15

At a hundred miles an hour on the deserted freeways, Detective Towers raced to the command center of the joint LAPD, state and federal task force of officers assembled to fight the gang punks terrorizing Los Angeles. He spoke to Able Team in the car as he drove.

"We got Silva cold. Read him his rights, served the warrant, took the evidence. Perfect case."

"What about interrogation?" Lyons had rinsed off some of the gore from the LAYAC slaughter-fest, but blood still obstinately clung to his hair and the hair of his arms. His luggage in the trunk of the rented Ford had provided clean shirts for himself and his partners.

"They're questioning him, but no answers yet."

"What're they doing?" Lyons demanded. "Letting him discuss his case with his legal staff? While those monsters rip Flor Trujillo apart?"

"You still think they've got her?"

Blancanales leaned forward from the back seat. "Lyons, the ones in that truck didn't grab her. Maybe some other gang..."

Lyons interrupted his partner. His desperate worry for the woman he loved did not allow anyone to reason with him. "I figure they somehow got her into that truck. And I figure Silva will know where the truck went. That's all we've got to goon."

"Makes sense to me…" Towers agreed.

"You weren't there," Blancanales told him.

Slowing to sixty miles an hour, Towers left the freeway. He sideslipped through a screaming, two-wheeled left-hand turn, then accelerated. He switched on the siren at the intersections.

In the back seat, Gadgets looked at the boulevard flashing past. "You cops, you drive crazy." He put his hands over his eyes. "Tell me when it's safe to look."

Turning to Gadgets and Blancanales, Towers steered with one hand. "It's part of the benefits package. You can't expect men to go out and face the puke of the world for the pay of a nursery-school teacher. So they give us some perks. Like supercharged Dodges."

"Please," Blancanales asked. "At this speed, it is important that you watch the road."

"What road?" Towers questioned them, his face solemn. "This is a jet plane!"

As the Dodge hurtled through an intersection, it hit a dip where the boulevards crossed. The undercarriage smashed into the asphalt, then the car left the pavement at ninety miles an hour.

"Whoooeeeee!" Towers laughed. "Airborne..."

The Dodge smashed its undercarriage again when it landed. Towers fought the wheel as the heavy sedan drifted sideways. A sign in the center of the boulevard flew end over end into the night sky after the Dodge sheared off its four-by-four post. Finally, Towers returned the speeding car to a straight line. Still laughing, he floored the accelerator. Lyons punched him in the shoulder.

"Get serious, will you? This is no time to show off."

"Never had a better opportunity. All the good, decent citizens are at home snorting cocaine and watching the LAPD storm troopers stomping on the civil liberties of the vatos and Crips. In living color. In stereo. In wide-screen video…"

Slowing, Towers swerved into a parking lot. The LAPD had taken over a high school closed for summer vacation. The parking lots provided assembly areas for the officers and vehicles. Typewriters and papers could be seen covering tables in the gymnasium. The school's many telephone lines provided quick communication to all the law-enforcement offices participating in the counterattack.

Blancanales saw the parked squad cars and unmarked federal vehicles. He shook Gadgets. "You can look now. We got here alive."

"This car stinks of blood," Towers told Able Team as he parked at the end of the lot. They all got out. "There's showers in the gym. Why don't you guys have a proper cleanup?"

"No time," Lyons answered. "Where's Silva?"

"Okay, come on. Maybe all the blood will enhance your impact as an interrogator."

Uniformed LAPD officers with shotguns and M-16s guarded a side entrance to the gymnasium. Lyons laughed bitterly as he passed the guards.

"Where were they when the punks rushed us?"

Towers turned to Lyons. "Those men aren't watching for punks. They're protecting us from the media and the Civil Liberties Union."

"I believe it."

"Silva's down this way."

A group of men in suits stood at the end of a row of lockers. A screen identified a small room as the towel room. One of the plainclothesmen saw Towers and the three bloodied Federals. He grabbed a briefcase from the floor and rushed to them.

"I've got information for you and… these specialists," the young man in a suit told Towers.

At first, Towers did not recognize the man. "Oh, yeah. You're not LAPD. You're that liaison man for the Olympics antiterrorist detail. Why are you on this program?"

"The incidents last night qualified as terrorism."

"Sure did. What's this information?"

