by Rob Swigart
“All right, Patria Koenig. A daughter. Although only time can really tell.”
“All right, skeptic. How do we prove to ourselves that we’re alive?”
“Well, there are a number of ways…”
“Don’t be obtuse, Dr. Koenig. How long would it take us to get home?”
“The record is twelve minutes. But I think we can beat that record, Dr. Mrs. Koenig.”
“You are sexist, chauvinist swine, Dr. Koenig. But I have a hankering to see you without your malo…”
It took eleven minutes. She saw him without his malo, and he saw her with nothing but her new belly, shading the soft core of her, and the shapes in dusky shadow of breast and thigh and cheek. The room was filled with light, but otherwise the house was empty. Kimiko and the kids had packed up and driven back to their house on the hills above Kapa’a, and the Koenigs were alone in the universe.
And the universe, too, was filled with light. The light fell on his tongue as he tasted her, though his eyes were closed. The light fell through her flesh and filled her, belly and breast. And into her mouth when she took him in, and onto her fingertips when she touched him in all the places that were there to be touched, the secret places.
“ ‘The heat on the river’,” she said, holding him. “ ‘Haze rising above the waters. I love you’.”
“ ‘Now’,” he quoted back at her, tasting her thighs. “ ‘Now is the proper time to make peace with me’.”
“Tsoy y-ol,” she said, holding his head in her two hands. “Good, good spirit, good spirits, good.”
She cried out when he entered, laughed when he lolled his tongue and rolled his eyes, and then fell in love with him over and over again with every thrust, seizing his hands to press them to her, and the two of them on the bed were barred with sunlight and shade that moved, as the sun moved, as they moved, together. Her heels hooked behind his knees and her belly shuddered against him, and she seized him then with both hands in his beard and pulled his face to hers and they came together.
Later he stroked the swollen rind of her stomach, touching lightly the puckered navel. The phone rang.
“Now I may be sorry we had that thing installed,” he said, rolling away and walking naked to the living room, where the instrument sat on the still-unfurnished floor.
“ ‘There was once a man who pinched the baby while rocking the cradle’.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Chazz asked. It was a ritual question by now.
“Well,” Lieutenant Takamura replied. “I can’t say I really know. Perhaps it means we have been working at cross-purposes. But some things are coming clear. ‘I batter old head until it feels sore, and then a splendid idea assails me. I go around.’ We have viewed an interesting videotape. We have traced a mysterious panel truck with fake license plates. We have seen tragedy happen on our island the past few days, and tragedy makes me angry, Chazz. Welter panicked and committed a major crime. He is now barely human. Elliot Propter and the others are in the hospital, poisoned through negligence or intent.”
“Start at the beginning, please.” Patria entered the living room and wrapped her arms around Chazz as he spoke on the phone. She, as naked as he, took some delight in pressing her large belly against his backside and biting his neck.
“Yes,” she whispered in his ear. “Start at the beginning.”
“Shh!”
“Did you say something?” Cobb asked.
“No. No, go ahead. A video, you said.”
“Yes. A very interesting video. Government briefing tape, with a scratchy version of a meeting. Not too clear, except for three items. Sandstone, in Utah. Candide, a code name for some kind of project. And Fort Detrick.”
“Utah? Dugway, where they used to test nerve gas and other chemical weapons. Fort Detrick is where the army has its labs. They study, so they say, antidotes to possible chemical and biological agents. To study an antidote, of course, you have to make the weapon. Purely research, of course. Purely defensive. No intent to violate the biological warfare conventions. But you may assume they are making biological agents.”
“My thinking exactly,” Cobb said.
“And the truck?”
“Ah, the truck.” Cobb paused. “Would you like to see it?”
“I’ve seen it,” Chazz said.
“So have I,” Patria whispered, not knowing what he was talking about, but observing an agenda of her own as her hands slipped down through the fuzz on her husband’s stomach.
“But not inside,” Cobb insisted.
