"The general will know, if you ever give him my G.o.dd.a.m.ned message!"

Juanito shouted before he slammed the handset back onto the radio.

He ran to a corner closet, put on his helmet and side arm, and picked up an ancient M-l carbine dating from World War II. He walked rapidly toward the door. Just before exiting, he turned to the radio operator.

"Try and notify as many of the neighboring outposts as you have time for. They must do everything they can to get ready for the onslaught."

The radio operator's eyes widened. "Can we hold them off, Juanito?"

Juanito grinned sourly. "Can a pig fly?"

Juanito made the rounds of his men, pulling some from the sandbagged outposts and putting them on roofs around the village. There was no way they could stop the rebels, but he d.a.m.n sure intended to make it expensive for them to take the town.

Carlos waited until the rebel tanks and half-tracks came within five hundred yards before he opened up with the fifty-caliber.

He gritted his teeth and pulled the trigger. The big gun exploded and began to chatter and buck in his hands as it spewed forth hundreds of bullets per minute at the rebels.Several of the soldiers walking alongside the tanks fell in their tracks, and the others scrambled to the sides of the road and fell facedown in the small ditches that ran there.

Hundreds of nine-millimeter bullets ripped into the sandbags around Carlos's emplacement, but he kept his head down and continued to fire until the barrel of the fifty-caliber was so hot it was smoking.

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Carlos shifted the barrel to the tank and peppered it with fire, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly off the armor plate of the tank.

The turret slowly swiveled until Carlos was looking down the black hole of the long barrel of the tank's cannon.

He paused in his firing long enough to cross himself and whisper a prayer to the Virgin Mary. Then he squatted and pulled again on the trigger, sending a steady stream of bullets into the tank.

He saw a puff of smoke and flame shoot out of the tank's barrel, and had time only to blink before the sh.e.l.l hit his outpost, exploding on impact and blowing sandbags, machine gun, and Carlos into a million pieces.

The other outposts opened fire, and men around the tanks and half-tracks burrowed even deeper into the caliche and sand around the Pan American Highway, waiting for the tanks and half-tracks to soften the village up for them.

Henry Gomez jerked on the tube of the TOW rocket in his hands, extending and arming the handheld ant.i.tank rocket. It was one of the few modern weapons that had been sent to Cardenas, and he intended to make it count in the battle raging around him. TOW stood for Target On Wire, and the sh.e.l.l, when fired, was guided by a fine wire attached to the launcher.

All the man firing it had to do was keep the sights on the target and it would hit it up to fifteen hundred yards.

Henry leaned over the parapet of the roof he was on in time to see the tank blow Carlos into dust. His lips pressed into a fine line-Carlos was from the same village as Henry and they'd played together as children before joining the Army together to see the country.

He put the TOW rocket launcher to his shoulder and sighted on the tank.

Taking a deep breath and holding it, he depressed the trigger.

A giant whoosh and the rocket was on its way, the wire attached to it visible as a gleaming line in the sun.

When a bullet tore into Henry's left side, just above his 163.

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waist, he jerked to the side, sending the rocket off course momentarily.

With almost superhuman effort, he straightened back up and resighted the tank. The rocket curved back and struck the tank just below the turret.For a second, nothing happened, and Henry thought perhaps the rocket was a dud. Then the tank exploded in a giant fireball, sending a plume of black smoke and flames two hundred yards into the air. Seconds later, the fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets and several of the tank sh.e.l.ls inside exploded. It was like the finest fireworks Henry had ever seen.

Dozens of the soldiers walking behind the tank were mowed down like a harvester going through a wheat field.

Just as Henry's lips curled in a smile and he whispered, "Gotcha," an M-16 bullet entered his forehead, exploding his brain into mush and killing him instantly.

Juanito, observing this from the upper room of a nearby building, made a fist and said, "Way to go, Henry."

The burning tank was blocking the roadway, and had halted the rebels'

advance for a short time.

Carlos stuck his M-l out the window and began to fire down upon the troops pinned down at the road's edge. He managed to kill two and wound another three before he heard a strange whoop-whoop sound in the hot, dry air.

He glanced up in time to see a machine out of h.e.l.l. It was a coal-black HueyCobra helicopter coming down at the town out of the sun. Juanito recognized it from the cla.s.ses he'd taken in Officers' Candidate School.

For some reason, the fact that it carried eight TOW ant.i.tank missiles and two rockets, and sported a 20mm cannon, popped unbidden into his mind.

