Dick Stivers - Warlord of Azatlan

A blond pro-fascist dodged through the cross fire and dived for cover under a truck. Lyons hit him with a two-shot storm of steel, throwing him sideways in the air. The guy tried to crawl, but one arm flopped uselessly at his side, the humerus bone shattered. The dying mere screamed throughout the remaining seconds of the slaughter, blood frothing from his mouth and chest.

Two men sprinted out of the kill zone, spinning around to spray bursts from their M-16 rifles. Slugs ripped through the branches of the trees. Lyons swung his weapon to sight on the running men but their downhill sprint took them out of his line of fire. A burst from Luis hit one man. He fell, rolled, lost his weapon, scrambled to his feet. Blood spread from a long wound across his back, but the mercenary continued running.

An autoweapon flashed from the curve. Single shots from Gadgets's captured Galil found the mere and dropped him. More slugs tore through the chests of fleeing mercenaries. One man fell down the slope of roadside trash, another died where he crouched behind a truck.

Lyons emptied the second magazine of 12-gauge shells. Slinging his Atchisson, he scanned the road for life. Only Luis fired now, burst after burst raking the dead and dying, silencing the screamers, then killing the dead again.

"Stop firing!" Blancanales shouted.

Silence returned to the mountains.

In the uniforms of Unomundo's mercenaries, in captured vehicles, Able Team drove on to Azatlan. Only minutes had passed since they had annihilated the platoon of foreign pro-fascists and Guatemalan traitors manning the roadblock. After gathering an assortment of materiel — four camouflaged uniforms, walkie-talkies, an M-60, an Uzi, a few boxes of 12-gauge rounds, a bandolier of 40mm grenades — they dumped the other weapons, all the corpses and a troop truck off the steep edge of the road. Only bloodstains and cartridge casings marked the site of the slaughter.

Gadgets and Blancanales had abandoned the rented car after transferring their gear from the Volkswagen to a bullet-pocked pickup truck. Now, with a full-powered vehicle, they followed the Dodge at sixty miles an hour through the twists and hairpin curves of the highway, finally reaching the crest of the mountain in full daylight.

They looked down through drifting clouds to Azatlan. In a valley between vertical mountains, surrounded by rolling hills and a patchwork of fields, the village straddled the sun-flashing thread of a stream. The asphalt road came to an end at the central square. A dirt track continued north to the next range of mountains. Another road cut to the west and disappeared into the cliffs and forests. Other than the asphalt highway, Azatlan had no paved streets.

In the morning light, the whitewashed church and rows of houses gleamed. Smoke drifted up from kitchen fires. Azatlan seemed to be a vision of peace and simplicity from another time.

But the long lines that streaked the fields west of the village destroyed the illusion.

Blancanales scanned the fields with binoculars. "See those tire tracks? Cutting across..."

"Yeah," Lyons agreed. "They've been landing planes there."

"Don't see a building big enough to serve as a warehouse." Blancanales swept the eight-power optics over the dirt roads. "But they could be trucking the stuff into the mountains..."

"Question is," Gadgets interrupted, "why would they have an arsenal out here? Ain't exactly a central location."

Nodding, Blancanales returned his binoculars to the case. "And what for?"

Descending the winding road, they left the pine forests. Fields of withered brown corn covered the lower slopes. No one hoed the rows. No families lived in the scattered houses of packed earth and stone. A skeletal dog saw the Dodge and the pickup approaching and fled into the burned ruins of a house. The whitewashed walls of another house showed the scars of bullets. Lyons watched the devastation pass, his mind raging.

This is why he had come. To fight the monsters who murdered families.

Lyons thought of the Manhattan Marxists who had denounced the new president of Guatemala for arming the village militias.

As a result of the American refusal to supply the Guatemalan army with spare parts for their helicopters, the army could not respond quickly to terrorist attacks — Communist and desconocido — against remote towns and villages.

Unlike rural people in the United States, the farmers and workers in the mountain villages had no rifles or shotguns for self-defense against Communist raiders or the death squads. The cost of a good rifle or shotgun exceeded what a subsistence farmer could earn in a year.

The new president confronted the problem directly. Despite the violent opposition of conservatives in his country, the president issued the Guatemalan army's old semi-automatic Garands and M-l carbines to the peasant militias. With the assistance of Army trainers, the people in the isolated villages formed self-defense militias. The violence against the innocent stopped.

But North American Marxists and misguided humanitarians protested. Through international organizations, they attempted to deny the Guatemalans the rights that protected the citizens of the United States, the constitutional right to defend their family and home against marauders, criminal or Communist or fascist.

Here, in this remote mountain valley, the Nazis had defeated both the army and the people of Guatemala. Lyons wished he could take the editorial writers of The New York Times on a drive through this devastation. What would they write when they returned to the comfort of their high-security apartments and police-patrolled streets?

At the outskirts of the village, they came to a checkpoint. Four soldiers in the camouflage of the Guatemalan army lounged in the shade of an avocado tree.

Luis stopped the car at the crossbar. A soldier reading a magazine looked up from the pages, then wandered over to the Dodge. The soldier glanced at Luis and Lyons and Senora Garcia. He leaned on the short end of the crossbar to raise the other end. Lyons saw the lurid cover of the soldier's magazine. Pornography, with the title printed in English.

Seeing the pickup approach, the soldier left the crossbar up for Gadgets and Blancanales. He returned to his magazine, not even looking up as the second vehicle passed.

Lyons keyed his hand-radio. "Those soldiers weren't Guatemalan."

Blancanales answered. "Two of them were Puerto Rican or Cuban. I don't know about the others. Quiz the Senora again."

"Definitely an international operation," Lyons added, then clicked off. He turned to the woman in the back seat. "Now you'll take us to your contact."

Her hair was matted from sleeping on the seat. Her face was puffy. She nodded. "The captain of police. I take the messages to him."

"And does he take the messages to Unomundo?" Lyons asked her.

"I don't know."

"Whenever you've come out here, have you seen mercenaries in the village?"

"Yes. No — I see them on the roads. Sometimes in Azatlan."

"There a place where they hang out? A bar? A brothel?"

"I take the messages to the captain of the police. I know nothing of these other things. I know nothing. I tell you a thousand times, but you do not hear."

"Same story," Lyons radioed Blancanales. "She takes it to the police. But if the local cops are any good, they'll know where the place is, even if Unomundo won't tell the police captain. We'll put questions to them."

Low-gearing through the village, they saw boarded-up windows, streets without people. In the central square, no vendors displayed goods or vegetables or meats in the market stalls. A face peered quickly from a window, then a shutter slammed shut.

Patterns of bullet holes dotted the whitewashed church. Sheet-metal doors bore the dents and holes of autofire. Across a dirt street from the church, an Anglo pro-fascist talked with a policeman. The Anglo wore an unfamiliar uniform, not green camouflage like the other mercenaries but gray. The policeman and the mercenary looked up at the approaching car and pickup truck. Lyons turned to Senora Garcia and warned her: "We're walking straight in. You make a problem, you die on the spot."