| |
Welcome to the Molokai Ritz.
“All things being equal,” Betty said, “I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”
“Dave Draper.” The man stood and extended his hand. He was pudgy around the middle with blondish hair going gray, the top of his head reaching Charlie’s collarbone. He wore only pants, no shirt. He pointed to a man on the left-hand side. “That guy is Montelle, no last name. You might recognize him if you listen to the same music your kids do. Those two folks are Japanese. I can’t make out a word they say. And this is my wife, Sarah Rae.”
Sarah Rae was a poster child for misery. Wearing stained white trousers and a Hawaiian shirt that was clearly too small for her, straining over surgically enhanced breasts stuffed into a frilly brassiere, Sarah Rae resembled a poorly dressed Barbie doll. Charlie noted Dave’s bare upper body, and it wasn’t hard to connect the two.
Draper continued, “We haven’t gotten around to everybody, so I don’t know the others.”
Several of their fellow captives left their bunks and introduced themselves. Seconds later, Charlie was at a loss to remember a single name. The Japanese pair drifted up and attempted greetings of their own. The elder of the two called himself Goro, and the younger man was Haru, if Charlie understood them correctly. The singer, Montelle, slipped over and perched on the cot near Draper. Charlie vaguely recognized him from the covers of grocery-store rags.
“I think they’re father and son,” Draper supplied, indicating the Japanese.
A prehistoric cockroach skittered across the floor, eliciting a shriek from Lu Kim. The group from the cruise ship stayed clumped near the door as if afraid that moving into the building would mean admitting defeat.
Charlie breathed deeply to settle her nerves. “Okay, Mr. Draper—”
“Call me Dave.”
“Okay, Dave,” Charlie said. “Do you know what’s going on here?”
Draper told his story in staccato bursts, with frequent interjections by Montelle and the other hostages. Kidnapped at gunpoint from Lanai and dragged to a waiting boat, thirteen hostages were zipped across the water to Molokai and marched through the jungle to the Terrorist Resort and Spa. They had been informed by a skinny young man with a clipboard that they would be staying here until the “insurgent action” was concluded. And then they’d been shoved into barracks and left alone for the last few hours.
“How many bad guys?”
“At least twelve,” Montelle said. “They come and go, so it’s hard to tell.”
“Add that to the guys who came with us, that makes sixteen,” Betty said.
Voices sounded from outside, followed by approaching footsteps.
“Somebody’s coming,” Charlie said.
Draper made a face. “This can’t be good.”
#
HOLIDAY INN, HONOLULU, Oahu
Saturday, 8 May
1930 Local
Victor couldn’t sleep, which was not natural. His time sense was all whacked out of shape, sure, and sirens whooped like crazy from the streets outside, near and far, but damn... he could normally sleep anywhere, anytime, and without a twinge of worry. Cuddling with a warm and naked Alexandra Lopez wasn’t helping, despite their having fooled around earlier. A shower and a snack and the drone of the hotel room AC should have knocked him out like a bullet to the head.
But no, being awake while spooning up to Alexandra’s backside and cupping a full breast while dozing resulted in an inevitable reaction. Soon his cupping turned into stroking and fondling, which turned into nuzzling and kissing, which resulted in more swelling and some gentle prodding.
“Hey,” he whispered. “You wanna play doctor?”
“Do you never get tired of that joke?” She reached back and took him in hand, guiding him. Her bottom ground against him, and he slipped inside her moist heat as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Mmm,” he hummed into her neck. “You were ready for me. I like that.”
“I’m always ready for you, mi cielo.”
Afterward, Alex went to clean up. Victor dug around for the remote, propped himself up in bed, and turned on the television. Punching off the free movie advertisement, he hit a news station, and his finger paused on the channel button. He blinked, his brain refusing to match the image to anything he could comprehend. Was that the Arizona Memorial? The white concrete of the bridge structure was broken into jagged shards, and the top appeared completely ripped away. Holes gaped where windows once stood. Fireboats sprayed high arcs of water into the smoking ruins. The pole from which the American flag waved had been knocked askew, bent like a flexible drinking straw, and the Stars and Stripes sloshed in the turgid water.
Victor’s mouth gaped, and his belly clenched as though he’d taken a punch to the gut. “Madre de Dios. Alexandra! Come here!”
The news went downhill from there. Active shooters on Maui. A jetliner downed. A huge cruise liner brutally sabotaged. Tourists kidnapped. Hundreds dead.
Wrapped in a towel, Alex hurried from the bathroom and perched on the edge of the bed. She watched with him in silence as the extent of the destruction was laid out between commercial breaks. They remained spellbound throughout segment after segment.
“It’s 9/11 all over again.” Alex turned to him, her eyes glassy wet. “Abel and Charlie? You think they’re okay?”
