"These commandos have attacked before? In North America? Now here? Comandante, no one informed me of this threat to your security..."
"Ready the helicopters. We leave immediately!"
Colonel Quesada switched off the National Security Agency radio. He pressed an intercom button. "Orderly. Return to your duties."
As the colonel left the communications room, the radio operator ran in from the other office. Colonel Quesada did not allow any of the technicians to remain at the other radios when he used the secure-band radios. The high-tech electronics encoded every transmission to ensure absolute secrecy. But a disloyal radio operator overhearing and repeating a message would negate all the marvels of the North American technology.
A militia officer waited in the corridor, his gray uniform dripping rainwater. He snapped to attention and saluted when he saw his commander. "I have the identities of the attackers, comandante."
"Who are they?"
"North Americans. One blue-eyed, the other Latin. The second one speaks Spanish. There is a third, but he is believed to be Salvadoran."
"Did you see them?"
"No. They took Lieutenant Kohl prisoner, but he fought his way free before the attack..."
"Kohl? Him? Take me to him."
The officer nodded. "He is with the wounded. This way, comandante"
Hurrying past the command offices, Colonel Quesada saw his officers speaking into telephones and pointing at maps. Some wore dry uniforms, others muddy fatigues. A radio monitored the walkie-talkie chatter between the scattered militia units. Voices announced a confusion of victories and defeats, casualties and men missing, guerrilla corpses and Communist units trapped in ambushes.
But the noise of machine-gun fire and the panicky voices on the radios had only suggested the truth.
As they stepped from the building, the colonel received his first images of the strike by the North Americans.
To the west, flames tongued the night. Orange light glowed on the storm clouds. Black columns rising from the fincamerged with the black sky. Despite the continuing rain, the acrid stink of burning fuel and rubber and flesh seared the colonel's throat.
Everywhere on the vast plantation, the hammering of machine guns continued. Tracers arced through the night like penny skyrockets at a saint's festival. He heard the ripping sound of M-16 rifles.
Colonel Quesada followed the officer along the veranda to a garage near the main gate. Holding the door open, the officer announced the colonel's entry.
"Attention! Our commander!"
Stepping into the dim interior, a smell struck Colonel Quesada, a horrible commingled stench of vomit and blood, scorched hair and burned flesh. Medics turned from a gore-red table and saluted with bloody hands. His eyes scanned the carnage on the floor.
Dead and wounded militiamen sprawled everywhere. A line of dead had been piled against one wall. Wounded men writhed on the garage floor, pouring their blood onto the oily concrete. One man had been totally blackened by fire. His eyes and features and fingers gone, he gasped down breaths through a seared throat, yellow fluid bubbling from the ruin of his face when he exhaled.
"How many men dead?" the colonel asked a medic.
"Eight dead, two dying, five wounded."
"Thank God it was not worse," Colonel Quesada told the officer leading him.
The medic corrected his commander. "But these are only the casualties from the compound and the guard posts. They are taking the other wounded to the hospital. And the fighting continues everywhere."
"There is Lieutenant Kohl," the officer pointed.
Stepping over wounded and dying men, they went to a militia officer wrapped in bandages. Splints immobilized his right shoulder and right arm. Blood seeped through the bandages wrapping his head.
Colonel Quesada went to one knee beside Lieutenant Kohl. "Nephew, what happened?"
Kohl, the death-squad leader whom Lyons and Blancanales had called el jefe, opened eyes glazed from medication. He tried to sit up. A medic held him down.
Finally, the sharp-featured, light-haired young man spoke.
"We returned from the mountains. In the motor yard as I left the troop bus, they took me. Two were gringos. They spoke gringo English and North American Spanish There was a Salvadoran traitor"
The colonel heard rotorthrob approaching.
"When Captain Lopez came in the jeep to take me to your meeting they shot him and his men. I knew if they went to the gate to the family compound, the guards would take them. I sounded the alarm and dived from the car then there was shooting. I know nothing else."
"Only two?"
"Three I saw three."
The colonel heard the helicopter descending in the garden. He hurried his questioning. "Only two gringos?"
"A dark one and a blond one."
"A Negro?"
"Not Mexican Puerto Rican I do not know. They covered their faces. I only guess."
"Comandante!" Captain Mendez called from the door. "There is a development in the battle!"
Colonel Quesada gave Lieutenant Kohl a salute. "Our family is fortunate you survived. Prepare a complete report when your condition permits."
The broken and bleeding officer grasped at his uncle's hand. "Comandante, did you kill them?"
"We will," said Quesada. "Be certain of that. The fighting continues. Soon we will know. Now rest, be strong" He leaned close to Lieutenant Kohl so that the others would not hear. "Your Fatherland and the New Reich need you."
The lieutenant balled his left fist against his chest, then extended his arm out straight in a variation of the Nazi salute.
Colonel Quesada paced away from the dead and the suffering men. Outside, he saw the helicopter waiting in the center of the garden lawns. Captain Mendez shouted over the roar.
"There is shooting outside the west gate," he reported. "May I delay your departure while I take my squad to the fight?"
"No! We go on to Honduras. I do my duty to the Reich, before I take revenge on the attackers."
The colonel ran across the courtyards and garden walkways to the waiting helicopter. In moments, the Huey lifted away, carrying Colonel Quesada to the safety of the Honduran mountains.
19
A lightshow of death red tracers, green tracers, the orange yellow flame slashes of RPG-7 rockets streaked from the night-black hillside. Amazed by the intensity of the one-way firefight that would end their lives, Blancanales and Lyons and Ricardo stared at the flashing autofire, reflexes locking their hands on their weapons, their reason abandoning all hope. But not a bullet hit them. Their heads pivoted as their jeep sped through the kill zone.
Behind them, the storm of full-metal-jacketed slugs tore the two pursuing trucks to bloody junk. The Quesada militiamen, who chased Lyons and Blancanales and the teenager knew only an instant of the high-velocity maelstrom headlights exploding, windshields shattering, windows dissolving into glitter, sheet-steel deforming before falling into the endless night of death.
Tires popped. The first truck went into a sideskid across the wet pavement, the steering wheel in the hands of a dead man. Ten lines of tracers focused on the truck. An RPG's warhead hit. Metallic points of flame sprayed into the night, then petroflame engulfed the rolling hulk.
A rocket flashed from the hillside to hit the second truck. Ragged sheet steel spun into the low brush beyond the road. A fireball churned into the darkness and rain.
Blancanales glanced in the rearview mirror and saw only flames. Then a wall of headlights appeared in front of him. The shadowy forms of cars blocked the road.
Stomping the brakes, Blancanales fought the fishtailing jeep. He danced the pedals, downshifting, braking, downshifting again. Desperate for an escape route, he steered for the hillside's muddy embankment. He would go above the roadblock.