17

TERUMBU ISLAND, LATE JULY

Havok felt a hand yanking him from the depths of an abyssal slumber. When he reached the surface of consciousness, he tried to open his eyes but found they were glued shut. While he had slept, his tear ducts had secreted fluid to flush his eyes of dirt and dried salt, leaving a thick, sticky mucus, He forced his eyes open with his fingers. Finally able to see, he focused on Manny, who was standing over him with a mug.

“Here,” Manny said quietly. “It’s cold, but it’s still coffee. I’m going to relieve Pete. It’s late afternoon.”

Havok accepted the mug before Manny stepped up the short ladder and out of the forward cabin, leaving him alone. Havok pushed himself upright and sat in a stupor. It took a few minutes, along with a cup of instant coffee, to clear his fuzzy brain. As he recovered, he raised his wrist so he could look at his watch, and smelled his armpit and his clothing.

After draining the cup, he unbuttoned his clothing and slid them off as he stood, letting them drop to the deck. Kicking the clothes out of the way, he squatted. Tugging at the mother-of-pearl knobs on the drawer under the bunk, he pulled out the drawer and grabbed a set of clean clothes and a pair of clean socks. After changing, Havok put on his boots and stepped up into the pilothouse. The little late-afternoon sunlight the jungle canopy and the netting allowed in blinded him. After a minute of letting his eyes adjust to the light, he grabbed his weapons and web gear off the chart table. With everything he needed, he approached the monkey line, but stood aside as Stone slid onto the deck.

“Go ahead and get three or four empty dive or duffel bags ready,” Havok ordered. “Whatever you think will be necessary to carry the individual sarin bottles. And grab a couple of entrenching tools.”

“All right,” Stone answered. “But where are you going?”

“Once we snatch the sarin,” Havok replied, “we’re gonna have to move fast. I’m gonna see if I can find a spot to hide the sarin, as carrying it with us ain’t an option. You know, in case we get caught. Also, I don’t feel comfortable with dropping them off at sea, as they might not sink.”

“They’ve invented things called lead weights,” Stone responded.

“They’ve also developed things called leaks and currents,” Havok said. “If I can find a spot good enough to hide the sarin long enough for us to get the professor, and away from here long enough to call Scott, then we’re good. Once Kang and the Russians know what we’ve done, they’ll take what they have and split as quick as they can.”

Stone sighed. “Go ahead, but don’t take too long.”

Havok answered with a silent nod and stepped past Stone, grabbing for the monkey line. He pulled himself ashore and, once on land, walked to the stream that emptied into the cove. As he stepped into the ankle-deep water, he pointed the muzzle of his M14 in front of him.

For the next three hundred yards, he followed the two-foot-wide stream through lush undergrowth. Alongside the stream, the forest grew thickly. Combined with the thick canopy overhead, this growth cut visibility to no more than three feet into the jungle. Havok came to a small clearing cut in half by the stream. A small amount of sunlight entered through the thinning canopy above. On either side of the moving water, he saw an inviting green carpet of grass covering the open ground. Opposite him was a four-foot-high limestone outcropping over which the water had been spilling for millennia.

Havok walked up to the small pool of water and inspected the area for any possible hiding spot. He looked down at the grass on the sides of the stream and froze. Four feet away was a small patch of sleeping grass, with the leaves closed. He knelt to inspect the leaves. They were empty of trapped prey. Somebody had walked through only minutes before. Havok stood and quickly stepped into the forest to wait and think. He could go back to the boat, or he could wait here for the person or persons to return. After all, it wouldn’t be good to run into anybody. Deciding on the latter, Havok selected a couple of broad banana leaves to sit on and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long before a man entered the clearing.

The aged Asian man walked quickly and had a concerned look on his face. He wore a short-sleeved button-up shirt that looked like it might have been popular during the early sixties, and although it was old and threadbare, the shirt still looked clean and well taken care of. His white gym shorts were about thirty-five years younger and had the words “HSU Athletic Dept.” embossed on the left thigh. He wore a broad-brimmed straw hat.

The old man came from the direction of the boat, but instead of walking up the stream like Havok had done, he emerged from the jungle and stepped across the small clearing and across the stream before disappearing into the jungle on the other side. Intrigued, Havok decided to follow him.

