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Maybe Kukailimoku, the Hawaiian god of war. He’d be a good one to recruit, when bullets were about to fly—but would he save two Polynesians and a haole who were bent on ruining the plans of Pele’s Fire?
The worst part, Aolani thought, was that she didn’t even know the goddamned plan. Polunu had either kept the details to himself, or really didn’t know them in the first place.
Either way, it seemed that curiosity was proving fatal once again.
BOLAN SAW Aolani roll across the Datsun’s hood and drop into a crouch behind the vehicle, as high-beam headlights from the two chase cars swept their position. They had gained maybe ten seconds from the swerve off Outer Drive. One of the chase cars skidded past their turnoff, while the other nearly stalled, but both cars had them covered now, doors flying open as gunners hit the ground running.
Bolan didn’t wait for them to organize. He fired a 3-round burst into the nearer chase car’s windshield, where the driver’s head should be, and thought he heard a strangled cry before all hell broke loose around him.
Bolan couldn’t accurately count the muzzle-flashes winking at him from behind the headlights, but he thought that there were only five. If he was right, if he had drawn first blood with the unlucky driver, then he had already shaved the hostile odds by about seventeen percent.
Which still left five assassins, armed and angry, throwing down at him with everything they had.
Aolani’s car would never be the same. Bullets were raking it from grille to trunk along the driver’s side, some of them coming through the now shattered windows. So far, Bolan could not smell any leaking gasoline, but that was just dumb luck. Both tires were already deflated on the driver’s side, and Bolan knew they wouldn’t leave the Punchbowl in the Datsun.
Assuming that they ever left at all.
He wished the gun fairy had left him something more substantial in the Honolulu airport locker—possibly a compact submachine gun; better yet, some frag grenades—but he would have to work with what he had. The 93-R was a potent close-range weapon, but its Parabellum rounds could only do so much against vehicles.
But he didn’t want to wreck the chase cars, anyway.
Without at least one of them functioning, he’d have to walk back to his rental car at the Royal Mausoleum.
There came a lull in firing from the other side, perhaps his enemies reloading, but he didn’t trust the sudden silence. Peering cautiously around the listing tail of Aolani’s Datsun, Bolan saw two shadow men breaking from cover, running to his left as if their lives depended on it.
Which they did.
Flankers, he thought, and reckoned one or two more would be making the same run off to his right, encircling Bolan’s weak position. Once they faded into darkness there, they could drift back and bring him under fire, drilling their hapless targets in the back while others hiding by the chase cars kept him occupied.
But not these two.
Lying on his left side, Bolan fired twice, two 3-round bursts at moving targets twenty yards or less in front of him. It wasn’t quite point-blank, but it was close enough.
The first man stumbled, clutching both arms to his chest and tumbled like a mannequin, his face slamming hard against the gravel of the access road. He shivered once or twice, then lay deathly still.
The second runner saw his comrade drop and tried to turn away from Bolan’s bullets, but he didn’t have that kind of speed. The bullets spun him like a novice dancer, trying out a pirouette he hasn’t mastered, lurching and collapsing midway through the spin. This time, death didn’t seem to be immediate, but from the spastic thrashing he observed, Bolan had no concern about his last mark rising to rejoin the fight.
He’d cut the odds by half, unless his adversaries had more men than he had counted at the onset. That was good, but Bolan had no time for self-congratulation. Rather, he assumed that one or two gunmen had flanked him on the right, while he was dealing with their comrades.
He would have to deal with them, if he intended to survive. And living on to fight another day was always part of Bolan’s master plan.
He crawled to Aolani, clutched her arm and drew her close, speaking into her ear without raising his voice. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”
“You’ll be back soon?” she echoed, sounding horrified. “What are you doing, going out for coffee?”
“Just stay put!” he hissed at her. “Stay quiet, and stay down. Do that, you just might stay alive.”
That said, he turned and scuttled off into the darkness.
TOMMY PUANANI SAW his brother fall, with Billy Maka Nani right behind him. Shot down, both of them, and if they weren’t already dead, he guessed they would be soon.
