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"Are you positive?" Lyons demanded.

"I live here. I know the weather. I have planned this for months. I am positive. What we must do is get in there quiet, close the main valve, wait, then hacksaw the line. After that we try to get out. We cannot shoot on the way out..."

"If we want to live through it," Gadgets concluded for him.

"Why close the valve first?" Lyons asked.

Gadgets filled in some technical details. "Like a pilot light on a kitchen stove. If the gas only goes a small distance before it catches, no blast. Just a fire. We want the gas everywhere in the cave before it goes. This man's given us a great way to fix those Nazis. Short of zipping a missile in there, this is it."

"What about cigarettes?" Blancanales asked. "Someone in the cave or bunkhouse is going to be smoking."

"A cigarette won't ignite propane," Gadgets continued. "Has to be a flame. Or C-4..."

Nate pointed to the sketch. "The bunkhouses are raised up from the rock. Three feet, some places six feet."

"Liquid petroleum gas isn't like natural gas." With enthusiasm, Gadgets took over Nate's plan. "Natural gas is lighter than air. Propane is heavier than air, and it'll be cold. It'll stay down for a few minutes, then start to dissipate. We'll put two doses of C-4 plastic on the tank, with radio-triggers. A main charge and a backup."

"My friends will be outside," Nate continued. "It would be a miracle if the blast killed every Nazi."

"Right," Lyons agreed. "We'll throw a circle of rifles around the loading area. Plus we've got that rifle with the Starlite scope..."

"My Heckler & Koch," Gadgets interrupted. "I've carried it long enough. Time to use it again."

"And the Walther?" Lyons meant the Walther .300 Magnum sniping rifle captured from the Nazi assassins.

"No," Blancanales shook his head. "If you're going into the cave, we'll be carrying your equipment. Your armor, bandoliers, grenades. Can't carry that weapon."

"But for any of them that get out of the cave" Lyons suggested. "We'll need to knock them down with rifle fire."

"At that distance," Blancanales answered, "the M-16s will do it. That Walther, the range increments start at three hundred yards."

"Yeah, you're right."

Gadgets jived him. "Don't cry, Ironman. Take the space gun home as a souvenir."

Nate stopped their laughter. "Here is a problem. Other than us four, I have only two men who can hit a running target. All my friends are brave, and they have served in the Civil Guard, but they don't have enough training."

As the hours passed in discussion of small details and contingencies, the men from the village and farms joined them, arriving one and two at a time. Every man carried an M-16 and a machete. Like Nate, they carried their grenades and spare magazines in hand-knitted bags. Instead of captured fatigues, they wore traditional clothes: embroidered peasant pants, bright colored shirts, coats of black wool, all hand-woven and embroidered.

Lyons stopped the planning. "Nate, those men need uniforms."

"We know what to wear," Nate told him. "You think we should all wear Unomundo's uniforms? You want us to face our god wearing rags stolen from Nazi soldiers?"

"This isn't some kind of religious expedition," Lyons protested. "We're going into a night attack. And you, you're talking about going into the complex."

"Okay, I'll be wearing the gray uniform. But they wear what they want."

Nate's Mayan wife bathed his wound. After Blancanales applied a sterile dressing, Marylena bound the dressing with a length of hand-embroidered cloth. She helped him slip a gray shirt over the cloth.

"Dig it, Ironman," Gadgets commented. "The cloth is magic. Like genipap and jockstraps..."

Flipping open his wallet, Gadgets took out a dogeared snapshot taken in the Bolivian Amazon. He gave it to Nate.

"That's the Ironman wearing his magic."

Nate looked at the photo, then at the blond ex-cop across the table. The snapshot showed Lyons wearing only a loincloth, a pistol belt, and bandoliers. Sandals protected his feet. His hair had been cut into a bowl. Blacking covered his entire body except at the shoulders, where two patches of red paint added brilliant color.

Laughing, Nate passed the snapshot to his wife. She stared. She looked at Lyons. Her sister leaned over her shoulder. They both laughed. Xagil took the photo and laughed. He ran across the cave to the knot of Indian men. In seconds, everyone in the cave laughed.

Nate went to the other men. He talked with them as they gathered their gear. A bottle of clear liquor went from man to man.

"Time to move, spooks," Nate told Able Team. He offered the bottle to them. "Aguardiente."

Lyons shook his head. Nate pushed the bottle into his hand.

"Drink. You are part of a very important occasion. Tonight we free Azatlan from Unomundo."

Gadgets took the bottle and gulped. Then he gulped air as he passed the bottle to Lyons. "It's only alcohol," he gasped. "About a hundred proof. But it ain't a drug. No super snuff on this trip. Last time Ironman participated in an Indian ritual, he got psychedelicized. And indigenized. But don't be afraid, take a swallow."

Lyons finally drank, then passed the bottle to Blancanales.

The appearance of a bloody young man stopped the laughter. He talked quickly in Quiche with Nate and the other men.

"Oh, God, not alive," Nate groaned. Then he translated for Able Team. "Unomundo mercenaries ambushed his brother and uncle. He thinks they were taken alive. We must hurry. Perhaps we can end their suffering."

15

Electronics guided the fighters Guatemalan and North American through the cool moonlit darkness of the forest. Nate and Lyons walked point. Lyons held the Atchisson ready, a 12-gauge shell in the chamber, his thumb on the safety. Nate carried the H&K MP5 silenced submachine gun, using the Starlite scope to penetrate the night. Knowing every trail and hill, every smell and sound of the valley of Azatlan, the ex-Marine rarely needed the Starlite's light-enhancing optics.

Gadgets followed with the Indians. Able Team's communications specialist also scanned the night with electronics but not in the visual spectrum. He monitored the several frequencies used by the pro-fascist mercenaries, listening for the chatter of squads on patrol or the clicks of ambush units. He walked almost deaf, wearing two earphones. One went to the altered circuits of a mere walkie-talkie, the other to the hand-radio linking him to Lyons and Blancanales. Able Team did not fear the monitoring of their frequency. Sophisticated encoding circuits totally scrambled every transmission.

Blancanales walked at the end of the line, his M-16/M-203 cocked and locked, a 40mm fragmentation round in the grenade tube. In case of action or ambush, he would need to serve as a radioman and translator. Only Nate spoke English, Spanish and Quiche. The Indians spoke Quiche and some Spanish. Gadgets spoke very little Spanish, Lyons almost none. Only Lyons, Gadgets, and Blancanales had radios. The combinations and permutations of languages threatened the group with communications chaos. And in combat, failure to communicate often meant death.

Descending the rocky slopes, they saw the lights of trucks moving on the dirt road. They moved quickly down the slope, Nate leading the group across untraveled ground. He accepted the slight sounds of their legs moving through ferns, the soft crackling of their feet on the woodland mulch, rather than risk ambush on the trails.

They entered the trees. With the branches screening the moonlight, they now walked in total darkness. The line closed up, each man putting a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead. Only Nate, with the Starlite, had sight. He scanned the black from time to time to spot the trees and obstacles ahead, then walked through the darkness by memory.

As they neared the road, Lyons saw lights again, streaking toward him from the darkness like tracers or distant headlights. He flinched, then realized he had not heard a shot or a truck.