The man’s walking had been sure and swift, indicating that he knew the island well. Havok followed well behind him, being careful not to be spotted by the old man or to make any noise. After Havok had been trailing the man for about twenty minutes, the terrain started to slope upward. The angle of the terrain made it difficult to keep an eye on the old man, and within minutes, he lost sight of his quarry. Taking a chance, Havok stood on a boulder to catch a glimpse of the old man, who pushed his way through a solid barrier of hedges that walled off the entrance to the ravine.

As Havok stepped off the rock and put his weight onto a mat of rotting vegetation, the ground gave way. Havok’s chest struck a rocky edge, and he let go of his rifle as his arms shot out in front of him. His fingers hooked a dangling tree root that poked through the cracks in the rocks, and the sudden halt wrenched his shoulder. Hanging by three fingers and with his head below the opening in the ground, he waited for the stormy waves of agony surging through his arm and chest to subside, while subconsciously ticking off the seconds it took the M14 to hit bottom. He had counted to five when he heard the echoing crack of his rifle striking a rock somewhere beneath him. Five seconds times thirty-two feet a second meant there was nothing between his hand and his death except 160 feet of air.

“Oh fuck me!” Havok blurted.

After the wrenching pain had ebbed, he grabbed the root with his free arm before carefully pulling himself up and over the edge. He rolled away from the hole and, still lying on the ground, looked back at what had almost taken his life. The opening he had fallen into was about three feet wide with a rocky edge or lip on two sides. He looked under the matting of vegetation and saw that it covered some sort of fissure in the ground. He could only imagine how long this crack ran. As he looked into the black depths, an idea came to mind.

Havok filed that idea away as another idea entered his mind. He stood and headed toward the solid wall of hedges that the old man had entered, massaging his throbbing arm as he did so. But as Havok approached the wall of hedges, the old man came back out. Havok rolled behind a moss-covered rock just in time to avoid detection. The old man walked back down the center of the wide ravine until he was about halfway down the slope. Then he turned in the direction of the Russian main camp.

After Havok saw the man disappear into the jungle, he stepped through the wall of hedges to the other side. What lay before him put the rest of the island to shame. The ever-present canopy covered a clearing about an acre in size. Outside the barrier was the wild jungle. Inside this barrier was a fabricated heaven.

In the center stood a peaked hut that was carefully constructed of materials culled from the island’s forests and beaches. Spreading out from the hut was a beautiful green lawn of patiently manicured grass. Opposite Havok, on the other side of the hut, was a well-maintained garden. Throughout the clearing were numerous plants, fruit trees, and flowers. There were also numerous rock formations, which looked like they were used to funnel rainwater to a rock-lined pond teeming with freshwater shrimp. All was blessed by the sweet kiss of sunlight that filtered through the thinning canopy above.

Havok approached the structure and ducked through an open doorway into the cool interior of the hut. He wasted no time, going straight to the back wall where a full bookshelf stood next to a table. On top of the table was a simple candle and holder, an open pack of Marlboros, a bottle of scotch, and a notebook and pen, all of which had been pilfered from the Outfit.

It looks like he was able to put quite a dent in the bottle’s contents in the last few hours, Havok mused.

The bookshelf contained a mixture of notebooks, sketchpads, rough reams of paper, and even a worn copy of the April 1965 edition of Playboy. Havok remembered Wheatley’s description of his father’s captor and the story behind his father’s captivity.

The Japanese man must have come back for the silver, thought Havok. But why is he still here, on this island?

Havok studied the bookshelf and looked at the notebook on the table. He figured the best place to start was the present, so he flipped open the notebook on the table and saw today’s date at the top of the page. It was written in Japanese, and there was a brief entry under it. Able to read Japanese to some degree, he was able to see that the old man was quite concerned about the presence of everybody else on the island. He looked up at the items on the bookshelf.

He thought it best to start from the beginning, so he selected a worn, old-looking notepad on the far left of the top shelf. The first yellowed page was dated June 26, 1954. Havok scanned the pages of this notepad and read about the man’s experiences just after the end of WWII. Once Havok finished with that notepad, he followed up with subsequent pads and books on the shelf, going forward in time chronologically.

