The Hostaged Island

Seventy-two filthy, vicious motorcycle hoodlums have taken over the fantasy isle of Catalina off the coast of Los Angeles. Their hostages are the island s seventeen hundred inhabitants, cowering from the butchery.

Also kidnapped are six top government thinkers attending a secret conference. The survival of everyone is paramount to the national security experts who call in Able Team.

Lyons, Blancanales and Schwarz begin a counter-insurgency of ruthless force. The terror cyclists have done far more than trash a tourist playground. So the strategy is: smash the whole scene into shards of blazing action!

Again, to those citizens who may suddenly find themselves warriors in defense of family, friends and neighbors, this book is dedicated.

Carl Lyons: blond blue-eyed ex-LAPD sergeant, this recent veteran of the Justice Department's war against organized crime has seen enough blow-torched, pliers-mangled corpses to know what to do about today's psycho punks — shoot first.

Rosario Blancanales: from a Chicano background, he's known as Pol for Politician. Able Team's broad-shouldered senior member now fights the war against international terrorism with a special kind of sophistication and fury.

Herman Schwarz: code-named Gadgets for his wizardry with electronic devices, this Vietnam vet with metaphysical leanings has a genius-level IQ and a penchant for the unusual and unexpected in strategy and action.

Blood sprayed into the night.

The watchman's body twisted in his hold as he pulled the eight-inch blade of the Bowie knife across the old man's throat, severing the arteries, veins, and the windpipe. He jerked the knife back hard, felt the blade scrape the old man's vertebrae.

Horse Delaney let the dying watchman fall. Cool and cruel with heroin — he'd fixed only ten minutes before — Horse stood grinning over the old man. The watchman tried to reach his gaping throat, then died.

The red-bearded, long-haired biker wiped the Bowie knife on his greasy jeans and slipped it into the sheath on his belt. He took a last glance around the docks.

To his right, the truck ramp led to the moorings of a tug boat and cargo barge. The barge carried four semitrailers bound for the markets, restaurants, and shops of Santa Catalina Island. Beyond the docks, ship lights and pilot beacons streaked the oil-black water of Wilmington Harbor.

To his left, an area of asphalt separated the docks from the warehouses. Tractor trailers were parked there, with stacked pallets of cargo alongside of them. Mercury-arc streetlights cast a bluish glare, yet left the alleys separating the warehouses in complete darkness.

Taking his hand-radio from the pocket of his denim jacket, Horse pressed the "transmit" button.

"It's clear, move it."

Six men in denim and leather ran from the shadowed alleys; two men from the alley directly opposite Horse, two from each of the alleys to the north and south. They carried assault rifles. The two pairs of men to the north and south slipped into shadows a hundred yards from where Horse stood. They leaned back against alley walls as if to melt into them. They were on the lookout.

The two men from the center alley ran directly to Horse. Charlie, a lean biker with a lot of kinky blond hair and no front teeth, carried Horse's gear: government .45 with ten magazines on a military web belt, .45 MAC-10 fitted with suppressor, a bandolier carrying ten 30-round magazines for the MAC-10. Horse buckled the web belt and slipped on the bandolier.

He turned to the second man, the full-blooded Navajo with his Mohawk haircut who looked like a bird of prey.

"Chief, bring in the trucks."

The hooked-nose Indian, scowling, raised his hand-radio to his mouth. In seconds they heard the muffled rumble of diesel engines. As the first stolen semitrailer emerged from the alley. "Chief! Guide them around. Charlie, get that..." Horse glanced at the dead watchman "...thing out of the way. We hafta take him out a couple of miles before we dump him. We can't have someone find him, can't have nothing go wrong."

The first semi wheeled in an arc, then backed up to the loading ramp. Chief yanked open the trailer's doors. Bikers jumped to the asphalt, pulled long planks from inside the trailer. Even as Chief guided the second semi to its place alongside the first, silent bikers wheeled their Kawasakis, Harleys, Suzukis and Hondas out of the trailer. Then more of them descended from the second trailer.

They wore denim jeans and black leather jackets studded with chrome, steel-toed motorcycle boots, Nazi helmets, Confederate caps, even Stetsons. They all carried weapons: assault rifles, submachine guns, revolvers, pistols, knives, machetes. On the back of every jacket was a grinning skull winged with flames — The Outlaws. All of them were male.

"Line the bikes up!" yelled Horse, pacing the loading ramp. "Over there, line them over there. Keep this ramp clear. Chief! Form everyone up. Charlie, break the locks off those trailers on the boat. Where's Turk? Turk!"

