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monarch to Waikiki in the nineteenth century, Mokapu had been transformed into farmland.
    In the late 1800s, a group of American businessmen saw the benefit of controlling Pearl Harbor. With the help of a small detachment of Marines—and this would be the part of military history that always made Chase squirm—they had stormed the Ioloni Palace and overthrown the Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liluokalani. When word reached President Grover Cleveland, he denounced the overthrow and ordered the queen reinstated. However, Cleveland wasquickly persuaded otherwise, and the queen was removed. Manifest Destiny in full force, by 1918 President Woodrow Wilson had established an army reservation near the Ulupau Crater of the peninsula. Shortly afterward, the Navy adopted the flat, isolated portion of the peninsula as an ideal base for seaplanes and constructed the 7,500-foot runway still in use today.
    Headquarters was a sandy colored concrete building in the middle of the base. Before she could pull in the parking lot, Chase had to wait on a long line of running Marines, bare-chested, in shorts and boots, from the Third Marine regiment, singing cadence and clapping to the left-right rhythm of their swaying column. Once parked, she grabbed her notebook and climbed out of thecar to the assault of cackling parrots in the palm trees.
    “Got cheated out of your weekend, did you, Captain Anderson?” Provost Marshal Major Sims, the base’s top cop, was so tall it actually hurt to look up at him. One night at the O’Club, he’d told Chase he’d always wanted to fly, but he was too tall for the cockpit. Since his father and grandfather had been cops in Boston—his grandfather during the 1920s strike and walkout—Sims figured police work was in his blood.
    “Another black eye for the 81, I’m afraid,” she said and saluted.
    Sims returned her salute. “Guess you’ve heard the disturbing news about Major O'Donnell—”
    “No, sir.” As the junior officer, Chase maneuvered to Sims’ left side and struggled inher high heels to match his long stride as she was expected to do. She fought the urge to hike up her skirt to free her legs, showing Major Sims she could keep up. Ordinarily, Sims was less the sort of military officer who enjoyed the backing of traditions. Today, however, he was walking with a purpose, with a sense of anger. He was forgetting the Marine by his side was a woman in high heels who had to walk on the balls of her feet to keep her heels from sinking into the hot asphalt. Or was he?
    “O’Donnell’s in the base hospital,” Sims said. “Tried to commit suicide last night.” He jogged up the steps.
    She stopped. “What?”
    Sims never answered but halted at the top and stepped aside for her to open the door.
    Sims dashed down the polished corridor ahead of them and disappeared in the office belonging to Hickman’s executive officer. Chase headed toward the raucous voices emanating from the conference room. As she entered, a hush fell across the room, and the first thing that occurred to her was that they’d been discussing Major O'Donnell’s suicide attempt. She crossed the room to the chair she always took—why was it everyone followed such habits as always sitting week after week in the same chair as if they’d been assigned? Still, as the only captain in a room of field grade officers, she wasn’t about to break the habit. She walked toward her chair, feigning interest in the framed photographs of Hickman in various poses taken back in the Middle East: there was Hickman in front of an 81 withColin Powell, and Hickman posing outside a tent with Generals Franks and Abizaid, just after the “shock and awe” phase of the war—the broad smiles of Franks and Hickman in sharp contrast to Abizaid’s prescient stare.
    Chase glanced around the conference room. There was the new intel officer, Colonel Figueredo, whose top-secret missions in Afghanistan were still on a need-to-know basis. She’d heard the