WE NEVER GOT back to headquarters that morning.
At least not until almost noon. Kenji took me to a little shanty at the edge of the village, one that turned out to be surprisingly clean inside. I figured she had cleaned it up for her and Heydrich, as a private place when others were on the island.
When we entered the place, the first thing I saw was the army cot across the small room. There was an open door and two windows without glass or screens, and soft sunlight shafted through the place, spearing the dimness with its warmth.
“This is one of my hideaways on the island,” Kenji smiled, turning back to me from beside the cot. She stood there with a band of yellow sunlight across her breasts, and she was doing something to me inside my groin. She had known that, that was why she had walked there stripped to the waist.
“I kind of like it,” I said. “It reminds me of a hut I spent a pleasant night in, in Vietnam.”
She pulled a light cover off the cot, and revealed a pillow and clean sheet. There was an exotic scent in the room, and when I glanced to a small table on one wall, I spotted the hash pipe and paraphernalia. She walked over to it.
“I used to do the whole scene, even heroin,” she said. “Now that the revolution is here, I’ve forced myself to cut down. Would you like some hash?”
I shook my head. “I never use it,” I said.
She frowned slightly, and her face was particularly beautiful in that light. “Why not?”
“A soldier can’t afford to lose control,” I said. “Not even for a while. I even go light on the booze.”
“I should have brought the brandy,” she said.
“I don’t need it. Do you?”
She smiled. “All I need right now, Rainey, is your hot rod between my legs.”
I could see she was not a girl to mince words. “What a nice idea,” I said. “I wonder why I hadn’t thought of that.”
She came to me and pressed those breasts against my bare flesh and made me tingle all through me. I kissed her, and her sensual lips opened to swallow me whole. We did that for a few minutes, with her slender hand finding me inside my pants, and then we were both feverishly stripping down. It did not take long. In moments we were pressed together nude, my hands exploring every delicious curve of her, our mouths in hot contact.
I don’t remember getting to the cot. All I can recall now is the fierce way she grabbed me with those golden thighs and forced us into violent copulation. There was a lot of sweat in the closeness of that hut, and some very emotional outpourings from Kenji’s throat, and above all there was the hot contact with her inflamed flesh as we reached a climax that shook the cot and ripped the bedsheet under her head.
Not long afterward I sat beside her supine figure and had mixed feelings about what had just happened. It had been raw, animal pleasure and unusual intensity on that cot with Kenji, but it had been with a girl that could only be subhuman somewhere underneath that physical beauty.
“Now do you want a fix?” I heard her ask me.
“I think I’ll still pass, Kenji.”
“You go on back,” she said languidly. She got up, still nude, and reached for the hash pipe. “I’ll just stay a while. Send Gunther here to join me if you see him there.”
I gave her a look. When she got herself doped up, she was going to start all over again with another man. It was the new liberation. But I wondered if Heydrich would be interested, if he knew I had been there with her. He seemed like a jealous sonofabitch to me.
I was dressed now. “I’ll tell him,” I said.
“You were good, Rainey. But don’t let that make you forget who’s running the show here.”
I grinned at her. “I don’t think you’ll let me forget,” I said.
That afternoon we went out for some more training exercises. Heydrich had seen me returning from the hut where Kenji had had that sensual episode, understood what had happened, and did not go to her. They did not speak much to each other for the rest of that day, and once when Kenji passed me out on the target range, she winked at me knowingly. I grinned, and Heydrich saw the grin, and gave me a look I won’t soon forget.
Huhu and Kanaka learned rather quickly about firing the AK-47’s. Pupule would never learn anything fast if he lived to be a hundred. He was an ornery, potentially dangerous bastard who would never have made it in any real military group.
“Hey, man, you trying to tell me how to shoot a goddam gun?”
And, “I do things my way, Jack. You don’t like it, up yours.”
Kenji did not hear these exclamations of mongoloid banter, and I didn’t bring them to her attention. I had no interest in whether any of these jerkoffs learned the first thing about weaponry. As soon as I learned exactly where to find the Council’s so-called enforcement squads, I would begin planning how best to destroy this cancerous growth from within.