A changing person seemed to roll off these pages as time went by. In the first volume, he saw a man who was full of anger and hate, a man who had come here to retrieve the silver so that he could buy his way into the Japanese mafia, the yakuza. His idea was to make enough money from the yakuza to fund Japanese anti-American groups and overthrow the American occupation of Japan. Then Havok read of the reason for the old man having been stranded on the island and an account of his following years. Now, the old man’s only concern was how to rid his island home of vile pests. This was a man who wanted only to be left alone with his thoughts and his garden. The only thing Havok could figure out was that over the years isolation had calmed a savage beast. He pulled the last notebook from the lower-right corner of the bookshelf and saw that the pages and entries were dated within the last few months.

Finally, Havok took a moment to look at his watch. He hadn’t realized how long he had been there: over thirty minutes now. Havok placed the pad back on the shelf and turned toward the open door. He stopped and thought about leaving a note behind, asking for a meeting, but thought better of it. If the old man found out his self-made heaven had been violated, any sort of fledgling trust between the two might be destroyed. Instead, he looked around to make sure everything was in the same place it had been before he entered the hut.

The sun was setting as Havok retraced his route to the Outfit. He had just crossed the stream with the little pond and waterfall when he heard a noise. Standing behind a tree, he waited, and after a minute, he saw Stone, with his MP5, walking toward him. Havok stepped out from behind the tree. “Is there any reason why you can’t stop making any noise?”

Stone immediately pointed his weapon toward Havok, but then pointed the barrel to the ground. “Where ya been? Hooking up with that Chinese version of Sharon Stone?” he asked, ignoring Havok’s sarcasm.

“No such luck. Instead, I fell into a hundred-foot-plus-deep hole in the ground and found out about our Asian visitor.”

“Oh, is that all?” Stone grinned. “And to think I was worried.” He nodded behind him. “Come on. Manny’s got dinner waiting for us, and you can fill us in on your plan while we eat.”

Havok followed him back to the Outfit. It had turned dark by the time they arrived back at the boat. The two men climbed aboard and met Manny in the pilothouse.

The men ate cold rice and canned corned-beef hash in the darkness of the salon behind the pilothouse as Havok told his companions about their visitor.

“His name is Hirosaki,” Havok said between bites. “At the end of World War II, he was stationed in Indochina, where he stood trial for war crimes. The British sentenced him to prison for nine years. Apparently, they couldn’t prove murder for the beheading of Wheatley’s mates or any other POWs. They got him on cruelty charges instead. In 1954 Hirosaki was repatriated back to Japan. It turns out the American who knew about the silver tried to bribe Hirosaki during the war. That’s why Hirosaki tried to have everybody associated with him killed, including Wheatley’s father. Anyway, Hirosaki kept the news of the pesos to himself throughout the entire war and while he was in prison. The year he got out of prison back in Japan, he was able to round up some sort of boat and crew, and came here to recover the treasure, planning to use it to join up with some other disgruntled soldiers back in Japan. He also needed the money to buy his way into the yakuza, which started out as a simple black-market organization but morphed into something bigger. There was a lot of underground resurgent movement back then. Its purpose was to get rid of the MacArthur government and reestablish the old military regime. They arrived here on June 26, 1954, and anchored out. On the third day, he and his crew discovered the silver. The diver that found the loot surfaced, waving her arms and yelling to get everybody’s attention.”

“Her?” asked Stone.

“Back then, scuba was still in its infancy, so they used female pearl divers. Anyway, Hirosaki was alone on the beach, sketching flowers, when he heard the diver yell. He was looking at the swimmer, just like everybody else was, which was why no one spotted the pirate junket sneaking into the bay behind them until it was too late. According to Hirosaki’s diary, it took only several minutes for the pirates to board the Japanese ship and capture the entire crew. Hirosaki said he watched from shore while all the males were murdered and their bodies tossed overboard. The pirates spent all night ravaging the females, the liquor, and the foodstuffs. By morning, they finished off the female divers and the booze; then they took the ship, leaving Hirosaki alone on the island.”

“That’s pretty ironic,” Stone said.

“How’s that?”

“If the pirates had waited a few more hours for the divers to recover the coins, they would’ve been a whole lot richer.”

“What’s even more ironic,” added Havok, “is Hirosaki. He came here full of hate and revenge, but got stranded with only a sketchpad, a pencil, and the shirt on his back. Forced to seek out a living, he forgot about prejudice. For him, a simple mango, the medicinal benefits of the aloe plant, or the basic palm frond meant more than a rifle or status. Now, his hard work means he has no wants, no worries, and no problems, which may be why he’s pretty spry for someone who must be at least a hundred years old. You know, that peace-of-mind sort of thing.”

