Stivers Dick. Army of Devils

   Once, at breakfast in New York, with early morning traffic racing past a small cafe, an incoming customer opened the front door exactly as a truck backfired three times, one-two-three, like the firing of a large-caliber autopistol or a battle rifle with a low cyclic rate.
   Lyons, seated at a small chrome-and-vinyl cafe table, had jumped simultaneously up and to the side. However, the table, bolted to the floor, had stopped him. The impact of his legs and torso against the table had overturned the water and juice glasses. Their breakfast plates clattered across the vinyl tabletop. All the waitresses and other diners stared at the big tanned man.
   But Flor, knowing why Lyons had jumped, laughed. After a second, even as his heart raced with adrenaline, Lyons laughed, too.
   Flor understood his silences and sudden rages. She understood his strange jokes. She understood his extreme generosity.
   Now Lyons studied the lovely young woman beside his image in the plate glass. In her high heels, she stood only half a head short of his own height. She wore a modest summer dress with an abstract motif. Yet on her, the modest dress revealed and celebrated her body; a belt at her waist accentuated her slender form, her full breasts; the pale blue fabric contrasted engagingly with her dark skin and ink-black hair.
   He touched the smooth fabric of the dress while his eyes watched his hand stroke her shoulder. In the reflection, she turned to him. He watched her profile as she looked to his face. He studied her while she studied him.
   Overcome with a sudden desire to hold her, to touch her, to taste her, he pulled her against him.
   One arm around her shoulders, the other hand on the muscled arch of the small of her back, he held her, feeling her breath on his neck, the rise and fall of her breasts against his shirt as she breathed. He kissed her, lightly, only wanting the sensation of her lips against his, to smell the warmth and moisture of her breath.
   Brushing his face over her hair — she wore no perfume, used a shampoo without scent — then putting his face against the side of her neck, he smelled her sweat. The sweet yet acrid scent of her summer-sweating flesh struck memories, which came like flames, memories of the previous night, of her sweat glistening on her body…
   His hands clawed her against him in the passenger lounge.
   Flor laughed as she eased away. "We're in public, you animal."
   He pulled her against him again and whispered,
   "We'll go to another motel. Maybe a hotel. The Bonaventure. Soon as we drop them off."
   "Think it makes a difference, a motel or a hotel?"
   "Not to me. Someplace where we can laugh."
   Lyons glanced past the waiting crowd.
   No passengers came from the jet bridge. Then a technician opened the doors to the lounge. The first passengers came a second later.
   Hand in hand, Lyons and Flor went to meet his partners. They passed returning vacationers, businessmen, elderly travelers, women with babies in their arms. Friends and families welcoming the passengers talked and laughed all around them. But many of the travelers had returned to Los Angeles reluctantly. Lyons heard snatches of conversation.
   "Think we'll be safe on the way home?"
   "Did you bring a gun for me?"
   "The east-coast news people — they say it's a war zone."
   "The newspaper made a joke of it. Crazy Californians on cocaine."
   "Is it true they're cannibals?"
   Then Flor saw the two ex-Green Berets in casual clothes. Gadgets Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales followed the flow of the departing passengers. Gripping Lyons's hand, she pulled him through the crowd.
   Gadgets blinked when he saw Flor. "Long time no see, Senora Meza."
   "Thought you were on business," Blancanales remarked, giving Lyons a wink. The Puerto Rican charmer put an arm around Flor. "Glad to see you again. But why do you have to hang around with him? It won't do your reputation any good."
   "Cut the crap," Lyons told his partners. "Let's go. You brought luggage?"
   "You expect us to wear the same clothes all week?" Gadgets said. "Or do you think we can do this overnight?"
   Lyons shook his head. "I got other plans for tonight. We'll take you downtown, introduce you to the blue-suits..."
   "Ix-nay, Ironman," Gadgets interrupted as the group went to the escalator leading down from the passenger lounges. "Even if they're your friends, we got to stay far, far away."
   "More congressmen call the Man?" Lyons asked.
   Lyons rode shoulder-to-shoulder with Flor, Gadgets one step ahead, Blancanales one step back. They effectively blocked out any possibility of the nearby people overhearing them as they talked.
   "You mean Hal, or the Main Man?" Gadgets said, turning to ride backward on the escalator.
   "Any congressmen calling anybody."
   "Just standard paranoia. Nothing special going on back east."
   Blancanales leaned forward and spoke quietly. "But elections are coming up. One of our national voices of reason and social compassion would very much enjoy putting any one of us in Leavenworth. That would get him on the news three nights straight. So we need to stay invisible all the time."
   Gadgets stared at Blancanales for an instant, his eyes and mouth wide with mock shock. Then he grinned to Flor. "The Pol never used to talk like that. Used to be soft words and brotherly understanding. It's hanging around with him..." Gadgets pointed at Lyons "...that's got our Rican talking this reactionary hard-core line."
