Wake of the Hornet

by R. R. Irvine

  Her glare closed down to a condemning squint. “You shouldn’t scoff at things you don’t understand. Where would we be if everyone demanded proof of the miracles that we take on faith.”

  The reverend sighed. Somehow, they’d strayed from the point, that they were both uncomfortable with the chief’s request for a memorial service.

  “What would you think if Henry and I got together to say a few prayers instead of a formal ceremony?” the reverend said.

  “Where?”

  “The village square maybe, if it doesn’t rain.”

  Her eyes widened, a sign that her mood was brightening. “You know what Henry will say.”

  The reverend nodded. “The same thing he always does, that John Frum is coming. No one pays attention anymore. Henry’s been saying that since the war.”

  “I heard him say John Frum is here already.”

  The reverend twitched. That was something new. “Are you sure?”

  “He said John Frum is here to drive out the unwanted.” She opened her arms to him. When he stepped down from the dais to hold her there were tears in her eyes.

  She spoke against his chest. “To Henry, we’re unwanted, too, I think.”

  The reverend shuddered. Balesin had a terrible history when it came to unwanted outsiders.

  Coltrane cursed his luck. The point of no return was coming up, and he was screwed either way. If he turned back, he’d be heading directly into the teeth of the storm. If he continued on toward Balesin, he’d be flying through one squall line after another. The one he was in now had visibility down to half a mile. He switched the Widgeon’s windshield wipers to high and leaned forward, squinting through the Plexiglas. All he could see was an angry, wind-whipped ocean below and clouds above.

  Coltrane gritted his teeth. Turning back was out of the question. Continued loss of radio contact with Balesin had seen to that. A ferry pilot had responsibilities to his passengers, he told himself, an unwritten code. He couldn’t leave them stranded. Besides, continuing on to the island gave him a tail wind. That was worth considering.

  He snorted. Who was he kidding? He had Nick Scott on the brain. He smiled in spite of himself. Scott on the brain sounded like some kind of rare disease.

  Wind shear bounced the Widgeon. When the plane steadied, he checked the heading, just as he had been doing every few minutes since leaving Guam. On course, the satellite navigator said. Well, by God, it had better be right, considering the small fortune he’d paid for it. The gear had put Coltrane Airlines into the red for months.

  Without thinking, he reached out to tap the dial, then caught himself. Electronic gear could be touchy. Tapping the fuel gauge or oil gauge was one thing, messing with the gods of electronics quite another.

  He’d already had one run-in with those gods. A faulty warning light had delayed his takeoff from Guam by more than an hour. Otherwise, he would have been ahead of the storm. The problem turned out to be a short circuit, triggering a light bulb on the temperature gauge. It had happened before but couldn’t be ignored.

  Coltrane tried radioing Balesin again, got no reply, then switched to Guam’s frequency and asked for an updated weather forecast.

  It was Bob Norris who answered. “Only a lunatic would fly in this kind of weather.”

  “It takes one to know one,” Coltrane replied, aware that Norris was out of shift, and should have been home in bed instead of manning the radio. “I thought you told me it was going to be bright sunshine all the way to Balesin.”

  “I told you not to fly, for Christ’s sake. Where are you, anyway?” The concern was obvious in Norris’s voice despite the background static.

  Coltrane checked his watch. “Just passing the point of no return, if my calculations are correct.”

  “That would be a first.”

  “So would an accurate weather forecast.”

  “Enough bullshit,” Norris said, his language flaunting protocol and FCC regulations. “What’s your situation?”

  “I’ve got a fifty-knot tailwind. Visibility is maybe half a mile, but not getting any worse at the moment. So I figure, I’m still running ahead of the nastiest part of your storm. Over.”

  “I’m looking at the map,” Norris said. “If you’re halfway, with that kind of tailwind, you ought to make landfall with plenty of daylight to spare. But once you get down, haul that goose of yours up on the beach and tie her down. This is going to be one humdinger of a blow.”

