17

The rotor throb of an approaching helicopter thundered above the pueblo. The three men of Able Team startled awake in one of the adobe houses.

In thanks for the liberation of the pueblo, the people had provided the North Americans with a room and beds made of dry cornstalks covered with woven mats. Now, the soft blue light of morning came through the branches roofing the house.

Cornstalks crackled as Gadgets sat up and reached for his CAR. Lyons opened his eyes, but did not lift his head from the pack he used as a pillow. Staring up at the hundreds of points of predawn blue shining through the thatched ceiling, their eyes followed the noise of the helicopter from the west to east. As the ear-shattering noise of the rotors faded, Gadgets turned to his partners.

"The army? "he asked.

Lyons yawned and shook his head. "There's no alarm," Blancanales answered. "The people would come to alert us."

"Must be Davis," Lyons said. "Unless one of the army pilots escaped. Time to get organized."

Standing, Lyons slapped dust and bits of cornstalk from his sweat-stiffened, filthy fatigues. Powdery earth from the ridge had shaded his fatigues a two-tone — the back of his shirt and pants faded black, the fronts, especially his knees and elbows, dirt brown. He unscrewed the cap of his canteen, poured water into one of his cupped hands, and washed his face.

"I don't think any of those goons are going to escape," Gadgets told his partners as they assembled their equipment and weapons. "Pol, you see what happened to that rapist shit, the one the Yaquis caught in the act?"

Blancanales didn't reply. Lyons laughed, the sound sharp and cynical. "Didn't live through it, did he?"

"You had to see it to believe it." Gadgets shook his head, as if attempting to clear his mind of the images. "I have seen some bad shit, but it's always been what's already happened, after the fact. But this, man oh man, right there in front of me, in living color..."

"What? They castrate him?" Lyons didn't pause as he broke down his silenced Colt and checked the mechanism. "Makes sense to me."

"More than just that. They took his skin off like a shirt. They unzipped him with their knives. His shirt and pants and... his skin... they just stripped it off him. If it hadn't been so horrible, it would've been flat out amazing."

Through the small window they heard crying and voices. Blancanales pushed aside a burlap curtain and looked outside. He watched for a moment, then spoke to his partners. "The people are preparing their dead. And it looks like everyone's leaving. They're all packed."

"Any minute the army could show up with napalm. You packed?" Lyons asked. "We're going, too."

"Where?" Gadgets asked.

"Wherever the goon squad came from," Lyons told him. "Now we've got transportation."

Shouldering their packs, they left the adobe house and walked into a crowd of townspeople gathering on the road. Men and women carrying bundles of possessions on their backs trudged north, followed by lines of children. Older children pulled goats along by ropes. Other children carried baskets of chickens. A few families shouldered heavier burdens: cloth-wrapped dead.

Townspeople gathered around the three North Americans, thanking them for their help. Blancanales acknowledged in Spanish; Gadgets and Lyons nodded. Children stared at the strangers. Finally, Able Team marched away to find the fighters.

Walking to the ridge trail, they saw that only furniture remained in the houses of the pueblo. The walls had been stripped of photos, shelves and tables were bare of utensils, the windows denuded of curtains. Before the sun rose over the eastern hill, the pueblo would be deserted.

"Think these people are opium farmers?" Lyons asked his partners.

"If they are, it doesn't look like they got rich," Gadgets said.

Blancanales indicated the pueblo with a sweep of his arm, taking in the mud-plastered adobe houses, the pole and tree-branch ramadas, the people with ragged clothes and bundles of possessions.

"Do you begin to understand why they would grow opium?" he asked Lyons. "Someone comes out here and promises them a few dollars. It's the difference between food or no food, shoes or no shoes..."

"But what they got was a gang war..." Lyons replied as he looked up. Vultures circled the village.

"Opium and death," Lyons said. "Heroin and gang wars. Billions of dope dollars and international fascism. Hell, it's time to move. We've got questions to put to those prisoners."

Bent under the unwelcome weight of their packs and weapons, they climbed up the steep trail to the ridge. Only two of the Huey troopships remained. Soldiers worked inside the helicopters. On the north end of the ridge, where Lyons and Vato had hidden and plotted the infiltration, soldiers dug ditches.

Vato, standing in the center of the ridgetop plateau, directed the soldiers. The old achaistood beside him. As Able Team approached the helicopters, the North Americans recognized Yaquis in the green camouflage fatigues. The Yaquis wore the fatigues, berets and boots of the Mexican army. They all wore army web gear. With the M-16 and FN-FAL rifles they had captured from the Mexicans, they looked like soldiers.

"What's going on?" Gadgets wondered out loud.

They saw that nothing remained of the killing the night before. No blood or flesh marked the spots where Mexican soldiers had died. Yaquis swept the earth clean with branches.

In one of the troopships, Miguel Coral worked with Yaquis to secure a chain of three claymore mines to the engine housing of a troopship. Taped together in a band, linked by a line of det-cord, the claymores faced them.

"I wouldn't stand in front of amateurs playing with claymores," Gadgets advised from a distance.

Lyons and Blancanales stepped back ten paces.

"What are they doing?" Blancanales asked.

"Vato!" Lyons called out.

The achaiand the young leader walked to them. Of all the Yaquis, only they wore dust-colored clothing. Vato had his Springfield rifle slung over his back.

"What's happening over there?" Gadgets pointed to the troopship where Coral had set up the claymore mines.

"The army is coming. With their officers. When they come, we kill them."

"How do you know?" Lyons demanded.

"This will be known as the Hill of Death," the achaiadded. With a salute to the foreigners, the old man walked away. "The boy will instruct you en su trabajo aqui."

"In the other helicopter, the one that Davis took away, there is a special radio..."

"Where's he now?" Lyons continued.

"My men hide the helicopter. He will wait with it."

"What kind of special radio?" Gadgets asked. He shrugged off his pack and set it on the earth.

Blancanales stopped the interruptions. "Gentlemen! The man's trying to brief us."

Vato continued. "I told the Mexican lieutenant to report that he had trapped the Yaquis and North Americans, but he needed more soldiers and weapons. The Mexican colonel immediately took command. I know the vanity of my enemy. He flies here now to lead the final assault. And we will kill them.

"There..." Vato pointed to the first helicopter "...we have the bombs in place. Claymore mines. In front of the bombs are barrels of gasoline from the helicopters. Senor Coral told me the arrangement would be very terrible..."

"Oh, yeah..." Gadgets agreed. "If the blast and shrapnel don't get them, the flash will toast them righteously."

"And now Senor Coral prepares the second bomb. When the helicopters land, my soldiers will go down the trail, then explode the bombs."

"But what a waste of helicopters," Gadgets interrupted again. "Those Hueys cost a million each."

"There is only one pilot," Vato countered. "The men there..." he pointed to the soldiers digging ditches on the hill overlooking the plateau "...they have the machine guns from the helicopters. They will fire down. And there on that mountain..."