by Victor Koman
He hefted the rock and performed the instinctive judgment of mass, distance, and angles that come naturally to anyone who has had to deliver a ball to a precise point. Finally, Johnny thought, a use for sports!
Leila picked up another rock, slightly larger, and performed the same preparation. Rising and taking a deep breath of salt-and seaweed-tinged air, she hurled the rock at the sleeping man at the same instant as Johnny aimed for the other. For a long second they watched the black stones arc across the width of the cavern, zeroing in on their targets.
The rustle of their clothing as they pitched the missiles caused the guard to look up from his magazine in time to see the incoming attack. Throwing himself aside, he cried “Caramb-” just as the stone slammed his right shoulder with numbing force. His companion twitched violently when the rock hit him between the eyes with a coconut-like klonk, then slid further down his seat, more unconscious than ever.
Reaching across with his left hand, the other guard struggled to draw his pistol from his right-side holster. Leila crossed thirty feet of sand and rock, leapt up at the waterline, and sailed into him with the speed of a flying tackle. The pistol went off with a report that echoed through the cavern. Startled bats fluttered and flew out with a leathery flap of wings.
“Hate to do this to a fellow lefty,” Leila muttered, “but…” She hammered the side of his head with a double fist, stunning him. Swiftly, she seized the pistol and tossed it to Johnny, who leveled it at the man and took aim with deadly intent.
“Don’t,” she said upon hearing the distinctive click of the semi-auto pistol’s hammer pulling back.
“Why not?” Johnny demanded. “They work for Dandridge.”
Disarming the other guard, she said, “They treated us quite civilly under the circumstances. They deserve a rap on the head for being rough guards, not death.” She nodded toward the boat. “Let’s get out of here.”
They hit the aluminum deck of the boat with resonant thumps, rolling and sliding into position. Leila gunned the engine into life and roared out of the cavern in a spray of sea foam.
“But we don’t know how many people they might have killed!”
“Exactly,” Weir said. “And we don’t know if they’ve ever killed anyone. We’re out to stop Dandridge, not judge everyone who works for him.”
Johnny frowned, puzzled and even a little annoyed. “Well, that’s a hell of a way to fight evil.”
Leila laughed mirthfully. “It works for us.”
The boat smacked over the waves. “All right,” she shouted over the roar of the engine, “Where’d they hide the plane?”
Johnny scanned the flat, blue horizon and saw nothing but the islands behind them and the sea everywhere else. Salt spray stung his face as the sun-low on the horizon-scintillated on the ocean’s surface.
“Flash!” she called out, confident that she had her earcomm signal back. “I’m going around to the other island. Fill me in!”
“I lost everyone’s signals two hours ago. They towed the Seamaster halfway between the two islands. Cap and the rest must still be somewhere inside the southern island. Be on your guard.”
Her long black hair whipped in the wind as she steered around the northern island. To Johnny, she looked like a golden statue of some Grecian goddess come to life. She gazed intently at the waters ahead, guiding the boat with sure strength. The slap of the metal hull against the swells punctuated the growl of the engine like the sound of a giant animal charging its prey.
He watched in wonder as the southern island came into view. It looked like something out of a mad scientist’s maddest nightmare. In the golden light of the late-day sun, it looked at first like the outline of an ordinary island, then like a tortured city skyline. As they grew closer, the shapes resolved into an intricate array of many-sided pillars that thrust out of the ocean at angles that, combined, lanced upward like a hideous sea creature breaking through the surf.
Off to one side floated the Seamaster. Leila steered toward it, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping the stolen pistol. Her index finger lay alongside the trigger guard, safe from accidental firing but ready to react to the slightest sign of danger.
She shouted over her shoulder to Madsen. “I suppose telling you to lie down and stay hidden would be pointless, so just be careful and work on not getting killed!”
“I can shoot, you know!” he hollered back.
“I don’t think you’ll have to!” She cut back on the throttle a thousand yards away from the aircraft. The boat settled down and drifted. “Flash-how many boats are out there?”
