“Where, Rick? We can’t land on the ground.” They would be exposed to ground-dwelling predators.
“Follow me,” he said. He went past her and flew on ahead, while she followed. He could see branches, leaves, obstructions, and he flew around them, twisting left and right, always staying inside the crowns of the trees, where bats wouldn’t be flying. Occasionally he looked back, and saw Karen’s running lights behind him; she was staying on his tail. The light of the fires faded behind them, until they had gone down inside the depths of the crater, into a zone where the wind blew more gently, blocked by the walls and slopes of the crater. They could no longer see the fires at all.
“I’m going to look for a landing place,” Rick said on the radio. He coasted along a branch, inspecting it: it was a wide, clean branch, free of moss, with plenty of taxi room. He settled down on the branch and came to a halt. These planes could land on a dime. Karen landed and taxied up next to him, until their planes were parked beside each other.
The branch rocked and bobbed: the wind played with it, threatening to pluck the aircraft off the branch.
“We need to tie these planes down,” Rick said, and climbed out. He discovered that the planes had tie-down ropes in their noses and tails; surely Ben Rourke’s invention. Rick secured both planes.
Karen King began crying softly, hunched in her cockpit.
“What’s the matter?”
“Ben. He was trapped. He couldn’t have survived.”
Rick thought Ben might have stood a chance. “I wouldn’t count that guy out.” But there was no way of knowing if Ben had escaped or had died in the flames.
Then came the wait. The clocks in the instrument panels showed the time: 1:34 a.m. Dawn would not come for many hours, but they couldn’t fly safely at night.
The trade wind was running strong, and the branch tossed and heaved like the deck of a ship in a storm. She could see the bruises on her arms, dark stains in the moonlight. The stains were getting larger. She wondered what the rest of her body looked like.
Rick became seasick as the branch pitched and bobbed, and he wondered if the micro-bends were getting to him. Or it might be lingering effects of spider and wasp venom. He thought about the distance they had to cover at dawn. Fifteen miles, including a long passage over Pearl Harbor, which was open water. He thought: It’s not possible. We’ll never make it.
Chapter 47
Tantalus Drive 1 November, 1:40 a.m.
W hen Eric Jansen swung into the parking area by the Diamond Head Lighthouse, the place had been deserted. There was no sign of Vin Drake’s car. He had arrived too late. Or maybe too early? Maybe Drake hadn’t shown up yet. He had parked in the corner of the area and debated what to do next. Wait for Drake? But Drake might have already been here. Should he go to the police? But that might cost the survivors their lives, because Drake knew where they were, and he might be heading for Tantalus to kill them.
Eric knew he had to go to Tantalus.
And so he drove up the Tantalus Drive, the truck roaring and misfiring, past expensive homes on hairpin turns. The road came to a gate with a rutted dirt track beyond it; the gate wasn’t locked. He started driving up the track. It wound up the steep mountainside through guava forests, and came out at the lip of the crater, and it followed the lip down through dips and gullies, washed out in several places. This was a four-wheel-drive track only, and Eric was glad he had a fat-tire truck. Eventually he reached a turnaround; still no sign of Drake’s truck. The place was deserted.
He did not have a flashlight; that was a problem. But he got out of the truck, leaving the headlights shining toward the Great Boulder, and stood there, listening. There was a reddish glow through the trees, and he began crashing through the undergrowth toward it. When he reached the Great Boulder he saw what had happened. Embers were dying down, the soil smoking, and the ground reeked of gasoline.
Drake had done the deed. He had killed everybody.
Regretting that he hadn’t brought a flashlight, Eric got down on his knees and found the entrance to the rat warren: Rourke’s hideout. “Anybody there?” he called.
It was useless. He waited for a while, though, poking his finger into the soil, wondering if there were survivors. It was too dark to see much, and they would be very small; he worried he might crush somebody by accident.
But there weren’t any survivors, anybody could see that.
He stumbled through the woods back to the truck.
Rick and Karen, parked on the branch, saw the headlights of another vehicle bumping slowly around the rim of the crater. It was a truck.
Rick watched for a while, then said to Karen, “I’m going to investigate.”
“Don’t.”
He ignored her. He untied his plane and started it, and taxied off. She heard it whining upward, toward the crater rim, toward the Great Boulder.
“Damn you, Rick!” Karen yelled. She wasn’t going to be left alone, so she started her plane and followed him.
Rick saw a man get out of the truck. He circled through the branches, listening for bats, but he didn’t hear any sonar, and he flew closer to the man. The man walked to the Great Boulder and got down on his knees in the darkness. His face wasn’t visible. The man stood up from the boulder and walked away, crashing through the underbrush, a black silhouette. Rick followed him, dodging among branches and trunks.
The man arrived at the parked vehicle. It was a strange-looking truck with fat tires and a weird paint job. The man got in, and the dome light came on, revealing his face.
Rick had seen the man before. Where? He circled past the window as the truck started with a roar.
“Karen!” he called on the radio. “Who is this guy?”
She swooped past Rick and made a steep turn by the truck. She was getting the hang of flying; it was pretty easy. “It’s Peter’s brother!”
“I thought he was supposed to be dead. Is he in with Drake?”
“How would I know?” Karen answered testily.
The truck started and began rumbling off, moving along the dirt track.
Karen ran her engine up to EMERGENCY MAXIMUM. Running at full power, their planes could barely keep up with the truck, even though it bounced slowly along the dirt road. The moment the truck arrived at a paved road it would speed up and they would never catch it, and it would be gone. They had to get Eric’s attention soon.
He was driving with the windows rolled up. Karen flew alongside the window, close to the man’s face, and waggled her wings. No reaction. Then the truck sped up, leaving them behind in swirling dust.
“Get in the slipstream,” Rick said. There would be a zone of dead air behind the truck’s cab, he thought, so he dove for it, watching the back of the man’s head in the glass. His plane flipped over and tumbled: the air behind the cab had gone turbulent and chaotic, and he nearly crashed on the truck’s bed.
The truck came to a bad spot in the road, where rain had washed a gully. The man slowed, and rolled down his window and leaned out to get a better look.
Karen flew through the window into the cab. She circled once, and the man drew his head back in. She made a slow pass in front of his eyes, and rolled the plane, its lights winking.
He saw that. He jammed on the brakes. “Hey-!” His eyes followed her as she banked and turned and flew low over the dashboard. He held out his hand, palm upward, and she landed on his hand. She climbed out and stood on his hand, while he looked at her.
Rick flew in and landed on the dashboard.
“Which-ones-are-you?” he said, his voice rumbling. He held Karen delicately, and he tried not to breathe too much as he spoke. He didn’t want to blow her off his hand.
Karen held up her radio headset and pointed to it. She remembered that Jarel Kinsky had said the radios
