A sectional aero chart of the island of Hawaii bore the tracks of an exhaustive search operation.
Tommy Anders occupied a chair near the connecting door. Lyons was at the small bar that separated the cooking and dining areas. Toby Ranger, sheer golden dynamite in bare legs, skimpy shorts, and a clinging, no-bra knit top, was posed at the balcony doorway, in half-profile and staring gloomily into the night.
At the table, Bolan completed an examination of the search chart and tiredly commented, “Looks like you’ve covered it all. And you found nothing at all?”
“Not a damn thing,” Toby sniffed, without breaking the pose.
“It’s been strictly an air search?”
“Yes. Understand—that’s rough country. It goes from sea level to nearly fourteen thousand feet without even thinking about it. It’s mountains, cliffs, canyons, meandering valleys, forests, lava flows, craters—and I mean craters, very active ones. And it’s a damn big island.”
“How many are you?” Bolan quietly asked.
“You’ve got it right here,” Toby replied.
“Plus, of course, Smiley,” Anders put in soberly.
“Do you have a detail map of the national park area?”
Toby stepped over to the table, did some shuffling, and came up with a geodetic survey map. “This is about the closest thing to it,” she said, opening the map and leaning over Bolan’s shoulder to study it with him.
He had a tough time concentrating on the problem. Toby Ranger had shared with him an exotic stage of the human experience such as those other friends present here were biologically unable to do.
Bolan growled, “Toby, get the hell off my body.”
She did so, but slowly, sliding along his arm to a chair close alongside. “There are no green pastures on that map, soldier,” she said coolly—adding, under her breath, “Dammit.”
The two of them had found a brief stretch of “green pasture”—a damned brief one, along the withdrawal route from Detroit—and much too recently to easily forget. Bolan had fallen a bit in love with the brasspantied fed, and there had been idyllic moments in the wake of that horror with the unlucky Georgette Chableu, the deceased member of the Ranger Girls. Actually, he admitted to himself, Bolan had been a bit in love with each of those girls. But there was no room for romance in the hellfire existence of a living dead man. Bolan knew that and accepted it. Toby knew it, also. Green pastures, no.
Bolan told the the lady, “Plenty of fire there, though.”
“Yes,” she murmured, “those volcanoes still rumble and boil. During my last overflight, I saw several huge glowing fissures.” She tapped the chart with a finger. “Right about here.”
“You know the legend of Pele?” he asked absently.
“She’s the fire goddess, isn’t she?”
“Yeah. According to the legend, she lives in Kilauea Crater. She dances in the lava fountains of Halemaumau Firepit, giving birth to the island in the constant outpouring of molten rock. The island actually is growing continually.”
“That’s very interesting,” Toby commented. “But hardly to the point.”
“Maybe it is,” Bolan said thoughtfully. “King Fire could be entirely symbolic. Or it could be descriptive of a location. And we know—or we think we know—that it’s somewhere around the volcanoes.”
“That isn’t quite good enough,” Toby said. “It would take incredible luck plus a battalion of ground searchers to find the place—going on what we know or think we know.”
Bolan had to admit the truth of that.
He’d spent time on that island, and he knew what the terrain was like over there.
“There’s only one way to go, then,” Bolan announced somberly.
“What way is that?”
“My way,” he replied.
“Thunder and lightning,” Lyons observed, from the sideline.
“That’s the way.”
“Mother Pele, move over,” Anders commented in a worried voice.
Lyons sighed and said, “No good, Mack. It’s a direct violation of our charter. Our job is to not—”
“Carl!” the girl cautioned him.
“Bullshit, Toby,” Lyons argued. “Look—all of us have drunk blood with this guy. He’s saved all our butts, each of us at one time or another—for some of us, more than once. Now either we go or we don’t go—but I damned sure can’t stomach any more of this mincing around at the edge. I’m sure as hell not going to use the guy!”
“That’s not fair!” Toby flared back. “I’ve had no such intention!”