   "Me?" Lyons startled, actually offended. "Me, reactionary?"
   Gadgets put up his hands, whispered, "I'm your friend, don't kill me. Don't kill me. Remember, you'd have to carry fifty percent more equipment."
   "Calmatese, mi hermano," Blancanales laughed, his hands on Lyons's shoulders. "Perhaps he meant it as a compliment."
   "I'm calm, just quit the clowning."
   They left the escalator. Walking in a tight group through the underground corridor from the passenger lounges and the terminal, the four counter-terrorists hurried past slower travelers.
   "Your luggage heavy?" Lyons asked his partners.
   Gadgets nodded. "Very heavy. Someone steal our suitcases, they could start a war."
   "Don't even say it," Lyons commented.
   "L.A.'s got one army of crazies out there already. An army of doper zombies."
   They continued to the crowded baggage pickup area. Knowing the traps and frustrations of international airports, Lyons waited until Gadgets and Blancanales took their bags from the oval conveyor belt before he and Flor went for their parked rental car.
   Minutes later they sped from the international airport. Lyons navigated the car through the stream of traffic on Century Boulevard. They passed high-rise hotels and rows of pornographic bookstores and "adult cinemas." Gadgets peered out at the neon and lurid billboards.
   "This specialist work we do is so amazing," he said. "One day in Bolivia, the next in California. I never get tired of this — the places we go, the things we do."
   Flor turned to the men in the back seat and said, "Do you think we can make any difference? Only the four of us?"
   Blancanales laughed. "Miss Trujillo, if you only knew…"
   "We make things different," Gadgets nodded. "Wherever we go. Good or bad, things get changed. In fact, dig it, Ironman — Konzaki's taking a seminar in robotics. Says he's going to replace us. With titanium Godzillas."
   Flor waited for the laughter to stop, then pressed her question. "But there are many police — thousands — already working. How can only four more make any difference?"
   "We'll see what we can do and do it," Gadgets responded.
   "That's it," Lyons agreed. "That is it."
   On the freeway, Blancanales and Gadgets noticed the empty lanes. On most weekday evenings, drivers commuting home late from work or early for the theaters and nightspots of the metropolis would crowd the freeways. Not tonight.
   "Where is everybody?" Gadgets asked. "Usually, there's more traffic than this after one in the morning."
   "The murders?" Blancanales asked.
   "What do you think?" Lyons asked him. "After a day and night of continuous media hype and on-the-spot video gore…"
   "Fear City," Gadgets commented.
   Half an hour of driving took them to the Civic Center. Lyons drove down into the guarded and patrolled underground garage for city employees. Their "federal" identification persuaded a uniformed officer to issue a guest sticker.
   At the reception desk of Parker Center, Lyons again flashed his federal identification. "We're here to talk to Detective Towers."
   "Took you long enough to get here," the desk cop answered. "Detective Towers told me to expect you. Interrogation's been going on for two hours."
   " Interrogation of who?"
   "Not anything I know about. But they got him the room with the mirrors."
   As soon as the desk officer issued four identification badges, the group rushed for the third floor. Uniformed and plainclothes officers crowding the corridor glared at the strangers.
   "Who are you?" a sergeant demanded.
   "Towers invited us to listen in," Lyons told him.
   "Oh, yeah?" The sergeant turned to another officer, "Check with Bill."
   "Who have they got in there?"
   "That's for Detective Towers to say."
   "Hey, Sergeant," Lyons protested, offended by the interdepartmental hostility. "We're on your side."
   "Yeah, they all say that."
   Bill Towers rushed from the interrogation room. He opened another door and motioned the four Federals inside. He waited until the door closed to tell them, "We got our break."
   "One of the punks?" Lyons asked.
   Grinning, Towers shook his head. "Not a punk. A superpunk. We got the one who gave them the rifle. He recruited the punks, his organization trained them, and he gave them the rifle."
   The four Federal specialists glanced to one another.
   Bill Towers continued, his voice rising with enthusiasm. "We got a chance. We got a chance to break them. Tonight!"

9

   Shabaka, a mullah of Allah and a warrior in the Holy War against the white devils of Satan, received the command to disperse his soldiers and dismantle or destroy his indoctrination center.
   At seven o'clock, Mario Silva, the chairman of LAYAC, telephoned Shabaka with the information of the capture of Ruiz. Silva told him that Ruiz would undoubtedly betray the organization to the police to save himself from prison. Shabaka had answered in monosyllables, then hung up the telephone.
   Abdul Shabaka, born with the devil name of Leroi Jackson, had known from the first day that the betrayal of the bourgeois front organization would be only a matter of time.
