The Presence

CHAPTER 33

The headset that Rob clamped over Katharine’s ears the moment after he dragged her into the helicopter’s cabin cut the rotor’s roar just enough so she could make out that he was trying to talk to her, but the words themselves were lost in the din coming from above. When she finally trusted herself to speak after the sickening series of dips and turns the helicopter made as the pilot raced it away from the estate, she had to raise her voice to a shout, even though the headset’s microphone hung only a fraction of an inch from her lips.

“I said, how long will it take to get to the Big Island?”

Rob started to reply, then went silent as the pilot jerked on the joystick and the helicopter yawed sharply to port as it banked away from the face of a cliff. It plunged straight down, then stabilized and began to rise, finally cresting the top of the cliff and swooping away to the west.

“Maybe forty minutes,” Rob finally answered.

Forty minutes? But before, she recalled, Rob had said Michael would have to breathe for only ten or fifteen minutes! And though one of the two plastic bags was still full — she herself was clutching its top to make sure none of its contents could escape before Michael needed them — the bag Michael had carried out of the research pavilion was already nearly half empty. He’d never make it! Before she could say anything, though, Michael spoke.

“I’m gonna try breathing regular air!” he shouted into his microphone. “Maybe I can save what’s in the bags!”

Katharine nodded vigorously, then shouted into the microphone again: “Just don’t waste any of it trying to talk!”

Michael made a thumbs-up sign. Then, as she watched, he exhaled the last breath he’d taken from the bag, and inhaled his first breath of air from the cabin.

For a second, just a second, Katharine felt a surge of hope. Then a fit of coughing seized Michael, and she could see the pain he was experiencing. He buried his face in the mouth of the bag, sucked in some of the gas it held, and the coughing subsided.

The bag, though, had collapsed still further. When Katharine glanced at her watch, she saw that only three minutes had gone by since they’d left the estate. At this rate, both the bags would be depleted before they were even halfway to the Big Island. “What are we going to do?” she asked, struggling to control the panic rising within her. Michael couldn’t die now! He couldn’t! They were supposed to be rescuing him, not killing him!

“Don’t worry!” Rob shouted over the noise of the rotors. “By the time he finishes them, we should be okay!”

Katharine gazed out through the Plexiglas bubble into the darkness outside. The route they were taking was leading them up the side of the mountain, and the pilot was keeping the chopper low, hugging the ground. The rain forests around the estate had already given way to the lush pastureland above Makawao and Pukalani, and just ahead and off to the port side Katharine could see a few lights she assumed must be at Kula. In the distance, strung along the edge of Maalaea Bay like a string of glittering diamonds, were the lights of Kihei and Wailea.

Farther to the south there was a vast expanse of darkness, broken only by a faint glow from the Makena Surf Condominiums and the Maui Prince Hotel, then a scattering of glimmers marking the dozen or so houses strung along the beach until the beach itself ended abruptly at the lava flow. Beneath the helicopter the landscape was changing again, the lush up-country pasturage giving way to the scrubby ranch land that dominated the leeward side of Haleakala. Even in the starlight she could make out the dense thickets of prickly pear cactus and scraggly kiawe trees that made up much of the sparse vegetation that grew there.

She glanced over at Michael; the first of the two bags was all but depleted, but as his body began to recover from the burst of energy he’d expended during the escape, his breathing, like her own, had started to return to normal, and the remaining gas contained in the bag had lasted far longer than she would have thought possible. But even so, the bag was deflated long before they had even crossed over the coastline and started out over the broad channel that separates Maui from the Big Island.

As Michael discarded the first bag and took his first breath from the second, she realized that instead of turning southeast, en route to the Big Island, the helicopter was still moving southwest. In the darkness, she could see the silhouette of a small island etched against the night sky. But there were no small islands between Maui and the Big Island. A glance at the compass confirmed her suspicion, and a new fear took root inside her as she searched for some plausible reason that they would be going in the wrong direction.

And why had Rob assured her that Michael would have to breathe no more than fifteen minutes?

Then, as the helicopter held a steady course almost ninety degrees away from the only place where Michael had a chance of surviving other than in Takeo Yoshihara’s laboratory, the truth dawned on her.

Rob was still working for Takeo Yoshihara!

Not only was he still working for him, but he’d led her — and Michael — directly into a trap.

