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  "Don't even tell me about it." Lyons slung the XM-174 grenade launcher over his shoulder, let it hang by its strap. He took an M-16, checked the tape that bound the two thirty-round magazines end to end. Then he buckled a web belt of magazine pouches around his waist.

  Gadgets looked at all the armament. "All right, peace through superior firepower. Twenty eight minutes until whatever."

  Lyons went out to the night to wait.

  * * *

  Rotor-throb descended from the stars. High above the yacht's deck, Blancanales leaned back against the safety strap and quickly swept the sky with the binoculars. He found a black silhouette. Even as he keyed his hand-radio, Gadgets' voice boomed over the yacht's loudspeakers: "Gentlemen, this is most definitely an unexpected event. Repeat, this is Number Ten. Number Ten."

  Flashes on the horizon caught Blancanales' attention. He focused on the southern horizon, saw red tracers stream from the distant sky. Dashes of red and orange tracers arced upward, then one more flash revealed the deck and superstructure of a freighter. The scene became as bright as midday as a magnesium flare floated down on a parachute.

  The white light glinted off of the wings of a prop-plane.

  "Oh, shit," Blancanales muttered. "Somebody screwed up." His hand-radio buzzed. Lyons' voice came on:

  "What's going on?"

  "Mucho problemas."

  Like a jackhammer on steel, the sound of tracers raking the deck of the freighter banged alongside the yacht. Ricochets buzzed in all directions, some invisible, others searing red. Blancanales watched lines of tracers shoot from the silhouette of the helicopter above them. Then the gunner targeted the yacht.

  A long burst ripped the length of Able Team's sailing vessel. Blancanales watched the curtain of red phosphorescent tracers pass within an arm's reach of him. The roar of the passing slugs was an unforgettable sound. The wooden mast he was hanging from bucked and shuddered with the impacts of slugs. His hand radio buzzed again. Lyons yelled: "Get out of there! That stuff passed so close it lit you up."

  Scrambling down the mast's ladder, Blancanales did not stop to answer his comrade-in-arms. Only when his boots hit the deck did he key his hand-radio.

  "I'm down. Where are the Mezas? We gotta get out of here!"

  Shouting came from the deck of the looming freighter. Fifteen feet above where Lyons stood, he saw a man brace a weapon on the freighter's railing and fire at the helicopter. It was a belt-felt machine gun. Brass showered down on Lyons. He saw a line of tracers cross the fuselage of the helicopter.

  The rotor-noise deafened Lyons as he ran to the rear to identify the freighter's boarding ramp. He crouched as the helicopter's door gunner sought out the machine gun on the freighter's deck. Tracers sparked in the shadows.

  Xenon light revealed the machine gunner on deck. He lifted the heavy weapon and fired from the hip. Tracers crisscrossed. The xenon beam died as slugs slammed into the helicopter. Then the machine gunner died, a stream of tracers from the helicopter finding him and slamming him back against the railing. Lyons watched the slugs rip through the man's body, tracers blazing through him to punch into the yacht's deck. Burst after burst hit the dead man.

  "We must board now," Flor called urgently to Lyons. She hurried up the ramp, a CAR-15 in one-hand, a satchel in the other. She had the collar of her jacket turned up. The copter was gone.

  The boarding was hasty, uneventful. The business was accomplished wordlessly, in a silence blessedly rotor-free.

  The uninvited helicopter was surely the work of the two hoods stung by the real, but late, Marchardo. To ensure the end of the deal. All it had succeeded in doing was scare away the attack plane.

  The buglike menace roared in again from the freighter as the two mere agents emerged at the top of the ramp. It sped over the ship.

  Flor led the descent to the yacht, followed by Senor Meza and three other men. Two were in suits, one in a leather Eisenhower jacket and carrying a Thompson.

  Senor Meza checked over his shoulder as the helicopter veered away, circling the ships.

  "These men are your link with a Mr. Pardee," Flor told Lyons as she passed, nodding toward the others. "Wait until we cast off from the freighter before dealing with the helicopter."

  Lyons laughed cynically. He saluted Flor. "Yes, ma'am! Anything you say!"