“I saw three on the last satellite image I nabbed. That was fifteen minutes ago. Now that you’re here, I’ll see what the plane’s cameras can pick up.”
After a moment, his voice buzzed in her ear. “I still see three. One by the nose, two coming straight toward you.”
Leila saw the rooster-tail spray from the two speedboats closing in on their inflatable. “Can you splash them with the portside missiles?”
“Just wanted your say-so. Already locked in.”
She nodded and said, “Fire away.”
Instantly, two white streaks tipped with fire screamed away from a rotating weapons pod under the Seamaster’s left wing. In less than a second, two explosions flung tons of water into the sky, taking the patrol boats with them. Tiny figures scrambled at air as the force of the blast threw them outward in every direction. One boat whirled in space and landed in one piece while the other disintegrated into shattered planks and engines, falling in pieces to the churning sea below.
Leila winked at Johnny as she gunned the engine into life. “We’ll toss out a life raft for them once we’re in the air.”
Her passenger frowned. “Why not let the sharks have ‘em?”
She grinned. “Cap says it totally annoys your enemies to owe you their lives. Besides”-her voice turned somber-“killing for convenience is a trait of the other side.”
She steered around the aft of the Seamaster, past its high T-tail empennage that towered like a diving whale’s powerful flukes, and said, “Open the gate to the castle, Flash.”
Hundreds of miles away in his electronic cocoon at the Anger Institute, Flash tapped into his keyboard the command to unseal the Seamaster. Encrypted with a 512-character prime number, the message darted upward to a commercial satellite and down again to the Seamaster’s computer, which decrypted the message and activated the gun bay door.
The boat bobbing at the prow of the seaplane released its tow line and roared into action, pulling around at the sight of the missile attack. Three men leveled their weapons toward Leila.
She took aim and squeezed off three rapid shots. Two rounds hit home, dropping the men to the deck. The third kept his cool and fired at the deadly woman.
The bullet punched through the boat’s windshield with a nerve-rattling crack. Leila sucked in a gasp of air and fired again. The pistol barked out a bullet that found its mark in her attacker’s chest. Dropping his rifle, he clutched his heart with one hand, gripped his skipper’s shoulder with the other, and sank out of sight to join his fallen comrades in the bottom of the boat.
“You’re shot!” Johnny cried, staring at the dark crimson stain glistening against the black fabric of her jumpsuit.
She nodded and tucked the pistol in the belt around her waist. “Swim for it!”
With that, she dove into the warm Pacific waters, followed an instant later by her companion. They splashed across the ten yards separating them from the gun bay and climbed aboard, but not before Johnny noticed a pair of threatening dorsal fins.
“Sharks!” he hollered, winding up with a mouthful of saltwater for his trouble. Scrambling for the rising and falling edge of the aircraft hatch, he twisted his head around to see the sharks race toward him with singular intent.
Leila, her blood’s scent luring the creatures, pulled herself into the weapons bay with her left arm, then drew her pistol and aimed behind Johnny.
He extended
his hand, scrambling and splashing in his race for safety. Behind him, he felt an impact reverberate through the water, followed by another, then the swirl of churning turbulence. He took Leila’s hand and clambered out of the water, the oily, metallic smell of the Seamaster as welcoming to him as the scent of apple pie and firewood to a weary traveler. Turning about, he glanced at the water outside in time to see a pod of dolphins ramming the sharks with their hard, round noses. The sharks swam away with a few powerful kicks of their tails.
Leila Weir smiled wryly. “See that, Johnny? Captain Anger has friends in the strangest places.”
“You’re still bleeding,” he observed, stepping toward her.
“It’s a clean in-and-out. We’ve got to get in position.” She flipped the switch to seal up the outer hatch and headed for the cockpit. “Flash! What’s Cap up to?”
“Search me,” came the radioed reply.
“Tell me where they landed on the island and I’ll position the plane nearby if they have to make a getaway.”
“All right-head toward the south shore. But stay out of blast range. I don’t think Cap will want to let Dandridge keep his toys.”
