Somewhere there had been a reason for it all.
If only I could see it.
The mountain gave a great belch and a column of thick black smoke rose above the caldera high up on the flank of Moana Loa. I remembered what Donna had said, that white smoke was good, that gray smoke was bad. What the hell did black smoke mean?
“David?”
“Shit, I don’t know.”
I picked up the radio.
“Felix.”
The mountain rumbled and shook. I could feel the vibration of the island through the deck of my boat.
“Felix.”
He did not answer.
“Felix! Anybody!”
A huge orange wall of lava spilled over the top of the caldera, slowly tumbling down the mountainside. Finding a different path, the flow set new fires in the jungle as it made its way toward the sea.
Another stream spilled over the lip of Hualalai and started down the other side of the lava flow.
“Anybody!”
The radio sat silent in my hand.
“John,” said David. “We’ve got to get them out of there.”
I looked around for spare diving gear and found nothing. They had taken everything I had. There wasn’t even a spare regulator.
“Well, crap,” I said. Then I remembered and ran down to my stateroom. In my personal diving gear I had a five-minute emergency bottle. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had it charged, but I turned the nozzle and air hissed, so I was satisfied. It would be better than trying to hold my breath, and I could snorkel along the surface until I came to the cave and only dive then, when I saw the entrance.
I tried the radio one more time and got no response.
“You stay on the radio,” I told David. “I’m going down.”
“It’s better if I go.”
“It’s better if you stay here. Get the engine going, raise the anchors and motor us as close as you can to the entrance. I’ll go down and bring them up.”
He nodded, glanced up at the mountain, and went to work.
The mountain rumbled and bellowed, sounding like one of those Japanese movie monsters in pain.
I was not supposed to get my wounds wet, the doctors told me. Severe infection would result, they said, along with other dire consequences. And that was if I just took a shower in soapy clean water. But those big pharmaceutical companies still made Keflex and other wonder antibiotics, didn’t they? We’d just have to see how well they worked, now wouldn’t we?
David brought Olympia as close as he dared to the coral reef. He shifted into reverse and kept her stable in the currents.
People on the shore were shouting at us and waving their arms.
I took one more look toward the mountain. A curtain of orange flame was descending, rolling down the hillside, forging an inexorable path directly toward us.
Madam Pele was on the move.
Grabbing my fins and mask, I carefully shed my shirt, kicked off my sandals, and jumped into the ocean.
53
The resonance of the volcano overwhelmed my senses as soon as the water closed over my head. It thundered like a freight train. It rumbled. It sounded like a living creature, mumbling incoherent incantations one moment, roaring curses and imprecations the next. Much louder than on the surface, it felt as if I had dived into the caldera instead of the sea. I was as immersed in the sound as I was in the Pacific.
The water grew warmer as I swam closer to the shore, and the sea turned sterile. Even the fish had deserted the area. I felt a fool, swimming toward the lava flow. There was no sane reason to be here, other than the lives of Tutu Mae, Donna Wong, James, Charles and the others.
I wondered what had happened to Felix.
It couldn’t have been good.
I snorkeled along on the choppy surface, the cool ocean water percolated by the cavitating disruption of Hualalai’s lava. The water was so disturbed that the normal visibility had dropped and I could barely make out the bottom. Following the heavy black electrical cables that ran from Olympia was difficult from the surface. Twice I had to dive to see which direction they ran from the point where I lost them in the tangle of rocks and coral, but I managed to swim to the place where they disappeared into the rock face.
It looked about thirty feet down, just as Donna had reported. The entrance to the ancient lava tube lay in a pocket below an overhanging wall. The noise of the lava reached a crescendo this close to its entry to the sea. It was so loud I could hardly think, and I could see flashes of orange light just to the north of the cave entrance as the lava pillows exploded. Black rocky shrapnel from detonations littered the coral bottom in front of the cave opening. It would be tricky getting in. I hoped that would be the trickiest part.
Felix had vanished. Remembering his demeanor the first time I met him in San Francisco, I didn’t worry about him, knowing that he valued his own hide far more than anything else. The heat and the danger might have been too much for him, and he would have simply fled. There are things you can fight, and there are things you can’t. That kind of thinking was forgivable in certain circumstances. What was not was his abandonment of the others.
Certain I had the right place, I put the emergency air supply into my mouth, cleared the mini-regulator, exhaled sharply, kicked my legs straight up into the air, and sank like a stone toward the bottom.
Clearing my sinuses twice before I reached the depth, I hovered only briefly outside the cave, cursing my stupidity at not bringing a flashlight. I must have pictured the entire cave lit up like a mining tunnel, not thinking that the lights would only be used at the location of the dig.
The cables were there, and I could follow them into the cave. That was now my only recourse.
Lava exploded nearby, stinging me with red-hot pellets. It was much closer than it should have been. I rocketed into the cave, hoping the entrance would be there when we wanted to swim out.
