Rocks! A previous wave's backwash rolled toward him, the kayak bouncing, then the wave behind him leaped up and crashed, and the white water engulfed him. He dug in with the paddle, trying to slow his rush onto the rocks.
Fiberglass shrieked. He felt several quick lurches, then the foam drove him onto a pebbled beach. As the backwash tried to tug him back, he jammed the paddle into the pebbles and jumped from the kayak. He quickly pulled the craft above the waterline.
He sat on a rock shaking, trying to calm his heart-beat. He took long, slow breaths. He could not remember being so scared in a long, long while.
He noticed some small rocks in a circle, scorched by campfire, and a discarded sandal, and some beer cans. Spray-painted across one large rock were the words: "Surfers Rule."
Here he was shaking, and teenagers did it for thrills.
Gadgets went to work. He glanced every few seconds to the hillsides above him as he stripped the plastic bag from his Uzi, snapped in a magazine, and chambered a round.
He examined the kayak and realized it would not float again. Long rips had broken open the fiberglass bottom. Near the nose, a snapped flap of fiberglass exposed the plywood frame. He unloaded his equipment and other weapons and pushed the kayak back into the water. The wash pulled it out to the shore break, and the first wave sank it.
He assembled his electronics. First, the scanner/auto-recorder. The LAPD file on the Outlaws had noted the theft of a case of high-quality walkie-talkies. If the Outlaws were using those radios, Gadgets' scanner could monitor and record the conversation automatically.
Then he extended the antenna of his hand-radio and keyed a click-code. Two beeps for onshore and safe, three beeps to identify himself. His scanner/auto-recorder picked up the beeps, recorded the signal on the cassette.
Voices came on. "This is Chief, this is Chief."
"Horse here. What?"
"We cleaned up Little Harbor. Had to kill a Park Ranger. We're sending back a couple of families we found at the campground. Couple of good-looking women in the crowd. We took turns on one, saved the other one for you if you're interested."
"Don't waste your time on that, you're on patrol."
"Sorry, it just sorta happened."
"You watching the ocean? Any ships, boats?"
"Use the radar. There's too much fog here."
"Okay, but keep patrolling the beaches the best you can. Over and out."
Gadgets hurried through the assembly of the rest of his equipment: the long-range directional microphone, the radio-triggered detonators. After what he had heard, he understood that every minute of delay meant death and degradation for the people of the island. As he shouldered his backpack, another voice came from the scanner, on a different frequency: "Horse, this is your friend. Answer."
"Yes, sir! This is Horse. Is there anything you need?"
"No, everything's fine. I'm quite comfortable. Brief me. Is the seizure of the island complete?"
"Oh, yeah. No problems. Some shooting. Had to kill some heroes."
"What about the conversations with the Governor?"
"Nothing else with the Governor. They said they'd be sending the submarine. They put a negotiator on the line, but I just hung up."
"Good. Follow the plan. Soon we will be very wealthy men."
"Yessir! That's what I want." Then there was static.
Who was that man? He called himself a "friend" of these biker sadists? The man with the calm, educated voice was a co-conspirator with Horse. Who was he?
Gadgets' thoughts were interrupted by clicks on the radio. Two clicks, then two more. Blancanales.
Another set of clicks answered. Two clicks, then one. Lyons. Gadgets keyed his hand-radio as he went up the hillside toward the rendezvous.
On shore and ready, Able Team were moving into action.
* * *
Striding through the sagebrush, Blancanales listened for voices or motorcycles. He had heard large-caliber rifle fire only seconds after reaching shore, but Lyons' and Gadgets' click-code replies calmed his fears. The rifle fire had not been aimed at them. Now his concern was to avoid it being aimed at him.
He glanced at his compass and the plastic-covered topographical map, then surveyed what terrain he could see for landmarks. Light fog still shrouded the hillsides. Continuing due south, he followed a cattle trail through the low brush, inspecting it for foot or tire tracks.
Below him he heard surf. Then when a canyon's breeze carried away the fog for a moment, he saw the rocky shoreline. Above him the sun rose from behind the unseen peaks; it became a gray disk. Soon the sun would burn away the fog. He hurried his pace, counting cadence to himself.
Footprints appeared on the cow trail. Blancanales stopped for a second to check the tracks. Jogging shoes, yesterday, maybe the day before. Cow hooves had crossed the shoe tracks. There was a dry cow-paddy over one of the prints. Going on, he saw more and more footprints — jogging shoes, hiking boots, sandals, even a high-heel shoe — and some cow tracks. Bubble gum wrappers, cigarette butts and drink cans indicated frequent visitors.
