five children. We hang the colonel, cut off his balls and hang him!'
'I say give him to the people,' Lyons commented.
'No!' The lieutenant countered. 'Military justice.'
Blancanales's low, resonant voice interrupted the shouting. 'If the settlers want revenge, good. But it will not feed the children or help the women who lost their husbands. If they kill Gomez, — they will only kill one slaver. They must still fear all the others out there.'
'What others?' the young farmer demanded. 'We see all dead.'
'Gomez and the soldiers were only one patrol. There are many more soldiers in this region. Mercenaries. Killers. They take Indians to be slaves. They wanted you for slaves. Soon we go to attack them. If you want revenge, come. Then your families will be safe.'
'More soldiers? Of Brazil?'
'No!' the lieutenant shouted. 'Traitors. Mercenaries in the uniform of the army of Brazil,' he explained in Portuguese.
Fear and hatred and rage pulsed in the faces of the men. Some of them rushed away to tell the others in the lounge. Women shrieked. All the men, even a few of the injured, crowded around Lieutenant Silveres and the foreigners, shouting, waving their fists.
'They want the rifles of the dead soldiers,' the lieutenant translated. 'To defend themselves. Some of them want to know where the other soldiers are. To attack them. Others want the army to come. Others fear the army, because of Gomez.'
'Will you come with us?' Blancanales asked the crowd in Portuguese. 'To attack the slavers?'
'Yes. We attack!'
Lyons grinned to Blancanales. 'Okay, recruiter. Make a deal with these people.'
In the next half hour, Blancanales and Lieutenant Silveres negotiated an agreement with the settlers. Balancing the blood lust of the men against the concern of their wives, Blancanales stated that he needed boat pilots and dependable men to fire heavy weapons, machine guns and grenade launchers, at a distance from the actual fighting. He would not risk the lives of the family men in close fighting.
As payment, and to help the families of men murdered on the riverboat, the settler community would receive all equipment captured from the slavers — boats, weapons, radios and whatever the settlers found at the camp, except for equipment stolen from the government of Brazil.
A work party with lights and power tools left immediately on one of the PT boats. They would strip the heavy weapons and their mounts from the several slaver cruisers and airboats on the other river. Able Team wanted the weapons to be mounted on the fast PT boats.
Other settlers smeared black paint on the riverboat's dinghies. The small aluminum boats and an aluminum canoe found in the cargo would take the assault force ashore. A blacksmith wired sheets of steel together to protect the men who would stay in the patrol boats, to machine-gun and bombard the camp from a distance.
Activity and war spirit replaced the settlers' grief as the refloated riverboat, its lights and windows blacked out, steamed downstream. At the fork where three rivers met — the one from Bolivia, the Mamore and the river leading to the nuclear complex — the riverboat would go no farther.
Gadgets assembled his electronic gear in the mahogany-and-polished brass bridge of the old paddle- wheeler. First, he swept out the shattered glass, then wiped the captain's blood from the walls and floor. The sixty-year-old white-haired immigrant from Zaire had died with a pistol in his hand, defending his ship and his passengers.
Switching on the recorder playback, Gadgets listened to the tape of slaver frequencies during the assault. While he worked, he heard static, the pops and squeaks of over-the-horizon transmitters disrupting the slaver radio frequencies, electronic noise from space. Then came the Asian voice, the words in textbook English, yet alien and macabre when Chan Sann spoke.
Chan Sann relayed a curt announcement of the capture of the steamboat to Abbott — an American, Gadgets judged from his Massachusetts accent. Other transmissions announced numbers of workers captured and the departure of Chan Sann by helicopter. But during the time of the assault, nothing. No clicking of a transmit key, no emergency call words, no voices cut off by rifle fire, nothing.
We did it. Took them out without a sound.
Spreading out his shortwave and scrambler on the captain's chart table, he carefully positioned the units. He set a note pad precisely where his right hand would rest. Then the tape antenna went up the flagpole.
Keying codes, receiving automatic coded replies, Gadgets taped a burst of Stony Man intelligence transmitted from Virginia, relayed by satellite. He replayed it through the scrambler as he wrote out his own message on the yellow pad.
His writing stopped. He listened another moment, then rushed out to find Lyons and Blancanales. Replaying the tape, they heard a conspiracy of depravity and assassination beginning before they were born.
Now, that conspiracy threatened every living man and woman and child in the Free World, and unknown generations of the unborn.
19
Born the eldest son of a Chinese warlord, Wei Ho enjoyed the vast wealth of his clan. The Wei clan had ruled Jiangsu province from the time of his greatgrandfather, a puppet for the British invaders of China. After the English introduced opium and addiction to millions of Chinese, the Wei controlled the drug trade in their region. They reaped an unending harvest of gold. The family maintained an army of mercenaries to enslave the people of the province, enforcing their sovereignty through assassination and atrocity.
The first-born son knew only palaces, European tutors and luxury. After an education in the finest English prep schools and universities, Wei Ho traveled the capitals of Europe, tasting the life and vices of royalty and the very wealthy before returning to China to assume control of his clan's drug trade in Shanghai.
Modern, designed by Europeans wanting a city of boulevards and lights, Shanghai represented a door to the hundreds of millions of the Chinese nation. There, English and French and Portuguese exacted the wealth of the vast but weak nation through 'concessions' imposed by military threat. The European masters erected ornate offices and regal homes, built opera houses and theaters for their own entertainment. Chinese police excluded Chinese from the European sections where the foreigners promenaded on jacaranda-shaded boulevards in the finest Paris fashions.
As China entered the twentieth century, the adventurous and radical among the nation's youth sought the freedom and the Western ideas of Shanghai. Actors, writers, poets crowded the ghettoes. Young girls sought careers denied by their traditions. Idealists read Marx and Engels and Lenin, dreamed of a workers' paradise in China.
This became Wei Ho's world. His playboy life-style and underworld connections endeared him to the decadent rich. The artists enjoyed his patronage. The beautiful young men and women enjoyed his exotic drugs — the finest opium, cocaine from far-off Bolivia, red hashish from Beirut, kif from North Africa. The radicals appreciated his education in philosophy, endlessly discussing their plans of political and cultural revolution in cafes and bookstores as Wei Ho, in his tailored English suits, smoking English cigarettes, smiled at their fantasies.
One night, not in a bookstore or coffee shop or lecture hall, he saw Lan Pin. The girl who would later rule the destinies of a billion Chinese ran from the stage of a cabaret theater, sequins in her bobbed and curled hair, sweat streaking her makeup. When the young Chinese playboy, dressed like a European prince, caught up with her and simply smiled to her, the actress invited him back to her tiny dressing room. They chatted of art and beauty, she thanked him for his roses and champagne. The cabaret's owner interrupted. The fat old man with a blind eye took the beautiful young Lan Pin away to his apartment.
