Police vehicles with piercing sirens pursuing the sedan slammed past him and Patrick, the two of them standing outside the stolen truck. One police SUV stopped alongside them. Chief Terry Koo exited, gave Philo the visual once-over. He directed one of his cops to Philo’s side to give him something to lean on, then he spoke.
“You said something about a hostage, Trout?”
His 9-1-1 call.
“Yeah. Back seat, Chief, a woman wrapped in a tarp. They drugged her, then they cut her open. She would have been the next evisceration murder. She needs an ambulance—”
“You have a name for her?”
He looked at the street sweeper, the truck full of bullet holes, all its glass shattered, its engine compartment hissing steam, and one front tire flat. His disjointed conversation with Kaipo was still fresh in his mind. Mostly incoherent, it had been coherent enough, especially the promise he made to her.
“Yes. First name is Aiata, last name Hauata.”
35
Ella Waumami’s husband Ben pushed the small, overburdened buckboard wagon out of the storage space in the rear of the church, then closed the double door, not bothering to padlock it. He guided the wagon outside the church, where Ella’s horse Kumu awaited him. Full moon; Ben didn’t need a flashlight. He spoke to Kumu in a soothing tone, then hitched her up to the wagon, her disposition changing as soon as Ben climbed into the buckboard seat, with her becoming all business. She met his command for her to pull with eagerness and determination. They made a stop at the settlement’s community garden to retrieve bushel baskets of gathered vegetables: squash, cucumbers, onions, some sweet potatoes. Ben deposited the baskets in the back of the buckboard, filling in whatever empty space remained around a tightly tarpaulined payload.
A yacht coasted quietly into the sleepy Miakamii lagoon, no running lights, almost no wake, under moonlit skies. The engine shut down. Six men climbed overboard into an inflated skiff and motored away from the cruiser. They beached, climbed out, and assembled on the sand, overdressed in dark business suits, and over-armed, on so peaceful an island, with AR-15s. One man took command, said “Follow me” in Japanese, and they filed in behind his lead.
They entered the interior scrub on a dirt path, the leader demanding they stay quiet. A clearing spread open before them, the island’s school, church, farmland, vegetable gardens, and smelly, decomposing livestock carcasses, and the crashed helicopter halves strapped and chained on large sleds, ready for transport to the beach, closer to the ocean. The dead copter pieces generated muted conversation, the men grabbing parts from tables and large canvas bags, winging them in all directions into the jungle, snickering at their cleverness, their disdain for the investigation and for this island full of backward, simple, vulnerable people. They dragged cardboard boxes off folding tables, tipped them over and spilled them out, then urinated on the littered helicopter parts.
Another path led to a new clearing. Volcanic ash underfoot gave way to a furrowed dirty rut that was fifty, sixty yards in length, at its end a memorial plaque in English on a concrete stand. The event the plaque commemorated: the crash of a WWII Japanese Zero in this very space after its Pearl Harbor sneak attack, its rusted hulk hauled away decades later for research and to validate the wartime historical event. The men gathered around the plaque, bowing in prayer, offering thanks to their pilot and other Samurai heroes in kami-no-michi, or Shintoism. Their prayers and the clearing left behind, they reached their destination: the settlement with the island’s only population, its defenseless houses and huts peppering this elevation and northward, up a gentle sway of a hill. They began their ascent.
A front door exploded behind vicious leg kicks, two Yakuza men leading with guns and flashlights, the living room unlit, unoccupied. They kicked through brittle wooden chairs and tables, shoved a parlor sofa aside, stormed the dining room, the kitchen, the two bedrooms at the rear of the house, found no one inside. The hut across the path faced a similar assault, a residence furnished for occupation by simple, indigenous people, the other two men strafing the entire interior with semiautomatic fire when finding no one inside to execute.
Two more small, simple, dust-laden, cobwebbed homes, two more residences obliterated with gunfire, neither with any people in them.
The lead executioner found a phone signal and made a call, began speaking in Japanese. “There is no one here in these homes, Oyabun. No one to kill…”
“You are wrong, you idiot!” Mr. Yabuki said. “Search every house in that bung-hole of a settlement. There are still many people on that island! The census says so. Find them. Exterminate them. Restore your country’s honor. Honor the Samurai…!”
The Yakuza leader assembled his men outside, eyed the higher elevation in front of them. More homes at intervals, four, five plus, a little larger than the ones they’d checked already. The largest homestead in the settlement, a farm, sat atop the hill.
“There,” he said, pointing. “The one at the top of this ridge. Our next target. If anyone is in this backward, scrub-fish shithole of a village, it will be there.”
The path opened up. At the end of it was a barn, a two-story house, a grain silo, and multiple fenced yards. Squealing pigs, sheep, and two horses roamed a corral outside a stable, the horses breathing heavily. The six men each caught their breath while checking the magnificent moonlit view and sightlines at this altitude: the lagoon with their moored cruiser, the beach with the inflatable outboard, a starry-starry night, the moon aglow. Across the channel and seventeen nautical miles away sat Kauai, the island illuminated and sparkling with nightlife. Breathtaking.
Barn first. Roaming, clucking chickens squawked at their arrival, each man tempted to blow them away in a flurry of bullets, but all were kept alive by the leader’s finger to his lips, demanding silence. Next, the house. On quiet feet they moved from room
