13

As black-and-white units screeched to tire-smoking stops in front of the apartments, Detective Bill Towers assembled the police officers into improvised fire-teams. Though the department had issued additional shotguns to the units patrolling the city, not every officer had one of the riot weapons.

Towers took Lyons's warning seriously. If that ex-cop said the men needed shotguns and automatic weapons, Towers knew Lyons meant it.

An incident immediately proved Lyons's warning true.

As Towers sent a two-man unit to the side street with an order to seal off the side exits and the alley, the officer behind the steering wheel called out, "Behind you!"

Turning, Towers saw a teenager in jeans, sneakers and a gang jacket run from the front door of the ground floor LAYAC offices. The teenager held a machete high as he sprinted for Towers, screaming hate jargon, "Die, you white genocidal Nazi running dog!"

"Halt or I'll fire!" Towers shouted out as he pulled his .38 pistol loaded with department-approved solid-point ammunition. "Halt..."

The command did not stop the punk. Towers sighted over the four-inch barrel of his Smith & Wesson and double-actioned six slugs into the punk's chest.

The slugs did not stop the youth. Blood spurting from his chest, he crossed the sidewalk and street in a few steps. He swung the machete at Towers. Towers sidestepped.

As the machete skipped off the sheet metal of the black-and-white, the officer in the driver's seat fired his service revolver point-blank into the gut of the punk. Slugs exited the punk's back and broke the plate-glass windows of the LAYAC offices.

But the punk did not fall. Retreating from the bloody teenage psychopath, Towers pulled the backup pistol he carried — in violation of department regulations — in a holster at the small of his back: a Colt Commander. Loaded with hollow-points — again in violation of department policy — the large-caliber autopistol went on line with the punk's chest as he rushed to kill Towers.

Towers snapped two shots. The first hollow-point slammed the punk back, exploding through his chest to destroy his heart and the knot of arteries between the lungs. The second slug went high and struck the dying punk in the nose. His head exploded with the shock-force of the impact.

Even when the medically dead zombie finally fell, the legs and arms continued to thrash, the machete still gripped in its right fist, the metal of the blade clanking and sparking on the asphalt as if the punk's arm had a nervous system independent of the destroyed brain.

Towers stared down at the thrashing corpse, astounded. Officers from other cars ran to the corpse. The driver of the squad car announced in a shaky voice, "Holy shit! You saw it. Towers put six through the chest. I put another four through its gut. And it still took two forty-fives to put it down!"

"Everyone with a shotgun over here!" Towers yelled, assembling officers.

As they gathered, Towers continued directing black-and-white units to surround the apartments. Inside, the battle continued. Directing his men, Towers heard the hammering of autofire, the booming of shotguns inside the buildings. He addressed the officers around him. "There're three men fighting in there. The crazies captured an officer and those three men went in to save the officer. We're going in to help. Everyone got their pockets full of ammo?"

"We shoot to kill?" an officer called out. "Do we try to arrest them?"

"This is war!" Towers shouted back. "Look at that one in the street and tell me if you're going to read them their rights!"

The group rushed into the battle.

Monitoring the police communications on their scanner, reporter Mark Lannon and his technicians sped to the battle at the LAYAC offices. When the sound man driving the van saw the flashing lights of the police cars blocking the avenue, he swerved onto a side street.

"I'll circle around and try the alley," the sound man told Lannon.

"Do it. Get past those pigs. We'll put this on the morning news. Smear those Nazi pigs."

They wove through the side streets, down one street, then two right turns, finally approaching on a tree-darkened street where no police squad cars parked. Lannon directed his crew with whispers. "Get the equipment together. We're going to sneak in there. If they see us, they'll pull some pigshit jive about the scene of a crime or whatever. Once we got the pictures, they can only subpoena the tapes."

"Right on!" the cameraman agreed.

After checking their video gear and sound-recording equipment, the three newsmen slipped into the shadows. They heard intermittent gunfire as they neared the alley behind the LAYAC buildings.

Headlights swept from the avenue. The three counterculture activists hurried into the darkness beside a trash dumpster. When Lannon saw two uniformed officers setting out flares to halt all traffic, he said to his cameraman, "Get some tape of that!"

