The uninvited helicopter was surely the work of the two hoods stung by the real, but late, Marchardo. To ensure the end of the deal. All it had succeeded in doing was scare away the attack plane.
The buglike menace roared in again from the freighter as the two mere agents emerged at the top of the ramp. It sped over the ship.
Flor led the descent to the yacht, followed by Senor Meza and three other men. Two were in suits, one in a leather Eisenhower jacket and carrying a Thompson.
Senor Meza checked over his shoulder as the helicopter veered away, circling the ships.
"These men are your link with a Mr. Pardee," Flor told Lyons as she passed, nodding toward the others. "Wait until we cast off from the freighter before dealing with the helicopter."
Lyons laughed cynically. He saluted Flor. "Yes, ma'am! Anything you say!"
"Don't sweat it, Ironman," Blancanales said beside Lyons. "It's only air holding that thing up..."
Able Team followed the others to the bridge as the yacht cast off. Flor and Senor Meza leaned over the radar screen while Gadgets took the ship's wheel. The other three gangsters peered through the windows, looking for the helicopter. Lyons shouted:
"I suggest you all get below..."
Blancanales cut him off, repeated the words in Spanish. Tracers ended all discussion. Streaks of red shattered the windows. Glass showered the gangsters and Senor Meza as they scrambled down the stairs. Flor raised her CAR.
Lyons jerked her down. She fell in the broken glass, tried to shove him away. Slugs slammed into the bridge again. Flor lurched.
"You're hit!" grunted Lyons.
Silence. Then they heard the helicopter circling. Its gun fired on the freighter again. Flor groaned, sucked down a breath. Lyons slipped his hands under her jacket and searched for the wound.
"Get the helicopter!" Gadgets shouted. "I'll take care of her."
"Let's go!" Blancanales dragged Lyons away from the woman, pushed him through the door. "Wait until they come back, then pop them." Blancanales pointed to the XM-174 grenade launcher that Lyons carried with the M-16.
"I'm not waiting!" Lyons fumbled through the magazine pouches around his waist, seeking the magazine tagged with textured tape. He dropped the magazine from his M-16 and jammed in the tagged mag. "Come and get me, fly-boys!"
Popping single shots, Lyons sent tiny tracers at the helicopter. When he got the range, he fired bursts, the tracers arcing into the distance. The helicopter broke away from the freighter and crossed in an instant the three hundred yards that separated the ships.
"That got their attention." Lyons slung the M-16 over his back, then took the XM-174 in his hands and released the safety as he climbed to the top of the bridge housing. The helicopter swooped in at water level, raking the deck of the yacht with more machine-gun fire. Lyons waited.
The helicopter then paused, hovering only a few feet from the deck railing. Lyons saw the face of the door gunner over the grenade launcher's sight as he squeezed off the first 40mm round. The upper half of the gunner's body disappeared in a flash of light. Lyons fired round after round into the interior of the helicopter — fragmentation, concussion, white phosphorous, fragmentation again.
Veering straight up, the helicopter pilot tried to gain altitude. Lyons continued firing, blowing away a pontoon, spraying the ocean with streamers of white phosphorous. Then a blast, a series of blasts, a boiling explosion as the copter was blown apart into a crackling cascade of hot fragments and phosphorous rain. Shards of wreckage showered the sea.
"Great shooting!" Gadgets Schwarz nodded to Lyons as he returned to the bridge. Squatting amidst broken glass and weapons, Gadgets was fumbling with Flor's nylon jacket as the woman sat in the captain's chair, holding a frosty beer can against her shoulder.
"I thought you were hit..." Lyons started.
"I was..."
"With this." Gadgets pulled a flattened slug from the jacket's fabric. "She's wearing a Kevlar wind-breaker. Neat, huh?"
Glancing outside, Lyons saw several bullet holes through the brass railing that encircled the bridge deck. The bullets had drilled through the brass, then the teakwood exterior, and finally through the interior's teakwood paneling.
Flor popped the top of the beer, gulped.
"You are one lucky woman," Lyons told her.
Foam spilling down her face and onto her chest, she offered the beer to Carl Lyons, saying:
"Very lucky. There's nineteen hours and thirty minutes until we dock in Jamaica."
4
Back in La Paz, ex-Lieutenant Navarro spread out the photos of the North Americans on his desk top. First, he arranged the thirty-six exposures in chronological order, referring to the negative to confirm the correct sequence. He numbered the photos. He studied the exposures, looking for the subsequences within the thirty-six. He knew the surveillance agent had used a motorized camera. Intervals of only a second separated some photos. A pause of seconds separated other photos.
He divided the photos into four groups. Each group represented bursts of exposures. The agent had simply focused on the moving subjects and held down the trigger-button. The sequences allowed Navarro to observe the interaction of the four men, as if he watched four film clips.
Though two of the men could possibly be Central or South American, they did not exhibit any distinctive mannerisms: they did not have the expressive hand gestures of Mexicans or South Americans, nor did they wear the scowling features of ex-military officers. The other two looked North American: light hair, fair skin, quick smiles. Navarro did not believe they were European — they did not show English reserve, French gestures, German mannerisms — but he knew he could be wrong.
One thing puzzled Navarro: though three of the men often turned to the fourth as if he were their leader, they did not defer to him. They did not surround him like bodyguards. They did not walk close to him, as junior associates would. And he was not their prisoner. They joked with him, questioned him. One of the photos showed the blond man pointing a finger at the apparent leader as if the North American was threatening him. But in the next exposure, approximately two seconds later, the four men laughed.
Without knowing the identities and roles of the four men, Navarro could not interpret their actions in that scene. He selected several of the photos for blow-up.
Today, he would ask El Negro for authorization to post agents outside the Drug Enforcement Agency offices. Those agents would watch for the four men in the photos.
There was another way to gain the identities of the four men. Navarro knew an expatriate American who recruited guards and soldiers for exiled conservative politicians and retired military officers. The Yankee boasted that he knew "every American mercenary south of the Rio Grande."
Navarro would test the Yankee.
* * *
Neon flashed behind longhorn skulls. Wagon wheels, frayed leather horse collars, Mexican blankets, weathered ranch tools hung on the mirrored walls.
Strips of red, white, and green bunting — the colors of the Texas flag — trimmed the black plastic bar and the chrome of the stage. Jamaica, too, was weird.
European tourists in designer jeans and Hawaiian shirts hustled the black waitresses. A Jamaican woman in an Annie Oakley buckskin dress shrieked, fired a six-gun cap pistol.
Three young Jamaican men in black slacks and white shirts and ties watched the tourists and resplendent Jamaican cowboys and cowgirls. The red blazers hanging on the backs of their chairs identified the young men as workers from a nearby hotel. An immaculate black cowboy passed the three hotel workers, the cowboy's high-heeled lizardskin boots and tailored jeans giving him the mincing steps of a debutante. The workers looked to one another and laughed. Soon they paid for their beers and left.
Craig Pardee came through the backstage door. He came to the table where Blancanales — a.k.a. Pete Marchardo — waited. Pardee signaled for two beers before he sat down.