Chapter 52

Hale Inu Sports Bar, Hilo, Hawai‘i

They were seated at a table against the wall underneath one of the TV sets, holding hands and acting as if there were no one else in the crowded bar.

Noa thought Leilana looked more beautiful than ever, if such a thing were even possible. When he'd first seen her at the Ohana Grill, he had thought she was out of his league. Was sure of it. But now here they were.

"Did you run all the way here?" she asked. "Your face looks sunburned." She touched his face with cool fingers. "God, Noa," she said. "You're burning up."

His mind took him back to the base, to the shower he didn't take, to boots he hadn't changed.

He told himself he was being crazy. What he was feeling was the rush of adrenaline that had gotten him here, the excitement of being with her.

"I would have run if I'd had to," he said. "I was afraid you wouldn't wait for me."

She asked what the big emergency had been. He told her as much as he could, making it sound like some sort of Mission Impossible plot.

He smiled. She smiled. They had both finished their first glasses of Big Island beer. Noa already wanted another one, another cold one, to see if that would cool him off.

What he wanted to do in this moment was just press a frosty mug to his forehead.

"Is the eruption going to be as bad as they're saying?" she said. "There's a headline on the Star-Advertiser website calling it ‘The Biggest One?'—with a question mark at the end. Can that possibly be true?"

"Don't worry." He grabbed their empty glasses and headed for the bar. "I'll protect you."

He told himself he really was Tom Cruise tonight. Noa got up to the bar, waved at the bartender. He noticed that the back of his hand was bright red. The hand without the stamp on it.

He was staring at his hand, almost mesmerized by the color of it, wondering if something was terribly wrong, when men wearing the same kind of hazmat suit he'd left on top of a pile back at the base came charging through the door.

They made Noa think of the Star Wars stormtroopers.

And they were coming straight for him.

"Sergeant Noa Mahoe?" the lead man said from behind his mask.

"Yes," Noa said. "Yes, sir."

More than ever he felt as if he were burning up. Everyone's eyes were on him, including Leilana's, but what he felt was more than embarrassment; he was sure of that.

"You need to come with us," the man growled at him. "Now."

Another man yelled, "Everybody else, stay where you are and do not try to leave."

The crowded bar had gone silent, but not for long.

"Fuck you, Iron Man," a big guy standing at the bar, a native in a floral shirt, said.

"You don't want to make trouble, sir," the first stormtrooper said.

"How do you know?" the big guy asked.

He tried to shove a couple of the stormtroopers, but they knocked him back hard, right into Noa. It was like getting hit by a car.

They both went down.

Noa heard yelling all around him. Somebody else went down. There were more shouts; Noa thought he could hear more men coming through the door.

There was a scuffle above him and then somebody fell on Noa, knocking the last air out of him. He struggled to get himself out from underneath the men pinning him to the sawdust-covered floor.

As he twisted his body, he could see the table where he'd been sitting with Leilana.

She was gone.

Sergeant Noa Mahoe's last thought before he passed out was that he felt like someone had set him on fire.