Yeager's Getaway, page 6
part #3 of Abel Yeager Series
Victor had emptied two tall bottles of water while waiting then switched to beer after they were airborne, and now he was back on water. All the liquid had the predictable impact on his bladder, meaning he had to disturb the sack of pudding in the aisle seat and stand in line for the head every hour or so. The last time he’d interrupted the woman’s movie marathon, her glare had been so cold it should have frozen the pee inside his bladder.
Make it a pee-sicle.
The shuffling and bumping of his return woke Alex from her latest nap. When not working, she could sleep more than a house cat. She wiped her mouth with a grimace and looked at him with puffy eyes. “Are we there yet?”
Her question was punctuated by a ding and the captain’s announcement that they were beginning their descent. Through the porthole, Victor saw nothing but black ocean and a faint indigo smear of horizon. The wing’s flashing light strobed the darkness.
“Finally.” He checked his watch. “A hundred or so hours since we woke up in Mexico.”
“Funny.” Alex stretched her hands straight up as if surrendering. Her shirt tightened across her chest in a way that Victor found distracting. “But I’m not tired at all.”
“Amazing.”
She leaned close and whispered, “Can you ask the lady on the end to get up? I need the toilet.”
WEST COAST OF MAUI, Hawaii
Saturday, 8 May
1745 Hours
On the western edge of the island of Maui, dozens of resort hotels lined the beaches from Lahaina to Honokowai Point in a near-solid line of luxury development stretching more than five miles. The properties were designed to pamper tourists with pineapple-flavored drinks and white-sand beaches, offer them fluffy towels and turn-down service, feast them with luaus, and adorn them with leis.
The man known as Manu Ho began the slaughter at the sliding-glass entrance doors of the Hyatt Regency Spa and Resort. He led two other supposed Niho soldiers toward the lobby of the hotel overlooking Kā’anapali Beach. His men followed him toward the valet-parking apron in front of the Hyatt. The members of the strike team wore black pants and T-shirts and covered their faces with black ski masks. They each carried a Type 88-1 automatic rifle with a thirty-round banana-shaped magazine, along with a Baek-Du San copy of the CZ 75 pistol and their blade of personal choice. Manu Ho’s choice was a pineapple-harvesting machete with a plain wooden handle and a fifteen-inch blade that thickened toward the tip.
His group was one of four teams striking targets all along the Maui coastline.
An overweight white woman and a teenager lingered to the left of the Hyatt entry, gazing into their phones. Ho triggered a burst from the hip, ripping the woman from her stretch pants to her colorful headband. A tiny swivel brought the Type 88-1 in line with the daughter. Ho stitched a compressed burst of fire into the younger woman, punching holes through the phone she held and slamming her into the portico’s support column. She slid to her butt, painting a streak of crimson on the white stucco.
His men fired in controlled bursts. More tourists dropped. The screams began.
The team split around a Cadillac Escalade parked in the drive. A native Hawaiian valet, not old enough to shave, froze halfway out of the SUV’s door, dark eyes bulging wide. Ho twitched his head. Go! He bypassed the black vehicle and led the way into the lobby.
“Hawaii for Hawaiians,” Ho shouted. “Now and forever.”
AIRBORNE, ON APPROACH to Honolulu International Airport
Saturday, 8 May
1750 Hours Local
Victor pinched his nose and cleared the pressure on his ears. The attendants roved up and down the aisles with trash bags, admonishing those with laptops to power down and put them away. The aircraft engines whined, and the flaps groaned. Victor caught glimpses through the porthole of sparkling lights set against a velvet-dark sea.
Alex took his hand and grinned. “This is going to be so much fun!”
MĀMALA BAY, OFF THE Coast of Oahu
Saturday, 8 May
1754 Local
Makani eyed the traffic and made his choice. He sighted on an inbound Delta flight, but his hands were shaking so badly that, by the time he’d gotten a lock, the plane was on the ground. He gingerly set the launcher on a bench seat and hunched over to light a cigarette. He had never smoked... until the day he was selected for this mission. The instructor had handed him a smoke right after his first successful training session. Despite his hacking and coughing, the nicotine had seemed to soothe his jittery nerves.