"The People's Republic of Cuba has decided to cooperate in the prosecution of Mr. Mario Silva."

"The Cubans?" Lyons asked, incredulous.

"Here's a copy." The liaison man passed Lyons a thick folder. "Most of it's in Spanish. Some of the papers are in English. Even some Russian and French. Silva has been a long-term agent for Communist Cuba — very surprising when you consider his family background. His father was a close associate of Generalissimo Batista. The Direccion General de lnteligencia assigned him to create a network of organizations and individuals who would advance Cuban interests in the United States. And he received millions of dollars to fund his operation.

"However, Mr. Silva used much of the money to finance drug deals. He kept the profits for himself. Seems they discovered his role in this terrorism and they want none of the responsibility. The Cuban consulate in New York said they'd send some intelligence officers out to testify if there's a trial. How's that for cooperation?"

"If there's a trial?" Blancanales asked. "Why the if?"

"Sometimes these things never go to trial," the liaison man answered. "Too public."

"Thanks a lot," Lyons said to him. "I got a good idea of my approach on the interrogation."

"Also, there's other information. Specifically for you three gentlemen. From an individual named Kurtzman. It's on a cassette. He said he couldn't wait for a transcontinental courier, so I recorded the encoded information over the phone. He said the Wizard would know what to do."

The three men of Able Team glanced at one an-other. Kurtzman, the Stony Man intelligence and computer specialist, must have been very hard-pressed to trust an outsider even with code names.

"Where's the cassette?" Blancanales asked.

"Here." The liaison man passed him a miniature cassette deck. "You can keep the cassette. But the tape recorder's mine."

"We'll only need it for a few minutes," Gadgets told him. He pushed the playback button. Electronic hiss came from the tiny built-in speaker on the expensive unit, the most expensive and sophisticated on the civilian market. "Supercool. Stereo static."

They moved to the towel room, making their way through the knot of plainclothesmen. The uniformed officer blocking the door recognized Towers and Able Team and opened the door without a word.

The towel room was actually several rooms. There were storage rooms for clean and used towels. Another room bore a stenciled red cross and the words First Aid. The interrogators had Mario Silva in the used-towel room.

Seated in a straight-back school chair, Silva smoked a cigarette and stared into space, bored by the questions from the three police officers interrogating him.

"Before we go in..." Gadgets stopped Lyons and Blancanales "...we decode this. Pol. Take the tape player, play it into your hand-radio while we listen on my radio."

Able Team went to the far side of the towel room to play the tape. The circuits of the radios decoded the noise on the tape. Kurtzman's resynthesized, monotonic voice hissed from Gadgets's radio. "Just got this info. Very top secret. As you'd say, Gadgets, Cosmic Top Secret.

"I scanned all Stony Man data on drugs. Found an unconfirmed report. An ex-Green Beret came out of Libya. Said he'd made a deal to smuggle some kind of new 'crazy dust' — a drug that made soldiers go crazy — into the United States with a Saudi Arabian prince. The smuggler said he'd gone to Khaddafi Duck Himself with the scheme. Ended up supplying it on contract to an ex-Panther, ex-Death's Angel named Shabaka. That's the only name he got.

"I put it through the machines. Nothing, I talked to Konzaki about all this, and he told me you guys have got more than freaked-out street punks to watch out for. You understand? Watch out for crew cuts in suits. And don't trust anyone with a Harvard accent. Over and out."

Gadgets clicked off the radios and tape player. "Oh, wow. Very curious."

Lyons looked toward the room where Silva sat. "It'd be interesting to find out who the Saudi Arabian prince actually worked for, but we've got other work to do. After we find Flor, we'll call the White House."

"You're talking totally crazy," Gadgets said.

"After I saw Unomundo's hired generals and colonels rubbing bellies with United States senators," Lyons said, "I decided I'd never know exactly what was going on. In fact, maybe even Cuba knows something about this that we don't. Now no more talk."

Rushing over to the used-towel room, Lyons stood in the doorway and studied Silva. A wide-shouldered Hispanic with perfectly styled hair and an expensive suit, Silva had never worked with his hands or struggled or fought. His manikin-perfect face had no scars or worry lines.

