The Hostaged Island (5 page)

Waiting at the rendezvous point, Lyons and Gadgets repeatedly sent out the click-code for the third member of Able Team. They received no answer until the scanner/auto-recorder spoke:

"Well, Horse. This here is Rebel out at the Little Harbor camping ground. Guess what? We got ourselves a commando."

"What? He alive?"

"Yeah, for a while. We were thinking of..."

"I want him! Bring him here!"

"All we got is bikes, man. He could get away."

"I'll send a car. You don't touch him, unnerstan'? He's mine!"

Lyons and Gadgets didn't wait to hear every word. Sprinting through the brush, they already knew the sadist's message:

Horrible death for Pol Blancanales.

Finally coming to the hillcrest, Lyons stumbled the last few steps, then had to fall, coughing. On his hands and knees he spat long ropes of mucus into the dirt. He had attempted to sprint up the hill with a fifty-pound backpack of weapons and equipment. Though his sprinting steps had slowed to a determined march, he had not stopped. His friend's life depended on him.

Glancing back, Lyons saw Gadgets still struggling up the slope. Packing more weight — weapons, electronics, and heavy nickle-cadmium batteries — and lacking Lyons' fanatical physical conditioning, Gadgets straggled a hundred yards behind him. Lyons slipped out of his backpack straps, snapped open the "Daylight" Mannlicher's fiberglass and foam case, and crawled to the ridgeline.

Though the morning remained gray and cool, the light breeze had blown away the fog. The scope's eight-power optics closed the distance between Lyons and the campground a couple of hundred yards below. He saw three bikers standing in front of Blancanales. With heavy wire twisted around his wrists, Blancanales hung by his hands from a utility pole, his boots swinging a few inches from the asphalt of the parking lot.

A biker with a bloody head waved a knife. As Lyons watched, the biker touched the blade tip to Blancanales' eye. Lyons whipped back the Mannlicher's bolt, chambered a .308 Accelerator. But one of the other Outlaws, a lanky, slow-moving biker wearing a Confederate army cap, shoved the bloodied biker away from the prisoner. The third biker popped open a beer can and swilled the drink.

Setting the rifle's safety, Lyons glanced to the gravel and dirt road leading across the island to Avalon. He saw no one.

Gadgets collapsed beside Lyons. His throat rasped with every breath. As he choked down the coughs, he pulled a pair of binoculars from a side pocket of his pack and focused on the scene below.

"Only those three? See any others?"

"Not yet," murmured Lyons. "You want to stay here? Work the rifle?"

"You're going down there?"

"Over there..." Lyons pointed north, to the road continuing past the campgrounds. A hundred yards from where the bikers held Blancanales, the road curved behind a hillside. "...I'll drop down on the far side of that hill and come back through the campsites. Trees and bushes all the way. Lots of cover."

Gadgets looked at his watch. "We intercepted the message eight minutes ago. Assuming they left one minute later and are now driving at thirty miles an hour over the mountain, we've got nineteen minutes until they get here."

"And what if they drive sixty?" Lyons gave Gadgets the Mannlicher. "The safety's on. There's a fast one in the chamber. If you see them coming on the road, kill those three down there, open up on the car.

I'm taking your Uzi. You hear me open up, kill those three and watch for targets. See you later."

Lyons buckled the bandolier of thirty-round magazines around his chest, then snatched up the Uzi. Sliding and running down the hillside, he paralleled the ridgeline for a hundred and fifty yards, finally angling upward to the crest. He crawled over the concrete-hard dirt of a firebreak, and looked to the south as he went over the top. Hillsides and trees blocked the bikers' view of him. He took the time to scan the road and campground hundreds of yards below him.

There was no movement. He listened for motorcycle engines, heard only the squawks of sea gulls picking over garbage in the campground.

He started down the steep firebreak. His feet slipped on dirt and loose gravel. Instead of digging his heels in, he let gravity take him, skiing down the firebreak on his boot soles. When the slope leveled for a few yards, Lyons ran, then jumped into space, flexing his knees as he hit. He dirt-skied again to the road, and crossed it without slowing.

Instead of continuing down the firebreak without cover, he plunged into the brush, running in a crouch. He held the Uzi at arm's length, using the small weapon to part branches.

Shots! He fell flat. He heard laughter and voices. Silently, he crawled through the sagebrush. He slithered into a gully not much wider than his shoulders. He followed the gully until he came to a grating of welded reinforcing rods. Beyond the grate, a concrete spillway dropped down a vertical embankment to the parking lot.

