Code Eighty-Six!”
Something made a chunking sound in the walls. The ventilators hissed.
“Gas!” Cap shouted, releasing Dandridge to reach into his cargo pocket. The other three men did likewise, though Rock withdrew a nothing more than a silicone rubber mouthpiece and some fiber fluff—the microbots had devoured all the metal parts of his pocket-sized gas mask.
“Aw, nuts,” he muttered in perfect American.
Dandridge stayed on the floor where he had fallen, smiling a wild, furious smile of triumph.
“Idiots!” he cried. “Masks won’t do any good against nerve gas!”
Cap slipped his mask on anyway and reached down for the doctor.
“Then it can’t be fatal or you wouldn’t be.”
Before his fingers could close around the grinning scientist’s neck, Cap’s
vision blurred. Those dark, penetrating eyes grew unfocused, glassy. Dandridge closed his eyes, head lolling to the side on the floor. Cap took a step forward, steadied himself, then turned to gaze at his partners. In the scintillating, kaleidoscopic numbness that enveloped him, he saw them collapse to the floor. Then his own vision blackened under the power of the void, and he felt himself fall into night.
He awakened to the sound of drilling.
The room was brightly lit, immaculately clean, and filled with surgical and electronic equipment.
Cap fought the pounding in his head, suppressed the pain using yogic techniques he had learned as a child and practiced all through life, and tried to rise from his supine position.
He lay strapped to an operating table. Testing the restraints, he found them resistant to what strength he had so far regained. He turned his head toward the source of the squealing sound.
Campbell—Dandridge’s weasely assistant, whose thin and frizzy light-brown hair exploded wildly from his head like mold on old bread—worked feverishly with a drill, installing extra shackles for the captives. Sun Ra and Tex already lay bolted to the metal floor with straps; Campbell knelt over Rock, drilling a hole in the thick plating for the manacle on the captive’s left wrist. His other arm and his legs lay pinned to the ground. Campbell had stripped the shirts off all of them. The bulletproof, gadget-laden clothes lay piled in a heap in the corner of the operating room. Their pistols were nowhere in sight.
All three of his crew still dozed in a chemical-induced slumber. Rock snored with loud, snarfling gulps of air and louder whistle-grunt exhalations. Cap craned his head to scan the room. On the far side lay Dandridge on a large cot, head on a soft pillow, sleeping off the nerve gas in relative comfort.
Quietly, Cap flexed his wrists, pulling at the straps’ weak point: the grommetted holes through which half- inch steel bolts passed, fastening the restraints to the table.
Campbell used an electric impact driver to torque down the self-tapping bolt. Rock groggily awoke just as Campbell tightened the last turn.
“Hey!” Rock bellowed. “Shto takoi?”
Campbell dropped the bolt driver with a start and jumped away. When he overcame his surprise, he watched Rock struggle futilely and laughed.
It was a nervous, vicious laugh that rattled sharply around the room.
“Go on, tough guy,” Campbell said gleefully. “Be a big brainless tough guy. Tough guys don’t fare well against the guys with the brains.”
“Look at Captain Anger,” Rock growled. “He is tough guy with brains and you won’t fare well against him!”
Campbell smiled. “Have so far.” He padded over to Dandridge to inject an antidote for the nerve gas. Within seconds, the evil genius’s eyes opened and he sat upright, staring at his captives.
“So,” he said woozily, “your little task force is neutralized and my plans can proceed. I believe I have a UN Secretary to reprogram. Campbell?”
His crony glanced smirkingly at the four bound men, then helped Dandridge to his feet. He walked unsteadily toward the exit.
“By the way,” Dandridge said casually, a wicked smile crossing his thin face, “you may be distressed to learn that I’ll be reprogramming the four of you next—starting with you, Captain—then the boy and the woman. You men will make fine worker-drones. The woman.” He let his voice trail off portentously.
Leila tugged at the leather straps around her wrists. The umber, two-inch-wide strips bound her tightly to the wall against which she stood upright, arms straight out at the shoulder, forearms bent up to form the universal sign of surrender. Johnny Madsen, fettered in the same way, gazed at her with grave concern.
They stood in a smelly little portion of the cavern that looked like a pirate’s torture chamber. The rock wall behind them dripped a dark ooze that soaked their shirts and pants. The air stank of rotting seaweed and worse. Only the flickering light from a portable fluorescent lamp allowed them to see anything at all.
Their captor had not noticed her earcomm. “Flash,” she muttered sub-audibly. “Can you hear me?”
No answer. She suspected that the mass of the mountain above them blocked her uplink to the satellites the Anger Institute used for global communication.
Leila tilted her head as close to Johnny as she could and whispered. “Keep an eye on the entrance. Let me know if you see anyone coming in.”
“Okay,” he whispered back. “Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Grasping the thick leather thongs that held her wrists to rings embedded in the rock, Leila Weir braced her lower back against the cold, dank cavern wall and slowly—silently—slid off her left boot. Tipping it over, she hit the side of the heel twice with her other boot. Something clicked out of a hidden compartment inside the heel. This she grasped with her left toes (through her sheer nylon stockings) and withdrew from its hiding place.
With a look of strong determination on her face, she raised her long legs up to waist level so that they extended straight out from the wall. She continued raising them with a contortionist’s limber skill until they were above her head.
Johnny saw that she grasped a small, extremely sharp, serrated-edge knife between her big and second toes. Two depressions in its handle allowed for a firm grip that way.
Flexing at the ankle, she sawed at the strap holding her left wrist until the thick leather surrendered. Transferring the knife from toes to hand, she lowered her legs and slashed at the right-hand restraint. Her raven- black hair swayed side-to-side with each of her movements.
Free, she released Johnny and slipped her boot on again. The knife she kept in her left hand.
“Let’s go,” she said a little louder than before.
They crept to the juncture of their small chamber and of the next. Leila moved like a panther, sleek and graceful with lithe power and supple strength. Motioning for Johnny to come to her side, she pointed toward their guard’s positions.
The two guards sat in the boat that had brought them to the island. The shallow inlet to the cave barely provided enough clearance at low tide, which Leila estimated it to be. One guard snoozed while the other read a tattered, dog-eared men’s magazine in the dim light.
She judged the distances, then whispered, “How well can you throw, Johnny?”
Her companion shrugged. “Well enough for left field,” he said.
“Do you think you could take this rock”—she reached into the water and handed him a stone worn round from wave action— “and hit the guy on the right in the head?”
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.