Silva looked up at the man filling the doorway. He saw polyester slacks stained with filth and crusted blood. The man wore a freshly laundered shirt — the front still had the creases from a suitcase — but blood stained his hands and arms. Bits of blood clotted in his hair. As Silva studied the blond stranger, he became aware of a new smell in the room.

The smell of blood and cordite and death.

Absently Lyons rolled the thick folder in his hands, gripped it and slapped it like a length of pipe in his left palm. Voices stopped. The steady whap-whap-whap of the roll of papers became the only sound in the small concrete-walled room. Finally, Lyons spoke to the plainclothes interrogators.

"Officers, wewill question the prisoner now. Please leave us alone with him. And don't interrupt us."

The plainclothes officers grinned to one another. But Towers shook his head. "We're responsible for what the prisoner looks like and I can't let..."

Lyons crouched, balancing on the balls of his feet in front of Silva. He looked into the man's face and smiled. "This puto..." Lyons used the Mexican word for a male whore "...is only a coward and a worm. He will answer all our questions."

Towers motioned the interrogators out. The men laughed as they left. The last man closed the door. Silva twisted his face into a sneer.

"I'll be free tomorrow. And I'll file a lawsuit claiming defamation of character. That obscenity will cost you millions of dollars."

Lyons ignored Silva's words. "Your father and his friends fought Castro. Your family fled Cuba. If you don't answer every question we ask, photocopies of this go to your father, your father's friends, every anti-Castro organization in the country, and Omega Seven."

Opening the curled folder, Lyons showed Silva the first page of the Cuban dossier. Full-face and profile photos identified Mario Silva. The stamp of the Direccion General de Inteligencia marked the lower right-hand corner of the identification sheet.

Silva went white. Lyons fanned through the dossier, showing the young attorney the hundreds of photocopied documents condemning him to prison and lifelong exile from his family and the Cuban American community.

Lyons grinned. "You'll talk now?"

Silva tried to speak. But his mouth had gone dry. He sputtered a few sounds, finally nodded.

"We want to know everything about Shabaka..."

The double shock of betrayal by his Communist masters and the police knowledge of it made Silva sag in the chair. He hid his face in his hands.

In less than a minute, without striking him once, Lyons had broken the arrogant attorney.

Furious knocking at the door interrupted the interrogation before the questions started.

"What?" Lyons demanded. "I said to leave us alone! What do you want?"

"You got a call from someone named Flor. You want me to tell her to call back later?"

16

A National Guard war-surplus Huey troopship took Able Team to El Monte, a community of Chicano barrios and light industry only a few minutes by freeway from downtown Los Angeles. Approaching the warehouse, they saw the headlights and flashing red lights of the ambulances and sheriffs patrol cars below them. White-uniformed attendants exited a building with sheeted forms on gurneys.

"Dead ones," Towers shouted to Lyons.

"I don't care who's dead," Lyons answered, also shouting to be heard over the rotorthrob. "Flor's alive."

Litter swirled in the glare of the streetlights as the Huey descended into a parking lot. Lyons jumped from the side door the moment the skids touched asphalt. Sprinting to the warehouse door, he saw two sheriff's deputies put up their hands to stop him. He dodged through them into the warehouse.

"Hey, buster! Who do you think you are?"

"Stop that clown!"

"Flor! Where are you?" Lyons shouted, ignoring the deputies rushing to seize him.

"Over here!"

A deputy with a baton confronted Lyons. Lyons pushed him aside. The deputy swung back the baton to club the ex-LAPD officer.

"Quit it!" Lyons told him. "You don't know who you're dealing with."

"Officer!" Flor Trujillo called out. She approached, limping, from behind the bullet-pocked truck, her dress bloody, a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder. "That is my associate you are threatening..."

"Then tell him to get out of here. This area's closed to civilians," the soldier said, breathing hard.

"Officer," Flor repeated. "This is my operation. You are only here to clean up. If you continue to threaten my associate, I will be forced to request your withdrawal."

As she spoke, she shifted the Kalashnikov in her hands. Casually gripping the forestock in her left hand, she flicked the AK's safety lever up and down with her right. In the quiet after the shutdown of the helicopter's engine, both Lyons and the deputy heard the sharp clacking of the Soviet safety. She ended the argument with the final question, "Do we understand each other?"

The deputy sheriff lowered his baton. "He with you?"

