"Give up or die!" Lyons yelled.
No more shots came. Lyons threw a chair into the office. No shots. He snapped a glance inside, and saw an open window.
Autofire suddenly hammered the outside wall, slugs breaking the window glass and punching into the interior of the office. Lyons took another quick look into the room to make sure the captain was not waiting against the wall. No one there.
Lyons dashed outside. The captain of police lay dead outside the window. As Lyons arrived, Luis fired a burst through the man's head, disintegrating the skull.
"You dumb bastard!" Lyons screamed at him.
"He tried to escape."
Rushing back to the front entrance, Lyons looked for Gadgets and Blancanales. He did not see their pickup truck. He keyed his hand-radio.
Blancanales kicked down the door of an abandoned house. He moved to a window and smashed out the nailed-closed shutters. Gadgets carried in the captured M-60 machine gun.
The window looked out onto the road into town. Blancanales keyed his hand-radio to answer Lyons.
"We're on the other side of the square. We're..."
The jeep raced toward the sound of gunfire at the police station. Its fascist force of four leveled their rifles to fire across the square at Lyons. Gadgets sighted the M-60 and pulled the trigger.
Slugs slammed the jeep. The windshield shattered. The continuous line of high-velocity 7.62 NATO punched through the mercenaries in the front seat and continued through the bodies of the men in the back. Gadgets held the trigger back, the heavy weapon jackhammering in his hands, Blancanales guiding the belt of cartridges. Tracers passed through bodies, ricocheted off steel, streaked into the distance.
The jeep hurtled out of control through the square, the soldiers aboard dead, their chests and heads masses of torn meat. Gadgets swung the M-60 around and gave the jeep a last burst through the side. Gasoline flamed. The jeep crashed into the square's stone fountain. It burned.
Blancanales keyed his hand-radio. "Got them."
Lyons whooped into his radio. They heard his voice simultaneously from their hand-radios and from across the square. "Let's get out of here!"
Dragging the unconscious woman to the Dodge, Lyons threw her in and slammed the door. Luis ran from the alleyway. He got in and started the engine. Lyons glared at him as he accelerated backward.
"You could have taken the captain alive."
"Why should the fascists live?" Luis asked. Whipping the wheel around, he jammed the shift into drive and put the gas pedal to the floor. Tires screeched as the stench of burning rubber filled the car.
"Not the highway!" Lyons shouted. "West. Take the dirt road to the west."
The Dodge careered through the narrow streets, bouncing on its heavy-duty suspension. Luis whipped the steering wheel from side to side to swerve around potholes. Rocks gouged at the oilpan and undercarriage. Blancanales and Gadgets followed only seconds behind.
They left Azatlan at sixty miles an hour. Passing through dry, untended cornfields, the well-maintained dirt road went due west toward the forest. In minutes, they had passed over two hills and left the village far behind.
Clusters of abandoned houses, their walls scorched, their burned roofs collapsed, dotted the fields. Rutted lanes linked the houses to the road. But Lyons saw that trucks had not followed the lanes. Instead, tire tracks scarred fields hand-tended and nurtured for generations. He spoke into his radio.
"We're cutting for the tree line. Konzaki said these Nazis have helicopters. We've got to get out of sight."
"Second the motion," Gadgets answered.
"There!" Lyons pointed to a narrow dirt lane cutting between two abandoned cornfields.
Slowing, Luis eased the big Dodge between two walls made of piled volcanic stone. Metal shrieked as rocks scraped the bodywork. Lyons snapped a full magazine into his Atchisson. He thumbed more shells into the spent magazine, then replaced it in the bandolier.
Blancanales drove straight across the cornfields. Bouncing and slamming over the rows, the pickup overtook the Dodge. Luis maintained the best speed he could without destroying the car. They passed stands of banana and avocado trees. In the yards of abandoned farms, unpicked fruit broke the branches of small trees. The lane meandered from farm to farm. Every group of houses had been burned. Walls were pocked with bullet and grenade-fragment scars.
They reached the pines. The forest showed the care of generations of woodcutters. No brush or fallen branches tangled the forest. Trees grew in spaced intervals. Near each stump, the peasant foresters had planted saplings to replace the harvested tree.
With the transmission in first and the accelerator floored, the torque of the Dodge's engine pulled the heavy sedan up the grassy slopes of the forested foot-hills. Luis maintained an angle almost parallel to the hillside. Soon the Dodge tilted sideways at forty-five degrees. Every bump and lurch threatened to roll the car.
But the pines did not screen them from airborne observation. Lyons called his partners.
"Think the pickup can keep going uphill?"
"Not much," Blancanales answered.
"Time to walk."
Luis found the best overhead cover and parked. Blancanales stopped beside the Dodge. Able Team assembled their gear. In addition to the gear issued by Stony Man Farm, they now had the weight of captured weapons and ammunition. Gadgets carried a folding-stock Galil rifle. Lyons packed an Uzi captured at the roadblock as a backup assault weapon.
Unfolding a satellite map of the area, Blancanales showed Luis a safe route back to the highway. "Over this mountain, follow the ridgeline of the next line of hills east. Even with the woman slowing you down, you should reach the road before dark."
"She will not slow me."
They knew what Luis intended. Lyons shook his head.
"Don't you kill her..."
"Why do you protect the fascist whore?"
"Let Unomundo take her," Lyons said. "Give us a few hours head start, then let her go where the meres can find her. They'll be searching for us, but they'll find her. People in the town saw her lead us here. Think of it as justice."
"Tell me of justice! They took machetes to my baby, then to my wife. Her feet, her legs, her hands, her arms. I will not give this whore to Unomundo. She is mine. She will suffer myjustice."
Lyons went to the Dodge. He jerked the woman from the car. A shove sent her staggering down the hillside. "Run! This is the last chance you get."
She sprawled in the grass. Blood matted her hair. Her throat was choked with sobs. Crying, she stared around her at the men she thought would kill her.
But the three men of Able Team shouldered their packs and walked into the trees. Marching through the cool wind-swayed shadows of the pines, Lyons turned.
He saw Luis open the trunk of the Dodge. The young man took out a machete and a tangle of rope. Luis moved toward Senora Garcia. The Nazi courier staggered to her feet and stumbled away. Luis pursued her down the hill. Lyons turned away and followed his partners into the mountains.
They heard screams.
"He's chopping her up," Lyons told Gadgets and Blancanales.
Rotorthrob drowned out the screams. Instinctively, Able Team dropped into the dusty grass. Each one of them looked up to see a Cobra gunship skim the treetops.
Blancanales squinted into the branch-broken sky as the throb diminished. "They couldn't have spotted us!"
But as he spoke, the rotornoise changed. The Cobra was returning.
10
Wheeling against the sky, the Cobra gunship dropped down to treetop level. The ripsaw sound of mini-Gatlings firing six thousand rounds a minute of 7.63 NATO struck a particular fear in Gadgets and Blancanales. During the Vietnam War, they had seen the mini-Gatlings of gunships reduce People's Army of Vietnam soldiers into nauseating heaps of chopped flesh and rags. Now, in the Sierra de Chuacus of Guatemala, a Cobra came at them.