Firing carefully aimed shots, Gadgets emptied the short assault rifle's magazine. Appearing unaffected, the plane made no attempt to evade his fire. Slugs continued punching through the roof.
Gadgets dropped out the magazine, jammed in another. He flicked the fire-selector to full-auto. To correct for the sixty-mile-per-hour crosswind, he aimed ahead of the Piper Cub. He fired the entire magazine, thirty brass cartridge casings showering Lyons.
The Piper veered away.
"Think I got it?" Gadgets asked.
Lyons did not answer. Startled by the rifle fire from the motor home, a commuter two lanes to the left had hit her brakes and swerved to the shoulder. Her panic exposed the nearest car of gunmen. Lyons sighted on its windshield. He fired a three-shot burst of twelve-gauge rounds.
At the same instant, Uzi-fire from the car hammered the left side of the motor home, the 9mm slugs tearing through the aluminum siding and exiting through the other side.
One hundred fifty steel balls traveling at 1,200 feet per second hit the pursuing car. The gunner in the front seat died instantly. Though the windshield deflected many of the projectiles, a spray of blood and the car's sudden lurch to the side indicated that Lyons had hit the driver.
Lyons sighted again on the weaving car. He saw a man in the back seat struggle to shove the bloody driver aside. Lyons fired as the car swerved across two lanes, the steel shot smashing a headlight, pocking a fender. He sighted to fire again, but the car sideswiped a pickup truck. The truck's tires smoked as the driver panic-braked. Both the car and the truck skidded to a stop.
Blancanales changed lanes. Slugs exploded through the motor home's right side. Accelerating from behind a diesel truck and trailer, two black gunmen strafed the motor home. As Gadgets and Lyons shifted positions to fire, the driver hit his brakes to regain the cover of the diesel.
Looking down from the high cab of the semi, the driver saw the ongoing firefight. He spoke into a citizens band microphone as he slowed his truck to get out of the line of fire.
Running through the litter of broken glass and plastic, Lyons went to a side window. He called back to Gadgets, "When the truck slows, they'll..."
"There they are!" Gadgets shouted back.
The gunmen's car accelerated, two Uzi muzzles extended from the back window of the driver's side. Lyons flipped his fire-selector to full-auto and aimed low. Gadgets fired first, the burst of high-velocity 5.56mm slugs from his CAR-15 destroying the skull of one gunman, spraying flesh from the shoulder and arm of the second man.
Lyons triggered a long burst of full-auto twelve-gauge fire. He swept the entire length of the old Chevrolet with steel, hammering sheet steel, tearing apart the whitewalls of the tires, a thousand fragments of flesh and bone and glittering glass exploding from the opposite side of the car as a dying gunman and the rear window disintegrated.
Careering wildly, the Chevy hit the bumper of the diesel. Metal screamed as the huge truck pushed the automobile sideways at fifty miles per hour. Tires smoking, the diesel braked, launching the Chevy into a roll. Doors flew open, the gyrating car throwing corpses to the asphalt. Flames came in a whirl of orange.
"One down!" yelled Lyons.
Slugs threw papers and pens from a shattered drawer as he went to the other side of the motor home.
The first car the three surviving gunmen firing: two men from the back seat; the driver steering with one hand and squeezing off pistol shots with his other gained speed. Jefferson's Smith & Wesson shotgun boomed.
Glass showered Blancanales as slugs shattered the picture window. The stocky Puerto Rican jerked sideways as a slug punched through the sidewall and hit the Kevlar of his battle armor.
"You all right?" Lyons called out.
"Shut up and shoot!" Blancanales shouted back.
Tearing another magazine from his bandolier, Lyons loaded and sighted. He fired a single round at the gunmen firing from the rear seat. The torso of one man exploded.
Lyons glanced at the magazine he had loaded. Not buckshot, but one-ounce slugs. Custom-fabricated by Konzaki, the slugs contained tungsten-steel cores for penetrating steel or Kevlar armor. He aimed next at the front fender as Gadgets's CAR-15 wounded another gunman. Lyons fired again and again.
Huge dents appeared in the fender as the steel-cored slugs hit with the foot-pound impact of express trains. A tire shrieked as impact-deformed sheet metal cut into the sidewall. The driver fought for control of the car. Lyons put another slug through the windshield.
An arm flew from the car. With a dying man at the wheel, the car sides wiped the concrete-and-steel center divider and scraped to an eventual stop.
Gadgets and Lyons reloaded their weapons. Searching the freeway lanes behind them, they saw no pursuers. Victory.
But their attackers had almost destroyed them. Slip wind blew through a hundred holes in the motor home. Every window had been shattered.
In the front, Jefferson reloaded his sawed-off shotgun. Blood trickled from a speckle pattern of tiny wounds on his face and left arm.
Lyons rushed to the young man. He examined the small wounds. A shard of glass protruded from one, a gleaming bit of bullet fragment from another.
"I'm okay, I'm all right," Jefferson told Lyons. He shrugged away Lyons's hands.
Lyons turned to Blancanales. "Where were you hit? You bleeding?"
"Take care of yourself," Gadgets told Lyons. "You're the one who's bloody."
"What?" Lyons wiped his hand across his forehead. His palm felt warm blood.
Blancanales looked to his partners. "I pronounce this vehicle a wreck. Time to get off the highway and find a replacement."
"Second the motion," Gadgets agreed. "Highway Patrol will catch up with us any minute now."
"State park five miles," Blancanales told them. He coasted through the curve of an off ramp.
"Think we can get this past the Rangers?" Lyons looked around at the bullet-destroyed motor home; glass continued falling from shattered windows as urethane dust from the walls' insulation blew in the wind.
"Spray paint, man," Gadgets told them. "What we need is some spray paint."
"What are you talking about?" Lyons demanded, incredulous.
"Vandals, ese," Gadgets jived in mock barrio dialect. "We stopped and we got vandalized. We're just tourists. We go to the wrong neighborhood, see what happen? No bueno."
As farms and roadside vegetable stands flashed past, Lyons leaned from the shattered picture window. High in the sky above them, he saw sunlight glint from the wings of a small plane.
"Wizard, we got a plane over us. Is that transmitter or whatever still on?"
Gadgets waved the electronic transmission detector over the front end of the motor home. The unit buzzed. "Got to stop. Pull that thing off. Either they got a D.F. on us or they're monitoring highway noise."
Lyons shook his head. "We'll leave it on. That way they can find us."
19
Captain Alejandro Madrano of Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista, better known by its acronym, ORDEN, watched the familiar landscape of central California flash past his car. Years before, after his training at Fort Bragg, he had visited his sister at the University of Southern California. He and his sister had toured California and Nevada for a week, visiting San Francisco, Yosemite and Reno. The decadence, the racial impurity, the weakness of the governing forces had enraged him. He had asked his sister: "Why does this country, this cesspool of socialism and racial chaos, have the arrogance to meddle in the affairs of El Salvador?"
His sister had explained to him, in her innocence and ignorance, that what he saw represented "the freedoms of the North Americans."
But now he returned. With the help of the North Americans, he would battle the cultural sickness of this vast nation so that sickness would not condemn El Salvador to revolution. Today, they would exterminate the negro journalist and the three mercenaries protecting him from justice.