A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  “Not very lucky at cards,” added Fenn.

  “Social skills of a walnut,” said Carter. “But a good guy.”

  “Yup,” said Fenn.

  “Yeah,” said Ted, then, “Right,” and, “A good man.” He looked from Fenn to Carter to Fenn again, squinted his eyes, then, to the pilots, seemed to shake off whatever momentary bit of human compassion had seized him. “Right. So anyway. Enough fucking eulogizing. We’ve got a fight coming, so I want you two, all the squadron leaders, and Billy in the comms tent with me in fifteen minutes, got it? Senior staff. Go dig ’em up from whatever holes they crawled into last night and carry them if you have to. Fast Eddie wants a word or two about… something…”

  Ted’s voice trailed off. His eyes drifted around the tent again, head revolving on his neck like a turret traversing and his tongue clicking against his fake teeth. Fenn and Carter shot quick glances at each other but kept quiet. Ted wobbled a little on his feet but, again, seemed to recover himself—to jink free of whatever kept grabbing at him.

  “Well, anyway, the man wants a word,” Ted finished. “Get it done.”

  “Right,” said Fenn.

  “Aye aye,” said Carter.

  “Good,” said Ted, then turned and was out the door without hesitation.

  “Such a pleasant man,” Carter said to Fenn after he was sure Ted was out of earshot. Cat got up, stretched, then slunk off to its bed by the door.

  “Yes. We should really have him over more often. Lends a bit of class to the place, don’t you think?”

  They both reclined quietly on their cots, Carter smoking, Fenn gnawing the ragged end of one thumbnail, neither in any rush to jump to Ted’s orders, and still not so sure about speaking. Carter couldn’t recall what they were mad at each other about. Could’ve been any one of a million things, he thought. Didn’t much matter.

  “I think he was sizing us up,” Fenn finally said, spitting a sliver of thumbnail off the tip of his tongue and into the dirt. “Don’t you think so? Coming in here, talking about Morris and all that?”

  Carter considered that a moment, having to cast Commander Prinzi into a whole new man just to get his head around the thought of him doing anything calculating or emotional. “What did he think we were going to do? Weep?”

  “Quit, maybe? Give up our commissions?”

  “And forgo all this splendor?” Carter put out his cigarette, popping the ember off with a finger and stashing the dog-end in his pocket.

  “It is a war, after all, isn’t it? People get hurt.”

  “People get killed. It’s to be expected.”

  “But not the good people.”

  “—Good people.”

  “The good guys.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Not us.”

  “We’re the good people?” Carter hucked out a short laugh. “Christ help the wicked.”

  “I just mean that none of us expected this,” Fenn said, swinging his feet over the side of his cot and planting them firmly in the dirt in probable expectation of eventually getting up and doing as Ted had asked. “At least not like the way it went. And not Morris, certainly.”

  Carter opened his mouth to speak, closed it, looked up curiously. “What do you mean, ‘not Morris’? Why not Morris?”

  “I just mean no one expected Morris to be the first to go.” Fenn paused. His brows came together to make a single straight wrinkle in the middle of his forehead. A fresh topography, as though no wrinkle had ever perturbed that place before. “Or next to go, rather.”

  “But why’d you say it like that? Like ‘of course, not Morris’?” Carter stretched, popping joints from toes to fingertips, and it felt good. He wanted to sleep just two or three more years, he thought. Two or three more years and then maybe he’d be able to find the energy to get up and fight this war in proper good humor. “You’re talking like there was a pool going or something.”

  “There was,” Fenn said.

  “What?” Carter pushed himself up on one elbow, actually facing Fenn. “Why didn’t you tell me about it? You know I would’ve kicked in.”

  Fenn stood. “Because you were on the top of the list, Kev.”

  Carter thought about that for a moment, then bounced to his feet all in one quick motion—a trick he had for fooling his brain into accepting a new orientation before the lingering hangover could make him all dizzy and nauseated. And it worked, more or less. At least he didn’t fall over.

