Cars blocked their line of sight for a few seconds, then they saw the red pickup accelerate through traffic. Their driver moved the van over two lanes and accelerated to follow the truck.
"It's the truck!" he called back to the two men of Able Team. "License plate matches exactly."
Gadgets relayed the information to the other five cars. Smoothly, inconspicuously, the DEA units slipped through the traffic on the northbound 805 Interstate.
The red Chevy pickup maintained a steady speed in the middle of the three northbound lanes. Lyons saw DEA cars move into blocking positions in the inside lane. Other cars eased past the pickup and took positions in front of it. Behind the van, Lyons saw the DEA car that carried Blancanales.
Three sides of the rat trap were in place.
Lyons nodded to Gadgets, and the Wizard spoke into his DEA-frequency radio. "This is it."
Their driver slid easily into the express lane. Slowly the van gained on the driver's window of the Chevy truck. Lyons peered through the side window of the camper shell. He saw someone move inside.
Instinctively Lyons's hand moved to the Velcro closures of his body armor. He adjusted the trauma plate.
"This could be a point-blank," Gadgets said, laughing.
"That's not the mission. Prisoners for information."
"How could they miss your head? You need a Kevlar and steel-plate face mask. With bulletproof shades."
Lyons only nodded to Gadgets. Gadgets activated the DEA radio and shouted out two words, "Lights! Sirens!"
Gadgets slammed back the van's sliding cargo door. Lyons released the catch holding the van's oversized viewing window in the frame. The window fell away to shatter into thousands of tiny cubes of tempered glass on the freeway's concrete pavement, and a chorus of sirens wailed from the DEA vehicles.
As Lyons and Gadgets aimed their weapons, a sudden impact threw the van into a side skid.
With smashed steel screaming and tires smoking, a DEA sedan pushed in the back doors of the van. Able Team's driver struggled with the wheel and accelerated.
A four-wheel-drive pickup rammed the sedan again, sending it out of control. Hauling himself upright, Lyons saw three Mexicans in the front seat of the four-wheeler.
Gunmen from the Ochoa gang, Lyons thought. Battling the DEA while the gang leader Miguel Coral accelerated away. They were buying their leader time to escape the law-enforcement trap.
The Mexican driver pulled his steering wheel to the side and the oversized steel bumper of the four-by-four rammed into the van.
Bracing himself against the sheet-metal body panel, Lyons pointed the M-79. The Mexican in the four-wheeler attacked again. Lyons wasn't about to give him another chance.
A low-velocity plastic canister streaked across the arm's distance of space between the two vehicles and shattered inside the cab. CS/CN gas sprayed the Mexicans, instantly incapacitating the gunmen with tear and nausea gas.
The four-wheeler drifted into the freeway's express lane. Behind the careering truck, other motorists slowed. Traffic jammed.
Sheet steel shrieked against concrete as the four-wheeler creased its skin along the center divider. Lyons and Gadgets raced ahead in the van.
"Catch the pickup truck!" Lyons shouted to the driver as he broke open the breech of the M-79 and flipped out the spent 40mm casing. He pushed in another plastic CS/CN grenade.
With the engine whining with RPM's, the van came up beside the red Chevy pickup.
Simultaneously Gadgets pointed his Uzi at the front left tire of the pickup truck and Lyons aimed the gaping muzzle of the grenade launcher at the face of Miguel Coral.
"Alto! Policia!" Lyons shouted out in his bad Spanish.
Only then did Lyons see who rode in the cab of the truck with the middle-aged, square-faced gang captain.
A woman and two young children clung desperately to each other. Fear haunted their faces. Then a teenage boy leaned from the camper shell to the cab of the truck.
A family. A middle-aged man, his wife and their three children.
The wrong truck? The right truck but the wrong man? How could they explain terrorizing this family on their way home from a visit with friends?
The man driving the Chevy truck closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps for an instant of prayer, perhaps to admit defeat. Then he moved both hands high on the steering wheel. He called out through the open window to the hard-faced North American with the grenade launcher. "I surrender! I surrender! For the love of God, don't shoot. My family is innocent."
3
"The White Warriors? In Sonora, Mexico?"
Gadgets looked out the window of the office. He stared at the lights of San Diego as if he expected the explanation to the mystery to rise from the darkness in flashing neon script.
Four floors beneath the men of Able Team, cars sped through the warm summer night. Strollers walked arm in arm on the sidewalks, passing the high-rise federal prison without a thought.
After capturing the Ochoa gunmen and the Coral family, Able Team and the officers of the Drug Enforcement Agency had escorted the group of prisoners a few miles north to San Diego. They questioned them in the high-security interrogation room of the prison.
The truck belonging to the Mexicans went to the federal impound garage to be searched. Only minutes later, DEA technicians had found heroin concealed in the frame of the four-wheel-drive truck driven by the gunmen. They quickly weighed and tested the Mexican white death, then telephoned the interrogating officers with the results: two hundred kilos, seventy-five-percent purity.
"And in Coral's truck we found toolboxes full of Mexican fifty-peso gold pieces. Each coin is ounces. We counted five hundred, four hundred pounds by weight. Over two hundred thousand dollars in 99.95-percent gold."
Even before the call had come, Coral knew he faced a lifetime in the concrete hell of a penitentiary. Only through complete cooperation could he ever hope to be a father to his children again, to sleep with his wife, to know the simple pleasures of freedom.
Coral had answered all their questions. Throughout the afternoon and into the night, Coral talked. He told his story, the story of the Ochoas family, and the story of the destruction of the Ochoa empire.
Now Able Team attempted to make sense of the interrogations. Overwhelmed by thousands of names and places, Gadgets stared into space, thinking. Finally the Wizard snapped out of his trance. He shook his head as if trying to wake himself from a dream, a bad dream.
"Everything clicked until he mentioned the White Warriors. I can believe that a gang of ultrahard-core psycho killers with military weapons and high-tech commando gear totally demoralized and wasted the Ochoa gang. But the White Warriors taking over the Mexican heroin trade? Mucho muy loco..."
Contrary to the report of the informer, Coral did not desert Don Ochoa in a time of crisis. He remained loyal to the end. He left only after Don Ochoa admitted defeat.
In the first weeks of the war, the White Warriors disrupted the Ochoa empire with terrorism. In that time of assassination and atrocity, no Ochoa employee worked without fear. Assassins murdered entire families of opium farmers. Couriers disappeared. Chemists found all their laboratory technicians executed. On isolated stretches of Mexican highway, drivers died in their flaming trucks. The bloodletting was unceasing and unrelenting.
When the Ochoa mobilized their army of gang soldiers to protect the growing, refining, and transport operations, the Warriors escalated to the second phase of their campaign. The loyalty and bravery of the Ochoa soldiers were like sand in the wind against the military weapons and lightning-strike tactics of the White Warriors.