdynamic cartridges and the Maxim multibaffle silencer converted the CAR to a silent rifle with deadly accuracy out to two hundred meters. Gadgets slapped the base of the magazine to check its seating.

"Ready to go," he rasped.

The North Americans joined the groups of Yaquis. With modern weapons and knives, they went to liberate the pueblo.

15

Wiping the blood of the young girl off his fatigue pants, Lieutenant Colomo pushed his way out of the crowd of soldiers. The men of the International Group already cheered on the next man who took his turn in the gang rape.

Flashlights illuminated the atrocity on the packed-dirt floor. The circles of light played on the naked blood-smeared leg of the girl, then on her breast and her face. The dim lights glowed on the polished boots of the soldiers. From time to time, a beam wavered over the crowd, the leering, openmouthed faces of the soldiers leaping from the shack's darkness like disembodied masks in a nightmare. The young girl cried without end, her voice hoarse and cracking from screaming.

Lieutenant Colomo crossed the dirt floor of the shack and stood in front of the girl's father.

Ropes bound the campesino to the rough-hewn wood of a chair. Though he looked sixty, he might have been only thirty years old — decades of searing mountain sun had weathered his face to leather, malnutrition and poverty had taken most of his teeth. He stared at the floor, groaning with shame and sorrow as his daughter cried. Jerking the man's head back by the hair, the lieutenant shouted down into the face of the campesino.

"Who killed the soldiers?" he demanded.

The waving beams of the flashlights, the only lights in the adobe shack, gleamed on the blood and tears streaking the man's face.

"We know nothing of it, please leave us alone, we did nothing to the army..."

The lieutenant slammed his fist into the man's face.

"We have no guns, we have nothing to fight with, we do not kill," the helpless figure went on.

Colomo drove his knee into the man's solar plexus. Choking, gasping, the campesino struggled to breathe. He dragged down a shuddering breath and rattled out the words, "We did nothing..."

Pulling his partner upright, the lieutenant sneered into his face. "Hear me, you half-breed filth. We want the information. You tell us or we will throw what's left of your daughter to the vultures. You understand?"

"Please... for the love of God, we did nothing to you..."

The words enraged the Lieutenant. How dared this half-human, indigenacreature, this ignorant Yaqui, this thing that lived in filth and bred offspring in filth, evoke the holy grace of a white God? Trembling, his Castilian features red with rage, Colomo snatched at the Colt pistol in his belt holster.

His thumb on the safety, the hammer standing at full-cock, the lieutenant stopped. The man headed the village. If anyone knew, he did. The trash must live until he answered the questions. Colomo reholstered his pistol and rushed outside.