"Bob Tieggs?" Carter asked.
"That's right," Tieggs said without warmth. "Fenster said you needed a pilot. I'll just get the chopper ready." He turned and went inside the hangar.
Carter followed him inside.
"Catch the doors, will you?" the pilot asked.
Carter found the switch for the doors and punched it. As they began to rumble open he went back to where Tieggs was readying a small Bell helicopter. The NASA symbol was painted on its fuselage. Their work here was under cover as a satellite tracking and receiving station for the space agency.
Tieggs had hooked a powered handcart to the front hitch on the helicopter, and he pulled the machine across the hangar and out into the hot afternoon sun.
"Where do you want to go?" the young man asked.
"I want to tour the islands."
Tieggs looked at his watch. "We'll have to hustle to finish by dark."
"I don't want to finish by dark."
Tieggs looked sharply at him. "There's nothing to see out there once the sun goes down. This place, the town, and perhaps a few native fires on some of the other islands is about all."
"We'll see," Carter said.
Within ten minutes Tieggs had warmed up the chopper, and they were rising away from the tracking station's air field and turning out toward the sea.
"Where to first?" Tieggs asked.
"Natu Faui," Carter said without hesitation.
Tieggs swung around toward the south, back over the island, and headed directly toward a group of islands several miles in the distance. Farther to the south, on the opposite end of their own island at the foot of a series of steep hills, the town of Hiva Faui gradually came into view. From here it looked like little more than a wide street that led up to a collection of white buildings scattered in and among the thick jungle growth. A thin plume of smoke rose from just beyond the town.
Carter pointed it out. "What's that?"
"Electrical generating plant. They burn everything from oil and coal to copra and wood."
They made it the remainder of the way across to Natu Faui in a few minutes, and Carter directed the pilot not to overfly the island, but to circle it at a distance of a quarter mile.
It was a very large island, even larger than Hiva Faui, but the western end of the island was dominated by a large volcano.
Once they had gotten around to that end of the island, they climbed so that they could see down into the smoking crater. It seemed to Carter as if it were still an active volcano.
"It is," Tieggs said. "But it hasn't blown its top for at least twenty-five years."
"Is it due?"
"The natives think so. Lots of superstition here."
"But natives live on this island?"
"At the eastern end," Tieggs said. "Not here. This end is very bad medicine."
They dropped down again and circled to the southwest side, and Carter had Tieggs set down on the wide beach. He got out of the chopper and motioned for the young man to shut it off.
"What's the idea?" Tieggs asked, climbing down.
"We're staying here until after dark, then we're going to fly over in a grid pattern."
"Listen, I don't know what you and Fenster have got cooked up, but as far as I'm concerned…"
"Fenster is an idiot who is no friend of mine. It's why I didn't take him along."
Tieggs looked at Carter for a moment. "No shit?"
Carter grinned. "You owe me an apology, Bob."
"I guess I do," Tieggs said, laughing.
Three
The sun went down in the west, and it was almost instantly dark. Unlike northern latitudes where there were long twilights, in the tropics there generally was only daylight or darkness with very little in between. The night insects were very loud, competing with the sounds of the surf crashing against the barrier reef a few hundred yards offshore and another, lower pitched, more ominous rumble.
"Just what is it you have in mind to do up here, Mr. Carter?" Tieggs asked.
Carter had trudged up the gently sloping beach to the edge of the jungle. Tieggs had followed him.
"Quiet a minute," Carter whispered, straining to listen, to define the low-pitched rumbling.
Tieggs looked at him quizzically, then glanced back toward the helicopter.
"What is that?" Carter asked.
"Sir?" Tieggs asked, looking back.
"The rumbling. You can barely hear it."
Tieggs listened. "The volcano, I'd suspect," he said.
The volcano. Carter thought. Yes, but there was more there as well. Something steady, rhythmic, man-made. Something was running — some machinery was operating somewhere at this end of the island — and the ever present rumbling of the active volcano was meant to mask the noise.
He looked back toward the southwest. The line between where the sea ended and the darkening sky began was nearly indistinct now. There was little to see other than an amorphous blackness.
"Let's go," Carter said to the young pilot, who looked at him for several long moments.
"Over the island? In a grid pattern?"
Carter nodded.
"What are we looking for, may I ask?"
"You may not, but if you see anything, let me know," Carter said, smiling.
They went back to the helicopter, Tieggs grumbling, and climbed in and strapped down.
Tieggs switched on the motor, and as the rotors began to slowly gather speed, he flipped on the chopper's running lights. Carter reached out and shut them off.
"No lights."
Tieggs opened his mouth but quickly had second thoughts about what he wanted to say, and stopped himself. He nodded, increased the power, cranked the pitch control so that the blades bit deeper into the night air, and they rose slowly into the star-studded sky.
Carter had to lean a little closer to Tieggs so that the pilot could hear him. "Bring her around to the western end of the island, and then give me a grid pattern, a few hundred yards on a leg, over the island past the volcano."
Tieggs nodded, but still said nothing.
They followed the beach to the western end of the island until it began curving north, then they climbed so that they were skirting the western slopes of the volcano. Carter watched intently as the dark jungle flashed by beneath them.
At the northern side of the island, Tieggs expertly swung the chopper around in a tight arc, coming back over the island along a path a couple of hundred yards to the east of their first pass.
This time they were closer to the volcano, and the land rose up much more quickly. But Tieggs knew what he was doing. After a time, Carter forgot completely about the machine and the flying, and concentrated on what he was seeing below… or rather what he was not seeing.
There was nothing below them, absolutely nothing but the pitch-blackness of a tropical island at night.
Within a half hour their passes across the island had taken them up and over the center of the volcano's crater. Far below the lip of the mountain, Carter could just make out a dull red glow that backlit slowly rising steam, and then they were past and banking down the far slope.
Twenty minutes later, on one of their passes just cast of the volcano, Tieggs sucked in his breath. Carter looked up.
"Uh-oh," the pilot said.
"What?"
For several moments they flew on in silence, Tieggs glancing from his instruments to the darkness outside. Then he looked over at Carter and shook his head. "If I didn't know any better I'd say we had passed over a fairly heavy electrical disturbance. All my instruments went crazy."
"Get us back over it," Carter ordered, swiveling around in his seat and trying to get a view of the jungle they had just flown over. "And bring us down."
Tieggs complied, swinging the chopper around and down in a very tight, descending arc, and soon they were skimming just over the tops of the trees.