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    By now his electronic warfare officer had climbed in the rear seat. They could not see each other but communicated by live mike. He fired up the left engine, moving the throttle forward and watching the rpm and exhaust gas temperature gauges rise. When the left engine reached idle, he started the right one and switched to internal electrical power. The ground crew pulled away the support vehicles beneath the plane. He reached up and chunked the canopy shut. Signaling back and forth with the ground crew, he tested the speed brakes, flaps, and ailerons. The crewman gave him the thumbs-up. The sun had climbed over the tree line on the horizon, burning off moisture, leveling a hard slant of heat across the streaked expanse of the airfield. His wingman was ready now, too.
    "Two up."
    "Three ready."
    He taxied briskly along the runway. At the head of the runway a serviceman ducked under the fuselage and activated the bomb racks and missiles.
    "Blue one ready for takeoff," he told the tower.
    "Blue one cleared."
    He signaled his wingman and pressed the throttle, running the engine up from idle to one hundred percent power—10,200 rpm. The airspeed indicator needle jumped to fifty knots, and then he moved the throttles outward and forward to the afterburner stop. Maximum power, jet fuel exploding in the exhaust nozzle. Give me everything, he prayed, let's fuck the sky. The plane jolted forward, the runway flashed past. The wheels thudded over the line of cement—football field lengths shooting beneath him—and then the nose gear quieted, lifted, and the plane arced skyward. He pulled the flaps up and again the plane lurched forward, the airspeed needle climbing past three hundred knots. The pneumatic system whistled as the plane groaned and banged and shuddered its way up to speed, the two immense engines feeding a roaring, cylindrical inferno that pressed the seat against his back. Beneath him, above him, around him, air rushed over the fuselage. Ground fell away. One thousand feet, two thousand, three thousand feet. In the sky.
    The four planes joined in a combat spread and vectored north, cruising at forty thousand feet, wingtips ten feet apart. He was so near his wingman he could see the rivets and scratches on the canopy frame, the stenciled emergency markings beneath it. The flight passed into an encompassing cloud rack—four airborne sharks in pale depthlessness. The radio gargled layers and layers of garbage sound: other Air Force radio conversations, the mocking and occasionally confusing interruption of Hanoi women broadcasters (false coordinates, insults, sexual taunts—all in a sneering, provocative voice), and the screeching static of North Vietnamese ground technicians trying to jam the frequencies. The noises tore through one another, became louder and softer, choppy, windy, punctuated by blasts of music and faraway unintelligible voices.
    The clouds cleared, and seven miles below stretched a landscape of flooded rice paddies, shattered mirrors of the sky, fed by a river that wound lazily like the ever-switching tail of a cat. Above them stretched a ceiling of cirrostratus.
    "Blue lead," came the ground air controller, "this is Red Crown. Bandits at two-four-oh degrees, thirty-two miles."
    "Roger," he said into the helmet mike. "Blue flight, make a ten-degree turn south, let them chase us."
    "Blue lead, Blue two. SAMs at forty degrees, five miles."
    "Right." The North Vietnamese were throwing up resistance to drive them south, make them waste fuel.
    "Blue lead, this is Red Crown. Three SAMs up ahead."
    "Bandits must be in contact with the ground."
    "You have an altitude on SAM, two?"
    "Eighteen thousand."
    Setting up a SAM envelope, chasing them into it. The SAM detonation settings would be varied to explode over a wide range.
    "Blue lead, MiGs seven o'clock, eight miles."
    "Roger."
    "I've got three up ahead, Blue lead."
    "Blue lead, make a hard turn north. You have SAM coming at you five thousand feet