  “You should’ve told me about it anyway,” he said. “I would’ve put fifty bucks on me, too.”

  It hadn’t been what he’d wanted to say, but it was what he said. Then he clapped Fenn on the shoulder and led the way through the door and out into the world.

  Carter’d taught Cat a trick a while ago. It hadn’t been much of a trick, but it was something. If Carter could get the thing’s attention—and if Cat was feeling frisky—he could throw a ball, a sock, a wadded-up bit of paper across the tent and, no matter where it landed, Cat would pounce on it and destroy it, shredding it to pieces. It didn’t matter what Carter said once the object had left his hand, but he usually said something like “Kill it, Cat! Kill!” just to feel like he was involved somehow, like this was something he’d accomplished by long training, not just the exploitation of instinct and Cat’s own murderous temperament.

  If it rolled into the mess under Fenn’s rack, Cat would pursue it. If it bounced out the door, Cat would rocket off after it. And when the little monster was done demolishing its target, it would return like a dog to exactly the place it’d been when Carter started the game and wait, expectantly now, to see if he’d do it again.

  One night, not paying attention, Carter’d absently thrown a crumpled ball of slick photo paper that had ended up between the legs of the potbellied stove, resting in the scorched dirt beneath the blazing hot body of the thing. And Cat had gone after it, of course. Only it was too large to fit, even slithering on its belly.

  The creature had screamed as it dragged its back along the underside of the stove, snapping at the paper with its jaws and howling like nothing Carter or Fenn had ever heard before. And even as they’d both leaped up, they could smell Cat burning—a stink like flaming hair and charred meat and some greasy filth.

  Fenn, in a strange instant, had panicked. Carter remembered him standing, bouncing on his toes, and waving his hands up and down in front of his chest, squealing, “Help it! Help it!” It was so unlike him that it’d stuck in Carter’s mind. For his part, Carter’d grabbed Cat by the back legs and dragged it out, yelling the whole time. Not words, just unintelligible noises of fear and anger.

  There was a bloody chunk missing from Carter’s hand now that’d scarred terribly. Cat’d bitten him, had torn the flesh from his arm in ribbons that required dozens of stitches from Doc Edison who’d been so happy to have something to do that he’d made most of a day out of it. Eyes rolled back, terrified, Cat had thrashed and fought and finally squirmed free of Carter’s blood-slick hands, hit the floor, and then went right back under the stove again, right back after the paper. In the end, Carter and Fenn had had to hold Cat down, wrap it tightly in a blanket to quiet it, get the paper, and throw it out the door. Carter’s first instinct had been to feed the paper into the stove, but Fenn had stopped him.

  “Cat’ll go after it,” he said. “It will. Just throw the paper away.”

  So Carter had, tossing it out the door. And as soon as they’d unwrapped the blanket, Cat had gone after it, just like Fenn had said. And when it was done, Cat came back—burned and meaty, scales blackened, panting from pain—to sit right in the spot where it’d been when Carter had first thrown the paper. It’d stared up at him with wide, rolling eyes, waiting to go again. There were wet, red stripes on its back where the stove had burned it raw.

  “Well done, Kev,” Fenn had said. “Nice trick you taught it.”

  “Fuck you,” Carter had said, feeling bad enough already and turning his back on Cat, staring at the wall.
/>   “No, really. You taught it to be just like you.”

  This moment came back to Carter when Fenn told him that it was the sound consensus of all the other pilots on Iaxo that if anyone was likely to die here, maybe deserved to die here, it was him. That was some heavy dope. It would hang on him for a good, long time. He recalled the smell of Cat burning. The crazed fixity of the little monster when, hideously wounded, it’d gone back under the stove a second time for no better reason than it hadn’t yet gotten what it’d gone in after. The ridiculous pride he himself had felt when Cat’d come back inside to sit, waiting for another turn.

  You taught it to be just like you, Fenn had said. But Carter knew that was wrong. He was nothing like that. He told himself that he’d quit in a minute if there was a way he could finesse it. That he’d gladly walk away. The day that their ride off-planet finally showed up, Carter told himself he’d be the first one aboard. Bulkhead seat, no baggage. And he’d never look back. Not ever.