“No. Not inside. Give me an hour.” Patria whispered something. “Make that an hour and a half.”
They agreed to meet. They had, Cobb said, some planning to do.
* * *
Two hours later Chazz and Patria pulled into a side street in Wailua and parked. Afternoon was waning, and in an hour or so the sun would fall behind the mountains. They could hear surf in the distance to the east.
The street was mostly dirt, although at one time it had been paved. A few abandoned garages and old wooden buildings slumped into the ground. The air, although warm, seemed to carry here a sense of desolation, a chill of abandonment.
A white panel truck was parked in a garage. The doors, rolled partway up, were peeling, and a hand-lettered KEEP OUT sign on the wall next to the doors had fallen sideways when one of the two nails holding it to the door had rusted away. A screen door to the office held only a few rusted teeth of screen and a small white metal sign with blue letters that said OFFICE.
Along the top of the building was a nearly illegible sign that hinted this was, once, the Okita Garage.
“Wrong license number,” Chazz told Takamura, who was leaning against his own nondescript sedan polishing the lenses of his dark glasses. Sergeant Handel was seated inside, writing in a small notebook. “No antenna.”
Cobb grunted and dropped his glasses. They dangled on their cord. “Take a look.”
“Who, me?” Chazz grinned. “Can’t you read that sign? It says, KEEP OUT.”
“Don’t worry too much. Mr. Okita won’t mind. He left no heirs sometime around 1955. The land has reverted to the county. This area has been scheduled for rezoning and development for, oh, twelve, thirteen years, now.”
They went inside and walked around the truck. Cobb told Chazz to take a look on top. He climbed on the rear bumper, remembering the sensation, and peered along the roof. The mountings for the antenna were still there, but the antenna itself was not.
The doors were locked. The inside of the cab looked familiar: the same color upholstery, the same tear in the driver’s headrest. Chazz looked at Takamura. Takamura produced a device that opened the door.
The truck was empty. Racks that had undoubtedly held communications gear showed nothing but metal struts and shelves. The floor was bare metal.
The glove compartment contained a companion to the flashlight Chazz had acquired a few days before. The only paper was a registration document. He held it out to Cobb, who shrugged. “Authentic,” he said. “The new plates are real ones. Truck was leased for a month in Oahu. Must have been shipped over, probably a couple of weeks ago. Outfitted and brought over. The false plates are over there on the bench. They didn’t bother to conceal it.”
“There’s something funny about this,” Chazz said. He slammed the door and leaned against the side of the truck, looking out at his van, Cobb’s car, and his wife, leaning against the door of the car, her hands clasped over her belly. She was wearing what he called her Mona Lisa smile. She knew something. “How’d you find it?”
“We can thank Sergeant Handel for that. He remembered this old garage, something about his high school days, he said. He just had this funny feeling, he said, that it would be a good place to hide something, like a truck, so he drove by. Just on the off chance, he said. And he accused me of being psychic! It looks as if they used this garage to work on the truck. Probably planning to notify the leasing agency to come get the truck. My guess is that the agency will have no knowledg
e of who they were or what they wanted the truck for. My guess is the truck was rented by SIG, and Colonel Jordan Wakefield, Department of Defense. My guess is we won’t find out much more. The office has been professionally cleaned. The only thing that gives them away is that it’s too clean.”
“Do you think they brought the remains of the satellite down here?”
“That,” Cobb said, tilting his ear toward a rapidly approaching sound, “is what we are about to find out.”
They moved outside as the helicopter circled once and settled onto the road thirty or forty meters away. Dust blew all around them, forcing Patria to duck her head and cover her face. Handel was folding his notebook closed as he climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
“Nice work!” Chazz shouted at Handel as the four of them ran, heads down, to the chopper. “Where are we going?”
Cobb shook his head and helped Patria inside. Chazz and Handel climbed in back with her, Cobb got in front and closed the door. Even before their belts were fastened, the pilot lifted off and turned steeply a few feet in the air to head west, toward the crater.