"Something wrong?" The dull-eyed ex-merchant marine ambled up to Horse. Turk was a balding giant with thick features, huge arms and shoulders falling about his beer belly. His ten-shot pistol-grip Ithaca riot shotgun hung in front of him, the sling looped behind his neck, his hands folded over the receiver.

"You know your job. Get in that tug, get that engine going."

"Ah, yeah. Was just gonna do that..."

"Three minutes! Three minutes and then we're on our way."

Aboard the barge, Charlie began to throw the boxes and crates from the interior of a semitrailer to the bikers on the dock. A line of bikers passed the freight from the dock, hand-to-hand up the loading ramp at the back of the semitrailer on land. As the last of the motorcycles came down the plank ramps, bikers threw the freight into the empty trailer.

Other bikers unloaded the gang's heavy weapons from the second semitrailer. It had taken the Outlaws months to assemble the contents of these nylon and oilskin cases. They had looted gun-shops, burglarized the homes of collectors, traded drugs for what they could not buy: M-60 machine guns, Marlin .444s with telescopic sights, grenades. A raid on the desert bunker of a radical Christian sect gained LAAW (Light Anti-Armor Weapon) rockets still in cases marked for shipment to Korea, .50 caliber Browning machine guns, and light mortars. It had taken three pickup trucks to carry away the weapons and ammunition. Now the weapons were bound for Santa Catalina Island.

Horse watched the unloading of the weapons, then spoke into his hand-radio:

"Anybody see anything?"

Two voices answered simultaneously. Horse jabbed the "transmit": "One at a time. Jake, what're you talking about?"

"Nothing. Nobody. The docks ain't the place for a big Saturday night. You want us to come in?"

"No! Stay there. Now you, Bart. What's..."

"Zero." The voice from the radio slurred the word as if half-asleep. "It's just dark and peaceful. What a trip, man. Just us and the rats."

"Pete, you there?" Horse called for the man watching the far side of the warehouses.

"I'm here. Watching everything. There's nothing to see."

"Stay there, all of you, a few more minutes."

The tug's engine sputtered, then revved. Clouds of diesel smoke burst from its stack. Turk leaned from the cabin and waved to the mass of men on the dock. Then he spotted Horse, went back to his job. The diesels' sputterings and pops smoothed to a steady, almost inaudible background idle.

Several bikers heaved the planks to the barge. As the first of the chromed and lacquered motorcycles went into the one emptied trailer, Charlie broke the locks off the second one. Horse strode down the ramp.

"What's taking you so long? Get that trash out of there!"

Toothless Charlie glanced at his watch, but he didn't pause as he passed box after box to the human conveyor belt below him. "We're thirty seconds ahead of schedule," he said. "Be cool, Horse. Why don't you take a break, maybe a little skullpop for you? Your nerves..."

Horse's MAC-10 pointed at Charlie's face. Charlie looked down the .45 caliber hole in the suppressor, continued unloading. "I'm just doing my work, Horse. Working as fast as I can. Can't work if I'm dead."

"Then you don't tell me what to do. I tell you." Horse stomped back up the ramp, past the rows of bikes, pushing through the groups of sweating Outlaws. He surveyed the scene. There was nothing more he could do. They all knew their jobs.

He went to the far side of the trucks. He was alone there. He leaned against the semi's radiator, watching the alleys and warehouses for movement. Nothing. He wished someone would appear. A guard, a dockworker, a warehouse manager. Anyone. He'd already killed twice tonight: a black teenage security guard, studying some textbook in the guard shack, and then the old man. Another kill would be almost as good as heroin. Almost. Nothing was quite as good as heroin. Not killing, not fucking, not highway cruising. And after tonight, he'd never have to hustle again; he'd be rich, super-rich.

Fifteen years ago he had walked away from San Quentin after two years inside for the theft of a motorcycle. It made him laugh. As a teenager he had committed assault, rape, murder, mayhem, but they put him away for breaking a showroom window and riding off on a Harley. Since then he had never done anything so paltry.

First he formed the Outlaws. With this gang of psychos and misfits, he pretty soon whipped the other motorcycle outfits into line.

They took on the West Coast syndicate for the control of the heroin trade in San Bernardino County, and they won. Then they took a big piece of the Los Angeles trade from the black and Chicano gangs.

But tonight was different. Tonight was not some gang war for a few thousand dollars a week in heroin profits.

