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.