Bolan had suddenly become a third person. He lit a cigarette and went to the balcony. It seemed that a crisis in government was brewing in that hotel suite; he wanted no part of it. He closed the door and sat on the railing, smoking and trying to ignore the rise of heated voices inside.
Presently the door opened and Toby softly called, “Mack …”
He stepped inside, went to his jacket, put it on. “I work better alone, anyway,” he said quietly. “Just stay out of my way, all of you. I want no friendly blood on my hands.”
“Wait a minute, dammit!” Lyons said miserably.
“We voted to put it on the table,” Anders explained.
The Bolan gaze fell on Toby Ranger. “Was it unanimous?”
Her eyes fell and she replied, “Yes. We want you to know the setup. Our data bank in Washington is labeled SOG-3. That means that we are Unit Three of the Sensitive Operations Group. I can’t give you the chain of command, except to say that we operate indirectly from the office of the United States Marshal.”
“Brognola your boss?”
“Possibly. We’ve met. But we have no direct line to him.”
Lyons explained, “We sort of, uh, float free—you know. The paychecks and expense vouchers are washed enroute to us. The key word in our charter is ‘sensitive.’ We walk the borderlines between law and disorder.”
“The hellgrounds,” Bolan interpreted it, smiling soberly.
“Hellgrounds, right,” Lyons agreed, still somewhat embarrassed by the whole charade. “I guess someone took a leaf from your notebook. They pulled us together shortly after the blast at Vegas. Said we’d worked good as a team there. Gave us a charter, a map to hell, and a gentle shove in the general direction. Toby and Smiley, Tommy and myself—we’re Unit Three. Georgette Chableu and Sally Palmer drew another unit. The entire SOG operation is, uh—well, I said it. Someone took a leaf from your book.”
“Brognola,” Bolan said, smiling.
“Who knows? Maybe so.”
Bolan knew. It was the same portfolio offered him by Brognola in Miami, too many eternities ago. Bolan had turned it down. Apparently the idea had proven too strong for Brognola to drop it entirely.
Toby was saying, “We do have one advantage that you do not. We can request direct support from any law enforcement agency in the country. And we can use their facilities.”
Anders added, “Emergencies only, of course.”
“The idea,” Lyons said, “is to remain in the woodwork to the greatest degree possible.”
Toby murmured, “So you can see why we—even with you—I mean, why we couldn’t …”
Bolan said, “Forget it.” He pinned the girl with a penetrating gaze. “You weren’t Sogging it in Detroit?”
She shook her head. “It was just as I told you at the time. I just didn’t give you all of it. Georgette’s unit had been working a Canadian connection. The head office let me look for her because—because we had been very close. I was operating independently in Detroit, just as I told you.”
Bolan smiled soberly, remembering. “You didn’t go back? After …?”
“No. Brave words notwithstanding, I did not. I rejoined the unit. We’ve been on this case ever since.”
Lyons said, “Smiley was our advance girl. She followed Lou Topacetti here from Chicago and made the initial infiltration. We didn’t really know exactly what we were looking for, at the moment. Just following the drift.”
“And the drift was westward,” Bolan commented.
“Yeah. From all the sheds. Boston, New York—name the family, it was sending headpower. You get curious about movements like that.”
Bolan nodded. He understood perfectly. The same movements had brought the Executioner to Hawaii.
Toby said, “When Smiley dropped from sight, I started getting visions of Detroit.”
Bolan could sympathize with that, also. It had been his first vision.
“We got Tommy booked into the Cove. That wasn’t hard to do. He worked that angle while Carl and I beat the bushes of these islands.”
“And,” Lyons added, scowling, “the morgues and beaches.”
