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Molokai Forest Reserve
Sunday, 9 May
2010 Local Time
Winston Pettigrew stepped to the side of the trail and motioned the line of people behind him to keep walking. He counted heads and waited for the appearance of a big Minnesota farm boy and a good-looking redhead married to a certain sleepy-eyed Marine.
Betty Pyle was the last in line, and she stepped up to him. “Where’s Ted?”
“Off with Abel Yeager, causing a distraction.” He craned to see over her head. “Where’s Danny and Mizzes Yeager?”
“I looked back, and Danny was climbing into the barracks, I assume to get that idiot Austin, who looked catatonic when I left.” She bit her lip. “I... I didn’t wait to see if they came out.”
Pettigrew patted her shoulder, his attention fixed on the trail behind them. “Don’t beat yourself up, Betty. The Michelin Man can take care of himself, and I ’spect Charlie Yeager can too.”
“She’s injured. Charlie is.”
“Say what?”
“She went after the big man with a nail. He crushed her hand like... like it was nothing. An eggshell.”
Pettigrew winced. “Abel not gonna like that.”
“Why is Ted with him? Why isn’t he with you?”
“We needed ever’ body looking the other way, with enough firepower to make ’em all go over yonder while we snuck up and got y’all out.” Pettigrew shrugged a shoulder. “Yeager figgered I needed somebody who could hear.”
“Damn that man,” Betty swore softly. “If he gets killed...”
Pettigrew checked the line and noted the last of the hostages disappearing to his right. Osterchuk and Charlie and the Austin feller had yet to appear. “Lookie here.” He squared up, held Betty by the upper arms, and locked eyes with her. “Ted’s safe as kittens with Abel Yeager. He’ll be fine. I need you to keep all y’all headed west, okay? The high mountain is on your left, and you can see the North Star pretty clear. Keep goin’ west, and you’ll cut the trail to the lookout. Where we left the cars. It’s all easy from there.”
“You’re going back, aren’t you?”
Pettigrew nodded. “I need to keep that big blue ox from doing something stupid.”
“If you see Ted, tell him not to get killed.” Betty scrubbed away a tear and squared her shoulders. “Get back safe, y’hear?”
“Yes’m, that is my intent.”
Pettigrew snaked back through the jungle and approached the prisoner’s barracks from the rear. The hole they had created in the building gaped dark and ominous as a horror-movie basement inviting the unwary teens to trot down the stairs and engage in heavy petting while surreptitiously observed by a hockey-masked psychopath lurking in the shadows. Osterchuk’s weapon lay propped against the side of the building.
“That ain’t good,” Pettigrew said to himself.
Ducking through the hole, Pettigrew smelled the open-latrine reek from the bucket used by the captives as a toilet. The interior of the space pressed in, tight and close. A hulking obstruction blocked the floor, deeper black against the gloom inside the barracks. It might have easily been mistaken for a pile of laundry heaped in the middle of the floor. Unless you happened to have seen a number of dead bodies in your lifetime, as Winston Pettigrew had.
Pettigrew approached on cat feet, stepping carefully around upturned cots and unidentified debris. He leaned in close. The knowledge of what he would find gripped his stomach in a tight knot and made his eyes water with emotion.
His big pal from Minnesota lay on his belly, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.
“Aw, damn,” Pettigrew whispered. “What the hell am I gonna tell Jan? And where’s Mrs. Yeager?”
A sound from outside drew his attention to the front door. Pettigrew crossed the room and skulked up against the front wall. He pressed his cheek against the splintery doorframe, surveying an open clearing in front of the barracks where two barrels crackled with leaping flames. A man had just finished dropping an armload of junk into the nearer barrel, and it had flared up, sending a crescendo of sparks spiraling into the sky. The man carried no weapons and appeared to be alone. He was in his midtwenties or so, as slender and physically unremarkable as a grad student on a camping trip.
Pettigrew shouldered his rifle and touched the hilt of the knife at his waist.
