Authors: Charles Knief

Diamond Head (18 page)

BOOK: Diamond Head

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T
he oceanâ²s surface retained a clear delineation with the sky six hours after the sun had slipped below the horizon. Light from a full moon reflected off the waves, painting their tops with silver all the way to the edge of the world.

I lay on my stomach in a stand of mature sugar cane trying to impose myself into the terrain, ignoring the possibility of centipedes and scorpions that inhabited these fields like commuters on the L.A. freeways. The cane was dry and ready for harvest and it made a hissing sound when the breezes blew in from off the sea.

From Chawlie's restaurant I had driven directly to my berth in Pearl Harbor, not bothering to scout the area before boarding
Duchess,
wondering, but not caring, if Thompson's people were watching me, and if SEALs were watching them.

My briefcase was still in Kate's apartment, so I retrieved more weapons and changed to black fatigues and jump boots. I drove directly to Haleiwa, through the rolling pineapple and sugar cane that covered the central plains of Oahu. Nobody followed me. The freeway ran all the way from Waipahu to Wahiawa, terminating at Schofield Barracks. From there it branched into a couple of two-lane country roads. Only one of the narrow little cane roads led from Wahiawa to Haleiwa. No one
could follow me without exposing their presence. It was too flat and too narrow, especially in the dark.

The map book of Oahu showed the property's address on a dead-end street. I drove by the house anticipating a quiet rural neighborhood, the kind of setting you'd expect in an affluent environment. I was surprised. The house was the only one on the street, its concrete driveway the only one that did not lead to a grass plot. Two police cruisers flanked the house and two more were parked in the street. Chawlie wasn't the only one with connections.

Seven people conferred in a group in the front yard. Huddled together, they had a collective end-of-shift attitude, as if nothing of importance had occurred. Their postures were those of hunters who had missed the game, fishermen without a bite. Their faces, hidden behind sunglasses, tracked me in the Jeep as I drove past. I stared back, an errant tourist.

It was disappointing, but not surprising that the cops beat me to the house. Government agencies can, when they put their collective minds to it, shift monumental piles of paper to find connections so seemingly trivial as to defy logic. That's their strength. But they couldn't know what wasn't written, filed, entered and collated. They didn't know Chawlie. That's their weakness.

The sun was gone and I drove all the way to the end of the road before turning back. This time I ignored them, concentrating on how to get to the cane field behind the house. I noted the position of the house. It was an intruder upon the field, surrounded on three sides by the cane. I wanted to get into position before it became too dark and too quiet.

If Chawlie's information was correct I wanted to get inside the house and look around. When I made the slow reconnaissance I noted large windows all the way around the house, a standard Hawaiian architectural device for maximum ventilation. From the exterior of the structure, nothing seemed to match the layout of the room where I suspected the tapes were
made. The secret basement that Chawlie had mentioned must certainly be there. The house looked to be slab on grade, but that didn't mean anything. The basement didn't have to be directly ventilated to the outside. Bomb shelters don't have windows.

Thompson could be hiding there until the search for him cooled off. Even the feds don't have the funds or the energy to continue a high-profile manhunt for long. After a few days they would conclude he had left the island and would depend upon other means to catch him.

Thompson would have had a back door in place long ago. A man in his position would have known it wouldn't last, no matter how self-delusionary he was in other respects. It was a gamble, but the police and the feds had covered all the other exists. They'd pierced the tangled corporate vines Thompson used to conceal his ownership of the property, and it followed they would know everything else about him, too.

He had to be somewhere and I had nowhere else to go. If Thompson was on the island, he would be hiding in that basement.

The cops were gone by the time I got into place at the edge of the cane. They had left a solitary vehicle parked in the driveway with a lone occupant. He appeared to be listening to the radio and drinking a cup of coffee, waiting out the time until his replacement arrived. He clearly expected no trouble.

As I lay in the cane watching the cop my thoughts returned to Kate's frustration at my actions. She must have felt betrayed. I hadn't promised her I wouldn't pursue my own mission. Somehow she had assumed that just because we'd become lovers we were allies, that her goals and desires were now mine. I owed a debt to MacGruder, and as long as it was still possible to repay it my goals wouldn't change.

Headlights appeared from the direction of the highway. A car stopped in the driveway, beside the cop's car. I strained to hear the conversation but there was a steady breeze whispering through the cane and I could hear nothing else. From their
relaxed postures it appeared they were two men who knew each other well. A third person occupied the shotgun seat, and for an instant I caught the profile of a woman. The driver lit a cigarette and the lighter briefly illuminated Kate's face. Had the interception of
Pele
gone so wrong that now Kate was out beating the bushes again?

Another vehicle came down the road, a dark cargo van with no windows in the rear compartment. Kate and the other two cops swiveled their heads toward the van. Beyond the two police cars, just in the periphery of my vision, I saw a door open and a shadow detach itself from the house.

The van stopped at the end of the drive, blocking the two police cars, and sat idling its engine, getting the full attention of the occupants of the police cars.

I tried to get my gun out of its holster below my fatigue blouse, but the breeze suddenly waned and every movement I made caused the dry cane around me to rattle. I rolled to one side and put my hand under my left arm and tried to draw the big revolver. I saw the interior lights of one car flash on as the uniformed cop got out of his car to investigate.

Two muffled shots came from the house and the cop dropped to the ground. Two more shots were fired into the driver's side of the windshield of the other police car. Then two more.

I lay frozen in place, on my right side, right arm under my fatigue blouse, hand on my Ruger Redhawk .44 magnum. Another breeze wandered through the cane field. I took advantage of the noise and drew the revolver.

