"Vato!" Lyons yelled as he tossed a 7-round mag of 12-gauge shells to the Yaqui leader.
Autofire tore past Lyons's head. Throwing him-self sideways, Lyons snatched the Colt Python from the hideout holster at the small of his back and snap-fired into the door of the helicopter. Another burst of 5.56mm tore past him, then he saw a face, and he fired and saw the head explode with the impact of the hollowpoint. On a dead run, he tackled Gunther, pushed him down and smashed the Python against the Fascist's head again and again, blood spraying, hammering the man into unconsciousness.
The Atchisson fired in wild full-auto, Vato losing control of the recoiling assault shotgun. But the spray of steel projectiles swept the troopship's interior, punching aluminum and flesh. Blasts threw a soldier back. A headless man flailed the air. The doorgunner thrashed in his safety harness, blood spurting from a hundred death wounds. The helicopter turned away.
Unaware that he carried only dead soldiers, the copilot banked the helicopter to circle around again. The maneuver exposed the top of the troopship.
The Yaqui spotter shouldered his FN-FAL para-rifle. Taking careful aim, he fired at the center of the spinning rotors. The .308 Winchester hollow-points punched into the engine cowling. The Yaqui emptied the para-rifle.
Metal shrieked. The helicopter lost power, the banking turn becoming a dead fall into the mountain. Missing the ridgeline, the troopship skipped off a steep slope. As the fuselage disintegrated into metal and Plexiglas and plastic tumbling down the mountainside, the fuel tanks exploded into an intense fireball. Burning wreckage drifted, as if in slow motion, into the canyon.
Lyons pulled the loops of plastic handcuffs tight around the ankles and wrists of the unconscious colonel. As a precaution he put two loops around the huge man's wrists.
On the hilltop a dying Fascist groaned, his breath bubbling blood. Vato dropped the Atchisson and went to the Yaqui machine gunner. He found the teenager dead, his weapon still in his hands.
Machine guns continued spraying out a river of lead death.
Lyons looked to the rocks where Blancanales and his Yaqui gunners hid. Drifting smoke from the burning hulks of the helicopters obscured rocks, but two lines of tracers emerged from the pall to streak up into the sky.
The light plane circled, its napalm canister flashing with the morning light.
"The machine gun!" Lyons called out to Vato.
They heard the engine pitch change. The plane lined up with the hilltop and gained speed as it dived.
Lyons scrambled across the litter of corpses. He took the M-60 out of the dead Yaqui's hands. Vato untangled the cartridge belt from the bloody camouflage.
Shouldering the heavy weapon, Lyons sighted on the pilot and pulled the trigger. Tracers hurtled past the cockpit. Struggling to hold the bucking M-60 on line, Lyons did not release the trigger. A windshield shattered.
The pilot pulled back as he released the napalm. Lyons saw the canister tumbling through the air directly at him. But he didn't stop firing. Resolved to kill the man who would kill him, Lyons followed the plane with the M-60.
Tracers touched a wing, then the line of 7.62mm NATO slugs found the engine. Black smoke and bright-orange flames erupted from the cowling vents.
A hand pulled Lyons down to cover. Lyons and Vato watched the bomb come. Flashing as it fell end over end, the canister of napalm came down at their faces.
Vato screamed out a prayer in the last instant of his life. "Huitzil!"
The aluminum of the canister almost grazed Lyons's hair as it hurtled past and continued into the void of the canyon. Lyons turned to see the canister fall into the pueblo, the splash of avgas and styrene engulfing the few houses in a holocaust of flame.
"The prisoners..." Vato pointed into the fires. The mud-plastered hut holding the Mexican and European officers was a raging inferno.
"Lost them," Lyons answered as he left the fighting hole. He stood over the unconscious Fascist officer. He saw the eagles and SS insignia on the gray fatigues. "But we got a colonel."
Lyons scanned the area. No weapons fired. He saw Blancanales and the Yaquis leaving their positions. They waved across the distance to the hilltop. Lyons turned to Vato.
"What's Huitzil?" he asked.
"Huitzilopochtli. The god of war. I offered myself so that I could fight in the next world. To kill as a spirit warrior."
"You want to keep fighting?"
"Until all of them are dead."
"Then come with us."
Before the fires on the Hill of the Dead cooled to ashes, Able Team and the Yaqui warriors flew south in the captured troopship. Guided by the defeated colonel, armed with the weapons of the Mexican army, they would enter a maze of treason and conspiracy to strike at the heart of the Reich of the Americas.