I groped blindly through the cave for what seemed like an eternity, keeping toward the top of the tube after I banged my head painfully against a boulder on the bottom. The tunnel was constricted at this end, jumbled with rocks and boulders of jagged lava, and there is no dark on the planet like the darkness of an underwater cave. I pushed myself into the black hole by sheer will alone, forcing my body to do things my mind absolutely forbid me to do. It may have been only a dozen meters or so, but it felt as though I had crawled like a worm through the darkness all my life. I was one of those pale cave creatures, born to exist in the void, until I came to a bend in the maze and saw the pale glimmer of electric light.
I followed the yellow rays until I swam up into a larger chamber. Off to the side was an obviously carved opening, square cut and chiseled. Inside, the light was brighter.
I swam a little faster and came to a tableau.
Tutu Mae was hovering above a large skeleton. The ancient bones were surrounded by gold and silver artifacts, jeweled candelabras, swords with golden guards and silver inlay, golden crosses, silver chalices, boxes of treasure. I had imagined what it might look like, but seeing it in the reflected glare of camera lights and electrical illumination it was the personification of a childhood dream of pirate treasure. And if that wasn’t the skeleton of old King Kamehameha, I had no idea who it could have been.
The others did not see me swim into the chamber.
I grabbed Charles, pointed at Tutu Mae, and signaled for him to take her up. He nodded and gently touched his great grandmother. She turned, startled; her eyes found mine and I pointed toward the roof of the cave and then crossed my throat with the same finger. Charles tugged at her and she did not resist.
Donna and her sisters kept the lights on and the cameras rolling and followed Tutu Mae, as if documenting her presence was somehow important to the experience. James, his arms filled with equipment, brought up the rear. I took one more look around, took in the bones of the giant skeleton, the treasure, the carvings on the tomb wall. It was a find, all right. And Donna had left it all in place
. I had to admire her lack of greed. Had I found it first I might have stripped the cave of every valuable before I said anything about it, if I said anything about it at all.
I looked, and didn’t touch, and swam out the narrow tunnel toward the open sea.
Outside, the lava was now piling up near the entrance, exploding at regular intervals. The others had made it out. Only James and I remained inside the tube. And both the frequency of the explosions and the volume of molten rock had increased.
I shoved him, and he balked.
My emergency air supply whistled and stopped flowing.
Rapidly cooling lava dripped over the edge of the entrance and piled on the rocky ocean floor in front of us.
James backed away, deeper into the tube.
I shoved him forward. He shoved back, refusing to move.
I willed him to move. He stayed at the mouth of the tunnel, his knuckles white, gripping the rock walls.
Another puddle of lava spilled across the entrance. This time the lava was hotter. The water churned from the catalytic heat. Bubbles streamed from the steaming rocks. I had never seen fire underwater, did not know it was possible, but dull orange flames licked the bottom of the newly minted rocks, and smoke swirled out into the ocean. Water boiled around the rocks. The water at the entrance to the tube grew so heated that it hurt. If we didn’t move now, and if we weren’t sealed into the cave by the lava, we would be boiled alive.
We had no more time and I had no more air in my lungs. I grabbed James’s harness and swam as hard as I could from the tunnel and into the open ocean, dragging him along beside. He was so surprised by my sudden assault he didn’t fight me until we were outside of the area of the nearby lava flow, in the relative safety of the sea. And he stopped fighting once we reached open water. He grew eerily calm, and I let him go and we swam to the fractured silver mirror of the ocean’s surface above us.
I drew in a deep breath, and immediately regretted it, inhaling a lungful of the thick sulfur fumes that hovered on top of the surface of the water. James surfaced beside me, saw me coughing, handed me his emergency regulator, and together we submerged again, kicking along the bottom until we came to Olympia’s shadow. We rose slowly together and hung floating in the water, hanging onto the boarding ladder, panting and gagging.
“Hey, you going to get up here before you boil?” Charles peered down at us. “Can I take your equipment?”
We tossed up masks and fins, and James climbed up first, painfully, carefully. Something was wrong, and I didn’t see it until he was halfway up the ladder and then I saw the raw, charred flesh of his calf.
“Help him! He’s burned!”
Charles appeared from out of nowhere and helped drag his brother on board. I followed him up the ladder.
Donna appeared. “Get the first aid kit!” I told her. “Get us the hell out of here,” I ordered. David cut the cables and goosed the engine. Olympia spurted ahead, clearing a coral head, and turned, heading out to sea.
“You going into shock?” I asked James.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“It hurts like hell, but I’ll be okay.”
“You’ll have a hell of a story to tell. How you spent your summer vacation.”
He closed his eyes.
“Hey!”
“Hey, yourself, Mr. Caine. I’m just resting.” He put his hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. I just panicked. That lava, the heat … it terrified me.”
“Me too.”
“But we got out of there.”
“We did.”
“You got us out of there.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not telling anybody anything.”
He looked at me with Kimo’s eyes, nodded once, and closed them.
Donna came with the first aid kit and knelt beside him, her face a mixture of fear and concern.
“Get the antiseptic and the burn ointment. Then get on the radio and see if we can rendezvous with a police launch or Coast Guard. They’ll have to get him to a hospital burn unit chop-chop.”
Despite what he told me, he looked like he was going into shock.
“I’ll finish here, Donna. Get on that radio.”
She handed me the antiseptic and ran to the cabin.