Lyons rushed to Flor. She had the presence of mind to reset the AK's safety before Lyons hugged her. For almost a minute he held her, not speaking, his face in her hair, drinking the scent of her sweat with every breath.

"Carl," she whispered. "It's okay. I'm okay. It couldn't have been more than an hour or two since I saw you."

"I thought you were gone." He felt the rise and fall of her breasts against his body.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I saw the truck leaving, and I jumped on. Like a fool I didn't take one of the radios. I'm not used to working with a team."

"What happened?" Lyons finally broke the embrace.

"Did you bring my luggage? I lost my shoes. And I have to throw this dress away."

"Hey, lovers," Gadgets jived as he joined them. "We're here on business. Time to get to it."

"What was the trouble with the sheriff's department?" Blancanales asked.

Lyons laughed. "Flor had to establish exactly who is in command here. Able Team one, sheriff's department zero..."

Flor interrupted Lyons's joke. "I am in command here. Now come meet the prisoner. He's only got a few minutes before he passes out from blood loss."

They passed the bullet-riddled boxes and crates. The overhead lights shadowed a hundred black pits in the concrete walls where slugs had chipped craters.

"Looks like someone did some shooting here," Gadgets commented.

"At me," Flor said. "They thought they'd killed me. But they hadn't. When they saw me under the truck, I came out shooting. Then I tried to hide. Like a scared little girl. They did much shooting, they shot the boxes, they shot the walls, they shot the floor but not me. When they thought I was dead, one of them found me. What a surprise he got. There were only two of them left, and I got them, too. And I captured Shabaka, their leader. But he's still alive. The others, no."

Medics and deputies crowded around the prisoner. Flat on a stretcher, the middle-aged black man writhed and groaned. As one medic knotted a tourniquet above the prisoner's bullet-shattered right knee, another medic prepared an injection. Flor motioned them all away.

"No injections. No medications. I am not done with this man."

"Miss, he's in terrible pain. He could slip into shock..."

"Of course he is in pain," Flor told the concerned medic. "He has been shot."

Lyons glanced down at the wound. "Perfect. Straight through the kneecap."

"He wouldn't answer my questions," the young woman explained, "so I shot him."

Lyons looked to Gadgets and Blancanales. "What did he say then?" He laughed.

"He told me he was only a lawyer for unfortunate teenagers. So I stood on his knee. Then he did answer my questions. You..." She shouted down into Abdul Shabaka's face. "You. Murderer of children! Tell us again what is in the truck."

"Allah be merciful, I don't know what you mean…"

"That's not what you said..."

"I told you nothing."

Flor stepped on the shattered knee. Shabaka flopped and twisted on the stretcher. Behind them, they heard one of the medics gasp and mutter, "Oh, good God… she's torturing him, somebody stop her."

One of the deputies turned to the medic. "You hear about all those college girls hacked apart? You hear about that family on the freeway?"

Shabaka gasped out the words. "The drug. Two hundred kilos. In the truck. Crossing the border. Stop the pain and I will tell you everything… Stop it, stop it, stop the pain, stop..."

Leaning her weight onto the knee, Flor asked, "The truck will go to that address. Are there any codes or passwords?"

"No. The radio is coded. No one else could send a message to the truck but…"

Holding the AK by the pistol grip, Flor put the muzzle to the tip of Shabaka's nose. His eyes wide with panic, he pleaded, "No, no. I am your prisoner. No!"

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes, I am telling the truth. Please don't shoot, I am your prisoner, I have told you everything…"

Turning to the medics, Flor motioned them to resume their care. She limped away from Shabaka without a backward glance. "Now we go to the border."

"Not you," Lyons told her.

"Why not?" his lover demanded.

"Your leg. You've been shot."

"It is nothing. A bullet fragment. I took it out with my fingernails. Come, you three..." Flor signaled the three men of Able Team. "With your help, I can stop this horrible drug. We can stop all the killing and the nightmares. Come."

Barefoot, she broke into a limping run to the helicopter.

17

A sea of wind-shimmering lights defined the city of Tijuana. Straight lines of lights marked the boulevards, snaking tongues of lights marked the coloniasof cardboard shacks in the hills and canyons. To the west, the lights of ships sparked from the vast mirror of the moonlit Pacific.

