Dick Stivers - Warlord of Azatlan

"Loading, locking," Gadgets answered.

"Don't even think it. Four pistols and rifles against the army?"

"If it's Unomundo's goons up there," Gadgets asked him, "do you want to be captured?"

"Loading, locking," Lyons responded, clicking off his hand-radio. He opened the Atchisson's case. He jerked back the actuator to feed the first shell into the chamber. He left the autoshotgun concealed in the unlocked case.

Luis turned to the woman. "Hear me, puta . You will not betray us. If we do not return to the city, your children die."

Lyons looked to the hate-filled young man. He shook his head, no. Luis laughed. He leaned on the horn as he sped past the waiting cars, flicking his high beams to warn oncoming traffic.

Troops watched from olive drab 6x6 trucks. Soldiers with autorifles went into buses and waved flashlights over the passengers. Other soldiers looked into cars, told drivers to open their trunks. As Luis raced to the roadblock, the soldiers in the trucks raised their rifles.

As he slowed, Luis extended Lieutenant Garcia's identification. A soldier put a flashlight on the wallet, then on Lyons and Senora Garcia. An officer came running to their car.

Lyons's right hand reached toward the Atchisson's pistolgrip.

The officer glanced at the stolen identification and saluted Luis. Then he looked into the car. He saw the fair-skinned Lyons. The officer saluted again. " Viva Unomundo ."

Luis spoke to the officer in Spanish. The officer looked at the two North Americans in the Volkswagen behind. Then he waved both cars past.

As they accelerated away, Luis passed the wallet to Lyons. One plastic divider held Lieutenant Garcia's army identification. A second held an embossed business card. The engraved lettering said only:

"UNO,'s.a."

"That means," Luis told him. "UNO, Incorporated."

"This is bad news. His people are everywhere."

Luis nodded. "Everywhere."

Following the Pan American Highway, they drove into the high central plateau of Guatemala. A starlit landscape of shadowy mountains and black stands of forest extended into the distance. Few vehicles traveled the highway. Opening his window, Lyons put his face into the windrush. The night smelled of pines and dust and wood fires. He thought of the High Sierras of California.

They passed villages bright with lights, electric incandescence creating islands of whitewashed houses, tiled roofs, and dusty rock-paved streets. Other times, as they rounded curves, their headlights revealed fields of tangled dry cornstalks and fire-blackened adobe walls.

"What happened at these farms?" Lyons asked Luis.

"The EGP. El Ejercito Guerilla de los Pobres . The Guerilla Army of the Poor. They needed money for the revolution. They demanded taxes. But the farmers are without money. They have only corn and beans. When the farmers would not pay the war taxes, the guerillas took men from every family and killed them.

"When guerillas came again and demanded taxes, the people paid the few coins they had. I knew one woman, an Indian woman. The EGP killed her father and her husband, so she paid the tax to stop them killing her son.

"It was not guerillas she paid. They were agents of the desconocidos . The unknown men. A gang of the desconocidos came, raped her, then hacked her to death with machetes. They carved a hammer and sickle on her face as a warning to the other Communists.

"It happened everywhere. There are villages of widows and orphans. The new president stopped it. He gave rifles to the men. Now, when the guerillas or the desconocidos come, they die.

"But not until all the fascists die," Luis insisted, "will there be peace. We must kill them all. When the new president came, I believed all would be good. But the war continues. The rich still have their armies of desconocidos . The EGP hides in the mountains. Unomundo still lives…"

Luis's voice drifted away as he stared at the highway, his face lit green from the dashboard lights. Mechanically he steered through the curves, maintaining an even speed. Lyons sat in thought. He had read of the terrorism in the remote villages, but the North American newspapers always described the attacks as "Army atrocities." He had read endless diatribes against the government, but Lyons had never really read the truth.

After a minute, Luis spoke of his own sorrow.

"I managed a trucker's cooperative. Many trucks, many drivers. Garages and gasoline stations. But we would not work for Unomundo. So his killers came for me. I was not there. I escaped death. But my wife and baby did not. With machetes…"

Luis went silent. He drove by reflex, his mind trapped in a numbing nightmare. Miles later, he suddenly said: "Now I fight. Why do you fight?"

After what Luis had told him, what could Lyons say? Had he suffered like Luis? Or like Dr. Orozco? Lyons had not lost his family to psychopathic monsters. True, years before, Mafia hoods had beaten and whipped him for a week, but within a few months he had healed. The experience had scarred him, hardened his character, but he had suffered no trauma.

As the landscape of fields and mountains drifted past, Lyons reconsidered his life. Why did he fight? Memories of his years as a police officer in Los Angeles came in a rush: the scenes of felons' mindless cruelty to their victims; the elderly broken for a snatched dollar; the bank clerks with their lives draining through wounds; the workers crippled or murdered for their paycheck; the children tortured and strangled to satisfy lust; the wide-eyed, slashed corpses of women — teenagers, mothers, grandmothers — raped and then murdered, sometimes murdered then raped, and dumped like trash.

He thought of the parole boards that considered the families of victims annoying obstacles to the swift release of convicts. He recalled the courts that gave child-rapists five trials to perfect their defense. And the psychiatrists who excused any atrocity as a product of society's errors. And the Utopians who petitioned the government to disarm society, to leave good people defenseless against the predators. And the industries glamorizing the drug gangs and criminals.

These things explained his rages, his passion for justice. But why did he fight?

Lyons had many excuses not to fight. As a taxpayer, he paid others to fight — police, teenage army recruits, air force pilots. As a robust male, no one personally threatened him. As a worker with skills and income, he could hire security guards to protect his home and office. As a man of some intelligence, he could easily rationalize noninvolvement. Why did he fight?

"Because I can. I'm strong, I'm fast, I get stupid when I'm angry, then I do brave things. I don't think about death except in the middle of the night. That's why." His explanation had come after a long pause.

"You have a wife? Children?" Luis asked.

"She divorced me. Couldn't take going to other policemen's funerals and waiting for mine. Couldn't take me twitching at night when I couldn't forget what I'd seen. Isn't easy for a woman to be married to a policeman."

"Why do you fight here?"

"Unomundo killed Federal agents in the United States. I wish my government had not waited for them to die. If we had come years ago, maybe they'd still be alive. Maybe your family would still be alive. There's a hundred places I wish I'd gone to fight when I had the chance. North America. South America. Here. Some nights I think of what I could have done and didn't and I'm ashamed."

Luis laughed. "You talk like a missionary."

"Yeah, yeah," Lyons agreed, laughing with the Guatemalan. "But they bring the Word. I bring the Wrath."

They came to a crossroads and took another highway. The hours passed. Cornfields and gardens became vertical hillsides. Winding upward through ravines, switching back every few hundred yards, the narrow road cut through a forest.