The three men of Able Team nodded.

"Lyons, you understand?" Konzaki stressed. "We've gotten some reports of very extreme behavior in Cairo. We sent you there to resolve a problem and you liquidated the problem."

"Resolve, liquidate, what's the difference?"

"Torture is not the American way."

"You weren't there!" Lyons snapped back. "I explained it all to Mack. Even he went with it. It had to happen."

"Mack said that?" Konzaki asked.

"It wasn't torture. Justice and torture are two different things. And victory is something else entirely. You'll never see me pulling some crap just to make someone hurt. But you'll never see me stop when someone's between me and the mission. You understand that?"

"All right, all right," Konzaki nodded. Enough had been said. "Here are maps. Satellite photos of the topography of Quiche. A dictionary of the language. The mass of the people don't speak Spanish. Maybe the village leaders and the merchants speak Spanish."

"Key-chay, key-chay, key-chay," Lyons repeated, learning to say the unfamiliar word.

"Here's a book on the life-styles of the Indians, here's a book on their traditional weaving, here's a book on modern Guatemala."

Blancanales took the weaving book and leafed through the color illustrations of Indian men and women in Mayan clothes. Painted in watercolors, the illustrations captured scenes from a culture that predated the civilizations of Europe. Women wore designs thousands of years old, men sported the same costumes their ancestors wore to battle the Spanish marauders. They had lost their freedom not because of ignorance or poverty or weakness, but because they did not have the modern weapons of the Europeans. The Mayans had only copper and gold knives against steel swords and armor, only stone clubs and arrows against muskets and cannons. Hence they became slaves.