And tonight it was Steve Stafford.

Impact. The A-6 was tough, but a lucky shot cut the hydraulics to the left wing.

“Uh, we have a problem, Steve,” said Joe Digger.

“Roger.” One look told Steve there was no hope.

They were out over the desert again, and it was time for the unthinkable.

“Prepare to punch out,” Steve said as calmly as he could.

“Roger. Sending our search coordinates.”

“Let’s hope the helos find us before the bad guys.” Steve grabbed for the yellow ejection handles and pulled. In an instant he became a missile himself, rocketing straight up through his own Plexiglas canopy.

Even with the protective helmet shield in place, the force of ejection at five hundred miles an hour could break a man’s nose, blacken his eyes, tear the skin clean off his face. But the explosion was so intense, the eruption so instantaneous, the dislocation so complete that Steve couldn’t tell what was his face and what was his ass and what was in between.

As he rocketed upward, the jet rocketed away, first out, then down. Then it was nothing more than a shadow riding a dying orange arc of flame.

He felt the impact of the plane’s death just as he felt the gallows-jerk pull of the parachute saving his life. For a moment, the desert floor burned bright with fuel and avionics and high-alloy metals. Then there was dark.

In the distance Steve could hear the rumble of war. In his gut he felt the vomit of despair. But in his head, the small Academy-trained voice was reminding him, Stay professional… and survive.

As soon as he hit, he unsnapped the Koch fittings and climbed out of his chute. Then he called to his partner. “Joe. You okay, Joe?”

“Shit hot, Steve. Shit hot.”

“Good.” Be professional. Even on the ground. Even in despair.

Preflight briefings had set three collection points where Apache helicopters, under the cover of A-10 Warthogs, would be waiting to pick up downed fliers. From his seat cushion, Steve took out a map, a compass, and six foil-wrapped packets of water. Then he unholstered the pearl-handled forty-five his grandfather had given him when he graduated from flight school. “We’ll be out of here by dawn. Let’s get moving.”

Then three sets of high beams came bouncing toward them.

Bad guys…

THAT WAS WHERE Jack Stafford stopped writing.

Always stop when you still have a little left in you. That way you’ll have a place to start in the morning. Hemingway used to say that. Leave it to Hemingway to find a reason to stop writing and start drinking at five in the afternoon.

Jack was just cheating. He had worked for a year on the story of Annapolis and his family and the navy that had given them both meaning. But he couldn’t write the chapter that had drawn him from the start. So he was writing the one after it, an easy one he would call “Pax Americana,” about Ronald Reagan’s six-hundred-ship navy and his own great-nephew’s adventures in the Gulf War.

He lit a cigarette and looked out the window of his hillside bungalow. In Los Angeles, the Santa Ana winds were blowing. They swept down from the high desert, scrubbing the air clean and drying it through, so that everything stood out in speed-freak clarity—the names on the boxcars in the train yards on San Fernando Road, the silvery leaves on the chaparral bushes at Chavez Ravine, even the people moving about in the downtown skyscrapers.

L.A. was no place to be in Santa Ana season. More drive-bys.