Dangerous Minds

by Janet Evanovich

  Emerson nodded. “Correct, one of the biggest lava tubes in the world. And it starts in Ola’a.”

  “The Kazumura is forty miles long and runs from the coastline near Puna all the way up to the summit of Kilauea. It takes a minimum of two days to hike,” Alani said.

  “Well, we can’t just go walk right up to the entrance in Ola’a and knock on the door,” Vernon said. “If it is being used by the Rough Riders, it’s sure to be guarded.”

  Emerson pulled up a detailed map of the lava tube on his iPad. “There are more than a hundred known entrances to the Kazumura. We just need to find an entry point close to Ola’a, that isn’t Ola’a.”

  Alani looked at the map. It was divided into five sections. The one adjacent to Ola’a was described as Sexton’s Maze.

  “What about here?” she said. “It looks like there are a couple entrances in the area.”

  Emerson clicked on that portion of the Kazumura. The next Web page revealed a complex network of side channels, some of which were dead ends and others of which linked up and eventually connected to the main tube.

  Wayan Bagus looked over Emerson’s shoulder. “A labyrinth. Very Zen.”

  “I bet it’s a dark, moldy, cramped cave, probably chock-full of Bigfoots. We’re going to get lost for sure,” Vernon said.

  “No man can be lost so long as he knows himself,” Wayan Bagus said.

  Vernon rolled his eyes.

  Alani looked at Vernon. “Don’t forget about the Night Marchers.”

  “ ‘Night Marchers’?”

  “They’re the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors that come forth from their burial places to roam the countryside at night,” Alani said.

  Vernon looked a little nervous. “Do they roam in caves?”

  Alani nodded. “Absolutely. Caves are what they like best of all.”

  Vernon looked up in the air. “Oh Lordy. This just keeps getting worse and worse.” He narrowed his eyes at Alani. “Are you joshing me? Are they for real?”

  “They’re no less real than Bigfoot.”

  “Oh Lordy,” Vernon repeated. “Assuming we get through the maze without getting raped by a Bigfoot or a ghost, what’s next?”

  Emerson pointed to the section above Sexton’s marked Ola’a. “We have to navigate through a series of lava falls.”

  “Lava falls,” Vernon said. “Seriously.”

  “There hasn’t been any lava in the Kazumura for five hundred years, so they’re more or less just cliffs we’ll need to scale. There are at least twelve falls in this section, some as tall as forty-five feet. Hopefully, we’ll see something while we’re exploring that leads us to where they’re keeping Riley.”

  “It’s a good theory,” Alani said. “But what if we’re wrong and Riley isn’t there?”

  Emerson shrugged. “We have until morning to try. If we fail, then we still have the option of bargaining with Tin Man.”

  “It’s a three-hour drive just to Volcano,” Vernon said. “By the time we get to the Kazumura it’ll be past midnight. That’s going to put us way behind schedule.”

  Emerson smiled. “Not to worry. I’ve already arranged for a ride and supplies. We should be at the entrance to Sexton’s Maze in less than an hour.”

  —

  Riley jiggled the handcuffs binding her to the heavy metal desk in the corner of the cavern and looked around the room. Tin Man, Bart Young, and the other Rough Riders were nowhere to be seen. Berta was at a workstation across the room, calibrating what looked to be a large, complicated bomb. A couple dozen similar devices were stacked neatly nearby.

  “What are you working on?” Riley asked.

  Berta continued her work. “It’s a delivery system for the strange matter.”

  “You mean a bomb.”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  “Then you’re Bart Young’s bomb maker.”

  Berta looked up. “I’m a mechanical engineer. Spiro and I spent the past ten years designing the technology to harvest and contain the strange matter.”

  “Spiro is dead,” Riley said.

  Berta went back to her work. Riley guessed she had nothing more to say on that subject.

  “If you’ve really discovered strange matter, you deserve a Nobel Prize in Physics,” Riley said.

  “I didn’t discover anything. It was discovered more than a century ago when the U.S. government was exploring the area known today as Yellowstone. Of course, all they knew at the time was that once in a very rare while a little blob of matter, which was like nothing ever seen before, would bubble to the surface of a mud pit or a hot spring and, well, you’ve seen what it can do under the right conditions.”

