“Awright! Far freaking out! Let’s try that again. Maybe we can— Jesus H. Christ!”
Jack had already seen it. His stomach was fluttering in awe. The news reports had mentioned it and he’d seen photos, but nothing had prepared him for the reality of it.
A whirlpool. A maelstrom. A swirling, pinwheeling, ten-mile-wide mass of water spread out below him like the planet’s navel. Its perimeter moved slowly where it edged into Kahului Bay, but quickly picked up speed as the water progressed inexorably toward the whirling center where it funneled down into a black hole somewhere far below in the ocean floor.
Both Jack and Frank stared dumbly through their windows on the first two passes, then Jack began noticing details.
“Frank!” Jack said, staring down on the third pass. “It looks like—”
He grabbed the binocs from the clamp in the ceiling panel and focused in on the colorful specs he’d spotted below, riding the rim of the maelstrom, then darting in toward its swirling heart and out again.
“What’s doing?”
“Windsurfers! There’s a bunch of nuts down there windsurfing along the edge of the whirlpool!”
“That’s Ho’okipa Bay, windsurfing capital of the world. Those dudes live for that shit. I know where they’re comin’ from. So do you, I reckon.”
“Yeah, I can dig it,” Jack said, nodding slowly. Jeez, he was starting to sound like Frank. “But one little slip and you’re gone.”
“Yeah, but what a way to go!” Frank said dreamily. “If I’ve gotta go, I want it to be right here, strapped into my jet. Stoked to the eyeballs and Mach one straight down into the earth so’s after we hit, me and the plane are so tangled and twisted up they can’t tell Frank Ashe from Frank Ashe’s plane and so they bury us together. Or better yet, straight down into one of those holes until I run into something or run out of fuel. Whatta trip that’d be! Might even try that one straight. Whatcha think?”
“Drop me off first. I think it’s time to land.”
Frank grinned. “Aw. And just when we was startin’ to have some fun!”
He radioed down to Kahului airport for clearance; they told him the winds were out of the west and that they’d cleaned off the runway. All was clear and he’d better land fast because once it was dark, the hangars would be locked and wouldn’t be opened for anyone.
“‘Cleaned off the runway’?” Frank said to Jack as he started his approach. “What’s that mean?”
They found out after they landed and opened the hatches. From off to the east came a dull roar, the low, gurgling rumble of uncountable tons of water being sucked down through the ocean depths. Looming behind them, Haleakala smoked and thundered. The steady breeze was warm and wet, and it stank.
“Sheesh!” Jack said as he stepped down onto the tarmac.
The ripe, putrid odor clogged his nose and throat. He shifted the strap of his duffel bag on his shoulder and glanced around at the deserted runways and empty buildings, searching for the source.
Frank made a face. “What is that, man?”
“Dead fish,” said Ba, debarking behind him. “I know that smell from village where I grew.”
“You get used to the pilau after a while,” said the tractor driver who’d come out to tow their jet into a nearby hangar.
“Don’t tell me Hawaii always smells like this.”
“Hell, no. Didn’t they tell you? It’s been raining fish the past two nights.”
“Fish?”
“Yeah. You name it: ahi, squid, crabs, blues, mahi-mahi, everything. Even a few dolphin. Raining out of the sky. And first thing every morning I’ve got to go out with the plow and clear them off the runways. Don’t know why I bother. Nobody’s flying much these days since all the tourists upped and went home.”
“But raining fish?”
“It’s the puka moana—the whirlpool. It backs up at night.”
With that he jumped on his tractor and started towing the jet toward the hangar, leaving Jack wondering how a whirlpool could back up. It wasn’t as if it were a toilet. Or was it?
Frank led them toward the terminal building.
“Let’s see what we can do about getting you guys a car.”
The main terminal building looked like an Atlantean relic raised from the sea. Its windows and skylights were smashed, rotting fish and seaweed draped its roof and walls. Inside was worse.
“Shee-it!” Frank said, waving his hand before his face. “Smells like a fish market that’s run out of ice.”
