The Hostaged Island at-2 Read online

  A buzzer interrupted him. Brognola went to the door separating the passenger area from the pilot's cabin, unlocked and opened it. A flight officer spoke quietly with him, then handed him a sheet of notes.

  "This complicates it," Brognola said, returning to the group. "The Pentagon have six of their theoreticians on the island. Boffins, unarmed. Specialists in lasers, particle beams and atomic fields. You have got to bring those men out, no matter what. Highest national security priority. When we get to L.A., we'll have photos and dossiers waiting for you."

  "What are they doing there?" Gadgets asked.

  "It says they wanted a quiet place for intensive talks."

  "Ha!" Lyons laughed bitterly. He turned to Konzaki. "What I want to know — did you put all this together in an hour? Are you a magician?"

  "No." Konzaki spoke with infinite sadness. "I assembled several groups of weapons, each group suitable for different locales in the world, and different circumstances. I am not a magician, nor can I foretell the future, Mr. Lyons. I simply read the newspaper. I knew it would only be a matter of time before these weapons were needed."

  5

  Chris Davis lay in the dark, listening to Mrs. Shepard comfort her husband. Mr. Shepard, though battered and bleeding, sometimes doubling over with pain in his gut, had been silent until he slipped into sleep. Then he moaned and cried out. His wife held his head, smoothed his hair, pulled blankets around him.

  He startled awake, and stared into the darkness around him. "It's okay," his wife whispered. "We're all right, it was only a nightmare..."

  "You mean what I dreamed?" he asked her. "Or what's happening? Kid," he called, and Chris jumped up, "get me a bucket or something so I don't mess up your dad's study."

  Mr. Shepard had suggested to the boys that they all sleep in the one room. As the den opened to the patio, their voices or flashlights would not betray them to Outlaws patrolling the street. If the Outlaws fired into the house, then two walls and Mr. Davis' shelves of law books protected them.

  And they could watch and listen for movement in the backyard while one of them stood guard in the front room. Chris took a towel and a bowl to Mrs. Shepard, then joined Roger and their friend Jack in the front room.

  He saw Jack smoking a joint. "Man! This ain't no party. You could get killed."

  "Hey, man," Jack laughed. "This is the best party yet. We're going to kill some bikers. They show up, they die! Bang, bang."

  "I told him," Roger said, shaking his head.

  "Yeah, well I'm telling him again. Listen to this, jerk. If the bikers out there see that joint or your lighter, they're going to know someone's in here."

  "Yeah. Well, okay. I'm going to catch some sleep. Wake me up when you see some targets." He blew smoke at them and returned to the den.

  "They don't call him Jack-off for nothing," whispered Chris.

  "I wish you hadn't given him that gun," said Roger.

  "He's a jerk but he is on our side. We need all the help we can get. I think Mr. Shepard's going to die."

  "I thought he only got punched out."

  "Nah, he's all broken up inside. He's trying to be cool in front of his wife, but I think he's puking blood. If he can't get to a hospital, he could bleed to death in his guts..."

  "Up there! Bikers! At the end of the street." Roger pointed up the block, to where their street ended in a three-way intersection with a cross street.

  The bikers went into the house. Chris and Roger watched the lights go on. Shadows crowded one window, the window opened. From it could be seen the entire length of their street.

  After the bikers left the house, the lights went out. One of the them pushed a motorcycle deep into the driveway, where it could not be seen from the street. Then the bikers left.

  "One of them's stayed in that house," Roger said. "Watching the street."

  "I'll get Mr. Shepard." Chris went into the study, and returned with the shaky adult.

  "How you feeling, Mr. Shepard?" Roger asked.

  "Fantastic." His face was too swollen for a grin. "So what's the problem?"

  "That house over there," Roger pointed. "The Outlaws left a man in it to watch the street. They've got us trapped."

  "You said you had it worse than this, Mr. Shepard. Were you in Vietnam?" Chris asked.

  "I did all my fighting on Wilshire Boulevard and in front of the Pentagon in Washington. The name's Glen..."

  "Your wife said you were in the army."

