A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  “Deal,” Carter said. He sat up, scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands. He was badly in need of both a bath and a shave. It had been too long. “And you were kidding, right? What you said before? It’s not really Christmas.”

  “No lie, G.I.” Fenn jacked the slide, dry-fired his piece, smiled beatifically at the sharp snap of the hammer falling. He pushed a loaded clip into the magazine, set the safety, and put it aside. He looked across at Carter. “It’s December twenty-fifth back home. Merry merry.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes. Wow, indeed.”

  “Then I need coffee to go with my Christmas cigarettes. Or something. Is there any coffee left anywhere?”

  Fenn’s smile brightened even further. “Oh, we can do better than coffee, my boy.” He stood and offered Carter a hand, dragging him roughly to his feet and then putting a hand on his shoulder to steady him. “Unscheduled resupply came in last night while you were off saving the world. I saved out your share while you were up, hid it down in the mess away from the grabby hands of our mates.”

  And to Carter, this came off as a stunning kindness in this place that generally felt short of everything nice and long on anything mean. Standing, he wondered for one dumb second whether or not he would’ve thought to do the same for Fenn, but needed only that second to know that he probably wouldn’t have even thought of it. Stammering, he blurted out an awkward thank-you to cover his embarrassment and flushing shame.

  Fenn just grinned, virtuous and cool. “Merry Christmas, Kevin.”

  Toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap that smelled like lilacs and dust. Dried fruit and hard candy, squares of weatherized chocolate, manufactured cigarettes beneath their tinned meat labels, scotch and Kentucky sipping whiskey shipped in black plastic bottles with VITAMIN SUPPLEMENT stenciled on their sides, and vodka by the five-gallon jerry. There were telestatic copies of pages from pornographic magazines wadded up and used as packing material in crates of medical supplies, cans of condensed milk, batteries, cereal, freeze-dried beef from real cows. Little indulgences like bottles of olives and cherries, jars of peanut butter, rock sugar, breakfast cereal, high-density data chips packed with music and magazines, news reports, movies, and ball games; letters from family for those who had them and personalized cards from the company for those, like Carter, who didn’t anymore. Pens, lighters, and vacuum-packed bricks of coffee were tucked in among smuggled cases of ammunition, spare parts, and tools.

  There were big things, too. A digital projector (which arrived broken beyond repair), a new generator, tires (the planes ran through tires like crazy, banging them out of shape from always landing on stubble fields, dirt, or grass), twenty thousand gallons of high-grade aviation fuel, six fresh engines for the planes (four 250-horse Royce Eagles and two hybridized Hispano-Suiza/Daimler air-cooled thirteen-cylinder behemoths that one of the company’s engineers had designed specifically for the improved Sopwith Camels). There were structural parts, bolts of fire-retardant cloth, lots of bomb parts that came packed (alongside cases and cases of beer) inside sealed caskets stamped with biohazard trifoils and those words, REMAINS UNVIEWABLE, just like on the one they’d sent Danny Diaz home in. The irony of bombs in a casket, they’d all appreciated. The fact of receiving a shipment of caskets at all, none of them did.

  For the medical area there was an ice machine that Carter thought was almost a joke because of the cold, but then not, because it meant that the pilots could now drink their whiskey on the rocks like gentlemen ought to, and that was like luxury beyond imagining. When he mentioned it to Fenn, his friend just smiled. “I knew you’d get the joke of it.”

  All told, it’d been a sixty-ton orbital drop, wholly unexpected by any of those who claimed secret knowledge of company resupply schedules. A Christmas miracle, then, whose origin or cause no one among the pilots wanted to examine too closely lest the mistrust in their black and suspicious little hearts would somehow make it all disappear. While Carter had been asleep and dreaming, or walking maybe, or up and in flight, it’d been delivered by a speedy blockade runner who’d done his job so well that he’d nearly flattened the machine shop with one of the armored containers. No one had even needed to leave camp to retrieve the riches. Santa Claus, it appeared, had gone high-tech now that all the good little children had become so greedy and scattered among the stars.