He jerked his M-l up at a forty-five-degree angle and began firing at the Cobra as fast as he could pull the trigger. He had little hope of doing any damage. It was like trying to hit a hawk flying overhead with a .22 rifle.

He must have done something, however, for the gunship 164.

changed course slightly, pointed its ugly-looking snout at him, and dived.

He could see the three barrels of the 20mm cannon belching fire and flame as the helicopter roared at him out of the sky at ninety miles an hour.

The windowsill and the walls on either side of Juanito dissolved in a maelstrom of debris and splinters as three hundred 20mm slugs tore across the building. Juanito was thrown backward against a far wall, a row of red flowers blooming on his chest where the slugs had st.i.tched a line across his body.

He groaned, blood bubbling from his lips. His last thought was to wonder if the general had finished his breakfast yet.

Lieutenant Colonel Pedro Vega had his driver pull closer to the outskirts of Cardenas. He'd learned from the previous commander of Perro Loco's troops, who'd been killed in his staff command car by a land mine while riding point, not to stray too close to the front until most of the action was over with. Vega kept his HumVee well to the back of the forward line of his troops.The action had slowed to an occasional pop as another sniper or hidden defender of Cardenas was found and dispatched by Vega's men. All of the sandbagged outposts and gun emplacements had been destroyed. In fact, most of the inhabitants of Cardenas had been killed along with the soldiers defending the town. The streets were littered with bodies of women, children, old folks, and even cats and dogs. No one had been spared by the invading army.

Vega stepped out of his HumVee and stood next to the scorched sandbags and melted, destroyed fifty-caliber machine gun, still red with Carlos's coagulated blood on it.

Vega walked over and leaned his arm on the bent and twisted metal.

"Miguel," he said to his driver. "I am ready."

Miguel Hernandez took the colonel's digital camera from a 165.

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bag hanging by a strap around his neck and quickly snapped off a couple of shots.

"Be sure to get the bodies on the street in the background," Vega ordered, adjusting his stance a bit.

Miguel shifted to the side, sighted through the viewfinder, and snapped two more times.

Vega nodded. "Good. Now get on the radio and have the tanks level the town."

"But, Colonel Vega," Miguel protested mildly, "all of the soldiers have been killed or already have run away to the fields to hide."

Vega fixed his driver with a steely stare. "Miguel, do you enjoy the privilege of driving for me?"

"Si, mi comandante!" Miguel snapped smartly.

"Then please do not argue with my orders. I want this town leveled to the ground as a lesson to the other towns that stand between us and Mexico City. Tonight, after we bivouac for the evening, I will print up hundreds of copies of the pictures and have one of the helicopters fly ahead and drop them on the towns to the north of us."

Miguel nodded, as if he understood what his commanding officer was saying and the advanced reasoning behind it. He did know that every night the colonel downloaded the pictures that had been taken of him in various leadership roles to a laptop computer and printed them out for his sc.r.a.pbook.

Miguel thought this quite silly, but then he knew little of the thought processes of officers and their need for constant aggrandizement.

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Herman Bundt, who, unlike Colonel Vega, flew in the lead helicopter, leaned forward and stared through the Plexiglas of the front windshield of the big Chinook chopper.They were only a few miles from the neighboring towns of Luchitan and Salina Cruz that lay on the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

His eyes, experienced in the art of warfare, noted that though the region was mountainous and jungled inland, it leveled out into a relatively flat area near the sh.o.r.es of the gulf. It was a perfect staging point to test his mercenary troops in their first under-fire battle under his command.

He leaned over and pointed downward to the pilot. "Drop us off right there, where the jungle thins out and becomes a sandy plain on the outskirts of Luchitan."

"Roger," the pilot said, nodding his understanding. He spoke briefly on the ship-to-ship radio to let the other pilots know the plan.

"Have the Kiowas fly low over the town to draw any fire while we unload the troops. That's our most vulnerable time," Bundt ordered.

The pilot nodded, and relayed his orders to the pilots of the Kiowa gunships accompanying them.

The pilot grabbed Bundt's arm and pointed toward the west. Three dark shapes rose like huge buzzards from a tiny airstrip north of the town.

"Skids," the pilot said over the intercom.

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"What?" Bundt asked, not familiar with the term.

"Skids. Old Huey helicopters, the kind that flew in Vietnam. They must've picked us up on their radar."

The pilot spoke again into his radio, and Bundt saw the Kiowas that were escorting them peel off into attack formation.

"Those ships must be forty years old," Bundt said. "Our Kiowas will make short work of those antiques."

