Yeager's Getaway, page 12
part #3 of Abel Yeager Series
For killing, though, nothing equaled Betty Ann. Named after a wicked little bitch from Mobile who had blown him, rolled him, and stolen his car, Betty Ann had sliced more throats than Sweeney Todd on free-shave Saturday. Man, he missed that blade.
Minutes ticked off the clock. Pettigrew had no idea how long he stayed immobile. In his folded-in state, time had no meaning for Winston Pettigrew. The critters crawling over and under his body did not register in his conscious mind. The damp ground chilling his belly and balls was as comfortable as his king-sized four-poster at home. Well, okay, that was a lie, but the point was, he could ignore the discomfort.
After an unmeasured space of time later, something clicked in Pettigrew’s subconscious. Sounds of the jungle returned to undisturbed harmony. His sixth sense detected no enemies within a noticeable distance. Pettigrew decided he was as alone as he was going to get. He unfolded, and a deep breath filled his lungs for what felt like the first time in hours. Wriggling from under the tree trunk, he stood on shaky legs and brushed off the debris clinging to his clothes. The chill of damp clothes made him shiver in the brisk morning air. Returning to the world brought with it a reminder of his aching bladder, his swollen, arthritic joints, and his tobacco-deprived lungs. Getting old sucks.
Pettigrew navigated around the tumble of rocks at the base of the cliff and scrambled to the earthen ramp leading up into the cut in the steep wall. “Aha!” he whispered.
The enemy soldiers had moved on too quickly to stop and secure the body of their fallen comrade. The commando lay in an awkward heap halfway up the gravel path, caught on a stewpot-sized bush. Pettigrew hiked up the slope and recovered the man’s rifle first—he’d need to check it for grit and obstructions later—then slung it over one shoulder and climbed up to inspect the body.
The ammo harness came off first. Six magazines and—oho, look!—two smooth baseball-sized grenades. Next came the flak jacket, which Pettigrew slipped over his shoulders. Rolling the body around had dislodged it, and the heavy weight of the corpse slid into Pettigrew’s legs, threatening to unbalance him but also revealing—
“Oh yeah, baby. Come to Daddy.”
A sheathed knife was secured at the man’s back. Double-edged. Four inches of blade instead of six. Plain wooden grip. Not a patch on Betty Ann, but...
“You’ll do, my sweet thang,” Pettigrew cooed, holding the blade low to keep from catching and reflecting sunlight. He repressed a chuckle and settled for a satisfied smirk. “Let’s go do some hunting, little sister.”
MOLOKAI FOREST RESERVE
Sunday, 9 May
0815 Local
Kimo Ekewaka stalked the camp, pacing like a caged lion. The two dead “advisers”—soldiers supplied by the nation that had agreed to fund and support the Niho Niuhi—lay under blankets in the center of the clearing. He couldn’t give a shit about their dead carcasses. The attack, on the other hand, made his blood boil. Who was it? What was his objective? Clearly, the guy was not a cop or a soldier. He wore plain clothes and had brought a rock as his only weapon. Plus, he had taken first blood. Those were not the actions of any type of authority.
Kimo had ordered a squad out after the lone-wolf attacker. The man had escaped down the ravine and disappeared before Kimo, running bare-assed and pricking his feet on a thousand fucking thorns, could catch him.
Hunter? Off-duty military? Kimo guessed the guy was in his midthirties and six feet tall with a wrestler’s body. Killing both guards had required skills beyond those of a casual hunter or passing tourist trying to play hero. These advisers were not conscript soldiers—they were commandos, supposedly Special Forces. It should not have been so easy to take them by surprise. Kanoa said they were North Korea’s best, though Kimo had been to Korea several times, and these men struck him as less Korean than pizza. That awareness was based more on gut feeling than any fact Kimo could point to.
The mystery attacker, however—now, that asshole was pure haole, a white cockroach who badly needed to get stomped on. Before Kimo needed to report the attack to Kanoa, he wanted that white hide tacked up on his wall. Kimo did not do failure. Failure sucked.
Six men had left the camp more than two hours back. Closer to three. The chatter of shots had crackled in the distant gorge for a while early on. Since then... nothing.