Charles appeared at my elbow.
“Anything I can do?”
“Stay with him,” I said, standing up. “Elevate his feet. I think he’s in shock.”
Charles propped his brother’s feet on the railing and sat beside him.
“Cover him,” I ordered. The boy had nothing on but his shirt, and he took it off and covered James’s torso. He sat next to his injured brother, alert to any change in his condition.
“Let me know if he gets worse.”
“Sure.”
“Anyone see Felix?”
Charles shook his head. “I was just wondering. He was on lookout outside the cave. Is that why you came?”
“He didn’t answer the radio. I thought he was hurt. Or something.” I didn’t tell him my real fears.
“He didn’t like what we were doing. I didn’t think he’d stay.”
I wondered where he’d gone. He couldn’t have made it to shore except by swimming all the way around the reef and finding a beach on either the north or south side. And then what would he do? There weren’t any beaches along this coast, and damned few of them on the island. Hawaii was too young to produce many beaches, and this side was one of the youngest.
The youngest now, Hualalai competing with Kilauea to create new land for Pele.
It was, I decided, not my problem. Felix had never been my problem. He was Chawlie’s problem. I just never understood why my old friend had insisted on hanging him around my neck on this trip. It made no sense.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know.” I’d lost my bandages in the salt water and my wounds had opened again. No telling what kind of bugs had entered my body. These tropical waters had sea maggots and other worm larvae, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a host of microscopic creatures had taken up residence in my flesh. The doctors would be apoplectic when they learned what I had done. It was a sure bet that I would be back in the hospital. I might even have company, but at least I wouldn’t be alone in the world. Hualalai’s lava and Madam Pele would have buried my friends in old King Kamehameha’s tomb. I could not have lived with that.
I sank down on a stern cushion and let the others carry out my orders.
“You want to raise the sails?” David asked from behind the wheel.
I shook my head, too tired to consider the process. “Keep her under power. Make a course for Kailua Harbor. And see what Donna’s raised on the radio.”
I felt exhausted and exhilarated, the adrenaline rush peaking as I sat there, giving me a tingling from the small of my back all the way up my spine to the nape of my neck. It was a familiar feeling. It meant that I had won. We had beaten the odds. We hadn’t lost anyone to the volcano. Aside from the missing Felix Chen, we were all aboard and headed toward safe harbor.
Madam Pele, the goddess of fire, the mistress of the underworld, had been good to old John Caine.
It helps to have friends in low places.
54
The Coast Guard plucked James from the deck of the Olympia and flew him to the trauma hospital in Hilo, on the far side of the island. Tutu Mae and Charles went with him for moral support and to relay information to the family back home until Kimo and Neolani could get there.
With James on his way for treatment, and Felix among the missing, what remained of the crew motored back and forth off shore, watching the lava pile onto the reef over the cave. We watched the lava advance until it covered the reef completely, pouring molten rock down into the crevices and crannies that had once supported abundant life forms. By the time the sun went down it was obvious to everyone of us that the cave had been sealed. Whatever and whomever was down there would remain. Treasure hunters would have to spend more than it was worth to uncover the rocky tomb, e
ven if they knew the location. If those giant bones were the remains of old King Kamehameha, he would continue to be the Lonely One, secure deep inside the rock of the island that had been his birthplace.
Of Felix there was no sign. It was inconceivable that he had been killed or injured. At the time he disappeared his station was relatively safe. Had something hit him I would have found him. No, he had cut and run. I used the field glasses to search the shore all afternoon, but I saw no sign of him, and I spotted few places where a swimmer could easily come ashore. But I knew he had made it. I knew he was gone. When, and to where, I did not know. Felix had not wanted to be with us in the first place. He had been drafted by Daniel, forced to come along, told to dive near the volcano without his consent. A free spirit, and an intelligent one at that, he must have resented all of it.
Felix had wanted to work for Chawlie. He must not have thought it all the way through before he found out, too late, that working for Chawlie meant doing things Chawlie’s way for as long as it was agreeable to him. The simplest way to disengage from Chawlie’s service was to disappear.
That’s just what he did.
I didn’t understand the kid, but I wished him well. All the same I would have to tell Daniel that I had not been able to hold onto the lad.
I went below for my cell phone.
We sailed into Kailua Harbor at sunset, just one more boat riding at anchorage off the little seaside village. We crowded into the Avon for a quick trip to shore, showering and changing clothes, and finding an agreeable Italian restaurant built like a houseboat directly on top of a seafood restaurant, which was, in turn, constructed atop a dock at the edge of the sea. The outside deck overlooked the harbor. We ate angel hair and Caesar salad, drank four bottles of a light pinot grigio, and topped it all off with one of each from the dessert tray, the meal accompanied by the sound of the gentle surf washing the pebbles on the shore below. We had a quiet celebration, somewhat muted by our concern for James and the disappearance of Felix, but satisfied that what Donna had set out to do had been accomplished. Of the skeleton’s identity, we would never be sure. Refusing to take a sample because of her respect for the Hawaiian people’s feelings, Donna had sacrificed what could have been the most important find. She disagreed with me when I asked her about it.
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