'One if by land'

1. Malibu, Sunset

Have you ever had the rug pulled out from under you while you were spinning around? Have you ever been unsure whether you’ve been dumped, semi-dumped, rejected, or just put on ice to cool your heels?

Mitch was badly confused. He planned the evening carefully; he thought all was going well. Did she know what he was about to say and did she react to that? She was intuitive like his cousin Sandra, an L.A. lawyer who was practically psychic, an asset in her practice. Did something tip her off? It was certainly possible. Her intelligence was a match for anyone he knew, and she had a social shrewdness well beyond her years. It was slightly embarrassing when his new pet, a rare, periwinkle gecko he’d named Perry had popped his head out of his pants pocket. Even so…

He’d ordered dinner from what he assumed was still her favorite French restaurant, and he’d tipped the Maître D. in advance to make sure of the quality, which was superb. A Vichysoisse as smooth as silk, accompanied by a rare Chardonnay so good no one would dream of oaking it. Escargots with a raspberry vinaigrette, then, abruptly, she said she couldn’t stay, strode off the sunset terrace with her back to the ocean, heels clicking on the marble, right through his living room and out the front door without a word of explanation. “I just can’t stay.” What did that mean?

Mitch knew he didn’t really understand women—what man does?—but this was a whole new level of bewilderment. Batteries and chips, the silicone of Silicone Valley that he worked with every day, could be complicated, very tough to crack, but if you kept at it, you understood them. This situation? Not so much.

He stoppered the wine, put the perishables in the fridge and started to clear, only half his mind on what he was doing, well less than half, truth be told. The crystal he set aside to wash by hand. The porcelain plates would be fine on the china cycle. Passing her chair, he glanced at the floor, and saw a thumb drive. He seized it immediately. Perfect! A rock-solid reason to phone her and figure out what on earth she meant. It was a half-hour drive to her apartment. He would wait, call her when she was there, settled, that would be best. 8 o’clock. He would call then.

What was on the thumb drive and would it explain her rash exit? No! No! It wasn’t his thumb drive and he had no right to read it. Right? If I read her thumb drive without her permission, she’ll be upset. At least one of the voices in his head was making sense, and that reassured him. No, I’ll phone her and say you left your thumb drive behind. I thought you might need it. And why did you have to leave? Hmmn, was that last question smart?

Another voice: What if something’s going on? What if there’s trouble? Exigent circumstances, the law called them, at least on television. I could check it out then. He plopped himself on the love seat. What a stupid, annoying name for an irritating piece of furniture. Love seat. He’d been waiting so long. Then the scientist’s voice spoke up. Review. Review your data before you take another step. Review before you make a mistake.

19 years ago, Sarita’s parents, his family’s friends, had died in a car accident. There was no one to take her in. Mitch’s mother had a deep mistrust of foster care, and insisted that they adopt her. She was five. He was eleven. He made a solemn promise to protect and watch over her as a brother.

When he came to have more than brotherly feelings for her, his parents noticed immediately and they had “a talk.” His mother told him he had to date other girls and later other women. His father told him pointedly he could not even consider expressing feelings for Sarita until she had lived elsewhere and had finished university and he was at least thirty.

He had followed those rules to the letter. He dated smart, attractive women with lots to offer, but it never led anywhere. Was it because he was not good with women? No, in fact one had proposed. It was because he compared them all to her, and they all came up short in the economy of his heart. And after all, at the dawn, middle, or end of the day, what other currency is there?

When his own parents died suddenly a year ago, that determination nearly unravelled. Their death hit them both hard. In their shared grief there were long embraces, and he managed to stop himself from going farther only because he could not bear the thought of messing up the future, if they had a future, which he didn’t know. And now she had finished university and he was thirty, and this was to be the night when he spoke, slowly at first, a speech that he had rehearsed thirty times, and not been satisfied with once. And now what?