  "They drafted me. It was prison or the Airborne. My mom and dad talked me into going, said Vietnam was all over, why not do my duty? Well, I went through basic, advanced infantry training, special weapons school, then they sent me to school to learn Laotian. That was in 1972, and they're teaching me to speak the Laos languages?"

  Glen warmed to his story. His wounds had put him in the right mood for it.

  "I told the Commandant of Fort Ord that if he tried to ship me out without declaring war, it would be my duty to resist. And the first criminal I'd shoot would be him.

  "That was a quick ticket to the stockade, but I didn't go to Laos. They figured I was crazy so I did eighteen months in the psychiatric ward. Drugs, electro-shock, beatings..."

  "Huh," Chris puzzled. "So that's why you're so political."

  "This man knows the truth. Now let's figure out how to snuff that sniper."

  "You can't do anything, Mr. Shepard. You're hurt."

  "You want to do it?" Glen Shepard asked bluntly. "Think you can kill a man in cold blood?" The boys didn't answer. "I was trained to defend my country. Right now, my wife and you and the neighborhood people are my country."

  * * *

  Leaning his M-14 rifle against the window ledge, Acidhead dropped a pinch of PCP onto a rolling paper, added some Mexican marijuana, and rolled up. He leaned back into the easy chair and touched a flame to the joint. "Dusted!" he laughed, watching the street through heavily lidded eyes.

  Headlights and taillights streaked across the far end of the street; the rumble of motorcycle engines came loud, then faded. A patrol, thought Acidhead. He stared at the trees overhanging the quiet street. Dawn-gray sky showed through the canopy of branches. He took a few more hits of the cheap dust and cheaper marijuana. The pattern of dark branches and graying sky suddenly reversed, the sky a mass of jagged fragments exploding from darkness all of a sudden.

  He shook his head to clear his vision. "Can't get too far out there," he mumbled to himself. He ground out the half-smoked joint. "Gotta do some killing."

  A wiry man, Acidhead stood less than six feet even in his thick-soled riding boots. He wore his curly hair and beard cut to the same two inch length; hair stuck out straight from his head, giving him a surprised look at all times. His bulging eyes added to the impression.

  "Acidhead, this is Horse," the hand radio squawked from the window ledge. "You in position?"

  "Wherever I am, I'm here and ready."

  "You got much fog there?"

  " I can see a block or so."

  "You know what to do. Anything that don't wear our colors, kill it."

  Watching for movement on the street, Acidhead thought of the people who lived there. Upstanding citizens. Righteous, God-fearing people. Daddy, mommy, the little kiddies. When he cruised the freeways on his bike, they were the people who stared at him like he was some kind of human-shaped shit.

  He'd get his chance. All the guys guarding the crowd in the Casino talked about how many teeny-boppers they'd rape. Forget the teeny-boppers, Acidhead thought. When he pulled guard duty, he'd take the real young ones.

  Fantasizing, he picked up the half-smoked joint, relit it. He thought of how they'd cry and scream. What would the good people think of that?

  * * *

  Easing himself over the last fence, Glen Shepard dropped to the sidewalk and stayed crouched in a shadow cast by a streetlight. He unslung the short-barreled shotgun, watching the street for bikers.

  Wearing his dark slacks, and a black leather jacket and black stocking c
ap borrowed from the Davis boys, he hoped he looked like an Outlaw. He moved from shadow to shadow until he saw the sniper's window. A lighter flared, the biker's face emerged from the darkness, then was gone as the flame died. But the red point of a cigarette glowed. Glen watched the window for a minute. He saw only the one cigarette, heard no voices.

  Calculating the angles, Glen saw how he could cross over the street. The trunk of a large tree on the opposite side blocked a part of the sniper's field of fire. If Glen stayed within that narrow area, he could cross unobserved.

  But he was visible from everywhere else. He would have to take his chances. Soon it would be daylight. Then the Outlaws would sweep the neighborhood, searching every house, flushing out the residents.

  Crawling to stay beneath the screen of a low hedge, he watched the window. When it disappeared behind the tree trunk, he stood up, stepped over the hedge, walked. He couldn't run. The pain in his gut flared with every step. If he ran, he'd puke again.