Goddamn it! How was he supposed to tell his mother that he’d gotten little Ehu killed?
“Fuck!” he said.
“Say what?” asked Steve Pilialoha, crouched beside him in the shadow of their stolen car.
“Nothing. Did Benny make it?”
“I think so. Hard to tell, it’s so damn dark out here.”
Tommy had meant to send one man around in each direction—Ben Makani to his right and Billy Maka Nani to the left—flanking the three they meant to waste. But Ehu wouldn’t take no for an answer, damn his stubborn ass. Not only was he set on going to the right, with Billy, but he broke from cover early, making Billy hustle to catch up.
Now both of them were dead, because his goddamned little brother was a stupid brat.
And John Kainoa, too, though that one wasn’t Ehu’s fault. One of the bastards they were hunting had some kind of automatic weapon, and he’d nailed John through the windshield of their second chase car right away, before John even had a chance to kill the engine.
It was idling even now, with John slumped over in the driver’s seat, blood leaking from his shattered face. Just then Tommy considered what would happen if the car slipped into gear and started rolling forward. If it maybe had some help, and slammed into the bullet-riddled Datsun, for instance.
How would that be?
Pretty goddamned good.
“I’ve got a plan,” he whispered.
“What, another one?” Pilialoha sounded skeptical.
“Shut up and listen. We can flush ’em out, we play our cards right.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“John’s ride. One of us goes around to diddle the accelerator, then we give a shove, and bam!”
“It’s not that far,” Pilialoha said. “It won’t be going very fast.”
“Won’t have to be,” Tommy replied. “If the impact doesn’t bring ’em out, we sit back here and shoot the shit out of the gas tank. Light ’em up.”
“Sounds risky.”
“Breathing’s risky. Would you rather just sit here and jerk off till the cops show up?”
“No, hell, let’s do it.” Pilialoha paused then, frowning, and asked, “Who’s rigging the gas pedal?”
“You’re the mechanical genius.”
“Fuck me!”
I just did, brudda, Tommy thought, but settled for, “Go on. I’ll cover you.”
“That’s great.”
While Pilialoha began duck-walking over gravel, holding his shotgun like a tightrope walker’s balancing rod, Tommy pulled the nearly empty magazine from his Uzi and replaced it with a fresh one. Stuffed the almost-empty clip into his pocket, just in case he needed one more burst to finish what they’d started here, before they split.
There’d been no shooting from the Datsun since Ehu and Billy went down, but what did that mean? Tommy, enraged, had fired off half a magazine after his brother fell, but had no reason to believe that he’d hit anyone. A lucky shot, perhaps, one in a million, but he didn’t really think so.
Now, he had to ask himself: who had the gun? Polunu or the haole stranger? Tommy couldn’t picture Aolani as a threat, in terms of shooting anyone, but Polunu—while a traitor—had been trained to handle weapons.
And the haole? Who in hell was he?
Check his ID after he’s dead, the small voice answered.
“Right.”
The dome lights in the second chase car flared as Pilialoha opened the driver’s door. Tommy flinched from John Kainoa’s shredded face, the blood that dribbled from his chin and streaked the inside of the punctured windshield. He imagined Steve reaching for the gas pedal, between John’s sagging legs.
And still no shooting from the Datsun.
Had their enemy run out of bullets? Was he waiting to find out what they’d try next?
Benny Makani hadn’t fired a shot since running off into the night, so Tommy guessed he hadn’t flanked their targets yet. What would they do if he just kept on running? Lost his nerve and didn’t even try to take out their opponents?
“Kill him,” Tommy muttered to himself. “I’ll kill him nice and slow.”
The second chase car’s engine revved, its harsh sound startling Tommy back to the here and now. He turned and lurched off toward its trunk, prepared to do his part and set it rolling toward the enemy.
They’ve had it now, he thought, unconscious of the fact that he was talking to himself again.
“You’ve fucking had it now.”
