Pele's Fire. Don Pendleton
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Cliffs Beach Park
WHILE COOPER WENT to make his phone call, Aolani turned to face Polunu, huddled in the farthest corner of the rental car’s backseat.
“Polunu, did you know we were being followed to the monument tonight?”
He gaped at her in horrified surprise. “You think I set that up? Man, they were after me. If I want to die sometime, I’ll go with pills, you know? Drift off to sleep and have an open casket at the funeral.”
“So, how’d they find us?” Aolani challenged him.
“I don’t know, damn it! Maybe they were tailing you. You ever stop and think of that? I never see you check the rearview when we’re driving. You could have a convoy on your ass and never know it.”
Aolani wondered whether that was true. But even if Polunu was correct, it still left one glaring question unanswered.
He got there first. “And anyway,” he said, “if they were trailing us, why wait to make the hit? We sat there at least fifteen minutes before your haole friend showed up. Then they came down on us. How do we know they didn’t follow him?”
Aolani didn’t believe that, for several reasons. First, although she’d had a meeting set up by her government contact with Cooper at the Royal Mausoleum, Aolani knew nothing else about the stranger who had saved her life tonight. She had no idea where he was coming from, the flight he had booked, or its arrival time. In short, she knew nothing about the man except his general description and his name—which, she suspected, had been snatched out of a grab bag for her benefit.
More to the point, Aolani had spoken of the meet to no one but Polunu, and she’d told him nothing but the time and place where they would meet an unnamed man to ask for help.
Aolani was not the one who’d blown the meet. Polunu, conversely, might have passed on what he knew to someone else.
But why?
He had deserted Pele’s Fire. His former comrades wanted him dead, likely after interrogating him with methods Aolani didn’t even want to think about.
Unless it was a setup all along.
Or, what if Polunu cut a deal to save himself? He could’ve called someone from Pele’s Fire and offered two fresh victims for the price of one. Aolani didn’t suppose that she was someone Joey Lanakila or the others gave a damn about; if so, they could’ve killed her anytime they wanted to in Honolulu. But an agent of the hated federal government, dispatched specifically to bring them down, might be a prize that could revoke a traitor’s death sentence.
“Polunu,” she said, with cold steel in her voice, “if I find out you set us up—”
“You’ll what?” he interrupted her. “Kill me? Lady, you’ll have to get in line, and there are a lot of cats in front of you who’ve done wet work before.”
“But they don’t have you, Polunu. I do.”
“Hey, you’re sounding like we’re married now. What happened to my free will, eh? I can walk out of this thing anytime I want to.”
And to prove his point, Polunu settled one hand on the inner handle of the door beside him.
“Go ahead,” she said, calling his bluff. “But think about it before you split. Where will you hide from your old friends in Pele’s Fire? Maybe in jail?”
“Jail! What the—”
“Face it, Polunu. You’ve already said enough to mark yourself as an accomplice on six counts of kidnapping and murder. Since the victims were active-duty military men, that makes it federal. And you could be judged an enemy combatant, now that I think about it. So, you have to ask yourself if you’ll be locked up in the Honolulu federal building, or if they’ll just ship you one-way to Guantanamo.”
“You’re tripping now,” Polunu said.
“Am I? You know what Pele’s Fire has done, and even if you don’t have all the details of their next big score, you’ve said enough to stand trial on your own, as an accessory before the fact. You could get twenty years for that alone. Of course, you’ll never serve the twenty.”
“No?”
“Smart money says Lanakila finds someone to take you out before you ever get to court. Sound possible?”
“Hey, man.” Polunu whipped his hand back from the door handle as it was red-hot. “I never said for sure that I was leaving. We’re just being hypocritical, you know?”
“The word you’re groping for is hypothetical,” Aolani corrected him.
“Whatever. Look, I’m doing all I can, okay?”
“So far, Polunu, it isn’t good enough.”
“I can’t tell what I don’t know, right? Your boy don’t want me making shit up for the hell of it, does he?”
“You got that right,” Bolan said, emerging from the darkness behind Aolani. She was startled, almost jumped out of her seat.
Cooper was as quiet as a cat, she thought. He also had a cat’s reflexes and the killer instinct of a jungle predator. She was embarrassed to admire him for those traits and turned her face away as he slid into the driver’s seat.
Biting her tongue, she sat and waited for the stranger to proclaim her fate.
“ALL RIGHT,” BOLAN SAID, turning to face both passengers at once. “Here’s what we need to do.”
“Listen,” Polunu interrupted, “I didn’t mean that shit you heard, okay? I got nowhere to go if I bail out on you, and no one to look after me. I know all that, okay? What I mean to say is, I’m sticking.”
Bolan prolonged the moment with a frown. “The only thing I heard is that you plan to tell the truth. Now, if I’ve picked your brain for everything you know, and you want to be on your way—”
“No, man. Hell, no. I talked that out with Aolani. We’re all clear on that, okay?”
“Sounds fair to me,” Bolan replied. “But be aware of one thing, Polunu.”
“What’s that, man?”
“You try to set us up at any time, or run out in the middle of a fight in progress, then you’re nothing but another enemy as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not taking any prisoners.”
“I saw that at the Punchbowl,” Polunu said.
“Remember it.”
“I hear you, brah.”
“Okay, then. Unless you have more information on the task at hand…?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry, man. It wasn’t like they took me in their confidence for the high-level shit.”
“Then I need someone who would know the details, or at least the broad strokes of the master plan. Someone who’s still accessible.”
“Meaning they haven’t disappeared?” Polunu asked to clarify.
“Meaning exactly that.”
“Okay, let me think,” Polunu said. “The big guys all went underground a while ago, you understand. Warrants and shit were bugging them too much to stay out in the open.”
“But they still have contact points,” Bolan surmised. “Ways they can keep in touch with others who aren’t hiding.”
“Well, sure, man. Lanakila and his number two, Eddie Nahoa, have a list of phone numbers. They can reach out to anyone they know, whenever. Maybe two, three others have the list, but they’re all—”
“Underground,” Bolan said, finishing the sentence for him.
“Right.”
“Turn it around,” Bolan replied.