Then he turned to his sound recordist. "Get all the noise and shooting. Maybe we can loop and dub it later on, make it sound like World War III."

A furious exchange of fire somewhere inside the building startled them. The sound man turned on his deck and held out a microphone to the sound of the firefight. "Won't need to overdub that…"

Another set of headlights flashed, this time in the alley. Lannon saw a lowered Chevy boulevard cruiser turn from one of the garages. He slapped the shoulders of his technicians. "There's some of the LAYAC brothers. We'll do an interview with them. Get some real shit on the pigs."

Stepping from the concealing shadows, Lannon waved his arms for the Chevy to stop. His technicians took their places in the alley. The cameraman switched on his sungun spotlight, the sound recordist extended a long microphone.

"Hey, comrades!" Lannon called out. "What's happening in there? We're from K-Marx. What's the truth?"

The Chevy stopped. Going to the driver's window, Lannon leaned in. What he saw sent him quickly staggering back.

A gang punk with a demented grin waved a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun at him. The punk lowered his aim and fired.

At a distance of ten feet, the spray of birdshot destroyed Mark Lannon's legs. In a tangle of shattered bones and muscle sinew, Lannon sat on the alley's asphalt. He watched as the Chevy's doors flew open. Punks crowded from the doors, machetes and pistols and automatic rifles in their hands.

Dropping his video gear, the cameraman ran. A burst of AK fire killed him. The sound man put up his hands in surrender. Several punks advanced on him while the others went to Lannon.

"I'm with you, I'm a comrade in struggle," the sound man pleaded, tears running down his bushy beard. "Here's my Communist Party card. I'm with you. I'll show you my card, I'm a paid-up member of the..."

As he reached for his wallet, a punk stepped forward and chopped off the sound man's arm with a machete. The sound man's face contorted with a scream that only rattled in his throat.

Machetes and pistols and point-blank gunfire dismembered the Communist sound man.

Mark Lannon suffered longer. With his white skin, stylish hair and neatly trimmed mustache, the reporter personified the typical bourgeois white man to the drug-enraged crowd of young black and Chicano gang boys.

Machetes flashed in the dark alley. First, the punks cut away Lannon's shattered legs. Then his fingers and hands. As the white man's screams echoed in the filthy corridor behind the buildings, the punks methodically reduced him to a flopping torso with a screaming head.

Cross fire of shotguns and department-approved .38 pistols drove the street gang back to their vehicle. Bleeding, their throats filling with blood even as they screamed defiance at the officers, the punks attempted to escape in their supercharged Chevy.

Officers fired shotguns and rifles into the engine, point-blank into the driver's head, then at the rear tires. The Chevy careered across the side street and into a tree.

Flames exploded. Orange light from the rising flames lighted the alley. Then the officers found the dead cameraman and the butchered sound recordist.

A wailing cry lead them to the thing lying in blood and a clutter of human parts. Only when they saw the arms and legs did the officers realize the flopping, bleeding meat had been a human being.

After another few seconds of pain and blind, silent anguish, Mark Lannon, the K-Marx man of the people, The Voice of Socialist Truth, finally went silent.

Storming through the offices and hallways of the LAYAC complex, Towers and his men killed everything that moved. There seemed to be no end to the punks in the building. They came from doorways, they came down the stairs, they rose from the heaps of dead to fight again. This was the crucial battle.

Towers rushed through one doorway and fell flat, expecting autofire. But he heard only the gunfire in the other rooms. Scrambling over the floor, he scanned the large room.

Black Nationalist posters plastered one wall. The three other walls had been painted stark white. He could not understand the purpose of the white walls until he saw the projection ports.

The room had been a theater with multiple projectors. Marks on the wall indicated mountings for now-gone speakers for a total-surround sound system. Wires and cables dangled from conduits around the walls.

His examination of the theater was interrupted by firing outside the door. Bracing his Colt Commander in both hands, Towers waited for a gang to appear. He heard a voice call out, "Police! Freeze, whoever you are!"

"We're on your side!"

"You're the Federals?"

