The Hostaged Island by Don Pendleton, Dick Stivers

the hill, then we find a better place, hit them on the way down."
    "Let's move it!"
    Moto-crossing, they left the canyon behind and found a wide hiking trail. Speeding until they dared go no faster, Able Team tore up the trail with their heavy semi-chopped Harleys, scraping fancy stone steps with their crankcases, rutting beds of rare California wild flowers.
    They made it. Steep hillsides rose above the junction of the paved highway and the station's dirt road. The station's road cut along the south slope of canyon running east and west. Fifty feet up from the highway, a steel gate blocked the dirt road. Now it stood open, its lock shot away. Below the road, the hillside dropped ten feet to a streambed, the stream-bed ending at a grated culvert passing under the highway. For hundreds of yards north and south, the highway ran straight.
    "Okay, Pol," Lyons said. "You're the Green Beret, retired. Call it."
    Blancanales pointed to the ridge on which they stood. "You with the Mannlicher right here. You can hit anyone on the radio station's road, and if any of them make a break for town, hit them in the back."
    He turned to Gadgets. "A quick booby trap on the gate..."
    "A phosphorous grenade..."
    "The gate's closed, they stop to open it, boom. The shooting starts. Lyons, let me take your Ingram. Let's go."
    In two minutes they had set the ambush, Lyons on the ridge, Blancanales lower on the hillside, only a hundred feet from the road opposite him. Gadgets closed the gate. He pulled the pin from a white phosphorous grenade and placed it carefully on one of the gate's hinges, using the gate to hold the lever closed.
    Lyons heard motorcycles. He whistled a warning. Gadgets sprinted through the brush and threw himself flat a few yards from Blancanales.
    Chief had reached the gate already, and he waited for the stragglers to join him, his bike drawn up parallel to the gate. He carried an M-60 machine gun slung over his back like a rifle. In his Italian wraparound shades and Mohawk haircut, the road's dust swirling around him, he looked like a demon from hell.
    Lyons watched him through the Mannlicher's scope, the biker's face and chest filling the image. Chief turned from side to side, counting his men.
    Panning back and forth across the bikers, Lyons suddenly noted a hideous ornament on the forks of Chief's bike. The head of a man, the eyes wide and staring, had been wired to the handlebars.
    "Ready to die, freak show?" Lyons whispered, his finger on the Mannlicher's trigger.
    Chief kicked the gate open, then gunned his bike. Gadgets saw the grenade drop. But Chief accelerated away. In the six seconds before the grenade exploded, Chief would ride to safety. Gadgets sighted his Uzi on Chief. He fired. The biker spilled splashily.
    All the bikers, the two pulling off the highway, the several near the gate, the others gunning their motorcycles up the road, turned their heads fast toward the Uzi-fire. The distraction served only to make them less ready for what followed. An exploding ball of white flame engulfed the road.
    Five human forms were directly hit. Hundreds of droplets of white phosphorous splattered their bodies, each drop a searing point of flame that burned through cloth and leather and flesh. Not requiring oxygen to burn, the metallic fire would continue through their flesh to the bone and burn there until the metal consumed itself. But they died before that agony. Their motorcycles' gasoline was exploding. Screaming, the bikers inhaled gulps of fire into their lungs, died in seconds.
    Dust and flame and smoke filled the scope's image, but Lyons still squeezed off a shot at the downed Chief. Then he opened his left eye, searching the road for targets, his right eye still at the eyepiece.
    Automatic fire from Gadgets and Blancanales poured into the two bikers immediately behind the fallen Chief. The hillside beyond the bikers puffed into a sheet of dust as slugs punched through the two men. Other bullets tore through the sheet