A mirror flashed. In code.
"Wizard, up there on the ridge." Lyons passed the binoculars to Gadgets. "There's a signal mirror."
"It's Morse," Schwarz declared. "It's saying... esperen... alli... nosotros... los... ayudaremos. Hey, we've got friends up there. They're telling us to lay cool."
Lyons laughed. "I'm cool, you're cool. It's those Mexicans who're..."
High-velocity slugs whined over them. A barrage of rifle grenades fell in a continuous roar of explosions. Then a storm of M-16 fire ripped the area, the Mexicans firing out their magazines in continuous full-auto.
"Here they come!" Davis shouted.
The Mexicans rushed.
On the high ridge above the canyon, Sergeant Mendoza watched the helicopter break off the attack. He signaled to his mortar crew to resume fire, and the riflemen continued blasting the North Americans in the canyon.
Mendoza turned to his radioman. He switched the radio to the helicopter's frequency and took the handset. Behind him, a man shouted.
A soldier rolled down the slope. The sergeant saw the two remaining men of the mortar crew staring wide-eyed at the falling man.
The firing of the other men died away. They all turned to watch the soldier as he came to a flopping stop in the rocks. He did not move. No one spoke. The firefight continued in the canyon below them, distance reducing the reports of the rifles and the explosions of the grenades to pops and sputters.
In the near-silence, the shriek of a heavy-caliber bullet and unnerving slap of the bullet hitting flesh startled the squad. Blood misted in the air as another soldier flew backward from the mortar. He spun and hit the rocks face first. Blood fountained from a hole in his back. Gasping, vomiting blood, the soldier tried to stand. He rolled to the side and sat up. His eyes stared around him. Then he fell back, dead.
Scrambling through the rocks, the squad took cover. Ordering two men to take the places of the dead men at the mortar, Mendoza lifted the handset to hear the pilot of the helicopter calling.
"Sergeant! Sergeant Mendoza..."
The handset was ripped from his hand as the radioman fell backward. Pieces of metal and plastic tinkled on the stones as radio components rained down. A bullet had killed the radioman, then exited through his back to shatter the circuitry of the radio into a thousand pieces.
A man shouted to the other soldiers, and frantically pointed across the canyon to the far mountain. The sergeant raised his field glasses and scanned the mountainsides.
He saw only mesquite and dust and rocks. Nothing moved. Then a semicircle of dust suddenly stirred.
An instant later, a bullet shrieked into the ridge and exploded in the rocks. A man screamed. A near-miss had ricocheted from the rock protecting him, and the smashed, misshapen slug entered his shoulder and erupted through his knee. Two soldiers dragged him below the edge of the ridge and attempted to stop the gushing blood. One glance told Mendoza the man had no hope.
The squad abandoned the ridge and scrambled to the safety of the mountainside, leaving the mortar in place, the 81mm rounds piled on a plastic tarp.
Sergeant Mendoza unslung his FN-FAL para-rifle and swung out the metal-tubing stock. Laying low on the ridge, he braced the long-range kill machine and sighted on the dust thrown up by the rifle on the opposite mountainside.
But in the glare, he could not see the dust. He raised his field glasses to locate the sniper. A bullet exploded against the rocks a step away as the sniper searched for targets.
Squinting through his rifle's peep sight, Mendoza could only adjust for the range by guess. The FN-FAL did not have a click adjustment for extreme ranges. He fired single shots, attempting to find the sniper.
Then he heard the rifle fire behind him.
Lyons switched magazines as the Mexicans rushed the last hundred meters. He returned the load of one-ounce slugs to his bandolier and snapped in the partially empty mag of number-two and double-ought steel shot mix. He took out a second mag of mixed-shot rounds and tucked it into the front pocket of his gray fatigue shirt.
The Mexicans, expecting to find a group of dead and wounded North Americans hiding in the rocks, attempted to finish the foreigners in one rush of sprayed full-auto fire. The men of Able Team waited. Mexican riflemen in concealment overlooking the streambed continued aiming fire into the rocks. The riflemen stopped shooting only when the soldiers closed on the North Americans.
Able Team waited until the Mexicans ran into the maze of rocks. Lyons saw a green uniform rushing toward him. He fired, and the blast lifted the Mexican off his feet and slammed him down. Gadgets triggered a 3-shot burst through another Mexican.
Another soldier spun at the sound of shooting to his side and took a steel storm of number two and double ought in the face. He fell, and Davis put the muzzle of his M-16 against the dead man's chest and killed him again.
A Mexican saw Davis and fired as Lyons fired. High-velocity slugs tore past Davis and exploded on the rocks and the Mexican died, his chest blasted open, one arm and his rifle spinning wildly through the air.
Miguel Coral popped up, fired a burst through a soldier, then dropped down as a rifleman two hundred meters to the south squeezed off a shot. Coral scrambled to another rock and fired at a running soldier, hitting him in one leg. The wounded soldier staggered past Blancanales, who shot him in the back. Then the Politician delivered a mandate of full-auto fire at another Mexican. Slugs from his M-16/M-203 tore the soldier to pieces.
Lyons snatched a glance, then quickly dropped down as a slug from an FN-FAL whined off the rock. But he had seen no other soldier still standing. He took an M-16 from a dead man, changed mags, then called out to his partners: "Anyone hit?"
"I'm bleeding," Davis answered.
"Is it serious?" Lyons called out.
"I don't know. But I'm bleeding like crazy."
Blancanales crawled to Davis. "It's not a bullet wound. He hit his head on a rock."
"Any of the soldiers alive?" Lyons asked.
The others all answered, no.
Lyons shouted out again. "We've got riflemen downstream. One on each side, with heavy rifles. We can't move until we get them. Everyone shift positions and on three, pop up and fire. Got it? Answer me, Davis!"
"I can handle it."
"No hay problema," Coral answered. "I have seen them."
"Shift and fire, shift and fire," Blancanales repeated.
"One... two... three!"
The five men lurched up and fired in a tearing burst. Dropping down, they heard a rifle firing back. They shifted positions in the rocks. One by one, they fired bursts, then dodged down before the rifleman could find them in his sight.
Staying flat on the sand and exposing only one eye, Lyons peered up at the canyon wall. He saw a rifleman pressing a field dressing against a bloody arm. Sighting on the wounded man, Lyons squeezed off a burst. The rifleman's body rolled down the slope.
A second rifleman broke for the safety of the streambed, running a few steps, then sliding down the steep canyon wall. Blancanales and Gadgets and Coral fired simultaneously, the slugs from three rifles tearing through the man's head and chest.
"That's it," Gadgets announced.
"Stay down!" Lyons shouted. "Gather up whatever equipment we can use and then crawl out. There could be another one out there."
"Ironman, put the binocs on that ridge," Gadgets told him. "Something's going on up there."
Focusing on the mountain overlooking the can-yon, Lyons saw figures moving. They did not wear the green uniforms of the Mexican army. Light flashes came from mirrors.
"Wizard, what's their code say?" Lyons called out.
"F-i-n-i...fini..."