  "Don't sweat it, Ironman," Blancanales said beside Lyons. "It's only air holding that thing up..."

  Able Team followed the others to the bridge as the yacht cast off. Flor and Senor Meza leaned over the radar screen while Gadgets took the ship's wheel. The other three gangsters peered through the windows, looking for the helicopter. Lyons shouted:

  "I suggest you all get below..."

  Blancanales cut him off, repeated the words in Spanish. Tracers ended all discussion. Streaks of red shattered the windows. Glass showered the gangsters and Senor Meza as they scrambled down the stairs. Flor raised her CAR.

  Lyons jerked her down. She fell in the broken glass, tried to shove him away. Slugs slammed into the bridge again. Flor lurched.

  "You're hit!" grunted Lyons.

  Silence. Then they heard the helicopter circling. Its gun fired on the freighter again. Flor groaned, sucked down a breath. Lyons slipped his hands under her jacket and searched for the wound.

  "Get the helicopter!" Gadgets shouted. "I'll take care of her."

  "Let's go!" Blancanales dragged Lyons away from the woman, pushed him through the door. "Wait until they come back, then pop them." Blancanales pointed to the XM-174 grenade launcher that Lyons carried with the M-16.

  "I'm not waiting!" Lyons fumbled through the magazine pouches around his waist, seeking the magazine tagged with textured tape. He dropped the magazine from his M-16 and jammed in the tagged mag. "Come and get me, fly-boys!"

  Popping single shots, Lyons sent tiny tracers at the helicopter. When he got the range, he fired bursts, the tracers arcing into the distance. The helicopter broke away from the freighter and crossed in an instant the three hundred yards that separated the ships.

  "That got their attention." Lyons slung the M-16 over his back, then took the XM-174 in his hands and released the safety as he climbed to the top of the bridge housing. The helicopter swooped in at water level, raking the deck of the yacht with more machine-gun fire. Lyons waited.

  The helicopter then paused, hovering only a few feet from the deck railing. Lyons saw the face of the door gunner over the grenade launcher's sight as he squeezed off the first 40mm round. The upper half of the gunner's body disappeared in a flash of light. Lyons fired round after round into the interior of the helicopter — fragmentation, concussion, white phosphorous, fragmentation again.

  Veering straight up, the helicopter pilot tried to gain altitude. Lyons continued firing, blowing away a pontoon, spraying the ocean with streamers of white phosphorous. Then a blast, a series of blasts, a boiling explosion as the copter was blown apart into a crackling cascade of hot fragments and phosphorous rain. Shards of wreckage showered the sea.

  "Great shooting!" Gadgets Schwarz nodded to Lyons as he returned to the bridge. Squatting amidst broken glass and weapons, Gadgets was fumbling with Flor's nylon jacket as the woman sat in the captain's chair, holding a frosty beer can against her shoulder.

  "I thought you were hit..." Lyons started.

  "I was..."

  "With this." Gadgets pulled a flattened slug from the jacket's fabric. "She's wearing a Kevlar wind-breaker. Neat, huh?"

  Glancing outside, Lyons saw several bullet holes through the brass railing that encircled the bridge deck. The bullets had drilled through the brass, then the teakwood exterior, and finally through the interior's teakwood paneling.

  Flor popped the top of the beer, gulped.

  "You are one lucky woman," Lyons told her.

  Foam spilling down her face and onto her chest, she offered the beer to Carl Lyons, saying:

  "Very lucky. There's nineteen hours and thirty minutes until we dock in Jamaica."

  4


  Back in La Paz, ex-Lieutenant Navarro spread out the photos of the North Americans on his desk top. First, he arranged the thirty-six exposures in chronological order, referring to the negative to confirm the correct sequence. He numbered the photos. He studied the exposures, looking for the subsequences within the thirty-six. He knew the surveillance agent had used a motorized camera. Intervals of only a second separated some photos. A pause of seconds separated other photos.

  He divided the photos into four groups. Each group represented bursts of exposures. The agent had simply focused on the moving subjects and held down the trigger-button. The sequences allowed Navarro to observe the interaction of the four men, as if he watched four film clips.