  “It was horrible,” Riley said. “What did they think it was?”

  “They didn’t know. It was impossible to collect and study because it bubbled to the surface so rarely and randomly and always in such small quantities. The reaction would be over in seconds and, as you saw, there was nothing left to study. Later, they discovered more in Hawaii and then in Samoa and so on. The government decided to create the National Park system to protect and study the mysterious substance that had such an enormous destructive potential. They didn’t know what it was at the time. They only knew that it was connected to volcanic activity. The real breakthrough was in 1970.”

  “What happened in 1970?” Riley asked.

  “We realized that certain volcanoes were formed over mantle plumes and were drawing magma directly from the earth’s core.”

  “Cosmic leftovers from the big bang,” Riley said.

  Berta looked surprised. “That’s right. The world we know is composed of normal matter, but at the earth’s core there are small bits of exotic matter leftover from the early universe.”

  “Like strange matter.”

  Berta nodded. “Correct.”

  “So why hasn’t the earth been destroyed long ago?”

  “Most of the strange matter we find is no bigger than the size of a light nucleus. They’re called strangelets, and they don’t seem to have the mass to do any significant damage. Every once in a couple hundred thousand years, a larger mass is extruded, and the results can be devastating.”

  “Destroy-an-entire-continent devastating?”

  Berta shrugged. “You’ve heard of the lost continent of Atlantis? We also suspect strange matter is the catalyst responsible for the past couple magnitude-eight eruptions at Yellowstone.”

  “And you’ve discovered a way to collect strange matter?” Riley asked.

  “Strangelet by strangelet. It’s been a painstakingly slow process. Even after ten years all we’ve managed to put together is the size of a tennis ball.”

  “Is that enough to destroy a continent?”

  “It’s enough to destroy the earth and turn it into a little dense ball floating through space. The little field experiment you witnessed was mostly plasma. The actual strange matter was less than a single drop, and it would have destroyed all of Mauna Kea if it wasn’t contained within a magnetic field.”

  Riley looked around the room. She needed to find a way to escape before Berta decided to conduct another field experiment on her.

  “Why doesn’t it destroy the earth’s core?” Riley asked.

  “We don’t know yet. There’s a powerful magnetic field at the core. Maybe it’s the intense heat or pressure. Maybe something happens to change its charge from positive to negative when it reaches the surface. For whatever reason, it’s not until it reaches the surface that it seems to react with normal matter.”

  “It seems to me that you’re a scientist, not a killer.”

  “Your life means no more to me than a lab rat’s. If the director wants me to experiment with human subjects, I have no problem with that. If he wants me to build him a super-weapon, that’s just fine with me too.”

  “Why?” Riley asked. “What’s in it for you?”

  “Just a little thing called France. It’s the bonus I’ve been promised once Director Young conquers the
world.”

  “A friend of mine recently told me that greed leads to suffering,” Riley said.

  “I guess I’d rather suffer as a rich empress than be a happy, dead scientist like Spiro,” Berta said. “You and your friends picked the wrong fight.”

  Riley jiggled her chains and glared at Berta. “Funny, I was just about to say the same to you.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The unmistakable wup, wup, wup of a hovering helicopter filtered through the windows of Mysterioso Ranch.

  “Ride’s here,” Emerson said, springing out of his chair, gathering up his backpack, and going to the door.

  Vernon, Alani, and Wayan Bagus joined him on the front lanai. A six-seat Airbus Eco-Star helicopter was landing in the pasture behind the house, stirring up the grasses in the process.

  Vernon looked at the chopper and groaned. “Tell me you didn’t,” he said to Emerson. “There must be a thousand helicopter pilots in Hawaii and you chose Mr. Yakomura, Alani’s dad, didn’t you?”

  “It was the only helicopter I could find at short notice, and who would fly us around at night, no questions asked.”

  Yakomura hopped out of the Eco-Star and walked over to them. He gave Alani a hug, then saw Vernon and shook his head.

  “Good evening, Mr. Yakomura,” Vernon said. “I reckon it’s been a while.”

  “Dad, you remember Vernon,” Alani said.