He decided to have another and see if that helped with the shakes.
AIRBORNE, ON APPROACH to Honolulu International Airport
Saturday, 8 May
1800 Hours Local
They landed with a double-thump, and Victor breathed out a sigh. Not for the first time, he wished he could sleep on a plane. Being airborne with someone else at the wheel left him edgy and paranoid.
Victor creaked off the jet bridge with sweat patches under his arms and two carry-on bags under his eyes. Alexandra, in contrast, was fresh-faced and chipper. They wheeled their luggage into the terminal a little after six o’clock in the evening. Two pretty girls in flower-print dresses handed out leis. Their smiles seemed brittle and forced.
The airport teemed with extra security. Police officers in full SWAT gear patrolled the concourses, dogs at their heels, M4s slung across their body armor. The lines at the TSA checkpoints meandered through mazes of black stanchions, hundreds of people deep—tired parents with fractious children and couples holding hands. Conversation was muted, the eyes of the departing passengers haunted. The buzz of tension was so strong that it vibrated on the back of Victor’s tongue.
“Looks like everyone else is leaving,” Alex said.
“Should mean a good deal on a hotel,” Victor muttered through a yawn.
“That’s awful!”
After a stop at the rental counter, they drove to a chain hotel near the airport and checked into a room with a king bed. Victor changed into shorts and a T-shirt, found the hotel’s gym, and used the elliptical. He followed that with a few sets of curls, flies, push-ups, and crunches. By the time he showered and changed clothes, he’d shaken off travel-induced zombie-ism.
Too tired to go out, they ate an overpriced meal at the hotel’s restaurant. On the television over the bar, a newscaster standing at an airport lobby was speaking into a microphone, looking grave. People were running around in the background. The screen showed a video of the night sky, shaky and out of focus. The sound was muted and the TV too far away for Victor to read the crawl. It looked like bad news anyway, and he wasn’t in the mood for bad news.
“I tried calling Charlie,” Alexandra said as they waited for their order.
“Anything?”
“No answer.”
“Probably out of range.” Victor sipped a cold Modelo. “Or, you know, they’re dancing at a fancy-dress ball on their cruise ship.”
“Can you see Abel dancing at a ball?”
“Hah!” Victor added in English, “Only if somebody was chooting at his feets.”
Alex pulled a face. “Will you stop with the Chicano gang-banger accent? You know I hate it when you speak like a moron.”
“Is how I talk. Besides, I thought you liked that I was a not as esmart as choo.” Victor winked. “Anyway, we’ll see the Yeagers tomorrow morning sometime. I’m sure they’re just busy partying and whatnot.”
“You’re right, I know.” Alex glanced at her watch. “We should go to bed.”
“What? You slept, like, a hundred hours on the plane!”
“You really aren’t very bright, are you? I said go to bed, not go to sleep.”
MĀMALA BAY, OFF THE coast of Oahu
Saturday, 8 May
1830 Local
Makani was ready. This time for sure.
A whining roar cut the night as an Aloha Airlines 757 spooled up on the tarmac. Makani sighted on the jetliner and steadied his breathing, which was coming in fast gulps. He blocked out the line of portholes, refusing to picture the passengers in their seats, heads bowed over magazines or engaged in conversation with their neighbors.
The 757 started its takeoff roll, gaining speed from a walk to a jog to a run then to a full-out sprint. Thrust from the engines powered out in twin shimmers of overheated air, driving the airframe down the runway in a thunderous crescendo of percussion. At V1, the jet’s nose tilted up, followed in seconds by V2, whereupon the twelve-thousand-ton monster lifted from the earth.
Makani pressed the first stage of the trigger, panning the missile tube from left to right to keep the Aloha Airlines Boeing framed in the optical sights. With a squeal, the missile locked. A spasm of terror clutched his heart. Doubt swept through him. The lives of at least two hundred people hung by the weight of his trigger finger. Once done, there would be nothing left of the old Kamahalo Makani. There would only be the mass killer Kamahalo Makani. His jaw trembled, and he forgot how to breathe. His insides clenched, and his bowels threatened to flood his shorts with shit.
