Page 136 of Eruption

“Creating our own avalanche of fire?”

Raley nodded. “We need to send it toward Hilo while we still can.” He gave Mac a hard look and said, “Whether you want to do that or not.”

“With one working engine and one wing?” Mac asked.

“Who said the other engine was working?”

They heard the crackle inside their headsets and assumed radio contact with the tower at Hilo International was back.

It wasn’t the tower.

The next voice they heard belonged to General Rivers.

“You’re out of time,” he said.“Deploy!”

Quietly and calmly, Colonel Raley said, “Not yet.”

One last time, even as he felt them losing more altitude, Rivers’s top pilot banked the F-15 to the south.

He didn’t stay in open sky for long.

Raley circled back and aimed the jet at the even bigger cloud that had just appeared between them and the Ice Tube.

Flew directly into it as the sky turned black—black flecked with specks of fiery ash.

In the communications room at HVO, Rebecca Cruz locked her eyes on the radar screen in front of her. She was seeing the same pictures they were watching at air traffic control.

“What’s the pilot doing?” she asked Rivers.

“Completing the mission.”

Rebecca’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “They’re going to die, aren’t they?”

CHAPTER 105

They were flying blind again.Maybe for the last time, Raley thought.

He looked down at the Eagle’s damaged left wing and the volcanic ash still swirling around it.

All those years in the Middle East,Raley thought. Now an enemy like this, with more firepower than he’d ever encountered, was about to shoot him out of the sky, finish the job the bastards over the Arabian Sea hadn’t been able to.

One more minute.

That was all he needed. He and Mac.

Maybe less than a minute.

They came out of the cloud, looked down, and saw that the lava had overtopped one of the last trenches to the north of Saddle Road.

Raley called to Mac in the copilot’s seat. “Now?” His pale eyes were fixed on the horizon.

Mac didn’t speak.

The plane began to shake violently. This was it, wasn’t it?

“I asked you a question,” Raley said.

Mac stayed silent.