One of the new sentries called a challenge from the south perimeter. The response came back friendly. The team leader, Manu Ho—the one who had carried out the resort hotel shootings—led his team and the Pearl Harbor mortar crew into the clearing. More advisers. The only native Hawaiian in the group was Mal, who came in dragging the tail end.
Kimo greeted his fellow native first. “Aloha, Mal. You win?”
Mal’s answering grin was tired but happy. “The monuments are toast, my bruddah. Pearl Harbor burns again.”
Kimo had argued for the Pearl strike to happen during the day, when the tourist attractions would be flooded with haole pricks. The slaughter of haole always warmed Kimo’s heart. Kanoa and his mysterious companion, Mr. L, had vetoed the idea. Too many people were around the launching area during the day. The mortar teams would be seen setting up the weapons and not achieve the objective. Still, the gutting of the Arizona Memorial would strike directly at the heart of the pigs infesting his nation.
Manu Ho approached, reporting to him since Kimo was senior member of the Niho Niuhi in camp. With a respectful nod, the strike-team leader said in his stilted broken English, “Strike team leader, reporting all objectives achieved.” The man slurred his Ls and Rs, so his words came out lepohting arr objectives achieved. Ho’s gaze fell on the two shrouded corpses. “Who killed?” Who kirred?
“Your sentries got sloppy, brah.” Kimo laced the last word with contempt. He stepped in closer, using his height and strength to intimidate the smaller man. The commando was forced to look up to meet his eyes. “A fucking tourist killed them and ran away. Six more of your men are on his trail. Assuming they don’t fuck up, too, I expect they’ll have his nuts in a sack pretty damn quick.”
Ho must have understood the gist of his comments because his brow lowered and his jaw clamped tighter than a vise. He stalked over, stiff legged, and flipped back the blanket covering first one soldier, then the other. Soft curses in a foreign tongue flowed from his mouth. The language did not sound Korean. Ho glared at Kimo.
“You... ah,” Ho growled, “re-responsible... this?”
“No, brah. Done told you—your guys fucked it up. Let a haole come in, and skrickkk!” Kimo made a throat-slashing gesture.
Ho’s eyes narrowed to slits. He nodded curtly and spoke to his men, this time in Korean. The foreigner troops collected their dead and carried them off into the woods. Kimo knew just enough Korean to order a beer and a whore, so he could only assume the leader had instructed his men to bury their dead in the forest. Ho followed after them.
Mal trailed him. “What’s this about a haole killing sentries?”
“Nothing big.” Kimo shrugged. “Some asshole playing soldier. The Koreans will get him.” Kimo smiled and punched Mal on the shoulder hard enough to jolt the smaller man. “Hey, but get this: I caught me some bitches hiking yesterday, dude, and College Boy brought some lookers with his haul. We are plussed up on pussy, brah. Come and see what we got, man. I got eyes on the skinny blond gal, but you can have your pick of the rest.”
HONOLULU, OAHU
Sunday, 9 May
1218 Local
Traffic in Honolulu had become a total bitch migraine, crotch-rotting horror show. Everybody in the city had decided to go for a drive at the same time—some leaving, some ransacking grocery stores, and some just wandering to no purpose. Checkpoints further solidified the traffic as the police looked for gun-wielding nutsos.
The spot between Victor’s shoulder blades had twisted into a Christmas-light tangle of nerves, muscles, and pain by the time he made it back to the city after seeing Butch. He inched through traffic to his hotel. Miraculously, he made it without pulling from vehicles and beating to death anybody in a minivan or a BMW. After arriving, he was so tense that he worked the hell out of the hotel’s inadequate gym for a solid forty-five minutes.
After that, showered and dressed and with totally no idea of what to do next, Victor wandered out to the bench seat under the motel’s portico and picked through the sparse articles of a pathetic newspaper to find some new piece of information about the attacks. Hunger nibbled at the edges of his stomach, though not enough to make him get up and do something about it.
His cell rang.
“Yo.”
“Victor, it’s Butch.”
“You find my ship?”