  Though two of the men could possibly be Central or South American, they did not exhibit any distinctive mannerisms: they did not have the expressive hand gestures of Mexicans or South Americans, nor did they wear the scowling features of ex-military officers. The other two looked North American: light hair, fair skin, quick smiles. Navarro did not believe they were European — they did not show English reserve, French gestures, German mannerisms — but he knew he could be wrong.

  One thing puzzled Navarro: though three of the men often turned to the fourth as if he were their leader, they did not defer to him. They did not surround him like bodyguards. They did not walk close to him, as junior associates would. And he was not their prisoner. They joked with him, questioned him. One of the photos showed the blond man pointing a finger at the apparent leader as if the North American was threatening him. But in the next exposure, approximately two seconds later, the four men laughed.

  Without knowing the identities and roles of the four men, Navarro could not interpret their actions in that scene. He selected several of the photos for blow-up.

  Today, he would ask El Negro for authorization to post agents outside the Drug Enforcement Agency offices. Those agents would watch for the four men in the photos.

  There was another way to gain the identities of the four men. Navarro knew an expatriate American who recruited guards and soldiers for exiled conservative politicians and retired military officers. The Yankee boasted that he knew "every American mercenary south of the Rio Grande."

  Navarro would test the Yankee.

  * * *

  Neon flashed behind longhorn skulls. Wagon wheels, frayed leather horse collars, Mexican blankets, weathered ranch tools hung on the mirrored walls.

  Strips of red, white, and green bunting — the colors of the Texas flag — trimmed the black plastic bar and the chrome of the stage. Jamaica, too, was weird.

  European tourists in designer jeans and Hawaiian shirts hustled the black waitresses. A Jamaican woman in an Annie Oakley buckskin dress shrieked, fired a six-gun cap pistol.

  Three young Jamaican men in black slacks and white shirts and ties watched the tourists and resplendent Jamaican cowboys and cowgirls. The red blazers hanging on the backs of their chairs identified the young men as workers from a nearby hotel. An immaculate black cowboy passed the three hotel workers, the cowboy's high-heeled lizardskin boots and tailored jeans giving him the mincing steps of a debutante. The workers looked to one another and laughed. Soon they paid for their beers and left.

  Craig Pardee came through the backstage door. He came to the table where Blancanales — a.k.a. Pete Marchardo — waited. Pardee signaled for two beers before he sat down.

  "My girl's got the stage jitters," he told Blancanales. "She don't usually sing country, but it's the only work she can get. They hired her 'cause she's got a Texas accent. This country-and-western fad, you know. Told her I'd take care of her, give her the high life while I did my business, but she says she's got to work. Got to advance her career. What a career, breaking her heart for tourists and niggers! She ought to go to Hollywood."

  Blancanales took in the crowd around them.

  "What's a Western saloon doing in Jamaica anyway?"

  "It's a conspiracy. Prairie fairies of the world."

  They laughed. Pardee raised his beer mug. "To you, Marchardo. And me. And all the soldiers like us. Right or wrong, we're real."

  "There it is."

  Pardee grinned. "And the marines!"

  "What outfit were you in?" Blancanales asked.

  "101st Airborne. Death From Above. Winged Victory." Pardee's grin suddenly became a sneer. "The PAVN couldn't stop us but a goddamned army of hippies and politicians did."

  The backstage door opened again. A young blond woman in a black velvet pantsuit and ten-gallon hat carried a guitar to the stage. Pardee's sour look faded. He watched her admiringly as she adjusted the microphone, tuned her guitar. "God, she's so pretty," he said out loud.

  While Pardee gazed at the girl on the stage, Blancanales studied Pardee. The man had a face scorched and creased by years of exposure. Squint lines marked the corners of his eyes. White sunburn scars splotched his high cheekbones. When Craig Pardee had sneered, Blancanales noticed a very limited mobility to the right side of his face. Now he saw why. A pattern of little scars crossed his face and disappeared into his short-cut hair.

  Though Pardee stood six foot in street shoes, his muscles made him look squat. He wore a size nineteen collar. But despite his bulk, all his motions were fluid and precise. Pardee was a hard man. He was the image of the professional soldier.