He checked the map again. He knew the Little Harbor campground was only a few hundred yards farther. He cut due east, staying in the narrow creek bed of a small canyon. The tangled brush and loose rocks slowed him to a hand-over-hand climb, but the steep sides of the gully and the overhanging branches protected him from being observed.
A retaining wall of sheer concrete blocked his progress. He saw the guardrail of a road above him. Not wanting to chance the road, he paralleled it, staying close to the hillside as he followed animal and foot trails.
At first, he thought the sounds were gull-cries from the ocean. He listened harder. It was laughter, coarse laughter, coming from the campground.
Unsnapping the flap of his Browning Double-Action's holster, he slipped out the pistol. Then he changed his mind. Always use the proper technology, Konzaki had said. Blancanales found the Beretta 93R in his backpack, slapped in a magazine and snapped back the slide.
He hid the backpack. Soft-footing it along the trail, crouching below the level of the brush, he could hear screams, more laughter, voices. He continued another hundred yards and came to some sort of fire road. He couldn't go any farther without losing cover. But another scream told him he was already there.
Fifty yards below, two Outlaws raped a woman. One struggled on top of the naked, shrieking woman. The other biker stood on her arms, looking down at her and the biker and laughing, urging the biker on, taunting him.
The standing biker also taunted the woman's husband. The man lay against a car, bound hand and foot. He was turning his head away. Inside the car, a child cried.
Blancanales surveyed the scene. The fire road cut straight down the steep hillside, ending at the gravel and asphalt of the campground. The Outlaws and the unfortunate family were at the bottom of the fire road.
He saw only two motorcycles at this particular campsite. He looked beyond to the other campsites. He saw collapsed tents, scattered belongings, but no other motorcycles.
Sliding and crawling as fast as he dared through the thick sagebrush, Blancanales silently closed the distance between himself and the bikers. Twenty yards uphill from the campsite, he could not risk getting closer.
Prone in the brush, only his hands extending from cover, he grasped the Beretta in both hands, right hand on the grip, left hand holding the extension lever in front of the trigger guard, his left thumb through the extra-large trigger guard as Konzaki had demonstrated. He sighted on the standing biker's chest, gave him a three-round burst.
The bullets interrupted a laugh, the first round punching into his chest, the second his collar-bone, the third taking away his left eye and sideburn. He fell backward and thrashed on the gravel.
There had been no sound other than the slap of the almost simultaneous impacts. The other Outlaw looked up from the woman, puzzled by his friend's fall. Blancanales flicked down the selector to single shot. He sighted on the biker's head.
The woman clawed the biker in the face, and twisted out from under him. She blocked Blancanales' aim. He broke cover, ran and slid and jumped down the hillside. The biker scrambled to his feet, his pants around his knees, trying to pull a pistol from a shoulder holster.
The snap shot glanced off the top of the biker's head, sent him staggering backwards. Blancanales finally reached the bottom of the hill, dropped into a two-handed, wide-leg stance to deliver the kill shot, when the woman again blocked his aim as she kicked and punched the bleeding biker.
"Get down!" Blancanales shouted. "Out of the way! Let me kill him!"
She turned and saw him for the first time. Her eyes went wide at the sight of the black-clad warrior with the pistol. But she didn't move. The biker sprinted away, weaving through trees and brush. Blancanales sighted, fired again, heard the bullet slap the biker. He fell, scrambled up, kept running.
Starting after the wounded biker, Blancanales yelled back at the woman:
"Take that dead man's weapons, you all go hide in the brush somewhere. Don't show yourself till you see uniformed police officers or soldiers. Move it — I can't help you any more!"
"Thank you, oh, thank you, thank you. God be with you," the woman sobbed as he ran.
He followed the blood trail through the campground. Ahead of him was a cluster of park buildings surrounded by bushes and trees. The blood led in that direction. Off to his left, the camp road curved through brush and trees shading the camping sites.
Not to risk walking into the wounded man's ambush, Blancanales took the road. He would circle around, kill him.
He jogged past the park buildings, then spotted a trail through the campsites and trees that led back to the buildings. If the biker was waiting for him, that trail would allow Blancanales to surprise him. He left the road and pressed through thick branches. He held the Beretta ready in front of him.
A rifle butt slammed into the back of his head. He fell hard, didn't move. A biker stood over him. He was pointing a Heckler and Koch G-3 assault rifle at the motionless Blancanales.
"Well, well, well. What is this?"
* * *
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.
7
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 quie
t 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.
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