Hawaii for Hawaiians. Makani clenched his eyes closed. And fired.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Pearl City, Oahu, Hawaii
Saturday, May 8
1906 Local Time
The man known as Pete Kaneholani rode in the lead of three extended-cab pickup trucks cruising on the Kamehameha Highway. The driver of his vehicle signaled, pulled off at Hekaha Street, and turned toward the water. The second and third trucks followed. At eleven o’clock, the Bradley Shopping Center was quiet though not deserted. The shops and offices were closed, a few cars remained, and a group of youngsters skateboarded outside a thrift store. Their wheels washboarded across the pavement, echoing in the dark, nearly empty lot.
The lead truck stopped for a pair of late-night bicyclers to whip past before continuing deeper into the parking lot. Both extended-cab pickups rolled very gently over the speed bumps before they stopped in the middle of a small parking lot, secluded behind the last of the four rows of long, narrow buildings. Twenty meters away, a fringe of greenery bordered the waterfront of East Loch, Pearl Harbor. The lights of the Ford Island Bridge glittered over the dark water, backlit by the glow from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.
The drivers turned their trucks toward the building, their rear beds facing the water. They lined up their vehicles with yellow marks that had been spray-painted the previous day by the advance team, on the concrete. Lights switched off. All six doors popped open. Kaneholani and eight other men scrambled out. Two, armed with automatic rifles, jogged back the way they’d come, to set perimeter security. Men from each vehicle pulled the cover off the beds, the snaps coming loose with muted pops. They leaped into their assigned truck beds and lifted the tubes of the two 81mm mortars into their prepared bases. The third truck carried crates of ammunition, which were removed, opened, and stacked next to the mortar tubes. Each weapon was nestled in a bed of sandbags, the base spot-welded to the truck bed. The weapons’ ski-pole forelegs fitted into an arc of holes drilled in one-centimeter increments. The “best guess” positions were circled in red tape and aligned the weapon along the truck bed’s center axis. The extra holes would allow for crude deflection adjustments. Once the trucks were parked at the designated positions and the bipods set, the gun tubes would supposedly be as ready as the trainers could make them without firing them. Presighting was well and good, but it was a rare mortar that could hit accurately on the first shot.
Time from parking to basic setup was eight seconds—slower than they’d done it in training but faster than the team leader had planned. His false identity of “Pete Kaneholani” would pass a cursory inspection and not much more, though the authorities would have no other trail to follow. Unless he broke under interrogation, they would never learn Kaneholani’s true identity. Even his DNA would leave a false trail.
Kaneholani waited while his crews finished their final adjustments. Waves sloshed against the piled stones of the shoreline, and the fitful breeze carried the oily-fishy smell of the inner harbor. He listened to and cataloged the suburban noises: a car stereo’s thumping bass from the Kamehameha, a distant—very distant—siren, and an unseen boat puddling through the harbor at just above idling speed.
“Ready,” Tommy Chin said. As mission commander and the leader of mortar team one, it was his job to issue fire orders to the team leaders as well as call out adjustments from the distant spotters. He stood between the two trucks, where he could speak to both crews easily. He checked the leader of Mortar Two, who indicated that his tube was ready as well.
Kaneholani pressed a speed dial on his disposable cell.
“Yo,” Don Akiona, one of the idiot terrorists, said.
“Stand by.”
Kaneholani held the phone to his chest and said to Tommy Chin, “One round, smoke.”
“One round, smoke.”
Mal Ka’uhane, another of the native Hawaiian idiots on the team and the ammunition bearer, selected the round from a foam-padded box. The propellant increments had been installed and the safety wires removed prior to leaving their staging area, which had made Kaneholani’s balls crawl up into his belly every time the truck dipped into a pothole. These Hawaiians were too untrained to properly load and fuse the rounds on sight, in the heat of battle. What will be, will be.
