AIR SUPPORT A dropped school falls through air, turning slowly as debris pours from windows: a contrail of papers and books streams upwards thousands of metres alongside computers, chairs, desks that tumble amid woodworking equipment, lockers, maps, basketballs, stage curtains all aimed toward tiny huts far below--a brushy hillside's cluster of subsistence farms reportedly harboring armed men: fenced yards with a few chickens, one cow, an ancient horse eyeing six rows of parched vegetables. Above the school while it descends, another follows, and beyond that, nearly invisible, a third floats as the fighter-bomber arcs away, and a second jet drones into position. The pilot of the first, now on the mission's homeward leg, reaches down in his cockpit toward a thermos of hot coffee. On the ground, hospitals released in the initial attack wave erupt sequentially into plumes of fire and dust as the buildings land: operating tables, obstetric wards, wheelchairs shatter into shrapnel, the jagged particles racing outward amid the roiling smoke to slice through mud walls, animal flesh, stone fences, human lives that cling to the shaking shuddering earth while they clutch forty-year-old rifles or axes, or the hand of a two-year-old below the flash of wing very distant in the blue-and-white sky.