by Victor Koman
Dandridge, bloodied, shot up, black and blue, cringed at what might come next.
•
What came next was being dressed in a high altitude pressure suit and strapped into the cockpit of Cap’s SeaDart. Ground crew used thick zipcuffs of an odd-colored plastic to fasten Dandridge’s wrists and ankles to the ejection seat so that he could not cause any further mischief during the flight.
Captain Anger-dressed in a similar flight outfit-slapped a helmet on Dandridge’s head, locked it down, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Like the Seamaster, the SeaDart used the Los Angeles harbor as its runway, but this jet was a two-seat fighter capable of supersonic flight. Based on the design of the Convair F2Y-2 (officially designated the F-7), its multi-compartmented lower fuselage sat in the water supporting a pair of delta-shaped wings.
Cap sealed up his own helmet, cycled shut the acrylic canopy, and strapped in for takeoff. He ignited the single Pratt and Whitney J-75 turbojet engine, sending a bright orange flame shooting across the water and up the concrete ramp leading from the hanger to the harbor. Steam roiled upward in the pre-dawn air, glowing from within like a ghost. The jet immediately surged forward, breaking the still waters with its prow.
Throttling up, the engine roared to its full 15,000 pounds of thrust, pushing the plane up onto a single extended ski. Shaped like a thin titanium surfboard, the ski lifted the plane out of the water, supporting the entire aircraft on three oleo struts.
Dandridge gazed blearily out the canopy to observe sea spray race past with hurricane speed just inches from his face. The pilot controlled the plane with deft ease, making the bizarre liftoff procedure smooth and certain.
Screaming across the LA harbor at nearly 200 knots, Cap eased the control stick back. The elevons on the rear edges of the delta wing moved slightly and the plane nosed up twenty degrees. Suddenly, the mild buffeting of ski-on-water ceased and the SeaDart’s delta wing took over. With a whine of motors, the ski retracted into the hull of the sea-jet. The SeaDart became a jet with its all-important supersonic area-ruled fuselage. Blazing into the sky with sunrise at his back, Captain Anger raced upward out of southern California at climb rate of 17,100 feet per minute.
William Arthur Dandridge blacked out from the g-force of the climb. Richard Anger III felt nothing but exhilaration.
Leveling off at 36,000 feet, he coaxed the jet to Mach 1, ripped through the sound barrier, and cruised over the sun-goldened Pacific at Mach 1.1, far below the jet’s Mach 1.5 potential.
Over his headphones, Anger heard a tired voice from the rear seat ask, “Am I so evil that you have to dispose of my body at sea? You could have just shot me through the head and thrown me in a grave. Or let some scavengers at me.”
Cap said nothing.
“I know I’ve killed people,” he continued. “But so have you, Anger. I’m sure you claim to kill for the sake of some floating abstraction such as ‘Good’ or ‘Justice.’ That’s funny, because those are the names I give to my reasons for killing. That’s the great thing about abstractions-they can mean anything you want.”
Cap, in a low, even tone, said, “I don’t kill people for sport, or to gain power over others, or to shock the world with terror. When I must kill, it is to defend the innocent against the aggressor. Justice takes care of itself. And Good will triumph with or without my help, because-and you must face this, Dandridge, if you want to survive on this earth-good people far outnumber the likes of you. And for every evil genius that some chance wiring of the brain creates against all odds, there are a dozen-a hundred-good genii in the world to oppose you.”
Dandridge sounded mystified. “You believe in genies and magic lamps?”
Cap smiled a smile unseen by his captive. “I believe you’re a genius who doesn’t know the real plural of the word ‘genius.’”
•
Away from Pacific shipping lanes lay a mysterious volcanic island. On ocean charts, its coordinates-near 141° W latitude, 28° N longitude-revealed nothing, yet it existed nonetheless.
Cap circled around the island once as a precaution. Since he had raced the sun westward at nearly 900 miles per hour, it was still just shortly after dawn one time-zone away from Los Angeles. The long shadow of the steep lava cone reached miles westward. Clouds ringed the summit, and the slopes that reached to the shore supported only a few patches of greenery. He saw nothing alarming, so he throttled back to descent speed and extended the hydro-ski. Within moments, he touched down feather-lightly onto the shimmering surface of the sea. He idled the engine and the SeaDart slowed and settled into the water, floating on its belly, nose slightly up, slender conformal wingtip floats keeping the sea-jet steady.
The swells topped out at less than two feet in the calm morning hour. The two men sat a thousand yards offshore. Cap opened the canopy, removed his helmet, and took a deep breath of clean ocean air. It smelled of salt and sun.
Unstrapping, he stood and stretched. “Say hello to your new home, Dandridge. It’s a little more hospitable than your fractal island, and I’m sure you and the other guests will have a lot to talk about.”
With that, he removed Dandridge’s helmet and set it on his own seat, then flipped a protective cover up from a red switch. The eyes of his prisoner widened in terror.
“I’m tied down!” he shrieked. “I’ll drown!”
Cap smiled. “Your bonds are water soluble. Whether you make it to shore or not is a function of your will to live.” He lay his finger on the switch and covered his face with his arm.
Angrily, Dandridge cried out, “You’re just as much a cold-blooded ki-”
Cap pressed the switch and the rear ejection seat blasted into the morning air, shoving Dandridge upward at hundreds of feet per second. Specially designed by the Anger Institute to cause minimal damage to the aircraft, the low-flame rocket exhaust barely warmed the pilot as he shielded himself, then turned to gaze upward at the soaring scientist.
