by Mike Bond
But Harris was my country, that I loved and had risked my life for so many years. And he was trying, like Thierry, Tomàs, Anne, and thousands of others, to defend our way of life from what the Czech Prime Minister had recently termed “an anti-civilization that stretches from North Africa to Indonesia, the greatest danger in modern times.” How could I not want to keep fighting that?
“What were you going to tell me,” I said, “that DGSE didn’t know?”
“Ah.” He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “They don’t know who’s screwing them over ...”
“Thierry knows. He just won’t say.”
“He won’t say because he doesn’t want to lose his job or his life, or his loved ones.”
“Who is it?”
“Tell him to look at the previous president’s cabinet. Politics, whether in the US or France, is based on compromise. There are people who were in power before but who still have direct influence on DGSE and top levels of government. There’s more than one. Let Thierry find them. It will be good for France.”
When I met with Thierry an hour later I told him what Harris had said. “The previous governments?” He smiled. “Which one? Just like before World War Two, there were lots of top politicians openly working with the Germans, people who then became leaders in Vichy and sent seventy-five thousand Jews to their deaths. It does no good to name them.”
“Then you know?”
He shrugged. “Stay tuned.”
—
MITCHELL OF COURSE was elated that we’d rescued Mack and Gisèle. “Don’t ever forget what you accomplished,” he said. “That your sticking with it was what saved them.”
“We all stuck with it,” I answered. “Anne, Thierry, you, all of us. We never gave up.”
He exhaled quietly, and I knew he was wishing he’d been here to help. “This Anne,” he said, “what can she possibly see in you?”
“Beats me.”
“Beats me too ...”
Mack and Gisèle were back in their lovely house in the Sixteenth when Anne and I visited, Mack in the living room with his damaged foot up on the edge of the couch. “I’m going nuts with this,” he complained. “The docs won’t let me go back to work, and I want to tie up loose ends with these bastards.”
“Rachid’s been released,” I said.
“I heard.”
I told Mack about my plan for Rachid in the Fontainebleau swamp. “We’ll get him,” he grunted. “We always do.”
“Nearly always,” I said.
“Yeah. Nearly always.”
“So why,” I said, “did Yasmina come over to us?”
He looked out the window and the blazing green leaves of the plane trees. At the bucolic blue sky. He nodded, as if deciding something inside himself. “All the recent terrorist attacks, they shocked her. To kill so many innocent people – this was a religious act? What the Koran said, that unbelievers will go to Hell – what if it wasn’t true? The last straw in her slow divorce from Islam. She reread the Koran, realized most of it’s about killing people. Asked herself questions, breaking herself free. It’s hard, you know, when you’ve been so ... indoctrinated?”
I saw where his head was going. “Don’t you dare blame yourself she’s dead.”
He gave me that steely black look. “More this shit comes down, more I can’t figure out why ...”
“It’s our fate.” I shrugged. “Fuck it, can’t change it.”
He looked out the window at the new leaves scintillating in the spring wind, turned back to me, and grinned. “Why would we?”
Gisèle brought us Côtes de Provence rosé, crackers and Rocamadour, and for a few moments we sat quietly as if none of this had ever happened.
“How are you?” Anne said, breaking the silence. “Really?”
“We’re so lucky to be alive,” Gisèle answered. “Strange, but that’s mostly what I think of.”
“She goes for a hike every day,” Mac said. “Bois de Boulogne. Wants to get back to the clinic.”
“Doctors say next week.”
“She says there’s too many hurting people out there,” Mack grunted. “That she can’t take more time off ...”
“Oh Mack,” she scoffed. “You make me sound like a fake.”
I smiled at them, at Anne. The world seemed split between the majority who work hard and care for others, and the minority who don’t.
I wouldn’t want to be in their camp.
—
ANNE AND I had reserved two bungalows on Martinique’s east shore, one with three beds for Mamie and the kids, the other for Anne and me. Each dawn to go barefooting soft green lawns down to the glass-clear sea to swim out into the sunrise. The world’s best Caribbean cuisine with rum so good it makes the gods weep. Vertical emerald mountains and an ocean brighter than light.
The surf in Martinique’s lousy in some places – go to Le Grand Macabou if you want fabulous, dangerous surf – but what joy to ride a windsurfer beyond the break and cavort in soaring, spinning flights across huge white-flecked crests and howling winds.
—
BEFORE WE LEFT PARIS I had a long talk with Stranger. Explained the virtues of retirement, that he’d paid his dues and didn’t have to be a roof cat anymore. That he could live out his golden years in rural Normandy with Cousine Claudine. Be a house cat, a barn cat, whatever he chose.
“When you getting back from Martinique?” I thought I heard him say.
“Couple weeks.”
He gave a quick glance around the apartment. “With the kids and Mamie you can’t possibly live here.”
“We found a dynamite place in the Seventh,” I said. “A whole new set of roofs, older, not so steep. Lots of rats and pigeons.”
He winked a yellow eye. “I’ll hang out here for two weeks. There’s a new hatch of mice in a building down the street. When you return come get me.”