THE FLANKER WHO’D been sent to Bolan’s right was on his own. Bolan had no idea what made them send two men in one direction, while another went alone, nor did he care. It was enough to know he hadn’t missed a shooter in the darkness.
The guy was cautious, Bolan gave him that, but caution slowed him. A well-trained soldier would’ve taken half the time to cover forty yards, and likely would’ve been in place before Bolan was ready to receive him.
Not this guy.
A revolutionary he might be, at least in theory, but a soldier trained for war?
Not even close.
Shuffling footsteps on gravel marked his progress before Bolan saw him. The stalker carried a Kalashnikov but never had a chance to use it. The Executioner nailed him with a single shot, snapping the gunman’s head back.
Easy.
When he was satisfied that no backup was coming from the shadows, Bolan closed the gap, relieved his lifeless adversary of his AK-47 and a spare clip that protruded from his pocket. Two heartbeats to check the captured rifle, and he doubled back to join his companions under fire.
And just in time.
As he arrived, one of the chase cars was accelerating toward Aolani’s crippled Datsun. It wasn’t going more than 20 mph by his estimate, but it would still cause damage on impact.
And it would provide cover for the last two shooters, coming up behind it while the high beams blazed their trail.
Bolan ignored the car, its lifeless driver, concentrating on the men behind it. They had revved the gas somehow, and maybe given the vehicle a shove to start, both of them clutching weapons now and sheltering behind the vehicle as it advanced. From Bolan’s angle, though, one of the hunters was exposed completely, and his companion was visible from the waist up.
It was enough.
He stitched the nearer of the gunmen with a rising burst, six rounds or so of 7.62 mm death leaving the AK’s muzzle at a speed of 2,300 feet per second. Downrange, his moving target crumpled as if he were made of paper, crushed within a giant’s fist. The dead man fell, firing a shotgun blast into his own foot as he dropped.
The hunting party’s sole survivor swung toward Bolan, ripping off a long burst from a lightweight submachine gun. Bolan could’ve ducked but didn’t bother, instead answering with a short burst from his Kalashnikov that nearly emptied the long curved magazine.
His target took most of it, jerking through a clumsy little dance that ended with a belly flop on gravel, while the car that he’d been following rolled on and nosed against the Datsun’s driver’s door. It wasn’t much of a collision, but it finally extinguished those annoying high beams.
Bolan advanced to find Aolani and her companion huddled on the far side of the Datsun, still staying put and keeping low. Not bad, he thought, all things considered.
She had done all right on what he took to be her first time under fire.
“It’s over,” Bolan said. “We need to leave now.”
“Leave?” she challenged him. “In case you haven’t noticed, they just shot the hell out of my car.”
“We’ll borrow one of theirs,” Bolan replied. “That one,” he added, pointing to the vehicle that stood alone now, headlights burning tunnels through the night.
“And leave mine here?”
“I’ll torch it. Take out anything you need that’s still inside.”
As Bolan spoke, he tore a strip of fabric from a lifeless gunman’s shirttail and removed the Datsun’s gas cap to insert the wick.
“Burn it or not, the cops will trace it,” Aolani said.
“No sweat. You’re out of town right now. How could you know some punks would steal your car and use it for a rumble with a rival gang?”
“Jesus. Okay, hang on a minute, will you? Let me get my purse and—”
She was scrambling, fumbling in the glove compartment, underneath the front seat, grabbing this and that before he lit the wick. They piled into the second chase car, and he had it rolling toward the Punchbowl’s exit when the Datsun blew behind them.
“This is really not what I had in mind,” Aolani informed him.
“Hey, you know the saying—life’s what happens while you’re making other plans.”
And death could happen, too.
Oh, yes.
They hadn’t seen the last of death, by any means.
3
Bolan drove back to the Royal Mausoleum State Monument, avoiding major streets with Aolani’s guidance. Their commandeered car was unmarked by gunfire, but Bolan didn’t want to take the chance that someone had reported it along their previous route of flight. If that turned out to be the case, and once the Punchbowl slaughter was discovered, the police would soon be searching for his ride.
