The Cadillac shuddered and rocked as it hurtled backward. As if in a nightmare, they all saw the man aiming the rocket at the center of the windshield. Lieutenant Lizco had the accelerator to the floor, but it would not save them.
As the guerrilla's finger pulled the trigger, Lyons grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it toward him. The change in direction gave greater traction to the tires. The Cadillac whipped through a two-wheeled backward turn, the rear end bumping uphill, smashing through bushes and pine saplings.
The rocket shrieked over the hood and into the distance. The explosion came an instant later.
"Forward now!"
With the rocking Cadillac tilted backward up the hillside at forty-five degrees, the lieutenant accelerated. He whipped the steering wheel all the way to his left.
For a sickening instant, the out-of-control Coupe de Ville again balanced on two wheels. Then Gadgets and Blancanales threw themselves against the inside of the rear door to shift the weight of the car. With a crash, the Cadillac fell onto all four wheels and fishtailed across the dirt road.
"And I always thought the rebels liked reporters," Gadgets commented.
"Perhaps they can't read," Blancanales said as he took out his M-16/M-203.
"You remember the expression?" Gadgets asked. He held his CAR-15 and scanned the mountainsides. " 'The pen is mightier than the sword'? I tell you, a rocket puts down any typewriter."
"Where now?" Lyons asked the lieutenant as he took his Atchisson from its case.
"There is another road," the grim-faced man at the wheel replied. "Actually only a trail. Perhaps we will take it. It is beyond the landing strip."
"But the firefight we heard..."
"Yes. That is also beyond the landing strip."
Blancanales leaned forward. "The Commies must have set a one-two ambush. The one up ahead, then that one back there. They hit the army up there, and then if a react-force comes up the road, they hit it too. Or if the unit up there broke out, they'll run into the second ambush on the way down. Standard procedure, straight out of the book."
"What's the book say about our situation?" Lyons asked the ex-Green Beret.
"Said to cover your ass," Blancanales answered.
"Hide out," Gadgets added. "Make them find you. And when they do, ambush them."
"Tough to hide a Cadillac Coupe de Ville," Lyons commented. "Lieutenant, how about we ditch this monster and cut overland?"
"That is also very dangerous. The road comes soon. Let us chance it."
"You're the driver." Lyons buckled on a bandolier of Atchisson magazines. "But I'd rather walk than play tag with RPGs."
"Second the motion," Gadgets told his partners. "When the Ironman says he's afraid, it's time to shake."
"Not afraid," Lyons corrected. He kept his eyes on the hillsides as he spoke. "We just don't have time for this nonsense."
They passed the airstrip. Pushing the overweight luxury car to its limit, the lieutenant continued into the hills. Over the rattling of gravel and rocks in the fenders, they heard no more rifle fire.
"The road comes soon," Lieutenant Lizco stressed. "Very soon. All will be okay."
At one hundred kilometers an hour, the Cadillac lurched across the gravel. A straightaway led over the crest of a low hill.
Bouncing over the top, they drove into the wreckage and death of the ambush.
6
As their hands closed on their weapons, the men of Able Team saw this scene: The road widened. Engineers had graded flat the low slopes of a hill to provide a service area for road maintenance. At the downslope edge of the area, trucks had dumped loads of gravel and broken stone. Pine trunks had been stacked a few meters away. To the north, the road went over a low rise to continue into the mountains.
A steep hillside overlooked the road and service area. High brush and pine saplings had concealed the guerrillas.
The ambush had evidently been quick and efficient. The first truck burned at the far side of the clearing, only ten meters short of the exit to the north. Corpses of soldiers indicated that gunfire had come from the hillside above them and from the rise ahead of the truck. The autofire had driven the survivors back from the truck and into the center of the kill zone.
The second and third trucks had been hit with RPGs as they attempted to back out. More sprawled corpses of soldiers indicated that the guerrillas had closed a circle around the unit. Running from the infernos of the trucks, the soldiers had run into the rifle fire of guerrillas waiting behind the piles of gravel and stacked pines.
Now the guerrillas, wearing workshop-stitched uniforms, tennis shoes and black nylon web-gear, herded captured soldiers through the smoke and flames of the killground. Guerrillas with red stars on their berets stripped uniforms from the living, and from the dying and dead soldiers. Other guerrillas gathered the captured uniforms, weapons and boots.
On the far side of the ambush site, where the road headed north away from Able Team, two jeeps with pedestal-mounted M-60 machine guns parked, the drivers pulling on the handbrakes. A guerrilla officer with an Uzi left the second jeep. Unlike the others in the ragged platoon of mountain fighters, the leader appeared military. Clean-shaven and short-haired, he wore clean fatigues and polished black boots. Guerrillas moved to the jeeps with their loads of captured equipment.
The freedom fighters of the Popular Liberation Forces made no secret of how they would dispose of their prisoners.
Two Communists forced a naked teenage soldier to his knees as a third Communist put a pistol muzzle to the boy's face.
The pistol flashed, the corpse flopped back as the Coupe de Ville hurtled over the rise.
Lyons thumbed his Atchisson's fire-selector to semi-auto. "The one with the Uzi the officer we take him alive!"
"Lyons, no!" Blancanales leaned from the back seat. "We can race through! We got the speed..."
A Communist sentry turned at the sound of the on-rushing car, the AK-47 he held rising to his shoulder.
Lyons fired. At 1200 feet per second, a spray of steel balls crossed the ten-meter distance to tear through the guerrilla's chest. The other Communists heard the boom of the assault shotgun and whirled as their dead comrades flew back.
A shiny symbol of capitalist decadence hurtled at them. Gadgets's Colt rifle flashed autofire from the back windows, lines of 5.56mm slugs military hardball alternating with hollowpoints scythed through groups of bearded, swaggering Communists.
Victory became annihilation as they died with their ComBloc rifles and RPGs slung over their shoulders.
The AKs of the guerrillas guarding the soldiers went on line at the Cadillac. Reprieved from execution, the soldiers started grabbing the weapons, punching the Communists, wrestling them for their AKs.
"Lieutenant!" Blancanales shouted. "Continue! Go through!"
"No!" Lyons countered. "We waste these shits." He sighted on a guerrilla and fired. A single blast of steel killed one Communist and wounded another.
"Use your head! It's not our war..."
"We need those jeeps!" Lyons shouted.
Lieutenant Lizco screamed his words like a battle cry. "We kill them all!"
Flashing past the flames of the second and third trucks, the lieutenant spun the steering wheel hard to the right, aiming for the gap between the first and second trucks. The Cadillac sideslipped, bounced across the road, threw mud and gravel. But it did not quite clear the first truck.
The left rear fender clipped the steel of the troop truck's plate-steel rear bumper. Metal tore. The impact threw Gadgets and Blancanales hard against the rear left door. Lyons fell against the lieutenant.
As the heavy Cadillac raced through mud, Lieutenant Lizco whipped the wheel to the left. Lyons flew toward the passenger-side open window.
Lyons somersaulted out of the Cadillac and slammed into the road, rolling. Stunned, he realized he no longer held his Atchisson. His reflexes took over.