  “What about wind direction?” Coltrane asked.

  “From the north. Seventy-five knots, maybe more.”

  “I’ll land on the south side of the island.”

  “Watch your clock. If you don’t spot the island on time, turn back.”

  To where? Coltrane wondered, but kept the thought to himself. They both knew that if his navigation was off in the least, he’d miss Balesin and be as good as dead.

  He signed off the radio feeling sweat trickle from his armpits. If he was going to fly across the island to land on the south side, he’d have to watch out for the volcano, Mount Nomenuk. It was two thousand feet high, but he couldn’t afford to fly at that altitude and risk missing land altogether. Instead, he’d have to stay low and hope he spotted that damned mountain in time to fly around it.

  In Honolulu, Sam Ohmura entered his well-appointed den, furnished to perfection by his wife, closed the door behind him, and approached his radio as if it were a time bomb. Gingerly, he switched on the set and waited for the promised message.

  Promised, he murmured to himself, playing the word over and over again inside his head. His surfing career had shown great promise at one time, with sponsors lined up offering money for his endorsement. His academic career had shown similar promise, only to be eclipsed by the likes of Curt Buettner, and even Walt Duncan. Only his bank account continued to show promise. More than promise, actually. All that money paid in for contingencies, options as Kobayashi liked to call them. Options that so far had never been exercised. Money for work never done, for being on call, for being a sleeper who’d hoped never to be awakened, until his fateful call from Guam.

  Only now, Ohmura suspected, he was about to be awakened from a nightmare. One over which he had no control, or no knowledge for that matter, other than that he was being held responsible for events on a remote island. A useless island as far as he was concerned, despite its unique Cargo Cult religion.

  The trouble was, Ohmura had been away from his homeland, Japan, for a long time now. In the eyes of a man like Kobayashi that made Ohmura suspect, subject to the corruption of the western lifestyle.

  Beware of the good life, Kobayashi had once told him. Never allow it to cloud your judgment or your loyalties.

  Ohmura tucked his chin against his chest and stared at the radio. He loved the good life and could think of nothing worse than being called home.

  A gentle knock told him that his wife had brought tea. He hurried to the door, relieved to have something to do, and opened it for her.

  She carried a tray set for two, complete with bud vase and rose blossom.

  “Alice,” he began, then caught himself. He’d been about to ask her how she’d feel if they were called home, but that was a question better left unasked. He knew how much she loved Hawaii. Here she was somebody, the wife of a department head at the university. In Japan, she would be an outsider, and never completely trusted.

  “Yes, dear, what were you saying?” she said.

  Before he could respond, the radio crackled to life.

  CHAPTER 29

  Kobayashi shook his head in despair. If he had been the head of the family he would have never allowed Haruko, Alice she now called herself, to marry a nisei. But his father had been weak, arguing that the Ohmura family had been in service to the Tokugawa family while Kensai’s family did not come into prominence until the Meiji restoration two hundred years later.

  Kobayashi thought of his grandfather, so proud of the sword presented to him by Prince Asaka. As a boy, he remembered his fat
her telling him that the sword was one of the famous Soshu-den works of Masamune from the Kamakura era. It was an honor for the family to own it. Later, when Kobayashi had it examined by experts, the sword had turned out to be a later utsushi-mono, a reproduction, by Yasutsugu. The sword dated from the seventeenth century and although Yasutsugu had been patronized by the Tokugawa, he was an inferior sword-smith. The sword was a fake. It was made from namban tetsu, foreign steel. Even then, the corruption of Western culture was making itself felt.

  And now here was this fake, this Sam Ohmura, married into the family. Now, I am the head of the family, Kobayashi thought. The honor of the family rests with me, but it balanced on an edge as sharp as his grandfather’s sword. In 1946, Iwane Kobayashi had escaped the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Westerners had called it. But he had lived in shame, nevertheless. He had erected a shrine and placed in it a statue of Kanon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, made of clay mixed with soil from Japan and China. To this day the family paid for a priestess to chant prayers and weep for the Chinese war dead. There are other dead we must weep for, Kobayashi muttered to himself. Whatever his grandfather had done in Nanking could not compare to what had happened on Balesin, and Sam Ohmura was a poor weapon to save the honor of the family.

