Page 17 of Wired Ghost

Raveaux checked his phone, hoping for a text from Sophie.

He needed to stop doing that.

Sophie would have reached out to someone other than him if she’d been able to. He was just a colleague who’d worked a case with her, when he got honest with himself. But now that he was within range of her signal, he couldn’t seem to keep from checking the damn phone every five minutes. “Give it up,” he muttered to himself. “She’s with her boyfriend now.”

“What?” Ohale yelled over the bouncing roar of their transport.

“Nothing.” Raveaux shook his head.

They reached an open area where a large, open-doored chopper painted in camouflage colors waited for them. Raveaux jumped out of the transport vehicle along with the other men. They trotted in an orderly line over to the chopper and got in. Raveaux and Ohale were last, taking seats that had been left unoccupied next to the pilot.

They rose once everyone was strapped in, the heavy bird weaving from side to side in a gust of foul-smelling wind. The open doors at the sides of the helicopter allowed unlimited visibility as they lifted up into and above the belt of ashy smoke layering the ground and spun ponderously to head in the direction of their destination.

Safe in the cradle of his five-point harness, Raveaux leaned out as far as he could to scan the ground. The range of visibility was limited by the vog, but the pilot was following Sophie and Jake’s last known coordinates. Something was bound to pop up soon.

“There!” Raveaux pointed, his voice tinny in the comm built into the helmet. “I see their vehicle. White SUV, six o’clock.”

The pilot circled a crude parking area where Sophie and Jake had parked the Security Solutions vehicle, along with a few rusted-out hulks of dead cars.

“There’s a path over the lava.” Ohale pointed. “That must lead to the suspects’ encampment.” He told the pilot to follow the trail.

Raveaux lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes, trying to ignore the thudding of his heart amplified by the vest and helmet as he scanned the rough black surface of the lava plain for any sign of Sophie or Jake.

There were none—and suddenly, the faint path across the rough black stone was obliterated by a lava river.

Nothing could have prepared Raveaux for the awesome sight of that natural phenomenon.

The lava glowed in an unearthly way, like the hottest heart of a fire, streaked by black crusts of hardening stone carried along on its surface. Though the river wasn’t moving particularly fast, there was an inexorable quality to it—nothing could stop this particular flow, or block its path for long. The lava engulfed and consumed everything in front of it, emitting little bursts of fire and smoke as it did so.

The hairs rose on Raveaux’s arms, as his scarred skin shuddered with the remembered sensation of extreme heat.The car exploding. His wife and daughter, burning. Reaching into the flames toward Lucie, his arms engulfed in fire. . .

Raveaux shut his eyes as the chopper lifted higher to clear a flaming tree surrounded by the lava below.

That was then. This is now. He opened his eyes again.Shake it off, Pierre!

The transport chopper reached the elevated, heavily wooded edge of thekipuka. Raveaux and Ohale scanned the edge of the forest, where the faint trail disappeared into trees.

“How are we going to set down with all this tree cover?” Raveaux asked through the comm.

“We aren’t. You’ll be rappelling in,” the pilot replied. Raveaux could hear the National Guardsmen in the back already preparing their ropes and belts. “You’re not trained for this, so I’ll be using a winch to lower you and Ohale,” the pilot clarified.

“We’ll hold back and wait for the Guardsmen to secure the area,” Ohale chimed in.

“Copy that,” Raveaux replied, relieved. He’d served two years in France’s armed forces right out of high school, but those rappelling lessons were long ago.

The chopper passed several times over the mile-long area of thekipuka, identifying where the camouflage-painted roof of the corrugated tin meth lab was located in the center of the “island” of trees: a large building surrounded by smaller ones like a hen and her chicks.

“Nobody visible.” Ohale scanned the ground with his binoculars. “Maybe they got out before the lava cut the area off.”

“We think Sophie and Jake didn’t make it out,” Raveaux said, “And that’s who I’m here for.”

Ohale nodded grimly, not verbalizing the possibility Raveaux was most concerned about—they hadn’t made it out because the meth cookers had done away with them.Then the criminal gang had decamped, abandoning their jungle lair and leaving it for the lava to claim.

Raveaux and Ohale observed as the pilot, consulting with the National Guard lieutenant in charge, a stocky mixed-Hawaiian man named Wong, chose an area away from the immediate buildings into which to lower the team.

The chopper held steady, rocking only slightly in gusts of wind off the lava plain, as two different ropes deployed off the sides and the Guardsmen rappelled down.

Listening through the comms to the soldiers checking the area to make sure it was clear, verifying that they weren’t going to be ambushed, was reassuring. Ohale, going down first, donned a harness. The pilot worked a winch at his dashboard that lowered the big station chief down through the trees.

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