Don Pendleton - The Hostaged Island

"What if..."

"What if what?"

"Nothing's going on."

"I told you, something's going on." Horse pulled out his knife. "Charlie, this kid don't learn. He's useless. Pull down his pants and hold him. I'm going to fix him."

Thrashing in Charlie's grip, Jack screamed and pleaded. Horse held the eight-inch blade of the Bowie near the boy's naked crotch. "Now, I told you something's going on. You're going to find out what it is. We'll give you an hour. You don't have something to tell us, we'll stand you up on the ballroom bandstand and cut that little thing off of you. Do you understand now?"

Jack nodded, pulled up his pants.

With tears streaming down their faces, Jack's mother and father hugged him. It was the first time in his life he could remember emotion from them. "We thought you were dead."

"So did I. They're killing people out there."

The residents crowding around Jack questioned him:

"Did you see the Davis boys?"

"Did you see any police?"

Max Stevens pushed in front of the others. "We want you to tell us everything you saw and heard. It's very important to us."

"Why?" Jack asked. "What's going on?"

Descending Mount Black Jack on captured Harleys, Able Team returned to the dry streambed where they had concealed their equipment and other motorcycles. Lyons transferred his backpack and rifle case from the bike he'd seized after the campground ambush.

"I'm beginning to like this machine I've been riding," he told his partners. "It's a Harley classic. And the chrome and black lacquer sure go with my jacket, hey?"

"Topping off the tanks over here," Blancanales called out. "Don't dump any of the bikes without letting me siphon out..."

"Hey! They're at the airport," Gadgets yelled. He ran over to Blancanales and Lyons with a captured walkie-talkie. "Listen..."

The voices squawked back and forth. "... Eagle and the other two dudes are gone."

"What? They dead? What's..."

"Just gone. We searched the airport. There's no blood, nothing. Oh, yeah. One of the doors is broke. But there's nothing..."

"Get over to the radio station. Ironman went up there with three men to change the guard and all kinds of shit broke loose. One of them said you were coming up the hill. Then it went quiet, nothing on the radio. Get over there fast!"

"Horse, it's the locals. They're running circles around us. They know the territory. They're making like the Viet Cong..."

"Dig this, Chief. You were the Marine. Get me a body count. Out!"

Opening his map of the island, Blancanales pointed to their position, then traced the route the bikers would take from the airport to the peak of Mount Black Jack. "They'll take the main road to the radio station turnoff, then go up the hill. They're four miles away from that turnoff, we're only a mile. I say we hit them there."

"What if it isn't right for an ambush?" Lyons asked.

"We let them go up the hill, then we find a better place, hit them on the way down."

"Let's move it!"

Moto-crossing, they left the canyon behind and found a wide hiking trail. Speeding until they dared go no faster, Able Team tore up the trail with their heavy semi-chopped Harleys, scraping fancy stone steps with their crankcases, rutting beds of rare California wild flowers.

They made it. Steep hillsides rose above the junction of the paved highway and the station's dirt road. The station's road cut along the south slope of canyon running east and west. Fifty feet up from the highway, a steel gate blocked the dirt road. Now it stood open, its lock shot away. Below the road, the hillside dropped ten feet to a streambed, the stream-bed ending at a grated culvert passing under the highway. For hundreds of yards north and south, the highway ran straight.

"Okay, Pol," Lyons said. "You're the Green Beret, retired. Call it."

Blancanales pointed to the ridge on which they stood. "You with the Mannlicher right here. You can hit anyone on the radio station's road, and if any of them make a break for town, hit them in the back."

He turned to Gadgets. "A quick booby trap on the gate..."

"A phosphorous grenade..."

"The gate's closed, they stop to open it, boom. The shooting starts. Lyons, let me take your Ingram. Let's go."

In two minutes they had set the ambush, Lyons on the ridge, Blancanales lower on the hillside, only a hundred feet from the road opposite him. Gadgets closed the gate. He pulled the pin from a white phosphorous grenade and placed it carefully on one of the gate's hinges, using the gate to hold the lever closed.

Lyons heard motorcycles. He whistled a warning. Gadgets sprinted through the brush and threw himself flat a few yards from Blancanales.

Chief had reached the gate already, and he waited for the stragglers to join him, his bike drawn up parallel to the gate. He carried an M-60 machine gun slung over his back like a rifle. In his Italian wraparound shades and Mohawk haircut, the road's dust swirling around him, he looked like a demon from hell.

Lyons watched him through the Mannlicher's scope, the biker's face and chest filling the image. Chief turned from side to side, counting his men.

Panning back and forth across the bikers, Lyons suddenly noted a hideous ornament on the forks of Chief's bike. The head of a man, the eyes wide and staring, had been wired to the handlebars.

"Ready to die, freak show?" Lyons whispered, his finger on the Mannlicher's trigger.

Chief kicked the gate open, then gunned his bike. Gadgets saw the grenade drop. But Chief accelerated away. In the six seconds before the grenade exploded, Chief would ride to safety. Gadgets sighted his Uzi on Chief. He fired. The biker spilled splashily.

All the bikers, the two pulling off the highway, the several near the gate, the others gunning their motorcycles up the road, turned their heads fast toward the Uzi-fire. The distraction served only to make them less ready for what followed. An exploding ball of white flame engulfed the road.

Five human forms were directly hit. Hundreds of droplets of white phosphorous splattered their bodies, each drop a searing point of flame that burned through cloth and leather and flesh. Not requiring oxygen to burn, the metallic fire would continue through their flesh to the bone and burn there until the metal consumed itself. But they died before that agony. Their motorcycles' gasoline was exploding. Screaming, the bikers inhaled gulps of fire into their lungs, died in seconds.

Dust and flame and smoke filled the scope's image, but Lyons still squeezed off a shot at the downed Chief. Then he opened his left eye, searching the road for targets, his right eye still at the eyepiece.

Automatic fire from Gadgets and Blancanales poured into the two bikers immediately behind the fallen Chief. The hillside beyond the bikers puffed into a sheet of dust as slugs punched through the two men. Other bullets tore through the sheet metal of the gas tanks.

Seeing the annihilation of the patrol, the last two Outlaws spun their motorcycles, throwing dust and rocks as their rear wheels skittered on the dirt road. Lyons put the Mannlicher's cross hairs in the center of the "Outlaws Forever" insignia on a biker's jacket. His shot snapped the man's spine.

Whipping back the bolt, Carl Lyons put the next slug into the second biker's head.

On the road, a biker lay under his motorcycle. Through the scope, Lyons saw blood streaming from wounds in Chief's head and chest. One arm flopped, broken a few inches below the shoulder. He struggled against the weight of the motorcycle with one arm. He was trying to reach for the belt-fed M-60. Lyons put the cross hairs on the man's forehead. But he didn't shoot.

He jerked back the bolt, caught the unfired Accelerator. Searching through the pouches of his bandolier, he found the .308 tracers. Lyons loaded up, then snapped the tracer through the struggling biker's gas tank. Immediately a churning ball of flame rose above Chief. His screams continued for thirty seconds.