"Hey, great. How d'you say 1984?"
"They don't use numbers over 100."
"Lights!" Gadgets put the binoculars to his eyes to see a boat round a headland. Spotlight beams illuminated the river's surface.
"A slave boat?" Lyons asked.
"Can't tell." Gadgets kept the lenses fixed on the outline of the craft a mile away. "Get below, keep them all quiet down there. Maybe we can drift past..." He looked down. Lyons had slipped away without a sound. Gadgets keyed his hand radio. "Politician! Boat ahead showing lights. Looks as big as this one."
"Lyons just told me. We're blacked out down here, staying quiet."
"Carl's moving real fast nowadays. Very spooky, in those moccasins and war paint."
"Come down to the deck, Gadgets. In a few minutes, it might not be safe up there."
"Down in a flash."
On the troop deck, Lyons gently woke the sleeping warriors, cautioned all the men to silence. Some of them went to the rail to watch the blazing speck of light approach. They spread the leafy branches screening the boat; they laid their rifles and shotguns on the rail. Gadgets came down the steps from the bridge.
"Can't get a good look at them," Blancanales complained, squinting into his binoculars. "Glare of the lights."
"Then maybe they'll tell us."
"What?"
Gadgets went into the cabin. Making a face at the stink of the vomit, he opened a window. Both Cubans sat tied, rags stuffed in their mouths. Gadgets switched on the radio, spun through the frequencies by the dial light, finally stopped on a band marked with a scratch. Only static came from the monitor.
"Lieutenant Silveres," Gadgets called out softly.
The Brazilian slipped into the dark cabin. "Yes?"
"When you were the prisoner of these scumholes, did you hear any of their radio calls? Was it Portuguese? Spanish? Did they talk in the clear?"
"Spanish and Portuguese. Once, a few words in English. Do you want me to impersonate their voices? I don't know if..."
"Not impersonate. You don't need to fake anything. Get on there, put out a distress call. If they answer, get their position."
Silveres nodded as he sat at the radio. He took a deep breath, flicked the transmit switch. His voice came in gasps, as if he were wounded, suffering. He spoke a few halting phrases, flicked off the transmit. Gadgets slapped him on the back.
"Supercool! You must be an actor."
"When I was in college, yes."
A voice blared from the monitor. Lieutenant Silveres listened. He held the map up to the radio's dial light. He nodded to Gadgets. "That is the boat of criminals. They called out the name of this gang boss, this Cuban." The radio voice called out again. "They search for the Cuban's patrol. Do we fight them now? I want a rifle. Or am I a prisoner? Tell me, gringo."
"Just stay here. We'll talk about it when we cross into your country."
"Then I am a prisoner."
Gadgets rushed out to Blancanales. "That's a slaver patrol. The lieutenant helped me pull a fake on them."
"They haven't spotted us yet."
Searching through the crowd of black-painted, heavily armed Indians, Gadgets found Lyons and Thomas at the extreme end of the cruiser. Thomas watched as Lyons loaded the boat's second machine gun, an M-60 on a pedestal mount. Lyons sighted on the distant spotlights, clicked up the M-60's rear sight.
"Mr. Iron! Down! That's most definitely the bad guys out there. Thomas, we have to keep everybody quiet. Maybe we can drift by in the dark."
"We fight?" Thomas asked, stepping down from the machine gun.
"Only if we have to. Maybe they won't see us."
"But they slavers, yes?"
Gadgets nodded to Thomas and to Lyons, returned to Blancanales. The approaching spotlight stayed fixed on the water ahead of the bow. Binoculars revealed lights in the cabin, silhouettes moving against lights on the bridge.
"We're going to make it," Blancanales sighed. "They're staying over on the other side of the river. As long as we don't..."
Lyons stood behind Blancanales. "When do we hit them?"
"We don't have to. Luck's with us. We're going to make it past them."
"No," Lyons shook his head. "We stop them now. Here. There's only three or four men and boys with the village. If we don't fight now, the Xavantes' wives and children and parents are slaves, or dead."
"We can't," Gadgets protested, "go up against trained soldiers and machine-gunners with Indians and shotguns and some liberated G-3s. Brave, but not very smart."
"It's their families." Lyons glanced back to the Xavante warriors. Weapons left the rails, swiveled toward Gadgets and Blancanales. "The decision has been made. You with us?"
They looked into the muzzles of auto-rifles and shotguns.
11
The spotlight of the slaver boat swept over the water, found them.
Xenon white light splintered by the screen of branches cast patterns of searing brilliance and black. Shadows slid across the faces of the men as they watched transfixed as the gunboat approached.
"The mutiny over?" Blancanales asked.
Lyons took the binoculars and focused on the slavers. He squinted against the spotlight, then passed back the binoculars. "How can it be a mutiny? We aren't leading them. We're with them. Period."
Slugs punched into the cruiser. Impact threw an Indian across the deck. He groaned, sucking in breath. Someone put a hand over his mouth to prevent noise. Other men raised their weapons. Thomas hissed a command to them. They lowered their weapons.
Bullet-chopped branches and leaves settled on them. A long burst sent streaks of tracer red over Lyons's back. This was the slavers' recon-by-fire. Bullets punched holes through the cabin, breaking glass.
Silence. They heard the motor of the nearing gunboat and voices. Lyons saw the spotlight sweeping from end to end of the camouflaged boats. Not one of the black-painted Xavantes moved. The wounded man stayed quiet, only his gasping breaths betraying his pain.
On the deck of the slaver gunboat, soldiers held coiled ropes and boarding hooks. Other soldiers crowded the siderails. Two men on the bridge kept sweeping the spotlight back and forth.
"When they're up against us. Right up..." Lyons whispered to Gadgets and Blancanales, then crabbed away to Thomas. "All the men to the rail," he whispered to Thomas. "Keep them flat. Wait for me to fire."
With whispered instructions and shoves, Thomas and Lyons moved the men into line fast. Shoulder to shoulder, the warriors kept their shotguns and auto-rifles within the tangle of branches. Lyons took a position behind them and sank to one knee. He put an extra magazine of 12-gauge rounds for his Atchisson at his side and waited.
A steel grappling hook crashed through the branches. An Indian pushed it away from his leg. It hooked the railing. The cruiser's wood and fiberglass creaked as the soldiers pulled in the slack.
The cruisers bumped together. A slaver officer shouted instructions to his soldiers. Lyons put the Atchisson to his shoulder, screamed, "Now!"
Lyons swept a seven-shot burst of 12-gauge fire across the slavers, in less than a second four hundred double-ought and number two steel balls traveling at 1200 feet per second punching through the camouflage branches to shred the soldiers only ten feet away from him. At the same instant, fifteen other shotguns and auto-rifles roared from the cruiser. Lyons jerked the spent magazine from his auto-shotgun, jammed it back into his bandolier. He slapped in a second mag, snapped back the weapon's actuator. He held his fire as the continuous wave of flame from the Indians and Gadgets and Blancanales smashed into the gunboat.