Pacific Creed

Hu stopped short of hissing like a cat. Bolan muttered a low “Hey, Tino?”

“Yeah?”

“Who’s Prince Charming?”

Tino made an amused noise and answered softly. “Best you don’t ask a lot of questions, Makaha. Not yet, anyway.”

“Got it.”

Koa came to the door sans shotgun and holding a six-pack and a bucket of chicken. He called back over his shoulder to Hu, “Don’t know when we’ll be back!”

The temperature in the bungalow dropped precipitously. “Whatever…”

* * *

The van bucked and bumped through the darkened back roads. Bolan hadn’t known there was such a thing as angry Hawaiian rap music, but Tino blared it loud enough to wake the dead. They had driven out of Happy Valley and entered state forestland. Bolan knew they were no longer traveling on state-maintained roads. Leaves and branches scraped the sides of the van. The forest formed a thick, sheltering canopy above when it wasn’t so low it scratched the roof. This was a smugglers road, most likely barely maintained by the local marijuana growers. Tino appeared to know the route like the back of his hand.

He killed the lights and spent the next ten minutes driving through the pitch black seemingly led by sense of smell. The white-knuckle ride ended as the van broke into a clearing and Tino brought the VW van to a halt beneath the stars. “We’re here.”

The Lua master turned around in the shotgun seat and held out his good hand. “The guns, bruddahs.”

Bolan smiled in the moonlight coming through the windows. “You can tell?”

“I don’t see everything, Makaha—” the Lua master smiled back “—but you’d be surprised what I do notice.”

Bolan withdrew his .45. He gave it 50/50 they’d been compromised the minute the Lua master had seen him in Melika’s bar. The soldier rolled the dice and gave himself to fate as he handed over the pistol. “Man, I thought I was all slick and shit.”

“You’re not bad.” The Lua man shrugged his mighty shoulders. “But I’m better. The knife, too.”

Bolan shook his head ruefully and handed over his knife. Koa gave up his gun. “You’re not going to put sacks over our heads and walk us into the volcano, are you?”

The thin man spoke. He sat in the backseat by himself, and Bolan had felt his eyes and his gun pointing at his back the entire ride. “We wouldn’t drop you in the volcano. But would you jump in if you were told?”

Koa met the thin man’s stare. “You know? I had just about enough of being told when I was in the army.”

The Lua man spoke quietly. “Would you jump in if you were asked, Koa?”

Bolan matched the man’s tone. “I would, if the right man asked me. For the right reason.”

Tino and the Lua master both nodded at the sagacity of Bolan’s words.

“What he said,” Koa agreed.

The Lua man got out and slid open the VW’s cabin door. “Then come out.”

Bolan stepped into the Hawaiian night. He still had his phone and his bare hands, which was far more armament than most would suspect. But they wouldn’t save him from a bullet in the back.

The Lua master nodded. “Follow me.”

Bolan and Koa followed as Tino and the thin man took their six. They walked out of the clearing into the darkness. The Lua man was barely discernible but he moved unerringly down a clearly cut and maintained path. Soon Bolan both smelled and heard the Pacific. They came to a clearing about the size of a large recreational vehicle. Overhead military camouflage netting stretched to form a canopy thickly interwoven with the boughs of overhanging trees. A pair of red military emergency lights lit the forest encampment. Solar panels stacked to one side told Bolan the camp was powered by batteries. It would give off little or no recognizable heat signatures to imaging satellites and there wouldn’t be any light leakage visible to passing aircraft. Nor would the red lights ruin the night vision of anyone in camp if they suddenly went lights off.

It was a very professional setup.

Three sawhorse and plank tables were piled with very suspicious-looking, four-foot-long military crates. The Lua master, Tino and the thin man waited. Bolan and Koa stepped forward. Bolan unboxed a rifle. It appeared to be a 1980s or ’90s vintage M-16 A2. He held up the weapon as if he were admiring it. Bolan had fought with this type of rifle many times. If it hadn’t been parkerized black, the rifle would have glittered with newness. The M-203 grenade launcher mounted beneath the barrel was new, as well. There were no serial markings, which told the soldier it was most likely a Chinese or Philippine knock-off.

“Sweet,” Bolan proclaimed.

