With the engine whining with RPM's, the van came up beside the red Chevy pickup.

Simultaneously Gadgets pointed his Uzi at the front left tire of the pickup truck and Lyons aimed the gaping muzzle of the grenade launcher at the face of Miguel Coral.

"Alto! Policia!" Lyons shouted out in his bad Spanish.

Only then did Lyons see who rode in the cab of the truck with the middle-aged, square-faced gang captain.

A woman and two young children clung desperately to each other. Fear haunted their faces. Then a teenage boy leaned from the camper shell to the cab of the truck.

A family. A middle-aged man, his wife and their three children.

The wrong truck? The right truck but the wrong man? How could they explain terrorizing this family on their way home from a visit with friends?

The man driving the Chevy truck closed his eyes for a moment, perhaps for an instant of prayer, perhaps to admit defeat. Then he moved both hands high on the steering wheel. He called out through the open window to the hard-faced North American with the grenade launcher. "I surrender! I surrender! For the love of God, don't shoot. My family is innocent."

3

"The White Warriors? In Sonora, Mexico?"

Gadgets looked out the window of the office. He stared at the lights of San Diego as if he expected the explanation to the mystery to rise from the darkness in flashing neon script.

Four floors beneath the men of Able Team, cars sped through the warm summer night. Strollers walked arm in arm on the sidewalks, passing the high-rise federal prison without a thought.

After capturing the Ochoa gunmen and the Coral family, Able Team and the officers of the Drug Enforcement Agency had escorted the group of prisoners a few miles north to San Diego. They questioned them in the high-security interrogation room of the prison.

The truck belonging to the Mexicans went to the federal impound garage to be searched. Only minutes later, DEA technicians had found heroin concealed in the frame of the four-wheel-drive truck driven by the gunmen. They quickly weighed and tested the Mexican white death, then telephoned the interrogating officers with the results: two hundred kilos, seventy-five-percent purity.