  CHAPTER 30

  Nick shifted her weight, trying to make herself comfortable. Beside her, Elliot and Buettner did the same. But the Reverend Innis’s rough-hewn pews defied comfort. Their backs were straight, their seats unforgiving. Sitting on them was pure penance.

  Even “Amazing Grace,” sung by a choir of women, Lily among them, failed to soothe Nick. She clenched her teeth against the growing kink in her spine. Making matters worse was the heat, intensified by the Quonset’s corrugated-metal walls. The place reminded her of a bake-oven, not a church.

  She was about to throw caution, not to mention protocol, to the wind and make a dash for freedom when the reverend strode to the pulpit. He was carrying a bible festooned with multicolored ribbons as bookmarks. With a flourish, he opened it to the first marker, then looked over his audience, a full house now that Yali’s contingent had arrived.

  “Amazing Grace” ended. The ladies of the choir, glistening with sweat, took their seats in the front pew that had been reserved for them. They immediately began cooling themselves with reed fans. Nick glanced around. All the islanders had similar fans. She nudged her father, who nodded his acknowledgment that they should have been forewarned and forearmed.

  The Reverend Innis cleared his throat. “ „I am a stranger and a sojourner with you; give me a possession of a burying place with you . . .’ So says the good book. Could we do less, even though this man, Walt Duncan, was unknown to us? Certainly not. We have buried him in full hope of resurrection.”

  The reverend shimmered, then lost focus as sweat flooded Nick’s eyes. She mopped her face.

  “ „I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy co-mandments from me.’ ”

  “Amen,” the congregation murmured.

  Nick rubbed her stinging eyes, then closed them.

  “ „I have been a stranger in a strange land,’ ” the reverend went on.

  A stranger in need of a fan, she added to herself, losing track of what Innis was saying. She felt sorry for the preacher. His voice was strong, passionate even, but he couldn’t compete with the oppressive heat.

  Her head sagged. Sleep threatened to overwhelm her.

  “„. . . hast Thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ ” Innis intoned.

  Wilderness, Nick echoed to herself, the Baleseans were living in a kind of wilderness. They were living on the wrong side of the island. She should have realized that before.

  She shook her head. Dummy. On an island like this, one with a dominating mountain, there was a wet side and a dry side, depending on which way storms tracked. In this part of the Pacific, they usually tracked from east to west. That made the west side of Balesin the dry side, but the village was east of Mount Nomenuk.

  The question was, why? Even if it were only a matter of a few inches of rain, the islanders should have known better. Maybe Lily could explain it.

  Nodding to herself, Nick tried to concentrate on the reverend’s words. But he’d given up quoting from the Bible to extol the virtues of Walt Duncan, a man he’d never met. Neither had the rest of the congregation. Among those assembled, only Buettner had known the man. Maybe Tracy and Axelrad had been acquaintances too.

  My God, Nick thought, remembering what Duncan’s remains had looked like. What a way to die. And for what? For Buettner’s so-called Anasazi connection? That was something else rotten about Balesin.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Tracy and Axelrad leave their seats at the end of the pew and slip outside. Their departure drew a barrage of condemning stares, but Nick envied them just the same. It had to be cooler outside, and Nick thought she had a good idea why they wanted to slip away. So much for Buettner’s standards of professionalism, she thought.

  “Let us pray,” Innis said.

  Nick sighed with relief. In this kind of heat, a short sermon made sense.

  “Amen,” Innis said a moment later, a signal for everyone to begin filing from the church.

  Outside, Nick took Elliot aside.

  “The whole place is upside-down,” she began. “If you ask me, the culture has been contaminated by too many outside influences. Fifty years ago we might have made some interesting discoveries. But now? Curt should have realized that before organizing this snipe hunt.”