   As a veteran of the Black Panthers, the Death's Angels and the Black Liberation Army, he knew any organization risked infiltration and betrayal. The FBI had infiltrated and neutralized the Panthers. Informers had betrayed the holy Muslim warriors of the Death's Angels to the San Francisco police. Informers had broken the Black Liberation Army.
   Even as a teenage recruit in the Black Panthers, Shabaka recognized the inevitable defeat of any open organization. The Panther leadership had welcomed him, a rapist and petty thief, because of his juvenile record of crimes against whites. They knew little else of his life. He had expected a careful check into his past and a long interrogation. But the Panthers had accepted him after listening to his stories of "revolutionary acts against the slavemakers." This easy entry to the revolutionary organization surprised him. As the numbers of Panthers grew, each new recruit joining with the same ease, he knew the organization had swallowed the seeds of its own destruction.
   The Panthers made no secret of their goals. The leaders published manifestos of racial hatred. At rallies, they pranced and posed in their leather jackets and preached social justice through the murder of police officers. They spat out their black racist diatribes from stages or in front of the microphones of radical radio stations.
   The Panthers knew all about the police surveillance. Police followed the Panthers everywhere, recording their words, photographing each leader and his aides and their friends. The ex-con leaders of the Panthers gloried in the surveillance. They accepted surveillance as an affirmation of the Black Panther Party as a threat to white racist society and the fascist corporate power structure.
   At meetings and rallies, the teenage Leroi Jackson looked at the young militants around him and wondered who worked for the police and who worked for the FBI. Other Panthers — the hardcore felons who'd had experience with prison informers — also believed the police slipped agents into the organization. The hard-core Panthers developed techniques to discover the agents; they initiated surveillance of one another, they investigated backgrounds, and they launched "actions."
   The Panther leadership had often talked of "strikes against the fascist monster." The hardcore Panthers screened the membership and identified the recruits they doubted. Then they invited these recruits on actions: the assassination of a detective, the driveby strafing of a police station, the bombing of a city councilman's office.
   At first, the police acted immediately on their agents' information and struck the Panthers. But they found the hardcore killers waiting quietly in their apartments, without explosives, without illegal weapons, without any weapons whatsoever.
   Antiterrorist detectives cautioned their remaining agents and informers to wait until the Panthers actually put a conspiracy in motion. But the Panthers varied their techniques; sometimes they organized an attack, then as the "front line brothers" approached the target, they canceled the hit, replanned and announced another time. This forced the agents to contact their officers again and again. That was how the Panthers caught them. Some agents died. Others fled.
   Leroi Jackson fled the Panthers for the closed society of the Nation of Islam. He joined a radical sect obsessed with hatred and racism, where he found many other young blacks who shared his lust for violence against whites. In obedience to the leaders who preached myths of pale, blue-eyed creatures bred by the Devil to plague the world, a group of felons and psychopaths created a secret cult of random racial murder.
   The Death's Angels believed they followed the will of their prophet. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland and in the cities of the East, gangs of fervent Black Muslims roamed the streets and highways to murder whites.
   White hitchhikers, white pedestrians, white shoppers died when shotguns fired from passing cars. Others died as unknown blacks attacked with machetes.
   The Nation of Islam never accepted responsibility for the horror inspired by their hatred. Meanwhile the Death's Angels continued untouched in their random terror, and they gained courage. They abandoned quick murder by bullets or machetes for the more satisfying ritual of murder by mutilation.
   Kidnapping whites, groups of Angels used pliers and soldering irons and saws to reduce "white devils" to screaming masses of tortured meat; eyes gone, hands gone, their limbs scorched and broken, white devils became sacrifices to a cruel medieval god worshiped by the welfare-state spawn of the long-past Arab and European slave trade.
   In accordance with Muslim doctrine, Leroi Jackson had become Abdul Shabaka. And in obedience to Death's Angels racial hatred, he became a murderer of whites. He shotgunned a young girl hitchhiking beside a freeway ramp. He joined in the rape and mutilation-murder of a San Francisco woman, keeping one of her fingers as proof of his service to the Prophet.
   Shabaka also aided in the indoctrination of other hateful young blacks who lacked the psychopathic intensity required to fight in the war of extermination against the white devils.
   Shabaka assembled thousands of photographs, thousands of feet of film of white cruelty to blacks. In a time when the white middle-class hippies took drugs and stared for hours at the abstract pulsating colors of psychedelic light shows, Shabaka presented Death's Angels initiates with multimedia assaults of images and voices of white racism and white hatred and white violence against blacks. He flashed a thousand images of blacks horribly mutilated and murdered by the KKK, the American Nazi Party and racist police throughout colonial and American history. He also taught the initiates to hate nonrevolutionary blacks — the "Uncle Toms," the Americans of African ancestry who sought their share of opportunity and prosperity as the United States ended the centuries of law-sanctioned oppression of their race. The teenage black punks, twisted by lives of poverty and suffering in the well-intentioned welfare state, twisted again by the circulated agit-prop of the Black Muslims and the Death's Angels, became the roving shock troops of race war by random terror.
