The Pouakai

by Sperry, David;

  I checked my watch; just over an hour until the meeting.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” I said. “My treat.”

  Still a young-looking forty, his broad-shouldered form used to be a regular sight around the airport with a young flight attendant or two trailing along at his elbow. The cutbacks had taken their toll, however. I hadn’t seen his smile in months. He’d taken the demotion to co-pilot hard, as had a lot of the pilots here. I was grateful for my seniority, and that I could hold on to my position for now. I understood how the more junior guys felt, but they needed to try to be more thankful for what they still had, like I was trying to.

  We wandered up to the concourse, where most of the restaurants had been shuttered due to the decreased tourist trade. The choices were pizza or Chinese. I got a slice of pepperoni, Jim picked up a plate of orange chicken & rice. We chose a plastic table in the nearly deserted seating area. The Honolulu airport used to be filled with excited families, happy newlyweds, and fast-talking businessmen. Now only a few grim-faced passengers sat silently, contemplating the dangers they were about to face by taking to the sky. More than half the lunch customers were airport workers.

  Jim stared into the distance, and ate his lunch slowly. I knew what he felt, and didn’t want to intrude. I’d been lucky to get him to accompany me. His guess of an impending furlough was probably correct, but I didn’t want to let my mind wander too far in that direction. That course led to fear and hopelessness. We ate in silence until both of our lunches were gone. I leaned back and looked at my empty plate, and then had a sudden flash of a memory from college; an empty pizza box, several dozen beer bottles, good friends laughing at a raunchy movie we’d rented. I wondered when, or if, I would ever feel that free and relaxed again.

  “What are you going to do?” Jim asked, looking out across the nearly empty ramp.

  “Do for what?”

  “When it’s all gone. When the airline shuts down and everybody has to leave the islands.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

  “Of course it will. There’s no stopping these things. They’ll keep moving, growing, expanding. They’ll hit here and make us move out. They’ll move up the Caribbean and get Florida, then Texas. The ones in the Pacific will go to Mexico, and California. They’ll find a way to live farther from the water.” His voice grew edgier and louder. A couple of heads turned our way. “They’ll hit us where it hurts; refineries, manufacturing, energy. We can’t stop them. We can’t! There’s no way we are going to survive. We’re just fooling ourselves and looking the other way while they take over the world and wipe us out.”

  “Jim, take it easy.”

  “Easy? Shit, we’re sitting here like it’s just another day on the job, while the world is falling down around us. Get it? The fucking world is coming apart and we’re sitting here eating this slop like there’s nothing wrong. Like we’re not going to hear about more job cuts and furloughs. Like we’re not going to be driven off these islands. Like those goddamn things aren’t going to erase us from the face of the earth!”

  Across the aisle, a young mother held her infant close to her chest, tears streaming down her face. I glared at Jim with my best Stern Captain face, and caught his eye. He looked at me as I subtly shook my head, and threw a glance at the young woman. Jim took a deep breath, and caught my meaning as he leaned back in the hard plastic chair.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Let’s get moving.” I knew what he was going through. We all did. It was still taboo to rant about the Pouakai, even though most people did it internally or with close friends.

  We walked back to the crewroom, where a majority of our pilots had shown up. These meetings used to be handled by memos, but there was no normal any more. We used to have over five hundred pilots. Now down to two hundred and five, those of us who weren’t out on trips, sick, or on vacation, easily fit into the large lounge under the main concourse.

  Jack Ching, our V.P. of Flight Operations stood behind a table at the far end of the room. Bob Lucas, the Chief Pilot, towered next to him. Knots of people stood around the room, deep in discussion. By looking at who stood in each group, I could pretty much tell what was being said, since the conversations didn’t change from day to day. In one corner was the ‘arm ourselves’ coalition, who’d been advocating mounting missiles and guns on all our planes. Despite the dire situation, the FAA did not look favorably on a fleet of armed passenger aircraft. Next to the coffee maker stood the ‘surf patrol’, local guys who’d do anything to get the world back to normal so they could hit the beach again without worry. On and on, groups of pilots who had their own ideas of how to handle the situation huddled with like-minded friends, certain their suggestions would work. The thing about pilots is that we’re never lacking in attitude or ideas. Our main focus at work is problem-solving; from one second to another, the changing conditions of flight means that we are constantly evaluating our position, attitude, progress, and course. Hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions are made each hour. I don’t know of an industry with a higher percentage of Type-A personalities. It also means that most pilots can’t leave their attitude in the cockpit. Put a couple of hundred people into the same room, who each feel they know best how to handle a situation, and there is bound to be friction.

  Jack Ching tapped a thick manila folder on the table, but nobody paid attention.

  “Hey jokers,” Bob, the Chief Pilot shouted. “Shut up and sit down. Jack’s got a few words to say so no mouthing off until he’s done.” Nobody had ever accused Bob of being subtle, either in the office or at the controls. Maybe it was in everyone’s best interest that he didn’t fly much these days. The murmur of voices faded, and most people took a seat.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “I’m sure you are wondering what this is all about…”

  “Not really,” Jim said under his breath.

