"Yer gonna be fly'n' inna dark comin' back, y'know," the old guy who ran the place had said as the wing tanks were filling.
He was the one who'd pocketed a stack of Glaeken's gold coins for the fuel. He was wrinkled and grizzled and looked old enough to have been Billy Rickenbacker's wingman in the Lafayette Escadrille.
"I know," Frank said from the pilot seat. He had his Walkman earphones slung around his neck and was playing with one of the drooping ends of his mustache.
Jack sat beside Frank in the pilot's cabin—he'd called it the "cockpit" earlier and had been corrected—while Ba sat in the passenger compartment, adding more teeth to his billy clubs.
"Lotsa planes disappearin' inna dark these days, Frankie. Go up, neva come down."
"So I've heard."
"Some are even disappearin' inna day. Inna dayl So nobody's flyin'—nobody with any sense, that is. Scared to get off the ground. 'Fraid they won't come back. Don't want you t' be one a thems that don't come back, Frankie."
"Thanks, Pops," Frank said. "Neither do I."
"Where's Joe?"
"On his way to Bucharest."
"Hungary?"
"No. Rumania."
"Same difference. Shit! What's the matter with you two? You need the money that bad? Hell, I can lend you—"
"Hey, Pops," Frank said. "It's not the bread. I'm a pilot, man. I fly folks places. That's what I do. I ain't changing that, okay? Not for any body or any bugs. Besides, we once like promised this here dude that any time he really needed to get somewhere, we'd take him. You can dig that, can't you?"
"No, I can't dig nothin' of the sort. Where y'goin'?"
"He says he's got to get to Maui and back real bad."
Pops stared past Frank at Jack like he was looking at a lunatic. Jack smiled and gave him an Oliver Hardy wave.
"Got to see my girl. It's her birthday."
Pops rolled his eyes and started to turn away.
"Real weird kind of weather you got around here," Frank said, glancing up at the lid of gray overhead.
"All that shit from Hawaii." Pops wiped his finger along the fuselage and held it up to demonstrate the coating of gray ash. "Just like your name, Frankie. And you're headed straight into it. Tops off at twenny thou, though. Watch yer intakes."
"Will do."
Pops went back to check on the refueling. A few minutes later they were air-borne. Jack sniffed the air that leaked into the cabin at the lower altitude.
"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.