Cobb shouted, “Meet Gil Gates. This is his chopper, the one our friends from SIG rented.” Cobb tapped the pilot on the shoulder, and Gil waved over his shoulder at them. “Put on the earphones and we can talk,” Cobb shouted, taking down the set hanging beside the windscreen.
The others put the phones on, and a silence descended on them. The attached microphones were voice-activated, and except for the slight delay that clipped off the very beginnings of the first word someone spoke, it was like ordinary conversation. Cobb said, “Below us is the Jeep trail toward the crater. We’re not sure where the satellite came down, but from what witnesses who were watching the operation the feds mounted, we have some ideas. First we’ll make a sweep along the cliffs.”
Semicircular cliffs loomed before them, a natural amphitheater only a couple of kilometers across at the rim and three thousand feet deep. The floor was only five hundred meters above sea level, while the rim was more than a thousand meters higher. The wall had collapsed on the east, where the Wailua River flowed out, giving them access.
“Do you think I should be here?” Patria asked, touching her belly.
“We’ll stay high,” Chazz reassured her with a glance at Cobb, who nodded. “The toxin should have dissipated from the air. It’s on the ground we need to be careful. We won’t endanger the baby.”
She nodded.
It was raining inside the natural cup of lava. It was almost always raining there. The swamp above these cliffs was reputed to be the wettest place on earth, raining up to 466 inches a year. The walls, glistening black through dense green vegetation clinging to them, were alternately obscured and revealed by shreds of cloud touched on the edge by the remaining rays of sun, forming rainbows above the green forest at the rim. Threads of water from the Alakai Swamp on the summit, and from the lake up there called Wai’ale’ale, “a rippling on the water,” fell down the nearly vertical slopes to the headwaters of the Wailua River, dozens of them. The helicopter seemed about to hit those walls several times as it circled inside the crater a thousand feet below the top. Emerald-green vegetation filled the spaces in the bottom of the crater that were not tortured by fallen lumps of black lava or pools of dark water that reflected alternately deepening blue sky, black rock, gray cloud, or green wall.
They made two circuits inside, then went east once more, descending to a hundred feet or so above the ground. It was, to Patria at least, a breathtaking passage.
Surprisingly the sky was completely clear. Gil traced a sinuous course along the Wailua River. They all (except Sergeant Handel, who was seated in the middle in the rear of the cabin) looked carefully for signs of the fallen satellite. Five days should not have obliterated the damage. Finally Patria tapped Gil on the shoulder and pointed down.
He nodded and first tipped the machine into a turn, then pulled back to a hover.
Sharp ridges thick with trees knifed away to the plains in the east. The river wound along the bottom of a steep canyon filled with shade and light, green leaves and silver water. Below them, halfway down the slope to the river, beneath the broken treetops, glints of metallic debris were clearly visible.
CHAPTER 28
IN THE GROUND IT WAS A different matter. It was still dark when they started up the road the following morning, and the greasy mud of the trail sucked at the wheels. The tiny Samurai labored for every meter of ground, whining against the sides of water-filled ruts as the mature cane plants clutched at its sides.
Cobb and Handel sat in front, leaving Chazz sitting in back on two large metal Anvil cases of equipment. He was regretting volunteering for this duty as he swayed back and forth, banging his side painfully against the corner of the case, first on one side, then on the other.
Cobb was driving. His small hands moved deftly on the wheel, shifting from low-second to low-third and back again as they rose over slight rises in the terrain winding through the cane fields. Their general progress was upward, though, as they climbed toward the crater floor level at 500 meters.
The air was already humid, which made the darkness more dense. A thin layer of water flowed down the middle of the trail. At one point Cobb braked and got out. There were, clearly visible in the glare of the headlights, fresh tire tracks in the rut not yet washed away by the stream. A few meters ahead a broader cane road crossed theirs.
“They’re here already,” he said.
“Who?” Handel asked.