Toby continued: “Two weeks ago we began to accept the idea that we’d probably never see Smiley again. It was about that same time when we began getting a glimmer of the full scope of the power behind Chung. He’s a real mystery man. And he really has—”
“It’s a strange deal,” Lyons interrupted. “This guy Chung popped up from nowhere a little less than a year ago and started taking over these islands. There seems to be a Hong Kong connection, but that’s not certain. Mystery man, yeah. Every cop in the area has heard the name but none has seen the face. FBI wiretaps began picking up the name in all of the mainland strongholds and we got a report straight out of the commissione that a Chinese enforcer had been chartered for the islands state. Nobody knows who he really is or anything about the guy—except that his presence here is suffocating the place.”
“Smiley knows,” Bolan said quietly.
“Well, sure—now. But—”
“He’s General Loon Chuk Wan, People’s Republic of China.”
Silence ruled that room for a long moment. Toby paced over to the balcony door to again consult the night skies. Lyons lit a cigarette. Anders broke the silence.
“That’s some hell of an ethnic joke,” the comic quietly declared.
“No joke at all,” Bolan murmured.
“Do the old men back home know it?” asked Lyons.
“Probably,” Bolan mused. “Why else the sudden link-up?”
“Doesn’t fit, that’s why,” Lyons said. “The mob boys are notorious flag wavers. Strongly anti-communist. I can’t see a conscious link-up there.”
“You don’t give the old men enough credit,” Bolan argued. “They have more practical vision than many of our statesmen. I’ve been smelling this dog ever since San Francisco. Accords are coming, detente is in the wind. The old men, whatever else they may be, can never be accused of sleeping when opportunity comes scratching at the door. They’re getting their shots in first. And Chung is obviously one of those shots.”
“But what’s in it for Chung or Loon or whatever?” Toby wondered.
“There’s the rub,” said Bolan.
Anders corrected that. “There’s the SOG. It’s exactly what we’ve been looking for, isn’t it?”
“Guess it is,” Lyons quietly agreed. “Ever since Vegas.”
Toby snatched a cigarette from the table, lit it with a flair, and began prancing back and forth with considerable agitation.
Bolan suggested, “Cool it. It’s a very simple problem.”
“Simple hell!” she fumed. “For you, maybe, Captain Blitz. But not for the rest of the world. We could be sitting atop World War Three here, the powder keg anyway.”
“Smiley said almost the exact thing,” Bolan mused. “But I don’t buy it. I would have to guess that Chung is a dissident. He’s playing some game on his own—or, at least, for the benefit of some disfavored faction back home. I see the problem as a simple smoke-out. Expose the guy. Bust his operation. His government will abandon him. They’d string him up, probably, if he ever returned home.”
“Sounds like a SOG mission to me,” Anders said gloomily.
“They’re stockpiling arms somewhere around here,” Bolan pointed out. “Some damned exotic arms. I know what the mob hopes to buy from that. The Big Thing. The question mark is Chung. What does he hope to buy? Official tensions between the nations? A loss of face that would be certain to wreck the slow march to detente? Or is he simply a bandit who’s decided it’s better to be rich than red?”
“That is precisely what I mean!” Toby said. “It’s very complex—not simple at all. I want a conference with the front office.”
Bolan said calmly, “You know better, Toby. Those people upstairs will be stumbling around for months trying to arrive at some great diplomatic moment. By the time that show got moving, this one could be long gone—dispersed anywhere in the wide world. You think Hawaii is a big island? Try finding King Fire somewhere on Island Earth.”
“Mack’s right,” Lyons decided. “If we contact the front now, their first order of business will be to clamp a freeze on everything.”
“That’s probably true,” Toby agreed, gnawing at a delectable lower lip.
“Meanwhile,” Bolan said quietly, “our girl Smiley is in a very bad position. It’s unnecessary, now. I should have brought her out—kicking and screaming, if necessary, but out.”
“Let’s SOG it,” suggested Anders.
“Agreed,” Lyons said, tight-lipped.
“Dammit,” said Toby Ranger.
“Mack’s way,” Anders voted.
“Agreed,” Lyons seconded.
“Dammit!” complained the outranker.
“We can’t find King Fire,” Bolan explained. “So we’ll have to bring King Fire to us. We hit Kalihi. At dawn.”
“Dammit, just dammit!” Toby yelled.