“Why aren’t they out yet? We were held captive for quite a while.”
The concern in Flash’s voice carried over the æther. “I don’t want know. All we can do is wait. Cap’s gotten out of worse scrapes.”
Leila stared at the alien landscape of the silver metal island and frowned. She subvocalized-inaudible to Jonathan-“I’m not too sure about that.”
Chapter Nineteen
Mexican Standoff
Captain Anger watched Dandridge and Campbell depart. As soon as the door clanked shut and locked, he asked the others, “Anything?”
Sun Ra huffed in exasperation. “Campbell stripped us bare.”
“And you know I don’t have any metal on me, not even my earcomm.” Rock muttered. He ran a tongue around inside his mouth. “Not even fillings in teeth!” His wide Slavic face grinned at the absurdity of his situation.
The straps resisted even Captain Anger’s powerful muscles. His biceps bulged with effort. Sweat stippled his chest and face. He lay back and stared at the ceiling.
He began to whistle. Not a tune, though the rising and falling notes had a musical quality. Not an unconscious trill some other genius might generate while deep in thought, but a precise and complicated tune. The others listened to the sound intently, catching every change in pitch, every metered vibration. And they understood.
Captain Anger spoke to his loyal band using one of the least-familiar languages on the planet. In fact, Cap had trained his crew to be the foremost authorities on silbo, the whistling language of the peasants of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. Used by the indigenous Guanches before Spanish conquistadors exterminated them in the 15th century, less than nine hundred peasants on the remote island itself knew silbo anymore.
And nobody off the island-except for seven Americans and a thimbleful of academics-knew the language even existed.
Anyone listening in on Captain Anger might have known some sort of communication was taking place, but that knowledge would be about as useful as knowing that birdsongs meant something to birds. Even a La Gomera native would not understand a good deal of Anger’s version of silbo, since he had out of necessity added new words to the language’s limited lexicon.
“By hand tightened them he,” Cap whistled in the island language’s peculiar syntax. “Twisting out the bolts try.”
As one, the three others rotated their wrists back and forth to the limits the manacles allowed. For long minutes nothing happened; the cool air of the operating room filled with the heat of their effort. Cap continued to wrench at the braided nylon straps. They had been designed to restrain the sick and tortured, the drugged and weakened-their designers in no way anticipated an encounter with the likes of Captain Anger.
A metallic squeak resounded in their ears. “Tagda!” Rock cried in Russian, then said in silbo, “My right hand free shortly I’ll have.”
Sun Ra and Tex chimed in with progress reports as Cap strained against the straps. Ultimately, neither the straps nor the bolt gave way: the stainless steel table to which the bolt connected bent under the assault. Cap reversed his effort and bent the sheet metal down, then back up. The back-and-forth motion heated the metal, annealing it, turning it soft. Metal fatigue weakened its structure and with a loud schank! a knife-blade-shaped piece broke free.
The others twisted their bolts out as Cap reached over to undo his left hand. Both hands free, he swiftly liberated his feet and leapt from the table to assist his comrades. Rock had already undone one hand by the time Cap joined in. In less than a minute, they rose from the floor and raced for their shirts in the corner.
Dispensing with silbo, Cap whispered, “We have to neutralize those two and then help their victims.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Sun Ra muttered, “but Campbell’s taken our guns and my WASP launcher.”
“And what about the microbots?” Tex asked.
“Our own scavengers will take care of them. We just have to make sure the island isn’t designed to self-destruct with us on it.” He looked from man to man. In the eyes of his friends he saw an unwavering devotion to their cause. They would face death at his side and never shrink from their mission: to rid the world of tyrants grand and petty.
Dandridge didn’t stand a chance.
They trod quietly over to the operating room. Hazarding a glance through the observation glass, he saw that the UN Secretary General still lay on the operating table, Dandridge feverishly meddling with the man’s brain.