The grad student turned and walked back toward the command hut, the one Yeager had labeled building D, and disappeared inside. Pettigrew flowed through the door and ghosted across the clearing. The crackle of flames masked any sound he made, which was pretty minimal to begin with. He crossed first to building A, then C, verifying no one else remained in camp. He paused at the open door to the command hut. Inside, the grad student hunched in front of a glowing computer screen. He was alone.
Pettigrew figured that in a minute or two, the lone terrorist would sincerely regret not having his buddies around for company, because one way or another, Winston Pettigrew intended to get some answers PDQ. Pettigrew slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
#
MOLOKAI FOREST RESERVE
Sunday, 9 May
2128 Local
The old Willis jeep jounced along a narrow, rutted excuse for a road, its one working headlight waving a weak yellow beam ahead like a drunk teenager running through the forest with a flashlight. Victor rode the bucket seat the way he would a bull at the Rio Grande Valley Livestock Show and Rodeo. The scrawny old fisherman, whose name was Jumbo of all things, worked the shifter without a demonstrated ability to mesh gears, palmed the wheel as though maintaining a straight line was against Hawaiian law, and smoked enough weed to leave a normal man comatose.
After dropping Monalisa at the police station, Jumbo and Victor had roared away in a cloud of oil smoke mixed with pot smoke. They zoomed out Highway 460 at a breakneck forty miles an hour for a few short miles, then Jumbo had left the main highway for a narrow two-lane road that cut across open fields. The two lanes turned into a gravel road that turned into a nightmare of pits and ruts. Jumbo hit every bump. Some of them twice.
The road bored through a tunnel of trees. A thin strip of stars shone overhead, but everywhere else, pitch-black night pressed in close and tight. Cool, damp air blew away Jumbo’s weed exhalations and chilled the sweat under Victor’s arms. At one point, the single headlight had picked out the glowing eyes of a feral dog, and later, three deer bounded across the track, lit for a fraction of a second before disappearing.
“Axis deer,” Jumbo said.
“If they’re the Axis, who are the Allies?”
Jumbo looked at him with the sleepy expression of the heavily medicated. “Huh?”
“Never mind—watch the road!” Victor grabbed the dash and held on as a deep rut catapulted his butt off the seat.
Victor’s kidneys were about done in by the time the Jeep emerged from the jungle into an open area. A Forest Service sign blipped past, illegible in the darkness. Jumbo applied the brakes, and the Jeep skidded to a halt at a fork in the road.
“You need a piss?” Jumbo gestured to the right, where a building hulked among the trees. It was visible only by the dull gleam of reflected starlight from its pale roof. An iron rail marked the road here, and sectioned off the space.
“No, I’m good for now.”
The fisherman popped the clutch, and the seat slammed Victor in the back. The old Jeep lurched forward another few dozen yards and came to a single paved parking spot adjacent to another structure, smaller and narrower than the first. Jumbo pulled into the space and stopped. The headlight revealed another rail crossing the darkness, this one accessed by a concrete path, and then the yellow beam was swallowed by darkness. A swath of stars, thick and bright, sparkled in the sky, and a quarter moon rose over the eastern peaks.
“Here you go,” his driver announced. “Dis de lookout. Picnic tables there.” Jumbo pointed at the building then back to the right where the road continued. “That way is the reserve. You gotta have an invite, you know?” He swiveled to indicate dead ahead, where the headlight pointed. “Walk out dat way, and you fall big-time, bruddah.”
“Bueno. You got a flashlight, homes? Cool, thanks. Wait here.”
Victor took the greasy dime-store flashlight, flicked it on, and was rewarded by about a candle’s worth of light. He climbed out of the Jeep and stretched. Then he resettled the pistol in his waistband, wincing at the bruises from where the hammer spur had dug into his spine.
Walking felt good after two hours of Jumbo’s driving. Victor craned his neck from side to side, and the crackle of joints realigning sounded like Bubble Wrap popping. Instead of exploring the overlook and possibly falling big-time, he opted to explore the trail to the reserve. Behind him, Jumbo switched off the engine, and Victor caught the distinctive sound of his cheap lighter snapping on to light another doob. How much dope can one man inhale? The secondhand smoke alone had given Victor a mild buzz.