At five to eight he called her cell phone, which went straight to voice mail. “Please leave a message. I will be away from my desk until Saturday the tenth.” Eight days? Eight days! This changed everything. There was no one else to call. They were each other’s emergency contacts. She might need something on the thumb drive, mightn’t she? Exigent circumstances!

Mitch shoved the drive in his desktop. Encrypted. Damn! He whipped out his phone and called his cousin. “Sandra, I need Stan to unlock a thumb drive for me. It’s an emergency. Well it could be an emergency.”

“Slow down, Mitch, you don’t sound like your usual calm self. Are you okay?”

“I will be if I can read this drive. Can Stan come now?”

“We’ll both be right over.”

It was a relief that Sandra and Stan lived just down the road, and that Sandra knew his story, even his plan, not to pop the question tonight, but to change their relationship, to explore, oh what does it matter now?

Stan went to work on the drive and Sandra asked for details. Mitch made his way over to her. “What did the two of you say, and what happened?”

“I congratulated her on her graduation and said I hoped she would tell me about her new job. She said sure, but to tell her what’s up with me at work first. I said not much. I mentioned the contract for the new batteries without giving names or details. Then she just bolted.”

“The long-distance batteries for the electric cars you’re excited about?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” Mitch arched his brow. He didn’t know his cousin paid attention to his projects.

“Then she bolted?”

“Straight out the door. She practically ran in those heels.”

“You didn’t show her a ring or something?”

“Of course not. It was just a prelude to a first date.”

“I don’t know Mitch, but I don’t think you’ve been dumped.”

Mitch was all attention. “How d’you figure?”

“Well you didn’t get far enough along to make the kind of personal comments that would have told her where you were heading. Could it be something to do with the batteries? She is an ecologist, right? Minor in anthropology?”

Stan interrupted. “I can’t read much. There’s tomorrow’s date and a time: 0900. Military style. And I can get a single word. ‘Cobalt.’”

“That’s it!” Sandra exclaimed. “That’s got to be it!”

“What?” both men asked.

Sandra explained. “Don’t you read the news? The Cobalt Corporation is a conglomerate just formed after the worldwide targets were made for controlling the temperature rise. Mitch’s batteries will use rare earth minerals. Cobalt, lithium, the white gold rush—that’s what the L.A. Times calls it. Their company is trying to collect as many of the minerals as it can to monopolize the supply and hike up the price. You find the stuff on underwater mountains in relatively shallow water. There’s a heap just off the coast of Hawaii. The state and environmental groups want to stop them from harvesting there. They’ve hired my firm. For one thing they’d need a staging post, probably in a protected area on the coast of Kauai. Apart from the ecological damage and the plan to dominate the mineral market, that’s sacred land to Hawaiians. The Cobalt Corp. is about as ruthless as any corporation in their position. There are rumors that one of their subsidiaries, and I can tell you there are a lot of ‘em, has infiltrated government agencies.”

Stan interrupted. “The co-ordinates are on Kauai, all right, right along the Napali coast.”

“That fits,” Mitch started to understand. “There are blowholes, tunnels, and other caves there. You could pull a sub right up to the coast, unload your minerals, board it again, and get more with no one knowing, then take off to the open seas. No one would know how much rare mineral cargo you had.”

“Whatever Sarita’s doing, when you said minerals and batteries she put two and two together, and maybe it was a conflict of interest for her to hear any more. So she left right away. What’s her job? Who’s she working for?”

“That’s just it, I don’t know. She was going to tell me tonight,” Mitch explained.

Stan worked his cell. “I have a buddy from my tour in Afghanistan,” he said tersely. His eyes widened as he listened to the muted telephone. After a couple of minutes, he hung up and turned to them. “Okay whatever it is, it’s big and it’s top secret. Everyone’s been ordered to stay away from Kauai tomorrow. It’s billed as a live fire exercise, special war games. But everyone knows that’s just a cover. No weapons are ever allowed on Kauai. Why would there be a live fire exercise? Something’s going down. Where does this all stand legally?”