Frantic, she looked wildly around, trying to decide what to do. Should she attempt to take control of the helicopter herself? She dismissed the idea the instant it occurred to her — perhaps in the movies someone who’d never flown a helicopter before could simply take over the joystick, but in real life it simply wasn’t possible.

“Why aren’t we going to the Big Island?” she demanded, shouting to make herself heard over the din of the rotor.

Rob cupped his hand over his ear, as if he hadn’t been able to hear her. But he must have heard! How could he not have? Furious now, she jabbed her finger toward the compass, then the island beyond. “That’s not the Big Island, God damn you! You lied to me! You’re going to kill us, aren’t you?” As Rob’s eyes widened in the face of her fury, she shouted at him again. “Why? Why are you doing this?” Suddenly it all made sense: of course she’d managed to pull off the escape — they’d always intended for her to! And they’d timed it perfectly:

The man from the laboratory appearing in the hallway just seconds too late to prevent her from using the elevator.

The alarms going off just seconds too late for the guards to prevent her from getting to the helicopter.

Even the arrival of the helicopter itself, unchallenged, its searchlight blinding her, confusing her, scaring her into shoving Michael into it with no questions at all.

An idiot! She’d been a complete idiot! Her frustration and fury overwhelming her, she lunged at Rob, wanting to smash him even harder than she’d smashed the guard with the fossilized bone half an hour ago. She wanted to hit him, to strangle him, to shove him out the door of the helicopter. “Damn you!” she screamed. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

Rob’s hands instinctively came up to defend himself, then his fingers closed on her wrists, holding her arms immobile. “What are you talking about, Katharine?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” she screamed. “For God’s sake, Rob! How stupid do you think I am? Don’t you think I’ve figured out why you told me Michael was only going to need to breathe for — what did you say? Ten to fifteen minutes, wasn’t it?”

“Kath—”

“I should have known then, shouldn’t I? I should have been able to figure out there was no way to get to the Big Island in that short a time. But I thought you had a plan! I trusted you, God damn it! I trusted you!”

“Stop it!” Rob shouted, so loudly his voice carried over the roar of the rotor even without the help of the headsets. “Will you tell me what the hell you think is going on?”

“I don’t think!” Katharine bellowed back. “I know!” She jerked her head toward the vista beyond the bubblelike cabin. They had crossed the coastline now, and the helicopter was speeding low over the water, directly toward the small island she had seen. “That’s not the Big Island, Rob. What is it? Does Yoshihara have another lab down there? Or are you just going to dump us into the ocean?”

Michael, his complexion going ashen in the face of his mother’s fury, loosed his grip on the neck of the plastic bag, and the cabin began to fill with choking fumes.

Instantly, one of Rob’s hands released Katharine’s arm and closed around the bag. “Careful with that!” he yelled. “You need that for about five more minutes. Don’t let it escape.”

As Michael, almost hesitantly, took the half-deflated bag back from him, Rob swung around to face Katharine again. “It’s the wind!” he shouted. “We can’t go directly to the Big Island — Michael would never make it! But the wind’s carrying fumes from the eruption almost due west, so we should be able to catch the worst of them just on the other side of Koho’olawe. Then we can turn and fly due east, right into the fumes. It might be rough for the rest of us, but Michael should be able to breathe on his own. It’s longer, but at least he has a chance!”

Katharine’s eyes bored into his, trying to read the truth.

And what she saw was love.

Love, and the agony that her doubt had caused him.

Then, as if what she saw in his eyes might not be enough to convince her, she felt a shift in the attitude of the helicopter and heard the pilot’s voice coming through the headset.

“Someone open a window. Let’s see if our boy can breathe.”

His hands dropping away from Katharine, Rob twisted around and slid his window open. Instead of the fresh sea air Katharine would have expected, the air that filled the cabin was so laden with volcanic fumes that her eyes immediately began stinging.

“Bingo!” the pilot yelled. “Don’t you love that vog?”

As the helicopter finished its swing, Katharine searched for the great mass of the Big Island that should be rising out of the sea ahead, but Rob, reading her mind, shook his head. “You won’t be able to see it through the haze. But wait ten or fifteen minutes. Believe me, it’s still there.” Then he said to her son: “Well, what about it, Michael? Can you breathe, or did we take the wrong gamble?”