Skidmore spent more time that afternoon trying to show Huhu fundamentals of timed detonation. But he was a different man now. He had been humiliated by Heydrich. He had been beaten, and then his life saved by a bastard who could have killed him with one shove of a short blade. If I knew Skidmore the way I thought I did, he would rather have died there in the grass. He was a proud bastard, who rated himself highly in combat, and he regarded Heydrich as a muscle-man punk, which he was. It was degrading to Skidmore to be bested by a punk, and a German one at that. I could see it was eating at him.
Just when we were getting ready to get our gear together and quit for the day, with Kenji already gone back to the headquarters with Huhu and Skidmore, Heydrich came over to me while we waited for Huhu to return with the van.
He was wiping grease from his hands with a cloth. We had been field-stripping a Kalashnikov.
“Well, Rainey.” He seemed even more smug and superior-acting, now that he had bested Skidmore. “It seems you do have some intimate knowledge of firearms. It is possible you might do acceptable soldiering in a real army.”
I was cleaning the barrel of a Kalashnikov with a rod and cloth, sitting on a stump in the shade of a large tree where the van usually parked. Kanaka and Pupule were getting other gear together.
“I was a soldier in a real army,” I said. “In Vietnam.”
“Ah. Well, I wasn’t counting the American army,” he said, watching my face for my reaction.
I did not look up at him. “Why do you have to make a full-time occupation of being such a complete sonofabitch, Heydrich?”
His face lengthened in sobriety. “We don’t need people like you here, Rainey,” he said. “This is some crazy notion of Kenji’s that I can’t get out of her head. That we need formal training. We should be concerning ourselves with strategy, not how efficiently we can kill.”
“You’ll need help in strategy too,” I said flatly. “As for killing efficiently, I guess it wouldn’t matter to a guy who would rather sneak up and stab a man in the back, or plant a bomb in a hospital for kids.”
His face grew anger across it. “Are you calling me a back-stabber, Rainey?”
“If the knife fits, wear it on your belt.”
He came very close to me. “Did you see me stab your friend Skidmore in the back? Did you see anything unfair about the fight?”
I looked him in the face. “I think you’re a coldblooded sonofabitch, Heydrich. Your record speaks for itself.”
“You don’t know the record, you impudent American! I did not favor the hospital attack! I preferred a sports arena during a game of some kind!”
“Oh, now that’s a lot nicer,” I said.
He came up so close that I could smell the sweat on him. “I told you before, Rainey. Keep out of my way. I know what you did earlier. With Kenji. You aren’t listening, Rainey. You’ve got to listen when I speak to you. Kenji is my woman. She had to get her taste of you, she’s that way. We have a kind of understanding that way. But don’t think that means anything. Don’t ever go to that hut again with her, or you’ll have me to answer to. And this time Kenji won’t be able to stop me, as she did with Skidmore.”
“Let me find the tranquilizers, Heydrich. You’re scaring the living hell out of me,” I said sourly.
“You don’t think I can do it, heh?”
I could have let it drop, but I felt like getting to him. I had begun disliking him with a vengeance. “I think you like to talk about it, Heydrich. There’s a difference.”
He was wearing one of the Beretta automatics on his hip. He drew it fast now, and shoved it up against my stomach. I was not armed, except for the unloaded Kalashnikov. I had left the Colt .45 back where I slept.
“How would you like a bullet in the gut, Rainey?” he growled at me.
He was still talking. That would have been fatal for him, if I had wanted to challenge the gun at that moment. Maybe Skidmore was right, maybe Heydrich was like his Nazi predecessors. The Gestapo had rarely killed cleanly and quickly. They loved to talk and torture first.
I would have made a defensive move immediately, but I knew Heydrich was not going to kill me now, if he could restrain his German temper. Kenji would not have liked that, and he was hooked on Kenji’s hot place.
“Go ahead,” I bluffed him. “Without me, you won’t know which end of the rifle to point at your victim.”
I thought he might really do it, for a moment. His finger whitened momentarily over the trigger. But then he eased the gun back away from me.
“You’re not worth the trouble it would cause me, at the moment,” he finally said. “But the time will come, Rainey, before this is over. When you will have to make an accounting. With me.”
I shrugged. “Let the good times roll,” I said laconically.
