His legs were instantly shredded. Blood gushed from a thousand wounds. He struggled to work the shotgun's pump action. But his left arm did not function.
Dropping the shotgun, he jerked the .38 pistol from the holster at the small of his back.
A boot stomped down on his arm. Horton looked up into the muzzle of an M-16. He never saw the flash, never felt the burst that ended his life.
2
Gray in the first minutes of dawn, the boulevards, parks and public buildings of Washington, D.C. wheeled below as the Air Force jet banked and took a route to the south-southwest.
Hermann "Gadgets" Schwarz, electronics and communications specialist for Able Team, looked to the east. He saw the incandescent disk of the sun rising above light-marked suburbs in Maryland and Delaware. Headlights streaked the expressways as commuters traveled to the capital. The ex-Green Beret radioman, veteran of wars in Southeast Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, smiled at the irony.
All we government employees, on our way to work. You to your offices. Me to...
"Guatemala," Andrzej Konzaki said from the conference table. The wide-shouldered, legless ex-Marine put a pointer to Central America. "You'll be landing in five hours at Guatemala International."
"This an official visit?" Rosario Blancanales asked. A calm, quiet ex-Green Beret born in Puerto Rico, Blancanales served as medic, interpreter and indigenous operations specialist for Able Team. Like Gadgets, Blancanales still wore his pajamas. The call to Stony Man had awakened them at 4:00 a.m.
Carl Lyons interrupted before Konzaki could answer Blancanales. The cynical ex-LAPD officer, hardened and scarred by wars in the streets of Los Angeles, and more recently in the secret dirty wars fought by Able Team, had a reputation that did not include courtesy.
"What does Guatemala have to do with Texas? The call said something happened in Texas."