Fire and Vengeance

by Robert McCaw

  “Mahalo,” he responded. Ikaika, Koa’s youngest brother, serving a minimum four-year sentence for burglary, had been subpoenaed to testify against another felon. Mary Perko had retrieved Ikaika from a contract prison in Arizona where the state of Hawai‘i had sent him after revoking his parole. Ikaika, the black sheep of Koa’s family, stuck like a thorn in Koa’s side, causing conflicts for him as a police officer and embarrassing him at every turn. The chief blamed Koa every time his brother got in trouble, and, in his early days as a detective, Koa had feared that Ikaika would get him fired. Still, now that Ikaika had been hauled back to the Big Island, Koa would have to make time to see his brother. It would be a difficult reunion.

  The press conference quickly became a zoo. Thick sulfur fumes hanging over the school forced authorities to hold the press conference in a makeshift tent half a mile away. Over a hundred media and print reporters, many from the neighboring islands, gathered in an unruly semicircle around an improvised public-address system. Governor Māhoe expressed condolences for lost loved ones and offered prayers for the injured children. Mayor Tanaka repeated much the same themes.

  ‘Ōhai briefed the press on the fatalities, promising to release the names of the dead after completing family notifications. He identified the hospitals treating the injured kids and confirmed four missing children and one missing teacher. Finally, he recounted various acts of heroism by teachers and first responders who’d raced into the building to save youngsters.

  When Koa stepped to the microphone, he told the press about the likely volcanic nature of the episode, repeatedly emphasizing the lack of evidence of terrorism and dismissing any immediate need for evacuation beyond the area already cleared by the police. He declined requests for pictures from inside the school building, citing safety concerns. The police, he disclosed, had ordered a robotic vehicle to search those parts of the school building first responders had yet to reach.

  Concluding his remarks, he took questions, which came flying from every direction. He answered those where he had solid information and deflected the others until the authorities had more information. When the press conference wrapped up, he breathed a sigh of relief but realized his ordeal with reporters had only just begun. The KonaWili school disaster would be front-page news around the world, and this first press conference offered just the barest glimpse of what was to come.

  Not long after the press conference ended, reporter Walker McKenzie—widely known as CNN’s “Mister Disaster”—arrived with a camera crew in tow and a bevy of assistants to prepare a KonaWili segment for the next day’s From All Angles news show. Koa recognized the handsome, urbane reporter, dressed in his trademark white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and knew he was about to enter a maelstrom of international publicity. He filled the celebrity journalist in on the information already made public. McKenzie, unlike local reporters, raised the question nagging Koa: “Why had the department of education built an elementary school atop a volcanic fault along the slope of an active volcano?” Koa wanted to refer the question to the DOE chief but instead told McKenzie the location of the school would be addressed as part of a comprehensive investigation of the disaster already underway. Still, Koa knew the reporter had opened a Pandora’s box as deep and dangerous as Hualālai’s volcanic cone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FIRST RESPONDERS WORKED through the stormy night. By six o’clock, technicians in Honolulu had loaded a bomb squad truck aboard a Coast Guard C-130H cargo plane. The turboprop carried the vehicle to Kona’s Keāhole airport, and by nine, it arrived outside the school. Koa watched technicians steer an Andros F6B robotic vehicle down a ramp and prepare it to reconnoiter the school.

  Four and a half feet long, the contraption featured eight wheels and a cart-like body with a complex manipulator arm extending out over four feet. It could go where no kanaka, no human—even in the best protective gear—could survive. Techs attached two cameras to its arm—a fire-resistant video camera and a thermal imager. The robot’s two powerful halogen lights allowed it to capture video in the otherwise pitch-black interior of the school building, while its thermal imager needed no light to detect heat sources, even those obscured by heavy smoke. They activated and tested the robot’s microphones.

  The bomb squad truck featured a filtered ventilation system, so they positioned the vehicle close to the school despite the gases continuing to pour from the wrecked building. ‘Ōhai obtained architectural drawings and construction plans for the KonaWili school, which he taped on the wall of the truck to guide the search.