Havok took another forkful of hash before continuing. “Out here, a human is no better off that a mouse or lizard. They all have to struggle equally to survive and not be eaten.”

“Now that we know all about Hirosaki,” Stone asked, “what about the goon squad?”

“Over the years, the island did have visitors, but only that‍—visitors. But about three months ago, a seaplane began flying over the island once a week for several weeks. Then, a little less than a month ago, the seaplane landed to leave behind a dozen soldiers to set up camp‍—that old Philippine naval barracks they’re at now. About a week after the seaplane dropped off the soldiers, a Russian ship with more sailors and soldiers came in and dropped anchor. The soldiers came ashore and disguised the ship to make it look like an island, and the seaplane made its home where it’s now anchored, along the southern shore of the small bay between us and the larger bay. Hirosaki’s pretty upset about the airplane because they run the engines now and then and it scares the hell out of his flowers. They’re not blooming like they used to. Also, the sailors on the ship anchored out in the middle of the bay and began diving operations. This made him happy. Figured if they got what they came for, they would leave.”

“But he wasn’t that lucky,” Stone said after swallowing a bite of rice.

“That’s right. Two of their divers died after they had recovered only a few canisters. Hirosaki saw the Russians bury them ashore. That put a screeching halt to everything.”

“Until the Kona Wave arrived, right, boss?” offered Manny.

“The Kona Wave showed up and anchored over the silver cache. Hirosaki watched the students diving, swimming, and taking soil and rock samples before they inadvertently found the silver themselves. The students recovered the pesos, and that night, the Russians who were hiding ashore snuck out and captured them. The Russians took the pesos, painted and renamed the Kona Wave, and then made the students dive for the sarin canisters.”

The three men fell silent, lost in thought. Finally, Havok looked up at his two friends. “I have a plan, if you want to listen to it.”

Stone and Manny acknowledged with nods.

“We’ll sneak into that lab building at the Russian camp and stuff as many sarin containers as we can into dive and duffel bags, then beat feet to that crack in the ground I fell through.” Havok looked at Stone. “Did you bring climbing gear like I suggested?”

“Sure did,” Stone answered.

“Good.” Havok scooped the last forkful of rice and hash off the paper plate. “Once we hide the sarin in that underground whatever-it-is, we’ll snatch up the professor on our way back to here and get as far away from this island as we can. By daybreak, we should be in a good enough position to call Scott.”

***

By ten p.m. the three men stood at the edge of the crevice that had almost taken Havok’s life. They peered into the hidden depths using a red-lensed flashlight held by Stone, but saw nothing but blackness.

Havok stuffed his pistol into his waist and pulled a short length of rope and an aluminum carabiner from his pants’ cargo pocket. In the dark, his practiced hands looped the eight-foot piece of rope around his waist and crotch and through the carabiner, fashioning a climbing harness.

“Here,” Havok said. “Pass me the flashlight.”

Stone kept it pointing into the hole while giving it to Havok.

Havok accepted the light and clipped it to his climbing harness upside down.

“You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Stone asked, still looking into the black hole.

“No. I’m only going down there for a quick look-see and to get my rifle back,” Havok said, reassuring his friend. “I’ll be fine.”

Havok stepped away from Stone and picked up a coil of rope. He secured one end around the trunk of a nearby tree. He held the remainder in his hand and walked back to the hole, dropping the coil into it. Where the rope rested against the crevice’s edge, Manny taped a slit length of garden hose over the rope as an anti-chafing device. Havok picked up the rope and snapped it into the carabiner, and, with one hand holding the rope above his waist and the other holding the rope under his butt, he turned around and backed up to the black hole. He placed his weight on the line, used his hands as brakes, and loosened his grip. Gravity pulled him deep into the alien bowels of the earth.

Slowly, Havok entered the darkness, his back scraping against rock outcroppings behind him. The humidity and exertion caused him to sweat, and the sweat worked into the scrapes in his skin. He had no idea what hideous denizens eeked out a survival in the depths, but the stinging pain kept him from worrying what was or was not beneath him. Beyond the hellish glow provided by the dangling light, he could see nothing. Suddenly, the rocky wall in front of him disappeared and he found himself swinging freely in what seemed to be a large dome-shaped cavern. He heard the echoing drip of water. Havok looked down at the slithering mass beneath him on the floor.