Simultaneous with their campaigns of denunciation of the United States, and of NATO and world capitalism, the Lopez Portillo Administration received a gift from deep beneath the rich soil of Mexico.

Oil.

President Portillo launched an ambitious national development program. But the president declared that petrodollars could not fund the creation of a socialist state as quickly as he wished.

With the oil beneath Mexico as collateral, the Lopez Portillo regime borrowed billions of dollars from American and European banks to finance the development of Mexico.

But these billions of dollars never reached the people of Mexico.

The wealthy elite became even more fabulously wealthy. Banks in the United States and Europe reported year after year of record deposits as Mexican leaders looted their nation.

But when the price of oil fell, when Mexico no longer had the flow of petrodollars to meet the interest payments, the orgy of greed ended.

Inflation attacked the value of the peso. The price of corn and beans, the staple foods of the common people, doubled then doubled again. Campesinos by the millions went north to work in the fields and factories of the United States.

In the cities of Mexico, mobs demanded an accounting of the stolen billions.

Leaving the crisis to his newly elected successor, President Lopez Portillo retired to his fifty-million-dollar mansion outside Mexico City. In a final ceremony, the departing president stood before the Mexican senate and accepted the praise and applause of the elite of Mexico. For he had already set in motion something that would buttress the fortunes of the Castillians through the years of his successors. He had begun the resurrection of the heroin syndicates of the sixties and early seventies.

Castillian wealth and privilege had been secured again.

And as had happened many times in Mexican history, foreign invaders once more came to the ancient land.

But these new invaders did not journey from Europe or North America. The elite of Mexico had found their allies among the criminals of El Salvador, Argentina and Chile.

Unlike the other invaders of Mexico, the fascists of the International came by invitation.

And Able Team came, the last invaders, because they damn well gave themselves no other choice.

In a storeroom of the abandoned garage, Vato prepared a drug. Gunther lay lashed to the springs of an iron bed, ropes securing his arms and legs and torso. He and the men of Able Team watched as Vato took the ingredients from a leather pouch, black with age and handling.

Vato put the knot of a cactus button on a board and chopped it with a knife.

"You think peyote will make me talk?" Gunther asked.

"This is not peyote."

"I am not unfamiliar with Mexico. I know what that is. I know I will not talk. You will only make me sick."

"It is like peyote, but it is not." Vato smiled to the prisoner. "You will soon know the difference."

An old porcelain cup and a rusty auto valve served as a mortar and pestle. After cutting the cactus button to hundreds of fine bits, he dropped it into the cup and crumbled in another substance. He ground the mixture to a powder. He added pinches of other powders. Then he took a folded square of paper from the pouch. The paper contained dried beetles the size of dimes.

"What do you call those?" Lyons asked.

Vato smiled and shook his head. He would not reveal the secrets. He dropped two of the beetles into the cup. Their shells crackled under the pestle as Vato ground them into the mixture.

Gadgets turned to their prisoner. "Last chance, colonel. Talk now and you won't have to eat that crazy shit."

"It will do nothing!" Gunther declared. He glanced around the circle of onlookers.

His eyes met Coral's for a long moment.

Then Gunther laid his head back on the squeaking bed. He closed his eyes against the searing light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

A couple of tar-colored lumps went into the cup next. Vato pressed down hard, grinding and blending. He worked patiently, stopping from time to time to stir the mixture with his knife blade, then grinding again. When the mixture became a homogenous green-black dust, he tasted it and nodded.

"Hold his head," he told the others. "Open his mouth and pinch his nose shut. Kino, you pour the water."

Lyons and Blancanales immobilized Gunther's head while Gadgets tried to pull his jaw open. Gunther locked his jaw shut.

"Relax," Gadgets told him. "Some people pay money to take drugs."

Gunther struggled against Gadgets's hands. Glancing to his partners, Gadgets asked, "Was it because I didn't say please? Come on, open up. We gave you the chance to talk. Please, open up...You're not cooperating..."

Gadgets slammed his fist into the side of Gunther's head, using the full force of his arm to drive the knob of his center knuckle precisely into muscles and nerves over the sphenoid bone of Gunther's temple. A second blow struck the ropes of muscle over the condyloid process of the jaw.

Stunned, his jaw numb, Gunther could not resist as Gadgets pulled his mouth open.

Vato dropped in the powder. Gunther strained to twist his head. Kino carefully poured a stream of water down Gunther's throat. Gunther had to swallow or drown.

"Now we wait."

The effects came slowly. After thirty minutes, Gunther began to blink his eyes and shake his head from side to side. He breathed deeply. Lyons leaned over Gunther and saw that his eyes no longer focused.

Gunther's breathing came in rasps. Then his eyes closed. Vato grasped his wrist and counted his pulse rate. Vato nodded.

"Question him now."

"Who are you?" Blancanales asked in English.

Violence seized Gunther. Arching his back, all the tendons of his neck standing out like cables, he strained to break the rope that bound him to the iron bed. His body trembled, sweat streamed from his face. He gulped air in panting gasps.

Vato studied the reactions, then took a plastic kit from his drug bag. The kit contained a vial and a disposable syringe still in the plastic envelope. Vato assembled the syringe and put the needle into the vial.

"This will calm him."

"What is it?" Blancanales asked.

"Morphine."

"Don't put him to sleep!"

"He will not sleep for days." Vato injected a few milliliters of the narcotic.

The spasms stopped but Gunther continued struggling. Blancanales leaned over him and asked him in Spanish, "Quitnes?"

Gunther raved through the night.

Lyons and two of the Yaqui teenagers, Kino and Jacom, stood guard on the rooftop. They alternated shifts, sleeping and watching the dark street. Cars and trucks sped by, bouncing over the broken pavement. People walked past without a glance at the abandoned garage. The street noises, the jets roaring overhead, the radios and televisions covered the screams and shouts of Gunther's delirium in the storeroom.

After midnight, the neighborhood fell quiet as the thousands of families in the tenements finally slept. But the sounds of the city never stopped, the traffic noise of the avenues and expressways still going on, planes and trucks and unmuffled motorcycles hurtling unseen through the gray, polluted night.

Despite the tropical latitude, Lyons shivered. He clutched his sports jacket tight around himself. At the elevation of Mexico City, more than two thousand meters above sea level, the air became cool after sunset. Now, in the predawn hours, the few people still on the streets wore jackets and sweaters.

He stared up at the flashing Tecate sign, a neon explosion of red and yellow letters framed in a blue afterimage against the gray night. Able Team had gone from searing desert to the tropical coast to the cool mountains in only a few days. His body had not time to acclimatize to the sudden changes. He said aloud, "I do get around. No doubt about it."