  Koa and ‘Ōhai watched a technician use video-game-like controllers to direct the robot into the school. Monitors showed readouts and pictures from the robot’s video camera and thermal imager. Bright red numbers flashed the temperature—120 degrees, twice as high as the rainy night air outside. The tech swiveled the robot’s camera for an overall view of the situation. All of the heat and gases appeared to come from the south end, leaving only haze in the northern end. First responders had already cleared the north area.

  The robot headed south, checking the main office and classrooms until it reached the last third of the southernmost wing. Here the Andros F6B reported temperatures above 280 degrees. An impenetrable yellow sulfurous haze reduced visibility to near zero. An ominous rumbling sound filled the air and echoed off the walls. Blistered paint turned cinderblock walls black. Fire-resistant ceiling tiles lay crumbled on the floor. The wooden classroom doors had disintegrated into charred heaps. Remnants of twisted metal, seared clean of wooden parts, stood as grim reminders of children’s desks.

  The robot painstakingly circled the room, lowering its mechanical arm close to the floor to see as much as possible under the layers of yellow smoke, until the video camera stopped on an elongated patch barely visible against its surroundings. The robot crawled forward until the video revealed the image of a small child, its clothes burned away, its body charred.

  “God, that’s one of the missing keiki,” ‘Ōhai said, choking on the words.

  Koa was no stranger to death. As a child, he’d discovered a childhood friend hanged. As a teenager, he’d killed a man. His closest Special Forces buddy had died in his arms. He’d seen dead children in Afghanistan and killed his share of fanatics in Somalia. As a cop, he’d investigated gruesome murders and lost witnesses he should have protected. Death and guilt were irrevocably intertwined in his psyche. Still, the sight of the tiny charred body hit him like a fist to the gut.

  The robot found the bodies of two more children and the missing teacher before approaching the door to the last classroom—the one on the southeast corner of the school. The robot’s thermal camera registered white-hot temperatures over six hundred degrees. Yet, the door to this last classroom, although ravaged charcoal black by fire and bent out of shape, remained intact.

  “What the hell?” ‘Ōhai said. “That’s a fire door—a steel fire door. We don’t put fire doors on classrooms. And it looks like that sucker suffered bomb damage.”

  The tech moved the robot’s claw to the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. The robot tried again to no avail, and the tech turned to ‘Ōhai. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Can we send it downstairs into the mechanical spaces?”

  “There’s a basement?” Koa asked. The island’s rocky volcanic soil made basements expensive and rare.

  “That’s what the blueprints show,” ‘Ōhai responded.

  “Got to be the only kula, school, on the island with a basement,” Koa mused.

  “Tell me where to go,” the tech requested.

  ‘Ōhai turned to the floor plans spread on the wall. “The stairs are back down the hallway, just south of the main office.”

  The Ardros F6B retreated back toward the main office and found the stairs. Koa watched the monitors as the odd-looking machine extended and lowered its front wheels, descending step by step down the stairs with remarkable agility. At the bottom, the robot turned to reveal a smoke-filled corridor with
a concrete floor, walls, and ceiling. The thermal imager showed the walls to be a relatively cool one hundred degrees, but when the robot faced the south end of the hallway, its thermal imager registered solid white reflecting temperatures above 600 degrees. Reading from the plans, ‘Ōhai announced, “It should be 300 feet to that end wall.”

  A rumbling sound reverberated through the speakers. The concrete tunnel shook, sending particles of cement into the air already laden with sulfur gases. The robot crept slowly down the hallway. Even with its powerful halogen lights, they could see less than a yard. The tech repeatedly stopped and turned the robot to avoid broken pipes and other obstructions. The sound grew deafening and the tech turned the volume down. Vibrations shook the images. The robot did not, however, transverse 300 feet.

  After 240 feet, it encountered a concrete wall—or rather the remnants of one. The whole middle section had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole. The remains of the barrier stood no more than three feet high at its midpoint with crumbling concrete and twisted reinforcing rods protruding all around. Broken electrical cables hung like spaghetti and a ruptured pipe gushed water that flashed instantly into steam.

  “I don’t understand,” ‘Ōhai said. “There’s not supposed to be a wall for another sixty feet.”