A couple of moments later the van rolled up to a dusty stop, and we all began loading equipment.
For the moment, the thing with Heydrich was over.
Kenji did not invite me to her bed again in those next few days, and that was fine with me. I had enjoyed that first diversion, but the more I knew the girl, the less her physical good looks turned me on.
We spent the days out on the firing range and in temporary bivouacs, and Skidmore and I were giving them some commando-type training. They were getting damned little from me, but Skidmore was still giving Kenji her dollar’s worth, despite Heydrich. At night, sitting around the long trestle table at headquarters through those warm evenings, Kenji would discourse on rebellion as practiced by real, legitimate rebels like Lenin, Zapata, and Robert E. Lee. As if there could ever be any comparison between those uprisings and this terrorist mayhem the Council was practicing.
“There were others of our calling, too,” she would go on. “Patrick Henry, Gomes and Marti on Cuba. Castro and Che.”
It was not only boring, most of what she was saying was half-truths and outright lies. Her eyes blazed when she spoke of killing for the cause, and I was becoming convinced that Kenji was a sexual sadist who was on a satiation trip. It made me sick to my stomach. She and Heydrich both were high on hash often in those bull sessions, and that turned me off, too. Kenji was like one of those deadly jungle flowers that are so beautiful to look at but so fatal to touch.
Several days and evenings passed like that, and still Kenji did not open up about the rest of the organization, or about the Big Gig she kept hinting at that would set up the islands for an HLA takeover. I was becoming impatient, but I kept quiet. To seem too anxious about it all might be to arouse her suspicion. Or Heydrich’s. So I let the time pass.
“Of course, the only way we ever used timed explosives was for purely military objectives,” Skidmore said one evening, his big feet propped on the trestle table. He had been quiet lately, subdued after the fight with Heydrich.
“What the hell does that mean?” Heydrich said. He sat near Kenji across the table. Huhu had had a hard day, and was slumped with his head on his arms on the table. Kanaka was doing some dishes at a sink in the corner, and Pupule was helping him. I was sitting at the far end of the table from Kenji and Heydrich, studying an armaments manual.
Skidmore glanced at Heydrich. He had not spoken three words to the German since the humiliation. He slowly ran a thick hand through his one-of-a-kind brush cut. “I guess you’re talking to me, German.”
“That’s right. Does your comment mean you criticize the Council’s possible uses of explosives?”
Skidmore sighed a long, steady sigh. “It means that mercs use timed explosives against military targets, to accomplish military tactics,” he said. “We don’t ordinarily get involved in hurting innocent people.”
“In wars of ideologies,” Kenji said, “who’s innocent, Skidmore? Did Americans think the civilians of Hiroshima were innocents because they didn’t wear military uniforms? Did that stop them from dropping the bomb on women and children?”
Skidmore didn’t seem to know how to respond to that skillful argument. That was another thing I hated about these people. Their confusion of basic moral issues with intellectual argument.
“That’s not the same,” Skidmore managed.
“No?” Kenji pursued. “Explain the difference.”
Huhu raised his head. “The difference is, Skidmore’s WASP friends dropped the biggie,” he grunted out.
“That’s not it,” Skidmore frowned. “They’re not the same.”
I had to admit there was a very fine distinction, one it would take a Philadelphia lawyer to state correctly. “Those civilians in Hiroshima worked their asses off to destroy us in the forties,” I put in half-heartedly, without knowing why I bothered. “They made the bombs, or whatever, that killed American civilians at Pearl. Maybe some of your relatives got it. They would have bombed Los Angeles if they got the chance. In a real war, there aren’t any innocents in the usual sense, except those who oppose it.”
“Do you think this is any less a real war because the aggressors are already in place here?” Kenji said a little loudly to me. “Do you think we are not a real army because we can’t afford uniforms?”
I had gone too far. “I didn’t say that, Kenji. I don’t care what you call yourselves, so long as I get my two grand a month.”
Heydrich grunted in his throat. “You see? That is the kind of men you have hired to become part of our organization.”
Skidmore decided to change the subject. “I was just hoping the explosives are used to help shape real strategy, not just terrorize. You have to get past that, or you’ll never be a strong political force.”