To the north, the city's lights ended abruptly at a boulevard. Then came a land of darkness and searing points of xenon white, the no-man's-land marking the southern border of the United States.

There, in the sand of the dry rivers and dust and mesquite of the hard-dirt hills, the United States border patrol fought the never-ending police action to stop the flow of Central Americans to the restaurants and factories and barrios of North America.

Every night, with the aid of all the technology of the United States — trucks, radios, remote audio sensors, infrared scanners, magnetic sensors — the officers of the border patrol arrested and deported thousands of the would-be workers.

And every night, the hopeful workers tried again. With the skills learned through generations of poverty and revolution and repression, of running, hiding, stoic endurance of pain and hunger and disappointment and courage, the tide of seasonal immigrants surged into the no-man's-land again.

Though the violent cholos — street punks from Tijuana — and the coyotes, who smuggled the illegals for pay, forced the border patrol to carry weapons and replace their trucks' window glass with steel mesh, the officers did not consider the losing battle against the illegals dangerous. Their work became dehumanizing — every night they had to arrest, process and deport thousands of people guilty only of hope. Often they laughed at the futility of their responsibility even while they struggled to enforce the law.

"Like trying to hold back the ocean with your hands," Patrol Agent Miles said through the helicopter's intercom. "That truck you want will come through the freeway gates over there."

The hard-muscled, good-humored young agent pointed to the complex of offices and inspections booths below them where the freeways of U.S. Highway 805 and Mexico Highway met at the border. The headlights and taillights of semitractor trailers carrying cargoes north and south streaked the freeways. Then he pointed to the lights of San Ysidro.

"And there's where it'll go. If you knew what the truck looked like, we could spot it at the border and follow it north. Eliminate any chance of a screw-up."

"We don't know what it looks like," Gadgets told him. The Stony Man electronics wizard pointed to the captured long-distance transceiver. "We only have the radio. I could transmit and backscan to their signal when they answered, but they know the voice of their man. We could blow it."

"Let's wait until they show up at the drop," Lyons advised.

"When exactly do you expect the delivery of the dope?" the patrol agent asked.

Flor spoke. "They didn't say a time. The one in the truck said they were making good time north. Said they were a hundred miles south of the border."

"A hundred miles?" Miles said. "When was this?"

"Two hours ago."

"Hey, friends," Agent Miles laughed. "Your people might be waiting for you. Trucks move fast on those Mexican highways."

"The Drug Enforcement Agency's already watching the address," Flor countered. "I gave them the address when I requested the unmarked cars."

"Those unmarked cars," Gadgets asked, "will they look like cars? Or will they look like unmarked police cars?"

"No way, hombre," Miles bantered. "They'll look like people cars. Your associate..." Miles nodded to Flor "...has the right credentials. The DEA operates its own used-car lot. They use them once, then sell them off. They buy cars, sell cars, take trade-ins, and they go straight into the war on Dope International. Always good cars. We use them to put the snap on coyotes."

The pilot of the National Guard helicopter returned to the border patrol's base. Flor and Patrol Agent Miles went into the office to confirm, via border-patrol radio, the waiting unmarked cars and the surveillance of the drop address.

Able Team gave their equipment a final check as the helicopter's rotors revved. When Flor returned from the office, she slipped her Kevlar Windbreaker over a denim jump suit. She put the fourth secure-frequency hand-radio in one of the Windbreaker's pockets. As she strapped on a bandolier of Uzi mags, Lyons shouted to her over the rotorthrob, "We need someone to stay here to coordinate."

"If you think you must, then you must," Flor told him. "The three of us can take them without you."

"I mean you," Lyons told her.

"No!"

"You're already wounded. No more talk. Pilot, up! Take it up!"

Lyons shoved her backward out the side door. Falling to the pavement only two feet below, she grabbed at the skid as the helicopter floated away.

Lyons looked down as Flor cursed him, her words unheard over the roar of the rotorblast.

A hundred feet above the parking lot of the Drug Enforcement Agency offices in San Diego, they saw a man in a suit run through the streetlights.

He stood in the rotorstorm as the helicopter touched down. Lyons jumped to the asphalt and helped Gadgets and Blancanales unload suitcases of weapons and electronic gear. Reaching the helicopter, the DEA officer stopped them.

