by Don Winslow
“We’ll get killed!” Gabe yells.
* * *
The leader is a cold, cool mother-jumper.
Cold because he’s going to let the wounded take care of the wounded. He still has four men left, and they’re going to fight.
So fuck this buggah Chon.
Cool because he’s been here before—a night ambush off an IED in Ramallah—so he lies down and marks exactly where the shooting came from.
So fuck this buggah Chon.
He spreads his men out, ten yards apart, and they belly-crawl into the clearing. Then he takes careful aim, sights in on the shooter’s position, and squeezes the trigger.
Hears this buggah Chon yell in pain.
* * *
Even in the moonlight, Kit hears Kings and Queens before he sees it.
The huge waves—thunder crushers—blast onto the reef like cannon fire.
KA-BOOM.
* * *
Chon has rolled five feet away from his last shot.
Experience has taught him that it’s preferable to let them shoot you where you were, not where you are.
The bullet zips close enough, though, and he yells like he’s been hit. He crawls away, moving along the side of the clearing, abreast of the Waianae hitters.
Now it’s up to Tim.
* * *
Kit’s sorry that Gabe is driving the boat.
He’s a great waterman, and it gives them a better chance.
He looks ahead and in the moonlight sees the first wave of a set—a giant, but still a little brother to the ones that will follow—coming directly at him.
He points the ski straight at it.
To climb the thirty-foot wall and go out the other side.
If he doesn’t, if the ski can’t get over the top before the break, the wave will throw him upside down and then crush him.
* * *
The leader waits.
No return fire.
He gets up slowly, signals his men to do the same, and they start across the clearing to go collect the shooter’s body or put him out of his misery.
The leader feels pretty safe.
It’s dark.
Then the world lights up.
Kit slides down the back of the wave, looks quickly behind him and sees the boat tottering on the top.
Then it slides down the backside.
Gabe is good.
But Kit can’t look back anymore.
The second wave is rising in front of him.
A bigger mountain than the last.
Chon fires the flare.
The clearing looks like a baseball park during a night game.
Tim can’t miss.
It’s the bicycle thing.
The guy closest to him goes down, opening a shot at the second guy. Ducks-in-a-row kind of thing.
The third guy hits the dirt before Tim can get a shot off.
The night goes black again.
Kit climbs and climbs.
Seems like it takes forever.
He looks up and sees the lip of the wave, the spindrift whipping on top, hissing like the fuse of a bomb before it goes off.
He hopes it does.
If he can just make it over the top, the wave will crash on the boat and swamp it.
Then he’s in the air, above the wave.
Two shooters, the leader thinks.
Who knew?
(“What you don’t know can hurt you.”)
Fuck Red Eddie, he thinks. If he wants this guy so bad, he can come do it himself.
Time to bug out.
He hisses, “Can you guys move?”
Hearing affirmative answers, he gets into a low crouch, gathers his wounded and moves back toward where the shooters aren’t.
Right into Chon’s line of fire.
He’s moved again, back along their probable lane of retreat.
The maneuver has a name—a “swinging-door ambush.”
Chon opens fire.
Shutting the door.
Kit pitches forward as he comes down the backside.
Almost falls off the front of the ski.
Rights himself, holds on and looks back to see:
Gabe makes it.
The boat slides crazily down the back, almost goes over, but somehow Gabe keeps it upright.
There’s only one wave left in the set, Tim thinks.
If I don’t take them down on that, I’m finished.
They’ll catch me in the flat water outside the break.
He heads toward the next wave.
It’s the big brother.
The leader knows he’s fucked.
If you can’t go forward, you can’t go sideways and you can’t go back, what you are is . . . fucked.
He has only one thing going for him.
Firepower.
“Lay it down!” he yells.
Wounded, scared or fucked, doesn’t matter—they’re going to blow the back door open.
The night blazes with muzzle flashes.
Chon flattens himself in the mud.
Bullets zing just over his head, kick up the ground around him.
He’s pinned, he can’t move.
You fucked up, he thinks. You thought they’d freeze in the kill sack or try to get out a side or a front door. Instead they’re coming right back at you, using superior firepower as a shield.
You can’t run and you can’t stay.
You’re fucked.
They’re going to overrun and kill you.
The only question now is how many of them you can kill first.
From the top of the wave, Kit can see the lights of the entire bay.
And the boat in the well below him.
Gabe keeps charging.
He has no choice. He’s in the impact zone, and if the wave falls on him, he’s done.
And if it doesn’t, Kit thinks as he plummets down the back side,
I’m done.
As any child knows, everything is worse in the dark.
Sound is magnified, distance warped, the imagination of the unseen makes monsters.
Night ambushes are the worst.