  Portions of each man’s pay were delivered. A small percentage, and only in company scrip, but that was fine. It wasn’t like there was anything to buy with it, but it was enough to make the card games more interesting for a time.

  Promotion reports, wage adjustments, a company stock report, and mission summary were delivered as well, in a sealed bag keyed to Ted Prinzi’s greasy fingerprints. Copies were already tacked to the walls in the field house. Not everything, but the important stuff. Carter had received a 1.72 percent pay raise. Billy Stitches was given the rank of flight lieutenant. Some of the reports were old but, to them on Iaxo, everything coming from the real world arrived old. Time and travel. Distance. Carelessness. It didn’t matter. News that was new to them was new news, and they devoured it like it wasn’t due to happen till tomorrow. Flyboy Inc. stock was doing well and, through their negotiators, the company had haggled up its stake on Iaxo to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred million acres in exchange for services. They owned (or would own, eventually) a sizable fraction of the total continental land mass, one entire ocean, and someday—once the place was civilized—the company could then sell that off to developers, mining conglomerates, real estate speculators, and land rapists of every stripe. Put in a casino, some strip mines, chain restaurants, a whorehouse, level the mountains, take out all the trees, drain the rivers. Show the indigs what modernity really meant. At that point, each of the mercenaries (mercenary pilots, mercenary mechanics, mercenary cooks and computer operators and lawyers) would get a piece of the profits, and the indigs on both sides, if there were any left at that point, would get screwed all over again. It was the company man’s retirement plan, so to speak. And it wasn’t a bad deal at all, provided you weren’t an indig.

  Carter and Fenn had themselves a huge and leisurely breakfast of local bread with grape jelly manufactured a hundred light-years away, powdered eggs (because every army everywhere has had to eat powdered eggs for breakfast since the day some jerk had first come up with the notion that such a thing as powdering an egg was a good idea), condensed-milk sandwiches with ground sugar, and slabs of the native equivalent of ham steak, which was, in actuality, nothing like a ham steak at all except that it came salty from the cure and cooked up the proper color. It came from an animal that looked something like a fat, legless rabbit, like a fluffy slug with big, floppy ears, and not the kind of thing anyone wanted to picture while eating. Tasty, though. And they were so dumb, they could be hunted with a hammer.

  Most important, they had coffee. Gallons of coffee. They drank coffee until the entire tent smelled like the inside of a grinder and Carter felt like he would burst. Coffee sweetened with condensed milk and bourbon whiskey, and made sweeter still by the fact that they hadn’t had anything but instant in nearly two months and had even begun running short on that in the last week.

  So they drank coffee. They sat with their boys from second and third squadrons who straggled in, bleary with sleep, dragged forward like zombies by the smell of fresh joe and frying slug-bunnies. Everyone helped themselves to the supplies. There were no arguments, only munificence and sweetness and men who, some days, acted as though they couldn’t stand the sight or sound or stink of one another, heaping one another’s plates with food and lighting one another’s cigarettes. They smoked, laughed, joked, swore, and kept wishing one another a merry motherfucking Christmas until the air inside the mess tent was warm, close, blue and foggy with smoke. It was, in Carter’s memory, the greatest Christmas party he’d ever been to until Fenn, reaching over behind the back of Jack Hawker, punched him in the shou
lder and pointed out one of the plastic windows at the blurry form of Ted Prinzi stalking purposefully across the compound, headed in their direction.