"I just got a report from the stake-out cars," he shouted to Able Team as the rotors turned above them. "The truck waited there for an hour or so. Then two carloads of Federals showed up and escorted the truck away."

"What!" Lyons gasped.

"Yeah, Federals they said. Described them as..." the DEA field officer read from the report "...unmarked Dodge with blackwall tires, institutional white, no trim. Antennas for radio telephones and police-band communications. Four Caucasian males. Crew cuts, suits, no sideburns, mustaches or beards. Second car was a pickup truck with blackwalls, no trim, antennas for radio telephone and police bands. Two clean-cut Caucasians in suits. What does that sound like to you?"

"Federals," Lyons agreed. "Or someone trying hard to look official. What do they mean, 'escorted'? Did they arrest them or what?"

"No, nothing like that. They helped the Mexicans back out the truck, and now they're all out on Otay Mesa Road. Our cars are keeping them in sight."

"Where does the road go?"

"The airfield."

"Got to stop them!" Lyons said as he climbed into the helicopter. They heard him shouting to the pilots.

Blancanales, swinging their equipment back into the Huey, asked two questions of the field agent. "Those Federals. They show anybody any identification?"

The agent shook his head.

"And did the agency, I mean, the Central Intelligence Agency give you any calls this morning?"

"Are you kidding? The CIA would never call us. We're only law enforcement. They're above all laws."

With a quick salute, Blancanales thanked the agent. Lyons leaned out the side door as the rotors revved to lift off. "Tell your people we're on our way!"

"What?"

Stepping onto the skid, Lyons shouted directly into the agent's ear. "Tell your follow cars we're on our way!"

Then the asphalt fell away. Standing on the skid, Lyons looked down at the rooftops and lights of downtown San Diego. Blancanales buckled on his safety harness and extended a hand to his partner.

Inside, Lyons jerked the side door closed. He shouted to his partners over the noise of the rotors and fuselage vibration, "Odds are, those Harvard boys are escorting the truck to a plane."

"Use the intercom," Gadgets shouted back.

Lyons pointed forward to the pilots. Gadgets and Blancanales nodded. They leaned close to Lyons.

"This could not be a Langley game," Gadgets told his partners. "The 'crazy dust'. The gangs. The M-16 from Vietnam. That theater for hate movies. Please tell me I'm crazy even to think this is a CIA game. Please."

"Maybe they could be Russians," Blancanales suggested.

"With the Cuban Commies cooperating to break it up?" Gadgets countered. "That doesn't help me at all. I want to believe those freaked-out right-wingers in Washington wouldn't want to start a war between black people and white people."

"Maybe it's a propaganda operation that got out of control," Blancanales said. "To make the Cubans and the Libyans and Russians look like psycho terrorists."

"Forget that talk!" Lyons told them. "There's two hundred kilos of 'crazy dust' in that truck. Towers said just one sniff of the stuff turns those punks into psycho killers. Two hundred kilos would make an army of psycho killers. An army from hell, ripping our country apart. We're stopping the truck before they load the drug on a plane. If we wipe out a CIA operation, that's their problem."

His partners nodded. Resolved, they suited up for the fight. They put on their blood-crusted battle armor and loaded their weapons. For the three men of Able Team, the questions of responsibility for the terror and the weapons and the drug became meaningless. Whether the conspiracy originated in the Kremlin or Tripoli or within a secret clique of extremists within the United States government, their mission remained the same: protect the people of the United States.

18

Three sets of taillights streaked along the desert road. In the distance, across an expanse of empty desert, a cluster of lights and parallel lines of lights marked the location of the airfield. To the east, the horizon paled with the early false dawn of summer.

Lyons sat at the helicopter's left side door. He had taken the twenty-inch barrel from the bullet-smashed Atchisson and replaced the short barrel of his own Atchisson. With his weapon loaded with a magazine of one-ounce armor-piercing slugs, he waited.

Blancanales sat at the right side door with his M-16/M-203 over-and-under assault rifle-grenade launcher. He had loaded the grenade launcher with a high-explosive 40mm shell. A bandolier of high-explosive and phosphorous grenades crossed his black Kevlar-and-steel battle armor.

Gadgets stayed in the center, where he could pass ammunition and weapons to either side and also man the scrambled radio to the truck carrying the drugs. With the radio's power on, he, too, waited.