The island used by men and women for greed, an island that some believed deserved to die, had been annihilated. The curtain was coming down on its agony.
Giordino had lifted the sleek British-built Agusta Mark II helicopter from the deck of the yacht and reached a safe distance from Gladiator Island before the spray of blazing rock fell over the dock and the yacht. He could not see the full scope of the devastation. It was hidden by the immense ash cloud that had reached a height of three thousand meters above the island.
The incredible twin eruptions were not only a scene of hideous malevolence but of awesome beauty also. There was a sense of unreality about it. Giordino felt as if he were looking down from the brink of hell.
Hope flared when he observed the yacht suddenly come to life and charge across the waters of the lagoon toward the channel cut in the encircling reef. Badly wounded or not, Pitt had somehow managed to get the boat under way. However fast the yacht could fly over the sea, it was not fast enough to outrun the gaseous cloud of flaming ash that scorched everything in its path before plunging across the lagoon.
But then any hope vanished as Giordino watched the uneven race in growing horror. The inferno swept over the yacht's churning wake, closing the gap until it smothered the craft and blotted it from all view of the Agusta Mark II. From a thousand feet in the air it appeared that no one could have lived for more than a few seconds in that hellish fire.
Giordino was overcome with anguish for being alive when the mother of the children strapped together in the copilot's seat and a friend who was like a brother were dying in the holocaust of fire below.
Cursing the eruption, cursing his helplessness, he turned from the horrendous sight. His face was drained white as he flew more on instinct than experience. His inner pain, he knew, would never fade. His old surefire cockiness had died with Gladiator Island. He and Pitt had traveled a long road, with one always there to save the other in times of peril. Pitt was not the type to die, Giordino had told himself on numerous occasions when it looked like his friend was in the grave. Pitt was indestructible.
A spark of faith began to build inside Giordino. He glanced at the fuel gauges. They registered full.
After studying a chart clipped to a board hanging below the instrument panel, he decided on a westerly course toward Hobart, Tasmania, the closest and best place to land with the kids. Once the Fletcher twins were in the safe hands of the authorities, he would refuel and return to Gladiator Island, if for nothing else than to try to retrieve Pitt's body for his mother and father in Washington.
He was not about to let Pitt down. He had not done so in life and he wasn't about to do so in death.
Strangely, he began to feel more at ease. After figuring his flight time to Hobart and back to the island, he began talking to the little boys, who had lost their fear and peered excitedly out the cockpit window at the sea below.
Behind the helicopter, the island became an indistinct silhouette, similar in outline to the one it had offered the emaciated survivors aboard the raft of the Gladiator on another day one hundred and forty-four years before.
Seconds after he was, sure Giordino had lifted the helicopter off the yacht and was safely in the air, Pitt pushed himself to his feet, wetted a towel from the sink in the bar and wrapped it around Maeve's head. Then he began piling cushions, chairs, every piece of furniture he could lift over Maeve until she was buried. Unable to do more to protect her from the approaching sea of fire, he stumbled into the wheelhouse, clutching his side where one bullet had plunged into the abdominal muscle, made a small perforation in his colon and lodged in the pelvic girdle. The other bullet had glanced off a rib, bruised and deflated one lung and passed out through his back muscles. Fighting to keep from falling into the black, nightmarish pool clouding his eyes, he studied the instruments and controls of the boat's console.
Unlike the helicopter's, the yacht's fuel gauges read empty. Dorsett's crew did not bother to refuel until they were alerted that one or more of the Dorsett family was preparing for a voyage. Pitt found the proper switches and kicked over the big Blitzen Seastorm turbodiesel engines. They had no sooner rumbled to idling rpms when he engaged their Casale V-drives and pushed the throttles forward. The deck beneath his feet shuddered as the bow lifted and the water behind the stern whipped into foam. He took manual control of the helm to steer a course toward the open sea.
Hot ashes fell in a thick blanket. He could hear the crackling and the growling of the approaching tempest of fire. Flaming rocks fell like hail, hissing in clouds of steam as they hit the water and sank beneath the surface. They dropped endlessly out of the sky after having been thrown a great distance by the tremendous pressures coming out of Mount Scaggs. The column of doom engulfed the docks and seemed to take off in pursuit of the yacht, rolling across the lagoon like an enraged monster from the fiery depths of hell. And then it was on top of him in full fury, descending over the yacht in a whirling convoluted mass two hundred meters high before Pitt was able to clear the lagoon. The boat was pitched for ward as it was struck a staggering blow from astern. The radar and radio masts were swept clean away, along with the lifeboats, railings and deck furniture. The boat struggled through the blazing turbulence like a wounded whale. Flaming rocks crashed on the superstructure roof and decks, smashing the once beautiful yacht into a shattered hulk.