A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Point one: Morris was dead. They mourned him now in the most banal of all possible ways: by committee. From behind his podium, Eddie informed the assembled men that the company would be sending official condolences to his family. Carter hadn’t even known Morris had one.

  Point two: funeral. Ted, with his arms folded across his chest and his eyes constantly shifting to watch his flanks, said that everyone was ordered to attend a brief service for the dearly departed scheduled for later that same night. Full dress. Show off their fancies and hard hearts for the wogs. The pilots all cursed him under their stinking breath.

  Point three: arrangement and disposition of forces. To be determined at some later date, unspecified. First squadron was now two men down, Danny first, now Morris. They were a weak link, to be officially assumed strong until further word and a rejiggering of the roster. Billy Stitches was to be commended on his unexpected promotion as flight lieutenant within first squadron now, please, with polite applause. That done, it was suggested that his brand-new lieutenant’s wings would count as an extra man, or something like that. Carter was paying very little attention.

  At the front of the room, Ted shifted uncomfortably while Eddie spoke. When it was his turn to talk, he said as few words as possible. When Eddie stood behind the podium, Ted kept looking at him like he was waiting for a snake to jump out. He wore a look the whole time as though half his mind was going. Like it was actually trying to squirm its way free from inside his skull.

  “Commander Prinzi is going to run through the details of yesterday’s action,” Eddie said. “I think there are things here that we can all learn from.”

  Point four: the action. Ted took the floor. He switched on the map projector, the other electronics around him, punching their buttons with a little more force than absolutely necessary. Eddie leaned, beaming, against the podium. Ted discussed the last flight of Morris Ross, working a laser pointer like it was a club, smashing it across the three-dimensional map projection that grew out of the wall. Everywhere he pointed, map marks would light up. They would dim again as he moved on. It was a nice effect.

  “Bomb-damage assessment,” Ted said, then something else, then, “First squadron here. Formation breaks east, hooks around the edge of the ridgeline here,” then something else again. Carter watched as four little blue triangles lit up on the map, altitude, heading, and airspeed indicators spelled out in even tinier blue letters beneath. The little triangles did just as Ted said, pausing when he did and moving when he spoke. “Now, two planes break to dive,” he said, and the triangles moved.

  Carter was tuning in and out, watching the little blue triangles follow Ted’s merciless direction. It was all very slick, but there was a feeling like he was making Morris die all over again with his words, making the triangles break, move into position for the coming kill. Part of Carter wanted him to stop—as though interrupting the presentation could suspend the terrible thing that was coming. Carter wondered if Ted had rehearsed this, too, while he’d waited for him and Fenn to go and gather the officers. Sitting there in the audience, Carter wanted Ted to say, Happily ever after, clap his hands, and make everything right again, but he didn’t. He just droned on, moving Morris’s triangle closer and closer to death. Jack Hawker was staring straight ahead with his mouth open like he’d been hit in the back of the head with a sack of nickels and was waiting to fall. Beside Carter, Fenn was asleep. He had a knack for doing it with his eyes open, like being dead himself. Porter, the first squadron flight leader, was staring at the floor.

  Ted again: “Billy and Albert here, flying high cover at six thousand. Porter, this is you and Morris, down at one thousand, dropping speed for observation of the target area, yeah?”

  Porter nodded. And as if his neck were on a spring, once he started nodding, he didn’t seem able to stop.

  Eddie was watching the action on the map with the vapid, distracted grin of a game-show hostess. To Carter’s eye, there was something so terribly deliberate and false about his every motion and every twitch of his pretty, pretty face. Even his teeth were perfect, and he seemed somehow to have far too many of them crammed into his sucking little mouth. He thought about Vic and had to shake his head to make her face go away. It was reflex—his body jumping at the barest scent of her presence, real or imagined. Vic leaning over him in the dark, her hair falling like curtains around them, blocking out the greasy light of the fires in the distance. Vic leading him by the hand away from last night’s festivities, turning back to look at him over one shoulder, smiling with a sadness so deep it was as if she’d swallowed an ocean.

  “They make their pass here, directly over the strike zone, and come up clean. Right, Porter?”

  Porter’s head kept nodding.

  “Porter?”

  “Right.” He didn’t look up.

  Carter was thinking about Fenn.

  You were on the top of the list, Kev.