  “I thought it was impossible to burn concrete?” Koa said, adding a question mark.

  “‘Ae,” ‘Ōhai agreed, “but at temperatures above a few hundred degrees, concrete loses its strength. The cement and the reinforcing steel inside expand at different rates and the stuff rips itself apart.”

  “Auē, my God,” Koa exclaimed, pointing to the monitor. “Look! Look at the edge of the hole. That’s no ordinary wall.” Smoke poured through the opening, but gaps in the opaque cloud revealed the remnants of a slab of concrete at least six feet thick.

  “Christ,” ‘Ōhai exclaimed, “it looks like a bank vault.”

  “Why would anyone put a six-foot-thick wall in an elementary school?” Koa asked.

  “It’s like the contractor tried to seal off the end of the building,” ‘Ōhai responded.

  The fire door on the classroom and this ruined basement barrier made sense only if they were intended to isolate the south end of the building. “Exactly!” Koa exclaimed. “The damn contractor must have known about the volcanic risk and tried to seal it off.”

  The two men stared at each other in disbelief. “Hard to believe anyone would do somethin’ so stupid,” ‘Ōhai said.

  “And criminal. The builders deliberately put those kids at risk. That’s murder by reckless endangerment.” Koa’s voice rang with barely contained anger. “Somebody’s going to pay for this. And pay big-time.”

  “Wonder where all that concrete came from,” ‘Ōhai mused. “With six-foot walls, they must have poured over a thousand cubic yards of concrete just in this one corner of the building.”

  “Had to be West Hawai‘i Concrete,” Koa responded. “One of Sergeant Basa’s brothers is a manager up there. It’s the only place on this side of the island big enough to handle the volume.”

  At that moment, an explosion rocked the truck. Rocks and other debris battered the side of the vehicle. The screens and readout from the robot went black. “Jesus,” the tech said. “We lost the robot.”

  What had begun as one of the worst civil catastrophes in Hawaiian history had suddenly become one of its most horrific crimes. The deliberate concealment of a deadly flaw inside an elementary school had killed keiki and their kumu, children and their teachers. Murder … reckless endangerment murder.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KOA NEVER MADE it to bed. Bleary-eyed, he found his way back to the police headquarters in Hilo. He stopped in the command center for a large Styrofoam cup of strong coffee. No cream, no sugar. Black and bitter. He’d always liked it black, and the Army taught him to like it bitter. The Army had taught him a lot of things and was the reason he’d become a cop.

  Jerry, his closest Army buddy, had planned to leave the service, return to his hometown of Seattle, and, like his father, join the police. Only Jerry had died in Somalia, killed by a bullet meant for Koa. That moment when Jerry had died in his arms set the pointer for Koa’s life. He returned to Hawai‘i, joined the police, and channeled his guilt into fighting for justice.

  His coffee had the acrid taste of sulfur dioxide, and he realized the chemical smell permeated his hair and clothes. Jolted by the caffeine, he made his way toward the jail. Waiting for one of the wardens to bring his brother to an interrogation room, he wondered which Ikaika would show up—the troubled boy he’d known as a child or the foulmouthed con he’d become.

  It bothered Koa that he couldn’t connect with his brother. In reality, they both had a criminal past. After Koa’s father had been killed in a supposed sugar mill “accident,” Koa, then eighteen, had talked to his father’s mill coworkers. They shared their suspicions that Anthony Hazzard, the mill manager, had arranged the fatal accident because of Koa’s father’s union activities. Blaming Hazzard for his father’s death, Koa had tracked the man to his remote mountain cabin.

  He’d watched Hazzard, biding his time. By late in the evening, after Hazzard had downed nearly half a bottle of bourbon, Koa had jumped the heavyset mill manager in a chokehold. Wanting to punish, but not kill the man, Koa had released his death grip. Hazzard had rebounded and they’d fought. Sensing he was outmatched by the older, stronger man, Koa had grabbed an iron fire poker to defend himself. Hazzard had charged, his huge fists swinging. Koa struck and Hazzard had gone down.

