"Smells burnt."
"It is," Frank said. "It's vog—a mixture of like water vapor, smoke, and fine, fine, super-fine volcanic ash. Under normal conditions it would give us awesome sunsets all over the world. But now…hey, who knows? We don't seem to get real sunsets anymore."
Jack felt closed in, trapped by the formless grayness pressing against the windows of the jet. It was difficult even to tell if they were headed up. He'd have to trust Frank on that.
Which was probably one of the reasons he didn't like to fly. He liked to be in control of a situation. Up here he was at Frank's mercy. He didn't know which way they were headed, and if something should happen to Frank, Jack didn't have the faintest idea of how to get them down safely. It had scared the hell out of him when Frank had put the controls on autopilot over Denver and made a trip back to the head. He'd returned soon, but it hadn't been anywhere near soon enough for Jack.
Suddenly the grayness darkened as if a curtain had been drawn, and the jet wobbled.
"What's up?" Jack said as calmly as he could.
"Don't rightly know," Frank said.
"Those are three little words I do not want to hear from my pilot."
Jack held on to his seats arm rests and knew if he looked down at his hands he'd see two sets of white knuckles.
"We'll be okay," Frank said.
"Good. A much better choice of three words."
"Be cool, Jack. Some weird air currents out of nowhere, that's all."
The grayness lightened as abruptly as it had darkened. Jack began to breath easier. He was leaning against his window, staring out into the unrelieved grayness, when the plane passed through a brief break in the vog. His throat closed and his hands renewed their chokehold on his armrests. Directly below the wings he saw a broad flat surface, smooth and black as new asphalt, spanning off in all directions until it disappeared into the gray. He was about to shout to Frank that they were going to crash when he saw the eye: Far off to his right, perhaps a quarter-mile away, cathedral-sized, huge and yellow with a slit pupil, it sat embedded in the black surface, staring back at him like a lab tech eying a microbe.
Jack slammed back in his seat, gasping for breath.
"My God, Frank!" he said, his voice a croak. "What is that?"
Frank glanced past him. "What's what?"
Jack took another look. The vog had closed in again. Nothing there now but gray.
"Nothing."
Jack remembered Glaeken mentioning winged leviathans big as towns cruising the skies, but he'd said they'd keep to the nightside. Looked like he was wrong. At least one of them had made itself at home in the dense vog from Hawaii. Maybe more than one.
His mouth was dry. "How long till we get above this junk?"
"Any minute now."
Sure enough, two minutes later they broke into clear air. But no sign of the sun. The whole sky was now some sort of tinted filter, a ground-glass lens that wouldn't allow direct sunlight through. Right now, Jack didn't care. They were out of the vog, out of reach of that thing in the clouds falling away beneath them.
He looked down. As far as he could see, nothing but a smooth dome of gray cloud. Plenty of room for a bunch of leviathans down there. Frank said they were over the Pacific; for all Jack knew they could be headed back toward New York.
The pilot's cabin suddenly seemed too small. Jack decided to head back and see what Ba was up to. He slapped Frank on the shoulder.
"Get you anything?"
"A hefty J would be super right about now. I've got a lid of bodacious—"
"Frank, don't even kid about that."
"Who's kidding, man? It's the only way to fly. Hell, I recall the time I jumped the Himalayas and coasted into Kathmandu totally wrecked. It was—"
"Please, Frank. Not on this trip."
Six miles above the Central Pacific with a blitzed pilot. Not Jack's idea of Friendly Skies.
Frank grinned. "Okay, man. Another coffee'd be good."
"Not getting sleepy, are you?"
"Not yet. I'll let you know when. Then you can take over the controls."
"Two coffees coming right up! An urn, already!"
Jack spent a few hours with Ba, trying to get to know him. It wasn't easy. He did learn a few things about Sylvia Nash which cast her in a different light—about her dead husband, Greg—"the Sergeant", as Ba called him—a Special Forces non-com who'd made it through Nam in one piece only to go out one night for a pack of cigarettes and get killed by an armed robber when he tried to break up a 7-11 heist.
He learned about Jeffy, the once autistic kid, and about the Dat-tay-vao that had inhabited Dr. Bulmer for a while and left him a cripple, and now lay dormant in Jeffy, waiting. He learned about the powerful love between Sylvia and Doc Bulmer, how they were soulmates who locked horns and butted heads on a regular basis but whose karmas were so intertwined that one could not imagine life without the other.
Jack learned all that, but he learned very little about Ba, other than the fact that he grew up in a poor Vietnamese fishing village and was intensely devoted to the Sergeant's wife—referred to simply as "the Missus"—and how that devotion extended to anyone who mattered to her.
When Jack ran out of questions, they sat in silence, and Nick Quinn's words to Alan Bulmer came back to him. Only three of you will return. He brushed the words away. Nick may have met this mysterious Rasalom down in that hole, but he'd yet to prove that he had any powers of prediction. He talked in riddles anyway.
When Jack noticed the plane banking to its left, he headed back up front to see what was going on.
"We almost there?" he said as he stepped into the pilot's cabin.
Frank was bouncing around in his seat, listening to his earphones. The volume was so high Jack could recognize "Statesboro Blues" from where he stood. He sniffed the air. No trace of herbal-smelling smoke. He tapped Frank on the shoulder and repeated his question when Frank pulled off the headphones.
"We're past it," Frank said. "Got to come around to make our approach from the west."
Jack strapped himself in the co-pilot's seat and peered out the window. The vog was gone. The air was clear all the way to the pristine blue of the Pacific below. Off the upturned tip of the right wing an irregular patch of lush green, spiked with mountains and rimmed with white sand and surf, floated amid the blue.
"Maui?" Jack said.
Frank shook his head. "Oahu. Pearl Harbor's down there in that notch. Hang on. We're coming around toward Maui now." A moment later the plane leveled off and three islands swung into view. "There. That's Molokai on the left, Lanai on the right, and Maui's dead ahead."
Jack had been studying the maps Glaeken had given him. They were approaching from the northwest. Molokai looked okay, and the resort hotels along Maui's Ka'anapali Bay were intact but deserted. Inland, the tops of the western mountains were tucked away within a wreath of rain clouds.
But as Frank banked southward, Jack saw that there was nothing left of the old whaling town of Lahaina—everything burned, blackened, flattened. To their right the whole southern flank of Lanai was scorched and smoking. And then Jack's stomach lurched, not so much from the movement of the plane as from what he saw ahead of them. He felt as if he'd been thrown into any one of a dozen prehistoric island movies of the Lost Continent/Land That Time Forgot type.
Maui looked swaybacked from here, as green as Oahu but with mountains at each end and a broad flat valley between. But the big mountain that took up most of the eastern end, Haleakala, was belching fire and pouring gray-black smoke into the air. The old volcano's sides, however—at least from Jack's vantage—were still lush and green.
And somewhere on the slope of that chimney flue to hell dwelt Kolabati and her necklaces.
Jack studied the scene, wondering what the hell he'd got himself into. Maui looked so fragile, like it could blow any minute. Just like Hawaii on its far side.