The younger officer spoke. "Now follow the line of approach back.''
The image shifted to reveal the scar where the crash-landing jet had plowed through the desert brush.
"It landed intact," the young officer continued. "It went in under the pilot's control. After the plane got hit by the rockets, the pilot maintained control long enough to put the plane down. If we had the resolution, we could probably see their footprints going into the brush. I'm willing to bet they torched the plane themselves to confuse the ground forces."
"Did they get any messages out?"
"There was a Mayday call. They even said, 'We're going down. We are hit by rockets from the Mexican army.' We erased the tapes. No inquiry will ever hear that."
"Any messages to their superiors?"
"Didn't have the time or the transmission power. And they don't work that way. On their missions, they go in, they make their hit, they come out. Sometimes they hit targets of opportunity. Usually no one knows what they've done until the debriefing. Stony Man is a very special operation. Very loose."
"Impossible to anticipate."
"That's it. Punch in those other coordinates."
The older man touched the keyboard. The screen flashed and another satellite image appeared. On the whorls and lines of this image, they saw a cluster of wrecks. The senior officer touched a key and the image expanded.
They saw a flat hill littered with the wreckage of four helicopters. The senior man shook his head at the sight.
"Millions of dollars of the International's equipment. What exactly did those hotshots carry in with them?"
"Rifles, pistols."
"They didn't do that with rifles."
"They seem to be operating with indigenous forces. That's the report from Mexico."
"What indigenous forces?"
"Indians."
"What?"
"That's what Mexico says. Seems Indians are growing opium in the mountains. There have always been gang wars for the control of the production, so the farmers had their own militias, men with shotguns and rifles to protect the crops. Then, when the International sent in the Mexican army to organize the opium farmers, things went crazy. The militias wiped out army patrols and took their weapons. Now the militias have got automatic rifles, machine guns, mortars. Their armament matches the army, because it is the army's..."
"Including a helicopter."
"They believe so. The army sent in six helicopter troopships and a light plane. They've only found the wreckage of the plane and five troopships. Now they've got reports of the Able Team hotshots in Culiacan trying to buy fuel."
"What's the range of that model of helicopter?" asked the senior man.
"It could make Culiacan. The locals had agents at the airport and the doper landing strips around the city. Nothing. So I pulled a computer analysis of both areas. Visual spectrum and infrared of the mountains around the fighting and the desert around Culiacan. No helicopter. Not that that means anything, of course. They could have it covered. But it's a spooky situation. They could show up anywhere."
"Why wouldn't they go north to the border?"
"Oh, let's hope they get that stupid. If they fly for the border, they'll come into our radar. Or if they put out a transmission and identify themselves, no matter where they are, we'll zap them so fast they won't know what hit them."
Lieutenant Soto of the 5th Army Division of the republic of Mexico turned from Highway 15 and guided his jeep through the ruts and flooded sinkholes of the pueblo's road. The previous day's storm had flooded the fields and washed soil and branches into the road, but the jeep's low gear powered through the mud and debris.
He consulted the map that a local policeman had drawn for him. Passing the row of houses lining the road, he turned down the intersecting road, not actually a road but two deep ruts cutting through the thick grass.
He saw the grove ahead of him. The tires of a heavy truck had flattened the grass. He saw places where the truck had bogged down and spun its tires, digging holes in the ruts and spraying the roadside with mud.
He thought this odd. His map showed another road that trucks utilized to take produce to market. No truck driver would take his vehicle through mud and soggy grass when he could use a gravel road.
Unless the driver had been unfamiliar with the area.
In his duties as an investigative assistant in the division's antidrug and anticontraband office, Lieutenant Soto had driven through all the back roads of the state of Nayarit. And he had encountered all the tricks and mistakes of the smugglers. He had found airstrips planted with corn. He had arrested North American surfers in San Bias as they refueled seaplanes from boats. He had found the wreckage of a plane, stinking with corpses and bloody marijuana, that crashed after torrential rain had doused the fires marking their landing field.
But smugglers using an army of Mexico helicopter?
When he first received the report of the helicopter down in an orchard, he had thought it could only be as told: an army troopship had been caught in the storm and had landed. But when he called the sergeant responsible for the scheduling of helicopter flights, the sergeant told him all the division's helicopters had been grounded by the weather.
Grounded at the division base.
Then he called the federal offices. No helicopters missing. Calls to the army units in the states of Jalisco and Zacateca found no missing helicopters.
Now the lieutenant would see whether the policeman's report had been true in the first place.
Glancing to the penciled map from time to time, he followed the lane, and the truck tracks, to the avocado grove. He saw deep marks in the mud where the truck had cut between the rows of trees. The lieutenant followed the tracks.
He saw the caretaker's house. A few hundred meters farther he came to another house. He stopped the jeep. Stepping through the thick mulch of matted leaves and red mud, he went to the door and knocked. The door swung open.
A dog ran out. The lieutenant looked inside. The single room of the house had been recently swept. Looking down at the concrete step, he saw chicken feathers and the smears of rain-soaked droppings.
Inside, he saw only cardboard boxes of trash: The dog had overturned the boxes to gnaw on chicken bones and stale tortillas. Beer cans had rolled everywhere.
Bootprints marked the floor. He stepped into the dirt. The prints of his army-issue boots matched the prints on the floor.
The lieutenant paced through the interior, looking for any other sign of an army squad — ration cartons, broken equipment, initials carved in the whitewashed walls — but he found nothing. Only the bootprints and the boxes of trash remained of the strangers that the policeman had reported stayed the night here.
He did not return to his jeep. Instead, he followed the bootprints into the grove. He noticed the prints of other boots, different from the army-issue boots. Some of the prints indicated men of normal size, other prints suggested very large men. He attempted to estimate the number of men by counting the boot-prints, but the boots crossed and recrossed and obscured one another. He could determine only that there had been several soldiers and two large men.
Following the prints to a clearing in the grove, he saw the cut leaves and branches. He looked at the branches above his head and saw that the branches had been trimmed off in an approximate circle. As if by rotor blades.
The bootprints led to the center of the clearing, where they stopped.
The tire tracks of the truck cut through the mud to the center of the clearing, then stopped too.
Rainwater filled the parallel marks of helicopter skids. He paced the marks and finally confirmed the policeman's report.
A helicopter, of the type used to carry troops, had parked there overnight.