Dick Stivers - Warlord of Azatlan

At many of the curves, their headlights revealed clusters of small crosses. Names marked the crosses. Rotting flowers indicated frequent visits by mourners. Beyond the guardrails, the wooded mountainside dropped away to darkness.

"Why the graves there?" Lyons asked.

"Not graves. Shrines. That is where they died, so their families believe that is where their spirits wander."

"EGP? The Nazis?"

"No. Buses. Cars."

The switchbacks and curves continued, the highway zigzagging ever higher. Mist swirled in the headlight beams.

Lyons awoke to see a half moon over a town, the whitewashed walls a bluish white against the night. He thought he dreamed. The image of the town surrounded by the mountains and forest seemed impossible, unreal. Then the road angled down a ridge, and they left the view behind. Lyons looked at his watch. Almost dawn.

"Where are we?"

"In the Sierra de Chuacus."

"Great. Where's that?"

"Perhaps another hour to Azatlan."

In the back seat, Senora Garcia slept. Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen a few hundred yards behind them. He keyed his hand-radio.

"How are you two holding up?"

"This is the scenic route," Gadgets bantered, "no doubt about it. But the government didn't send us here to shoot picture postcards."

"The man says another hour to the town."

"Lights! Lights behind me, coming up fast!"

Luis heard the words shout from the hand-radio. As the blond American slipped his Atchisson out of the guitar case, he brought the car to a halt against the hillside. He killed the lights, then took a folded-stock Galil from the floor of the Dodge. Both men stepped into the predawn chill. They took cover behind the car.

"We've stopped," Lyons told his partners. "Make it past us. If they're trying an intercept, we'll blow them away."

"Oh, man! They're gaining on us. And if they don't get us, the next curve will."

Headlights streaked through the network of branches downslope. Bracing his Atchisson's fourteen-inch barrel on the trunk lid, Lyons flicked the fire-selector to full-auto and waited.

An air horn blared. Careening around a hairpin turn below them, tires sliding on the mist-slick asphalt, the Volkswagen van raced what looked like a truck. The second pair of headlights almost touched the van's back bumper, then the vehicle swerved into the oncoming lane to pass. The air horn sounded again.

Squinting against the glare, Lyons aimed at the center of the pursuers' truck. He heard the click of the safety on the Galil that Luis held. But then Luis said: "It is nothing. Only a bus."

"What? Passing on a mountain curve?"

At seventy miles an hour, the Ford thirty-eight-seat bus hurtled past. Lyons saw a teenager sitting on the dashboard next to the driver, leaning back against the windshield, reading a comic book by the beam of a flashlight. Its horn warning downhill traffic, the bus downshifted for the next curve, and took it seemingly on two wheels. They heard the engine roar up the next stretch of road above them, then the warning horn as the bus roared on its way along the up-and-down switchback road.

Lyons set his assault-shotgun's safety. "Take the bus and leave the suicide to us..."

Autofire ripped the quiet. Lyons dropped down and keyed his hand-radio.

"Wizard! Pol! Stop, someone's shooting up there."

The Volkswagen swerved off the asphalt near the Dodge. Jerking the parking brake, Blancanales jumped from the driver's door, his M-16/M-203 over-and-under in his hands. Gadgets followed an instant later, a captured Galil in one hand, a bandolier of magazines in the other.

In the graying darkness, Able Team gathered together and crouched in the roadside brush, listening. Mist glistened on pines and oaks. Drops of moisture fell through the leaves, some falling on the warriors' hands and weapons. But they heard no more shots. Lyons whispered to the others. "I'm going for a look."

Jamming an extra magazine of seven 12-gauge shells in his jacket pocket, Lyons ran uphill along the road. The mist chilled his face as he labored against the incline. His lungs ached as he tried to gulp oxygen from the thin air. The 9,000-foot altitude defeated his sprint. He slowed to a jog, then a panting walk.

After a half-circle curve, the road continued straight. Lyons went flat on the asphalt at the end of the curve. He scanned the straight section. He saw nothing moving. Above the roadway, beyond the overarching pine branches, the sky became gray with dawn.

Lyons did not chance walking on the road. He slung his Atchisson over his back and snaked across the asphalt to the other side. Clutching at roots, his soft-soled shoes finding footholds in the rocks, he went hand-over-hand up the embankment.

The exertion made him gasp. He slowed his climbing. He disciplined his breathing, pulling down long, deep gulps of moist air, matching his breath cycles to his motions. He pulled himself through the roots and ferns and rocks very quietly, only the slight sound of falling pebbles and dirt breaking the silence.

Voices came from above. He froze, listening for the source. In the tangle of pines and oaks growing from the near-vertical mountainside, some of the voices seemed distant, others near. He inched up the slope as if crawling up a wall.

An obstacle stopped him. He made out the rusting, dismantled form of a car — doors and interior and motor gone — propped against a pine. A broken guardrail lay amidst cut branches. He could not continue to the road above without thrashing through the debris. He looked to the sides. More debris blocked him. For years, road maintainance crews had simply dumped trash and tree trimmings downhill.

He looked at the pines. Fifty to sixty to a hundred feet tall, the trees rose high above the road. Branches grew from the trunks in all directions.

Lyons climbed silently up a pine, keeping the trunk between him and the voices. In seconds, he was looking down at the road.

The mist glowed red with taillights. Soldiers in the camouflage uniform of the Army of Guatemala paced the road in front of the stopped bus. Flashlights swept the interior of the vehicle, casting silhouettes against the windows. Soldiers checked identity cards.

Laughter came from the pickup trucks and a troop carrier parked against the side of the mountain. Lyons heard English.

A flashlight revealed a blond soldier. Lyons saw an M-16 in the soldier's hands. Another soldier, this one over six feet tall, his bulk indicating a weight of two hundred pounds, carried an M-60 machine gun. A belt of ammunition went over his shoulder.

Eventually the mercenaries waved the bus on.

Now, at last, Lyons knew why the bus drivers of the Terminal Extraurbanos hated him and Blancanales. They had assumed the two North Americans had come to their country to serve as pro-fascist mercenaries for Unomundo. He keyed his hand-radio and whispered: "We got problems."

Ten minutes later, the sky becoming blue, Blancanales and Luis climbed up nearby trees along the road. Lyons signaled Gadgets.

"Ready."

The Volkswagen's horn answered him. On the road, the mercenaries heard the honking. They flicked away cigarettes. Fanning out across the road, they took positions to block the approaching car.

Lyons saw the headlights of the Volkswagen far below him. The horn sounded twice to alert oncoming vehicles, then the vehicle swept around the curve. The mercenaries waited. As Gadgets neared the next hairpin turn, the horn sounded twice again.

The mercenaries waited. No car appeared.

An officer called out in an American accent. "Mitchell! Run down the road and see what's going on."

Fire from Lyons's Atchisson smashed down mere after mere, each blast sending double-ought and number-two steel shot ripping through a chest. A 40mm fragmentation round popped at the far end of the line of troop trucks, a thousand high-velocity razors shredding a line of men. Luis fired an instant later.