At the zenith of the flying chair’s arc toward the island, a parachute shot upward, assisted by an even smaller rocket. It bloomed instantly into full expansion and lowered the seat- and Dandridge-to the waves. He hit the drink halfway to shore: about five hundred yards. Like a popcorn kernel dropped into hot oil, the chair instantly sprouted six bright yellow flotation bags. The parachute settled to the surface in the still morning air.
For a long moment, nothing happened, and Cap suspected that the g-force of ejection had driven his foe unconscious as it had several previous recipients of Cap’s largesse. Pulling ultra-compact binoculars from his flight suit, Cap stood astride the seat of the gently bobbing SeaDart and watched.
It took the bonds about thirty seconds to dissolve in water; a little longer if merely damp. Within a minute or two, Dandridge freed first his legs, then his right arm and then his left.
Unfastening the five-point harness that also kept him safely strapped in for flight, he clumsily splashed into the water and swam frantically toward the beach in a manic dog paddle.
Out of curiosity, Cap scanned the black lava sands for signs of life. He counted seven figures in all standing on the beach. The sound of the SeaDart doubtless roused them. They did not gather together in a group, but stood apart from one another, scheming megalomaniacs ever suspicious of the motives of others. Around them lay the scattered and burnt remains of attempts to build one-man boats, one-man huts, one-man gardens. The polished white bones of several skeletons reflected the morning light like hideous ceramic artworks.
Cap had marooned eleven men there after discovering the new island. Aspiring or actual tyrants all, they were stranded there without henchmen, underlings, toadies, or sycophants: no one to act as their muscle; no one to protect them from one another. Violent, aberrant genii, the concept of cooperation among equals failed to occur to them. So they remained on their barren island without the hallmarks of civilization: trust, exchange, division of labor, or even mutual respect.
Cap lowered his binoculars and smiled. “If you on
ly knew, Professor Dandridge, how little indeed we differ, you would have the answer to all your suffering. You all would. If you knew the one main difference between us, you would discover the way off your island.” With that, he sat down, strapped in, closed the canopy and fired up the jet.
Airborne within moments, he accelerated to a mere 200 mph, staying so close to the water that the wide, triangular wing supported the aircraft on ground effect, the same phenomenon seagulls use to conserve energy flying. The wings cruised so close to the surface-about six feet above the swells-that induced drag between the wings and the water slowed the air enough to create added lift. In this way, Captain Anger flew away from the island at a leisurely pace (for him).
Twenty-five miles west of the island-too far for one of them to swim, but close enough for a team-built raft to reach-floated a surplus oil rig. It served as a refueling stop for the SeaDart, which could only carry enough fuel to fly out to the island with a few gallons reserve.
Cap taxied to the center of one side, far from the thick pillars that provided flotation and stability. Connecting the long fuel line to the jet’s tank, he turned the nozzle on and filled up.
During moments such as this-quiet, solitary moments on the sea-Captain Anger belied his name. Calm and confident, Cap gazed at the horizon and saw a world bigger than the one envisioned by Dandridge and his ilk. After a moment, he shut of the fuel line, let it retract, and sealed up the tank. Gazing up at the retired oil rig, he pondered its significance.
Onboard, in a comfortable crew building half the size of a football field, lay stores of food, water, and a library of books hand-picked by Captain Anger. He intended it solely for the solace and education of anyone who might finally acquire the human genius necessary to escape from the island to this place that he fondly thought of as The Last Resort.
It had not happened yet, and the proof of that lay in pieces on the island’s shore. None of them could be satisfied simply to succeed; each had to ensure that the others fail.
Captain Anger fired up the Pratt and Whitney engine, donned his helmet, and lifted off into the sky like a rocket punching through the stratosphere. With a thundering sonic boom that rattled the island and all upon it-including its drenched and wheezing newest inhabitant-Captain Anger vanished into the golden sun like an avenging angel heading homeward.
Epilogue
One True Thing
The land on which the United Nations building stood did not belong to New York City or even the united States. New York had ceded it to the UN half a century before. Maruk Arafshi, head still bandaged, watched the blue-bereted UN military police escort away a violently kicking mirror image of himself.
“I don’t know why they needed you!” the imposter cried. “I was good! No one would have checked my fingerprints or my DNA! I was great at being you!”
“I’m sure your were,” Arafshi said with honest amazement at the familiar face before him. At the moment, the recovering Secretary General looked less like Maruk Arafshi than did the fake being stuffed into the patrol car.
Welcomed back to his plush, mahogany-lined office with sincere applause from his staff and fellow delegates, he blinked from the flash of camera strobes and video lights. Leaning unsteadily against his broad desk, he said, “Please, I’m back and I am eager to get to work. My recent unpleasantness is not the issue here.”
“What is the issue?” shouted a reporter.
Without a thought of self-censorship, Arafshi honestly replied, “That the last superpower on earth doesn’t even pay its UN dues, yet shamelessly uses the General Assembly and Security Council as a rubber stamp for its policy of economic and cultural expansion and we all go blithely along with it, eager to trade self-determination for World Bank credit and national sovereignty for a false sense of security.”
Arafshi raised his hand to his mouth and nearly bit his tongue off. Allah take me now, he thought with growing terror. What have I said?
The End
Captain Anger and his companions will return in Adventure #2: The Ivory Tower
Notes
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-fc433c-58fc-ce48-ee8f-cd01-1c02-82f60f
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Document creation date: 16.03.2010
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Document history:
v1.0 - создание файла (fb2) - Paco
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