  Yakomura frowned. “How could I forget? Are you still a degenerate?”

  Vernon looked around for help. “No, Mr. Yakomura.” He reached out to Wayan Bagus. “In fact, this here’s my personal spiritual adviser. He’s teaching me the ways of the Sage and such.”

  Mr. Yakomura looked skeptically at Vernon. “Really. What ways would those be?”

  “Oh, you know. Showing my elders respect and not objectifying women’s racks and things like that. Isn’t that so, Little Buddy?”

  “No,” Wayan Bagus said politely.

  “This is my father, Steven Yakomura,” Alani said to Wayan Bagus.

  Wayan Bagus steepled his fingers and bowed ever so slightly in greeting.

  Half an hour later, they were airborne and flying over the interior of the island. The sun had just set and they had a full-on view of Kilauea. Glowing red rivers of lava flowed down the dark mountain and into the sea. Huge plumes of smoke and steam obscured the entry points. Even from a distance it was impressive.

  The helicopter banked to the left, and the dark lava fields were replaced with lush rain forests.

  “That’s Ola’a,” Alani said.

  Everyone looked down. A thick blanket of trees covered the area completely. Emerson reached into his backpack, pulled out a large telescopic camera, and aimed it at Ola’a Forest.

  “What’s that?” Alani asked.

  “It’s a long-range infrared camera I appropriated from the security system of the main house at Mysterioso Ranch. It basically picks up any heat signature and takes a picture using temperature differences the same way a regular camera uses light.”

  Vernon, Alani, and Wayan Bagus looked at the camera’s viewing screen as Emerson scanned the forest through the thick canopy. Except for the occasional pig or goat displayed in a rainbow of yellows, reds, and greens, initially there was nothing but complete darkness.

  “The detail is amazing,” Alani said. “We have an infrared telescope at Mauna Kea, but I had no idea the image quality for terrestrial cameras was so good.”

  “It used to be strictly a military technology,” Emerson said. “It provides an accurate image up to a distance of two miles.”

  Emerson aimed the camera at the center of Ola’a. A good-sized red and yellow blob of an unknown heat source filled the screen.

  Emerson pointed at the area. “It looks like we may have found Riley.”

  “I don’t know,” Alani said. “It’s just a blob of heat. It could be anybody down there.”

  Emerson shook his head. “It’s not a campfire. We’d see the light from the air. I think it’s an exhaust, just like the one we saw on Mauna Kea. And it’s coming from the center of an unspoiled wilderness that just happens to be owned by the National Park Service.”

  The helicopter circled over Ola’a and the little town of Volcano. The town of Puna was ahead, and beyond that the Pacific Ocean.

  “Where do you want to set down?” Yakomura asked.

  Emerson looked at his map. “There’s an entrance to the Kazumura Cave on the outskirts of Ola’a Forest called Wild Pig Drop Falls.” Emerson pointed to a fifty-acre pasture at the outskirts of the forest. “Can you land there? The falls are somewhere at the edge of the field, and there’s supposed to be an ATV trail used by the local guides that leads to it.”

  “Why don’t we just land in Ola’a near the heat source?” Vernon asked.

  Emerson shook his head. “The jungle is so thick, there’s no place to land. And even if we did find some clearing, Ola’a is not a lava desert like the summit of Mauna Kea. It would be nearly impossible to find an exhaust pipe in the dense vegetation. Most importantly, if by some miracle we did find the compound, it’s certain to be heavily guarded. If we have any chance of rescuing Riley, we need to take Tin Man completely by surprise. Our best chance is to sneak up on them through the lava tubes.”

  “I have a fix on the ATV trail,” Yakomura said. “There’s just enough moonlight to see the tire ruts.”

  The helicopter landed and everyone piled out. Emerson spread a map of Ola’a Forest on the ground and circled the area in red pen where he had seen the heat signature. He overlaid a map of the Kazumura Cave on top. “Here’s where we need to head once we find the entrance to the Kazumura.”

  Alani looked at the map of Ola’a and frowned. “Assuming the heat source is where they’re keeping Riley, the bad guys’ base of operations isn’t near any of the mapped portions of the Kazumura.”