   The San Francisco police succeeded in breaking one gang of Death's Angels. With the closing of the Zebra case, they solved fourteen murders of whites. But the police never brought to justice the other gangs murdering whites in other parts of California. Investigators never resolved the scores of other murders in California.
   Shabaka took no comfort in that failure of law enforcement. Fearing informers, he fled to Algeria to join the surviving Black Panthers in exile.
   There, he avoided the other North American black expatriates — or as they came to call themselves, the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters. He learned Arabic, the language of the slavers who had decimated the nations of Africa to supply slaves to Arabia and the European colonies, and Russian, the language of history's most powerful slave state.
   The Soviet KGB had already bought control of the Palestinian and Pan-Arabic movements. Shabaka saw the Soviet weapons and munitions supplied to the Arabs and knew where to seek support in his continuing war against North American whites. Though white themselves, Soviets listened to Shabaka's racist diatribes against whites and nodded their approval.
   They saw him as a weapon to throw against the world's most successful revolution. With a thousand terror-warriors like Shabaka, the Soviets could rape the hope of an egalitarian United States. With the horror of a black-extremist race war racking Americans, counterterror and counteratrocity — whites against blacks, whites against Meso and South Americans, whites against any non-European foreigners — became certainties. And every incident of white backlash would be featured in the KGB's worldwide media machine as horrors, thus winning a propaganda victory for the Soviet monsters who armed and dispatched the terrorists.
   As he had no outstanding indictments, Shabaka risked traveling between the United States and Algeria. He arranged for the smuggling of weapons and money to the Black Liberation Army, a gang of heroin and cocaine addicts seeking revenge for their years in prison through the assassinations of police and federal officers.
   It was Shabaka, in the early years of the eighties, who found Mario Silva, the son of Batista fascists, who had sold himself to the new general who ruled Cuba. For a million dollars a year, Silva provided Shabaka with the pick of the black and Chicano teenage offenders in LAYAC's youth programs. He told Silva that he trained the young men and women for the "Revolution." Shabaka kept his operation separate from all other LAYAC concerns. He pretended to be only an aging revolutionary black lawyer who took time off from his legal practice to help juvenile delinquents.
   But Silva had learned of the weapon shipments. He claimed a few of the automatic rifles and grenades for his own enforcers and allowed Shabaka to keep all the others. They maintained a good working relationship.
   When Shabaka learned of Silva's involvement in the KGB plot to depopulate Los Angeles with binary nerve gas, he began to admire the Cuban to a certain extent. But he never told Silva about his new deal, never mentioned the sponsors who were now backing him to establish a terror center in the United States. Unlimited funds from the Soviets and Libya had produced a drug never before known to the drug subculture. The extremely addicting drug had the effect of instantly creating a psychopath who felt no pain or remorse or human limitations, who would strike at any nearby target. His qualifications had earned Shabaka the privilege of launching an army of devil zombies to attack North American whites.
   Shabaka's killers remained secret, insulated from all possible betrayal.
   Then came the phone call. Against Silva's orders, without Shabaka's knowledge, one of Silva's lieutenants had given an automatic rifle to a gang of punks. The capture of the rifle meant that a law-enforcement task force would investigate the entire LAYAC structure.
   As the end of Shabaka's operation neared, he had no regrets. He had trained a hundred black and Chicano punks. He had indoctrinated them in the hatred and murder of whites. Though he now could not train the thousand he wanted, the experiment had succeeded. He had sent out the three kill-squads to test the combination of drugs and indoctrination. The test had been a complete success.
   Now, he would release all one hundred of the chemically enraged zombie warriors. As the terror seized Los Angeles, he would escape.

10

   Neon gave life to a night without laughter or joy. Lyons cruised through East Los Angeles, surveying the dark, silent residential streets, the shops on the deserted boulevards.
   Families did not brave the streets. No one sat at the tables of restaurants and cafes. A theater had turned off its marquee lights. Supermarkets had closed their doors.
   Few cars moved on the streets, only cruising gang cars and infrequent police black-and-whites on patrol.
   Groups of Chicano punks loitered on street corners. Latin disco rhythms and loud voices came from oversized portable stereos. Others stood near the open doors of their cars, their auto stereos blasting. The groups stared at the passing Ford, eyes on every street squinting to look inside the dark interior of the car.
   As they approached the LAYAC address, Lyons knew that any one of the hundred gang punks could be a loco with a concealed walkie-talkie or a dime for a pay phone. Gang boys could be watching from the rooftops of the apartments.
