At first, he thought the sounds were gull-cries from the ocean. He listened harder. It was laughter, coarse laughter, coming from the campground.

Unsnapping the flap of his Browning Double-Action's holster, he slipped out the pistol. Then he changed his mind. Always use the proper technology, Konzaki had said. Blancanales found the Beretta 93R in his backpack, slapped in a magazine and snapped back the slide.

He hid the backpack. Soft-footing it along the trail, crouching below the level of the brush, he could hear screams, more laughter, voices. He continued another hundred yards and came to some sort of fire road. He couldn't go any farther without losing cover. But another scream told him he was already there.

Fifty yards below, two Outlaws raped a woman. One struggled on top of the naked, shrieking woman. The other biker stood on her arms, looking down at her and the biker and laughing, urging the biker on, taunting him.

The standing biker also taunted the woman's husband. The man lay against a car, bound hand and foot. He was turning his head away. Inside the car, a child cried.

Blancanales surveyed the scene. The fire road cut straight down the steep hillside, ending at the gravel and asphalt of the campground. The Outlaws and the unfortunate family were at the bottom of the fire road.

He saw only two motorcycles at this particular campsite. He looked beyond to the other campsites. He saw collapsed tents, scattered belongings, but no other motorcycles.

Sliding and crawling as fast as he dared through the thick sagebrush, Blancanales silently closed the distance between himself and the bikers. Twenty yards uphill from the campsite, he could not risk getting closer.

Prone in the brush, only his hands extending from cover, he grasped the Beretta in both hands, right hand on the grip, left hand holding the extension lever in front of the trigger guard, his left thumb through the extra-large trigger guard as Konzaki had demonstrated. He sighted on the standing biker's chest, gave him a three-round burst.

The bullets interrupted a laugh, the first round punching into his chest, the second his collar-bone, the third taking away his left eye and sideburn. He fell backward and thrashed on the gravel.

There had been no sound other than the slap of the almost simultaneous impacts. The other Outlaw looked up from the woman, puzzled by his friend's fall. Blancanales flicked down the selector to single shot. He sighted on the biker's head.

The woman clawed the biker in the face, and twisted out from under him. She blocked Blancanales' aim. He broke cover, ran and slid and jumped down the hillside. The biker scrambled to his feet, his pants around his knees, trying to pull a pistol from a shoulder holster.

The snap shot glanced off the top of the biker's head, sent him staggering backwards. Blancanales finally reached the bottom of the hill, dropped into a two-handed, wide-leg stance to deliver the kill shot, when the woman again blocked his aim as she kicked and punched the bleeding biker.

"Get down!" Blancanales shouted. "Out of the way! Let me kill him!"

She turned and saw him for the first time. Her eyes went wide at the sight of the black-clad warrior with the pistol. But she didn't move. The biker sprinted away, weaving through trees and brush. Blancanales sighted, fired again, heard the bullet slap the biker. He fell, scrambled up, kept running.

Starting after the wounded biker, Blancanales yelled back at the woman:

"Take that dead man's weapons, you all go hide in the brush somewhere. Don't show yourself till you see uniformed police officers or soldiers. Move it — I can't help you any more!"

"Thank you, oh, thank you, thank you. God be with you," the woman sobbed as he ran.

He followed the blood trail through the campground. Ahead of him was a cluster of park buildings surrounded by bushes and trees. The blood led in that direction. Off to his left, the camp road curved through brush and trees shading the camping sites.

Not to risk walking into the wounded man's ambush, Blancanales took the road. He would circle around, kill him.

He jogged past the park buildings, then spotted a trail through the campsites and trees that led back to the buildings. If the biker was waiting for him, that trail would allow Blancanales to surprise him. He left the road and pressed through thick branches. He held the Beretta ready in front of him.

A rifle butt slammed into the back of his head. He fell hard, didn't move. A biker stood over him. He was pointing a Heckler and Koch G-3 assault rifle at the motionless Blancanales.

"Well, well, well. What is this?"

Waiting at the rendezvous point, Lyons and Gadgets repeatedly sent out the click-code for the third member of Able Team. They received no answer until the scanner/auto-recorder spoke:

"Well, Horse. This here is Rebel out at the Little Harbor camping ground. Guess what? We got ourselves a commando."

"What? He alive?"

"Yeah, for a while. We were thinking of..."

"I want him! Bring him here!"

"All we got is bikes, man. He could get away."

"I'll send a car. You don't touch him, unnerstan'? He's mine!"

Lyons and Gadgets didn't wait to hear every word. Sprinting through the brush, they already knew the sadist's message:

Horrible death for Pol Blancanales.

7

Finally coming to the hillcrest, Lyons stumbled the last few steps, then had to fall, coughing. On his hands and knees he spat long ropes of mucus into the dirt. He had attempted to sprint up the hill with a fifty-pound backpack of weapons and equipment. Though his sprinting steps had slowed to a determined march, he had not stopped. His friend's life depended on him.

Glancing back, Lyons saw Gadgets still struggling up the slope. Packing more weight — weapons, electronics, and heavy nickle-cadmium batteries — and lacking Lyons' fanatical physical conditioning, Gadgets straggled a hundred yards behind him. Lyons slipped out of his backpack straps, snapped open the "Daylight" Mannlicher's fiberglass and foam case, and crawled to the ridgeline.

Though the morning remained gray and cool, the light breeze had blown away the fog. The scope's eight-power optics closed the distance between Lyons and the campground a couple of hundred yards below. He saw three bikers standing in front of Blancanales. With heavy wire twisted around his wrists, Blancanales hung by his hands from a utility pole, his boots swinging a few inches from the asphalt of the parking lot.

A biker with a bloody head waved a knife. As Lyons watched, the biker touched the blade tip to Blancanales' eye. Lyons whipped back the Mannlicher's bolt, chambered a .308 Accelerator. But one of the other Outlaws, a lanky, slow-moving biker wearing a Confederate army cap, shoved the bloodied biker away from the prisoner. The third biker popped open a beer can and swilled the drink.

Setting the rifle's safety, Lyons glanced to the gravel and dirt road leading across the island to Avalon. He saw no one.

Gadgets collapsed beside Lyons. His throat rasped with every breath. As he choked down the coughs, he pulled a pair of binoculars from a side pocket of his pack and focused on the scene below.

"Only those three? See any others?"

"Not yet," murmured Lyons. "You want to stay here? Work the rifle?"

"You're going down there?"

"Over there..." Lyons pointed north, to the road continuing past the campgrounds. A hundred yards from where the bikers held Blancanales, the road curved behind a hillside. "...I'll drop down on the far side of that hill and come back through the campsites. Trees and bushes all the way. Lots of cover."

Gadgets looked at his watch. "We intercepted the message eight minutes ago. Assuming they left one minute later and are now driving at thirty miles an hour over the mountain, we've got nineteen minutes until they get here."