  Emerson nodded. “That’s true. It’s not near any of the mapped portions. However, the Kazumura is actually a vast network of independent lava tubes that became connected into a maze of tunnels over a hundred years of active lava flows and water erosion.”

  “So you think Tin Man has Riley in some unmapped side channel?” Vernon asked.

  “I’m hoping so. The main tunnel is too well-known and used regularly by tour companies and spelunkers.” Emerson pointed at the red circle. “There has to be a secret underground route to this area. If there was an aboveground road in, everyone would see them coming and going.”

  “If it’s a huge maze of unmapped tunnels, how the Sam Hill will we know we’re heading in the right direction and not into a den of Bigfoots?” Vernon asked.

  Emerson smiled. “There are hundreds of mapped entrances, mainly through naturally occurring holes called skylights in the ceiling of the tunnels. There are bound to be hundreds of other unmapped entrances. We won’t have cell reception when we’re underground, but when we reach a skylight we’ll pop out of the hole and get a GPS reading on our location.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Vernon said. “We’re going to be popping in and out of hundreds of holes.”

  Both Wayan Bagus and Mr. Yakomura slapped him on the back of the head.

  Vernon jumped away from the two men. “You guys have dirty minds. How do you know that’s what I was thinking? And in fact I was only thinking it for a minute, and then I was thinking something entirely different. I don’t get how popping out of the holes is gonna help us. Won’t we still be under jungle canopy? Doesn’t the canopy screw up, excuse my French, the GPS?”

  “Mr. Yakomura will be our eyes from the air,” Emerson said, handing him the infrared camera. “He’ll fix on our ground location, and he’ll give us direction on which way we need to go in order to reach where we saw the heat source.”

  Alani nodded. “Kind of like a high-stakes game of Warmer and Colder.”

  Emerson nodded. “The highest.”

  Emerson stuffed the maps into his backpack and led the way down the trail toward the falls.

&nbs
p; Five minutes later, Vernon, Alani, Wayan Bagus, and Emerson were staring into a dark hole at the outskirts of the Ola’a rain forest.

  “Why do they call it Wild Pig Drop Falls?” Vernon asked.

  Emerson shone his flashlight down into the hole, draped in jungle vines. The beam illuminated the skeleton of a massive wild boar submerged in a plunge pool at the bottom, forty-five feet below.

  Alani looked down at the bones. “I guess that answers the question.”

  Emerson took a rope from his pack, tied one end to a tree, and attached a harness to himself with a carabiner.

  “We’re going to have to rappel down. Does everyone know how this works?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Alani said.

  “You betcha,” Vernon said.

  “No,” Wayan Bagus said.

  “Tell you what, Little Buddy, you just wrap your arms around my neck and hold tight, and I’ll have us down lickety-split,” Vernon said.

  Emerson went first, swinging out a little to avoid the pig, splashing down in a foot of water. Vernon pulled the harness back to the top and handed it to Alani, who got into the rig and descended next.

  “Look out below,” Vernon yelled, as he slid down the rope with Wayan Bagus riding piggyback.

  Vernon sloshed out of the shallow pool and set Wayan down on solid ground.

  “This here’s gonna be creepy,” Vernon said, taking in the pitch-black tunnel that led away from the pig bones. “Good thing I’m big and brave and not afraid of the dark.”

  Emerson handed out headlamps. “This should help. Pay attention to where you’re walking and don’t lag behind.”

  They walked ten feet into the tunnel, and Wayan Bagus reached out to touch the smooth, ropey black walls.

  “It is like being inside a sculpture,” Wayan Bagus said.

  “There are two main types of lava flows in Hawaii,” Emerson said. “A’a is the jagged, rocky stuff you see all around Kona. This is called pahoehoe, and it tends to form when the eruption is slower and less violent. Most lava tubes in Hawaii are made from smooth pahoehoe lava.”

  They spent the next half hour scrambling over a series of lava cascades and smaller falls. It was fairly easy going. The tour guide companies had left an assortment of ropes, ladders, and handholds to make the trip possible for tourists. Finally, they came to a skylight in the ceiling about fifty feet above them with a rope dangling down.