“Listen to the great mercenary theorist,” Heydrich grinned.
Pupule had turned toward us. “I don’t care how we use the bombs,” he said in his high voice. “I kind of enjoyed driving that truck in there, knowing what it would do. It gave me a high, man.”
So it had been Pupule that destroyed the children’s hospital. I had known the bastard was subhuman, but hearing him admit to that atrocity sent a small chill through me. I squinted down on him, and Kenji saw the look on my face.
“Shut up, you fool!” she hissed at Pupule. “The Council did not destroy that hospital for pleasure, damn it! Get back to your work, and quit talking about what’s past!”
Pupule looked like a scolded child. “Hell, I was just telling it like it is, man.”
Kenji glared at him. The fact is, dumb, psychotic Pupule had hit a nerve with Kenji. She had done it for pleasure, murder all those innocent kids. She just did not want it expressed quite so plainly by Pupule.
“Don’t judge the Council by what comes out of that mouth,” Kenji told me. “We work with what is given to us, and Pupule was available.”
Pupule turned and gave Kenji an unnerving look that she didn’t even take notice of. I decided that I should never turn my back on that soulless man. He was capable of just about anything.
“What is this Big Gig you’re working up to?” suddenly Skidmore asked Kenji out of the blue. “And when are we going to have to be prepared for it?”
Kenji turned cold eyes on Skidmore. “It won’t be long now,” she assured him. “As for exactly what we’re going to accomplish, you’ll learn in plenty of time. Between now and then, you and Rainey are going to have to get us ready. Not just here, but our two remaining squads where they’re stationed in place.”
I decided to participate, since Skidmore had opened up the subject. “We’ll be going to Honolulu and Kauai?” I said.
“We’ve moved squad C to Niihau,” Kenji replied. “It’s safer for them there.”
Niihau and Kauai were both rather remote islands. Kauai was called the Garden Island because it was so richly luxuriant with tropical foliage. Niihau was where the Robinson family had preserved an entire small society that was still pure Hawaiian.
“These are five-man squads?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Kenji said. “I wanted at least three full squads in addition to the Council here. But the massacre robbed us of that luxury. Now we will proceed with what we have left. There is no time for new recruiting, at this point.”
The Council was seven, with its tacticians and advisors. With me and Skidmore out of that count—I had no intention of including him in my plans unless he tried to stop me—that meant that I had fifteen of the enemy to dispose of before they discovered my motive in being there. Well, I had already cut the odds down from twenty to one. But at some point, I would come under heavy suspicion.
“A commando group should be limited in size, anyway,” I told Kenji. “Whatever you have planned, I’m sure we’ll have the manpower to do the job, after Skid and I get through with them.”
“Oh, yes, I am certain we would fail miserably without your magnificent guidance,” Heydrich grated out. “You and this—aging Errol Flynn.”
I didn’t think that was much of an insult, but I saw Skidmore’s face grow tight. He said nothing.
“I told you before,” Kenji said thickly to Heydrich. The hash was beginning to show in her actions and speech that evening. “Get off that shit. We’re going to have to get along here. Otherwise we won’t accomplish anything.”
Heydrich grinned slightly. “You are the boss,” he said.
I wondered if he meant it.
I retired to my upper story hammock after that, and in a few minutes Skidmore came up. He and I were sleeping in the same room up there, on hammocks. The others generally slept downstairs.
Skidmore looked grave as he threw a cotton blanket onto his hammock. “What’s the matter, Skid?” I asked him.
“I’m going to kill that bastard,” he said.
“Heydrich?”
“That’s right. As long as that sonofabitch is alive, I’m dishonored. You saw what he did to me. That frigging Nazi punk.”
“He got lucky,” I lied.
“It don’t matter. Him and that shithead Pupule, they got to go. Now that you know, don’t get in my way.”
I sighed. He couldn’t know that anybody killed here would be one less I’d have to. And I couldn’t tell him. He had nothing against Kenji and her Council in general. He could see nothing really wrong with their methods. It was possible I might have to go against him, too, in the end.
“Hell, let it go, Skid. He isn’t worth your effort.”
“I won’t cause any trouble just yet. But somewhere along the line, when the time is right. He’s a dead man.”
