ARC LIGHTS BLAZED at the far end of the ancient underground workshop. Koa, Basa, Zeigler, and Detective Piki, Koa’s most junior detective, who’d been on cave-exploring expeditions, assembled the ropes, hand lights, and safety equipment necessary to explore the tunnel that fed fresh air into the stone workers’ cavern. Jimmy Hikorea joined them, riding a small three-wheeled scooter, retrieved from the back of his Bronco.
“‘Natural sewers,’ that’s what the pros call these here lava tubes,” Piki said, his boyish face and crew cut making him look no more than nineteen years old. They perfectly matched his exuberant voice and inability to stop moving around.
“Well, if this tube is one of Piki’s natural sewers, its lava came from Mauna Kea, and the tunnel leads back that way,” Jimmy said in his squeaky academic voice.
“Yeah, the airflow is real, real strong. That’s peculiar.” Piki made a speeding motion with his hand.
All of them turned to look at Piki. “Why?” Zeigler asked.
“Well, air don’t flow for no reason. I figure Dr. Hikorea’s got it right. This here tube carried lava from Mauna Kea. The other entrance must be somewhere up the side of the mountain where the air is cooler. Cooler air is heavier. Temperature difference might explain a light breeze, but this air is really movin’. It’s more like a wind tunnel. It’s real peculiar.” Piki made another swooping gesture with his hand.
“Dead-on, Sherlock.” Jimmy looked appreciatively at the young detective. “You ever think about becoming an archaeologist?”
Piki couldn’t contain his pride. “No, sir, but I’ve read books about grave robbers.”
Jimmy frowned. “Not exactly what I had in mind.” His voice betrayed more than a touch of sarcasm, and Koa shook his head.
Coils of rope, cord, and wire lay stacked on the cavern floor. The arc lamps sent light piercing far into the tunnel’s depths. Zeigler carried a portable field telephone, linked by wire to a communications set on the surface. They were ready. The mouth of the tunnel beckoned.
The five men moved easily down the wide underground passage trailing a white nylon cord, knotted at hundred-yard intervals, as well as the communications wire linking them to their support team on the surface. Jimmy rode his scooter, rocking back and forth as the fat rubber tires gained traction over the uneven floor. Each man carried a battery-powered halogen light.
“Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four …” Basa kept count of the knots as Piki played out the nylon cord behind them. Suddenly he paused. “Oh my God.”
They all heard the growing rumble. Particles of dust separated from the walls of the cave, sparkling in the beams of their halogen lights. Everyone stopped moving and stood, statue-like, in the middle of the cave. “Oh, God! It’s an earthquake,” Zeigler shouted.
“Christ, we’ll be trapped in here,” Piki yelled, his voice reverberating through the tunnel.
“Get flat against the walls,” Koa commanded. Everyone save Jimmy sprang to obey and crouched against the sides of the tunnel.
The rumbling rose, growing louder and deeper. Louder and deeper. Bearing down upon them like a speeding locomotive growling through a tunnel, the sound reverberated, echoing off the walls, reinforcing itself and growing ever louder.
“Mayday! Mayday! Earthquake! We’re caught in a strong earthquake,” said Zeigler, speaking urgently into the field telephone and huddling against the cave wall. “We’re about twenty-four hundred yards in. Explorer base, do you copy? Over.”
There was no reply. Zeigler desperately repeated the mayday call, his voice rising to be heard above the din. Still there was no answer. A frightened look creased his face. “I can’t get through.”
Basa, a devout Catholic, crossed himself. He sang baritone in the church choir whenever work permitted and rarely missed going to mass. His lips now moved in an obvious prayer none of the rest of them could hear above the awful noise. Koa guessed he was praying for his wife and kids.
Louder. Louder. Rumbling. The sound seemed to be almost on top of them. The ground trembled. Dust particles flaked off the lava and clouded the air, growing thicker by the second. The noise became deafening. Piki screamed. Shaking like a tree branch in a hurricane, he broke from the wall into a stumbling run back the way they’d come. Koa thought about going after him but knew you couldn’t outrun an earthquake.
Piki’s scream and the rising volume of the ominous roar reminded Koa of the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, where his rescue unit had come under heavy machine gun and rocket fire from Somali militia. Two of his men had died that day. Odd, he thought, to survive that disaster only to die in a lava tube. He knew now why he’d always hated caves. Someone in the great beyond had been warning him.
Through it all, Jimmy sat on his scooter in the middle of the cave with his head cocked to one side, listening intently.
The rumbling rose to a thundering crescendo … and peaked.
The sound began to gradually fade. Softer. And softer still. The din slowly faded away to an intense silence. Koa felt his heart racing and realized he’d been holding his breath. Zeigler too had stopped breathing.
“What the hell was that?” Basa exclaimed.
