“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 æther. “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.”

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.