The man with the Springfield watched the foreigners through Mexican army-issue binoculars. The other two waited for his instructions.
A rotor throb came from the south, distant and faint, heard, then gone, then heard again. The men searched the horizon for the helicopters. One man shielded his eyes from the glare and stared into the distance. He pointed.
Raising the binoculars, the third man found two OD Bell UD-1D military helicopters. The three young men watched for the next few minutes as the helicopters circled the burning jet.
One helicopter landed on the sandy flat while the other continued circling overhead. Like shadows in a storm of rotor-thrown dust, a skirmish line of soldiers in the green uniforms of the Mexican army searched the alluvial fan for survivors of the crash.
A soldier signaled to an officer. The officer and a radioman went to where the soldier stood. The three Mexicans thrashed through the mesquite to the gully cutting through the alluvial fan.
Above the search group, the command helicopter broke off its orbit of the wreck. The helicopter spiraled down to an altitude of a hundred meters from the desert, then followed the streambed south, in the direction of the road to the Pacific coast.
The Mexican soldiers re-formed into a skirmish line and swept south through the mesquite. In a rotor storm of sand, the second helicopter lifted away from the crash site and took a slow, hovering course parallel to the streambed.
The command helicopter flew to the south, the direction from which it had come, as if returning to base.
On the high ridgeline, the three young men watched the search. The watcher with the binoculars looked down to the base of the mountain. Through the high-powered optics, he saw the five foreigners, three in fatigues and carrying weapons, quick-marching to the north.
The watcher lost sight of the foreigners when they gained the concealment of the shadows and rocks of the gorge.
"Brujo, mira aquello," one of the young men said, pointing to the southwest.
El Brujo, the young man with the old Springfield rifle and the binoculars, scanned the horizon. He saw the speck of the command helicopter returning. But the helicopter came by a circuitous route, staying far in the distance. From time to time, El Brujo lost sight of the helicopter behind the mountains, but he continued to track the helicopter as it completed a half circle around the plateau where the private jet had crashed.
Finally, the helicopter disappeared into the mountain ranges in the north.
The young man the others called El Brujo returned his binoculars to their case. He issued quick instructions to one of the others. The young man nodded. He cinched the sling of his M-16 tight, then ran north along the ridgeline, his rag-wrapped feet kicking up puffs of dust as he ran, but leaving no tracks.
El Brujo and the other young man took a trail leading down the mountainside. For the next hour, on trails and ledges several hundred meters above the rocky riverbed of the gorge, they paralleled the foreigners who were attempting to escape into the mountains.
8
As the pilot held the Huey troopship in a hover, Mexican soldiers stepped down to therocks of a mountain ridgeline. The NCO leading the ambush squad turned and saluted Colonel Gonzalez. The colonel returned the salute, then the helicopter sideslipped away and descended into the canyon. The helicopter stayed low in the canyon, the pilot weaving the million-dollar ship between the cliffs and mountainsides, using the topography to conceal its rotor throb from the North Americans somewhere in the mountains.
Sergeant Mendoza called his men together, and briefed them quickly, touching the map to indicate the location of the gorge.
At the site of the wreck the searchers had found the false tracks leading south. Colonel Gonzalez believed the North American drug agents who survived the wreck had fled north, into the mountain gorge. The colonel's helicopter had placed Sergeant Mendoza and his squad more than ten kilometers north of the crash site. Now, only a mountain ridge and a march of a few kilometers separated the soldiers from the North Americans.
"We think four escaped the crash and ran into the mountains. Some are bleeding. The colonel will send the other squad into the gorge. The gringos will run from them..."
His blunt calloused finger traced the path. The squad would go uphill to the first ridge, proceed north to a second, then travel east along a third. "We will take positions here, above them, and kill them. Or force them to surrender to the others. It should all be over before nightfall."
He led his men west up to the first ridge. They grunted against the weight of the weapons and munitions they carried. In addition to their heavy FN-FAL folding-stock paratroop rifles and two hundred rounds of 7.62mm cartridges in magazines, each man carried rifle grenades and mortar rounds. The mortar crew, burdened with the components of the 81mm mortar, carried lightweight Uzi submachine guns. Every soldier carried four one-liter canteens of water.
At the mountain ridge, as the soldiers caught their breath, their rasping throats and coughs loud in the silence of the mountains, Sergeant Mendoza surveyed the terrain.
To the south, he saw the foothills and desert. A smear of gray smudged the sky, but smoke no longer rose from the crash site. To the other points of the compass, Mendoza saw only the Sierra Madres, the thousands of canyons and ridgelines and peaks continuing into the distance.
With his binoculars he searched the mountainsides for signs of Indian bandits. His brigade had lost men in these mountains before. Though soldiers with dogs searched for the lost squads, they never found the missing men. The dogs found the scent of blood and a few cartridge casings buried in the sand, but nothing else.
Legends told of Indians who still fought in the Sierra Madres. Sergeant Mendoza searched every rock and shadow and form of the mountains, focusing his binoculars on scrub brush and wind-gnarled trees. He did not want his death to contribute to the legends.
The sergeant ordered his squad to move. Leading the way, he followed the ridge to the north, his men behind him groaning and complaining about the weight of their weapons. Automatically his eyes searched the sand for signs of Indian bandits.
Mendoza consulted his map at every turn of the ridgeline. Prepared from satellite photos, the topographical map had been provided to the Condor Group by the DEA for use in operations against the opium farmers.
In the recent months, Mendoza had used the map to find and force the cooperation of the farmers in the mountains. Now he used it to find and kill American DEA officers.
The squad followed the ridgeline, slipping and scrambling across the steep slope until they came to a sheer drop. Hundreds of meters of void separated the squad from the opposite mountain. A hawk floated in the updrafts, watching the canyon and mountainsides for prey.
Mendoza crawled to the edge and looked down into the cleft between the mountains. Two hundred meters below, stagnant water pooled in the sand of the streambed. A thin stream snaked around slabs of fallen stone. Twisted cottonwood and mesquite trees grew from the walls of the gorge, but at the bottom, where countless flash floods had scoured the stones, only brush and grasses would provide cover for the Americans.
He scrambled up to the knob of stone where the ridge ended. From there, he looked down into a section of the gorge.
Perfect. Here, his riflemen and mortar crew would command the entire canyon. Without cover the Americans could not pass him. They would be trapped between his squad and the squad pursuing them.
Between death and death.
Able Team maintained a quick pace north. In the streambed at the bottom of the gorge, they walked in cool early-morning shadow. Above them, the intense sunlight burned white on the cliffs and near-vertical mountainsides. They constantly scanned the slash of sky overhead for helicopters, but none appeared. They heard no rotor throb.