Garry pushed the throttle past idle, and led Jake out towards the runway, steering with his rudder pedals. The end-of-runway crew gave them a final systems check, and the weapons crew pulled the safeties on the bombs. He kept his hands in the air, where the crew could see them, just so the crew knew he wasn’t about to flatten them with a careless touch of a flight control.

They were cleared for takeoff, and he taxied onto the runway. He pushed the throttle to ninety per cent power. He ran one last check, cycling the flight controls. All was in order.

He took his feet off the brakes and pushed the throttle to military power.

The engine rose in pitch to a scream. He turned on his afterburner, injecting neat fuel into the hot exhaust stream, generating huge thrust.

The plane kicked him in the back, and the runway was ripped out from under him.

At three thousand feet he reached his takeoff speed, two hundred miles an hour. He touched his stick back, stroking the fly-by-wire, the plane’s nervous system.

The plane just leapt into the air, and he followed the flight-path marker on the head-up display into the sky.

Below him, the Earth closed over on itself, turning into a dome littered by the blocky buildings of the base — airplanes sitting in the washed-out sun like kids” toys — and he could see the desert beyond, etched by roads, scarred by the smooth sheen of the dry lakes.

Monica saw the takeoff from the ops building.

It was a burn and a roar, as Garry bore down the runway at full thrust. His engine nozzle opened with eerie mechanical grace, and a sheet of flame shot out. There was a rumbling, and the air seemed to shake, or perhaps it was the very ground.

Then he was in the air, and receding quickly, the flame becoming little more than a red dot. She watched until she had lost him, in the blur of the volcanic sky.

Then she went indoors, wondering how much more of this marrow-sucking heat she could withstand.

The doctors said she had a full house of mets now: secondary sites, lungs, and liver… She knew what to expect. The pressure in her skull was giving her the headaches. She might get speech or movement disorders, or epilepsy. Maybe even dementia, if she lasted so long. But the liver or lung stuff would probably collapse on her first.

The only good thing about her illness, she was finding, was that it took her mind off her worry about her son, the fighter pilot.

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

Jake checked his relative position by radar. Two is tied. Two is visual.

Garry craned his neck; he could see Jake’s bird in the muddy sky. “Clear to rejoin.”