It was interesting. Heydrich had just made the same prediction about me, in so many words. And Pupule and Skidmore were already committed to eventual mayhem against each other. It might be a tense time up the road a way, if I didn’t end it all first.
I slept restlessly that night. I had a dream in which Skidmore, Heydrich, Pupule and I were playing musical chairs of a sort. The chairs were lined up in a row, and there were only three of them for the four of us. Kenji stood nearby with a tape recorder that was playing mob sounds from an HLA demonstration. The four of us would circle the chairs, and when she suddenly turned the recorder off, we all made for a chair. In my dream, Skidmore missed getting a chair on the first try. Kenji picked up a Beretta, aimed it at his head, and fired. Skidmore’s head exploded as if a bomb had been surgically implanted in it. Bone splinters and wet gray stuff spattered all over me because he was standing next to me where I was seated on one of the chairs. Kanaka and Huhu came from nowhere and hauled the bloody corpse away. Then we rose and started it over again, with the mob scene sounding in my ears from the tape recorder. Huhu had joined us at the chairs. The noise stopped again, and I looked around and saw that all the chairs were taken. Heydrich grinned up at me evilly from the closest chair. I turned and saw Kenji aiming the Beretta at me. She fired, and I yelled.
“Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
I had woken up in a sweat. Skidmore was staring over toward me from his hammock. “You yelled out something in your sleep,” he said. “You okay?”
I was breathing heavily. I had had similar nightmares upon returning from southeast Asia, and I didn’t like anybody seeing me have one. It was a weakness of some kind, and I hated it.
“Hell, yes,” I grunted, embarrassed. “It must be that bad booze.”
Skidmore narrowed those hard eyes on me. “Right,” he said. Then he rolled over away from me, and we both went back to sleep.
There was more training the next morning, but in the afternoon we took some time off and went hunting.
It turned out that Kenji also kept an old military Jeep on the island, and that was brought out for the hunting trip. There was wild boar on the island, and we needed meat for the table, so Kenji asked for volunteers to go out and bring some in. I said I would go, and I would have preferred to go alone or with Skidmore. But it was Heydrich and the psychotic Pupule who volunteered to accompany me.
It was late afternoon when we left, with Heydrich driving. Pupule sat up front in the open vehicle with Heydrich, and I sat behind Pupule. I could not have picked two men I would have less wanted to go with, but I had committed myself.
It was still hot when we went, and I figured it was too early to catch most animals out and around, but Heydrich didn’t care much what I thought. We all took a Winchester M-l carbine, and the iron-man Pupule buckled an ammo belt across his chest and looked very macho. I got the feeling he volunteered just because he liked to kill, and as it turned out later, I was right.
We drove to a part of the island where I hadn’t been. There was some wooded acreage there, and we had to park the Jeep and go into the trees by foot.
“I’ve seen a lot of them in this area, man,” Pupule said to Heydrich as we started out, advancing like infantrymen three abreast. Pupule’s eyes had a glittery look to them. “I killed three in less than an hour one day right here.”
“I hope you’ve hunted boar before,” Heydrich said to me, with a half-grin. “The little bastards have a way of coming at you when you least expect it. If they manage to knock you off your feet, they can rip your throat out before you can get your gun into play.”
“I hunted them in Asia,” I said.
The grin evaporated. I knew Heydrich hoped I was gored, that would make his day.
We moved into trees with thin underbrush. Off in the distance somewhere a bird yelled at us. Heydrich and I went quietly, but the big-footed Pupule made a lot of noise, and I wondered how we would ever find our quarry with him along. But then it happened.
A big boar came out of some underbrush like a streak of lightning, straight at Heydrich. I got a shot off that grazed the animal’s back, and Heydrich shot just before the thigh-high boar hit him, but his shot missed. The animal punched him in the legs hard, using one of its long tusks to rip a gash in Heydrich’s thigh as he went down.
What happened next took only seconds. The boar was on Heydrich, throwing its head, trying to rip Heydrich’s chest and throat out. It missed twice, ripping the sleeves on Heydrich’s tunic. Pupule moved around to the side to get a shot, but hesitated, thinking he would hit Heydrich. I quickly knelt down, getting down where I had a silhouette shot of the boar. It tried to gore Heydrich in the face, and again Heydrich managed to deflect the lunge. It was just a matter of time. I saw the boar separate itself from Heydrich for just a split-second, and I squeezed the trigger on the carbine.