Tonight would be for millions.

As the tug and barges left Wilmington Harbor, Chief scanned the water and the lights behind them from the pilot's cabin. Nothing moved on the dark break-water. No Coast Guard craft pursued them. No flashing lights from Police or Harbor Master. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, tried to find the truck docks in the dark mass of wharves and warehouses along the shore. He couldn't see the dock. He buzzed Horse on the hand-radio:

"We're out of the harbor."

"Anything following us?"

"Nah."

Horse pocketed his radio and turned to the other Outlaws in the trailer with him. "We're on our way."

The fifty-odd bikers were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the tangle of motorcycles and weapons. They cheered, shoving into one another. Some beat their fists on the aluminum sheeting of the trailer. Horse stepped up on a customized chopped Harley, raised his arms for order:

"Shut the fuck up! Trailers full of tomatoes and soda pop don't scream, remember? You want to come this far and get busted? QUIET!"

The trailer fell silent. From the second trailer beside them on the barge, they heard the cheering of the twenty other Outlaws. Horse pulled out the hand-radio and hissed:

"Charlie! Shut them up! Now!"

"Sure, boss. Can we smoke now?"

"No smoking."

"Not even tobacco? I'm having a nicotine fit."

"Cigarettes okay. But no grass, no PCP. And no lights, no cigarettes once we start unloading. You know the plan."

Then he glared at the Outlaws in front of him.

"You heard what I told Charlie. Everyone stays straight until we take the Island. No one leaves the trailers until we dock.

"No cigarettes, no noise, no shooting. Only knives. Me and the guys with silencers will do any shooting. You see one of the Catalina pigs and you don't have a silencer, you let him go. No noise, no alarms, nothing! Understand?"

The bikers murmured their compliance. But one of them, Stonewall, the one in the Confederate cap, raised his parkerized Remington 870. The riot weapon had been modified with a magazine extension and a bayonet mount.

"When we start the round-up," Stonewall asked, "what happens if the locals..."

"If the locals don't follow orders, they die. Once the round-up starts, anything that doesn't move when it's told to, dies. Tell them once, then kill them. But that's only after the special squads are in position. Silence until we turn on the sirens. Then it's straight ahead and we don't stop until the island is ours."

Horse raised his arms to quiet the cheer.

"Remember this," he commanded. "We stay together, everyone does his job, we can't lose. But if anyone pulls some chicken shit trick, anyone gets in a hard place and thinks he can surrender, you think about what I'm going to tell you now.

"We killed four guards to get to the docks. We killed those crazy Jesus-people out in the desert. And we're gonna kill every last hero that tries to stop us on the island. That's murder-by-ambush, that's conspiracy-to-murder, that's murder of witnesses. That's mandatory death sentence, for all of us.

"Some chicken shit thinks he's going to bargain his way out of anything, the most he can hope for is life. Life in a little concrete room. I been inside, I know. So do the chicken shit a favor and kill him. Do us all a favor, kill him. Do we all understand!"

Horse let the bikers cheer and shout. "Outlaws forever!" they yelled. He pushed open the trailer door and jumped down to the barge deck. He stood at the barge's safety ropes for a minute, watching the lights of the Harbor and Long Beach recede.

Then he went into the second trailer. There he answered the questions of twenty more Outlaws, gave them the same speech as the first group. Same seething threats, same encouragement, same venom.

The voices of seventy-two Outlaws had faded, and Horse needed a fix. He wandered the deck of the barge, found shelter from the wind and salt-spray behind the wheels of a semitrailer, and unwrapped his kit. He heard the shuffling of heavy boots above him as he cooked the heroin with the flame of his butane lighter. He pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, tied off, found a vein under all the scars. Horse had been an addict for the past ten years, his habit costing him hundreds of dollars a day. The rush still lifted him to heaven.

His brain floating, Horse watched the wake of the tug and cargo barge chujn the dark ocean. He had been a child and teenager on Catalina. The people had beaten him, jailed him, humiliated him, driven him out of their precious community.

Now he returned.

He returned with a gang of seventy-two felons, psychopaths, addicts.

He came back with a Plan. A lethal plan conceived and drafted by the only man Horse had ever admired: an ally, a friend, and a man of wealth and prestige and position.

He came back with a white-hot hatred for the community that had rejected him. The people of the island would suffer the terror of the Outlaws. The people would die. And their terror and death would make Horse rich beyond his dreams.