At the far end of the parking lot, two bikers taunted Pol Blancanales. The third, the biker wearing the Confederate army cap, braced his G-3 assault rifle on his motorcycle and fired at the gulls that soared in the gray sky.

Lyons took the hand-radio from the thigh-pocket of his black battle suit. He checked the volume and called Gadgets.

"Wizard, what you see?"

"I saw you. Where are you now?"

"Maybe a hundred feet to the north of them. We've got to do this all at once, I can't rush them from here. I've got a good angle on the two in front of Pol. Think you can hit Johnny Reb without putting a hole through the motorcycle?"

"Negative. Unless he's standing up. Want to do it right now?"

Lyons rested the Uzi on the rebar gate, sighted through the peep sight on the biker with the knife. "Waiting for you."

Watching through the peep sight, Lyons saw the bloodied Outlaw whip his head around as the roar-shriek of the ultrahigh-velocity slug ripped apart the quiet morning. Lyons fired the split second he heard the big rifle's report.

Blood spurted from the biker's chest. The single 9mm slug had punched through his heart. Lyons found the other man, tightened his aim, calmly squeezed off a single shot as the biker spun around, his head whipping back and forth as he searched the hillsides for the attackers. The shot caught him in the arm and ribs, knocking him down. He tried to crawl, but his broken arm collapsed underneath him.

Should we take him for interrogation? thought Lyons, hesitating an instant. But the man pulled a pistol from his belt holster. Even as Lyons snapped off two shots, a second ultrahigh-velocity slug slammed the biker into the asphalt. Lyons spoke into the radio again:

"Keep watch. If we got time, I'm going to strip those creeps."

"Role camouflage?"

"And transportation."

Blancanales was grinning as Lyons ran up to him. "Just the man I wanted to see."

His wired wrists hung from a bolt in the utility pole. Lyons lifted his friend off. Then he helped him untwist the wire.

"Can't you keep out of trouble?"

"Trouble is my business," Blancanales countered. He appeared unhurt from his ordeal, although his wrists were bleeding, and his head was badly banged up at the back, where he had received the rifle butt.

"Gadgets is up there." Lyons looked toward the top of the hill as he finished uncoiling the wire from Pol's wrists. "We got to get back there. A goon squad is coming this way. Which motorcycle you want?"

The hand-radio buzzed. "What's happening?" snapped Lyons.

"A car and three motorcycles, moving fast!"

"Let them come in the parking lot, fire when we do."

Lyons grabbed the G-3 from the asphalt and threw it to Blancanales, who had already regained his hijacked Beretta. Then he jerked the dead biker into a sitting position against a motorcycle. He pulled the messy heart-shot biker up against the utility pole where Blancanales had hung, and left the dead man sitting there, still leaking dark fluids. He went to the last biker, rolled him over to take his jacket, had to look away. Nausea twisted his gut.

Not looking at the part that had been a face before the accelerator got to it, Lyons stripped off the jacket. He dumped the body in the bushes. He found a chromed Nazi helmet, flipped it on, then sat on a Harley to wait, nonchalantly wiping bits of human tissue from the denim jacket.

Escorted by three low-slung motorcycles, a Lincoln Continental fishtailed into the parking lot and came to a tire-smoking stop. The Harleys swung in a wide loop, coming to a slower stop. Lyons waited.

A hoodlum resplendent in chrome-studded black leather jacket and pants stepped out of the Lincoln. He wore a western holster with a nickel-plated, pearl-handled six-gun. He looked at Lyons, lifted his sunglasses. "Who the fuck..."

"Surprise!"

Leaving the gravel road behind them, Able Team followed a rutted, four-wheel drive track several hundred yards into the hills on their captured Harleys. Blancanales pointed to a grassy area shaded by a sheer hillside. They coasted to a stop and propped the motorcycles against the embankment. Lyons looked back. They could not be seen from the main road.

"So, gentlemen, what's the plan? Where do we hit next?"

"I don't think our next engagement will be so easy," Blancanales said. He spread out his map of Catalina Island on the grass.

"Able Team eight, Outlaws zero," Lyons said without emotion.

"...but now they know we're here."

"I want you guys to hear something." Gadgets took the scanner/auto-recorder from his pack and rewound the cassette. "The name of the Outlaws' leader is Horse. That's what the LAPD file said, and all the calls I've heard, the name of the man giving the orders is Horse. But listen to this."

