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.