use them to put the snap on
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.
'Hit the lights,' Lyons said into the intercom.
The pilot switched on the helicopter's xenon spotlight. Sudden noon illuminated the two-lane road. Exactly as the DEA report had described, Able Team saw a white Dodge leading the truck. A pickup truck followed.
'Tell the follow cars to fall back,' Lyons said next.
Breaking in on the radio frequency of the cars that trailed the drug convoy, the pilot advised the officers of the interception. Lyons looked back. Far behind, he saw a set of headlights pull to the side of the road.
'Wizard… tell the scum what's happening.'
Gadgets flipped up the transmit switch. 'You in the truck. Stop. We are prepared to destroy if you continue. Stop or die.'
He flicked off the transmit. As he waited for an answer, he called out to his partners, 'Is that straight talk? Did I tell them?'
An electronically resynthesized voice answered. 'Whoever you are, you are interfering in the operations of
