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pulse-doppler radar.’
    ‘Are you kidding?’ said Daniel, flipping the bacon over. ‘My mother used to tell me bedtime stories about X-band pulse-doppler radar. Didn’t you ever hear the one about X-band pulse-doppler radar and the seven dwarfs?’
    ‘Seriously,said Willy, ‘this is one of those high-tech discoveries a man makes just once in a lifetime.’
    ‘Will you pass me the pepper? No, that one. Thanks. Go on, then, tell me what you’ve found out.’
    ‘Ah, shit,’ Willy despaired. ‘How do you explain anomalies in APG-63 multi-mode radar to a guy who’s frying onions?’
    Try, will you? I’m listening.’
    Willy dragged his chair across to the table without even taking his backside off it. He laid a wooden spoon on one side of the table, and a blue-and-white china butter-dish on the other. “This radar is highly sophisticated, very advanced. It fits into the nose of a fighter-plane, and it controls every move that the fighter-pilot is going to make in any kind of combat situation. It can track one enemy airplane, and at the same time it can carry on looking for
     
    others. It can lock from one target to another instantly. Up until now, I thought it was the best air-to-air radar in the entire world.’
    ‘In that case, I’m glad that it belongs to us, and not to the Russians’.
    Willy blinked at him.
    That’s all I could think of to say,’ Daniel apologized.
    Willy took the pewter flour-shaker, and carefully sprinkled a fine coating of white self-raising flour all over the surface of the table. Susie watched him with grave interest; Daniel thought, God in Heaven, here we go again, another Willy Monahan hobby-horse. He remembered the time that Willy had got a bee in his bonnet about missiles with non-imaging infra-red seekers, and how he had single-handedly persuaded his bemused commanding officer to lobby the Pentagon for all TAG airplanes to be re-equipped. Unsuccessfully, of course.
    This table is our attack scenario, right?’ said Willy.
    ‘I thought you were making shortcrust pastry/ Daniel retorted.
    Willy raised a hand to silence him. ‘Don’t make fun. This is serious. This wooden spoon is an enemy intruder, right? And this butter-dish is me, okay, in my F-15. I’m protecting the homeland in the late stages of a protracted nuclear confrontation. Enemy wooden spoons are coming in from all sides.’
    ‘What do you do, Uncle Willy?’ asked Susie, frowning.
    ‘Do? I’ll tell you what I do. I get up there in my F-15, fully armed with a 20mm M-61 multi-barrel gun with 960 rounds of ammunition, plus four AIM-7 Sparrow air-to-air missiles and four AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and I track those wooden spoons on my radar until I’ve locked right on to one, and I’m ready to blow it right out of the sky, and then I fire one of my Sparrow missiles, and then what happens?’
    ‘You’re telling us,’ Daniel reminded him. He sneezed, twice.
    I’m glad that’s not my breakfast,’ said Willy, caustically. ‘Just tell us what happens,’ Daniel told him.
    ‘Okay - I’ve fired the missile. It’s really hot stuff, this missile. Radar-guided, with a PD capability and lock-in up to 10 db clutter in the look-down mode.’
    Daniel turned over the strips of bacon one by one, setting up a tremendous sizzling chorus. Lannie Watts from the Globe Trucking Corporation would be pressing his nose to the diner’s window in five or ten minutes from now, demanding his breakfast. Lannie always ate seven strips of bacon, three eggs, toast, and a heap of hash browns, but he insisted on drinking grapefruit juice with it to keep his weight down.
    ‘Are you listening to me?’ Willy demanded. ‘Sure I’m listening,’ said Daniel. ‘Listen, I’m listening. But I’m not at all sure what the hell you’re talking about. What’s this “clutter”?’
    ‘Just shut up,’ insisted Willy. T fire the missile, the missile locks on to the woden spoon, here it comes - ‘ he traced an unerring