“A truck,” Jimmy proclaimed dispassionately. Poised upon his wheels in the middle of the tunnel, he alone sat completely unruffled by the terror they’d experienced. They all looked at him as though he’d lost his mind.
“We’re directly under the Saddle Road,” he piped with a self-satisfied grin. “You just got run over by an eighteen-wheeler.”
The sound came again, only softer this time, rising and fading, like an oncoming vehicle crossing above them.
“That must have been a damn car,” Zeigler said. He laughed. Basa joined him. They all laughed, even Jimmy.
Koa knew that laugh well. He’d heard it many times in the military. It had nothing to do with humor.
One by one Koa, Basa, and Zeigler unfolded themselves from their crouched positions against the cave walls and slapped dust from their clothing. Piki, now red as a fire truck with mortification, rejoined the group. Zeigler, choking down his embarrassment, cancelled the mayday call.
“Wow, that was scary. I thought I was about to meet my maker,” Basa, who was normally unflappable, commented.
“Yeah,” Koa conceded.
The five explorers slowly moved forward again. As they advanced, the tube became narrower. The airflow going past them grew stronger and cooler. The floor of the tube sloped upward, and Jimmy had an increasingly difficult time maneuvering his scooter. Finally, they came to a point where the passage narrowed to the width of a man. They had to proceed single file, and Jimmy had to abandon his scooter.
“You want one of us to go back with you?” Basa knew the answer, but somehow felt compelled to offer.
“Hell no, my arms need the exercise. Besides, I wouldn’t miss the end of this expedition for a week’s R and R in Bahrain.”
The five men forged through the narrow, now-twisting underground passage. Jimmy hopped along behind at a surprisingly rapid pace. Their route turned sharply upward. The tunnel veered ninety degrees to the right, then ninety degrees to the left. Koa suddenly saw light ahead, glimmering off the lava walls.
He emerged from a tiny portal behind a giant boulder inside a cinder cone. He saw that the wall of the cinder cone rose almost straight up an eighty-foot cliff to the west, while the eastern side of the cone had disintegrated. One by one the others emerged from the cavity, blinking in the brightness of daylight, leaving Jimmy behind.
“Hey, Koa,” they heard Jimmy exclaim, “come look at this.”
Jimmy sat inside the mouth of the lava tube on his pad and pointed toward a spot on the wall about eighteen inches off the ground. Koa, mindful of his neck, knelt and bent over to see. Recessed into the wall below a small rock shelf, he spotted a small metal plate with a tiny dim red light. Jimmy pointed to a similarly small plate with a crystalline patch on the opposite wall. Both were impossible to see when standing.
“What do you make of it, Jimmy?”
“Looks like an infrared light beam designed to detect the presence of anyone entering or exiting this tunnel. And it’s positioned so anyone walking normally would miss it. Whoever installed it didn’t count on someone looking at the world from my vantage point.”
“And we’ve just tripped it.”
“Dead-on, Detective.”
Jimmy finally hopped out of the crevice behind the boulder screening the mouth of the tunnel. Koa pointed up toward the western wall of the cinder cone.
“Those old adze makers could teach modern engineers a thing or two. There’s the answer to your airflow mystery. The western wall of this cone acts like a sail. It catches the predominantly easterly winds and funnels the air down the wall into the lava tube. Nature has created a near-perfect ventilation system for the underground workshop two and a half miles away beneath the floor of the saddle.”
“Wow. That’s way cool,” Piki said. He grinned, the cherry-red blush of embarrassment having faded to a dull rouge.
Koa led them southeast toward the collapsed side of the old cone. They climbed to the crest of a small rise and were greeted by a breathtaking view. Looking south, they peered down the slope of Mauna Kea, back across the Humu‘ula Saddle, and over the Saddle Road. Their starting point was identified by Jimmy’s bright red Bronco, which sat among a collection of military vehicles. The broad shield of Mauna Loa rose to a snowcap on the other side of the saddle.
Basa voiced their shared feelings. “I’m never gonna feel the same way about that damn road. That truck scared the shit out of me.”
A shout came from Detective Piki about twenty yards down the hill. Koa hurried toward the young detective, who knelt over a small pit on the slope of the mountain.
“What have you found?”
“Dunno. Looks like somebody’s been blasting.” Piki held up a short piece of frayed cord and a fragment of heavy yellowish paper. Koa examined both the cord and the paper. The detective was right. The cord appeared to be fuse material, while the paper had the waxy texture of explosives packaging.
“What do you make of it, Piki?”
“There’s no reason for blasting … except maybe the survey crew for the Saddle Road improvement project?”
Koa shook his head at the young detective’s wild guess. He tried to make sense of it all. The mutilated body, the series of caves, the disturbed grave, and now this explosives residue. What the hell was going on? Who would go to all this trouble, with all these elaborate ritual preparations, to kill someone? And leave a body, he reminded himself, he hadn’t yet identified?