"That's us — the Super-Feds…"

Towers recognized the voice of the Wizard, the electronics specialist who worked with Carl Lyons. He went to the door and announced himself. "Detective Towers coming out!"

Only then did he emerge. He saw the three men with automatic weapons and military gear standing with a group of his uniformed officers. He could not identify Lyons.

Blood crusted all three men. Blood concealed their features and hair color. Finally, Towers heard a voice that identified his ex-partner. "What about the woman? Any of you see her?"

"No," Towers told Lyons. "We came in through the front. Where were you?"

"We went in through the side. There's a first-floor hallway connecting all this together. We got hit by banzai charges of scumbags."

"Yeah, tell us about it. We met a few of them ourselves."

The blood-masked man that Towers could recognize only by voice stared urgently at him. "Flor has to be somewhere. We've got to search every room in this place. Did any of them get away? Other than that one truck?"

"Could they have her in the truck?" Towers asked.

"No chance," another of the Able Team soldiers answered. Towers recognized the sonorous voice as the voice of Lyons's Puerto Rican partner. "That truck went muy rapido. They wouldn't have taken the time to grab her. And I don't think they could have grabbed her. Not without leaving bodies."

An officer returned from checking the corridor. He said nothing.

"So what's down there?" one of the other officers demanded of him.

The officer lifted one of his feet and pointed at it. Blood glistened on his shoe. He had stepped in blood deeper than his shoe tops. "Does that tell you what's down there?"

As other cops went to stare at the carnage, Lyons called them back. "We're still looking for our partner. We got to find her."

"Sure, bad man, we're on it." Towers spoke into his walkie-talkie and directed his other officers to check every room and hallway. "If we don't find her here, we'll question the headman of LAYAC. We grabbed him down in the marina. He tried to get away in his yacht."

An officer reported. "We got civilians coming down the fire escapes. There're apartments up there that have got nothing to do with the gangs."

"Well, help them down. 'Protect and serve,' officer. Get to it."

As the three men of Able Team started for the avenue, Towers spoke into his walkie-talkie again. "We got three Federals coming out. Do the city a favor and hose them off before they get in one of our cars."

14

Flor Trujillo rode on the bumper of the five-ton truck speeding from East Los Angeles. The wind whipping her hair, she gripped the latch of the roll-up aluminum cargo door.

As her hands became tired, every bump and lurch threatened her with a high-speed encounter with asphalt. She watched for a police car, hoping to signal for assistance.

But the only patrol cars she saw flashed past in the opposite direction. Lights flashing, sirens screaming, the black-and-white units went to help the officers caught in the ambush she had overheard on the scanner.

So she held on. Few other cars traveled the streets and boulevards of the city. She saw the driver of one car do a double take at the sight of her — a young Hispanic woman in a wind-flagged green dress and high heels — riding the cargo truck's bumper.

Then the truck went onto the freeway. Gripping the latch, she eased herself into a crouch as the evening air tore at her hair and skirt. Behind her, she saw only two or three distant pairs of headlights. On this night after the slaughter of the Valencia family, no one risked the freeways.

A few minutes before, she had seen the truck swerve from the alley behind the LAYAC building. The truck had lurched for a moment as the driver clashed the gears. On impulse, she dashed from the rented Ford and stepped up on the bumper. She wished she had taken a hand-radio. With only her Detonics and a few extra magazines, she sped to a destination unknown.

She felt movement inside the truck. Pressing her ear against the roll-up aluminum, she heard voices and footsteps. The vibrations and noises of the speeding truck made the words incomprehensible. But now she knew she faced more opponents than only the driver and the gunman in the truck's cab.

Without slowing, the truck swerved onto an off ramp. The truck's body clattered and shook as the tires seized the asphalt, the acrid smoke of burning rubber swirling around Flor. The truck whipped through a right turn, then accelerated again.

Before Flor could catch sight of a boulevard street sign, the truck whipped through another right turn and sped through a gray district of wrecking yards and industrial buildings. She saw only empty streets and desolate parking lots under the blue white light of the mercury-arc street-lamps.

Finally the truck slowed. Flor heard the cab door open and footsteps run from the truck to the building. Steel clanked against a steel door.

