“Any idea what happened?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, but I’m looking into the GPS system or the gyros. The system performed perfectly until it veered off course. It didn’t seem to hear any of our commands. I’ve never seen a test go so haywire.”
“You think it could have been deliberate?”
She frowned. “Deliberate? It would have had to be someone on our own team, and no one I know here would send a missile into a boatload of tourists.”
“We’ve had some break-ins. Could someone have accessed the missile controls?”
She shook her head. “No. Only our computers can do it, and they’re all here. There has been no break-in to this room. And it can’t be one of our own. We’re all together. Someone would have noticed. It was a malfunction.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive. The bigwigs are going over the missile scraps right now, but I’m sure they’ll find it was in the navigational system.”
Jesse nodded in feigned agreement. He still wasn’t convinced. The WWII veteran’s words wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he wanted them to.
Kaia drove her Mazda pickup along the narrow highway. A flock of chickens squawked and ran for the ditch when she turned into her driveway. She slammed the brake to avoid hitting the last straggler. Wild chickens had once roamed freely on all the Hawaiian islands, but the introduction of the mongoose to all except Kaua’i and Lana’i had decimated the wild chicken population on the islands where they’d been imported. The chicken situation on Kaua’i had grown worse when Hurricane ’Iniki roared through the island in 1992 and freed most of the domestic chickens. The island had slowly recovered from the big blow, but capturing the chickens had been the least of the islanders’ concerns.
Bane clung to his door handle as the truck jerked to a stop. “Where did you learn to drive?” he demanded.
As an oceanographer for the Coast Guard, he was taller and slimmer than Mano, and his long limbs could glide through the water like Nani herself.
She stuck out her tongue at Bane. “You taught me,” she said. She rubbed her eyes. They’d been at the Lihu’e hospital all night, and the sun was already halfway up the horizon now. She glanced at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. Her gaze met her brother’s. “They never found Laban.”
“I know.”
Kaia wanted to comfort Bane. She hadn’t known their cousin well—he’d spent most of his life in California and had only recently come back to the islands—but Laban and Bane had grown close in the past year. Thankfully, Laban hadn’t left a wife or children.
The media had accosted them when they’d gone ashore, and she was sure reports of the disaster had been on TV this morning. After disappearing for a time, the handsome lieutenant commander had returned to take charge of the reporters with the same aplomb he’d demonstrated on the water. The self-sufficient type always made her feel inadequate.
Bane got out of the truck and went to the porch of Kaia’s bungalow. The neat green shutters framed windows that overlooked the blue waters of the Pacific from the house’s perch atop a cliff. A set of steps that had been cut into the face of the rock led to Echo Lagoon, a tiny smile of beach on the leeward side of the island. Square and squat with a roof that looked like thatch but wasn’t, the house had been in the Kohala family, her mother’s ancestors, for nearly a hundred years. Her brothers had opted to let her have it, and she hadn’t refused. A brightly colored rooster crowed and hopped off the step as Bane neared. “You’d better run or you’ll be dinner,” he said. He held open the door for her.
“He knows he has nothing to fear,” she told him. “No one in their right mind would try to eat one of them.” The local joke was that if you put on two pans to boil and put a chicken in one and some lava rock in the other, the chicken would be ready when you could stick a fork in the lava rock.
Bane laughed, but his eyes were grim. She pushed open the door, and her brother followed her inside.
“This place looks like ’Iniki just came through again.” He looked around with obvious disfavor.
Kaia tried to look at it through his eyes. Her cat had knocked last night’s popcorn bowl onto the floor, and unpopped kernels littered the carpet. The laundry she’d sorted on the living room floor was still there. “I haven’t been home much lately,” she said. “Besides, I’ll never be Suzy Homemaker.”