They trooped through the gloomy, deserted building, looking for someone, anyone. Finally they ran across a dark, middle-aged fat guy squeezing into a wrinkled sports jacket as he hurried toward them down a ramp. His badge read “Fred” and he looked part Hawaiian.
Jack waved him down. “Where are the car rentals?”
“There ain’t. All closed up. Nobody to rent to.”
“We need a car.”
“You’re outta luck, I’m afraid.”
Jack looked at Ba. “Looks like we’ll have to wait till morning, Ba. What do you say?”
Ba shook his head. “Too long away from the Missus.”
Jack nodded. He knew Ba was feeling the time pressure as much as he; maybe more. He grabbed the guy’s arm as he tried to squeeze by.
“You don’t understand, Fred. We really need a car.”
Fred tried to pull away but Jack tightened his grip on his flabby upper arm. Ba stepped closer and looked down at him.
“I can’t help you, Mister,” Fred said, wincing. “Now let me go. It’ll be getting dark in half an hour. I’ve got to get home.”
“Fine,” Jack said. “But we’re new around here and you’re not. And since you seem to be the only one around here, we’ve elected you to find us a car. And if you can’t help us out, we’ll be forced to take yours. We’ll pay you a generous rental price before we take it, but we will take it. So where do they keep the cars around here?”
Fred stared at Jack, then up at Ba, then at Frank who stood behind them. Jack felt a little sorry for the guy, but they had no time to play nice.
“Okay,” Fred said. “I can do that. I can show you to the rental lot. But I don’t know about keys or—”
“You let me worry about keys. You just get us there.”
“All right.” Fred glanced up through one of the broken skylights. “But we’ve got to hurry!”
Fred drove them to the rent-a-car lots, only a couple of hundred yards from the terminal. Jack used his Glock to shoot a link out of the chain locking the gate to the Avis area. Rotting fish littered the lot—on the cars, between the cars, in the lanes—and so the stench was especially vile here. Fred’s tires squished through them, spraying rotting entrails left or right whenever he ran over a particularly ripe one. He drove them around the return area until they found a Jeep Laredo. Jack was ready to hot-wire it but didn’t have to. The keys were in the ignition. It started easily. The fuel gauge read between half and three-quarters. That would be enough.
Jack returned to where Ba and Frank waited in Fred’s car. He pulled out the Maui road map Glaeken had given him and pointed to the red X drawn above a town called Kula.
“What’s the best way to get here—to Pali Drive?”
“You want to go upcountry? On Haleakala?” Fred said. “Now? With night coming? You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Fred,” Jack said, staring at him, “we’ve only known each other for a few minutes, but look at this face, Fred. Is this face kidding?”
“All right, all right. I’ve never heard of Pali Drive but this spot you’ve got marked here is somewhere between the Crater Road and Waipoli Road.”
He rattled off directions.
“But there’s nobody up there … except for the pupule kahuna and his witch woman.”
Jack grabbed Fred’s wrist. “Witch woman? Dark, Indian looking?”
“That’s the one. You know her?”
“Yeah. That’s who we’re going to see.”
Fred shook
his head. “Lots of strange stories coming downhill. Now I’m real glad you’re not taking my car. Because you ain’t coming back.”
“We’ll see about that.”
After Fred rushed off to drop Frank at the hangar where he planned to spend the night in his plane, Jack pushed a half dozen dead fish off the Jeep’s hood, unzipped his duffel bag, and began laying out its contents.
“Okay, Ba. Name your poison.”
He laid out the chew-wasp-toothed club Ba had given him, plus a .45 1911 Colt, a pair of Glock .40s, two HK MP5s, and a pair of Spas12 semiautomatic twelve-gauge assault shotguns with pistol grip stocks and extended magazines.
Ba didn’t hesitate. He picked out the 1911 and one of the shotguns. Jack nodded his approval. Good choices.
Ba turned the Spas12 over in his hands. “Semiautomatic?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah. Abe was fresh out of Benellis, but these’ll do.”