  “We just heard from the Department of Defense. They’ve decided not to allow any more escort flights through the Roc’s territory.”

  “Shit,” came a loud voice. I looked to my right, and saw the petite Annette Wilson glaring at Jack. “Goddammit, what the hell are people down there supposed to do? Fucking swim here?” Annette had family in New Zealand, and had been one of my regular co-pilots down to Sydney and Auckland over the past few years. She also had a vocabulary that could peel the rust off of a sunken battleship.

  “Annie, shut up and let Jack finish,” Bob said.

  She stayed quiet, but I could see she was really steaming.

  “Without the DoD escort,” Jack continued, “we won’t be making any more flights south of here.”

  “Then put the guns on our planes like we’ve been saying,” said Kelii Rogers. “We can do the flights on our own. We don’t need the freaking military.”

  “You too Rogers,” said Bob, pointing a finger at Kelii. “I mean it people. Shut up or you’re going to get booted out of here. Jack has more to say, so let him say it.”

  An uneasy silence settled on the group. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “Thanks Bob,” Jack said, his fingers nervously strumming on the folder in his hands. “The point is that we can’t do these flights south, so they’re gone as of now. Also, we’ve seen a marked reduction in load factor coming from the mainland, especially from some of the smaller markets. People simply aren’t coming here for vacation and a lot of the locals have left for good. We received word today from Washington that they are reducing our subsidies, and eliminating them completely for markets that don’t meet a certain average load factor. As of now it looks like we’ll have to stop service to Salt Lake City, Boise, and Toronto.”

  “Cut to the chase,” Jim Reynolds said as he stood up. “How many of us are getting cut.”

  Jack cleared his throat.

  “This is preliminary of course, based on projections for staffing the remaining flights, plus expected attrition and retirements, along with our current negotiations to pick up some of th
e routes from our competitors like…”

  “How many?” Jim repeated again, in an even tone.

  Jack cleared his throat again and looked at the file in his hand.

  “Eighty five furloughs, effective in two months.”

  Silence filled the room for several seconds, followed by a loud “Fuck!” from Annette as she stormed out of the room. She would be on the furlough list.

  “That leaves one hundred twenty active on the list,” continued Jack. “There will have to be some retraining because a higher percentage of those being furloughed are on our inter-island aircraft, and the staffing will have to shift. The bid period is open for one week from today. Training for those shifted to different aircraft will begin immediately after. I’m sorry guys, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re at the mercy of the government now, and if they say we don’t fly, we don’t. We’ll have a copy of the new bid out tomorrow, and if you have any questions, call my office.”

  Jack and Bob hurried out through the crowd, and amazingly enough, nobody tried to deck them as they walked by. I think we were too numb.

  Jim looked at me, a resigned stare in his eyes.

  “Are you going to get bounced back to co-pilot?” he asked.

  I did some quick mental math.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m number forty-two, so I should still hold on to Captain.”

  Jim nodded, and then looked around with just a tiny hint of a smile on his face.

  “Maverick, you have the number of that truck driving school we saw on TV? Truck Masters, I think it was? I think I'm gonna need that.”

  “No problem Goose,” I said, following his lead on the Top Gun quote. “I got your six.”

  4

  Colin waved at me from across the dock, a big grin on his face. A cryptic phone message said to meet him at the university’s dock in Honolulu harbor. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d returned from the conference in Tokyo a month earlier. Sometimes he gets wrapped up in his work, but this had been a longer stretch of quiet than usual.

  “What’s up?” I asked as I walked closer.

  We shook hands, but he didn’t say anything. He just kept that goofy grin on as he motioned for me to follow. We turned the corner and walked next to the university’s research ship, the R/V Kilo Moana. Its broad twin hulls rubbed against the fenders with a slow creak. The trade winds had eased, and the heat from the summer sun pressed down hard on us. The sharp tang of creosote and salt water filled the air.

  “Come on, Colin, where are we going?”

  “Right here,” he said as he turned around. We stood between an orange shipping container and the ship.

  “What’s here?” I asked.

  “This.” He pointed to the container.

  “Something inside it?”

  “No, the container itself,” Colin said, practically giddy.

  “This isn’t a game of chess,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.” A standard seagoing shipping unit, the container stretched forty-eight feet long, and a square eight feet high and wide. Painted bright orange, it had ‘Property of the University of Hawaii, Manoa’ stenciled on the side. The name of the previous owners, a now-defunct ocean cargo company, had been hastily painted over, leaving orange splotches of a different shade on the sides and end.

  “Okay,” said Colin. “What’s our number one problem right now?”

  “Your bad breath?” I said, suppressing a grin.

  “Yeah, fine, number two problem,” he replied, not falling for my bait.

  “The Pouakai?”

  “Yes, but more than that, the problem is that we haven’t been able to study them. We haven’t had enough time to examine a live subject close up to determine behavior, biology, habits, chemistry, or anything else. What we need is a live, captive Pouakai.”

  I hesitated for a moment and looked at the container. Then the bottom dropped out of my stomach. “You don’t have a live Pouakai in that container, do you?”