  Expecting a bullet, he forced himself to swagger, holding the shotgun loosely in one hand. At the far curb, he strolled into the tree's shadow, then dropped flat, and crawled into the driveway of the house. He painfully snaked up the porch steps, praying there was nothing in the darkness to knock over.

  A voice broke the stillness. He cringed, pointing the shotgun. It was the hand-radio, holding forth from the window only six feet from him.

  "Acidhead! Come in, you there? Wake up!"

  "Yeah, I'm awake. What?"

  "This is Charlie. You kill anything yet?"

  "Nothing to shoot at..."

  "You will have in half an hour. Happy hunting, over."

  As he listened, Glen slid the last few feet to the window. A window screen leaned against the house. He saw the forestock and barrel of a military rifle sticking out a foot from the window.

  So slowly that his thighs shook from the strain, Glen stood up. He shifted the shotgun from his right hand to his left, slipped the Davis family's twelve-inch stainless steel carving knife from his belt. He held it low.

  "Hey, Acidhead," Glen Shepard hissed. "You got a smoke?"

  "Who's there?"

  "The bogeyman. You got a smoke, I'm all out of the good stuff."

  Leaning from the window, the biker looked in, both directions, saw Glen. "You gotta be careful, I coulda shot..."

  Thrusting upward, Glen jammed the long blade through the biker's throat and up into his brain, pushing through cartilage and bone. The dead man convulsed, snapping the blade off inside his skull. Glen was left with only the handle and four inches of blade.

  "Hey, Acidhead, you okay?" Glen asked, speaking loud, testing the environment. "What's with you? Anybody else here? Help me with him, will you?"

  But no one answered. Shotgun ahead of him, Glen stepped through the window. In seconds, he stripped the dead man of his Outlaw jacket, his weapons, and the walkie-talkie.

  * * *

  Electric stars sparkled overhead in the domed ceiling of the Avalon Casino Ballroom. Beneath the false heavens, the imprisoned people of Catalina — men, women and children: residents and tourists — waited, agonized. Some tried to sleep on the dance floor. Most sprawled on the floor or paced through the crowd. Numbed and silenced by fear, many stared into space, ignoring the other prisoners around them.

  Max Stevens refused to surrender to his fears. Leaving his wife and teenage daughter with a group of friends, he limped through the crowd. He saw crying men, sobbing women, men and women with faces twisted by barely restrained hysteria. Despite the ballroom's humid warmth, he still wore his coat. He searched through the crowd, found men and women who were still calm and thinking. He quizzed each hostage as he spotted them:

  "You want to talk about getting out of here?" he asked a young woman.

  "How? What are you going to do?"

  "I don't know yet, but if we get the chance, we should be ready."

  "I'm willing to listen..."

  "Not just listen. I want to hear your ideas." Then he moved on to the next person.

  "You think we can break out?" he asked a bath-robed man.

  "Maybe. Those creeps aren't supermen."

  "Tell me when I get back with the others." Max pressed on, always searching for the faces of the acquaintances he trusted.

  "Max Stevens! You okay?" One of the island's resident fishermen held him by the shoulders. "I saw them shoving you around."

  "I tried to get away."

  "That's my man!" The fisherman leaned close. "Think a knife could help us get out of here?" He pulled up his pants leg, revealing a knife handle in his boot.

  Max grinned. "They didn't search me, either. Think fourteen rounds of .45 caliber hollow point might open some doors for us? I got my Hardballer and two magazines."

  The fisherman's face crinkled into a wide grin. "Might help."

  "Don't go anywhere," Max told him. "I'm looking for more recruits."

  He found many, but searched for more, crisscrossing the ballroom, looking into the faces of everyone there. Screams and shouts stopped his search. He joined a crowd gathering around a scuffle.

  Two Outlaws were beating and kicking a middle-aged man as two others dragged away a pretty teenage girl. A woman lay gasping on the floor, doubled-over, her face bleeding from several blows.

  "What's happening there?" Max asked an onlooker.

  "Those animals saw a girl they wanted. The girl's mother and father tried to stop them. I wish I hadn't left my gun in the house."

  "You want to do something about it?"

