"Going." Lyons gulped down the last of his coffee and left the cave. As he scanned the village for Vato, he glanced up and saw the sentries at the uppermost point of the camouflage tent watching him.
"Vato? Dinde es?" Lyons called out in his bad Spanish.
"Alla," a young woman with an M-16 told him, pointing with her left hand. Her right hand did not leave the grip of the assault rifle.
Vato sat with a group of young men and women in the center of the village. As Lyons went down the steps, he saw Vato reading aloud from a book, speaking in Spanish and Yaqui, then the group discussed what he had read. Some nodded agreement, others differed.
Putting down the book as Lyons approached, Vato asked, "When do we go?"
Only when he squatted down in the group did Lyons see the title of the book. He laughed. "Whenever you're done reading your paperback, we can talk the next move."
"Why do you laugh? Is it this book?"
Lyons pointed to the worn paperback, The Art of War. "There is no art to it," he said. "Only fear and blood and suffering."
Now Vato laughed. "True and not true. You are describing defeat. Even though Sun Tzu wrote more than two thousand years ago, he guides us to victories. Like yesterday."
"What do you read in the book about tomorrow?"
"To learn the future, I must go to other books. But what you want to know is not the future but the past. Who organized the White Warriors and where did they come from. Correct?"
"And what they intend to do with the money from the dope trade. To get that information, we need to get to the leaders."
"The leaders do not come into the Sierra Madres. The highest ranking we have seen are Mexican officers and one foreign officer."
"Who was the foreigner?"
"We saw them. We got no names. He was blond, his hair lighter than yours. Almost white. Our people saw him with a Mexican colonel."
"What uniform did he wear? What country?"
"The distance was too great. The scout could only describe it as gray."
"With black boots? A black pistol belt?"
"And a black beret. You know who we saw?"
"I know, but I don't want to believe. The only way to answer our questions is to take those officers and interrogate them. We've got to get those Mexicans and the foreigners."
"But is this for the DEA?"
"You'll be paid as mercenaries with Agency money..."
"I do not fight for the Drug Enforcement Agency. I fight for my people."
"So they can grow opium?"
"So they can be free of the opium and the gangs and the Mexicans. So they can live in these mountains like free people again."
"Sounds good. Our money will help."
"But we will not be mercenaries."
"We'll tell the DEA we hired you as soldiers. You can tell your people the money's a gift for helping us against the Blancos."
"No. We do not fight for you. It is our war. You came to our mountains and joined us. I will tell my people you fight for us."
"Forget the semantics!" Exasperated, Lyons cut off the argument with a salute. "Anything you want. You're the boss, yes, sir."
"It is agreed. I ask you again. This information, will it go to the DEA?"
"Depends. If the Blancos are only another dope gang, the information goes to the Agency. But no matter what, no information goes to the Agency until we're finished. We made the mistake of taking a DEA jet south, and they sent us into an ambush."
"Oh," Vato said, nodding. "That is why the trucks waited. They knew your plane would come."
"They waited?" shouted Lyons. "How long?"
"A lookout saw their headlights before dawn. They waited until your plane came. That is why we were ready. We thought they would come into the mountains, and they did. But what if the Blancos are not only a drug gang? I tell you they are not. Yes, they move the heroin to the United States, but they operate with the army. The army and the DEA never cooperated with the Ochoa Family. What if the Blancos are not a drug gang? What do you do?"
Lyons almost hated to think how far into the DEA gutter he was going to have to crawl to get to the slime who had set up the ambush.
"If they are who I think they are," the Ironman said, "we destroy them."
"Four North Americans and a Mexican against Los Guerreros Blancos and the army?"
Lyons gestured to the fighters in the mountain village. "The five of us and all your fighters. We can do it."
"I will not waste the lives of my fighters in stupid attacks." Vato passed Lyons The Art of War. "Look in the index. You will not find Courage or Heroism. But you will find Recklessness."
Lyons examined the worn paperback. It was translated from the Chinese by a U.S. Marine Corps general. The pages showed the wear of hundreds of readings. Sweat and oil and blood had stained pages. Then he looked through the index. He found an entry and turned to a page.
As Lyons silently read the pages, Vato opened a bottle of pills. He took one and passed the bottle to the circle of men. Every man took a pill, swallowing it dry. A boy took the bottle to other men in the area. Every man or woman who carried a weapon got a pill.
Lyons looked up from the book. "What're those?"
"Megavitamins. So that the fighters will have night vision."
"You are a leader," Lyons said, nodding with admiration. He returned his eyes to the book and read aloud.
"Here, I read from the section on the use of guides. 'We should select the bravest officers and those who are most intelligent and keen, and using local guides, secretly traverse mountain and forest noiselessly, concealing our traces... we listen carefully for distant sounds and screw up our eyes to see clearly. We concentrate our wits so that we may snatch an opportunity...'"
Vato translated the reading to the others. When all the men understood, Lyons looked at them.
"That is what we will do," he said.
13
Carrying only weapons and water, they ran the mountain trails. Vato set the pace for the main group, his custom Springfield rifle slung muzzle-down over his back, the sling drawn tight to hold the heavy rifle against his body. Yaquis and the men of Able Team followed. Miguel Coral, physically fit but unaccustomed to long-distance running, slowed them. Vato stopped the group from time to time to allow the Mexican to catch his breath. Davis had stayed behind.
Able Team and Coral wore dust-colored cloaks over their fatigues. Wads of rags masked their boot-prints as they ran, and the lightweight cotton cloth of their desert camouflage flagged behind them.
Two formations of scouts preceded and followed the group. When the main group jogged through a valley, the scouts ran along the ridges to both sides, watching for ambushes or distant helicopters. When the group approached a mountainside, Vato waited for the flash of a forward scout's signal mirror before starting to the top. As they zigzagged up mountains, mirrors flashed behind them.
Despite the rest stops, they covered kilometer after kilometer in the clear, cool morning air. The long shadows of the mountains shielded them from the blinding desert sun. But as the sun rose higher, the oppressive heat slowed them to a quick march.
In one canyon, they passed a black scene of horror. Where several families had attempted to farm, using water from a hillside spring to irrigate the deep sand of a streambed, only ashes and scorched poles remained. An adobe wall showed bullet pocks. Blackened rows of corn stood in the fields. The people had been buried under a pile of stones marked with crosses.