Justice by Fire

'Well, say, honkies, What you doin' on our side a' town?'

'We're just tourists,' Blancanales answered. 'Reading a road map.'

'Got any money?' the driver — the man with the cloud of ratted hair — demanded.

Gadgets looked up as he deactivated the minimike, shook his head. Slowly, Blancanales reached under his coat.

'Keep your hand where it is, mother!' the driver shouted. The second man threw open the Olds's passenger-side door.

Lyons stood up with his silenced Colt held at assault height, his right hand braced against his gut, his left hand gripping the Colt's fold-down lever.

Glass exploded as he swept the interior of the Olds-mobile with bursts of silent .45 ACP hollowpoints. The first burst exploded the driver's head. Hunks of hairy skull plastered the inside of the shattered windshield. The second burst caught the man in the turban as he twisted in the seat to point a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The three slugs tore away his left arm and his jaw. A horrible whine bubbled from his devastated face as his right hand spasmed, pulling both triggers of the shotgun. His left leg disintegrated in the flash.

In motion as the first man died, Blancanales put his Beretta 93-R on line. He ripped the front seat with bursts of subsonic 9mm steel-cored slugs, ending the agony of the half-faced, maimed felon. Blancanales 'killed' the headless driver again, the corpse jumping and twitching as it fell to tangle with the mangled corpse of his partner in terror.

Lyons fired two bursts into the back seat. He glanced inside, saw only the two dead men.

'Time to go!' he shouted to his partners.

Already in motion, Gadgets ran to the other car. Able Team accelerated with smoking tires. In seconds, they left the scene of sudden death far behind. They continued west on Century Boulevard. Gadgets looked over to Lyons. He broke the silence.

'One question, Ironman.'

'What?'

Gadgets followed the taillights of the rental Dodge as it turned off the boulevard. Several blocks short of the location marked on the map, the two cars stopped.

Fire-gutted and vandalized houses lined the streets. Many houses had been moved from the lots, leaving only foundations where families had lived.

Blancanales threw Prescott into the back seat and cuffed his wrists and ankles behind him, linking the cuffs to pull Prescott's ankles up to his wrists.

The three warriors of Able Team assembled their weapons, and slipped into their Kevlar and steel-plate battle armor. Bandoliers crisscrossed the black armor.

The laughter of only a minute ago had gone. Now they talked quietly as they armed themselves.

'Prescott didn't have any prearranged signal,' Blancanales told the others. 'Not even a code on the walkie-talkie...'

'So he wouldn't freak the family,' Gadgets added.

'Right,' Blancanales agreed. 'He was to drive up slow and the Blancoswould take them. So they'll be waiting curbside. What I thought is we could drive up with the high beams on to blind them. Second car stays a block back, no lights. When they step out, I'll floor it.'

'I'll ride shotgun,' Lyons volunteered. 'In the back seat, with the Atchisson, I'll have 180 degrees field of fire to the rear. Forget the windows and roof posts. I'll put down everything in the street.'

'They'll scramble to chase us,' Blancanales continued. 'But I'll kill the lights after about a block and wait...'

'And I'll come up behind them with the Beretta,' Gadgets told them. 'Man! Wish I had a cassette tape of the girls and the mother and father talking in Spanish. Would have been perfect with that minimike. El ultimo perfecto.'

'Too bad.' By touch, Lyons checked the number of tiny MU-50G grenades in the thigh pockets of his night- black fatigues. 'But it ain't a perfect world.'

Blancanales put his hands on his partners' shoulders. He spoke in sober, sincerely felt words. 'But we're doing what we can, right? For a better world?'

'Don't get ideological,' Gadgets told him with a straight face. 'I'm only doing this for a pension. Doing what they tell me, punching that time card, till the day I can retire to a life of luxury.'

The three men laughed at Gadgets's standard put-on.

A roar of auto-fire stopped their laughter.

* * *

In the gray luminescence of the Los Angeles night, the bullet-torn Dodge lurched to a stop on flattened tires. Slugs from the Uzis of the Guerreros Blancoscontinued to hammer the pocked doors. Ricochets slammed into the stucco of the deserted houses across the street. Captain Madrano emptied his second magazine of cartridges into the driver's door, then reloaded his scorching hot Uzi.

Surveying the street, Madrano watched as his soldiers continued raking the wrecked Dodge. He had fired a total of sixty rounds into the car. Certainly, he and his soldiers had killed the 'specialists from Washington' riding inside. He shouted out to his men: '!Alto! !Alto!'

The auto-fire died away. Madrano motioned for his lieutenant to check the hulk.

Zigzagging as they had taught him at Fort Bragg, the lieutenant dashed into the street. He looked into the Dodge, then flicked on a flashlight. After searching the interior with the beam, he called out to the captain: 'El federal!'

Captain Madrano left his concealment. The stink of gasoline swirled in the cool night. The flashlight's beam illuminated a sickening mass of flesh and torn clothing. Spilled intestines reeked of excrement. Vinyl and auto glass and foam plastic mixed with the gore.

What remained of the head had the face of Agent Gallucci.

Confused, not believing what had happened, Captain Madrano backed away from the car. The stink of gasoline choked him. He looked down at the asphalt. Gasoline and blood flowed from the bullet-patterned automobile. The captain grabbed the flashlight from his lieutenant and looked in again.

No corpses sprawled in the back of the Dodge. And only one body — not actually a body any longer, actually a tangled spill of body parts — covered the front seat.

Agent Gallucci.

Captain Madrano had killed Colonel Quesada's most effective North American. A North American who operated within the same agencies threatening the Families of El Salvador with investigation and indictment and slander. Though Colonel Quesada had forgiven his blunder in the mountains south of San Jose, because of the friendship of their families and their intermingled bloodlines, how could Madrano beg forgiveness for this?

Shining the flashlight down on the horror that had been a valuable informer, Madrano prepared his explanation to his father's friend. He prepared his defense as a playwright imagines a scene, the dialogue flying back and forth between the characters, the hand gestures, the drama of emphasizing his words with soft words, then shouts, then silence.

No problem. I can explain it. The North American misunderstood or disregarded instructions.

Captain Madrano had always explained away his failures and mistakes. The students looked alike. The house numbers had been tampered with. One street looked like another. The man with the pistol and uniform had not looked like a real policeman. I'll be more careful next time. Please do not shame my father and my family because of this insignificant and forgettable error. Please, for the honor of the army, forgive me…

If the other squad succeeds in executing the Communist family, Captain Madrano thought, all will be well. He could hear his impassioned speech to Colonel Quesada: 'Gallucci's blunder was unfortunate, but the Communists died. True, it was a quick death. It was not the justice I wanted to give them. But it is a step onward to victory of the fatherland!'

For two minutes, the men of the death squad stood in the street and waited as Captain Madrano stood motionless at the wreck, staring down at his error, mentally rehearsing the scene in which he would win the forgiveness of Colonel Quesada. The men glanced at their watches. They looked around at the darkness.

Unlike the police of San Salvador, the police of Los Angeles did not honor the extraordinary privileges of