  Elliot nodded in agreement. “I know. I’m not sure what Curt is up to. In the past he’s been prone to rush to judgment, but I feel I owe it to him to let him come to his own conclusions, however long it takes.”

  “So how long are you going to stick with this goose chase?” Nick demanded.

  “What makes you think it’s a total goose chase? I find that there are some very interesting features in this island culture.”

  “You mean, like they live on the wrong side of the island,” Nick snapped.

  Elliot’s eyes lit up. “Daughter, you do me proud. I was beginning to think you hadn’t noticed.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Axelrad squeezed Karen’s hand. When they’d started out, he thought they could stop along the way to make love. But the bugs made that impossible. They were out in force, swarming like frenzied dive-bombers. If anything, there seemed to be more of them than ever. Perhaps they were desperate for blood because the rain had kept them from feeding.

  He opened his mouth to expound his theory but swallowed one of the little bastards. It reverberated all the way down his throat.

  He coughed so hard Karen pounded him on the back.

  “Someone went down the wrong way,” he managed finally.

  “I know what you mean,” she answered, keeping her teeth clenched, her lips barely moving.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was stupid of me not using the native bug potion, but it made me itch.”

  “You broke out in red spots.”

  “You didn’t have to stop using it and suffer with me.”

  She winked at him. “I figured touching me might bring your spots back.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  They kissed briefly.

  “One thing’s for sure,” he said, breaking contact. “It was something a lot worse than bugs that got to Professor Duncan.”

  “Are you having second thoughts about us going off on our own like this?”

  “I’m walking, aren’t I? Besides, we’ve already agreed. The only way to prove ourselves is to make a find that’s ours alone. If we do that we’ll be home free, with our doctorates handed to us on a platter.”

  She smiled weakly. “Then, I say it’s worth the risk.”

  “It was probably an accident, you know. Professor Duncan should have known better than to wander around on his own. You need a buddy system. That’s why I’ve got you.”

  She snuggled against him.


  “If you ask me,” Axelrad continued, “Duncan probably died of natural causes, maybe a heart attack. Once you’re disabled in a place like this, things eat you. Remember that last dig we were on.” He grimaced. “God knows what got to those people.”

  “Yeah, but in their case they’d been dead for a thousand years,” she reminded him.

  “Dead’s dead.”

  She punched his shoulder playfully.

  “One thing’s for certain,” he went on, “that shaman puts on a good show. Saying it was Frum’s will and that Professor Duncan had broken some sort of taboo. Curses don’t work unless you believe in them, for God’s sake.”

  By now they were both breathing hard as they headed uphill toward Mount Nomenuk, sacred ground according to the shaman. Dangerous ground, as Professor Duncan had learned the hard way.

  “It stands to reason that anything worth finding is on this mountain,” Axelrad said out loud, to justify the risk they were taking.

  “Stop worrying,” Karen told him. “Everyone’s still at the service, so we ought to have the mountain to ourselves.”

  He hoped she was right. Besides, as far as he was concerned, Yali was the man to worry about and he and his men were sitting in church right now.

  “What do you think about the model airplanes Nick keeps going on about?” he asked to clear his mind.

  “Somehow, I don’t think Buettner’s Anasazi flew them here.”

  Axelrad snorted. The path was growing steeper with each step. Scrunching his neck, he trudged forward, head down, scratching at himself.

  “That only makes it worse,” Karen told him.

  He kept going, ignoring her.

  “You’ll get an infection,” she said after a while.

  Angrily, he lurched to a stop and turned to face her. “I don’t want to hear—” The sight of her bite-swollen face made him wince sympathetically. “Dammit. I’m sorry. Maybe we ought to forget this and get you back to base for a shower and heavy dosing of the local bug juice. Besides, we haven’t seen a damned thing.”

  Her puffy lips managed a grin. “Why don’t you raise your sights?”