Eagle in the Sky by Smith Wilbur

'With a dull but awful roar, the Mirage bloomed with dark crimson flame and sooty black smoke, the wind ripped flames outwards in great streamers and pennants that engulfed all around them, and David staggered onwards in the midst of the roaring furnace that seemed to consume the very air.' Drawn to the sky as though to his natural element, young David Morgan spurns the boardroom future mapped out for him by his family for the life of a jet pilot. Then he meets Debra, the beautiful Israeli writer for whom he will fight, in another country's war, at the controls of his Mirage. Yet the breathless action which brings them together is also the very tragedy that will threaten to tear them apart ...