  Watching the girl now, however, he had the soft eyes and smile of a boy in love. Blancanales decided to drop it on Pardee: "Oh, yeah. I want to introduce you to some friends of mine. They're good guys. And they're looking for work."

  Pardee turned to Blancanales, his face suddenly expressionless, his eyes dead, but the arteries and tendons in his throat stood from his weathered skin.

  "What?"

  "Slow, Pardee. Slow. I didn't break your security. They don't know what's going on. They don't even know your name. I told them nothing. I just said there's a chance for work, and that I'd vouch for them. That's it. You say no, they fly on to Miami. No problem."

  "Who are they?"

  "We just came off a run. One guy's like me, a shooter. Great with a rifle, better with a pistol. The other guy's into electronics. Radio, radar, high-tech stuff. But when there's trouble, he knows how to rock and roll."

  "Drugs?"

  "It was work. There's no war on, so..."

  "I mean them. They into drugs?"

  "I've lived with them for weeks at a time, on ships, in neighborhoods. I never saw them do anything except a little alcohol. Pardee, you don't know that business. Dopers don't last long in the dope trade."

  "What's their background?"

  "Nam. Some police trouble. The shooter says he's on the run. The electronics man is clean."

  "So what's he doing running dope?"

  "Making money." .

  On the stage, the girl began her song. She accompanied herself with the guitar. Pardee turned away from Blancanales and watched her. He gently responded to the rhythm of the guitar chords as he sipped his beer, making it last. Blancanales waited.

  The girl paused after her song and Pardee applauded. His clapping moved two or three other patrons to applaud. Blancanales joined in, but the applause was lost in the nonstop barroom noise. Pardee glared miserably at the tourists and phony cowfolk who were ignoring the girl. Then he demanded of Blancanales: "Who else will recommend them?"

  "Ask Senor Meza. Ask the people we both know. But I can't give you any other names — security works both ways. I didn't give anybody your name, I can't give anybody's name to you. They'd think you were Federal. And then it would be all over for me. But anybody on the yacht will vouch for them. They wiped out a hijack most professionally."

  Without commenting, Pardee returned his attention to the girl. He listened to the several more songs in her set. He didn't ask any more questions of Blancanales.

  The girl hit the last chords of her last song as the jukebox blasted away her final lyrics, drowning out the few patrons who had the courtesy to applaud.

  She hurried off the stage and
rushed through the backstage door.

  "Assholes," Pardee muttered, casting a surly eye at the crowd. "Don't have good manners. They pay to hear a singer, then they don't listen. They work in an office, then dress up like cowboys. Civilians. I even see puke faggots wearing camouflage on the streets. Total mystery to me."

  "They're bored," Blancanales replied. "They wear suits during the day, so they want something different. Like you, you're not in uniform. You're wearing a suit."

  Pardee grinned. His smile looked like the fixed grimace of a skull. "Suit's just another uniform to me. You wouldn't believe how many suits I've ruined with other people's blood."

  The girl arrived. "Craig, let's get out of here," she said immediately, pulling at Pardee's arm. She carried a guitar case and had an oversized purse over her shoulder, but no more Texas hat. She glanced at Blancanales. He saw tears streaming from her eyes.

  Pardee threw money on the table, then followed the girl through the crowd. Blancanales followed Pardee.

  Blancanales fell back for an instant and spoke to the miniature microphone in his lapel. "We're coming out."

  Waiting in the parking lot, Gadgets and Lyons heard their partner's announcement through the earphones of the radio receiver. They slouched down in the rented car's seats.

  At the exit, Pardee turned to Blancanales. "We'll drop her off first. Then we'll go down to the docks."

  "My friends are outside in the..."

  But Pardee didn't hear. He saw the club manager standing with a waitress. Pointing his index finger like a pistol, Pardee sneered into his face: "You cater to lowlife assholes!"

  The manager tried to slap the finger aside. Pardee drove the finger powerfully into the manager's solar plexus. The manager collapsed gasping.

  In the parking lot, the girl cried as she walked. "I'm never going to sing in a beer bar again. Never! It is just so humiliating, it's so..."

  "You were good," Pardee consoled her. "I couldn't hear you most of the time, but you sounded good. You looked good..."