Three days later, the plane roared from the sky and dropped the bombs. In the instant before his cremation, the man who had spoken to the lieutenant saw the markings of the Republic of Mexico on the wings of the plane. Then he died in the fire storm of flaming aviation fuel and molten plastic.

Colonel Gonzalez and Colonel Gunther observed the effectiveness of the superhigh-octane napalm. A campesino working in the fields had died before he could drop a hoe. The blackened, brittle hands of the man still held the seared hardwood handle of the crude implement.

Across the field, the child continued to cry. From a place beyond pain, the girl shrieked out for her parents. Over and over, she pleaded out for her mother to come to her.

Snapping his cavalry crop against his leg, Colonel Gonzalez turned to Colonel Gunther. "One moment. Let me shut up that little bitch."

Gonzalez pointed to the suffering child and shouted in the direction of the helicopter. "Tronatela luego vos con la ametralladora!"

The helicopter doorgunner snapped back the cocking handle of an M-60 machine gun. The auto-weapon hammered away the quiet. The slugs raked the tangle of sticks and burning plastic where the child suffered, throwing cans into the air, chopping the blackened wood, spraying ashes. He fired three long bursts. The heavy 7.62mm slugs stopped the screams.

"Finally..." Gonzalez muttered.

Colonel Gunther nodded. "It is the speed of combustion. The fuel burns so quickly it does not disrupt the circulation or penetrate the internal organs. The chemical companies make standard military napalm using less volatile fuel and a greater percentage of plastic in the solution. Military napalm burns deep into the body."

"I will do as you suggest, Colonel Gunther. The technicians will change the formula again."

Smiling, Gunther shook his head. "That is not necessary. I believe this compound better serves our purpose. Military napalm must incapacitate soldiers inside of vehicles, and under protective cover. But these peons?"

With a sweep of his arm, the foreign colonel directed Gonzalez's gaze to the blackened ejidoin the desert. The blond, blue-eyed East German continued in his excellent Spanish.

"This was no military operation. Our purpose here was to make an example of peons who will not work. The present formula serves the purpose of our organization."

Sweat dripped onto the steel and plastic of the M-79 grenade launcher Carl Lyons held. Sweat ran from his hair and down his face. He shifted in the seat and felt sweat flow down his back.

Under his short-sleeved shirt, Lyons wore Kevlar body armor. The rectangle of a steel trauma plate shielding his heart and central chest showed through his shirt. Hours before, when the summer sun had risen to its zenith and begun to beat down on the roof of the Drug Enforcement Agency surveillance van, the first streams of sweat had flowed from under the Kevlar. Now, sweat soaked the waist and pockets of his slacks.

Gadgets Schwarz set down his Uzi submachine gun. He pulled off his sunglasses and wiped sweat off the lenses for the tenth time in an hour. He also wore body armor. As he pushed the sunglasses back on, a drop of sweat hit the right lens. He wiped his sunglasses for the eleventh time in that hour.

"Can't the government afford an air conditioner?" Schwarz asked heatedly. "Summertime in Kevlar is cruel and unusual."

The young DEA agent who had volunteered to drive the van answered Gadgets in a bored monotone. "We've got one. It's in the director's car."

"Then let the director take over this fucking watch," Gadgets answered impatiently.

"Can't do it. He's in D.C., romancing Congress for funding. Money for the air conditioner."

Lyons didn't take his eyes off the long lines of cars and trucks waiting to cross the United States-Mexico border. Beyond the multicolored ribbons of autos, the sprawl of Tijuana faded into the gray distance. With Gadgets and the DEA driver, he watched from a van parked on the San Ysidro side of the border, less than a hundred feet from Mexico.

"Think your main man will get enough money," Gadgets continued, "so maybe next time we'll have an air conditioner?"

"No problem with a cooler next time..." the DEA agent replied.

"Far out. Feels good already."

"But next time," the agent said with a laugh, "we'll need a heater."

Twenty steps away, at the San Ysidro port of entry, U.S. Customs officers in inspection booths processed sixteen lanes of incoming traffic. The officers took stock of every driver, looking for nervousness, sweating, forced expressions, then checked the license plate of every vehicle with the aid of federal computers. Each officer — at the rate of one examination every ten to fifteen seconds — waved cars past. Then the vehicles entered the promised land, the United States, accelerating past the van in an unending, monotonous blur of color and glass and faces.

Auto exhaust and diesel soot hazed the crossing, and heat rose from the asphalt in an undulating, vision-distorting curtain. Motionless on the bench seat of the surveillance van, the tinted windows concealing him from the traffic, Lyons watched the thousands of cars and trucks shimmer in the heat and engine fumes. On the Mexican side, peddlers went from car to car, offering painted plaster figures of Jesus and Montezuma and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Other peddlers offered sandals and black flocked bulls and tropical fruit-flavored sherbets.

Lyons glanced to his partner. "Check with the Politician."

Slipping out his hand radio, Gadgets keyed the transmit button. "Hot Box calling Mr. Cool. Qui pasa? Donde esta Senor Pistolero?"

A customs officer in a booth signaled a driver to stop for a search. The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic man with two young Mexican girls in his Mercedes, argued. Lyons watched as other customs officers motioned the driver toward a parking place. Finally the driver steered the Mercedes under the awnings. Officers on each side of the expensive sedan thumped the fender panels while a third officer waited for the big Hispanic to open the trunk. Another customs official walked a drug-sniffing German shepherd around the Mercedes.

"Hey, Politico!" Gadgets keyed his hand radio again. "Digame. What's going on?"

"Relax," Rosario Blancanales answered, his voice coming without tone or inflection through the National Security Agency encoding-decoding circuits of the hand radio. "Nothing's going on."

"Any word from Fantasyland East? What's the D.C. scam on our man?"

"The teletype printed out quite a biography." Blancanales spoke from the DEA offices only a few steps away. The windows of the office overlooked the thousands of cars crawling into the United States. "Our man is most definitely a killer. I'll give you a copy of the bio when I bring down some food."

"Forget the food. I want ice."

"Hot down there?"

"I'm the incredible melting man."

"You might be down there all night again."

"Yeah, I'm a regular owl," Gadgets said, and then he signed off.

Able Team had received the directive the day before: Go to the San Ysidro port of entry. Wait for Miguel Coral. Suspect known to kill without hesitation. Capture for interrogation.

The directive included — courtesy of a DEA informer in Culiacan — the license number of the truck and the name appearing on his valid California driver's license. But the informer did not supply the time Coral would cross the border. Able Team had waited through the night, watching the endless stream of traffic. Perhaps Coral would come today, perhaps tonight. Perhaps tomorrow.

But they knew he would come.

Miguel Coral had fought on the losing side of a gang war. A few days ago, the informant said, Coral deserted the defeated gang. With a hundred kilos of Mexican heroin, Coral intended to start a new dope gang in Los Angeles.