  Koa would never forget the waves of fear and self-revulsion that consumed him when he’d realized he’d killed Hazzard. He sat for hours blaming himself for his recklessness and stupidity. The sugar barons who still controlled the police and the courts would have him locked up for life. He considered fleeing to a foreign country or even ending his life. After hours of agony that seemed like days, he decided to hide the killing. He considered, but rejected, burning the cabin with Hazzard in it, and instead, disguised Hazzard’s death as a hanging suicide in which the rope broke, allowing Hazzard’s body to topple onto the iron fire tools, explaining Hazzard’s head injury. Koa then left the cabin door open, hoping that pua‘a, wild pigs, roaming the forest would ravage the body, making it difficult for the authorities to detect the murder.

  He hadn’t been convinced his subterfuge would work and was haunted by fear of discovery. He saw Hazzard’s face in every passing stranger and in the ao ‘āla‘apapa, the “circus-train” cloud formations, so common in Hawai‘i’s evening skies. He jumped at every knock on the door or passing policeman. Yet, gradually, his fears subsided. Days passed before the Hawai‘i Tribune Harald reported that hikers had found Hazzard’s body in the remote cabin. It had been ravaged by pua‘a, and the coroner had called it a suicide.

  Although he didn’t realize it at the time, Koa came to understand that the first sparks of his life’s mission were born in the crucible of penetrating guilt and self-loathing caused by Hazzard’s death. That death drove him into the U.S. Army. Officer Candidate School and Special Forces training made him into a man. Stints in Afghanistan and Somalia taught him about the world outside Hawai‘i. The death of Jerry, his closest friend, had been the final turning point.

  Unlike Ikaika, Koa’s crimes were secret even from his family. But Koa hadn’t escaped the guilt, which ultimately drove him to become a cop and devote his life to exacting justice. Fear and guilt, he imagined, accounted for the difference between brothers. He was terrified of getting caught and facing society’s wrath, and he suffered penetrating guilt prompting the need to make recompense for what he’d done. Ikaika feared nothing and felt no remorse.

  “So, my cop brother has come to gloat,” Ikaika hissed when the guard brought him into the room. Ikaika, a big man, well over six feet, had the hard face of a convict and a sea of prison ink. Tattooed with black, genealogical, geometric bands spiraling around his neck and down his arms, he looked old beyond his years. Telegraphing attitude,
Ikaika’s eyes shocked Koa, exuding a strange, demented anger as he paced the small room, turning frequently to glare at Koa. Koa wondered if his brother was sick or if jail had further warped his twisted mind.

  Koa never understood what had gone wrong with Ikaika. Eight years apart, they’d both grown up in a shack on the hill overlooking Laupāhoehoe on the northern coast of the Big Island. Koa’s father, a humble sugar plantation worker, and his mother, a native healer of local renown, presided over a poor but close-knit family. Except for Ikaika. He’d lived in a world steeped in cruelty and violence. Barely halfway through grade school, Ikaika beat up another kid, breaking his jaw and putting out one of his eyes. With time and punishment, Ikaika only got worse. His white-hot temper and swift left hook enabled him to break records for schoolyard fights and later barroom brawls. Ruggedly handsome and physically powerful, true to the meaning of his name, Ikaika had left a trail of broken hearts and hāpai, or pregnant girls. Graduating to car theft and drug dealing, stints in juvie, and later prison, only made him more violent.

  “You think I want to see you like this?” Koa responded.

  “Sure you do, big brother. You and that asshole Moyan got me locked up.” Ikaika referred to Hardy Moyan, his hard-assed parole officer. Ikaika clenched and unclenched his fists while he prowled the room.

  “I opposed Moyan’s pulling your parole. Maopopo ‘iā ‘oē, you know that.”

  “Bullshit!” Ikaika screamed, turning to face Koa. He leaned forward like he might lunge across the table that separated them. “You like seeing me locked in a cage.” Ikaika’s spittle sprayed Koa’s face, but he didn’t back away.

  “‘A‘ole, not true,” Koa responded in a calm voice. “You were in the courtroom. You heard me plead for your release.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure you did. All mouth. Only lies.”