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—