A beer can fell, rolled on the concrete of the balcony, foam and beer gushing from the top. 'Goddamn it,' the biker muttered. Then he called out as he leaned over the edge. 'Vito. Throw up another beer...'
'Coming up.' Blancanales called, a single slug suddenly punching into the biker's nose. He collapsed, his hand and head twitching as they hung over the edge of the parapet. Lyons and Gadgets joined Blancanales.
Blancanales pointed to himself, then pointed inside. Lyons shielded himself with the Ingram as they stepped into the office.
The room was empty. Blancanales continued to the next door, Lyons a step behind him.
In front of a television, a very pale biker nodded off. He wore only undershirt and jeans. In one hand he was holding a length of surgical tubing. A needle and syringe hung from his other arm. He didn't wake from his heroin stupor as Blancanales slipped up to him, put the Beretta to his temple. The junkie would never wake.
They returned to the door. 'It's all over.'
'Now we go put this...' Gadgets held up a small charge of C-4 explosive with a radio detonator, '...on the radar.'
'I'll do the clean-up here,' Lyons offered. 'I'll be watching the road down the hill until you get back.'
Gadgets and Blancanales nodded, then hurried out. Lyons gathered together the junkie's jacket, boots, and World War II German MP-40 submachinegun. He dumped the whole lot, dead junkie and belongings, into a tangle of brush outside.
He heard the motorcycles before he saw them. Running back to the station office, he keyed his hand-radio: 'Gadgets, Pol! Take cover, bikers coming up.'
'There's a sentry on the radar tower!' Gadgets hissed. 'We're stuck out in the open hoping he won't... Oh, man... he sees us. We are in the shit!'
The Outlaws' walkie-talkie buzzed. Behind the voice, there was the roar of engines. 'On our way up to relieve you dudes. I tell you, you're going to dig the good times at the casino — hey, you motherfuckers! You shooting at us?'
Rifle fire was ripping the quiet. A confusion of voices on the Outlaws' walkie-talkie mixed with the motorcycles' roar as they gunned up the hill. Lyons looked out the door, saw four bikers race past. Halfway between the radio station and the radar towers, Gadgets and Blancanales sprawled in the dirt road's ruts. A biker on the radar towers fired down at them with a large caliber rifle.
Firing wild from the handlebars of their 1200s, the four bikers sprayed Gadgets and Blancanales with shotgun and automatic fire. Bullets and double-zero shot kicked up dust all around Gadgets and Blancanales. The sniper in the towers continued firing.
A burst from Gadgets' Uzi spilled one of the bikers. Lyons grabbed the Outlaw walkie-talkie. 'Pull back to the radio station! Chief's coming up the hill with twenty more guys. Don't die for nothing. We'll sit back here and shoot those two assholes to pieces.'
Lyons saw the bikers circling back. He snatched an extra magazine for his Ingram. He stood in the doorway in his biker clothing, with the walkie-talkie covering most of his face. When the three bikers came within twenty feet, ignorant of the danger, he emptied his Ingram at them, knocking down two, wounding the third. Lyons ducked behind the cinder block wall, slammed in the second magazine, then blasted the third biker as he dumped his motorcycle and tried to pump a shotgun with an injured arm. Another biker, badly wounded, struggled to crawl behind his bike for cover, but died as slugs ripped away pieces of his head, punching holes in his downed bike. Gasoline whooshed into a dramatic fireball, singeing Lyons' eyebrows.
Changing magazines again, Lyons put a coup de grace burst through the third biker. On the other end of the mountain crest, Uzi and G-3 fire answered the sentry's rifle. Lyons saw the sentry fall through the tower struts.
Sprinting, Lyons didn't pause as he fired a burst through the spilled biker in front of him. The smell of death was everywhere. He continued on to Gadgets and Blancanales.
'Great trick, grandstand.' Blancanales rose out of the dust holding his thigh.
'Heard it on the walkie-talkie,' Gadgets grinned.
'Sorry about that,' Lyons laughed. 'Did it again. Improvised.'
'I didn't say you couldn't improvise when it was necessary...'
'Pol, you're wounded.' Lyons saw blood on Blancanales.
'My G-3 got customized.' The automatic rifle had two bullet holes in the plastic buttstock. 'And my leg, too. But...' He pulled a Heckler and Koch box magazine out of his thigh pocket. Bent and twisted, the magazine had a hole through it. Blancanales reached into his pocket again, felt the wound, probed it. 'Oww! Here it is, double- ought.' He held up the flattened lead ball.
'You okay, Gadgets?' Lyons asked.
'Oh, yeah. I took cover behind Pol!'
The screech of the Outlaws' walkie-talkie interrupted them: 'This is Stonewall, come in Horse. We're a couple of blocks up from the pier, and we got ourselves a hero. Alive.' Horse's coarse laughter cackled through the walkie-talkie: 'Bring him in. We'll make an example of him.'
The three fatigued but fit Able Team avengers looked to one another. 'Anything we can do?' Lyons asked.
'In Avalon?' Blancanales shook his head, no.
Carl Lyons looked at the ground. 'Well, God grant you a quick death, whoever you are.'
9
Minutes before dawn, Glen and Ann Shepard, the Davis cousins, and Jack Webster slipped out of the Davis home. They crossed the street, went through a yard, climbed a fence. Rather than risk crossing the next street, they climbed fence after fence until they came to the end of the block. They broke into the last home in the street, a two-story house with a peaked roof.
Waiting there, they heard shots and yells and roaring motorcycles. As the Outlaws swept the other block, smashing doors and rampaging through homes, Glen examined the home in which they were hiding. As he had thought when he first saw the house, there was a triangular crawl space between the ceiling of the second floor and the peak of the steeply angled roof. He found the access hole in the ceiling of one bedroom's closet. He helped his wife up — her eighth-month belly a tight squeeze — then passed up blankets, water, a transistor radio with an earphone, all the weapons, and a plastic bucket to serve as a toilet.
Glen and the boys carefully searched through the drawers and closets of the house. He told the boys they would be hiding in the attic all day and perhaps the night, however long the siege of the island continued. They should gather anything that would make their wait more pleasant or safer. He also advised them to return everything they touched to where it had been. The house must not appear different than when they entered.
From the vents of the attic, they watched the Outlaws search the nearby homes. The Outlaws did not discover the knifed Acidhead until an hour after dawn. The crackle of the radiophones and walkie-talkies reached a pitch approaching hysteria. The discovery of the corpse, with rifle, pistol, ammunition and radiophone gone, had gotten the Outlaws seriously fired up.
Hearing motorcycles and voices getting really close outside, Roger went to a vent and peeked through the louvers. 'They're searching this block now.'
'Don't sweat it,' Glen spoke calmly. 'Roger, stay there, watch the street. Chris, you go to that back vent, watch the back. Both of you take blankets.'
'Why?' asked Chris.
'Because if they open up the trapdoor and look in here,' Glen explained, 'if it's dark, they won't be able to see us. If we hear them in the closet down there, you cover those vents with the blankets. But dig it — once they come in the house, nobody moves! Have those blankets folded up and ready so you can do it silently.'
'What if they have flashlights?' Roger asked.
'Then we got a problem.'
'And what should I do?' asked Jack.
'Go over there,' Glen pointed to a far corner of the attic. 'Lie in the corner and be quiet. Ann, you go over