  That was what he told himself. When asked, that was what he would say: First one aboard, motherfucker. Race me. He pretended like he dreamed of that moment every single night.

  CARTER, FENN, AND THEIR CHARGES MADE IT to the comms tent in under a half hour, and they were only that quick because they’d found Charlie Voss and Billy together by the machine shop trying to coax Jack Hawker down off the roof by poking at him with long sticks. Porter was in the longhouse with the mechanics seeing to his planes, and they collected him along their way. Vic wasn’t there, and Carter was thankful for that at least.

  The comms tent was part of what was generally referred to as the field house—a large, square, pavilion-like affair with canvas walls, a metal roof, and grate flooring to keep everyone out of the mud. It might have been festive if it’d been colorful and garlanded for Christmas, but it wasn’t. It was military-regulation gray-green, the color of mildew, of Chongju or the Marne, and festooned with ratty camouflage netting. Since no one was flying, the ground control electronics were going unmanned, though Jimmy McCudden, one of the day controllers, sat off in a corner with his head down and fat, coconut-shell phones over his ears, ostensibly monitoring the radio and microwave traffic, but probably just sleeping. Every device in the place had some manner of alarm attached to it so that whenever anything at all happened, one gadget or another would immediately start screaming. A human head between the earphones was more a backup system than anything else. A brain to parse the static and background radiation for whispers in the dark. And Jimmy’s head was as good as any. The company didn’t miss much.

  At the back of the tent there was a ready area—the kind of arrangement one almost always saw in movies about fliers, where the pilots all sit in chairs with desk-arms and listen in rapt attention while some crisply uniformed senior officer tells them how the day’s bombing and mayhem is supposed to go and then warns them all not to be heroes.

  Here, the area was supposed to be used for preflight briefings, tactical and strategic planning, pep talks by management. It was intended to buzz with talk and busy action, to be full of young men pushing chits around a map and talking in hushed tones about axes of advance and diversionary maneuvers. And in anticipation of such productive use, it’d been outfitted with whiteboards, tables, maps, computers, fancy and expensive projection equipment. There was even a podium, as a setup like this would’ve seemed naked or incomplete without one.

  Mostly, the space was used for card games, office space, storage of extra equipment, or as a bivouac for off-duty controllers sleeping between shifts. No one gave the Flyboy pilots pep talks. Their strategy and tactics consisted entirely of shooting anything that moved and bombing anything that didn’t. Preflight briefings—if they occurred at all—were normally held over drinks or consisted of orders screamed at a pilot as he jogged out onto the strip toward his plane and, in either case, were invariably misheard, misunderstood, or just plain ignored. The pilots knew what they were doing most of the time anyhow. Things had not been complicated here. And as recently as this morning, all of the expensive war gear had been covered with tarps and dust covers, pushed off into corners, ignored. To make plans for fighting the indigs, it was thought, would’ve been giving them altogether too much credit. Simpler just to kill them and be done with it.

  But now, just a very few hours gone from the freewheeling innocence and egotism that’d died with Morris Ross, there was Ted, standing surrounded by all this gleaming, uncovered technology, glaring at it like he was afraid that if he took his eyes off it even for a second, it would all slink off into the woods somewhere and defect to the enemy. Fast Eddie stood with him, but Eddie was behind the podium because Eddie was the sort of man who, if there was a podium around anywhere, seemed most natural behind it. He was leaning easily on its top when the men all stumbled in, looking as comfortable and at ease there as some men do behind the wheel of a car or with their elbows down on top of a bar. Had he been feeling better, Carter would’ve laughed. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if he were to find that Eddie’d brought the thing with him as personal baggage.

