Lyons gave Blancanales the nod. "Go to it, Mr. Politician. Promise them anything. But get us what we want."

"Might take a few days." Blancanales glanced at his watch. "It's after midnight in Washington. Might have to talk about it all day tomorrow."

"And maybe we'll have to get an Act of Congress," Lyons added. "Just get it."

With a quick salute, Blancanales left the office.

His partners heard him speak with agents in the corridor. Then they heard Blancanales enter another office. Gadgets turned to Lyons.

"Just a look-see? Easy to say, but if we go, I'm taking everything I got and two or three nukes, too."

Lyons nodded. "Standard operating procedure. Places we go, we always seem..."

"To kill people," Gadgets finished.

"It's kill or be killed. We've got enemies out there, Wiz."

Gadgets smiled nervously. "We've got enemies out there we've never even met. Hell, we've got enemies out there we don't even know about yet."

"We know about Los Blancos."

"And they know about us. So I'm packing up. I'm checking my list. I'm checking it twice... because..."

The office door flew open. Blancanales rushed in. "I didn't even ask them. They asked me if we'd go south. To confirm Coral's statements. At dawn, with Senor Coral in an Agency Lear jet!"

Gadgets finished his jingle: "Able Team is going... downsouth."

An unmarked panel van ferried Able Team across the sun-baked asphalt of Lindberg Field.

In the first red glow of the day, rows of parked executive jets remained shadows in the morning darkness. Miguel Coral stared straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the three North Americans riding in the closed van with him. Lyons watched him, trying to read the Mexican's thoughts.

By the light of a penlight, Blancanales studied an operational navigation chart prepared from satellite photographs by the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center. He focused the tiny spot of illumination on the colors and mazes of lines representing the topography of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. He folded and refolded the oversized chart, searching the relief portrayals for elevations and the symbols of airfields and towns.

"There's our plane," Gadgets told his partners. "This is unbelievable. We're traveling like congressmen. A real for-live Lear."

"Confiscated from a dope smuggler," the driver told his passengers.

"Who'd he steal it from?" Gadgets asked. "Why didn't the Agency return it?"

"Steal it?" The driver laughed. "He paid for it, cash. We seized it under the Rico Act."

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act allowed the U.S. government to seize the wealth and property of millionaire drug dealers. Passed in 1978, the Act presented a greater threat to the gangs than prison. Gangsters could avoid prison through endless appeals of their convictions. However, the initial judgment of guilt — and not the eventual state or U.S. Supreme Court findings — allowed the DEA or IRS to attack the illicit gains of the gang lords. The U.S. government took their mansions and Cadillacs and private jets, even if the gangsters eventually won reversals of their convictions on technicalities.

The driver braked the van only steps from the Lear. Lyons jerked the sliding door open and pulled out his oversized luggage. He carried his heavy cases — one the size of a shipping trunk, the other long and flat like a guitar case — to the jet's steps. Not waiting for his partners, he went up in a run. He had to crouch to enter the luxurious interior of the Lear.

Sitting on one of the leather passenger seats, the pilot eyed the cases. "Thought this was a day trip. Looks like you're taking up residence in Mexico."

Lyons gave the pilot a wide grin. "Just gifts for my Mexican friends."

"Oh, yeah. Good idea. We won't be going through Customs inspection. I guess there's going to be some people down there who'll be glad to see you."

"And then again," Gadgets added as he set down identical oversized cases, "maybe not."

"Why do you say that?" the pilot asked, not understanding.

Blancanales and Coral came up the stairs and crowded into the cabin. The pilot extended a hand and introduced himself to his passengers. "I'm Pete Davis. I'll be taking you down to Culiacan and bringing you back. Once we're down there, I'll stand by in case you want to go sightseeing in a helicopter. You know, view the beauty of poppy fields in bloom, the romantic charm of mule caravans carrying opium through the mysterious mountains, maybe a sinister gang fortress."

"We won't want any doper tours," Lyons told him.

"Hey, man," Gadgets jived. "We're straight. We don't work for the government or anybody. We're businessmen. We're going down there on business."

"Right!" Davis nodded. "Businessmen. Glad I got that straight. Businessmen on a business trip to the heroin capitol of the Western Hemisphere."

Blancanales and Gadgets laughed. Lyons looked irritated by the joking.

"Just fly the damn plane, will you?" Lyons said to Davis. "If I want entertainment, I'll take a taxi."

Davis glanced briefly at Blancanales and Gadgets and then started toward the pilot's cabin. "On our way! By the way, you gentlemen got names?"

"No," Lyons told him.

"Right," said Davis as he closed the cabin door behind him.

Blancanales spread out the navigation chart on the cabin table. Miguel Coral watched from a corner seat as the Puerto Rican ex-Green Beret traced his team's route along the coast of Mexico, bordering the Gulf of California.

"We'll do a certain amount of sightseeing," Blancanales stated. "This flight will parallel the coast and mountains and give us a chance for an overview of the region."

As the jet's engines whined to life and the plane taxied to take off, Blancanales briefed his partners from memory.

"Last night I read through the history of western Mexico's dope trade, and the only way I can summarize it is, Wild, Wild West. In 1971 the U.S. decided to shut down the Turkish opium trade and the French Connection that refined the opium and shipped the heroin into the United States.

"Turkey has grown poppies for thousands of years. It took the Corsicans and French most of the twentieth century to create the market for morphine and heroin. But Mexico charged into the horse trade in only two years.

"By 1974, after arrests broke the French Connection and Turkey banned the growing of amapola poppies, it didn't matter anymore. Mexico supplied almost all the heroin the needle heads of the United States needed."

The jet accelerated down the runway and soared into the dawn sky. The lights of the city and the shimmering blue mirror of San Diego harbor appeared below them. The Lear banked to the southeast.

"We'll be flying over territory you won't believe," Blancanales continued. "The heroin organizations grow their poppies in mountains and valleys so isolated and removed from the rest of the world that the Mexicans, with the largest fleet of aircraft in Latin America — prop planes, jet planes, bombers, helicopters — can't patrol it. The lands where the poppies grow might as well still be in the sixteenth century."

Lyons had stopped listening. He stared out the port window to the lights and shadows of the city to see into his own memory.

In the few minutes of flight, their Lear jet had already flown the length of the San Diego Bay. Below the jet, streaking lights of traffic speeding north and south marked Interstate 5 and Interstate 805, the freeway where Able Team had arrested the Mexican assassin now returning to Culiacan with them.

Beyond the Interstates, the lights of the suburbs become individual and random as the urban monster sprawled into the desert. There, in the vague folds and shadows of the undeveloped lands, a blinking strobe light marked Brown Airport.