“Nada, amigo.” Cassidy’s voice conveyed a verbal shrug. “The vessel has not checked in with its parent company and is unreachable by radio, and the Coasties have nothing on her. She has, for real, dropped off the radar. Last known position: headed for anchorage off the south coast of Molokai.”
“Well...” Victor leaned back into the bench. Sirens wailed, making it hard to hear. An ambulance cut across his field of vision, light bar flashing as it weaved through traffic. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, it do,” Cassidy said. “Look, buddy, I got to run. Shit has blown up into a class-A clusterfuck of giant proportions out here. But hey, did you hear? We got one.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, a sport fisher was intercepted by the Coast Guard leaving the vicinity of the Delphinius. They fired missiles at the cutter, who blew the ship out of the water. No survivors, unfortunately.”
“Yeah, I’m so sad,” Victor said. “My heart, she is breaking.”
“Intel, buddy. We needed the intel.”
Victor grunted an assent. A fire truck followed the ambulance, blowing its horn and howling through traffic. “Kind of approaching a clusterfuck out here too. Thanks anyway, dude. I owe you.” Victor ended the call.
Now what was he supposed to do—snatch up a helicopter and fly around, buzzing ships, to see if he could find Yeager’s? Volunteer as a CareFlight pilot and do some good like Alex? Or go back to the hotel and drink beer and eat peanuts while watching movies at fourteen dollars a pop? Logic suggested no one would be turning him loose in a borrowed helicopter, and staying in a sterile hotel room all day sounded like a torture made for the hell bound.
An idea crept up from a dark corner of his mind and begged for attention. Maybe...? With the use of his phone’s browser, Victor checked his way out-of-date social-media pages for news of a certain someone who...
“Oh, hell,” he said after a time staring at the screen. “Alex is gonna be so pissed.”
Victor smacked the fist holding his phone into his other hand a few times, jaw tight. He spat between his teeth, got up from the bench, and headed for his rental car. There was one trick left up his sleeve, and it would mean getting out into the craziness seizing Honolulu and driving back across the island to a spot near where he’d met Cassidy, but it beat doing nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Molokai Forest Reserve
Sunday, 9 May
1235 Local Time
When the barracks door opened, Charlie tensed and broke out in a cold sweat. She relaxed a tiny bit when two guards entered carrying boxes, a third man maintaining watch with his rifle held across his chest. In the seconds between the sound of the lock and the entrance of the three terrorists, Charlie had been convinced the gargantuan monster who took Lu Kim was returning for another victim. She clamped her thighs at the sudden need to pee.
The guards brought in two boxes the size of totes she used to store quilts and winter blankets, each requiring two hands to carry. They set the boxes on the floor by the first cot and barked orders for the captives to clear the central aisle. One man exited and returned with an empty five-gallon bucket. The previous night, some of the men had stood two cots upright and leaned them together to form a rickety wall around the waste bucket that afforded users a tiny amount of privacy. The bucket carrier kicked over the cots and exchanged his empty container for the one full of waste.
Seventeen people had made a tremendous number of contributions to it. The guard’s features twisted into a mask of disgust as he walked the waste bucket to the door, holding it by the handle away from his body. The contents sloshed over the rim, and some spattered the floor. The other guards laughed when gunk landed on the unlucky man’s boot and he hissed in displeasure.
The trio exited, and the door banged shut and was locked.
Ed Collins, a fellow Texan, was the first to reach the boxes. “Hey, y’all. Food. And water!”
People scrambled to claim meals and bottled water. There had been no breakfast that morning or dinner the night before and nothing to drink either. One tote contained field rations similar to the MREs the US military used except with Asian markings. The water was the type Charlie bought from a warehouse club, still shrink-wrapped. The tote contained forty-eight bottles, or about two and three-quarters bottles for each person.
“Oh, yum.” Betty Pyle’s lips twisted in a sour way when she got her meal open.
Charlie had to agree. Inside her MRE, she found a sealed packet of sticky rice mixed with pungent bits of an unnamed fish. Another packet contained desiccated fruit—pear, maybe—that was almost tasteless. She ate everything and drank a full bottle of water.
