Army of Devils

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