The animal jumped into the air three feet, twisting and squealing as it went. When it hit the ground beside Heydrich, it began thrashing wildly there. But it was brain-shot. In a moment the thrashing was over, and the animal lay dead.
Pupule looked over at me somberly. He did not like it that I had shown such skill in a situation where he had failed. Heydrich got up slowly, and I walked over to him. The gash in his thigh was shallow, and he had another one in his left arm. But he was okay.
“I guess he didn’t cut you up much,” I said.
Heydrich turned to me. He didn’t speak for a moment. “Don’t think this makes any difference between us. I was just about to grab the tusks and pin the animal.”
I held his steady gaze. “Of course you were,” I said noncommittally. “Why don’t we return to the Jeep and get you some first aid?”
We took the boar to the Jeep, and Heydrich bandaged his own wounds, refusing help. I thought we would go back to headquarters then, but Heydrich wanted to continue the hunt for a while. Pupule agreed quickly.
We drove to another area where woods abutted onto a field with tall grass. Heydrich stopped the Jeep again and we disembarked. Then began the second incident of that trip, and the much more bizarre one.
We had not left the Jeep yet, when Pupule turned and pointed toward the edge of the trees, about thirty yards away. “Hey,” he said.
Heydrich and I looked, and saw the leper.
It was a middle-aged man, dressed in hanging rags. His face, and the flesh on his arms and hand was grotesquely distorted. His feet were wrapped in cloth that looked filthy.
Skidmore had told me that there were rumors that at least one leper remained on this remote island, but nobody had seen one recently. Now the rumor was fact. The fellow seemed not to have seen us, as he headed out from the trees and beyond our vehicle into the field. When he got out there a ways, Pupule yelled at him. “Hey, you!”
The leper stopped and turned toward us, and a look of raw fear came into his face. Pupule turned to Heydrich, and they exchanged a grin.
“Well, well,” Heydrich said. “Maybe the day won’t turn out so badly after all. I think I will have some fun.”
Heydrich got into the Jeep again, and Pupule moved toward the leper on foot. Heydrich started the Jeep and drove over toward the leper. I had no idea what they were doing, but sensed they might have teamed up like this before.
Now Heydrich was driving in a circle around the leper. The leper was confused and scared as hell. He would start off in one direction to get away from Heydrich, then another, and Heydrich would always be there, kicking up dust in the grass with the wheels of the Jeep. The leper fell, and got up again, breathing hard in the hot sun. Pupule had come closer now, and suddenly I saw him raise his rifle and fire it. The shot hit the leper in the thigh and knocked him down.
“Hey!” I yelled out, moving toward them.
They paid no attention. The leper got up and tried to run on one leg, and Heydrich moved the Jeep in front of him. Pupule fired again, from the hip, and caught the leper in the ribs. This time he went down hard.
I moved up quickly. “Stop it!” I said in a low growl.
Pupule ignored me completely. He fired off another quick round before I could intervene, hitting the leper in the head. The ragged figure jumped on the ground and was still.
I had heard of certain African tribes who hunted men for sport, but I had never seen two so-called civilized men engage in such a thing for entertainment. I turned to Heydrich first.
“What the hell kind of animal are you?” I said in a low voice.
He held my gaze with a hard one. There was no hint of remorse in that Nazi face. “A dangerous one,” he told me.
“You let him kill a man for fun,” I said.
Heydrich shrugged. “Pupule has to have an outlet for his urges. Sometimes boars are not enough.”
Pupule came over within ten feet of me. “You don’t like it, man? You want to make something of it, huh? You want to go tell teacher?”
I took a deep breath. There was no point in talking with a thing like Pupule. Skidmore had been right about him. Pupule was holding his carbine so that he could raise it and fire at me very easily. It was an open threat to me if I gave him any trouble.