Koa racked the action on a rifle and peered through the sights. “Same model I learned on in basic.”

The Lua man nodded. “We need a lot more of them.”

Koa set the rifle on his shoulder. “I know a little something about smuggling. AKs would be a lot cheaper. Shit, they’re disappearing from Iraqi and Afghani inventory by the day, and for that matter the Russians and Chinese sell to anybody.”

Bolan knew the answer but kept his mouth shut. The weapons mimicked U.S. National Guard issue. A real insurgent force wanted the same weapons as their oppressor, so they could steal compatible parts, ammo and magazines. On a secondary note, until one of the weapons was taken from a captured or killed Hawaiian secessionist, the sight of them would send U.S. law enforcement scrambling to find out what military depot in the Islands was hemorrhaging storage guns. That would give the smugglers a few more moments of cover.

A few more moments might be all they needed. All evidence and Bolan’s hard-won instincts reaffirmed that something very bad was going to happen soon.

Bolan kept the frown off his face. If they added a few stolen military uniforms to the mix, the secessionists would be able to drive up to a Hawaiian military base as if they belonged and engage in some serious slaughter. “A lot more are going to cost a lot of money.” Bolan gazed meaningfully at the inland pot grower’s paradise. “Mary Jane going to pay for that?”

The Lua master went Island-style stone face. “How bad you want to know?”

Koa put down the weapon. “I trust you, and Uncle Aikane. Whatever it is, I’m down with it. All the way. Makaha?”

Bolan nodded slowly. “You got me out of Pennsylvania, back to my island and back to my ohana.” Everyone nodded at the all-encompassing Hawaiian word for family. Ohana meant family by blood or otherwise, friendship, as well as race. “If I don’t have your six by now, then you should have left me. You decide to jump in the volcano? I’ll jump in right next to you.”

“Good.” The Lua man nodded. “Good. Then follow me a little farther.” Bolan and Koa walked into the nearly pitch black once more. The ocean breeze began to blow stiffly in their faces. They broke out into starlight and found themselves on a cliff. The Lua man spoke over his shoulder as he vanished through a cleft in the rock. “Careful.”

Bolan climbed down ancient steps cut into the lava rock. The Pacific thundered and crashed against the cliffs below. Happy Valley and Wailuku were close to the beach, but their shores were not tourist destinations. The locals were not particularly friendly, and the rip tides and undertows made surfing and swimming a suicidal proposition. The rest of the coastline was a series of jagged lava cliffs carved by eons of tidal surges.

Bolan knew from experience that lava eruptions and the action of the ocean often meant caves.

The steps were so steep they almost became a ladder, and then the ladder turned into a lava chimney. The Lua master’s voice spoke from below. “Six more feet, brah.” Bolan clambered down into the blackness. His bottom foot found empty air and a huge hand caught his ankle. “Just drop.”

Bolan dropped and bent his knees as he hit soft sand. He found himself in a cave lit by a red emergency light, with the roar of the surf outside. The soldier grinned at the Lua man guilelessly. “You did that climb one-handed?”

The man made a pleased grunt. “Been doing it since I was six, bruddah.”

Bolan knew he was on Hawaiian Holy Ground. The muted sound of feminine fear and misery coming from the gloom told him Hawaiian Holy Ground had been violated.

Koa dropped down, followed by Tino and the thin man. Bolan kept an exhilarated look on his face as Ferret-face came hobbling out of the dark on crutches with his hatchet jaw set in an orthodontic brace. If the big kill was going to come, it was going to come now, and his bundled body would be consigned to the surf outside.

Tino spoke happily to Ferret-face. “They’re in! All the way!”

The thin man spoke. “We’re gonna see.”

Ferret-face turned and crutched awkwardly through the sand back the way he’d come. The thin man took up an electric lantern and turned it on. Bolan saw a pair of small boats parked in the sand and more sawhorse tables laden with boxes and crates. Beside solar panels stacked for the night the cave was equipped with a pair of small gas-powered generators and fuel drums. A threesome of small shipping containers that had been dragged in with obvious effort dominated the back of the cave. Two of them had been converted into living quarters.

The group stopped beside a little side cave formed by a pocket of superheated gas eons ago.