My Kind of Town
>> Ala Moana Beach Park The Honolulu Soap Co.:
Sunday digestWearing a mask and shotgun snorkel, standing in water where the beach curves toward Magic Island, Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka watched HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes just 25 yards away. An easy shot. Gomes pulled on goggles and dove into the water, and started thrashing around. Gomes couldn't swim. Donovan moved in for the kill.
Shotgun snorkel really was the right term. An aficionado of blowguns, Donovan turned his snorkel into a double-barrel blowgun, armed with two tiny steel-tip darts he'd soaked overnight in poison. Soon after he was hit by a dart, Gomes' muscles would stiffen and he'd go into convulsions. If Gomes didn't drown, the poison would kill him. And Gomes had to go. If not, he would tell Donovan's girlfriend, Dr. Laurie Tang, that Donovan had fathered the child in the woman who crashed Donovan's car yesterday. Gomes was also the guy who busted Donovan smoking ice. Yes, Gomes had to go.
Gomes came thrashing and flailing up out of the water, gasping for breath.
Appearing to adjust his snorkel, Donovan tipped his head, checked his aim, inhaled deeply through his nose.
>> This was freaking ridiculous. Sherlock Gomes had watched Dr. Laurie Tang swim so gracefully. But when he tried it, he sank like a chunk of lava.
He was determined though. By the time Dr. Tang got back from her swim to the other end and back, Gomes wanted to at least appear comfortable in the water. He suddenly plunged back into the water, unaware that a strychnine-laced dart had missed the back of his neck by two inches.
>> Shinjo Eiki launched his sub in Ho'ola's cove at high tide. Once clear of the two lava arms that reached into the sea, Shinjo submerged the sub and looked back through the periscope. He saw Ho'ola and her valley fading from view, and soon she and her paradise were but a warm blur in his memory. But he felt a pull, and he turned the sub to the west.
Hawaii was a far different place now than it was when Shinjo arrived in 1944. Back then, when he discovered that neither tube in his one-man submarine would fire, even though it was wartime Shinjo found it relatively easy to get from Pearl Harbor to the north shore of Molokai, where he found a quiet cove away from civilization and planned to repair the tubes and get on with his mission of sinking U.S. ships. Instead, he tarried for 57 years in the valley of Ho'ola, goddess of life, making love and never growing old.
But now, there were so many more people, more boats, more planes. The biggest difference were all of the lights along the shorelines of both Molokai and Oahu. It was so much more difficult to be invisible.
And so it was that the Star-Bulletin's Cruz MacKenzie received a call from a retiree who swore he saw a WWII vintage mini-sub -- with a big red circle on the hull, the unmistakable sign of the Rising Sun -- while fishing at Queen's Beach early that morning. While MacKenzie didn't quite laugh at him, Jimmy Ahuna knew the guy didn't take him seriously.
And as summer turned to fall, Shinjo Eiki felt a greater urgency to complete his mission. The urgency was because from the day he left Ho'ola's valley he began to age rapidly. He'd been 26 when he arrived in 1944, and physically he was still 26 when he launched the sub again. Cruising the islands, Shinjo felt and saw his body age 57 years in just three months. So that now, as his sub lay in 20 feet of water at the bottom of the swimming channel inside the reef at Ala Moana Beach Park, Shinjo was all of 83 years old. His life was ebbing away, but he felt calm, because he knew that this is where he was supposed to be.
>> Only another 150 yards to the end of the beach and Dr. Laurie Tang was swimming strong, what she thought of as "drive" mode -- her stroke, kick, breathing and glide all in synch. This was the joy of swimming, the purity of the stroke, the sensation of water flowing fast around her body. That's when Laurie heard an engine start and she nearly jumped out of the water. She stopped swimming, treaded water, looking for the sound of a boat, and saw none.
The water, of course, was too murky to see the submarine just 15 feet below her. But Laurie could hear the engine. She could feel its vibrations in the water. She resumed swimming. Only another 100 yards now.
>> The time was now to fulfill his mission. Shinjo Eiki started the engine of his sub. It was his last conscious act. As he died, Shinjo saw a vision of Ho'ola at the helm.
>> Dr. Laurie Tang was pushing now, the final 50-yard sprint at the end of her swim. Laurie felt so strong it was like she was swimming on top of the water, as if she was being pushed along by an unseen force.
And she was.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com