   Flor rode beside Lyons. In the back seat of the rented car, Towers worked a cassette player. The voices from the Parker Center interrogation room filled the interior of the car.
   "The blacks and vatos are soldiers, right, for enforcing dope deals? So when they wanted the rifle, I traded it..."
   "You mean the Colt Automatic Rifle," a police interrogator interrupted.
   "Yeah. The little machine gun. They gave me a kilo of coke for it."
   "A kilo? What're you talking about?"
   "Yeah. A kilo. They ripped it off some rich lawyer in Beverly Hills."
   "The punks didn't want it?"
   "Nah, man, they said it was nothing..."
   Towers punched the stop button. "You hear that? The punks didn't want the cocaine. Listen to this…"
   The recorded voice of Ruiz continued. "They were high on something else."
   "What? Heroin?"
   "They didn't act stoned. They acted insane."
   "That's one interesting part," Towers told them, clicking off the player again. "After he traded the rifle for the cocaine, he arranged a phony burglary of the warehouse to suggest that the punks stole the rifle. But that was set for tonight. The FBI traced the rifle too quick. And then someone in the Bureau leaked it to that crazy Communist television station. And the boss of LAYAC, this Silva guy, found out about it and went after our boy Ruiz."
   Lyons thought for a moment. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see the lights of the car that Blancanales drove. As Lyons eased through a slow left-hand turn on the deserted avenue, he asked Towers, "Why did Ruiz have the rifle in the first place?"
   "He said there was a 'heat wave,' " Towers answered. "Right after that problem with the gas, remember? If you know what I mean?"
   "Flor was in on that," Lyons told him. "You can talk about it."
   "Good. Trying to keep all that classified info and authorization and clearance jazz straight makes my head spin. Right after your people wiped out that gang, the Feds put LAYAC under the microscope."
   "Then why didn't they..."
   "Because they didn't get the chance! The investigation had only got started, they put in a day or two of questioning, then the Feds get calls from every politician in the country. All of them concerned about LAYAC's good name. But in those two days of 'heat,' they had an arms shipment come in before the politicians pulled the plug on the investigation. Ruiz was the only one that didn't have Federals parked outside his door. He picked up the rifles and stored them until Silva and that Shabaka could divide up the boxes."
   "Who brought in the weapons?" Lyons asked.
   "Some Mexican trucking company. One of LAYAC's companies."
   "Convenient."
   "That's what LAYAC seems to be all about. But listen to this..."
   The voices of the interrogators and Ruiz spoke again. "What was that?"
   "The third phase."
   " What does that mean ?"
   "I don't know. I wasn't supposed to hear that. A weird spade called Shabaka said it to one of his assistants. Said the rifles could stay in the warehouse until the third phase."
   "But the third phase of what?" The interrogator pressed.
   "The gee-had. That's the word he used. Gee-had. Whatever that means."
   Lyons knew the word too well. "Jihad. The Holy War. Hashish and Commie lies weren't enough, so they came up with a superdope."
   "There, that place." Towers pointed at an apartment house decorated with spray-painted gang script. A group of young men in identical khaki pants and sleeveless white T-shirts lounged on the steps. Other knots of gang punks stood on the sidewalks and leaned against cars. They drank from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
   "Public drinking and intoxication," Lyons commented. He glanced back to his ex-partner. "What do you say we just take them away?"
   "No, thanks. I want to spend my pension."
   "Two against twenty. We got them outnumbered."
   "You do it. I want to see if the Feds taught you any special survival skills. Like how to reincarnate."
   Laughing, Lyons coasted past the punks. He made a right turn, then he keyed his hand-radio. "That's the place. I see an alley back here. Garages."
   "A whole lot of mean-looking dudes out front," Gadgets answered. "I don't know about getting in and out quiet. You want to rethink this?"
   "Yeah, they got M-16s and grenades in there," Lyons said. "What happens when a hundred doped-up punks with automatic rifles go berserk?"
   "That informer said the M-zipteens are upstairs?" Gadgets asked.
   "That's where that organization has all the offices. Upstairs."
   Lyons continued to the next block and parked in the darkness under a tree. In the rearview mirror, he watched the second rental car cruise past the alley.
   Blancanales spoke through the radio, "The roof. We'll go up one of those other apartments, drop down into the office."
   "Second the motion," said Gadgets's voice. "I don't want any firefights with that crowd on the street. I didn't pack that much ammunition."
   Lyons turned to Flor and Towers. "My partners and I are going in. Bill, you stand by in one car. Flor, you drive the other one. We have a problem — things'll happen fast."
   "This is for information only, yes?" Flor asked.
   "We find those weapons, we'll call for the police."
   "No heroes? Tell me, no heroes."
   "Not me," Lyons assured her.
