Dick Stivers - Scorched Earth

He heard voices coming from a house. Looking inside, he saw the single room packed shoulder to shoulder with the captured townspeople. They saw his blackened face in the window. Then a Yaqui appeared beside the North American and whispered urgently to the prisoners.

Moving on, Gadgets looked between every adobe house, glanced in windows, listened for the authoritarian voices of soldiers. He came to a group of local people tied together. They lay on the dirt outside one house. A woman cried, a wounded man groaned. Yaqui fighters went to them.

A form moved in Gadgets's peripheral vision. He spun, the Beretta's glowing tritium night sights streaking the darkness. As the autopistol went on line, a hiss stopped him.

"Wizard! Don't!" Blancanales whispered hoarsely. "Any here?"

"Most of them went up the trail." Gadgets pointed to the group of soldiers rushing up a switchback trail to the ridge overlooking the village.

"Any others?"

"Maybe in there." Gadgets pointed to the house. Inside, they heard crying. "I'll check..."

"Give me your rifle. Is there a round in the chamber?"

Gadgets unslung the silenced Colt autorifle in one motion. "An empty shell."

Blancanales jerked back the actuator.

Gadgets went to the door of the house. The door stood open an inch. Peering inside, he saw a man lashed to a chair. A flashlight on the floor lit the interior. Gadgets pushed open the door.

On the floor, in the light of the flashlight beam, a soldier grunted on the body of a girl. Totally involved in the rape, he did not see Gadgets step up to him with the Beretta.

Yaquis pushed past Gadgets. Tearing the soldier away from the crying semiconscious girl, the Yaquis threw the soldier against the adobe wall. One fighter pushed a hand over the panicked rapist's mouth. Another fighter grabbed a torn scrap of the girl's clothing from the floor and jammed it into the mouth of the soldier to stop his screams as they put their scalpel-sharp knives to his body.

Staggering back two steps, Gadgets did not turn away in time. He saw what he could never forget.

On the ridge, the Mexican soldiers of the International Group tired of the gruesome puzzle of the drunk's body. They drifted back to the bonfire. Lyons and the Yaquis waited.

Lyons heard his hand radio click. The pistol grip of the selective-fire shotgun in his right hand, he keyed his radio with his left.

"This is the Ironman. I'm still here."

"What's the situation up there?" Blancanales asked.

"We're ready to hit them. You got the town?"

"It's secure."

"Then come up here. They outnumber us three to one."

"On our way."

Soldiers joked and laughed around the roaring fire. One of the soldiers went to a Huey and climbed inside.

" Puta ... puta ... Donde esta mi pequena puta ?"

Instead of finding the young girl, he found death. A blade slashed his throat. Hands pulled him to the shadowed side of the helicopter and held him down as he thrashed, his blood draining into the dirt.

Another soldier went to the first troopship. As the soldier approached, Lyons slipped out his silent Colt. Lining up the tritium night sights on the man's head, Lyons waited for him.

" Capitan. Donde esta el Teniente Colomo ?" the soldier called out.

The soldier saw Blancanales and a line of Yaquis running behind the line of helicopters. Turning suddenly, a silent .45-caliber hollowpoint whisked by his head.

" Yaquis! Ellos atacan! Ellos ..." he shouted out.

Breath and blood exploded from the soldier's mouth as a slug shattered his spine and tore through his right lung. As the dying man flopped on the earth, Lyons fired a third time, tearing away the top of the soldier's head.

Soldiers ran for the helicopters. Yaquis butt-stroked them with the stocks of their heavy FN-FAL rifles.

In the open, illuminated by a leaping bonfire, soldiers turned and looked. One jerked his rifle to his shoulder. M-16 and FN-FAL rifles fired from the line of helicopters. The impact of high-velocity bullets threw the soldier back, spinning him through the air. Single accurate shots killed the other soldiers before they could unsling their rifles.

Around the bonfire, soldiers died almost before they could scramble for their rifles. A soldier jerked a pistol from a shoulder holster and fell flat on the rocks and hard earth. His revolver popped twice, and slugs shattered the Plexiglas windscreen in the helicopter. Full-auto fire from several rifles answered, and the earth around the soldier exploded. Hits in his shoulders, head and arms arched the soldier backward. He knelt there for an instant, already dead, until another burst threw him to his god.

Soldiers ran from the ridge, seeking escape in the darkness. Two claymore mines boomed as scurrying soldiers fell over trip lines. Dust and shredded mesquite rose in a wave as thousands of lethal steel balls tore into the slope, shredding flesh and pulping bone.

A few survived to surrender. Vato shouted out to halt the rifle fire. Silence came. Somewhere in the darkness of the mountainside, a soldier maimed by a claymore screamed in agony.

Standing at the first helicopter, Lyons watched the Yaquis herd the soldiers together.

Defeat had come quickly to the airborne commandos of the International Group.

Lyons analyzed the action by the doctrines of Sun Tzu. He realized Able Team and the Yaquis owed this victory to deception: the self-deception of undisciplined criminals who thought automatic rifles and helicopters made them an elite airborne force.

Arrogant with easy victory, the International Group had deceived themselves. They thought that the murder of defenseless people proved power. They thought that gang rape proved them invincible.

But a group of brave people — with captured rifles, with ashes for camouflage, with a paperback book of Chinese philosophy for guidance — had destroyed the gang of murderers.

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..."