Jack already had his own Glock; he added the toothed billy, an MP5, and the remaining shotgun to his armament, then tossed a fifty-cartridge bandolier to Ba.
“You ride shotgun.”
Ba pumped the Spas12, checked the breach, then handed it to Jack.
“No,” he said, his face set in its usual mortician’s dead pan. “I am much better driver.”
“Oh, really?” Jack repressed a smile. This was the longest spontaneous comment he’d been able to elicit from Ba all day. “What makes you say that?”
“Driving to airport this morning.”
Jack snatched the offered shotgun from his grasp.
“Fine. You drive. But try not to wear me out with all your empty chatter as we go. It distracts me.”
They’d gone about half a dozen miles or so on Route 37—some of the signs called it “Haleakala Highway”—driving on stinking pavement slick with the crushed remains of countless dead fish. The outskirts of a town called Pukalani were in sight when Jack glanced back at the lowlands behind them. Fairly dark below, lights few and scattered, the airport completely dark. He glanced beyond the coast to the strange-faced moon peeking huge and full above the edge of the sea, but when he saw the sea itself, his heart fumbled a beat and he squinted through the thickening dusk to confirm what he thought he saw.
“Whoa, Ba,” he said, grabbing his shoulder. “Check out the whirlpool. Tell me if you see what I see.”
Ba braked and looked over his shoulder.
“There is no whirlpool.”
“Thank you. Then I’m not crazy.”
He wished he’d thought to bring the binocs, but even from this distance in the poor light it was plain the huge pinwheel of white water was gone.
Had the hole in the ocean floor closed up?
“I don’t understand any of this. But then, I’m not supposed to. That’s the whole point.”
He was about to tell Ba to drive on when he noticed a white area of water bubbling up where the center of the whirlpool had been. The bubbling grew, became more violent, and finally erupted into the night. Not volcanic fire, not steam, just water, a huge thick column of it, hundreds of feet across, geysering out of the ocean and lancing into the sky at an impossible speed. It roared upward, ever upward, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand feet into the air until it plumed into billowing cumulus clouds at its apex.
And it kept spewing, kept on pouring unmeasured thousands of tons of water into the sky.
“My … God!” was about all Jack could manage in the face of such a gargantuan surreal display.
“It is as the man said. Whirlpool back up at night.”
Ba threw the Jeep back into gear and continued up the highway. They had the road to themselves.
They’d traveled three or four miles uphill from Pukalani when heavy drops of seawater began to splatter all around them. Jack rolled up his window as the shower evolved into a deluge, forcing Ba to cut his pace.
A few minutes later, a blue-and-green parrot fish bounced off the hood with a nerve-jarring thunk. Then a bright yellow butterfly fish, then they were being pelted with sea life, banging on the hood, thudding on the top, littering the road ahead of them. The ones that didn’t burst open or die from the impact flopped and danced on the wet pavement in the glare of the headlights. A huge squid splatted against the windshield, momentarily blocking Ba’s vision; when it slid off he had to swerve violently to the right to avoid a six-foot porpoise stretched dead across the road.
And then fish weren’t the only things in the air. Chew wasps, spearheads, belly flies, men-of-war, and a couple of new species Jack hadn’t seen before began darting about. Ba accelerated. Jack was uneasy about traveling at this pace through pelting rain and falling fish over an unfamiliar road slick with dead or dying sea life. But the headlights and speed seemed to confuse the winged predators, and Ba plowed into the ones that wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way.
After they passed through Kula, Jack spotted the turnoff. Ba slid the Jeep into the hairpin turn as smoothly as a movie stuntman, downshifted, and roared up the incline.
Jack had to admit—silently, and only to himself—that Ba was indeed the better driver.
The Waipoli Road turnoff came up so quickly they overshot it. But Ba had them around and back on track in seconds. And then the going got really rough. The pavement disappeared and devolved into an ungraded road that wound back and forth in sharp switchbacks up a steep incline. The slower pace allowed the night things to zero in on the Jeep. They began battering the windows.