—
THE FIRST NIGHT in Martinique Anne and I were too weary to sleep, tossing on our big bed in the cool breeze, the soft waves susurrating against the velvet sand beyond the window. The moon threw silvery stripes across our naked flesh. I felt completeness, almost free, all spent, all action done, danger quelled, enemies dead.
“It’s not so easy, for these Muslim guys,” I said. “Can you imagine life with several different women telling you what to do?”
“You try that,” Anne whispered, her hand down my ribs, “and see what happens.”
“I’ll have three. If I live with you.”
“You would have another woman?” She dug her nails into my ribs. “Two other women?”
“Of course.”
She readied for the kill. “You think?”
“Of course,” I repeated. “You first of all. And then Mamie and Julie. Between the three of you, I don’t stand a chance.”
“For once in your life.” She caressed my shoulder, snuggled against me and fell asleep.
—
I LAY THERE THINKING of what had happened and what it was really about. We had won, saved the Eiffel Tower and a plane full of people. Dr. Death was cooling his heels in a French cell till his Iranian masters traded the French some oil to let him out. Mustafa was dead, and others in Rachid’s evil clan were either dead or headed for whatever minimal jail terms the French courts might give them.
But a much bigger villain, Rachid Raqmi, had walked away for now, even stronger than before. More beloved by his coterie, more praised by the media.
And he was not the only one. Islam’s attack on the west had many perpetrators, not linked but separate. Like the ones who’d killed Anne’s husband – how were she and I going to find them? In addition to the 22,000 known terrorists in France, how many others that hadn’t been identified? We could cut off one head but that wouldn’t harm the many others.
The war with Islam would go on, perhaps Isl
am would win. We were naïve and lazy, and believed ourselves to be good-intentioned. And they were smart, very driven, and ruthless.
It would be lovely for all of us to coexist. No religion should attempt domination but most do. And religious domination is the end of freedom. The end of human progress and evolution. The end of the individual.
If there’s a solution it’s love. The best of all possible worlds.
—
THE NEXT MORNING Anne and I swam out beyond the coral sands brilliant in rising sun, past myriad fish flashing and exploding round us, past a sleepy tarpon lazing across the bottom, out a mile to the edge of the vertical wall where the sandy bottom thirty feet below comes to a cliff that drops straight into the depths.
I dove maybe forty or fifty feet till the surface above was hazy pale green like an old glass float. The cliff wall was thick with coral and vegetation and alive with fish of all colors and sizes darting and feeding and looking for love. Drifting down there I thought of the great wave in Tahiti less than three weeks ago that had nearly killed me, that maybe I’d been saved so I could help save Mack and Gisèle. And meet Anne.
I rose slowly to the surface, clasped her close then sank to kiss her between the thighs till she tugged off her bikini bottom and we made love in the warm dawn with golden sands below us on one side and the dark abyss on the other.
THE END
Two more
Pono Hawkins Thrillers
Saving Paradise
When Special Forces veteran and Hawaiian surfer Pono Hawkins finds a beautiful journalist drowned off Waikiki he is quickly caught in a web of murder and political corruption. Trying to track down her killers, he soon finds them hunting him, and blamed for her death. A relentless thriller of politics, sex, lies, and remorseless murder, Saving Paradise is “an action-packed, must read novel ... taking readers behind the alluring façade of Hawaii’s pristine beaches and tourist traps into a festering underworld of murder, intrigue and corruption.” — Washington Times
Excerpt from Saving Paradise
Lovely, Cold and Dead
IT WAS ANOTHER MAGNIFICENT DAWN on Oahu, the sea soft and rumpled and the sun blazing up from the horizon, an offshore breeze scattering plumeria fragrance across the frothy waves. Flying fish darting over the crests, dolphins chasing them, a mother whale and calf spouting as they rolled northwards. A morning when you already know the waves will be good and it will be a day to remember.
I waded out with my surfboard looking for the best entry and she bumped my knee. A woman long and slim in near-transparent red underwear, face down in the surf. Her features sharp and beautiful, her short chestnut hair plastered to her cold skull.
I dropped my board and held her in my arms, stunned by her beauty and death. If I could keep holding her maybe she wouldn’t really be dead. I was already caught by her high cheekbones and thin purposeful lips, the subtle arch of her brow, her long slender neck in my hands. And so overwhelmed I would have died to protect her.
When I carried her ashore her long legs dragged in the surf as if the ocean didn’t want to let her go, this sylphlike mermaid beauty. Sorrow overwhelmed me – how could I get her back, this lovely person?
Already cars were racing up and down Ala Moana Boulevard. When you’re holding a corpse in your arms how bizarre seems the human race – where were all these people hurrying to in this horrible moment with this beautiful young woman dead?
I did the usual. Being known to the Honolulu cops I had to call them. I’d done time and didn’t want to do more. Don’t believe for a second what anyone tells you – being Inside is a huge disincentive. Jail tattoos not just your skin; it nails your soul. No matter what you do, no matter what you want, you don’t want to go back there. Not ever.
So Benny Olivera shows up with his flashers flashing. If you want a sorry cop Benny will fill your bill. Damn cruiser the size of a humpback whale with lights going on and off all over the place, could’ve been a nuclear reaction – by the way, why would anyone want a family that’s nuclear? Life’s dangerous enough.
