"Hey, Acidhead," Glen Shepard hissed. "You got a smoke?"
"Who's there?"
"The bogeyman. You got a smoke, I'm all out of the good stuff."
Leaning from the window, the biker looked in, both directions, saw Glen. "You gotta be careful, I coulda shot..."
Thrusting upward, Glen jammed the long blade through the biker's throat and up into his brain, pushing through cartilage and bone. The dead man convulsed, snapping the blade off inside his skull. Glen was left with only the handle and four inches of blade.
"Hey, Acidhead, you okay?" Glen asked, speaking loud, testing the environment. "What's with you? Anybody else here? Help me with him, will you?"
But no one answered. Shotgun ahead of him, Glen stepped through the window. In seconds, he stripped the dead man of his Outlaw jacket, his weapons, and the walkie-talkie.
Electric stars sparkled overhead in the domed ceiling of the Avalon Casino Ballroom. Beneath the false heavens, the imprisoned people of Catalina men, women and children: residents and tourists waited, agonized. Some tried to sleep on the dance floor. Most sprawled on the floor or paced through the crowd. Numbed and silenced by fear, many stared into space, ignoring the other prisoners around them.
Max Stevens refused to surrender to his fears. Leaving his wife and teenage daughter with a group of friends, he limped through the crowd. He saw crying men, sobbing women, men and women with faces twisted by barely restrained hysteria. Despite the ballroom's humid warmth, he still wore his coat. He searched through the crowd, found men and women who were still calm and thinking. He quizzed each hostage as he spotted them:
"You want to talk about getting out of here?" he asked a young woman.
"How? What are you going to do?"
"I don't know yet, but if we get the chance, we should be ready."
"I'm willing to listen..."
"Not just listen. I want to hear your ideas." Then he moved on to the next person.
"You think we can break out?" he asked a bath-robed man.
"Maybe. Those creeps aren't supermen."
"Tell me when I get back with the others." Max pressed on, always searching for the faces of the acquaintances he trusted.
"Max Stevens! You okay?" One of the island's resident fishermen held him by the shoulders. "I saw them shoving you around."
"I tried to get away."
"That's my man!" The fisherman leaned close. "Think a knife could help us get out of here?" He pulled up his pants leg, revealing a knife handle in his boot.
Max grinned. "They didn't search me, either. Think fourteen rounds of .45 caliber hollow point might open some doors for us? I got my Hardballer and two magazines."
The fisherman's face crinkled into a wide grin. "Might help."
"Don't go anywhere," Max told him. "I'm looking for more recruits."
He found many, but searched for more, crisscrossing the ballroom, looking into the faces of everyone there. Screams and shouts stopped his search. He joined a crowd gathering around a scuffle.
Two Outlaws were beating and kicking a middle-aged man as two others dragged away a pretty teenage girl. A woman lay gasping on the floor, doubled-over, her face bleeding from several blows.
"What's happening there?" Max asked an onlooker.
"Those animals saw a girl they wanted. The girl's mother and father tried to stop them. I wish I hadn't left my gun in the house."
"You want to do something about it?"
"No! Max, no!" His wife Carol had come to the crowd. She jerked him back. Pressing close to him, she clutched at the weapon under his coat. "If you try anything, even if you kill them, kill ten of them, you'll die. You've got Julia and me to think of. No matter what, you'll be killed. They've got machine guns for God's sake!"
Max looked helplessly at the Outlaws. They dragged the shrieking, pleading teenager out of the ballroom. His wife took his face in her hands, made him look at her. "She'll probably live, Max. Don't throw your life away. Someday, she'll forget. If they kill you, I'll never forget."
He listened to his wife, his lips a bloodless line across his face. He looked over at the beaten man and woman. As the bikers walked away, a few onlookers went to the aid of the bloodied couple, covering them with coats, wiping the broken teeth and blood from the man's mouth. Max looked back to his wife:
"What if the next girl they want is Julia?"
6
Luck blessed Able Team with fog.
Maintaining a distance of four miles off the western coast of Santa Catalina Island, the Coast Guard cutter lowered a steel boarding ramp to within a few inches of the water, then launched the three kayaks at intervals of a half mile. After the cutter faded into the fog, its wake and propeller foam dissipated and the surface of the sea returned to a mirror calm.
They floated in a gray void unbroken by sound or daylight, the only motion a gentle groundswell bobbing the fiberglass kayaks.
"Well, all right!" Lyons called out, his voice lost in the emptiness. "This is fun!" He tried the double-bladed paddle, going straight for a few strokes, then spun the kayak in a circle as he watched the wobbling needle of the compass that was epoxied to the deck of the kayak.
"I'd be nowhere without this compass," he said out loud. "In fact I am nowhere..."
A splash broke the water. Lyons whipped his head around to see a shadow and a fin move under the ocean's surface. He remembered the recent news accounts of Great White sharks attacking surfers. Search teams had recovered only body parts and pieces of shark-gnawed surfboards. He touched the butt of the Colt Python shoulder-holstered under his black rain slicker, then paddled furiously to the west. "Hope it was a seal," he chanted. "Hope it was a porpoise, hope it was a dolphin..."
Less than an hour after the cutter had cast him into the Pacific, Gadgets spotted the rocky shore. Though the fog still held, from time to time sunlight flashed on the water. Wind came and went, allowing him glimpses of sage-covered hillsides. In a few minutes, he knew, he would be visible from shore.
Off to the south, his right, he saw a wave rise to a wall, then arc over. The curl created a tunnel of churning foam, then the wave collapsed, shooting spray. Gadgets angled toward the pattern of white water that the wave had left. If he could get the force of the white water behind him, he would surf the last two hundred yards.
He paddled hard for a minute. He seemed no closer than before to the peaking waves. Maybe it was a current, he thought, as he kept on paddling.
Glancing behind him, he suddenly understood. He had misjudged the distance. He had thought the waves small, and only a few hundred feet away. No, they were several times that distance, and over ten feet in height, like the wave walling behind him.
Thinking first of the electronics inside the kayak, Gadgets checked the plastic and elastic seal closing the gap between the hole in the kayak's deck and his body. It was tight. He gave his black plastic rain slicker a quick tuck into the elastic seal, then stroked hard and fast with the paddles, spray flying behind him. His only hope was to be ahead of the wave when the top came down.
Feeling the wave lift him, he knew he'd lost the race. The kayak stood vertical on the wave face for an instant, then, as the wave curled over him, blocking out the sky, at the moment he expected to be thrown into the churning vortex, the kayak slipped down the wave, accelerating.
He hurtled through darkness and the roar of the wave around him overwhelmed his thoughts, and for a moment his fear too. Instinctively, he leaned toward the light beyond the curl. The roar became so loud he seemed to be flying through silence.
Light circled by a vast, spinning vortex rushed toward him, and then he burst out. Salvation. But above him still, the wave's face towered, a wall of water defying gravity and overhanging him.