Chapter 15
The beat of the helicopter’s rotors swelled and changed pitch somewhere above us.
The hammering thump of them leveled off, then eased, the way an engine does when it’s settling.
I couldn’t see the chopper from where we stood at the cave mouth, hemmed in by the green walls of the Valley; they must have been able to find an area flat and open enough to land up above us.
A burst of static, then Lei’s voice, clearer now that she was on the ground. “Copy. We’re down.”
“Listen.” Malia replied, her voice shifting into deliberate.
“There’s another way to get to that deep section where the suspect is.
There has to be. That’s how the thieves took the petroglyphs out—they didn’t haul stone panels through this entrance, not past these boulders and up that trail.
They had a back route, a wider access on the far side of the ridge.
If you can find that opening from up top, you and whoever’s with you could approach the fall site from the other end. ”
Static. Lei replied: “That tracks. The grading on the topo printout showed a second access on the north flank. Give me a minute to find it and confer with the pilot.” A beat. “What’s your move on your side?”
“We have one suspect restrained. We leave an officer with her at the entrance, and—” she glanced at Keone and me with a slight smile—“I and two operatives move in as far as the narrow passage, no further. We hold there. We’ll be your ears from this end.
If the victim calls out, we’ll know, and we’ll relay whatever we find.
” Malia’s jaw set. “But the kahu warned us away from that section. Uncle Kalani was clear. We don’t go past the water without the protocols. ”
“Copy that. Will bring the gear we have and a map. We’re moving out now.” A breath of wind tore at her transmission. “Over and out.”
Malia lowered the radio and turned to us. For a second the cop facade faded, and I saw the worry she was carrying—a local woman about to call people into a place her own kupuna had told her to stay out of.
“Souza. Madison Chang stays with you, cuffed. Move her up the trail a bit, clear of the entrance. You’re our anchor. Anybody comes out that isn’t us, stop them.”
“You got it,” Souza said. He tugged Madison Chang to her feet and led her up the trail, out of view of the entrance to the cave.
Then Malia stepped to the mouth of the cave, took a ti leaf lei from around her own neck—I hadn’t even registered she’d been wearing the simple twist of green under her collar all morning. She held it in both hands and bowed her head.
“I’m not the kahu,” she said quietly to Keone and me, and maybe to something further back in time. “Uncle Kalani should be the one to pule for us. But he’s not here, and a man is inside who needs rescue. So I’m going to ask for entry. For protection. On his behalf, and on ours.”
She closed her eyes and began a chant in Hawaiian.
The language came low and steady, the liquid cadence of it filling the cave’s mouth—a chant of permission and respect, asking the ancestors whose bones hid in the deep to allow us passage, to know that we came not to disturb, but to help.
I didn’t have the knowledge to follow it, but I understood the shape of the request in the tone of the words. Beside me, Keone bowed his head, his lips moving too.
The valley went still around us. Even the water seemed to quiet, deep within. The trade winds dropped. For a long moment, the only sound was Malia’s voice.
When she finished, she stood another beat with her eyes closed as if listening. Then she lifted her head, laid the lei carefully on the largest of the three boulders at the entrance, and squared her shoulders.
“Okay,” she said. “Now we go.”
We skirted the boulders and moved into the dark.
The cold met us, that mineral exhale rolling up out of the stone, raising the hair on my arms and neck.
Malia’s flashlight beam swung across the outer chamber—and there they were, exactly as before—the petroglyphs.
What was left of them.
The main composition rode the curving wall to our right, the warrior with his raised spear, the rows of dots, the forked sweep of the ‘Iwa’s wings, all of it dim and ancient and watching in the light as we moved forward.
And below the wall, in the lower area, wounds: pale rectangular scars where panels had been cut clean out of the rock, raw and bright-edged against the dark patina of virgin stone.
The wrongness of it hit me afresh—ancient letters to the world had been carried off into a warehouse in Kahului, their absence left behind like missing teeth.
“Stay to the right,” I murmured to Keone. “The floor drops on the left, near the back. Keep to the carved wall and we won’t trip into a hole.”
We moved forward in a careful line, Malia’s beam leading, the scarred panels sliding past us on the right, close enough to touch—but none of us daring to do so.
The temperature dropped further. The sound of the underground stream rose to meet us, steady and unhurried, growing from a trickle to a low constant rush as the ceiling lowered and the shadows thickened toward the back of the chamber.
“It’s going to get tight,” Keone said softly.
“Yes, going into the second chamber,” I confirmed. My voice came out hushed; the space did that to you. “The narrow passage is past this—where the water runs through. That’s our line. We don’t cross it.”
We arrived at the place where the second chamber pinched down to a black throat barely wide enough for one person. A stream poured black water over a lip of stone and into the slotlike doorway of the passage.
Malia’s beam shot into the hole and was swallowed—a few feet of wet rock, then nothing, then the steady silvery sound of liquid disappearing into a depth the light couldn’t reach.
Somewhere down in that throat, Victor Chang had fallen.
Malia crouched at the edge of the passage, careful to keep her boots clear of the line we’d agreed not to cross and cupped her hands. “Victor Chang! Maui Police! If you can hear me, call out!”
The cave drank the sound and gave it back without an echo.
But then—maybe—something came back. A groan? A sigh of air moving?
“I think I heard him,” Keone said. “Way in there.”
“Hold.” Malia keyed her radio, and now there was an urgency under the discipline. “Airship One, come back.”
“Airship One here.” Lei’s voice was thin and small, but distinct in spite of the layers of stone between us.
“We’re at the narrow passage, holding our line. We may have heard something but can’t confirm life. Where are you?”
“We’re at the north access point on the map,” Lei said. “We’re able to put the bird down here. It’s wider than your entrance. This is the route they used. There’s evidence of drag marks and rope anchors all down it. Give me a minute—someone’s approaching.”
The three of us exchanged surprised, apprehensive glances—who could that be?
A moment later, Lei’s radio crackled. “Trailhead Team, we have an ally.” Her voice had brightened. “’I’ve got Pali Moku here, and he’s carrying caving gear.”
I started but Keone grinned.
“Pali? How did he know about this op?” Malia asked.
“He arrived when we set down. Said he had a feeling today was when he’d—find what he’d been hunting for.”
“Has to be referring to the archive,” I whispered to Keone.
“He says he’s been mapping the tubes—the whole system.
It’s a lot more extensive than the map shows.
” Lei’s voice held something like grim hope.
“Pali says he knows this section. He thinks he knows where a man would fall if he ran into the dark from your end without knowing where the floor gives out. We’re going to use him as a guide. ”
“Copy that,” Malia said. “What about the protocols?”
“He has been observing them as he trains under Uncle Kalani.” Her transmission crackled with the scuff and shift of careful movement, boots on wet rock, the sounds riding in under her voice. “We’re good to go that way.”
Then came Pali’s voice, close to Lei’s radio, low and certain and carrying that deep calm that was a part of him even now: “There’s a drop about forty feet ahead of where you’re standing, Trailhead Team.
A lava shelf that breaks off into a lower gallery.
You can’t see it coming if you don’t know it’s there.
If Chang went in from your side at a run, that’s where he is. We’ll be there soon.”
Even though the need to see what he was talking about and check if Chang was alive had ignited me with adrenaline and energy, I was glad we hadn’t stumbled into an abyss.
I stood at the edge of the forbidden passage, the cold stream running over the stone and moving between the three of us.
Via the radio we listened to my fiancé’s childhood friend, along with Lei and another officer, move into the tunnel and head toward a fallen man—and I let myself hope, for the first time since we heard that scream, that it might not be too late after all.