The shouts of anger, the screams of the wounded, the hissing of bullets, the crack and boom of explosions. The enemy is nearer than he is, then farther away, then nearer than ever.
The monsters are real.
Real enemies, real bullets, real shrapnel, real blood, real pain, real death.
Anyone who’s ever been on either side of a night ambush knows the true meaning of chaos.
The concepts were always related.
In Greek mythology there first existed chaos, darkness and hell.
The Greeks had it right when it comes to night ambushes.
But—
If you’ve been through them before—
If you were skilled and lucky enough to survive—
You might have learned something.
You might have learned to keep your head enough to read bits of structure in the confusion.
You might have learned to read muzzle flashes—streaks of light in the darkness—to discern patterns of movement.
You might have learned to hear sound—the salvation of the blind—to find out what’s going on around you.
Tim Karsen (né Kearney) is one of those survivors.
He hears the gun battle to his left.
Sees the multiple flashes of the Company gunmen going one way, sees the single, intermittent flash of Chon’s rifle coming back.
Knows what’s happening.
Knows what’s going to happen.
What he can’t let happen.
If he can help it.
He can’t shoot for fear of hitting Chon.
So he stands up, steps out of the trees, and charges.
Screaming like a banshee.
To draw fire.
To let Chon escape.
Kit turns to look behind him.
Gabe and the inflatable slide down the back of the wave.
They made i
t, Kit thinks. They made it, and they’ll kill me, and they might go back and kill the rest.
He starts to turn the ski.
One last desperate shot—
Ram the ski into the inflatable at full speed and tip it over.
Drown all of us.
* * *
What the triple fuck? the leader thinks, hearing the screaming.
He turns around but can’t see in the darkness, can only hear someone charging toward him, screaming like a night demon.
He shoots toward the sound.
Tim keeps going.
One thing in mind.
Close the distance.
To grenade range.
* * *
Then Kit sees it.
A fourth wave.
Impossible, but there it is.
A rogue wave.
A giant’s giant.
If the last was the big brother, this is the father, the grandfather, the ancestor, God.
Forty feet on the face.
Looming over them like judgment.
Rushing toward them with murderous intent.
The kind of wave you don’t survive.
* * *
Adrenaline shrieking, Tim launches the grenades.
The blasts shatter the night.
He hurls himself flat to the ground, so jacked-up he doesn’t realize that he’s been shot and is bleeding.
* * *
It’s a nightmare
surfers have
children have
some adults who’ve never been in the ocean inexplicably have
this nightmare of sitting in a deep valley beneath a wave, a gigantic wall of water—unstoppable, unforgiving, relentless, omnipotent—looming above, rising until it blots out the sky until there’s nothing but water and imminent doom.
The lucky wake up, shaken, trembling but alive.
The unlucky are in the water when the wave comes down on them.
They never wake up.
* * *
The leader can’t hear and can barely see.
The bright grenade flash has all but blinded him, his ears ring and whine, the concussion has him reeling, he’s bleeding from shrapnel wounds.
But he’s tough.
He gathers his people, also wounded, and half drags, half carries, half beats them back to the surviving vehicle. Loads them in and on the car, gets behind the wheel and starts back down the trail.
Chon hears the grenade blast.
He moves along the side of the trail toward the sound, knowing it could only have been Tim.
Knows it means that he’s likely to be spotted by the enemy, but he’s not going to leave a man behind.
Or a man’s body.
He heads for Tim.
But stops to perform a small task first.
* * *
Gabe looks up.
Sees the NBW.
Nothing But Wave.
Nothing But Water.
He tells God he’s sorry and begs forgiveness.
Hears the other guys screaming.
Not yelling—screaming.
The wave comes down on top of them, then
NBN
Nothing But Nothing.
* * *
Plunging in the dark.
Falling in the cold black.
Tumbling down
head over heels over head.
Kit fights to keep his arms tight so the wave doesn’t rip his shoulders out of their sockets.
Fights to hold his breath.
He’s trained for this.
Since he was a kid.
But nothing can train you for this.
The wave pushes him down and holds him down.
* * *
The vehicle hits the second trip wire.
(Synchronicity is a beautiful thing.)
The leader hears a pause, then a click—
Then—
Nothing.
* * *
Chon finds Tim.
Stretched out
in the grass.
Bleeding out from the legs.
Chon grabs the compress on his belt.
Presses it, applies pressure, says,
“Don’t you fucking die on me.”
* * *
They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
Ben—who prides himself on his knowledge—doesn’t know that—
there wasn’t one hit squad—
there weren’t two—
there are three.
(Eddie’s not fucking around.)
What you don’t know . . .
But we’ve covered that already.
* * *
There are three of them, and they’re already on edge.
They haven’t talked with the two other teams, but Eddie’s strict instructions were “radio silence.”