At Anger’s silent cue, Sun Ra burst through the doors. Dandridge grunted in shock as the flying tackle slammed him into a supply cabinet. The doors bent inward with the force of impact. From inside came the sound of breaking glass and clattering instruments. Disoriented, the doctor stared at Ra’s wicked smile just before an ebon fist slammed the side of his skull, ramming him into unconsciousness at the speed of dark.
Sun Ra let Dandridge slip to the floor, then turned to join his team. Cap had already donned a surgical gown and Latex gloves and peered inside the soft pink-grey recesses of the exposed brain before him. Tex slipped his long, slender fingers into surgical gloves and joined Cap in his effort to save the diplomat.
“He’s got a more powerful chip in there,” he muttered. Looking up at Rock, he said, “You and Sun Ra find Campbell. Tex”-he glanced at Dr. Uriah West-“we need to disconnect the axons of his brain from this chip and reconnect them to the correct dendrites before they grow into the iridium channels.”
Sun Ra and Rock sped from the room, grinning widely at the notion of payback time for Campbell.
Tex swung the microsurgery videocam into position and peered at the infinitesimal nerve strands attached to the equally minuscule squares wired to the microchip. He whistled.
“Cap, this chip is in the portion of the brain that controls deceptive behavior. It looks as if Dandridge wanted Mr. Arafshi to lie for him.”
Cap nodded. “What would a diplomat be without some ability to lie?” Suddenly he smiled a leprechaun’s smile, his red hair and green eyes ablaze with inspiration. “On the other hand, I wonder what the world would do with a diplomat who always told the straight truth?”
Dr. West grinned back, then moved out of the way as Richard Anger, holder of an M.D. among many other degrees, lowered his eyes to the microsurgical scope and deftly disconnected the chip from the brain cells, then reconnected the axons in a pattern slightly different from the norm.
“There,” he said, after a long while peering into the hole in Arafshi’s head. “Stitch up the dura, put his skull back in place, and zip him up.” With a snap of rubber, Cap peeled the gloves from his deft yet powerful hands and bent down to grab the unconscious criminal mastermind. Glancing back at Tex, he said, “I’m taking Dandridge. Get Arafshi to the beach if you can.”
“Sure Cap,” Tex said. With a quizzical tone in his voice
, he shouted toward the departing man, “Say, who-all’s running the UN while Arafshi’s here?”
“A surgically altered imposter,” Cap shouted back, throwing Dandridge over his shoulder and opening the door to peer cautiously through it. “Just like the Dr. Madsen impersonator who escaped and caused the mess up in Los Gatos.”
“You mean that wasn’t-?” Before he could finish his question, Cap slid through the doorway to race toward the sounds of battle.
•
William Arthur Dandridge awoke to slamming pain in his guts, not to mention a splitting headache. In an exhausted tone, he muttered, “Killing me won’t stop my plans, Anger.”
“Killing you isn’t my plan,” Cap said tersely, negotiating the metallic corridors, moving ever toward the commotion. “Stopping you is all I want. The internal clocks on the scavengers I reprogrammed will trigger them to dismantle this island and everything on it in about an hour. So I’d advise you to join me for our flight out of here.”
Dandridge, trying gently to feel his head bruise despite the bouncing around he received on Cap’s broad shoulder, said, “Campbell will kill you all and I’ll still have time to program a retaliatory microbot.”
“And what makes you think-?” The words caught in Cap’s throat as he raced through a hatchway leading outside the steely fortress. On the gleaming metal shore, he stared in wonder at the giant monstrosity that had cornered his men.
Chapter Twenty
The Silver Beetle
It looked like a cross between an enormous insect and a gargantuan crab. The setting sun drenched the creature in blood-red hues as it thundered across the wet, glittering shore. Thirty feet high and twice as long, the six-legged machine pounded toward Rock and Sun Ra firing tracer bullets that lit up the landscape like laser blasts. Inside its head sat Campbell, furiously working a pair of joysticks and peering down on his victims with an insane gleam in his eyes. He fired wildly, with no attempt to aim. Cap’s powerful legs slammed into action to speed him toward the battle, Dandridge wrapped around his shoulders like a hunter’s prize. As he ran, he spoke into his earcomm.