Now came the danger. She knew she must somehow slip away from the truck without betraying herself. In the isolation of a manufacturing area, with only her autopistol against the rifles of the gang punks who guarded the truck, she had no doubt of the outcome of a pursuit and firefight.

She peered around the side of the truck. She snapped her head back instantly when she saw the punk at the warehouse door looking at the truck. The truck lurched into motion and turned to enter the warehouse.

Desperate, Flor considered her options.

Run and be seen and pursued.

Stay on the bumper and be seen as she rode into the garage.

She could not run, and she could not remain immobile. Her desperation forced her into the only possible action…

Gripping the edge of the bumper with one down-stretched hand, she released her other hand's grip on the latch. Then she grabbed the bumper with both hands, and thrust a foot underneath it.

She hung below the bumper by her hands and one foot, her back only inches from the asphalt. Reaching into the undercarriage of the truck, she gripped the gritty steel of the chassis. She lost her high-heeled shoe as she struggled to maintain her toehold. She let her other shoe fall away as she moved her other leg.

The truck paused. Hanging underneath the truck, she heard the punk at the garage door shout out, "A la derecha. Poquito a la derecha."

With a lurch, the truck continued into the warehouse. She heard the steel door crash down. The punk jumped onto the bumper and released the truck's cargo latch.

Footsteps and voices inside the truck became feet and legs as a gang crowded out from it. She heard ghetto English and Spanish. Another voice spoke in softly accented English. Flor could not identify the accent as the man talked.

"To your positions, my warriors. Though we will be secure here, we must remain on guard. Soon we go to another city and continue Allah's work."

The punks answered. "Sure thing, brother… Waste those white devils."

Hanging by her hands and ankles, Flor waited for the gang to disperse. Only after the footsteps of the punks and their leaders receded did she ease herself down to the oily concrete of the warehouse floor. Crawling a few feet, she pressed herself against the double tires for concealment. She watched the activity in the warehouse.

Work lights in the high ceiling lighted the interior. The driver had parked the truck in the center of the building. Open concrete extended on all sides. A few boxes and crates and tables lined the walls. But she saw no open doors. Flor could not hope to snake from under the truck and dash out to the street.

The truck had carried her into a trap.

She could do nothing but wait.

Across the concrete space, she saw a stoop-shouldered black man in a dark blue suit. He wore his hair conservatively short. Glasses framed in black plastic gave him the look of an accountant. He directed two gang punks in blue nylon jackets and dirty jeans to open a wooden crate.

The punks crowbarred away the crate's lid. They carefully lifted out a block of Styrofoam and put it on a table. Then the black man took a knife from the punks and cut the tape that secured the Styrofoam.

When the packaging fell away, Flor saw a shortwave radio. The black man attached antenna leads to the back of the radio and handed a coil of wire to one of the punks. The punk took the wire up a flight of stairs to the roof. The other youth ran an extension cord to the radio.

Hiding only a few steps away, Flor heard every word the black man said.

"This is Shabaka. Calling the truck. Shabaka calling the truck…"

The black man repeated his call for minutes. Finally a voice responded. The monotonic, strangely disembodied voice alerted Flor to the electronic code guarding the conversation.

Like the hand-radios Able Team used, the longdistance radio employed encoding circuits to electronically scramble and unscramble every conversation. Only those with the radio sets could understand the transmissions. Any technician or amateur radio enthusiast monitoring the transmissions would hear only bursts of static.

"This is the truck," came the reply. "We're a hundred miles south of the border. No problems, we're making good time."

"The Los Angeles delivery is canceled."

"What?"

"The Los Angeles delivery is canceled. We will take the delivery in Escondido instead. Do you understand?"

"It won't be going to L.A. We're going to drop it Escondido instead."

"This address is outside of the city. Are you ready to copy down the address?"

"Right. I got a pencil. Go ahead."

Flor memorized the address and the time of the delivery as Shabaka dictated it to his truck crew Shabaka switched off the radio.

As the punks put the radio in the truck above her, Flor racked her imagination for a way to escape. With the information on the place and time of the delivery, Able Team had the opportunity to follow the conspiracy to its source. Whatever the cargo — weapons, terrorists, cash or drugs — the cargo and drivers and truck would provide another lead in breaking the puzzle of the gang siege that terrorized Los Angeles.

