Brian L. Reece

ABOUT THE BOOK

Inspired by true events and a real CIA mission that remains classified, this gripping military thriller features a war where nature kills as fast as the enemy.

June 15, 1991. Clark Air Base, Philippines. 

As the world celebrates the victory of Desert Storm, nature is preparing a different kind of violence in the Pacific. After 600 years of silence, the active stratovolcano Mount Pinatubo has awakened. As a column of superheated ash rises twenty miles into the stratosphere, Typhoon Yunya is also bearing down on the island. 

The US Air Force must evacuate 15,000 people in one day. But not everyone leaves.

Major Wade “Wreck” Riley, a Pave Low helicopter pilot grounded for saving six lives at the cost of his forty-million-dollar aircraft, is left behind when the base empties. Someone has to be last. He is joined by Master Sergeant Manny Reyes, a Filipino flight engineer who spent his whole life in the shadow of Clark. Now his city is burning and the Americans are leaving.

Their task is interrupted by the arrival of Dean Shaw, a CIA operator on a black-book mission to secure crates of prototype Stinger missiles hidden on the base. But the CIA are not the only ones who know about the missiles. Khalid, a brilliant and ruthless commander in the militant and terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group, has breached the base perimeter. He sees the blinding ash and wind not as a disaster, but as a holy edict for his rise.

As the supervolcano explodes and the typhoon turns the ash into deadly sludge, the base is cut off from the world. Trapped together in a suffocating hellscape, these enemies must decide if trust is more deadly than the mountain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian L. Reece is a retired Special Operations Air Force Colonel with twenty-six years in field ops and strategic command. Highly decorated, his service includes two Legions of Merit, the Bronze Star, and nine Air Medals. His career spanned classified helicopter operations, intelligence work, and high-level strategic planning—experiences that inject visceral authenticity into his fiction.

Drawing on his background as a PAGE International Screenwriting Award semi-finalist and Hollywood Screenplay finalist, Screen Actors Guild actor and director, and film industry technical advisor, Brian crafts stories that blend military precision with visual, propulsive pacing and a cinematic eye. Eye of the Caldera is his third novel, following the critically acclaimed Stealing Stealth and Arctic Fire.

With three master’s degrees, in history, business, and strategy, Brian is a recipient of the Nowak Award for writing from the Air War College and served as an adjunct professor at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, teaching the complexities of international engagement.

SAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Which came first, your love of writing and film or your 26 years of military service?
2. You are a soldier, a scholar – and a creative. What fuels your creative output when so much of your career and life has been in structured, disciplined settings?
3. How has your work in films, as a screenwriter, a technical consultant and an actor, informed your writing?
4. In Eye of the Caldera, the protagonist is a Pave Low helicopter pilot. How did your own Air Force experience drive the character as well as the action?
5. Your first two novels featured female protagonists. Why did you decide to change that for Eye of the Caldera? What are the common threads they all share?
6. Your books question the balance between duty, morality, and redemption, and how tenuous the line between hero and villain can be. Can you elaborate?
7. You’ve written a Cold War spy thriller, an Alaskan noir-Western, and now a military disaster thriller with real-world inspiration. Tell us about your game plan as an author. What type of career and catalog are you trying to build?