Lyons turned to Soto and the other soldier. "Captain, I'm going alone. Tell your men not to shoot me. Not to shoot anyone over on that side of the stream. Might be me."
"And what of the North Americans there?" Captain Soto pointed to the ridge.
"Just a second..." Lyons spoke into his hand radio. "Calling Politician, calling Mr. Wizard. What goes on?"
"What you see is what we did," Gadgets answered. The hammering of the M-60 machine gun continued behind his voice. "Did you get the ones in that Toyota?"
A line of tracers arched down. Lyons watched an Iranian break cover and run to the shelter of a ditch. Silhouetted against the burning ranch buildings, the Iranian raised a Kalashnikov and fired at the ridge. One of the Mexican soldiers near Lyons sighted carefully and put a bullet through the Iranian's back.
"I'm chasing them. One's an Iranian, who may be a leader. The other one's a negro male. Might be a black nationalist, like we encountered in Beirut. They cut to the west. I'll be following them. Why don't you send Powell and Akbar down to talk to the Iranians. Maybe some of them will surrender."
"That's an idea. Happy hunting."
Lyons clipped the radio to his web belt. One step took him down the gully in a controlled slide. He paused, listening. He heard only the firing of rifles and auto weapons.
Light from the flames rising from the airstrip and ranch created shadow along the east side of the gully. Lyons stayed in the shadow, his boots silent in the soft sand. He moved quickly for a hundred meters, then slowed as he approached a curve in the stream.
Crossing the stream, he went flat and peered around the curve. Smoke from smoldering brush obscured his sight. A blackened corpse lay in the stream. He saw no one moving, heard no shooting.
He clawed up the gully wall to the hillside opposite the rancho. Taking his hand radio from his belt, he reported his position. "I'm on the west side of the creek, going north."
Blancanales answered. "I think I spotted them. There's a section of burning brush..."
"Yeah, I'm at the south end."
"I saw them come out of that."
"Can you slow them down without killing them?"
"Maybe..."
On the ridge, the muzzle of the machine gun flashed. A line of tracers cut through the smoke. For Lyons, the tracers pinpointed the position of the terrorists. He moved quickly through the sage and small trees, the auto-Colt in his hand.
The NATO-caliber slugs hit with a sound like a whip, striking with a dull crack, followed by the sound of the bullets ripping through the air. A tracer ricocheted past Lyons, the pinwheeling bullet passing him and ripping into dry brush. Other ricochets hummed past, invisible.
Another projectile came down, this one slow, rushing through the air, then exploding fifty meters north. Bits of wire shrapnel rained around Lyons. Then he heard the black man, "Those white motherfuckers are throwing all kinds of shit down! They got to know who we are, they got us spotted, we got to..."
The Iranian interrupted in another language. Switching to that language, the black man continued as Lyons crept ahead. Finally Lyons could not risk approaching closer. The terrorists had the embankment shielding them from Blancanales's machine gun fire. Lyons did not.
He reached to the hand radio. Turning off the voice speaker, he clicked the transmit key three times, then three times again.
Talking fast, in what Lyons assumed to be Arabic, the black man scrambled for the top. He reached back to help up the Iranian. On the ridge, Blancanales fired again, tracers sparking off the rocks only three steps away from the black man. The black dropped the Iranian and ran into the flames of the rancho.
As the Iranian pulled himself to the top of the gully, Lyons lined up his auto-Colt's tritium dots on the right knee of the Iranian. He fired once.
The forty-five-caliber hollowpoint smashed through the cartilage and tendons and bones of the Iranian's leg. He fell screaming. Rolling on his back in the streambed, he reached for his knee. He found his leg, flopping, folded backward over his thighs. Blood spurted from the severed artery.
Lyons jumped into the sand. The Iranian saw him and reached for his pistol. Lyons fired again; the slug smashed the Iranian's hand to ragged flesh and shattered on the steel of the holstered pistol, spraying lead fragments.
Blood gushed from the mangled hand. Staring into the suppressor of the auto-Colt, the Iranian raised his hands and pleaded.
"Please... I Rouhani, leader of Revolutionary Guards. No kill, please! No!"
Lyons kicked Rouhani in the head, stunning him. As the Iranian cried and babbled in Arabic, Lyons flipped him onto his face. He used the plastic loops of riot cuffs as tourniquets on his forearm and above his gory knee. Then he linked the tourniquet on his right forearm to his left arm with another loop of space-age plastic, effectively immobilizing the maimed Iranian terrorist. Lyons spoke into his hand radio, "Got the Iranian. Claims he's a leader. You see where the black creep went?"
"Into the fires," Blancanales replied. "He's dodging over to the road, up against the foot of the hill."
"Where you can't hit him..."
"He thinks..."
"Don't. But slow him down."
Unslinging his Konzak, Lyons ran through the smoke and blackened brush of the gully. An Iranian hiding in the weeds turned. His eyes didn't register the black-uniformed, black-faced American for an instant, then he jerked up his Kalashnikov.
But far too late. Blasts of steel shot tore away his hands, destroying the AK he held, the shots continuing through his arms to scramble his guts, the second blast spraying Number Two and double 0 shot through his lungs and heart. Thrown back by the impact, already dead, the Iranian collapsed in a bloodied heap as Lyons continued past without breaking stride.
Leaving the gully, Lyons continued through the clouds of black smoke stinking of rubber and plastic and flesh. To his left, flames and smoke rose from the gutted hulks of the trucks and plane. To his right, the buildings of the ranch burned.
Squinting against the smoke and heat, he saw tracers skipping off the hillside. The black terrorist dodged from cover to cover. Sometimes smoke from the burning hillside brush screened him. In front of the terrorist, the crashed truck and trailer continued to burn.
The black terrorist chanced the open ground. Lyons saw him zigzagging to cover. Sprinting diagonally across the corner of the airstrip, Lyons dived into a ditch. He laid his Konzak within reach and unholstered his auto-Colt. Flipping down the left-hand grip lever, Lyons braced the heavy pistol on the edge of the ditch and waited.
Rising from a shadow, the black man ran toward the road.
Twenty meters to his side, flame exploded from the trailer. Torn aluminum and scraps of metal tumbled across the open ground, carried along by a tremendous jet of fire.
A rocket hurtled through the opposite side of the trailer, tearing through the aluminum. Shooting out a tail of flame, the rocket spun wildly through the night and exploded. Other rockets flashed simultaneously, their launching jets coming in one wave of superheated gases and vaporized aluminum, every combustible thing near the wrecked truck and trailer suddenly burning.
The black man, who had conspired with foreign terrorists to assassinate the President of the United States, stood in an incandescent wind. Lyons saw the man's clothing flame away, then his flesh, bones suddenly visible in that instant of cremation. Lyons went flat in the ditch.
Flames and shredded metal continued streaking into the rancho, burning what had not yet burned, charring the dead. Rockets flew wildly from the trailer, then the trailer exploded in a giant fireball.