   Two minutes later, Flor guided her car through the wide commercial alley. Lights illuminated rear entries and garages and parked cars. On the higher floors, balconies jutted from the back walls of the apartments.
   The car rolled to a stop near a dumpster head-high with trash and garbage. The three men of Able Team slipped out into the alley's shadows.
   The car eased away. At the end of the alley, it disappeared into the night. Surrounded by the trash and rotting filth, Able Team scanned the alley for movement. They carried no assault weapons. Their sports coats concealed their radios and shoulder-holstered autopistols. Gadgets carried a few hand tools and electronic devices in an airline bag.
   Without a word, Lyons led them through the alley's darkness. He pointed to a derelict car sitting on four flat tires, then to the steel ladders and platforms of a fire escape above the alley.
   The apartments' fire escapes doubled as balconies. Flowerpots and planter boxes covered the landings. Blancanales and Gadgets nodded. Lyons stepped up and onto the top of the derelict car. He tested the ladder, then went up quickly, his neoprene-soled shoes silent on the rungs.
   Glancing into the lighted interior of the second-floor apartment as he passed, he saw a family gathered around a color television. A news commentator pointed to a map of Los Angeles. Lyons continued. In the next apartment, two young girls — perhaps ten years old — danced to a North American rock-and-roll standard sung in Spanish.
   Lyons stopped at the top of the fire-escape ladder. He eased his head up over the wall and scanned the rooftop. The black silhouettes of vent pipes and antennas stood against the distant lights of downtown's high-rise towers.
   The diffuse gray light reflected from the polluted night sky revealed a tar roof littered with trash and beer cans. Lyons snaked over the top. Crouching in a shadow, he unhooked his hand-radio from his belt.
   "You two. I'm on top. Waiting for you." Lyons looked around. "Flor. You monitoring?"
   "Monitoring," she answered.
   "Mr. Detective see anything out front?"
   "Zero. Will tell you if."
   The steel ladder vibrated with steps. In seconds, Blancanales swung over the wall, followed by Gadgets.
   Motionless in the shadows, they listened. City noises and snatches of music came from the streets below. A ventilator fan grated in its housing, ejecting the smells of cooking oils and mildewed apartments into the warm night air.
   Moving again, Lyons crouch-walked toward the roof of the adjoining building. He felt his way past the guy wires of antennas, his eyes continuously sweeping the shadows and forms ahead of him for the motions of a sentry. He heard only the faint cracking of dust and grit under his shoes.
   At the edge of the roof, he waited again as two shadows followed him. They peered over the low wall to the next building.
   A loud stereo played beneath them. The tar of the roof, still warm from the summer sun, throbbed with the disco beat.
   The bricks of the two apartment buildings met. There was no airspace or easement between the walls. Scanning the next roof, they saw another expanse of shadows and gray half darkness. They saw no motion on the next building or on the roof of the LAYAC building beyond.
   "Electronic security?" Lyons hissed to Gadgets.
   "You can hear it?"
   "Hear what?"
   "Listen…"
   Straining their ears, Lyons and Blancanales listened. A motorcycle passed on the avenue, the staccato popping fading. Quiet returned. They heard a high-pitched whine. Then a low rider's loud muffler blasted the avenue.
   "Ultra High Frequency motion sensor," Gadgets whispered as he searched through his bag of gear. "Plus they'll have pressure sensors. And someone standing guard. Look around for some pigeon shit."
   "What are you talking about?"
   "They have motion sensors. If pigeons fly around up here, they have false alarms..."
   "Pigeons don't fly at night."
   "Use your imagination. Find some bat shit."
   A dog barked, once, twice, then went quiet.
   The UHF whine cut off. They saw the silhouette of a man moving on the LAYAC roof.
   "That makes it easy," Gadgets whispered.
   Lyons tapped Blancanales and Gadgets. "Berettas… I'm going ahead. You follow."
   Lyons crept over the roof to a fan housing. He stood up with the bulk of the housing behind him. He watched the far building, looking for movement. Then he hissed to the others.
   He saw them approach, slinking through the antennas and vents. A tangle of razor wire, two coils high, stopped all three of them.
   They spread out along the barrier of concertina razors. They knew the group inside the building would have provided for rooftop escape. The razor fence would have gates.
   Blancanales went slowly, feeling ahead of him for security sensors or trash that might make noise. He peered up at the barbed wire, then moved along, fingers sweeping over the gritty tar. He found a bottle, then another; he set them far to the side.
   Suddenly a shape directly in front of him blocked his view.
   Hands seized him, pulled him into the tangle of steel razors.

11

   Two blocks away, Flor Trujillo waited in the rented Ford, the engine idling, the front seat covered with radios.
   A portable police-band radio scanned the department's communications, electronic noise and voices filling the interior of the car.
   An encoded hand-radio provided for an instantaneous link to Able Team.
