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 ^ther. “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.