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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 fu
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 i
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 sca
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 only 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. Co
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.