"He's here."
Only a fraction of a centimeter of steel linked the two sections of pipe. Nate grabbed the valve and wobbled it, attempting to break the pipes apart. Lyons kicked the pipe, once, twice, stood on it and jumped.
The pipe broke. Lyons spoke into his hand-radio.
"We've cut the line. And we've confirmed Unomundo's here. Are you ready?"
"Affirmative," Blancanales answered. "We're in. The men are moving into position."
"This is it. Over."
Nate opened the valve. A colorless gas rushed from the severed pipe. Looking through the spreading gas, they saw the shadowy rocks waver as the flow spread. White frost formed instantly on the valve and pipe and the rocks.
Lyons and Nate ran. At the mess hall walkway, they forced themselves to slow to a quick walk. Lyons pointed to the center of the complex.
They strode toward the helicopters. Lyons looked back once at the offices. Bodyguards, pro-fascist mercenaries and Guatemalan army officers the traitors' chests bright with medals crowded from a door. All the Nazis attempted to speak with one person, a tall, blond man with the sharp sculpted features of an aristocrat. Wide-shouldered bodyguards knotted around him.
"Unomundo," Lyons told Nate.
Nate glanced back at him and smiled. "Soon he burns in hell."
A bodyguard spoke with Unomundo. The Hispanic pointed into the night to the searing light of the welding torch torturing the two Quiche men. Unomundo spoke with a mercenary officer. The officer led Unomundo and a knot of bodyguards down the steps.
Lyons and Nate maintained their stride. They passed Hueys and Cobras. Technicians loaded rocket pods. Other men pumped aviation fuel into the helicopters' tanks. Nate smiled to Lyons.
Leaving the brilliant light of the cavern, they saw a flashlight blink from the top of a parked bus.
The crowd of drunken mercenaries laughed. A scream rose, wavered, faded. Lyons's hand-radio buzzed.
"Give the signal!" Gadgets told him, his voice seething with anger and frustration. "Time to put that goon gang down!"
The rotorthrob of a helicopter approached from the sky. With his thumb on the transmit key, Lyons looked up at the black silhouette of a Huey against the stars. He looked back to Unomundo.
Leaving the cavern, Unomundo and his bodyguards hurried to the horror. The Hispanic bodyguard who had listened to the faked message about the CIA and the Indians pointed to Lyons. Unomundo and all the bodyguards turned.
Lyons hissed into the hand-radio. "Wizard, do it! He's getting out!"
Swinging the barrel of his Atchisson around, Lyons flicked down the safety and sprayed full-auto high-velocity steel at the Nazi warlord.
A great wave of flame churned from the cavern.
17
A roar came, then heat, but no explosion. Uncompressed and too cold to mix with the air, thus lacking the correct oxygen-to-gas ratio, the liquid petroleum gas unlike a true explosive failed to flash instantaneously into the heat and combustion wastes. Yet the gas had spread under and beyond the kitchen and mess hall areas, to the command offices, and to the barracks and the helicopters.
In the first milliseconds of the fire, half the cavern was enveloped in a single flame. The initial instant of fire heated the inches-thick layer of cold gas that coated the floor of the cavern, causing the unburned gas to expand rapidly into the flames. As the heat of the flames accelerated the rate of combustion, and the heat produced churning air currents that intermixed the flames and expanding gas with more oxygen, the flames rose still higher. This happened in the first fifteen-hundredths of a second after Gadgets Schwarz detonated the radio-fused plastic explosive.
The exploding charge also tore open the steel tank that held hundreds more gallons of liquid gas. Encountering the superheated atmosphere, the fuel expanded into gas. In the absence of oxygen the available atmospheric oxygen had been consumed by the first flash of flame the unburned gas surged outward. When it mixed with the atmosphere, it also flamed.
Though the Nazi personnel did not suffer dismemberment, all of the personnel in the south half of the cave received instantaneous third-degree burns. Then the wave of flame enveloped the helicopters and aviation fuel.
Av-gas became superheated. It burned, radiating a flash-temperature of three thousand degrees Centigrade. Every combustible object or substance wood, hoses, insulated wires, tires, fuel, clothing, hair, skin fat burst into flame.
In the center of the flames, the staff offices became the crematorium of the Nazi commanders and the handful of Guatemalan army officers who had betrayed their country to Unomundo's European doctrine.
The hired commandos sleeping in the steel barracks knew a few seconds of confusion and agony as they woke to red hot walls and superheated air. When they screamed at the shock of their waking nightmare, they scorched their lungs, and died choking seconds later. As the flames and heat continued, the glowing barracks baked the dead men's bodies. Fat flowed and burned, contributing to the inferno.
Mercenaries and technicians in the open felt only an instant of pain before their bodies became ash.
Outside, a few of the mercenaries near the mouth of the cavern turned to the roar. The heat-flash melted their faces. Others threw themselves down. Those near the fire received third-degree burns, their uniforms first smoking, then bursting into flame.
Unomundo sprawled under the corpses of three of his bodyguards. Stunned by a head wound caused by a .33-caliber steel ball that had punched through the head of one of his bodyguards to tear through his own left cheek and ear, Unomundo saw the diffused glare of the inferno. He did not suffer burns. The bodies of his guards had saved him. He heard screams, then autofire from a dozen rifles.
Knowing that his lifelong dream had been shattered only hours before he made it reality, he lay still. Now he plotted survival.
Heat searing their backs, Lyons and Nate sprinted into the shelter of the parked trucks and buses. A Quiche saw them, mistook them for mercenaries. As he raised his M-16, another Quiche knocked the rifle aside, a single shot ripping through the side of the bus.
"Get the Nazi clothes off, spookman!" Nate shouted at him over the screaming and shooting and the roar of the burning cavern complex. He ripped off his shirt to expose his light skin and bandage of red cloth.
"Politician!" Lyons called out.
"Your armor's up here!" Blancanales answered.
Climbing the side ladder to the cargo rack of a bus, he saw Blancanales on the bus roof, snapping single shots into Nazi mercenaries. Every shot killed. Blancanales sighted on two meres dragging a burned comrade to the cover of a truck, and he triggered a 40mm grenade. Steel-wire shrapnel shredded the three.
"How many still alive?" Lyons yelled, going prone beside his partner. Blancanales had already discarded his own Nazi shirt. He wore his black bat-tie armor and a red Indian shirt whose sleeves would identify him in the firefight.
"Maybe fifty, sixty. Most of the ones doing the torture, some drivers, some officers."
Lyons took grenades and his heavy Kevlar and steel trauma-plate battle armor from the pack. He stripped off his gray shirt, started to put on the armor. He found one of Nate's hand-sewn cotton shirts folded inside the armor, the cotton fabric woven in the design and color of Marylena's Quiche village.
"The shirt's for you," Blancanales told him. He touched the cloth of his own shirtsleeves. "Magic."
"With Kevlar and steel plates, it's magic."
"What about Unomundo?"
"Got him. Put him and his bodyguards down with a full-auto chop job," Lyons grinned. He slapped his Atchisson. "Lyons's Crowd Killing Device."
Lyons pulled on the red shirt, then the battle armor, and he watched the Huey troopship that hovered above the scene. The troopship stayed at a thousand feet, only observing.
Blancanales glanced at Lyons's new uniform black armor, red sleeves pinstriped with yellow and purple, black nylon bandoliers and gray pants.