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“I just saw Vernon naked.”
Vernon followed Riley into the room. He was still damp and he was wearing a towel. “Yep, she saw my doodles and my dongle in all their glory,” he said.
Alani gave a bark of laughter. “Your dongle isn’t that glorious. I’ve seen it, along with half the women on this island. You’ve got a teeny wienie.”
Not that Riley had seen hundreds of dongles but from what she’d just seen of Vernon he looked pretty darn good from head to toe, dongle included.
Emerson walked into the room. “What’s going on?”
“Riley saw Vernon naked,” Wayan Bagus said. “Furthermore, Alani thinks Vernon has a teeny wienie.”
“It was an accident,” Riley said. “I thought Emerson was in the bedroom.”
“I’ve heard about this on HBO,” Vernon said. “It’s a fetish called CFNM, or Clothed Female Nude Male. Apparently some women just like to look at as many wieners as they can. You’re probably next, Little Buddy.”
Wayan Bagus shook his head and looked disapprovingly at Riley. “Not good. Not good at all.”
“Criminy,” Riley said, “I don’t want to see everyone’s wiener! I only wanted to see Emerson.”
Emerson glanced down at himself. “And who could blame her.”
TWENTY-TWO
By five A.M., Riley, Emerson, Vernon, Wayan Bagus, and Alani were loaded into the ranch SUV and passing through the cowboy town of Waimea on their way to the Mauna Kea summit.
“The turnoff to Saddle Road is just ahead,” Alani said. “It’s about twenty-five miles from there to the Pohakuloa Training Area and another ten miles from there to the Mauna Kea Access Road and the Onizuka Center.”
Riley wound her way up the mountain road in the darkness and felt her ears pop. “How high are we going?” she asked Alani.
“Waimea is at twenty-six hundred feet elevation. Pohakuloa is about nine thousand feet. The summit is almost at fourteen thousand feet. It’s usually below freezing there through the night and, in winter, it’s not uncommon to have snow.”
By five-thirty A.M., the thick cloud cover was right above them.
“It’s called an inversion layer,” Emerson said. “The temperature difference keeps a dense cloud over Mauna Kea at this elevation most of the time.”
Riley drove into the cloud. Even with the high beams, it was almost impossible to see more than a foot or two in front of the car.
“This is kind of spooky,” she said as the car passed a sign reading POHAKULOA TRAINING AREA. Riley slowed and looked off to the side of the road. The visibility was so bad she couldn’t see a single building, let alone the army airfield.
“There’s no way a plane could land in this soup,” Riley said. “Especially if you’re carrying cargo that could explode if you jostled it the wrong way.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Emerson said. “There’s an eight-hour window tomorrow when the sky will be clear. I’m betting our friends try to land with the Penning trap during that window.”
Five minutes later, the car popped through the clouds, and the impenetrable white ceiling turned into an impenetrable white floor. Riley looked up into the predawn sky. “Wow. I’ve never seen so many stars.”
Alani smiled. “Mauna Kea is the world’s largest observatory for optical, infrared, and submillimeter astronomy for a reason. The atmospheric conditions at the summit are near perfect.”
A couple
minutes later, Riley turned on to the Summit Access Road and climbed steadily until reaching the Onizuka Center, where the paved road ended.
“There’s a very steep five-mile-long gravel road to the summit from here,” Alani said. “It requires a four-wheel drive.”
The sun was just beginning to peek above the horizon, and they all got out of the car. The air was noticeably thinner, and even walking up the small hill to the center was a workout. Only Wayan Bagus and Emerson seemed unaffected.
Vernon put his hands on his knees. “It’s kind of hard to breathe proper up in this here high country,” Vernon said.
“We all need to be alert for signs of altitude sickness,” Emerson said. “We haven’t had time to acclimate. Mauna Kea is probably the only place in the world where you can go from sea level to fourteen thousand feet in less than two hours.”