I explain Benny what happened. He’s hapa pilipino – half Filipino – and doesn’t completely trust us hapa haoles, part white and part Hawaiian. To a kanaka maoli, a native Hawaiian, or to someone whose ancestors were indentured here like the Japanese or in Benny’s case Filipinos, there’s still mistrust. Didn’t the haoles steal the whole archipelago for a handful of beads?
Didn’t they bring diseases that cut the Hawaiian population by ninety percent? And then shipped hundreds of the survivors to leprosy colonies on Molokai? While descendants of the original missionaries took over most of the land and became huge corporations that turned the Hawaiians, Filipinos, Japanese and others into serfs? These corporations that now own most of Hawaii, its mainline media, banks and politicians?
I’m holding this lissome young woman cold as a fish in my arms and Benny says lie her down on the hard sidewalk and the ambulance comes – more flashing lights – and she’s gone under a yellow tarp and I never saw her again.
Couldn’t surf. Went home and brewed a triple espresso and my heart was down in my feet. Sat on the lanai and tried to figure out life and death and what had happened to this beautiful woman. Mojo the dachshund huffed up on the chair beside me, annoyed I hadn’t taken him surfing. Puma the cat curled on my lap but I didn’t scratch her so she went and sat in the sun.
I’d seen plenty of death but this one got to me. She’d been young, pretty and athletic. Somehow the strong classic lines of her face denoted brains, determination and hard work. How did she end up drowned in Kewalo Basin?
Benny’s bosses at the cop shop would no doubt soon provide the answer.
—
AS MENTIONED, I’ve seen lots of dead people. A tour or two in Afghanistan will do that for you. I sat there with my feet up on the bamboo table and tried to forget all this. Mojo kept whining at the door wanting to hit the beach but I didn’t. Once the sun moved past her spot Puma jumped back in my lap and began kneading her claws into my stomach.
By afternoon the surf was looking good, and when you’re under that thunderous curl you don’t even think about Afghanistan. Or about Sylvia Gordon, age 27, KPOI reported, a journalist for The Honolulu Post, dead in the surf this morning near Ala Moana Beach.
But I had a raunchy feeling in my stomach like when you eat bad sushi so I quit surfing and went down to the cop shop on South Beretania to see Benny and his friends. Benny was out cruising in his nuclear Chrysler but Leon Oversdorf (I swear that’s his name), Second Lieutenant Homicide, wanted to see me.
“Look, Lieutenant,” I said, “I been cool. I don’t drink or smoke weed or indulge in premarital sex or habituate shady premises –”
“So how the fuck you find her?” Leon says by way of opening.
I explained him. How it happened. All the time he’s looking at me under these gargantuan eyebrows and I can tell no matter what I say he won’t believe me. Just because I been Inside. I could tell him Calvin Coolidge is president and even then he wouldn’t believe me.
“So she drowned,” I said after a while, looking to leave.
Leon watched me with his tiny sad eyes. Him that helped put me Inside. “No,” he said.
And what he said next changed my life. “She was drowned.”
“I didn’t do it,” I said right away.
Leon leaned forward, meaty palms on his desk. “Pono,” he chuckled, “you think we don’t know that?”
“Know what?” I said, covering my bases.
“She was dead six hours before of when you found her.”
The thought pained me horribly. This lovely person floating in the cold uncaring sea. When I could’ve held her, kept her warm.
“She was dead,” Leon said matter-of-factly, “from being held underwater till her lungs filled up with good old H2O.”
“How do you know she was held?” I risked. �
�Even if she just normally drowned there’d be water in her lungs –”
Leon scanned me the way the guy with the broadaxe smiles down at you when you lay your head on the block. “This water in her lungs ain’t ocean, it’s fresh.”
“Fresh?”
“Like from a swimming pool or something. You get it?”
—
Killing Maine
First Prize, New England Book Festival, 2016: Surfer and Special Forces veteran Pono Hawkins leaves Hawaii for Maine’s brutal winter to help a former comrade falsely accused of murder. Pono learns first-hand about Maine’s rampant political corruption, seeing huge energy companies pillage the State’s magnificent mountains and purchase its politicians at bargain prices. Pono is hunted, shot at, betrayed, and stalked by knife-wielding assassins as he tries to find the real murderer. Nothing is certain, no one can be trusted, no place is safe, while Pono is the target of every cop in several states.
Second in the Pono Hawkins series after the critically-acclaimed bestseller Saving Paradise, Killing Maine is an insider’s view of Maine politics and industrial crime, the state’s magical and fast-disappearing natural beauty, how a lone commando hunts down those who hunt him against overwhelming odds.
Excerpt from Killing Maine
Dead of Winter
A COYOTE BARKED downhill. As I stopped to listen a bullet cracked past my ear and smacked into the maple tree beside me. I dove off the trail skidding down the icy slope toward the cliff. Whack another bullet smashed into a trunk as I tumbled past, couldn’t stop sliding, couldn’t pull off my snowshoes, the cliff edge coming up fast as a shot whistled past my eyes, another by my neck.