“Do you know what phone records are?” he asked. “Evidence.”
He just wants one quick call. “It’s done.”
So although Hani’s name means “happy” in Hawaiian, the hitter ain’t happy at the moment. He’s stressed, because he has to just trust that the other two teams have done their jobs.
Stick with the plan, Eddie had ordered.
Just stick with the plan.
What freakin’ plan? Hani wonders as he walks toward the house. We don’t even know who’s going to be in there. The place could be empty, there could be one person or seven, one of them could be this guy “Chon” who is serious business. And one of them could be KK, who is not going to go down easy.
Eddie had instructions about this, too.
(Eddie has instructions about pretty much everything.)
Don’t hurt KK if you can help it. Don’t hurt any Hawaiians—especially Gabe’s cousin—if you can help it.
The haoles, the mainlanders? Take them out in the ocean and give their bodies to the sharks.
A block from the house, Hani and his two boys pull hoods over their faces.
* * *
O is in the kitchen when the glass of the back door shatters, a gloved hand comes through and opens the door.
A second later she’s face-to-face (so to speak) with a hooded man holding a gun on her.
Two more men follow him in.
Then Ben comes in behind her.
Holding a gun.
“Three to one, buggah,” Hani says. “How you want to play this?”
Ben doesn’t know.
Hani sees that, sees that this isn’t that Chon guy. He just steps up and swats the gun out of the guy’s hand. “Now you don’t have to t’ink about it.”
He cracks him in the side of the head.
* * *
Ben’s never been hit like that.
Actually, Ben’s never been hit.
His head whirls.
He staggers back against the counter.
* * *
This is going to be easy, Hani thinks.
“Just the haoles,” O hears the man say.
Elizabeth glares at him. “I’m a haole.”
“You’re KK’s mom,” the man says.
“If you take them,” Malia says, “you take us.”
“You’re not in charge here,” the man says. He turns to his guys. “Tie the two wahini up.”
O watches as they tie Elizabeth and Malia up, wrap duct tape around their mouths and set them on the sofa.
“Sorry, Auntie,” one of them says. Then he turns to Ben and says, “Let’s go, buggah.”
“Where are we going?” Ben asks.
“Nice ride in a boat,” the man says.
They walk them outside.
The one guy leads, the other two stay tight behind Ben and O. She can feel the gun barrel poking into her back.
She thinks about trying to run, but she’s too scared.
The men pull off their hoods.
O knows that can’t be good.
* * *
Tim hefted over his shoulder, Chon trudges back down the trail. With his free hand, he pulls his cell phone o
ut of his pocket and calls Ben.
No answer.
He tries O.
Same.
This is not good, Chon thinks.
“What’s wrong?” Tim asks.
“Nothing,” Chon says.
He picks up the pace.
* * *
Hani walks down the pier.
Doesn’t see a boat.
Where are dose buggahs?
There’s a man at the end of the pier, fishing,
An old man.
Hani steps up to him. “Hey, old man, maybe bettuh you be someplace else, eh?”
The old man looks right past him.
At the haole girl.
Pretty damn rude.
* * *
“Everything all right?” Pete asks O.
She’s too scared to answer.
Even in the moonlight, he can see her eyes fill with tears. He sees the guy standing too close behind her, the man standing too close behind her friend what’s-his-name, Ben.
“Hey, old man,” one of the guys says. “Maybe you not hear so good. I said mo’ bettuh you leave.”
“I heard you,” Pete says.
* * *
Air.
Kit sucks it in.
Fills his lungs.
So beautiful.
The wave had held him down but pushed him forward. Slammed him, rolled him, bounced him off the reef, scraped him across and then, having punished him for his insolence, let him go. Kit pushed to the surface.
Bleeding, battered, exhausted, his left shoulder dislocated, he takes a few deep breaths and starts swimming, with one arm, toward shore.
* * *
O sees that look in his eyes again.
She says, “Maybe you’d better leave, Pete.”
He nods, sets down his fishing pole and reaches into his tackle box. Comes out with a pistol and shoots the three men between the eyes before they can as much as move.
Sometimes what you don’t know can save you.
His real name isn’t Pete, it’s Frank.
Frank Machianno.
“Frankie Machine.”
Once the most feared mob hit man on the West Coast.
The life he left behind to come to paradise.
He looks at O and says, “You’d better go. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of things here.”
“Pete—”
“It’s all right,” he says. “Go.”
Frank loads the bodies into the boat, goes out into the deep water and dumps them in.
The sharks will dispose of them.
They’re sort of . . . bait.
* * *
Eddie gets a call, but not the one he expected.
He hears the haole say, “Your people met with a series of unfortunate mishaps. They aren’t coming back.”
Ben has skills.
They’re not gun skills, not fighting skills, not Chon skills.