The pilot turned his head to glance up at Bundt. "Don't be too sure. The skids are big, slow, and clumsy, but they're tough to bring down. 'Bout the only way to down one is to hit the prop or to kill the pilot and copilot."

"How are they armed?" Bundt asked, more out of curiosity than out of any worry about the Kiowas.

"Main weapon is a fifty-caliber machine gun in the side hatchway. The gunner is strapped to the chopper walls so he won't be thrown out when the chopper dives and banks," the pilot answered shortly.

As the Chinooks hovered feet above the ground and the a.s.sault troops bailed out of them like ants from a disturbed mound, Bundt couldn't help but stand and watch the air battle taking place in the skies over Luchitan.

The Hueys moved forward in a modified-V formation, with the two leadchoppers flying almost sideways so the big fifty-caliber machine guns in their hatches could be brought to bear, while the back chopper at the apex of the V gave them cover on their flanks. Evidently the men flying the big helicopters were experienced in combat, unlike the men Bundt had flying his Kiowas, who were barely out of flight school.

First Lieutenant Gunter Kalb, pilot of the lead Kiowa, saw the lumbering Hueys and almost laughed. "No need to waste one of our missiles on those," he said on the intercom to his copilot. "I'll just rake him with our Minigun and blow him out of the sky."

The copilot, Hans Gruber, laughed into the mike. "Look how slow they are," he said. "It's a wonder they don't fall from the sky like bloated cows."

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Kalb jerked up on the collective in his left hand and advanced the throttle, and the Kiowa put its nose down and screamed through the air at the Hueys, who were going so slow they almost seemed to be hovering, as if waiting to be slaughtered.

When he got within range, Kalb depressed the trigger on the 20mm Minigun in the Kiowa's nose, and grinned at the vibration from the gun as it spewed forth death at a thousand rounds a minute.

Kalb felt an almost s.e.xual thrill as he saw the tracers in his ammo st.i.tch a line of holes across the body of the Huey, expecting it to burst into flames and fall from the sky.

His thrill turned to panic as he saw the Huey shudder under the impact but remain otherwise unaffected.

As his ship rapidly closed on the Huey, he jerked back on the collective and tried to turn, but it was too late.

He could almost see the gunner's teeth in the wide-open hatchway of the Huey as he grinned and opened fire with his big fifty.

The gun jumped and shook in the gunner's hands, flame shooting from the barrel along with hundreds of molten lead bullets that had the Kiowa's name written on them.

The Plexiglas windshield of the Kiowa shattered, sending hundreds of razor-sharp shards of plastic into Kalb's and Gruber's faces and eyes.

Kalb let go of the collective and the throttle to cover his ruined face just as the stream of fifty-caliber bullets tore into the Kiowa's fuel tanks.

The chopper exploded in a ball of flame and smoke, sending pieces of the ship and its pilots floating toward earth.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it!" Bundt screamed on the ground when he saw the ship disintegrate above him. "You stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," he growled to himself, "use your missiles."

Almost as if the other pilots heard Bundt's plea, they peeled off from their attack and climbed out of range of the other169 169.

Hueys's machine guns. They made a wide circle overhead, able to stay out of range due to their crafts's superior airspeed.

Viktor La.s.sinov, a Russian pilot who'd hired on with the mercenaries under Bruno Bottger, vowed not to make the same mistake his friend, Gunter, had. He lined the lead Huey up on his mast-mounted sight and flipped the switch arming his missiles. When he pressed it, the ship shuddered as the missile was launched, and he could see the smoke of its trail as it arrowed toward the Huey.

The pilot of the Huey, who must have seen the missile streaking toward him, turned the big, clumsy Huey almost on its back in a desperate attempt to dodge the missile, but his ship was just too slow.

Seconds after the missile launch, the Huey disappeared in a ball of smoke and flame, and its wreckage soon joined that of its previous victim on the ground next to the jungle below.

The other two Hueys, seeing they were outgunned, turned tail and raced to the northwest, toward the neighboring town of Salina Cruz on the coast.

When the Kiowas turned to give chase, Bundt grabbed the mike through the window of the Chinook and ordered them back.

"Leave the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds alone," he cried. "We need you to cover our attack of the town."

The Kiowas dutifully gave up the chase and flew back down over the outskirts of Luchitan, raking the defenders' emplacements with fire from their Miniguns and blowing a couple of ancient tanks up with their missiles.

Bundt wasted no time. He spread his hundreds of troops out to the right and left and ordered them forward, to attack the town.