   A second nonsecure walkie-talkie linked her to Detective Towers where he waited a few blocks to the west.
   She watched the street around her. Nothing moved. Despite the warm night, no one sat on the porches or talked with neighbors. No children bicycled or played soccer in the brilliant blue white glare of the streetlights. When she parked, she had seen the curtains of the security-barred windows of several houses part as the residents peered out. But the people remained hidden in the safety of their homes.
   From time to time, headlights streaked the boulevard. But no cars moved on the side street. Flor had set her rearview mirrors to provide overlapping views of the sidewalks and street behind her. As she waited for a signal from Able Team or Towers, she scanned her surroundings, her eyes always moving, from the neighborhood in front of her to the lawns and houses on the right and left, and to the images in the mirrors.
   A chaos of voices erupted from the police-band scanner. Though Flor strained to understand, the police officers spoke in code words and numbers, only the urgency in their voices telling of what they faced. Then one voice said simply, "We're taking fire from the roof. Automatic-weapon fire! We're getting out of..."
   A high-velocity shriek tore from the radio.
   "They've got rockets! Someone up there's got..."
   The band went blank for an instant, then other voices called out. Flor heard the word "ambush."
   Turning down the radio's volume, she rolled down her window.
   Autofire popped in the distance. She heard the tearing sound of a rocket and the crack of the explosion. Then came a sound only possible in that night of empty boulevards and unnatural quiet: the night screamed.
   As police officers in a hundred squad cars all hit the same switch, sirens rose in one vast wail. The flooring of accelerators came next, by every officer — in uniform and plainclothes — who heard of the ambush.
   Rolling up her window, Flor turned up the volume of the scanner. She heard a commander assigning response units. The commander ordered all other units to maintain their patrols. Flor keyed the Stony Man secure-circuit hand-radio.
   "Able Team! This is Flor. Able Team!"
   She waited for an answer. Then she keyed the transmit key again. "Able Team! Report. There has been..."
   She heard autofire. This time not in the distance. The popping of automatic rifles came from the boulevard.
   Slipping out her Detonics .45, she thumbed back the hammer to full cock. She slammed the rented Ford into gear and accelerated into the roar of the firefight.

* * *

   Shoes scuffed on the asphalt roof. Lyons looked up to see Blancanales standing, his back arched, his hands gripping the hands closed around his throat. In the instant that Lyons evaluated the situation, two other forms appeared on the other side of the tangled concertina wire.
   "Hijo de puta!" one voice spat out.
   "Quien es?" another asked.
   Then Lyons saw the silhouette of an AK-47 and heard the distinctive "clack" as a hand flicked the ComBloc weapon's safety to fire position.
   In one smooth motion, Lyons swept out his re-engineered and silenced Colt Government Model, his thumb flipping the fire selector down to three-shot burst. He put the dash-dot-dash of the tritium night sights on the silhouette showing the AK.
   A burst of .45-caliber hollowpoints sprayed the form's lungs and heart into the night. Lyons put the sights on the next form, squeezed off another burst. The three instantaneous impacts threw the silhouette back.
   A muzzle flashed, the report of an assault rifle blasted the quiet. Lyons aimed above the flash, triggered a burst, saw the form hurled back. He emptied the last cartridge from the extended ten-round magazine into the falling gunman.
   Gasping for breath, Blancanales fell back from the concertina barrier. A dead man hung in the coils, hundreds of razor-points stuck in his arms holding him upright.
   As Lyons dropped out the empty magazine and slapped in another, he heard Gadgets's Beretta zip slugs into a stairwell housing on the LAYAC roof. Nine-millimeter subsonic slugs hammered stucco, one slapped flesh. In the blackness of the doorway, someone gasped. A rifle clattered to the roof.
   "In we go!" Lyons called out to his partners.
   Gadgets answered. "Ironman, what the..."
   "Now! Through the wire!"
   Rushing to the concertina barrier, Lyons reached through the tangle of steel razors. He grabbed the hair of the dead man and jerked him against the wire. Lyons dragged the corpse toward him, forcing the wire down with the dead man's weight. The wire sagged. Pulling his arm clear, Lyons put his foot on the corpse and compressed the coils.
   "Now!"
   Lyons ran over the dead man's back. Reengineered Colt pointed at the stairway housing, Lyons snatched up an AK from the roof. He glanced at the sights. The ComBloc weapon had the clip-on night sights in place.
   A muzzle flashed from the door. As slugs tore past his head, Lyons triggered a three-round burst. He did not slow in his rush. He saw movement and slammed it with the AK. As the form fell back, Lyons flicked his Colt's fire selector up to single shot. He killed the gunman as the guy raised a shadowy autorifle.
   Gadgets checked Blancanales. His Puerto Rican partner pulled himself up.