  Eddie had been the one who’d uncovered all the equipment and pushed it into useful alignment. He’d wiped the dust off things with a cloth he’d found and made sure everything was plugged into the generators. On the podium, he had a stack of handwritten notes. He’d slept a little, cleaned himself up, and turned out for the meeting all polished, prim, and proper. He’d fussed because fussing was what he was good at. Meetings were what he was good at. This was his element, where he felt most comfortable, and after years spent fighting very different kinds of battles inside the dark and clubby confines of the company headquarters, he could slip on the aura of calm and competence like putting on a jacket.

  Ted had followed him in a few minutes later and had stood off to the side, watching Eddie shove and polish and straighten.

  Like a goddamn maid, Ted had thought. Straightening up. Fretting.

  “Saw you in your tent last night, Eddie,” he’d called out while Eddie crouched to drag the podium into place at the head of the room. “Crying like a girl.”

  Shame had flared in Eddie’s cheeks. He’d felt the heat of it prickling his skin, but hadn’t responded. Instead, he’d shuffled the map projector around until it was sitting just so and made sure the proper information was loaded into it and would be waiting. He liked his meetings to run smoothly, with a minimum of glitches or distractions. There was an art to it. He knew that half of appearing in command was simply controlling the environment. More than half.

  Ted leaned against a stack of discarded shipping crates and looked at his hands—making fists, then releasing them, watching the play of the muscles beneath his skin. “Finally hit you, didn’t it? What’s happening here?”

  “I am well aware of what’s happening here, Commander,” said Eddie. “More aware than you are right now.”

  Ted didn’t rise to the bait. “Nothing to be ashamed of, you know. I’ve seen men break down worse. Not many of them, but still. It’s good you’re so in touch with your”—he spit onto the grating, making a little popping sound with his tongue and his lips—“your feelings.”

  “We should discuss our order of speaking,” Eddie suggested. “We have a lot to get through.”

  “How do you figure? We’ve got a real fight now. A stand-up fight. Everyone needs to toughen up a little bit, that’s all. Get some things done around here.”

  “Like you did this morning? I heard about your little stunt. I’m sure that just impressed the heck out of the natives.”

  “Better than lying around in the dirt crying for my mommy.”

  Eddie looked up. “Do you see me crying right now, Commander?”

  Ted said nothing. He stared at Eddie, eyes hard. Eddie stared back, face a mask of calm, a twitch of a smile jerking at the corner of his mouth. He felt strong here. A decade of boardroom ambushes, career assassinations, back-office street fights, and paperwork sieges had hardened him in ways that a creature like Ted Prinzi would never un
derstand. He’d been unprepared last night, on the relay. Two years on the front lines had left him soft and vulnerable—afraid only of bullets and bombs, the cold, the natives, and dying, which, Eddie knew, was far from the worst thing that could happen to a man. But he was over that now. He had his armor on tight.

  “I have notes,” Eddie continued. “We can work from them together if you like. You can talk about the operation and about Mr. Ross. I’ll take care of the rest.” Standing behind the podium, Eddie held out the stack of papers he’d arranged earlier. He rattled them a little. “I have a couple surprises you might be interested in.”

  Eventually, more out of curiosity than anything else, Ted came over to take a look. At which point, Eddie squared the papers up and placed them back on the podium. “It’ll have to wait,” he said, jerking the point of his chin in the direction of the door where the first of the officers were starting to filter in. “But try not to fall asleep before the end. I have some news that I know you’ll want to hear.”

  He waved Ted off and turned to concentrate on his notes.

  Controlling the environment, Eddie knew, was half the battle.

  All around Carter, the men settled into seats as though even this simple action was something entirely new to them. They fiddled with the folding arms, scrabbled their chair legs around on the flooring, and shifted their weight uncomfortably. Everything about them was red-meat raw. Everything hurt. Carter was still thinking about Cat and the way it’d sat there, staring, waiting to play again.

  Eddie talked. He smiled more than was comfortable, or probably necessary. Ted spoke barely at all. For the most part, no one else had anything to say. Once things got going, it was just a meeting, same as any other, save that those who weren’t still drunk from last night remained terribly hungover and all of them felt more than a little guilty just to be breathing. It was just like a meeting except that their action items, talking points, and memoranda all had to do with bloody death and destruction.