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.
A metallic squeak resounded in their ears. “Tagda!” Rock cried in Russian, then said in silbo, “My right hand free shortly I’ll have.”
Sun Ra and Tex chimed in with progress reports as Cap strained against the straps. Ultimately, neither the straps nor the bolt gave way: the stainless steel table to which the bolt connected bent under the assault. Cap reversed his effort and bent the sheet metal down, then back up. The back-and-forth motion heated the metal, annealing it, turning it soft. Metal fatigue weakened its structure and with a loud schank! a knife-blade-shaped piece broke free.
The others twisted their bolts out as Cap reached over to undo his left hand. Both hands free, he swiftly liberated his feet and leapt from the table to assist his comrades. Rock had already undone one hand by the time Cap joined in. In less than a minute, they rose from the floor and raced for their shirts in the corner.
Dispensing with silbo, Cap whispered, “We have to neutralize those two and then help their victims.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Sun Ra muttered, “but Campbell’s taken our guns and my WASP launcher.”
“And what about the microbots?” Tex asked.
“Our own scavengers will take care of them. We just have to make sure the island isn’t designed to self- destruct with us on it.” He looked from man to man. In the eyes of his friends he saw an unwavering devotion to their cause. They would face death at his side and never shrink from their mission: to rid the world of tyrants grand and petty.
Dandridge didn’t stand a chance.
They trod quietly over to the operating room. Hazarding a glance through the observation glass, he saw that the UN Secretary General still lay on the operating table, Dandridge feverishly meddling with the man’s brain.
At Anger’s silent cue, Sun Ra burst through the doors. Dandridge grunted in shock as the flying tackle slammed him into a supply cabinet. The doors bent inward with the force of impact. From inside came the sound of breaking glass and clattering instruments. Disoriented, the doctor stared at Ra’s wicked smile just before an ebon fist slammed the side of his skull, ramming him into unconsciousness at the speed of dark.
Sun Ra let Dandridge slip to the floor, then turned to join his team. Cap had already donned a surgical gown and Latex gloves and peered inside the soft pink-grey recesses of the exposed brain before him. Tex slipped his long, slender fingers into surgical gloves and joined Cap in his effort to save the diplomat.
“He’s got a more powerful chip in there,” he muttered. Looking up at Rock, he said, “You and Sun Ra find Campbell. Tex”—he glanced at Dr. Uriah West—“we need to disconnect the axons of his brain from this chip and reconnect them to the correct dendrites before they grow into the iridium channels.”
Sun Ra and Rock sped from the room, grinning widely at the notion of payback time for Campbell.
Tex swung the microsurgery videocam into position and peered at the infinitesimal nerve strands attached to the equally minuscule squares wired to the microchip. He whistled.
“Cap, this chip is in the portion of the brain that controls deceptive behavior. It looks as if Dandridge wanted Mr. Arafshi to lie for him.”
Cap nodded. “What would a diplomat be without some ability to lie?” Suddenly he smiled a leprechaun’s smile, his red hair and green eyes ablaze with inspiration. “On the other hand, I wonder what the world would do with a diplomat who always told the straight truth?”
Dr. West grinned back, then moved out of the way as Richard Anger, holder of an M.D. among many other degrees, lowered his eyes to the microsurgical scope and deftly disconnected the chip from the brain cells, then reconnected the axons in a pattern slightly different from the norm.
“There,” he said, after a long while peering into the hole in Arafshi’s head. “Stitch up the dura, put his skull back in place, and zip him up.” With a snap of rubber, Cap peeled the gloves from his deft yet powerful hands and bent down to grab the unconscious criminal mastermind. Glancing back at Tex, he said, “I’m taking Dandridge. Get Arafshi to the beach if you can.”
“Sure Cap,” Tex said. With a quizzical tone in his voice, he shouted
toward the departing man, “Say, who-all’s running the UN while Arafshi’s here?”
“A surgically altered imposter,” Cap shouted back, throwing Dandridge over his shoulder and opening the door to peer cautiously through it. “Just like the Dr. Madsen impersonator who escaped and caused the mess up in Los Gatos.”
“You mean that wasn’t—?” Before he could finish his question, Cap slid through the doorway to race toward the sounds of battle.
William Arthur Dandridge awoke to slamming pain in his guts, not to mention a splitting headache. In an
