Don Pendleton - The Hostaged Island

Then there was silence.

"Lyons!" Blancanales shouted. "You see anything moving?"

Motorcycle tires burned, filling the narrow canyon mouth with acrid rubber smoke. Around the gate, a brushfire spread up the slope. By the time he had gazed over the blackened scene of bone and scorched flesh, Lyons could see nothing that was living. He searched the rock and brush of the stream-bed.

He saw the barrel of an M-60. The muzzle flashed. Lyons flew backward, his body exploding with pain.

Streams of .308 slugs suddenly shrieking over them, Gadgets and Blancanales sprayed back with 9mm Parabellum. The machinegunner fell behind his rock for an instant, then popped out a few yards away, still firing his belt-fed M-60.

Slugs marched across the hillside, chopping brush, making the earth around Blancanales jump. "Lyons!" Blancanales screamed. "Hit him, hit him!"

There was no rifle fire, no answer from the ridge.

Burst after burst searched for Blancanales. Desperate, he screamed again, but this time without words, his voice shuddering with faked agony. He screamed until his throat ached, then let his wail die to a whimper. "Arm... my arm... it's... off." After a second, he wailed again. "My arm — oh God oh God oh God..."

"Rosario!" Gadgets cried.

Another long burst searched for Gadgets. He rolled clear, crawled toward Blancanales. Hissed words stopped him: "Lay cool! I'm all right, see? It's Lyons up there we got to worry about. Radio!"

Keying his hand-radio, Gadgets got no reply. "Lyons! Answer. Answer! Lyons..."

No reply.

Gadgets crawled back to Blancanales. "We got to bring this show to a close."

"Frag him? Or phosphorous?"

"We need that M-60 of his."

"Frags." Blancanales took a fragmentation grenade from the battle rig under his Outlaws jacket. He straightened the cotter pin, saying: "Wanted to save these for tonight, when we..."

"There won't be any tonight for us if we don't use them now." Gadgets braced himself to throw. "On three. Yours to the right, mine on the left. Pull. Now, one and two and three!"

The surviving biker, dizzy from blood loss, saw the arms heave the grenades. He snapped a burst at the hidden men as the grenades arced toward him. One grenade hit a rock and bounced over him. The other landed exactly three feet in front of him.

He snatched up the grenade and threw it back. He struggled to crawl a few feet, the exposed bones of his right leg scraping on rocks, the pain beyond imagination.

Then an explosion of thousands of steel razors shredded his legs and punched tiny holes in the back of his head. The rush of even greater pain lifted him into darkness. The grenade he had thrown had exploded in midair, and fragments of steel wire were showering even Gadgets and Blancanales.

The grenade sent tiny slivers into their backs. Blancanales felt blood on his hands. He looked at his hands and saw bits of wire in the flesh. Gadgets had tiny cuts also.

The wounds did not stop them. They fired into their target's twisted, mangled body, the bursts of 9mm slugs throwing him over. Gadgets put a burst into the guy's haircut, spraying it and everything else rosily over the creek bed.

"Think he's dead?" Blancanales joked.

"Might be. Let's go make sure."

Breaking cover, they zigzagged down the hillside. They crouched beside the biker's almost headless body.

"Take the M-60, I'll check his bike for belts of .308." Blancanales ran up the embankment to a big downed Suzuki. He searched through the saddlebags and found two belts of two hundred and fifty .308 cartridges. He slung them around his shoulders, then slid back down to the creek bed.

He heard motorcycles. "Gadgets. They're coming."

They looked up the hillside for cover. Too far. They saw the culvert. They glanced to each other, and without a word ran through the rocks and sand mounds to the shelter of the highway's overhang. Above them, motorcycles screeched to a stop.

"Oh, sweet Jesus!" a voice cried. "Someone's out here with a flame thrower."

"Chief!" another biker called out. "Chief, where are you?"

Shotgun blasts chopped brush, kicked up dust on the hillside opposite the ambush site. The casings clattered on the rocks in front of Gadgets and Blancanales. They heard four or five or six more motorcycles arrive.

"It's all over here," a voice announced. "Look at them all, all burned to death." More shotgun blasts of frustration peppered the hillside.

Gadgets pulled the third phosphorous grenade from his battle rig. He whispered to Blancanales. "My last one."

"Make it a good throw. No bounce back."

Gadgets jerked the pin, held down the lever.

He took three steps, then turned and looked up at the gathered bikers.

"Hi guys," he said. Then he lobbed up the white phosphorous, jumped the hell back to cover.

"Kick it!!"

White molten metal showered the creek bed. There was screaming. Falling bikes. Exploding gas tanks. The conflagration, and the cries of agony, continued noisily for quite some time. A lot of smoke. A lot of smell. A lot of slow, sure death.

Blancanales had his hand-radio to his mouth. "Lyons, come in. Lyons! Lyons!"

No answer.

In the Casino's ballroom, the hostages' prison, Max Stevens had organized a cadre of resisters. Persuading, explaining, sometimes preaching, he turned angry islanders into leaders, fearful residents into spies.

"I've got to do something," a father told Max and the group of conspirators. "When they dragged that last girl out, they looked at my daughters and said, 'We'll be back for them.' In the name of God, they're only twelve and fourteen years old! I'm going to grab one of their guns, I don't care what happens, they won't take my girls."

Max spoke calmly, slowly. "Since we circled up, they haven't taken another girl, have they?" After the Outlaws had stalked through the crowd of hostages several times, each time dragging away teenage girls, Max had suggested the hostages form a tight circle, men and women and teenage boys on the outside, children and teenage girls inside. Later, when two Outlaws came in, they saw an unbroken wall of men and women facing them. They had turned and left.

"When do we hit them?" another father asked. "They hurt my girl every way there is. It's us against them. If the police were coming, they'd be here already."

"That's not true!" Max explained. "If there's a ransom to be paid, remember it's Sunday. The police will have to open banks. If they're negotiating for something, that could take days. SWAT teams could hit those scum any second now, or tonight, or tomorrow. If we fight at the wrong time, the police will bust in here and only find dead people.

"If we hit at the right time, we're helping the police. We'll hit those creatures when we hear shooting — we'll shoot them, knife them, take their weapons.

"I promise you, the police won't get a chance to take any Outlaws prisoner. Prisoners sell their memoirs to publishers, make movie deals. No, we have to wait, but when we hit, they all die."

"Does that mean we wait a year?" the red-eyed parent demanded. "How about four hundred and forty-four days? I'd rather die."

"It won't be long," Max told the man, then spoke to the others. "Things are happening outside. People are fighting: Shirley, tell them what you've learned."

A middle-aged woman in a jogging suit spoke. "Whenever I see one of them with a walkie-talkie, I get one of my people to go up to the creep and ask for something — food, water, medicine, magazines, anything. Two of my spies heard the bikers yelling at their radios about heroes, kill them, make an example. One time when I went up, I heard, 'His rifle's gone, the ammunition too.' That's a word for word quote. The punk got real agitated, punched me, but it was worth it." She touched her blackening eye.