But soon the headlights picked out a brightly painted hand-carved sign that read Pali Drive. Ba made the turn and the road narrowed to a pair of ruts. They bounced along its puddled length until it ended at the cantilevered underbelly of a cedar-sided house overlooking the valley. Ba stopped with the headlights trained on a narrow door in the concrete foundation.
Jack rechecked his map and notes by the dashboard light.
“This is it. Think anybody’s home?”
Ba squinted through the windshield. “There are lights.”
“So there are. I guess that means we’ve got to go in.”
A spearhead rammed the tip of its spike through the roof then. Hungry little tongues wiggled through the openings behind the point and lapped at empty air. As it pulled back, seawater began to dribble in through the hole.
“Let’s go,” Jack said. “Shotguns and clubs?”
Ba nodded and picked up the other Spas-12.
“Okay. We meet at the front bumper and head for the house back-to-back. Use the shotgun only if you have to. Go!”
Jack kicked open his door, leapt into the downpour, and dashed-splashed toward the front of the Jeep. Something fluttered near his head; without looking he lashed out at it with the wasp-toothed billy. A crunch, a tear, and whatever it was tumbled away. He met Ba in the glow of the headlights and they slammed their backs together. A spearhead darted through the light, low, toward Jack’s groin, while a belly fly sailed in toward his face. The wound where the first belly fly had caught him on the arm had healed, but he remembered the pain. He wasn’t about to let this one in close. He swung the club at the spearhead and shredded its wings while ramming the muzzle of the shotgun into the belly fly’s acid sac, rupturing it.
“Let’s move!” Jack shouted. “I’ll lead.”
Like a pair of Siamese twins fused at the spine, they moved toward the door, Jack clearing a path with his billy and shotgun, Ba backpedaling, protecting the rear. When he reached the door, Jack began pounding on its hardwood surface, then decided he couldn’t wait. He handed Ba his billy and pulled the plastic strip from his pocket, all the while congratulating himself for bringing Ba along. The big guy was faced into the headlights now, a club in each hand, batting the bugs away left and right. Fortunately, they weren’t nearly as thick here as they’d been in New York, but even so, without Ba, Jack would have been eaten alive as he faced the door.
He quickly slipped the latch and they burst into a utility room. He spotted a sink and a washing machine before they slammed
the door closed behind them and stood panting and dripping in the safe quiet darkness.
“You okay?”
“Yes,” Ba said. “And you?”
“I’m just groovy. Let’s go see who—”
Suddenly the overhead lights went on. A tall, dark-skinned man with reddish hair stood in the doorway. He was dressed in a loincloth and a feather headdress and Jack might have laughed except that he was pointing a Marlin 336 their way.
“Who are you?”
Jack put up his hands. “Just travelers seeking shelter from the storm.”
“No shelter here for malihini.” He stepped forward and raised the rifle. “Get out! Hele aku oe!”
“Easy there,” Jack said. “We’re looking for Miss Bahkti, Kolabati Bahkti. We were told she lived here.”
“Never heard of her. Out!”
Even if the guy hadn’t flinched at the sound of her name, the necklace around his neck, a perfect match to the copy Jack carried in his pocket, would have proved him a liar.
Then Jack heard a woman’s voice call his name.
“Jack!”
Kolabati had followed Moki down to the lower level to see who was pounding on the door; she’d hung back in the dark hallway, watching the scene in the utility room over Moki’s shoulder. Two wet and weary men there, one white, the other a tall Asian. Something about the smaller man, the brown-haired, brown-eyed Caucasian, had struck her immediately as familiar. But she didn’t recognize him until he spoke her name. It couldn’t be! But even with his hair plastered to his scalp and down over his forehead, he could be no one else. Her heart leapt at the sight of him.
She brushed past Moki and ran to him, arms outstretched. Never in her life had she been so glad to see someone.
“Oh, Jack, I thought you were dead!”
She threw her arms around his neck and clung to him. He returned the embrace, but without much enthusiasm.