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County of Hawai‘i Civil Defense Building, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Henry Takayama stormed into his office and slammed the door behind him, knowing the sound would send tremors across the desks outside because everyone assumed it meant he was upset about something. And he was. It was only eight thirty in the morning and already he was having a very bad day.

First of all, representatives from both Paradise Helicopters and Mauna Loa Helicopter Tours had called him, demanding to know why they couldn’t take tourists over the volcanoes. The airspace over Mauna Loa and Kīlauea had been closed the night before—Henry knew about that ‘ōkole pilot Rogers and his damn-fool stunt—and was still closed in the morning, and the companies wanted to know what Takayama was going to do about it. Henry had said it was a mistake and promised he would fix it, mostly because Henry Takayama saw himself, first and foremost, as a fixer.

So he called the tower at General Lyman Field/Hilo International Airport. Bobby Gomera was running Access Control, which Henry saw as great good fortune. Henry had known Bobby since he’d met him at his family’s luau when Bobby was one year old.

But that got him nowhere today. Bobby informed him there was nothing he could do about the airspace because the army command had ordered it closed.

“I’m willing to do a lot for you, ‘Anakala Tako,” Bobby Gomera said, using the Hawaiian word for “uncle.” “But I can’t go to war with the United States Army.”

The army sometimes closed the airspace around the volcano but never without giving advance notice to the Civil Defense office, and Henry had gotten no advance notice. This was not just a breach of what he considered island protocol—it was extremely strange.

Worse, he would now have to call the helicopter guys and tell them that he, Henry Takayama, couldn’t open the airspace even though he’d promised he’d do it. He would blame the army, of course, a perfectly good default position in almost any matter involving them. But Henry did not like going back on a promise. Not because he saw keeping promises as some kind of moral imperative. No. Because breaking promises made him look bad. And that, to Henry Takayama, was a sin against everything he considered holy.

He asked Bobby if the army was staging maneuvers at the military base.

“I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “But something is happening.”

“Why do you think that?”

Bobby told him that the HVO guy MacGregor had flown in one very big hurry to Honolulu on a military transport the night before. No one knew why. And MacGregor hadn’t come back yet.

Or maybe he had, because an army helicopter had entered Big Island airspace early that morning and landed at the military base. It had given Gomera a call designation of Romeo-Vector-Three-Niner. That meant army brass was on board.

An hour after that, an army helicopter had landed at Lyman and six guys had come out, not in uniform but wearing short-sleeved shirts. They’d been driven from Lyman to the UH campus in Hilo. Bobby told Takayama he’d overheard some of their radio transmissions. They were going to the computer science department at the university. They’d arranged for it to open early. They were clearly techies of some kind, Gomera said. Maybe engineers.

In addition, he told Takayama, six helicopters had recently entered the airspace from the west, the Kona side. Gomera had monitored their radios and discovered they were C-17 Globemaster III cargo aircraft bringing earthmoving equipment to the military base.

“Sounds like maneuvers to me,” Henry said.

“I don’t think so,” Bobby said. “The army guys left the computer science department in Hilo and went up the mountain by helicopter. To the NOAA observatory near the summit.” He paused. “There’s more.”

“Am I going to like it?” Takayama said.

“Doubtful,” Gomera said.

He told his uncle Tako about the helicopter going to HVO from the military base.

“I heard another transmission after that,” Gomera said. “The brass is coming in for some kind of summit. Something to do with a programmer named Wong and another guy, Ozaki. Apparently, they worked all night on something big.”

Gomera was right, Takayama thought after he hung up. He didn’t like anything about this. Whatever those two had been up all night working on, a summit had been convened, very hastily, to discuss it. At the summit of Mauna Loa.

Henry Takayama leaned forward on his desk, his fingers clasped tightly in front of him. Last night MacGregor announces an eruption. Today he meets with the army at the summit. It’s obviously something about the eruption, Henry thought, though he couldn’t imagine what. But whatever it was, important things were happening fast.

And he had not been informed.

“Those bastards!” Takayama said.

He had never liked MacGregor. A mainlander who acted as if he were doing Takayama a favor every time they had a meeting, as if he always had something more important to do, someone more important to see. Guys like MacGregor made him ho‘opailua.

Made him want to puke.

He pushed the button on his intercom. He still used one; he considered it stupid to send a text to an assistant seated just outside his door. “Has HVO called me?”

“No, Henry, not yet,” Mikala Lee said.

“Any calls from the army?”

“Not yet. No.”

He paused, organizing his thoughts about what to do next. The easiest thing would be to alert a reporter; Kim Kobayashi at KHON owed him a lot of favors. But with the Merrie Monarch under way, that might be the wrong move. Takayama didn’t know what was going on, and he didn’t want alarming news to get out. For the moment, he would just obtain as much information as he could.

“Put in a call to MacGregor,” he said. “And call Colonel Briggs.”

“Right away.”

He sat back and almost immediately leaned forward again and jabbed at the intercom button. “Never mind. Cancel the calls.”

There was something else to consider. If he started asking questions, he’d probably get answers today. But what about tomorrow? And the day after? These men had already demonstrated their indifference to Civil Defense by keeping him out of the loop on whatever they were doing. Henry couldn’t very well call them every day, hat in hand, pleading for intel. What he needed was an ongoing flow of information. From the inside.

He needed a contact inside HVO.

The trouble was, everybody up there was loyal to MacGregor. All of them, whether they were newly arrived haole or kama‘āina. Like that Kimura girl from Oah‘u who acted like a snob because of her fancy mainland education. There wasn’t a chance in hell that she’d inform Tako of anything. And the other techs were just foot soldiers.

He needed to put a source in place. A reliable source.

There were only two people in the world who could help him.

One more time, he pushed the intercom button. “Do we know where the Cutlers are?” he asked his assistant.

“No, but I can probably find them by following their bread crumbs on social media.”

“So find them,” Takayama said.