He touched the play button. "Horse, this is your friend. Answer."

"Yessir! This is Horse. Is there anything you need?"

"No, everything's fine. I'm quite comfortable. Brief me..."

Gadgets played the conversation through. "That went out on a different frequency. What does it sound like to you?"

"Sounds like this isn't all Horse's game," Lyons replied. "He's just the front man."

"Is he talking with someone off the island?" Blancanales was fieldstripping the Beretta, spreading out the components on the plastic map. When the Outlaws had captured him, they had experimented with the weapon. He was checking it thoroughly, cleaning it like it had been violated.

"Maybe on a boat," Gadgets pondered. "But hardly the mainland. No way."

"So we have some mastermind floating offshore directing this horror show..." Lyons said. "You think all this could be a grab at those six scientists? By commies, terrorists? Except that that guy speaks perfect English. He couldn't be foreign."

"Too perfect," Blancanales said. "Remember, those eggheads are here by chance. They wanted a quiet place, this was close. They could've gone to Lake Tahoe. The man talked about 'the seizure of the island, and about money. If he only wanted those six, why not grab just them? Why take everyone on the island?"

"Yeah, very curious." Gadgets fast-forwarded the tape, stopping to listen to snatches of conversation.

"What else you got?" Lyons asked.

"I don't know. Been kind of busy, haven't had a chance to listen..."

He caught another snatch of the calm, educated voice. "...I can't help you there, Horse. Do what you think is necessary."

Gadgets rewound the tape and found the beginning of this later conversation. "Any developments, Horse?"

"Yeah, more trouble with heroes. I've lost a couple of men to local crazies."

"Your men can eliminate the opposition. Has there been any attempt yet to land security forces?"

"I don't know. There was nothing on the radar, but one of my men says they've got a commando over on the other side of the island."

"Is that in fact true? If the authorities have ignored your stipulations..."

"We'll know soon enough. I'm going to, ah, put the questions to him myself. I've sent some men to bring him here. If he's a cop..."

"You will need to impress the authorities. If he is one of these local residents, I suggest you make an example of him."

"Oh, yeah!"

"I'll call you again..."

"Wait, sir. I need to be able to call you."

"Please don't. There is no privacy here. You could compromise me."

"Yessir, I'm sorry sir."

"Speak with you again in an hour."

They heard Horse again: "Blackie. Come in! You got that commando? Blackie!"

Lyons now wore the biker's black leather jacket. "Sorry, Horse. Blackie is Missing In Action," he said under his breath.

Finished with the Beretta, Blancanales field-stripped and cleaned the captured Heckler and Koch G-3. "As long as they don't identify us," Blancanales reasoned, "we don't have to worry about the bikers taking it out on the hostages."

"What do you make of what he said?" Gadgets asked suddenly. "He said, 'There is no privacy here. You could compromise me.'"

Lyons counted off the points on his fingers. "One, he isn't alone. Two, the people he's with don't know what he's doing. Three, he isn't a resident. He used the words, 'one of these local residents,' right? He said it like he thought they were a lower life form. Four, we don't have time for a mystery. I say we hit the airport, the radio station, and every Outlaw patrol and outpost we can find. What do you two think?"

"Why the airport?" Blancanales asked. "He's got the place radar tight, nothing can come in."

"It gives the Feds and the LAPD an option. If we don't make it, they could land assault squads if things got desperate..."

"If we took out the radar!" Gadgets pointed to Mount Black Jack on Blancanales' map. "Right there. The radar station's in town, but the actual scanning equipment's up on top of this mountain. We hit that equipment, he's blind."

"Can't do it." Lyons shook his head. "Assault units would be a desperate, last-chance gamble. And hitting the radar wouldn't help. He'd pull in his men, kill the hostages before the assault teams got into town.

"And another problem. We are not making informed decisions. We won't be able to devise a real plan until we know what's out there. Time to move."

"Time to forward all this information to Brognola," Gadgets added. "Maybe Stonyman and the LAPD can work out a plan."

Lyons paced the dirt road while Gadgets prepared his transmission. Dictating into the recorder, Gadgets detailed what Able Team had seen and heard. He summarized their discussion on a possible coordinated assault. Then, plugging in the scrambler module and speeding up the tape to ten times normal, he transmitted the information. Anyone intercepting Gadgets' transmission would hear only a shriek of electronic noise. Finally Gadgets packed his equipment: "Ready to go."

Blancanales gave the captured G-3 a last wipe, snapped in a magazine. "Loaded."