10
In the last hour of morning, they met the Yaquis.
After the firefight Able Team had bandaged Davis, then outfitted themselves with weapons and gear from the dead Mexican soldiers. Lyons and Davis and Coral found folding-stock FN-FAL paratrooper rifles. Davis and Coral stripped the dead of knives and packs and clothing. They had marched for the rest of the morning and afternoon, watching signal mirrors flash from the cliffs and mountainsides above them.
Following the streambed north, they left the gorge and climbed trails cutting across the sides of mountains. Animal prints marked the trails, but they saw no human footprints. Yet they knew others walked in these mountains. The others watched them from ridgelines, signal mirrors flashing from mountain to mountain.
The introduction came abruptly. Lyons, sweating under his load of gear and weapons, had walked point for the preceding hour. He looked down to check the trail for tracks, then looked up to see the three young men.
Two of the young men carried M-16 rifles. The third carried what looked like a .30-06 Springfield rifle with a custom stock featuring a pistol grip.
Lyons knew that rifle, or a rifle like it, had saved them from the trap in the gorge.
Lyons let the FN-FAL rifle in his hands hang by the strap over his shoulder. He crossed his hands over the top of the receiver. He stood without moving as the others caught up with him.
Blancanales spoke first in Spanish. "Buenas tardes."
"We will speak English," the young man with the Springfield told the foreigners.
"Thanks for helping us," Lyons said. "Without you, we'd be dead now."
"Why are you in our mountains?"
"The Mexican army," Lyons explained, "or a gang dressed in the uniforms of the Mexican army, shot down our plane. We're walking to the railroad. We'll take the train down to the coast. Who are you?"
"Are you with the Ochoa family?"
Behind Lyons, Blancanales whispered quickly with Miguel Coral.
"Don't talk about it," the young man with the Springfield told them. "Answer."
Coral stepped forward. "I served Don Ochoa. But he is gone now."
"Do you serve now with Los Guerreros Blancos?"
"Those assassins!" Coral spat on the trail. "They killed my friends, they killed the children of my friends, they mutilated one of the sons of mi Padrino Ochoa. Juntarme con esos? Jamas primero muerto!"
"Who are you?" Lyons asked again. "Why are you asking about Los Blancos?"
The young man answered. "We are Yoeme. The Mexicans call us Yaquis. We also fight the White gang. Come."
"Yaquis?" Blancanales asked, incredulous. "Yaqui Indians?"
"I said, Yoeme. Yaquis. The Yoeme do not come from India. We are the people of this land."
The three Yaquis led the way.
"Broncos..."Miguel Coral told the North Americans. "Wild ones. The old men used to talk about Yaquis and Mayos and Tarahumaras who still fought in the Sierras, but that was when I was a boy. Even then no one believed it and that was thirty years ago."
"We go?" Lyons asked.
"Why not?" Gadgets answered. "We're here, let's make the scene."
Blancanales looked to the Yaquis striding away. "They said they're fighting the White gang, Los Guerreros Blancos. I think we have a lot to talk over with them."
"We came for information," Lyons said, nodding. He started after the young men. "And they've got it."
To keep pace with the Yaquis, Lyons forced himself to jog. He realized why he had not seen tracks. The Yaquis wore rags over the soles of their boots. Their footsteps were only vague smears on the sand. His boots, stamping into the trail with the combined weight of his body and the equipment and weapons, left deep imprints.
They walked for kilometers, over the crest of a ridge, through a canyon. The Yaquis led them through the zigzags of a switchback trail weaving up the slope of a mountain. Sweat soaked Lyons's fatigues and rained into the dust of the trail.
On the last switchback before the top, the young Yaquis disappeared. Lyons looked up to the ridge. He did not see them.
Lyons stopped and studied the mountainside. Thoughts raced through his mind. Ambush? No. The Yaquis had saved them. Had the Yaquis abandoned them? He followed the vague smears of the Yaquis's tracks to a rock formation of vertical slabs. He found a shoulder-wide space in the rocks. The tracks led through the space. Inside the mountain, he saw what appeared to be the interior of a cave, highlighted by late-afternoon sunlight that came through the ceiling.
Taking a step back, Lyons studied a patchwork that stretched over the mountainside. The color of the cloth matched the sand. Splotches and patterns of gray matched the rocks and stone formations. Green plastic created the illusion of weeds. Planes or helicopters or photo-recon satellites orbiting the earth would see this mountain as no different from all the others in the Sierra Madres.
Lyons looked back. His partners and Davis and Coral struggled to catch up with him. Behind them, Yaqui children ran along the trail with mesquite branches, sweeping away the boot prints of the foreigners. A child laughed at a question from Blancanales, answering with a point to where Lyons stood.
Stepping through the gateway of stone, Lyons entered the shadowy interior. A fissure cut through the stone of the mountain. Along the sides of the fissure, three levels of caves had been cut into the stone. Stone steps led to the entrances of the caves. In addition to screening the interior of the mountain from airborne observation, the tent of camouflage, reinforced with spider works of rope inside, protected the village of caves from the sun and the wind.
Inside, Yaquis waited for the foreigners. Lyons saw young men and women, a few children, a few older people. Perhaps fifty people. Their faces showed neither welcome nor hatred, only interest. As Gadgets, Blancanales, Coral and Davis filed into the hidden village, Lyons noted details.
Like the three young men who had led them to the village, the men and most of the young women wore dust-colored cotton clothes. Many carried holstered revolvers and autopistols. Some of the men had dirt and bloodstains on their clothes. Sweat had streaked the crust of dust on their faces.
The interior smelled of cooking, but not of wood burning. Long ago, wood fires had blackened the tops of the caves with soot. But in a cave on the first level, Lyons saw pots bubbling on the gas burners of a clay stove. The cooking fire made no smoke.
In the same communal kitchen, white plastic pipe carried water to a sink made of fired clay. He saw a drainpipe under the sink. A woman making a meal from a stack of captured Mexican army rations looked directly into Lyons's eyes.
Above the crowd, people looked down from the second and third levels of caves. Clotheslines with pulleys ran from one side of the crevice to the other. High above the others, from above the third level of caves, a young woman in dust-colored clothes and web gear looked down. She wore binoculars around her neck, and held an M-16. Only the rise of her breasts under her shirt and the khaki scarf over her hair distinguished her from the males.
To one side of him, Lyons saw captured Mexican army equipment and weapons on a plastic tarp. Uniforms, web gear, boots, binoculars, a mortar and rounds, a few Uzi submachine guns, a stack of M-16 and FN-FAL rifles were all arranged and ordered like a quartermaster's display.
A stripped M-16 lay on a cloth. The Yaqui cleaning the assault rifle finished his task with a last flourish of an oily rag, then snapped the weapon together. He stood to watch the strangers arriving.
"These people have got their act together," Gadgets said behind Lyons.
Blancanales noted the weapons. "The mortar, the rifles. The food. They captured all that today."
"It's an invisible town," Lyons commented.
"Not a town," Blancanales corrected. "Almost all these people are fighters."
The young man with the Springfield rifle stepped out of a second-level cave, and an old man followed him. The old man paused to study the five strangers, then came down the stone steps.