Sandra explained. “We’ve gotten an international order restraining anyone from extracting the minerals. Practically speaking that means no ships are allowed in the area. The minerals are far enough off Kauai that they’re in disputed waters. It depends on which standard you use for territorial waters. Twelve nautical miles off the coast? Twenty-four? More? The U.S. can’t push the court for the maximum because we dispute Canada’s claims in the Arctic Ocean. We want passage through there, so we argue for a low limit of territorial waters in that case.”

Stan followed well. “So no ships in the area and that applies to the corporation and to the navy. There’ll be satellite surveillance of the surface. They’ll use a sub. We could track their sub with our subs and sonar, but you can’t stop a sub with a blockade, and no one’s going to torpedo a civilian sub.”

“Exactly,” Sandra agreed. “They’ll stage their mining operation from the coast, approach by land, work with the sub back and forth, then slip the minerals out in a sub, which we can’t stop. The interdiction has to be done on land, before they get to their staging spot. That’s hereditary land, so whatever our forces are doing, it’s going to be minimal. I would say maximum six or eight people, and bows and arrows, maybe crossbows only.”

“Sarita’s sport is archery,” Mitch noted, and they all fell silent. Mitch continued, “Sarita’s young and she’s in over her head. I’ve got to go there. I’ve got to protect her.”

Sandra objected. “Hmmn, I dunno, Mitch. You’re great in the lab, but against weapons? If Cobalt has a man there, he’ll have a gun. Have you ever even shot an arrow?”

“I’ve used a starter’s pistol for a charity race,” Mitch offered weakly.

“Well this time you would need good aim,” Stan said kindly. “And it might be bullets coming back at you.”

It is always good to have a practical cousin, one who can take charge in a crisis. “Okay,” Sandra announced, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Mitch, get us three reservations for the red-eye to Hawaii tonight. Pack your bag. No firearms, no bows and arrows, no knives, no weapons of any kind. Got that? Stan, how do two men survive entering into a designated live fire zone?”

“No weapons?” Mitch asked weakly, knowing it was a ridiculous question.

“Sandra’s right,“ Stan answered. If we cross that live fire perimeter carrying crossbows, you’re liable to get an arrow in the chest from the lady you’re hoping to date. And no camouflage.”

“Well what do we wear then? Black?” Mitch asked, his only reference to special operations what he’d seen on television.

“No,” Stan thought for a moment, “pack the brightest, loudest Hawaiian shirt you have and pack one for me. If we encounter armed friendlies or otherwise, they’ll be thrown off for a minute before they shoot. They’ll say who are those two idiots in the shirts? That gives Sarita a chance to say Mitch is that you, or something like that.”

“One more thing, Mitch,” Sandra added. “I’m phoning Roya. You need some calm and clarity and she’ll help you get it before we board that plane.”

“Roya your friend the psychic? I’ve never really understood that.”

“Roya the empathic Tantric Zoroastrian,” she clarified. “And you need a clear head before you go marching into a military operation. And Mitch, Perry stays here.”

“Why?” Mitch asked, suddenly sounded like a seven-year old.

“Reptiles aren’t allowed in Hawaii,” Stan noted.

“Perry is not …” Mitch protested.

“Mitchell, get packing!” his cousin commanded. She was fierce in a courtroom too.

2. The Hills Late Evening

In half an hour, E-tickets in hand, the trio was driving up the hills to the Zoroastrian in Mitch’s Mazda CX9. The SUV easily navigated the mountain road to the Tantric Center at the top. Sandra thanked Roya for seeing them at short notice. The mystic looked curiously at the vehicle. “Mitchell, you arrive at my temple in a moment of crisis, travelling in the chariot of the great Ahura Mazda.”

Mitch had never put the Mazda brand together with the Zoroastrian deity. He resolved to address his GPS with greater respect.