  “Not yet, but hopefully we will soon.”

  “How the hell do you expect to do that?”

  “Come here,” he said. “Let me show you.”

  We walked around to the open end. Instead of a bare metal interior, it had thick black padding on all sides, floor, ceiling, and ends. Even the inside of the doors had the padding installed. Colin grinned from ear to ear.

  “It’s nice, but what do you do? Send out invitations?” I said.

  “At the conference last month, our paper was very well received. By the end of the week everyone had agreed that the Pouakai derive at least some, or maybe even all their energy from the sun. The next step was to consider how to make a closer study of them. That’s where Alan came in, because he was originally an engineering major before he got into biology. He designed this thing for us, with the help of some naval architects. We started with three problems. One, how to attract a Pouakai; two, how to capture it; and three, how to keep it alive long enough to study it. Step one is simple enough. We just have to make a lot of noise while the Pouakai are nearby. Steps two and three were harder, but that’s where this container comes it.”

  He hopped up into the container, each step springy on the padded material. I followed him in.

  “So here’s the plan,” he continued. “We take this container to an island at the edge of the Pouakai’s territory. It will sit on a raft just a few feet from the shore. Once the ship has dropped it off they’ll hightail it back north, out of the Pouakai’s range. Alan and I will be onboard a Navy sub just offshore, monitoring the container. Built into the end of the container are some flat speakers hooked up to a small computer. It can play a variety of sounds, from machines to music. The whole device is run by remote control. Once the Pouakai are nearby, we’ll arm the doors, which have hydraulic rams to slam them shut. Then we turn on the sounds to attract a Pouakai inside. There are cameras that work both in visible light as well as infrared and ultraviolet behind that clear panel up on the ceiling.” He pointed to a smooth square above us. “Once we know the Pouakai is inside we trigger the doors. They’ll slam shut, trapping the thing inside.”

  “Won’t the other Pouakai attack the container?”

  Colin shrugged. “Probably. We armored the inside before we attached the padding, however. The padding is Kevlar lined too, so the thing’s beak can’t tear it apart. It should keep the Pouakai from flailing itself to death inside here. It’s also watertight so it can’t sink if it falls off the raft. It will be in shallow enough water so that if it does capsize, we can recover it once the rest of the Pouakai have left.

  “Hopefully, the darkness inside will cause it to slow down, to keep it from beating itself up. We have lights up there behind the Lexan too; different wavelengths that we can use to see what kind of light the Pouakai need to live. There are armored manipulator arms under that hatch there,” he said, pointing to another flat spot in the ceiling. “If the Pouakai calms down enough, we can use them to hold it in place and do an exam.”

  “What if it dies?”

  Colin shrugged. “We’ll do an autopsy immediately, which should give us enough time to study it better than we have before. Then we open the doors, toss the thing into the water, and arm the container to capture another one. Eventually we hope to have it set up semi-permanently as a research station somewhere down south.”

  As I looked around the container, a thought hit me, and I grinned.

  “What?” Colin asked.

  “Build a better mousetrap…” I said, as I started laughing. Colin joined in too. For the first time in weeks, I felt a break in the tension.

  5

  I cast the line into the surf and set the reel. Using the tip of the rod, I jigged and pulled, making the small lure look like an injured fish to any hungry, bigger fish nearby. I’d already pulled in two nice papio, but wanted more to throw in the freezer.

  Jennifer sat in the sand behind me, her long, tan legs crossed as she read the newspaper. The morning had started out nice and cool, but now th
e sun began to beat down on us. I didn’t want to be out here sweating all afternoon.

  The next few casts didn’t bring in anything, so I sat in the sand next to Jennifer. She put the paper on her lap and watched the surf roll in.

  “Peter and Kailani are moving to LA,” she said, without looking at me.

  “What? When?”

  “Next week.”

  “But his job at the city was secure. Hell, the emergency services division is the only part that’s still growing. What happened?”

  “It isn’t Peter’s job. Kailani just couldn’t take the stress of living here anymore. I saw her working in the yard yesterday. She was crying, so I went over to talk to her. She’s scared, Mark. So are a lot of people. She knows what’s coming, and wants to be gone before the Rocs get here.”

  “They’re not coming right away,” I said. “It could be years. Maybe never.”

  “Or it could be tomorrow,” she said. “You may have spent time with them, but you don’t know what they are really doing.”

  “But Colin doesn’t think…”

  “It’s all just guessing,” she said more forcefully. “They don’t know for sure what those things will do next. Kailani is scared to death. She doesn’t want to be here when they arrive, whether it’s tomorrow or in ten years.”

  “She grew up here. This is her home.”

  “That doesn’t mean we want to be targets. We’re scared, Mark. You may think you can live with them, but we don’t.”

  She crumpled the newspaper onto the ground and stood up, shaking. I had no idea what to say to her. She walked to the edge of the water and looked out to sea, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

  I came up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders.

  “You said we?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re scared too?”

  “What the hell do you think?” she said, still looking out to the ocean. “They’re going to come. Anyone who thinks differently is just fooling themselves.”