The time-to-drop clock counted down to zero.

The two bombs fell away from his wing pylons. They lit up and accelerated away quickly.

When the bombs were fifteen seconds from impact, Garry fired his guidance laser at the base of the dam, as close as he could get to the water line. A clock in the multi-function display counted down to zero.

He could see the missiles slam into the face of the dam: small puffs of masonry dust, in utter silence.

After that, nothing.

He peeled around, and stood off as Jake completed his own run.

The bombs were “Deep Throat” penetrator bombs, officially designated GBU-28/B, complete with Paveway laser guidance kits. The first of these babies — improvised from old, rusting Howitzer gun barrels — had been put together by Lockheed in haste in the build-up to Desert Storm, to dig out Iraqi command and control bunkers.

When all four bombs were emplaced, their tail-mounted fuses caused them to detonate, simultaneously.

It happened in an instant.

Concrete erupted from the face of the dam, hailing over the water of the Lake, which turned white. Garry imagined a shear wave slamming into the structure of the dam, weakening it fatally.

The first cracks appeared, even as he watched.

Jake whooped. “We’re the new dam-busters, boy!”

They turned into CAP — “combat air patrol” — even though they weren’t on combat duty today; they’d trace a series of long, skinny ovals in the sky, like following invisible racecourse tracks, while the camera pods they carried recorded the results of their handiwork.

It wasn’t particularly usual for a pilot to do his own follow-up spotting like this. But then, this wasn’t a usual mission. There were no hostiles. But the sky was full of volcanic shit, which nobody was quite sure of what it would do to the airplanes” engines, and so there was a reluctance to risk launching off more guys than necessary.

All of which meant, Garry thought wryly, that all of the risk today was being bought by himself and his wing man.

But he patiently settled into his ovals, each of them taking fifteen or twenty minutes, scooting over the tortured scenery of the Grand Canyon. It was no big deal. He was comfortable here, in this armchair in the sky, with the world’s greatest view; he could do this all day, or at least until he had to take a dip, a refuel, on the airborne tanker, the big 707 they had lined up on the ground.

Over the dam, the sight was spectacular. Already he could see the angry water, brown-white and swirling, smearing itself across the landscape of the Canyon, washing out Highway 89, pounding at the Navajo Bridge, ramming its way deeper into the Canyon.

Since the damming in 1963, the Lake had been storing up two hundred and fifty tons a day of sediment — the sand and silt and smashed-up rocks which had enabled the river to scour out the Canyon in the first place — and today, all that good stuff was going to come pouring down the Canyon, taking decades of pent-up revenge, the mother of all mud slides.

He took another tour over what he was coming to think of as the badlands, the bleaker western end of the Canyon, laced with clouds of ash and steam, lair of the Moonseed. It was going to be a hell of a sight when the floods rammed into the Inner Gorge—

His head set rang with an alarm.

Acquisition radar. It was so unexpected it took him a couple of seconds to recognize it.

But he confirmed it on his threat warning screen. Right on top of him, out of nowhere.

Working on automatic, he called Jake. “Mud six. I got mud six.”

What?

It had to be a malfunction.

Closing up, Jake said.

The sound went off, but the visual alarm continued to show.

He turned his head, scanning through his bubble window through a hundred and eighty degrees. He was looking for the plume of a surface-to-air’s rocket motor. What if some crazy was shooting at him? Some eco-freak, maybe…

He saw nothing.

Jake was screaming. Shit, man, it’s right under you!

Counter-measures. Radar chaff—

But there was no more time.

There was a slam, the loudest noise he had ever heard.

He was thrown up, like a punted football, and then he fell away to his left. Whatever had struck him had come from beneath, his blind spot, and hit the F-16 in the belly of the fuselage.

He glanced back.

His plane was gone.

The F-16 had been broken in two; his nose and cockpit had broken away, and were falling through the sky, powerless. He couldn’t even see the rear section.

There was flame lapping all around him. His instrument console was breaking up, splintering and warping, glass dials popping and smashing. The flames dug into a gap between his oxygen mask and his visor, and the nape of his neck, behind his collar.

Slam, fall, flames, pain, all within a fraction of a second.

He looked down. There was a hard rubber handle jutting between his legs: PULL TO EJECT. He reached down with his left hand and pulled.

The seat pulled his restraints in, back to the parachute risers, dragging him back against the seat frame. The canopy popped, and was gone; air rushed over him, cool and clean, dousing the flames. The seat slid up its glide rails, and a rocket catapult hurled it into the air. A kick in the back: ten or twelve Gs, for maybe half a second. Garry thought he could feel it all along his vertebrae.

The air slammed into him like an ocean wave.

Then he was upside down, still strapped to the seat, shards of debris fluttering around him. The seat stabilized itself quickly, and there he was: face down, stranded in the air, five miles high.

The crumpled Arizona landscape was rising towards him, so slowly it was almost imperceptible. It would take five minutes to free-fall to Earth. He was supposed to ride out four minutes of that, until the seat opened at fourteen thousand feet.

He could see the wreckage of his plane, two big chunks surrounded by a cloud of smaller fragments of debris. He watched the nose section hit the Canyon wall, and it exploded there, and a pall of black smoke rose from the crater. His own miniature volcano, to go along with his earthquake.

There was no sign of whatever assailant had struck at him.

The air up here was cold and empty and silent, after the explosive shattering of the airplane. As the adrenaline shock receded, he waited for the wave of pain to hit him.

He’d never tried this before.

You didn’t practice ejections; they were too dangerous, not to mention expensive. You just studied the manuals and made sure you knew where the yellow lever was and hoped you never had to pull it. For sure, he didn’t feel as badly as he always imagined he would, after being hurled out of his safe, bubble-wrapped armchair in the sky, into this position of complete nakedness and exposure.

You’re in shock, he told himself.

He could even recognize where he was. The western end of the Grand Canyon was laid out below him like a National Park tourist map. There was the skinny sheen of the Colorado, bright blue against the Mars-red of the high desert into which it had cut. He could see the tributary canyons, cut by their own rivers, Prospect and Mohawk to the south, Andrus and Parashant to the north. Even now, there was no sign of the flood water that was forcing its way along the Canyon from the east. The Canyon was long…

There was a fiercely black knot of cloud, right about where Lava Falls should be. He was, in fact, drifting over the Falls, and so looking down, right into the cloud.

He could see the glow of red, inside the cloud. He heard distant bangs, like cannon fire, disturbing his peace. He saw sparks fly out of that red scar.

Sparks?

If he could see them from here, then they had to be the size of houses. Rocks, then. Probably lava bombs, freshly birthed from the Earth, cooling even as they sailed up from the mouth of the ground.