  "No! Max, no!" His wife Carol had come to the crowd. She jerked him back. Pressing close to him, she clutched at the weapon under his coat. "If you try anything, even if you kill them, kill ten of them, you'll die. You've got Julia and me to think of. No matter what, you'll be killed. They've got machine guns for God's sake!"

  Max looked helplessly at the Outlaws. They dragged the shrieking, pleading teenager out of the ballroom. His wife took his face in her hands, made him look at her. "She'll probably live, Max. Don't throw your life away. Someday, she'll forget. If they kill you, I'll never forget."

  He listened to his wife, his lips a bloodless line across his face. He looked over at the beaten man and woman. As the bikers walked away, a few onlookers went to the aid of the bloodied couple, covering them with coats, wiping the broken teeth and blood from the man's mouth. Max looked back to his wife:

  "What if the next girl they want is Julia?"

  6

  Luck blessed Able Team with fog.

  Maintaining a distance of four miles off the western coast of Santa Catalina Island, the Coast Guard cutter lowered a steel boarding ramp to within a few inches of the water, then launched the three kayaks at intervals of a half mile. After the cutter faded into the fog, its wake and propeller foam dissipated and the surface of the sea returned to a mirror calm.

  They floated in a gray void unbroken by sound or daylight, the only motion a gentle groundswell bobbing the fiberglass kayaks.

  "Well, all right!" Lyons called out, his voice lost in the emptiness. "This is fun!" He tried the double-bladed paddle, going straight for a few strokes, then spun the kayak in a circle as he watched the wobbling needle of the compass that was epoxied to the deck of the kayak.

  "I'd be nowhere without this compass," he said out loud. "In fact I am nowhere..."

  A splash broke the water. Lyons whipped his head around to see a shadow and a fin move under the ocean's surface. He remembered the recent news accounts of Great White sharks attacking surfers. Search teams had recovered only body parts and pieces of shark-gnawed surfboards. He touched the butt of the Colt Python shoulder-holstered under his black rain slicker, then paddled furiously to the west. "Hope it was a seal," he chanted. "Hope it was a porpoise, hope it was a dolphin..."

  Less than an hour after the cutter had cast him into the Pacific, Gadgets spotted the rocky shore. Though the fog still held, from time to time sunlight flashed on the water. Wind came and went, allowing him glimpses
of sage-covered hillsides. In a few minutes, he knew, he would be visible from shore.

  Off to the south, his right, he saw a wave rise to a wall, then arc over. The curl created a tunnel of churning foam, then the wave collapsed, shooting spray. Gadgets angled toward the pattern of white water that the wave had left. If he could get the force of the white water behind him, he would surf the last two hundred yards.

  He paddled hard for a minute. He seemed no closer than before to the peaking waves. Maybe it was a current, he thought, as he kept on paddling.

  Glancing behind him, he suddenly understood. He had misjudged the distance. He had thought the waves small, and only a few hundred feet away. No, they were several times that distance, and over ten feet in height, like the wave walling behind him.

  Thinking first of the electronics inside the kayak, Gadgets checked the plastic and elastic seal closing the gap between the hole in the kayak's deck and his body. It was tight. He gave his black plastic rain slicker a quick tuck into the elastic seal, then stroked hard and fast with the paddles, spray flying behind him. His only hope was to be ahead of the wave when the top came down.

  Feeling the wave lift him, he knew he'd lost the race. The kayak stood vertical on the wave face for an instant, then, as the wave curled over him, blocking out the sky, at the moment he expected to be thrown into the churning vortex, the kayak slipped down the wave, accelerating.

  He hurtled through darkness and the roar of the wave around him overwhelmed his thoughts, and for a moment his fear too. Instinctively, he leaned toward the light beyond the curl. The roar became so loud he seemed to be flying through silence.

  Light circled by a vast, spinning vortex rushed toward him, and then he burst out. Salvation. But above him still, the wave's face towered, a wall of water defying gravity and overhanging him.

  Keeping the paddle out of the water that blurred beneath him, Gadgets leaned forward until his arms and chest rested on the deck of the kayak. Whether from reduced wind resistance or improved hydrodynamics or both, he gained speed, leaving the roaring curl behind him. Soon he skipped far ahead of the critical section and into almost flat water. Still moving fast, he sat up and looked for shore.