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.

"Now?"Colonel Chad Raley asked again.

The plane went into an even sharper descent.

Mac remembered the reconnaissance plane crashing into the observatory while he and Rebecca watched.

The lava was too close to the Ice Tube and the canisters inside. If the lava reached them, the effect would be like detonating a nuclear bomb.

They had to direct the lava toward Hilo. There was no other choice. "Now."

A moment later, Chad Raley said, "The ejector rack is jammed."

The bombs wouldn't deploy.

Somehow Raley was able to pull the plane out of the dive, veer to the right, then veer back to the left toward the target.

"Now we are out of time!" Raley yelled.

"What do we do?" Mac yelled.

"There's one way to create that avalanche of fire," Chad Raley said.

"How the hell do we do that without bombs?"

Raley looked at Mac and said, not yelling now, his words measured and eerily calm, "By crashing this plane."

"Do it," Mac said.