Katharine turned to look at Michael. Once more, as he had shortly after the helicopter took off, he exhaled the fumes from the bag and inhaled the cabin’s air. He coughed once, hesitated, and tried again. After a long pause, while Katharine waited anxiously, he stuck his right hand out, thumb up. “It’s not great,” he said. “But I’m not feeling as bad as I did at school yesterday.”

“Hang on to the bag, but just use it when you have to,” Rob told him. Then he grinned at Katharine. “And as for you, I forgive you your suspicions,” he said, as he drew her close.

Half an hour later the helicopter, with both its windows wide open, was cruising along the Kalapana Coast southwest of Hilo. The entire mountainside was pocked with glowing vents, and Michael gazed in awe at the lava flows that oozed down the mountain’s flank like slithering, flaming serpents.

Bathed in the eerie silver light of the moon, he could see the stone cliffs of the coastline being battered by the heaving ocean — an ocean made angry by the mountain’s attempt to invade its realm with spreading fingers of molten rock. The Pacific was waging an unending counterattack, hurling vast masses of water against the intruding rock and casting spume high into the sky like spent artillery shells being ejected from machine guns.

Here and there along the battle’s front line, enormous plumes of steam gushed up where the ocean quenched the mountain’s fire, and from behind the lines, on the mountain’s slopes, clouds of smoke arose.

The helicopter crossed the coastline and began moving up the flank of the mountain. Below, most of the terrain was barren lava without so much as an inch of topsoil covering it, though here and there a few scrubby bushes had gained a foothold. Almost everywhere Michael looked, steam or smoke belched forth from deep within the mountain’s bowels. The air reeked with the acrid smell of sulfur.

He sucked it deep into his lungs, feeling the warmth that spread through his body as he absorbed the fumes. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

“The pilot says there’s a clearing where he can set the chopper down,” Rob told them. “The idea’s to get you as close to these vents as possible.”

In the distance, and two hundred feet above them, flames rose out of a crater like a beacon. As the pilot guided the chopper higher, rising above the caldera, they saw for the first time its demonic contents. Lava boiled with the fury of hell, flames leaped across its surface, evil fountains of molten rock shot high into the air, some of them breaking apart to drop back into the churning cauldron, others exploding into brilliant bursts of sparkling embers that drifted on the wind before cooling to the point where their fiery glow died away.

The heat rose in waves, and above the gaping, hellish maw into which Michael was gazing, the air itself shimmered and danced. The flames took on a hypnotic quality that wrapped itself around Michael’s mind until he was staring at the spectacle with unblinking fascination.

Only when the helicopter began to drop down toward the ground, and the lip of the caldera once more hid its fires from his view, did Michael finally turn away to see where they were going. A minute later the helicopter settled into something that seemed to him like an oasis in the desert of fire and lava. Somehow, in the vagaries of its flow, the lava had left a clearing in which stood a grove of scraggly kiave trees. On the ground, miraculously, a thin covering of grass still survived.

Near the center of the clearing there was a fire pit, built of a circle of rocks very much like the one in the ravine where his mother had uncovered the skeleton.

Beyond the fire pit were the ruins of a hut, its walls also built of lava, its roof long since caved in.

The chopper settled onto the ground and the pilot cut the engine. As the roar died away and the great rotor slowed to a stop, an eerie silence fell over the four people inside.

“What is this place?” Michael finally asked.

“Used to be a campground,” the pilot explained. “This is all that’s left of it. It’s about the only place around here that’s still safe to land. Everywhere else, you don’t know what’s under you.”

Katharine, feeling oddly disoriented by the sudden quiet, looked uncertainly at Michael, as if perhaps his breathing might have been somehow dependent on the power of the helicopter’s engine. “Well?” she asked.

Pushing open the door, Michael scrambled out of the cabin and dropped to the ground, then turned and grinned at his mother. “I can breathe!” he yelled. “It worked! I can breathe!” Almost as quickly as his grin had come, though, it faded. His eyes flicked around the desolate landscape, taking in the darkness that was laced with patches of glowing fire and swirling smoke and fumes. “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?” he asked, his voice quavering despite his effort to control it. “Is this where I’m going to have to live the rest of my life?”

Katharine’s eyes met Michael’s and she felt a terrible sense of dread come over her.

She had no answer for him.