A blonde assistant ushered him into a change room. He was told to bring only his three towels into the steam room and lie face down on the massage table. “The steam purifies the psychic senses,” the assistant explained.

“I don’t smell eucalyptus,” Mitch observed.

“No, it’s sandalwood,” the assistant seemed amused. What was so funny about eucalyptus?

Roya was with Sandra and Stan, behind glass in an observation room. Well you couldn’t expect a mystic to sweat several times a day, he supposed. At a gesture from Roya the assistant took a pair of tongs to some kind of heater. Oh, hot rocks, he realized. She dropped the first one on his butt crack. Do I really have a chakra there? he wondered silently, flinching with the heat.

More rocks followed, working up his spine. Suddenly, with the sixth rock, a vision broke into his consciousness. A ship had foundered. He saw himself running into the water with others to rescue survivors. There was a tiny white child and he scooped her up. Where was he? Hawaii, it seemed. When he came to, the assistant moved the rocks and told him to get changed. What did it mean?

Roya and his friends were waiting. The mystic spoke briefly and to the point. “The two of you are tied together from another lifetime when you saved her life and took her as your own. I don’t know how it will work out this time. Will you save her? Will she save you? But what are you waiting for? Go to her!”

Stan took the wheel and drove them towards the airport.

“What did you tell her?” Mitch demanded.

“Nothing,” Sandra answered. “Nothing at all. She saw it all herself. She had the same vision you did.”

There were few passengers for the red eye, so the security and boarding went quickly. Mitch took the aisle seat, reached into his pocket, and popped a pill.

“Panic pill?” Stan asked.

“Claustrophobia,” Mitch explained.

Stan thought about his expansive frame for a minute, understood the reason for the CX9, and asked, “Any other phobias we should know about?”

“Nope, just spiders,” Mitch replied, and closed his eyes.

3. Hanalei, Kauai, Pre-Dawn

1 Hotel in Hanalei was not only luxurious, it was efficient. Stan returned with a package from his contact—maps and flares. He passed out pagers. “Cell phones won’t work everywhere,” he explained. Send 3 if you’re in trouble, 4 if you’ve succeeded.

“What are 1 and 2 for?” Mitched asked.

“Paul Revere code,” Stan said. “We’re going to a blow hole, on the coast.”

Sandra took charge. “You two take the trail,” she said. “I know a judge. If what we think is going down, we’re going need an order and some action pretty damn quick.”

4. Head of the Kalalau Trail, Napali, Kauai, Dawn

Stan parked the Jeep in the parking lot and they headed down trail, the Pacific below them on their right, dense rainforest on the left. They passed some disgruntled latter-day hippies. “Man the Feds have some nerve, rousting us out in the dark. For what? Some crazy military mission? I’d turn back guys.”

“He’s right,” Stan said, “we have to walk in the interior.”

“In the rainforest?” Mitch asked, hardly able to believe his ears.

“Only way,” Stan answered.

5. 0700 1 Hotel

Sandra’s friend on the bench was an early riser. Over her morning coffee (Kona, of course!) she explained the problem was a matter of national and international security. “Do you have a contact in the navy?” she asked.

The judged knew a naval lawyer, highly placed, and he put him on the call. She told her story to both.

The naval lawyer answered, “Young lady all of this is highly classified. If, and I emphasize if, there is the possibility of an incident of the kind you are describing, why is it you doubt the ability of the armed forces to contain it, to interdict?”

“Because you can’t attack or even board a sub without cause, without proof,” she explained. “You probably have a good location on that sub, but you can’t do a thing unless you catch them in the act. You have a team on the ground, and you’re waiting for confirmation from them before you move, by which time it may be too late, if you even get that confirmation.”

The judge was intrigued. The naval lawyer took a deep breath. “Okay. We’re very concerned about those metals. And I don’t know who you are, but let’s say for a minute you’re right. What can you do that we cannot?”