But Flor knew she must escape silently, secretly. If Shabaka suspected he had been overheard by a federal agent, he would change the location of the delivery.

How could she escape? She had seen the punks lock both the big cargo door and the office door.

If she left the darkness under the truck, she risked an instant firefight.

If she stayed under the truck and waited, she chanced the punks discovering her.

Flor decided to take the greatest risk, to wait until the punks and their leader left the garage, then drop away from the truck when the opportunity came.

She prayed that the truck would slow for a moment at some point on the route to the town on the Mexican border. Hitting the asphalt at a high speed would not be pleasant…

A voice interrupted her thoughts.

"What's that under the truck?" one punk asked another.

A Kalashnikov rifle gripped in his right hand, a black punk got down on his hands and knees to peer under the cargo truck.

Flor shot him in the face. She scrambled from under the truck and grabbed the AK from his still-twitching hand. Snapping down the safety lever to semiauto, Flor put a single shot through the chest of the other punk as he struggled to unsling the AK on his shoulder.

A brown-skinned youth ran down the stairs. Flor put a ComBloc slug through the center of his chest.

Running around the truck, she came face to face with another Chicano punk. Without raising the Kalashnikov in her hands, she jerked the trigger twice, the first slug smashing through his crotch, the second slug striking him in the top of his head as he doubled over in agony.

Without the strange drug supplied by Shabaka, the punks knew fear. They struggled to aim their rifles with shaking hands as a barefooted young woman in a shimmering dress ran through their midst, killing them.

A sentry at the door turned at the sound of the shots and raised his rifle. He saw the woman with the Kalashnikov. Sighting, he fired his M-16.

Another punk chose that moment to rush the woman. Swinging a machete, he attacked. Flor blocked the blade with the barrel of the Soviet autorifle, then the punk's head exploded with the impact of a 5.56mm slug.

Dodging from the mist of brains and blood, Flor saw another youth rushing her. She threw herself sideways, felt her shoulder hit a truck tire. A blast deafened her and showered her with chips of enamel paint from the truck. Kicking out, she tripped the charging punk.

Flor extended the rifle with one hand. With the muzzle against his face, she fired. The flash illuminated an expression of surprise and confusion as the slug smashed through the youth's eye socket.

Rolling, she gained the cover of a few crates and cardboard boxes against one wall. She shoved through the boxes as slugs pocked the wall around her.

She clicked the Kalashnikov's fire selector down to full-auto and sighted on a muzzle-flash. A burst sent a punk staggering backward.

A dead guy sprawled only an arm's reach away. Flor grabbed his shirt and pulled him into the boxes. From the corpse, she took a web belt hung with AK mags and a .357 Magnum pistol. She took one of the magazines out and held it ready as she searched for targets.

She recognized the voice of the black man, Shabaka. "All of you. Fire there," she heard. "All at once. She's in there."

Spraying slugs at the voice, she dived through cardboard, felt her shoulder hit a heavy crate. Autofire punched the walls and concrete floor as the surviving punks tried to kill her with wild, unaimed bursts.

She took cover behind the heavy crate and waited. She felt several slugs hit the crate, but the two-by-fours and the contents stopped the slugs. She waited, silent, not moving.

"Manuel," Shabaka called out again. "Go take a look."

"Let's shoot her some more first," Manuel answered, then emptied another magazine into the clutter of boxes. Slugs ricocheted and fragmented on the concrete.

Flor felt high-velocity metal rip through one of her legs. But she did not cry out or move, not even as the blood flowed and the pain came. She waited. As the shooting continued, she dropped out the AK's magazine and put in the full magazine with thirty rounds. Counting the one round in the chamber of the AK, she had thirty-one shots.

Then she checked her wound. With her fingers, she found where a tiny bit of metal had hit her leg. Exhaling hard against the pain, she pressed on her flesh and felt the piece of metal in her leg. She would not let the injury slow her.

Shotgun blasts threw cardboard and bits of wood everywhere. Finally, Shabaka stopped the barrage. "She's dead! Now get the body and find out who she was."