He obstinately shook his head. He turned to find a log to sit on, and after he'd comfortably arranged his bulk there like a sitting bull, he looked up into the muzzle of Jim's. 38 revolver. The metal bore he stared down needed no further explanation, end of argument.
“ Get up and get ahead of us, Awai. You're being paid to guide us, so get to it.”
Awai's feelings looked quite bruised, his dark, meaty face blanched and pinched. “You haoles and your guns. Damn you, you no heah so good? Dey no like me over heah.” He indicated the general direction of the village. “Usually trade at the shore. No like dem old ways and magic. Dem people spook me, and… and some I owe goods to.”
“ Just get us there,” Parry said with bitter authority.
Awai returned to striking at the canopy of vines ahead of them. “You hard man, Mr. Parry, no menemene.”
“ No sympathy,” Jim told her.
The big man was perspiring in the cold night. She worried he could turn on Jim with the cane cutter.
“ Be careful of that machete, Jim,” she whispered, but it was a useless warning when all around them the rain forest itself came to sudden life, painted limbs reaching out to them, dark faces and eyes following, brandishing native weapons and machetes. They took hold of Jim and her before Jim could get off a shot, and before she could reach for the gun at her ankle.
Jim was knocked down, a huge spear pinning him at the spine to the earth. Awai was likewise manhandled. All other eyes, straining from behind war paint, were on Jessica.
“ Oh, Jesus,” she moaned.
They were prisoners of the island, prisoners of Chief Kowona.
Awai was cursing in his native tongue, glaring at Parry and Jessica as he was being led away by the village warriors.
They were neither tied nor abused, but Jim's weapon was taken and the native men, spears in hand, forced them onward toward the village they sought.
“ No chance we'll lose our way now,” she joked, displaying more nerve than she felt.
“ Damn me,” Parry moaned. “I should've forced you to remain in Maui. I should've left you at the hotel.”
“ I'd hate you for a long time if you had.”
“ And what, you don't hate me for this? Getting you involved in what's bound to become a very sticky international incident if we're lucky enough to ever get off this island with all our parts intact?”
“ We're not dealing with cannibals, Jim. Are we?”
“ No, but I can imagine what the old chief's going to do with us.”
“ What?”
“ Bind us over-literally-to U.S. authorities. Don't know 'bout you, but there goes my pension.”
“ Shut up, haole ilioV shouted one of the men in paint with frightening force and venom. Jessica was told by Jim that the stocky Hawaiian had just called the Chief of FBI's Hawaii Bureau a white dog with a loose tongue.
Jessica swallowed her fear and shouted back, stunning the painted warriors. “Hey, you just tell your chief that this man you call a dog is also an important chief.”
“ Jess,” Parry cautioned.
“ No, no… they have a right to know who their dealing with. Chief.”
“ Everybody knows who Parry is,” said the native coldly.
“ What? How'd you know his name?”
Parry's eyes had already fixed on Captain Ben Awai.
“ You bastard.”
“ I knew this was a setup,” shouted Jessica, pulling her arm free of a native who ushered her along.
“ This whole thing was engineered, wasn't it?” asked Parry of Awai. “When? When did you know who we were?”
“ News travels fast around the islands, especially on the Hawaiian hot line, Chief Parry. You've been watched since leaving Oahu, and we know of your desecration of the burial site at the Spout.”
“ You're PKO?” asked Jessica.
“ Every Hawaiian is PKO. Some of them just don't know it yet,” replied Awai sternly.
“ Then you do know the chief here.”
“ That's right.”
“ And you wanted your cover protected, so you wanted to wait at the shrine, or were you simply going to turn back for your boat and disappear?”
“ All of the above, but it appears the chief wants to see me as well.”
“ I see your English has improved since we came ashore, too,” said Parry, his teeth now set in anger at the man. “You just better pray, white man.”
Jessica exploded at Awai even as she fought to keep on her feet, what with being shoved forward. “You harm an agent of the FBI and your little island paradise here'll be swarming with U.S. marshals and G-men. It'll make Waco, Texas, look like a backyard barbecue! Is that what you want, you… you native son of a-?”
“ You don't have no juice here, and your haole threats fall empty on Hawaiian soil, so shut up, white bitch.”
“ Do as he says, Jess. Hold onto your temper. We'll have to use our wits here, negotiate an agreement, some sort of amicable settlement so we can extradite Lopaka Kowona. That's all we're here for.”
“ I can just imagine what they'd like for a settlement. Especially Lopaka Kowona,” Jess replied in defeat.
“ Settlement, agreement, you haoles,” said Awai, shaking his head sadly. “You're trying to write up one treaty while you're trampling another.”
She countered, “You know why we're here! What kind of an animal we're tracking!”
“ The island is off-limits to U.S. military personnel, and the entire Caucasian race. That's what was granted us, this scrap of native land. You desecrate it without a thought, and you look for leniency from our chief?”
They were forced onward to march to the village. Parry leaned into her and said, “Don't worry, Jess. They're not so stupid as to harm us.”
“ Who even knows we're here, Jim? Anyone?”
Parry gritted his teeth and air seeped through them in a hiss. “Only Ivers, but Tony's smart. He'll figure it out.” Just then they smelled wood fires and the lingering cooking odors of the village, and in a moment flickering fireflies shown among the wall of green darkness before them, campfires.
Ben Awai brandished the cane cutter and Parry's. 38 over his head as he welcomed himself into camp ahead of the others, calling out his name repeatedly, “Awai, Awai!”
Ben was greeted by several of the children who'd come awake and wandered to the noise. Women, too, hung on Ben Awai until he shooed them off with their children in tow.
Jim and Jessica were pushed ahead, out of the dense foliage where they might have found safe hiding, a point from which to observe the village at a safe distance, spying to determine if Lopaka were actually there or not. But all those plans were dashed now, and they were forced to their knees in a neady carved clearing where traditional huts stood about the circle of a communal campfire.
Jessica felt her stomach chum, fearing the worst lay ahead of them, getting extremely annoyed at the same time with the short creep that kept poking her ribs with a war club.
She wondered if these people were f6r real or if they were like the survivalists she'd encountered on tf^e mainland, who were more obsessed with a lifestyle than committed to a way of life. The native population was crowded around them, obscuring her view, but she could hear the collective gasp that followed in the wake of Chief Kowona, who parted an Army-issue tarp acting as an entryway cover and came towards them, wearing a thick feathered headdress.
She felt Jim's hand grasp hers and tightly squeeze. “Let me do the talking. If you talk, he'll see it as a sign of weakness.”
“ Whose weakness?”
“ Mine.”
25
Once upon a time a man looked into the reverse side of a mirror and, not seeing his face and head, he became insane.
They were forced back on their feet and toward the center of the village, while the chief, acting as if they were not even present, performed a ceremony of dancing before the fire, which was brought to a fever pitch by the natives. But Jim suddenly stopped in his tracks beside her, and Jessica, following his eyes, stared across the fire and the compound to a ten-foot-high wood and bamboo rack that looked like an instrument which normally held fish and possibly goat meat stretched across it for drying in the sun.