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.

"Frank," he said, "can we swing around the island? I'd like to get the lay of the land before we touch down."

"I don't know, Jack. It's getting late. And we'd have to fly low to see anything. Air currents could be tricky on the far side. I mean, with the wide temperature variants between the ocean and the lava and the vog, we could hit some weird thermals. I don't like to do that when I'm straight."

"Okay," Jack said casually. "If you don't think you can hack it, I'll find somebody at the airport to take me up after we land."

Frank grinned. "You're a rotten, despicable, evil dude, Jack, and I hate you very, very much. May your karma turn black and fall into the void. Hang on."

Frank swung the jet out and banked around the western flank of the reactivated Haleakala to the south end of the island. The scenery changed abruptly from lush green to scorched black, as if a giant flame thrower had been played over the terrain. The eastern slope, however, was a scene from Dante's Inferno. Molten lava streamed down the broken-out side of the cone, cooling black crusts rode inexorably downward on the crests of crimson flame-waves, throwing up immense clouds of salty steam as they wiped out in the sea.

Frank skirted the turbulent clouds for a few miles. On the right was the immense bubbling, boiling cauldron of ocean where the Big Island of Hawaii had once stood, the source of the lid of vog that covered much of the Eastern Pacific.

Frank turned to Jack. "You sure you want to go all the way around?"

Jack nodded. "All the way."

"Okay. Strap in and don't say I didn't warn you."

He banked a sharp left and gunned the jet into the roiling steam. Water sluiced off the windshields like rain as the craft was buffeted about by updrafts and downdrafts and mini-vortices of air, but Frank guided her through with a clenched jaw and steely-eyed determination. When they broke free into the light again, Frank relaxed his grip on the controls and half-turned to Jack.

"Awright! Far freaking out! Let's try that again. Maybe we can—Jesus H. Christ!"

Jack had already seen it. His stomach was fluttering in awe. The news reports had mentioned it and he'd seen photos, but nothing had prepared him for the reality of it.