“Hang,” Chin said.
The gunner, one of his and not a Hawaiian, took the round from Mal Ka’uhane and slid the tail into the tube the proper distance. On Chin’s command of “Fire,” Morris dropped the round and twisted away.
Thud!
The concussion of the small rocket firing slugged Kaneholani in the chest. At a little over two kilometers, the target was well within range, and the round impacted seconds later, out of sight and sound from Kaneholani’s position. He held the phone to his ear.
“Shot out.”
“Splash,” the idiot said. “Ahh... one hundred meters long... uhhh... fifty meters left.”
Kaneholani consulted a laminated table taped to his sleeve and called out corrections.
“Ready,” Chin said.
“One round, smoke.”
Thud!
“On line,” the idiot on the phone said. “Fifty short.” After the next smoke round hit, Don Akiona reported. “Oh man, wow. Dead ringer, brah. Ahh... target hit. Fire for effect.”
Success ignited a warm blaze in Kaneholani’s chest. Even working with barbarian numbskulls, his mission would be a success.
“Round, HE,” he told Tommy Chin. “Fire until you run dry.”
By his informal count, mortar one had fired eight rounds during the time it took him to lay in mortar two. Both mortars engaged until they ran out of ammunition. In twelve minutes, fifty rounds of high-explosive shells had rained on the targets.
“Pack it up,” Kaneholani told the crews. Into the phone he said, “Report.”
“Oh, dude,” Akiona crowed. “You should see this!”
“Idiot. Tell me the result.”
“The Arizona Memorial is a crater in the water. It is fucking gone, man! And on the Missouri... uhh... I see fire aboard the ship.”
During the planning of the strikes, the dapper spook—the true mission leader, no matter what the Hawaiians thought—had pulled Kaneholani aside and said, “You know what this will mean, right?”
“What?”
“You, my honored comrade, will go down in history as the man who conducted the second attack on Pearl Harbor.”
Kaneholani sneered at the glow over the water. Just like Americans, to memorialize a defeat. Now they would know that taste again, and Kaneholani was only too happy to be the instrument of his country’s will. In truth, he was honored to be the one to deliver it.
“Come,” he ordered the team. “Secure the weapons, and return to base. We have more to do. Move!”
HIDDEN CAMP, MOLOKAI
Saturday, 8 May
1910 Local
The gunmen marched Charlie and the other captives through the forest, following no discernible trail that she could see. The first time she had tried marking their passage by snapping a green branch of a leafy vine, one of their captors screamed at her and threatened to strike her in the face with the butt of his gun. From then on, Charlie stepped hard into every soft spot she could find, trying to leave footprints for Abel to follow.
They hiked for over an hour. Late-afternoon shafts of sunlight speared the forest by the time they crossed a rippling stream and entered a clearing under the trees. Netting laced the trees overhead, woven through with green patches. Camouflage cover. Four buildings huddled under the netting—long, narrow cabins of raw timber that resembled National Park Service buildings. Thick mounds of earth were piled on the roof of each cabin, held in place by more netting.
Charlie leaned close to Betty, whose arm she held to steady the old lady. “Why the dirt roofs?”
Betty glanced up with watery eyes. Red-faced and sweating, Betty Pyle didn’t look well. The forced hike and the tension of captivity had worn on the older woman’s stamina. “Blocks infrared,” she whispered back. “From drones and aircraft. Satellites—”
“Stop talking!” snapped the slab-faced leader of the soldiers. Charlie had nicknamed him Kong for both his size and the undercurrent of violence that bubbled close to the surface. “Move!”
One of the guards unlocked a door in the second cabin from the left, and the other gunmen chivied the hostages into the dim interior. Lu Kim went first, followed by the California couple, Austin and Melissa. Charlie led Betty inside last. The door slammed shut, followed by the sound of a padlock clicking into place.
As her eyes adjusted, Charlie made out a row of eight cots lining each wall, reminiscent of every barracks in every military movie she’d ever seen. People occupied thirteen of the sixteen beds spread out on each side.