Sandra replied, “My husband and cousin are on the ground. They’ll get your confirmation. I’m waiting for a page any minute. Unless you have somewhere else you need to be …”

The navy man took the full measure of her. “I’m staying right on this call,” he said. “And I’m alerting command to wait for word from me.”

6. Near the Napali coast. 0930.

Up a tree with a crossbow. It doesn’t get much more romantic than this, Sarita thought. No sign of Cobalt. She was in the forward position, near the blow hole their intel had marked. The three other team members, Larry, Morgan, and Jim with the curly hair (privately she thought of them as The Three Stooges) were a good distance behind her. No word from them. It was time to check in, so she paged. No response. She paged again. Nothing. There was a crackling behind her on the ground. It was Jim, team leader, and he motioned her to descend.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’ll blow our surveillance.”

“Look,” Jim pointed. A sharp pain in her head, then everything went black.

7. Off the trail. 1000

Their progress was slow but steady. They followed the GPS. Stan pointed to the top layer of the triple canopy. “Someone abandoned that post,” he said quietly, or was removed from it.”

They quickened their pace. Stan twisted an ankle. “Damn,” he said. “It’s only half a mile, but I’ll slow you down. You take the GPS and two of the flares. Leave me the radio. I’m paging Sandra now!”

Mitch sped up, spurred on by determination. The terrain was rough, but he covered it quickly, GPS on silent. Suddenly the dot centered. Arrival point! Sure enough there was the entrance to a blow hole. He took a close look. There was a petroglyph of a spider. His pulse quickened. The Hawaiians worship the cave wolf spider. The creatures are blind, and they sense movement. They are also very venomous. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pill. I was saving you for the flight back, he thought, but spiders in a blow hole? I need you now.

Inside, he heard voices. One was Sarita, he was fairly sure. The other was male. “Just stay still, honey,” the man said, “I’ll kill you with a knife if you make trouble, but a bullet’s less messy. Easier for me, easier for you. I can’t fire until we shove off, so just chill for now, or we’ll do this the hard way.”

Mitch threw a rock to make noise. The man was distracted and started to look around. It bought Mitch the time he needed to gain the chamber where she was being held. She sat, bound and gagged, blood on her face. There were Wolf spiders and they were restless. “What’s this? An oversized tourist in an ugly shirt contest?”

The sight of the spiders had Mitch rooted to the spot, but he found some bravado. “Come over here and criticize my shirt!” he taunted. The criminal walked towards him. But the spiders were faster. The venom worked instantly. The more he flailed and stomped the more they were attracted to him. There must have been a hundred.

Preoccupied with their prey, which would not survive long, they did not take notice as Mitch bravely slipped past them to free Sarita. She breathed with relief. “You found the thumb drive. But how’d you put it all together?”

“Sandra,” he answered. He glanced at his pager; she’d sent the number 4. “How many enemies here?”

“Just him. The rest are in the water.”

“Then let’s go down to the ocean, double time.” They reached it in two minutes. “I’m guessing that when I show my face that sub will want to surface.”

It did, about fifty yards off their position. Mitch lofted one flare straight overhead. The other he landed on the sub, greatly to the confusion of the enemy. She looked at him. “Remember?” he asked. “Archery is your sport. Football was mine. Quarterback,” and he beamed.

The sub crew was preoccupied with the fire from the flare. A chopper landed on the water and a gunboat sped up. “Unauthorized vessel, prepare to be boarded,” the captain shouted through the megaphone.

Mitch took his pager and sent the number 2 to his cousin. “What are you doing?” Sarita wondered.

“Well I guess Sandra got her order,” Mitch mused. “I don’t fancy walking back. Besides, you need that tended to. He pointed to the gash on her head. Stan said use the Paul Revere code, so 1 if by land, 2 if by sea. I just paged 2. They’ll pick us up here, but we have a minute or two to wait.”

“And?” she asked.

Mitch thought for a moment. All of his planned speeches seemed ridiculous. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he began. The gecko popped out of his pocket.