Chapter 104

Somewhere Above the Big Island

They couldn't shake the thick volcanic smog. It kept washing over them in blinding, grainy waves. The wind buffeted the jet, tossing them in every direction, threatening to rip the plane apart or smash it to the ground. The ash blocked airflow to the engine, sending it toward a stall.

Then Mac felt the Eagle lose thrust. His heart nearly stopped.

"Left engine's compromised," Raley said before Mac had a chance to ask. "Ash and glass particles. Must be melting the components."

The F-15 dropped another few hundred feet.

"We need some sky," Raley said, "so I can see where the hell we are."

The plane was hit again by glass and rock, even harder than before.

"What was that?" Mac said, his voice going up an octave.

"That was our left wing," Raley said. "The rocky particles destroyed the outer surface of the fuselage where the wing connects to it."

Mac looked at his hands. He was squeezing his knees; his knuckles were the color of chalk. "Are we going down?" Mac asked.

"Not until we do what we came up here to do."

There was a brief patch of blue, there and then gone. But it lasted long enough for them to see another eruption at the summit and feel it in the F-15. It was as if the earthquake had suddenly reached up into the sky.

Somehow Chad Raley got control of the wounded plane. He leveled it off and said, "This shit is disabling the jet one piece at a time."

In the next moment, they saw the ground again. It was so fucking close.

Smoke and steam were rising up from the lava, but it was clear how fast and how far the lava had traveled while they were bouncing around in the cloud.

Raley said, "That thing you talked about doing before we took off?"

"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?"