The shadow emerged from the darkness and stood over the body of the policeman lying between the two cars. The man was a big Asian I had not seen before, big as a sumo wrestler. He fired again, aiming toward the body at his feet. He kicked at the body, grunted, and opened the driver's door of the nearest car, his pistol extended.

A small figure darted from the passenger door and raced for
the street. I recognized her at once. Head down, arms pumping, feet flying over the driveway, Kate looked like she had a chance to escape until the back door of the van opened and two men jumped out and tackled her to the concrete. One of the men hit her with his fist after she went down.

The big man pulled the other body from the car. It was Captain Yoshida, Kate's boss. The big Asian dragged Yoshida and the other dead policeman into the house. At the van the two men turned Kate over and searched her roughly, and after a short conference, hauled her into the van and closed the cargo doors.

There was an opening in the hurricane fence surrounding the property that looked wide enough to drive through. If there had been a road at one time it was long gone, reclaimed by the vegetation. The sumo wrestler came out of the house and drove each police car into the cane until they were no longer visible. He piled cut cane around the last car until he was satisfied they were covered and returned to the house.

The van's occupants remained hidden. I didn't know Kate's condition, but her captivity changed the equation. I couldn't rush them now. Waiting was all I could do.

Thompson came out of the house preceded by the big Asian and followed by Tweedledee. Each man carried two satchels.

I tracked the big Asian with my Ruger, judging him to be the most dangerous. When I had a shot I fired a double-hammer, two shots into the man's chest. As he went down I moved my sights and shot Tweedledee twice. I emptied the gun toward where I thought Thompson had been. By then everybody was down and I was moving, retreating into the cane field, rolling, crabbing sideways, back and away from the light, ejecting the empty shells and searching for a speedloader as I moved.

I'd counted Thompson plus four men, including the two in the van. I'd taken out two with my assault. That left two plus Thompson. I didn't really count him. He wasn't the type to run around a dark cane field searching for an armed man. I could
see him ordering someone else to do it but I couldn't see him going himself.

I crawled to a rough row of old tire tracks gouged into the soil and covered by cane. I'd scouted the field on the way in, choosing this as my first fallback position. I waited, knowing they'd come.

They did. Four of them, flanking me in two lines.

Four?

I lay motionless, allowing them to pass me in the dense cane. When the last man passed I eased myself onto my elbows and shot him in the back. He bellowed in pain and pitched forward, throwing what looked like an automatic weapon into the darkness in front of him. I fired on where I thought the drag man would be on the other line. Then I ran.

Automatic weapons fire opened up behind me. I dropped to the ground and rolled to my right. An invisible harvester cut the tops of the sugar cane above my head. I lay on the ground, hugging the tire tracks, and reloaded.

The only advantage I had was invisibility. They didn't know my location unless I fired on them or moved. That went both ways but they had to move and time was running out. They outnumbered me, but someone somewhere would have heard the shots and called the police. I'd hit three, so there should only be two left, but I was hearing four, one moaning complaints but still upright.

It wasn't possible. A .44 magnum will put a man down and keep him there. Hit a man with one and he wouldn't be able to get up and complain about his injuries unless he was wearing a bulletproof vest.

That possibility had not occurred to me. I had no armorpiercing ammunition. I'd been firing stepped-down magnums, as accurate and easy to control as hot-loaded .44 Specials. I hadn't figured on Kevlar. I did have maximum-loaded magnum ammunition capable of knocking down a grizzly, the same load I'd used on the shark. It might not penetrate the Kevlar, but it
would give them something to think about. I dumped the rounds from the cylinder and replaced them with max loads.

From a position deep in the cane I lay immobile, waiting for them to make the next move. The wind shifted, blowing steadily from off the ocean, obscuring the softer noises. Thompson's men were quiet, hunkered down, waiting for me to do something. They had learned a great deal over the past few minutes. Any time they moved I shot them. Even with body armor it couldn't have been fun. A Kevlar vest provides protection against fatal injuries, spreading the shock throughout the garment's fibers, but it is still like getting hit with a baseball bat, and the .44 was at the upper end of the protection capabilities of most vests.

The breeze became stronger, rattling the cane around me and masking any movements. It heightened my senses. Had I been in their position I would have used the distraction of the wind to charge.

They came head on, firing as they went. Bullets zinged by me, cutting stalks and plowing into the dirt. One of the men came raging out of the cane ten feet away and I aimed carefully and shot him in the upper thigh. He fell forward and I shot him through the top of the head. Both shots were accompanied by a three-foot cone of orange flame from the end of the Ruger's barrel.

I rolled toward my left as the night exploded. The others saturated the area where I had been, filling the empty space with bullets.

A muzzle flash was visible through the stalks and I returned fire, hoping to hit something not covered by armor. My shot lit up the night. The muzzle flash stopped. Two other guns were directed my way and I jumped sideways, rolling to safer ground.

I snapped off a shot toward the nearest weapon, knowing it was a miss. Then the night went quiet.

Thompson's unmistakable voice ordered his men from the
cane. From the sounds around me, three men were making every effort to obey as quickly as they could. I held my fire.

“Thompson!” I shouted into the black night. “I'm coming after you!”

There was a silence, almost a tangible shock wave running through the cane. Mine was probably the last voice he would have expected to hear.

“Not bloody likely, Caine!”

“You can't kill me, Thompson!”

“I've got a hostage. You come any closer I'll pop the little policewoman, and it'll be your fault!”

BOOK: Diamond Head

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