Chazz answered, since Cobb was driving again. He had to shout over the whine of the engine as they turned right toward the west. They were still enclosed by high cane plants that dropped across the road. From time to time the vehicle would crush cane stalks and release a thick gust of sugar sweetness. The road was wider here, and the high cane receded from the sides. “Who indeed? Our guess would be Ueda and the others. Peter Linz. Maybe Jordan Wakefield and his team, although we’re pretty sure they’ve already been up here to confirm Candide. But they did not bring back the satellite. We saw it from the air. That means it is still there, which is why we have all this stuff.” He smacked an Anvil case as they bounced over a rut.
Handel shrugged rather than answer; he clutched the frame of the door as they jolted over ruts.
“What about Propter?” Handel asked when the road smoothed out briefly and the whine of the engine diminished. “He drove up here, but he couldn’t have gotten much farther than this, and he got very sick.”
“The toxin probably blew down,” Chazz shouted. The cane vanished, replaced by fern and hau trees. “No one downwind got sick except people who touched the car, so it must have attenuated below the threshold level by the time it got this far. There haven’t been any more cases since then, so it was a small amount that escaped. There shouldn’t be any problems.”
A few minutes later Cobb stopped again. He snapped on a map light and consulted a sectional map of the area. The map had a red circle on it, marking where Propter’s car was found. He checked the turns leading up to the spot, then looked outside, shining the flashlight around at the next bend in the road. A small creek crossed in front of them, flowing over the roadway. “Another two hundred meters we turn left, onto this maintenance trail. Plantation crews come up here to clear out the irrigation flumes.”
They drove on. When the turn appeared, the road was overgrown and narrow.
Cobb stopped. “Two miles on this road and we’ll be as close as we can get. Maybe we’d better get ready.”
Chazz opened the first case and pulled out a flexible clear plastic suit and handed it forward to Takamura. He struggled with it for a moment in the front seat, then gave up and stepped outside. It slipped on over his clothes. He pulled up the hood over his head and sealed the edges around a full face mask attached to an elaborate filter system.
“Is this going to work?” Cobb asked. His voice was muffled by the mask. “This was a poison gas, wasn’t it?”
Chazz shook his
head. “Probably more like a dust. Particles, anyway. That’s a one-micron filter. It will keep out viruses if necessary. It should be more than adequate. I got these outfits from the P4 lab at DRC. The latest thing.”
“You do have one for everybody?” Handel asked. It was a question he had asked before.
Chazz grinned at him. “Everyone but you, Scott.”
“Yeah. Well, sure. I see.”
Chazz handed another suit up to the sergeant, who appeared relieved as he put it on beside the car. Chazz, too, zipped himself up.
They drove on. From time to time Cobb would stop to examine the tracks of the vehicle that had apparently preceded them by a few hours.
A gray haze seemed to be gathering around them, slowly congealing out of the darkness into the looming shapes of trees and ruts, water and mud. Behind them the dark pool that extended away at ground level gradually gained definition, giving mass and substance to the jungle on either side, a jungle that in many places joined overhead as well.
Progress grew slower as the dawn expanded, filling the world of light with heat as well. It seemed they might be able to walk faster than the Samurai was moving. They approached a bend in the road, crawled around it with ohia brush pressing in on both sides. Branches seemed to reach out and clutch at the windshield, the handles on the doors, the bumpers. This trail was terrifically overgrown, in places nearly invisible but for the broken branches left over from the previous few passages the past week. They had left the spot where Propter’s car had foundered far behind by the time the sun appeared over the surrounding low ridges on the rare occasions the sides of the gradually narrowing canyon could be seen at all.
No clouds moved in to relieve them from the now-oppressive sun. The heat was intense inside the car, but they dared not open windows. They had no idea, even this late, whether death waited for them outside the confines of the cabin.
When the sun had cleared the ridge, Cobb stopped again to look at the map. The circle marking Propter’s car had crawled almost to the right-hand fold, and the intersection of the trail and the Wailua River was not far from the left fold, but they had only covered two-thirds of the distance to their destination.
