So the Scavenger was the ideal instrument to fly over Piedmont, Arizona, in the dead of night.

Wilson carefully checked his equipment, his hands fluttering over the controls, touching each button and lever, watching the blinking green lights that indicated that all systems were in order.

His earphones crackled. The lead plane said lazily, "Coming up on the town, Gunner. You see it?"

He leaned forward in the cramped cockpit. He was low, only five hundred feet above the ground, and for a moment he could see nothing but a blur of sand, snow, and yucca trees. Then, up ahead, buildings in the moonlight.

"Roger. I see it."

"Okay, Gunner. Give us room."

He dropped back, putting half a mile between himself and the other two planes. They were going into the P-square formation, for direct visualization of target by phosphorus flare. Direct visualization was not really necessary; Scavenger could function without it. But Vandenberg seemed insistent that they gather all possible information about the town.

The lead planes spread, moving wide until they were parallel to the main street of the town.

"Gunner? Ready to roll?"

Wilson placed his fingers delicately over the camera buttons. Four fingers: as if playing the piano.

"Ready."

"We're going in now."

The two planes swooped low, dipping gracefully toward the town. They were now very wide and seemingly inches above the ground as they began to release the bombs. As each struck the ground, a blazing white-hot sphere went up, bathing the town in an unearthly, glaring light and reflecting off the metal underbellies of the planes.

The jets climbed, their run finished, but Gunner did not see them. His entire attention, his mind and his body, was focused on the town.

"All yours, Gunner."

Wilson did not answer. He dropped his nose, cracked down his flaps, and felt a shudder as the plane sank sickeningly, like a stone, toward the ground. Below him, the area around the town was lighted for hundreds of yards in every direction. He pressed the camera buttons and felt, rather than heard, the vibrating whir of the cameras.

For a long moment he continued to fall, and then he shoved the stick forward, and the plane seemed to catch in the air, to grab, and lift and climb. He had a fleeting glimpse of the main street. He saw bodies, bodies everywhere, spread-eagled, lying in the streets, across cars . . .

"Jesus," he said.

And then he was up, still climbing, bringing the plane around in a slow arc, preparing for the descent into his second run and trying not to think of what he had seen. One of the first rules of air reconnaissance was "Ignore the scenery"; analysis and evaluation were not the job of the pilot. That was left to the experts, and pilots who forgot this, who became too interested in what they were photographing, got into trouble. Usually they crashed.

As the plane came down into a flat second run, he tried not to look at the ground. But he did, and again saw the bodies. The phosphorus flares were burning low, the lighting was darker, more sinister and subdued. But the bodies were still there: he had not been imagining it.