I was wearing the Colt .45 on my hip. I drew it in a quick movement and aimed it at Pupule’s left eye. He started swinging the carbine up to fire, but he was much too late. I squeezed the trigger of the Colt casually, hitting the Hawaiian in the eye. The hot slug blew the back of his big head off, and raised him entirely off his feet as he was hurled backwards to the ground beside the leper’s corpse. He still held the carbine in both hands. His right leg drummed at the ground, and he was still. He had been dead when the slug entered his skull.
I looked at the Colt. “Two brain-shots in one afternoon,” I said in that low voice I used when I was aroused. “Not bad.”
Heydrich was staring at me incredulously. “Have you gone completely mad, you fool?” he yelled at me.
I met his wild look with a hard one. “I killed a gone-nuts animal,” I said. “You participated in the killing of a harmless man, for fun. Who do you think is mad?”
Heydrich had his own carbine in hand, and for a moment I thought he might shoot it out with me right there. But he decided that it was not the right time or place.
“Kenji will be interested to hear that you have executed one of her Council,” he finally said heatedly.
“I’ll take my chances with Kenji,” I said.
Much later, back at headquarters, we buried Pupule in the rear of the building.
Kenji stood somber-faced over the grave. She had listened to both Heydrich and me tell what had happened out there, and she had made no comment about it yet. I had told her that Pupule was a threat to the operation because he couldn’t keep his base emotions under control. Skidmore couldn’t keep a grin off his face, and that didn’t help my defense.
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said when he heard.
When Pupule was under the ground, Kenji came over to me. “Don’t ever do anything like that again,” she said. “Without my approval.”
“You’re the boss,” I said.
“Don’t ever forget it, Rainey,” she told me.
Surprisingly, Huhu and Kanaka did not seem upset by Pupule’s sudden demise. In fact, both men seemed to gain a respect for me that they had not had before. Heydrich expected Kenji to fire me, or at least punish me somehow, and when neither happened, he became even more bitter toward me. It did not matter at all that I had saved his miserable life out there in the bush that afternoon. It probably even made him more hostile, if that was possible.
That evening after we had a light meal cooked by Kanaka, Kenji called a meeting and started talking about the Big Gig, as Huhu and Kanaka had begun calling it. We all sat around the long table, and Skidmore and I listened with particular attention.
“The hospital attack was nothing,” she said after she got started. “Next to what we’re doing next, that will seem like trick or treat.”
I knew it was going to be big, but this made it seem pretty bad. I watched Heydrich’s face, and it was clear he already knew the plan. He and Kenji were the strategists of the Council. They talked and everybody else listened. Kenji had taken Heydrich back to her bed now, and they seemed close again.
“What would you think if I told you we’re going to destroy Honolulu?” she said now, her dark eyes glittering.
Huhu and Kanaka exchanged happy looks, and I caught Skidmore’s eye. I think he had guessed that I was less than enthusiastic about working with crazies. But he had not rooted out my true motives, I was quite sure.
“Destroy Honolulu?” Huhu said with excitement.
“Not the city itself, not the physical city,” Kenji amended. “Just the people. All the people.”
My eyes narrowed down involuntarily. Here she was, talking about killing thousands of people like it was a hukilau fishing trip.
“Right on, man!” Kanaka exclaimed.
“Jesus,” Skidmore said.
“But how?” Huhu asked. “Do we have access to some kind of nerve gas? Or one of those bombs that don’t knock buildings down?”
Kenji shook her pretty head. “No, we don’t need the weapons of the establishment to make our statement against the imperialist Washington pigs. The WASP thieves who stole our islands from us and made us economic slaves in our own land. We have a mutated virus.”
“Huh?” Kanaka said.
But I had an idea of what was coming. I had read about it in the local papers.
“A virus?” Skidmore said, who was accustomed to fighting with automatic rifles and bombs and antitank guns. “What the hell we going to do here, give the sonofabitches the flu? I thought we were planning a military operation, for Christ’s sake.”
It was the most outspoken Skidmore had been since our arrival on the island. I think it was because of what I had done to Pupule, and how I had stood up to Heydrich and Kenji about it.
Heydrich shook his head slowly. “You see?” he said to Kenji. “You see how imaginative your hired guns are?”