Someone had rebuilt the makeshift privy, and already, there was a line for the “toilet.” The sound of urination into the plastic bucket triggered the urge to go for Charlie as well, but she could hold it until the rush passed. She was amazed that people who had not had much to drink in the last eighteen hours could find so much fluid to dispose of
Migliozzi, the baker from New Jersey, belched and returned to the topic of conversation he had been drumming all day. “So who was it, ya think, who killed the guards?”
The loose confederation of leaders had hung together throughout the night, hashing and rehashing everything from how to escape to what the terrorists wanted with them. Would they demand ransom? Would the prisoners be executed on the internet, like those poor folks caught by the Taliban or ISIS? Would the ape-man who’d taken Lu Kim come back to claim more victims?
“Like Charlie said,” Betty responded to the baker’s question, “it was probably her husband, who was a Marine—is a Marine, because once you’re a Marine, you’re always a Marine. So is Ted, though I don’t see him taking out two armed men... not anymore, at least.”
“What is he thinking?” Melissa said. The pretty, slender blond from California was standing close by, in line for the potty.
Charlie and Abel had tried getting to know the California couple early in the cruise, since they were all around the same age. She soon gave it up. Every time either of the vegans made a political or social observation, Charlie felt Abel’s eyes roll so hard they clicked in their sockets. At one point, when Austin was carrying on about gun control with unsupportable assertions, dubious facts, and numerous clichés, she sensed her husband would spontaneously explode. His restraint was admirable, but Charlie was sure it wouldn’t last, so she had steered them to other social contacts—the Leatherneck Legends, for instance.
“I mean, for real?” Melissa continued. “He’s going to get us killed!”
“Pretty sure we’re slated to die anyway,” Dave Draper said. Charlie had learned that not only was Dave the king of car sales in Southern California, but he was also a currently sitting congressman in the US House of Representatives. The pudgy man had a no-bullshit approach she really liked. “I mean, where’s the ransom demand? If they wanted money, they would have already demanded something, right?”
“I believe I agree.” This from the lean Ed Collins, who turned out to be a no-kidding Texas oil baron from Houston, though he wore running shoes, athletic shorts, and a T-shirt with a Just Do It logo rather than boots and a Stetson. He was CEO of a well-supply company that outfitted oceangoing rigs with everything from drill pipe to light bulbs. “These folk ain’t acting like they’re in it for the money.”
Migliozzi threw in, “Maybe we’re supposed to be exchanged for some political prisoners, huh?” That was another idea he’d introduced a couple of times already.
“Who understands their cause?” Montelle wondered in his soft voice.
“It’s oppression, of course,” Melissa said. “Their land was annexed against their will. You, of all people, should understand how greedy white Europeans have built the United States on the backs of oppressed people.”
Montelle laughed softly. “Oh, honey, I own a villa in Italy and a nine-thousand-square-foot house in Beverly Hills. I ain’t in no way oppressed.”
“We should talk to them,” Melissa insisted. She ignored her turn at the bucket to stay and speak her mind. “Let them know we understand their cause and that we sympathize with how they’ve been treated. If we can establish common ground—”
“Fuck common ground.” Charlie had spoken with more force than she’d intended, but once committed, the heat rose in her voice and colored her language, and she let it loose. “And fuck them too. They kidnapped us, killed Tom, and raped Lu Kim. My husband, assuming he’s not dead, is a goddamn US Marine and a veteran of Afghanistan and twice beat the shit out of Mexican drug cartels. Killed a fuckton of them. The three men with him are US Marines, too, and they fought for each other in a faraway jungle to stay alive and to keep your lily-white ass safe from communism—which, by the way, has killed and enslaved more than all the white European settlers of the American continent ever have.” She sucked in a lungful of air as if pausing to reload. “I hope the four of them are out there right now. I hope Abel killed those guards and stole their guns. I hope that because I hope Abel and his fellow Marines take this camp and stomp the everlasting shit out of every goddamn, mother-fucking one of them.”
The entire hut fell silent. Charlie hadn’t realized that she had that much profanity in her. Getting all that out of her system felt like lancing a boil. She regretted none of it.