In minutes, he was alone with singing insects and rustling of the foliage, following a crunchy twin-track road that could have been any backwoods camp road in any state park in America. Victor kept on, sweeping the wan light ahead of him, not sure what he was looking for or even why his instinct was driving him to look in the first place. It wasn’t as if Yeager couldn’t handle trouble—no, in truth, trouble often couldn’t handle Yeager.
But... something itched in Victor’s conscience. He needed to be out here, doing something positive, rather than sitting back in a Honolulu motel, watching pay-per-view movies.
A flash of red reflected from the darkness ahead. Victor centered the light and picked out the rear of a vehicle parked at an angle beside the track. As he approached, another SUV materialized and parked next to the first. Victor slipped the .45 out of his pants and held it down by his thigh.
The SUVs were Range Rovers, mud-splattered and dingy, with a company logo on the side: Adventure Tours Unlimited. Same company as the one noted on the brochure from the Fair Breezes. He shined the light inside the first car, holding it against the glass to avoid reflection. Front seat, empty. Back seat, empty. Rear compartment... dead man, bullet hole in his forehead, blood all over his shirt. Victor noted that the shirt had the same logo as the vehicle. The driver must have been employed by Adventure Tours to carry tourists to the trailhead.
He checked the second Rover and found an identical situation: dead driver stowed in the back compartment, one shot to the head, multiple gunshot wounds to the torso. Both drivers had apparently been gunned down then received a coup de gras to the forehead. Their killers had thrown them in the back of their own cars, then departed.
Victor prowled in an ever-widening circle and found nothing else of interest. No trace of the shooters remained, at least in the immediate vicinity. He stabbed the gun back in his waistband and stood in the middle of the trail, smelling his own sweat and listening to his own heartbeat. Victor tilted his head back and consulted the heavens.
“So now what?” he asked the white blanket of the Milky Way.
The stars glittered down without answering, indifferent to his confusion.
#
MOLOKAI FOREST RESERVE
Sunday, 9 May
2130 Local
For over an hour, Yeager worked at the pace of a snail harnessed to a boulder, creeping under fronded vegetation, over mud and dirt and gravel, and through hip-high water. He paused often, listening a lot and waiting for the moment when he would be the guy making the first move, not wanting the slamming impact of a bullet to be his first indication of enemy presence.
He arrived at the camp’s perimeter wet, muddy, and exhausted. The place appeared to be abandoned. In the middle clearing, two oil drums plumed smoke into the night sky from long-abandoned fires. The barracks hulked with silent menace, portals open to black interiors. The building that had held the hostages lay open as well, its interior as impenetrable as the others.
Yeager studied the opening, hesitating to move forward and examine the contents. The longer he delayed looking, the longer he could imagine Charlie long gone with Pettigrew and Osterchuk. The empty building would attest to the success of their strategy and reward Yeager with joy for the future reunion with his wife.
Or... checking inside the building might reveal a horror he was unwilling to allow. It was all too easy to picture a scene of butchery so profound it would crush him so that he was unable to recover, like a submarine sinking to the ocean floor. The weight of despair at the thought of life without Charlotte would squeeze him to the point that his heart would burst from the pressure.
But remaining frozen was cowardice, and cowardice was as abhorrent to him as failure. Yeager rose from his crouch near building A and entered the clearing, eyes fixed on the black doorway awaiting him.
“There you are,” a voice to his right said.
Yeager pivoted on one heel, rifle swinging into alignment at his hip. His finger was taking up slack when he recognized Winston Pettigrew at the doorway of building D, the one they had identified as the command hut. The slight man was in the process of wiping a knife blade on a piece of cloth.
He studied Yeager with a sad expression. “I nearly shot you.”
“What the hell? Why aren’t you with the hostages?”
Pettigrew sheathed the knife, his expression as grim as a doctor describing a terminal illness raging through his patient’s body. “C’mere and take a knee, big guy. I got some bad news, and I got some bad news.”