“That makes it unanimous,” said the Executioner. He turned to Carl Lyons with a grim smile. “Think you could scare up a hang glider on short notice?”
“A what? You mean those manned kite gadgets?”
Bolan’s gaze was seeking the moonlit sky outside. “Yeah. I’ve never tried it in this particular area, but—why not? We have the currents, we have the heights. Why not?”
“What are you talking about?” Toby demanded worriedly.
Very soberly, Bolan told her, “I’m talking about dropping in on the general like a big bird.”
“A big fire bird,” Anders said, awed by the thought.
“A thunder bird,” Toby sarcastically corrected Anders. “Captain Thunder, honey, you have got to be out of your loving mind!”
“So what’s new?” Bolan asked quietly. “We hit at dawn.”
The game had definitely changed.
The Executioner had taken on allies.
10: Soaring
Hang gliding could be a tricky business, even for an expert. Bolan was no expert, but he was not exactly a novice either. He had tried the big kites on several occasions during the pre-war, but always along coastal areas where the wind was predictable and the updrafts certain.
Once he had sustained a fifteen-mile flight along the Southern California coast—then again, once he’d gone down like a rock to within a few feet of the beach, catching enough lift at the last moment to send him hurtling out into the water instead of smashing to certain death on the rocks.
There was no saving water waiting at the bottom of this try.
The valley floor lay several thousand feet below. Between Bolan and his target were plunging slopes and wild forests, rocky gorges, hazards of every type known to gliding. Worse yet, the wind patterns were tricky, unpredictable. Severe downdrafts on the leeward side of the mountains were a distinct possibility—even “dead fall” or “swirl” areas could be awaiting the venturer.
Natural hazards were not, of course, the entire problem. Bolan realized that he had no direct control over the human events that might await him at the end of the journey. He could set up the scene, put the actors in motion, and hope that everyone reacted properly to the cues of the moment. Once airborne, however, he would be pretty much at the mercy of all the variables that could enter the situation.
With all that, Bolan still considered it a sound plan.
Toby, of course, did not. She had denounced it bitterly, washed he
r hands of it, then—as Bolan had known she would—actively entered into the tactical planning and added some positive touches of her own.
Bolan had great respect for the plucky lady, and with good cause. She had a mind of her own, naturally—and he granted her that. She also had the guts of any man, and he loved her for that.
As for the bickering and the brass mouth, most of it was her way of letting off steam, equalizing tensions; Bolan understood that, also.
Lyons had found no difficulty obtaining the glider. Soaring was becoming a popular sport in the islands. There were several glider clubs in the Honolulu district. He even brought back a tipsheet on the wind and terrain characteristics for the preferred soaring areas on Oahu. Unhappily, though, the leeward side of the Koolau Mountains enjoyed very little prestige as a soaring area for hang gliders. None, in fact, at all.
The glider itself was not the sort of thing to inspire confidence in the novice. Bolan remembered his own hesitation to entrust his life to the flimsy contraption that first time out. The thing was no more than a light aluminum framework supporting a few yards of nylon, a hang bar, and seat harness. Lyons had come closer to a proper description of the contraption when he referred to it as a kite. “Hang gliding” was more definitive of the actual operation. You simply grabbed the bar, hung on, and leaped off a cliff. That took care of raw courage. The rest was in the hands of friendly air currents, great physical instincts, and an understanding of the principles of flight.
It could be an exhilarating experience. With good currents, a guy could soar like an albatross for hours—and even feel like one. In good soaring areas, it was usually the skill of the pilot rather than any other condition that dictated the length of flight. Theoretically, a guy could fly for as long as he could hang there and control the thing.
And now Bolan was alone in the Koolau Mountains and ready for his moment of truth. The glider was assembled and ready, situation go with the wind strong and steady.
He was poised atop a high peak with a sheer drop and a clear view to both windward and leeward—a position where the currents were definitely updrafting as they lifted above the mountain range.
Hawaiian Hellground Page 6