  Fenn grabbed him by the sleeve, dragged him back and out of the general melee of conversation. “Here we go, Kev,” he said. “I’ve seen this coming for a year.” This struck Carter as strange because he had no idea what his friend could’ve seen coming or why he wouldn’t have told him about it if there’d been anything about anything he’d suspected for a whole year. They’d had entire conversations about their feet, the two of them; they’d spent hours talking about tent canvas or toast because they’d run out of meaningful things to say to each other so long ago. Suddenly Carter felt as though Fenn had been holding out on him and would’ve said something cross about it except that inside the overcrowded tent, a couple of people had seen Captain Fenn point. A few more saw them looking out the window and, before long—in the space of a breath or two or three—their fine and blasphemous Christmas party had gone from cheerfully effusive, piggish, and juvenile to sepulchural. Half the pilots were on their feet and seemingly ready to make a dash before Ted even stepped through the door—the idea being to put a bit of running distance between themselves and whatever ill tidings Ted eternally bore. Raoul, one of Vic’s mechanics, had Lori Bishop, a flight controller, on his lap, and they’d frozen together like that, a tableau of holiday merriment with her arms thrown around his neck and his hands creeping high along her hips. Ernie O’Day from Fenn’s 3rd had his eyes squeezed shut and was muttering curses under his breath. Beside Carter, Jack Hawker, his squadron leader from the second and not at all a religious man, appeared to be praying.

  Ted had followed his feet across the field, thinking Christmas with each step. Christmas, step-step. Christ-mas, Christ-mas. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He felt as though he should look like he knew what he was going to say. But he had no earthly idea.

  He pushed through the flap door and into the mess, his face bruised by exhaustion. And for a broken second, he stood there, just inside the door, swaying slightly, drinking in the warmth of bodies, of breath. He felt like a drowning man suddenly given one more gasp of air. His back was straight. His eyes were bright. The rest of him felt like it could turn to liquid at any second.

  “First squadron took fire over Mutter’s Ridge five minutes ago and are coming home hot. Two planes damaged. One pilot wounded.” He swallowed. His throat felt hot and distended, like he’d swallowed a billiard ball halfway. “I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know sweet fuck-all, so don’t ask me any questions. I want crews on the field with emergency gear and all pilots to their planes double-quick.”

  Ted looked around. He tried to catch each man’s eye. There was a lot of blinking but for one terrible, long moment no one spoke, no one moved, no one even breathed.

  And Ted could’ve yelled. He knew he could’ve screamed his head off to snap everyone out of their collective trance. And maybe he should have done that, but he was so tired, so spent. Scared. Sick with it.

  So instead, Ted just spoke. One word, dropped with all the intensity of an atom bomb as, in the background, everyone heard the grinding moan of the scramble siren beginning to wail.

  “Now,” he said.

  And the tent was empty before the word hit the floor.

  CARTER WAS ON THE FIELD WITH ENGINES HOT, the squadron arranged behind him in scramble formation, and the ground vibration was enough to shake his vertebrae like dice. They were ready to go, ready to fly, but instead they sat, boxed together for fast takeoff, idling impotently on the west end of A strip with orders to go exactly nowhere.

  Carter was still thinking about breakfast because breakfast was preferable to death. Breakfast was preferable to most anything, and death, obviously, was among the worst things in the world.

  Carter was thinking about toast. About real toast. Not too long ago—less than a year, maybe—he and Fenn had had a long conversation about toast. Real white toast made from real white bread by a machine, perfected across centuries and made to do nothing else.

  Toast. Seriously, they’d talked for hours. How toast, made well, was one of those things a person didn’t ever think about missing until it was gone and then missed with an ache that was incalculable. How toast might be the one thing he’d wish for if he were suddenly granted one wish and, of course, couldn’t wish to leave, to go home, to be just gone and, of course, wealthy and, of course, dog-piled by naked girls.

  Ridiculous, sure. Ask them on any other night and it would’ve been something else, some other stupid little thing that no one ever thought about until it was unavailable.

  Toast. Golden brown, still hot from the toaster, dripping with butter until the middle of a piece of it got a little wet and squishy but the edges stayed crisp. How even bad toast was great toast when compared with having no toast, and was fucking phenomenal toast when measured against the coarse, gritty, heavy local bread toasted over a fire or in a pan on the gas stove in the galley. The bread on Iaxo was terrible. What bread must’ve been like when bread was first invented, before anyone knew better. It tasted green and almost moldy even when fresh. And the toast made from it suffered accordingly.