Kenji ignored the remark and looked at Skidmore. “This virus we have stolen from Pacific Laboratories just a few days ago is not an influenza virus, Skidmore. The lab has been experimenting with new strains of meningitis, in their attempts to isolate a cure. One of the things they accomplished as a byproduct was a mutation of the original virus into a much more deadly and horrible one.”
“Oh, I remember,” Huhu said. “It was in the newspapers. A lab assistant came down with something they couldn’t treat. He had a hell of a time in the few hours he lived. Turned blue, with skin eruptions and spasms.”
“The press labeled it the Blue Death,” Heydrich put in. “The lab was ordered to destroy all specimens of the virus, but they delayed on one sample, until they could make a couple of tests. It is that last sample we stole. One of our B squad worked in the lab.”
“They don’t even know it’s gone yet,” Kenji smiled nicely. “In the meantime, we’re culturing it. We have plenty already.”
“Plenty for what?” I asked her.
The unnerving smile widened. “For introduction into the Heiau Reservoir just outside Honolulu,” she said. “That supplies most of Honolulu’s drinking water.”
“Good Jesus,” I muttered.
Skidmore frowned, and whistled a low whistle.
“Fantastic!” Huhu said in a soft voice.
Kanaka, who was himself Hawaiian mostly, saw nothing wrong with killing a whole city where Hawaiians and part Hawaiians lived. “What a great gig, man!” he offered. “I mean, that would show the pig-man we mean business, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose you mean,” I said carefully, “that you would use such a sabotage as a threat to get certain things you want immediately. That you’ll use the toxic virus only if your demands for independence are refused?”
Kenji eyed me coolly. “No, I don’t mean that, Rainey. I mean we will use the Blue Death on Honolulu, and in the next week.” The eyes went glittery again. “It’s too soon to make demands. The hospital attack didn’t impress them sufficiently. We need something really big to get their attention. After most of Honolulu dies with their faces going blue and their tongues sticking black out of their mouths, we’ll make another threat to them and Washington, and they’ll listen because they’ll know we’re capable of doing what we say we’ll do.”
I suddenly realized that Kenji was another Pupule, hiding in that beautiful body. She was really crazy. She didn’t want revolution, she wanted to kill. Kill in a bigger way than had ever been done before. My earlier feelings about her had been confirmed.
“The reservoir is under heavy guard, isn’t it?” Skidmore said. “Because of a threat against it last year?”
Kenji nodded. “That’s why we need you and Rainey. We’re going to make a commando-type assault against the guard there, and the reservoir personnel. That will take some firepower.”
That seemed to make Skidmore feel better. He didn’t like the virus part, but it appealed to him to attack the reservoir in a military operation.
“We can handle it easily,” he said. “If we get your other people trained.”
“You and Rainey will be assigned to that task starting tomorrow,” Heydrich put in.
“You’ll go to Niihau, Skidmore,” Kenji said. “Our people will be expecting you there. There’s a remote area where you can train Squad C just like we were trained here. You, Rainey, will go to Kauai, our garden of Eden that is so much like Hawaii was before it was overrun by mainlanders. You’ll train Squad A there, I have a man meeting you in Lihue.”
“You will get the training accomplished in just three days,” Heydrich told us. “Then you will report back here. We will be ready to put the Heiau operation into action then.”
“We’ll converge on the reservoir from our secret headquarters at different sites, not meeting together as one force until moments before the attack,” Kenji told us. “That way it’ll be very hard for the operation to be aborted through some slip in security, as happened in Honolulu when Squad B was massacred.”
Kenji had it all figured out. The trouble was, she hadn’t figured on me. I hoped.
“It sounds strategically smart,” Skidmore offered. “But where’s this virus stuff located?”
Kenji turned a dark look on him. “In Honolulu, in a safe place,” she said pointedly. “I met some Squad C people there and hid it myself. I’m the only one who knows its exact location. It’ll be retrieved the night we go into Honolulu to assault the reservoir, and not before.”
“What if they discover it’s been stolen in the meantime?” I suggested. “They might guess it could be used at the reservoir, and put on a heavier guard.”
Kenji smiled. “Then we’ll just get to kill more pigs on our way in,” she said.
I returned the smile with a false one. “Let’s keep a happy thought,” I said.