“Yeager. Pssshhh!” Victor waved his hands as though overhanding a throw in from the sidelines. “I’d be more worried about the terrorists. Yeager, he don’t get mad fast, but when he does... ai-yi-yi.”
“You think they’ll come to port with all this going on?”
“Good question,” Victor said, hopping off the bed and digging in his discarded pants for his phone. “Let me see what I can find out.”
#
OPEN SEA, NORTH OF Molokai
Saturday, 8 May
1945 Hours
Anxiety. Exhilaration. The sense of falling without a parachute. All these feelings had racked Kanoa for hours. As the leader of the Niho Niuhi, the responsibility for success or failure lay with him, and the stakes came no higher than those on the table now. Ever since his meeting at Diamond Head with Palakiko, where they had witnessed the hotel bombings, he had been wracked with doubt.
And not a little guilt. Many true Hawaiians had died that day. Was it worth it? Only time would tell.
Sweat slicked the plastic cover of the scrambled satellite phone he gripped in one hand. He braced the other hand on the instrument console of the Kekepi as it pitched through moderate seas twenty miles off the coast of Molokai. They were running without lights, and the reflected glow of the instruments blocked any view through the bridge windows. Matty Abbado, one of the few nonnative Hawaiians in the Niho Niuhi, stood to his left, keeping an eye on the radar while holding the helm.
The sat phone beeped. Kanoa keyed the sequence to accept a scrambled call.
“Strike Leader.”
“Strike Leader, Strike Two. Objective Poha. No casualties, no problems.”
“Acknowledged. Charlie Mike. Leader out.”
“Strike Two out.”
Kanoa ended the call from Kimo Ekewaka, and the belt of tension around his chest eased a notch. The team taking VIP hostages from the resort hotels of Lanai to the hidden camp deep in the forest on the neighboring island of Molokai had reached their destination without incident. More than twelve wealthy and influential haoles would be locked in barracks constructed under a shroud of heavy foliage and heat-shielding materials. They would provide human shields to prevent aerial attack on the camp.
The brooding figure in a white suit—the Korean known as Mr. L—stirred and queried him with a look.
“All is well,” Kanoa said. “Only one strike team unaccounted for.”
“Team three.” Mr. L pursed his lips. “They had the most difficult objective.”
“News reports would seem to indicate they were successful.”
Team three’s mission: infiltrate the six-thousand-plus passengers aboard the mega-cruise liner Delphinus Oceanus. The nine-man team would disable the massive ship’s watertight compartment doors, sabotage the lifeboats, and blow gaping holes in the liner’s hull, using containers of smuggled C4 explosives. Once the ship was gutted and sinking, the team would abandon ship in an inflatable raft and rendezvous with Makani in his sport fisher off the coast of Oahu.
The news had not run any reports of the men who attacked the cruise liner having been captured, and he didn’t know if they were merely delayed in reporting through some malfunction or the authorities were keeping quiet to avoid tipping their hand.
Makani’s strike on the jet liner had succeeded, but that was the last message Kanoa had received from the man. All other attacks had been a complete success. No casualties taken. Maximum damage inflicted—just as his “advisers” had predicted.
“It’s crazy out there,” Kelly Pajela said. He’d been monitoring the news feed via a tablet computer while seated in the captain’s chair. He met Kanoa’s eyes. “Like an anthill. The governor’s called out the National Guard. Police and firemen are swamped. Riots at food stores. Tourists running around in circles, demanding to get off the islands.” He grinned. “Looks like we got their attention.”
Tension knotted in Kanoa’s chest again, tighter than before. “They’ll be after us now.”
“I expect so.”
They had prepared for this day. Five years of dreaming had been followed by two years of planning, training, and making contacts with the right people to supply weapons and personnel, including trainers and experienced soldiers—contract killers, really—to bolster the ranks of his followers.
Kanoa had no illusions that they would succeed in overturning the United States’s enslavement of Hawaii. The beast was too big, too powerful. He’d seen firsthand, while serving in Iraq as a private, what the US military could do once it set its mind to accomplishing something. With one misstep, his remaining time on this earth would be measured in days, if not hours. Liberty for Hawaii would come, but he would probably not live to see it.
The trick would be to prolong the ordeal, to bring attention to the Hawaiians’ cause by focusing the media and the eyes of the world on their tiny group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The average US citizen had no clue that native Hawaiians hadn’t asked to become a state but had been annexed because a small group of sugar barons wanted to consolidate their hold and control the market without compensating the natives. It was the ultimate westward expansion of manifest destiny, which translated to white men stealing all the land they could grab and hold.
America, overreaching as usual. Well, they would learn a very painful, long overdue lesson.