  Toast. Hours of talk about toast until they were mad for it. And now, all Carter could think was that this was one of the things they’d talked about, wasted their time on, when Fenn wasn’t saying whatever it was he’d claimed to have known about for a year. If it’d been important, he thought—important enough to mention now, important enough and right enough that he’d copped to it just a minute before Ted had opened his big mouth—motherfucker should’ve said something.

  Carter hadn’t been able to ask Fenn about it in the mess. No time. Certainly, he hadn’t been able to ask when they’d broken in a frantic sprint for the tent line—for their gear, their gloves, their warm coats and collars; scrambling for them and then running out again, whooping and cursing, for the flight line where the planes were being shoved out of the longhouse like boarders late with the rent. And now it was bothering him. And now he really wanted some toast, too.

  First squadron had come down on the southern tip of C strip, which was the emergency strip, while Carter and two squadron were taxiing into position and before Fenn and his squadron had even gotten their planes out of the longhouse. Consequently, no one had seen what sort of shape they’d been in. No one had been able to count planes and guess at who was hurt, who was down, or anything. No one in the control tent was taking questions. Ted couldn’t be raised on the radio.

  Sitting, waiting, Carter could see the tail and body markings of Fenn’s plane, Jackrabbit. It was the best of the company’s D.VIII models, square-bodied, boxy, with the odd little fin on the tail and Fenn’s painting of a rabbit, running, just below the cockpit. A huge penis had been added, drunkenly, by someone who may or may not have been Fenn, at some later date. So, too, had a top hat. A cigarette holder poking crookedly from the rabbit’s mouth.

  Lined up with him were Charlie Voss and George Stork in the company’s two Airco DH.2 pushers, each loaded down to the axle stops with 250 pounds of bombs. It’d been a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, the aerial tactician, October 28, 1916. Boelcke had written the book on air-to-air combat, was a genius, died at twenty-five. Carter’d read the book. So had everyone else.

  Carter knew that it wasn’t really a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, but rather a collision with his wingman during a dogfight with a squadron of DH.2s, but that was close enough. The DH.2 was what pilots had flown before there was anything else to fly—one of the first planes that didn’t kill them instantly.

  Behind Voss and Stork were Emile Hardman and Ernie O’Day at the sticks of two Vickers Gunbus F.B.5s, two-seaters, with Max, the armorer, and Willy McElroy, the machinist, on the guns in the forward observer seats. There was no legend to the Vickers. They were ugly, cranky, and slow. No one liked them at all.

  Two squadron was in formation. Carter and Jack Hawker, the squadron leader, were sitting side by s
ide with fourteen feet of space between their wingtips. Tommy Hill was behind Carter. David Rice was behind Jack. Lefty Berthold was in drag position.

  They were trained to lift this way, five seconds between pairs, which was dangerous but quick. When Carter looked again, he saw Fenn’s third squadron laid out on the south end of B strip with their bombers and ground support planes, arranged the same way. With two squadrons using both strips, the controllers could lift ten planes in less than a minute. It’d never been necessary before, but they’d practiced it. A few times. A long time ago. They’d drilled things like fast lifts and combat descents, squadron flying, rush envelopments, and all the nasty tricks of the dogfighter. After a while, it’d seemed ridiculous, so they’d stopped, comforted a little by thinking that they could probably still do it if they had to. Now it was what was on everyone’s mind: whether they could and whether or not they’d have to. Whether this, finally, was the moment when it might matter.

  Except that they weren’t doing anything but sitting. On the ground, they were useless, harmless, vulnerable. Ask Danny Diaz. Though they might play at it with their feet rooted to the earth, it was only in the air that they became elder gods, avenging angels of decrepit technology, all roaring engines and blazing guns, raining fire from the heavens, death from the clear blue sky. In the air, they were wrath. They were furious might. They were power without bounds.

  On the ground, though, it was all backaches and leg cramps, boredom, the wasting nervousness of sitting, clenched and waiting.

  Carter recalled a month or a year ago sitting in the tent with Fenn, talking bullshit. Not even about anything because neither had anything to say, but just talking. About socks, say. Or weather. Didn’t matter.