   "Cover me!" Blancanales scanned the roof ahead of him for movement, then scrambled over the corpse.
   "This is crazy!" Gadgets said to no one. But he followed his partners.
   At the head of the stairway, Lyons emptied the captured AK into the chest of a punk on the landing below. Dropping the empty magazine, he searched through the tangle of dead punks in the stairway housing. He found a loaded Kalashnikov and an Uzi. Blancanales grabbed a bloody AK and snapped shots down the stairs.
   Gadgets ran up behind them. "Ironman, you gone crazy? I got two mags for my Beretta, and we're going into a firefight?"
   "If they've got this many sentries..." Lyons passed the Uzi to Gadgets as the punks returned autofire "...they've got something important down below."
   "Like an army," Blancanales answered.
   "Something as important as us living through this?" Gadgets asked.
   Flipping over a dead punk, Lyons found a web belt hung with AK mag pouches. "Two magazines, plus whatever's in the rifles. And this..." He held up one of two grenades he found in a pouch.
   Blancanales searched other corpses and came across a belt pouch with two Uzi mags. He passed the pouch to Gadgets. A burst of AK fire roared past him and feet hammered on the stairs.
   A wide-eyed, screaming punk sprinted up the stairs, his Kalashnikov flashing. Lyons stepped back, waited an instant, then fired two rounds from his own Kalashnikov point-blank into the screaming punk's chest.
   Flesh and fragments of bone exploded from his back as the punk slammed sideways into the stucco of the stairwell housing. He did not fall.
   Staring around him, the punk saw Lyons and Blancanales. Screaming as he staggered forward, his face twisted with hatred, blood spraying from the two lung wounds, he swung his AK toward Blancanales.
   Lyons put the muzzle of his captured Kalashnikov under the chin of the punk and fired. Impact lifted the bleeding, mortally wounded teenager off his feet, the blast tearing away the side of his head. But still he did not fall.
   Screaming, his shattered jaw yawning, blood frothing from his mangled throat, the punk lurched forward again. Lyons grabbed the barrel of the punk's AK and jerked him off balance.
   The punk staggered from the stairwell. Gadgets stepped up behind the punk and put his captured Uzi at the base of the punk's skull. A burst severed the brain from the spinal cord.
   "Take his weapon," Lyons told Gadgets.
   "This is insane! I'm not going down there! There could be a hundred of them!"
   Lyons jerked the cotter pin from the first grenade. A storm of autofire came from below, then more feet hammered the stairs. Berserk punks screamed with chemical rage. Lyons let the safety lever flip away, counted to four, then gave the grenade an underhand toss.
   Standing to the side of the roof door, he raised his AK. The first punk out the door took a through-and-through head wound from a Com-Bloc slug. Still screaming, he fell and kicked as his life spurted from his shattered skull.
   A second punk ran from the stairwell as the grenade exploded below. Though the stairs and landing shielded the punk's body, steel fragments punched through the back of his head.
   As if he did not feel the wounds, the punk continued advancing, streams of blood fountaining from his skull. Blancanales aimed at the punk's back and put a careful burst through the wounded punk's heart. Still screaming, with a vast wound where his heart had been, the punk continued on to the end of the roof. He hurtled into space.
   From the stairwell they heard a bestial, inhuman sound. A sound like a dog's growl, but broken with gasps and choking. They saw a hand clutching a Kalashnikov, then the third punk crawled from the stairwell.
   A hundred grenade fragments had shattered and ripped both legs. Dangling by only ligaments and a few strands of flesh, the legs flopped and twisted behind the punk. But obviously he did not feel the horrible wounds.
   Clawing at the asphalt of the roof, he looked around for the attackers. Blancanales dispatched him to darkness with a burst to the back of his head.
   The autofire from below slacked off. Absolutely astounded by what he had seen, Gadgets stared down at the finally dead teenager. Then the ex-Green Beret turned to Lyons.
   "I'm not going down there. I don't care what the fuck you say, Lyons. Call down an airstrike, call for tanks, call for the Marines, but I'm not going down there!"
   Blancanales changed mags on his captured AK. "Second the motion. Motion carried. We retreat. Period. Follow me."
   "All right, all right," Lyons finally agreed. He took his hand-radio from his belt. "I need my Atchisson, anyway. Flor," he said into his hand-radio, "we got some heavy action here. We need our weapons."
   In the alley behind the apartments, skidding tires answered his call.
   "Now that's a quick response," Gadgets commented.
   "Go!" Lyons shouted to his partners. "I'll cover."
   Gadgets and Blancanales, both holding captured autoweapons, dashed to the corpse spanning the wire. They jumped through the gap, then took positions to cover Lyons.
   Sporadic autofire came from the stairwell. Lyons held his fire. He stuck a finger through the ring of the second grenade, then stopped.