  He wondered how much of that was because of the interest Vic had taken in him, how much of it he’d brought on himself, how much was the prescience of pilots for just knowing somehow who among them was going to go. It wasn’t a measure of skill. Not about like or dislike. Rather, it was a determination of hardness, of armor. Some pilots shone with it—an aura that clung to them like skin and spoke of invulnerability. Others didn’t. Others had chinks, bits of softness that were like psychic weakness.

  Carter thought about Danny Diaz.

  “Breaking here. Still in formation.”

  It was still a crapshoot, though. Luck, good and bad. People’s internal numbers got skewed, odds tumbled. Luck was the only real divinity of the battlefield, and it broke to no amount of praying or sacrifice. This time, the pilots’ pool had been wrong. Carter wondered where Morris had been on the list and who was profiting from his demise.

  “We’ve got planes high and low. Porter and Morris descending, making a second pass.”

  Of the many, many things Carter hated about this place, its people, the situation as a whole, he thought sometimes that the thing that drove him most secretly crazy was how the stupid indigs wouldn’t fight back. Couldn’t fight back, really. Not against the company and its flying machines. Because while he supposed that they tried, it was rarely to any effect. Things might be different on the ground, but from the sky, fighting the indigs was like punching a baby. It was like shooting some dumb animal chained to a post. It was safe, sure, but there was little dignity in it.

  And it wasn’t like Carter cared about honor or fairness—at least not that he would ever admit to out loud—but he’d hated the indigs for the fact that they just died without having the self-respect to make him feel good about it by putting up a fight.

  He squirmed in his seat while Ted talked Morris Ross closer and closer to his little death. Contrary to his standing in the pilot’s pool and his comradely offer of betting heavy on his own dying, Carter didn’t want to die. He wasn’t a suicide case. He didn’t want the filthy little indigs to kill him or Danny or Morris or anyone else, either, but sometimes—occasionally, he would say—he did want them just to hit him back.

  That was all. Even in the cloister of his own mind, Carter was careful to halt his imaginings right there. No one needed to die, but there was a dark and wet and awful part of him that wanted to be hurt—that hated the indigs for being stupid and backward and powerless, for just rolling over and dying in his gun sights for the past two years; that wanted them to fill the sky with tracers and blacken it with flak and shoot him all to hell and back.

  He’d dreamed of it. Not often, but some. On those nights when, if asked, he would say he’d been dreaming of nothing more than the lead-weight pressure of six gravities of acceleration and the long burn for home, he actually dreamed of the indigs punching holes in the skin of his plane and the flesh of his body. On those nights he dreamed of them burning his eyes out the way they’d done to Danny or carving into him with bullets and shrapnel as he’d done to them so many times before and making him hurt the way he’d been hu
rting them for so long. He dreamed of waking, bloody and screaming, in a medical tent with pieces of himself left scattered on these alien fields and to thus be granted—finally—a pure fury. A clean and justified rage. A clarity of purpose and a singularity of intent that would give him a reason to kill and maim and hate without guilt, without doing it just because he’d been told to. He wanted to love himself and his machine and the job and his weapons. He wanted the unquestioning faith in rightness that Durba’d had before he died, raving, with a hole in his head and a spike of wood through the belly. He wanted Ted’s upright coldness, Billy’s joy, Fenn’s calm. He wanted an enemy, not a victim.

  Only then, on that awful morning with Morris dead and Ted droning on and all his wishes coming true, Carter still wasn’t happy. He wasn’t sad either. He wasn’t grateful and didn’t hate any more or less than his usual amount. He wasn’t even angry. If he felt anything at all, sitting there in his uncomfortable chair, watching the Ted-and-Eddie show, it was only the slow relief of an unbelievable pressure of waiting. He caught himself whispering without moving his lips. “Now,” he said. “Maybe now,” over and over again while Ted’s triangles danced around, drawing closer and closer to the kill. Carter spoke as though blowing breath onto sparks, hoping for a flame, hoping to kindle that love he’d been looking for—its heat pale and tentative and delicate.

  “Now as reported,” Ted was saying, “the artillery site was hammered real good. Carter had ’em lit up, so it was tough to miss. Fokkers one and four pull up into a turn here, moving to rejoin formation, and here”—the map paused itself—“just as you’re starting your turn, Porter, you call in movement in the tree line.”

  Porter nodded. “Just on the edge of the strike zone.”

  “Just on the edge of the strike zone,” Ted repeated. “Right, Porter?”

  “Movement in the trees,” Porter said. “Didn’t know what it was. Figured it was nothing.”

  “Yeah, well, you were wrong. Nothing’s nothing. Everything is something. And that’s why you’re a shitty card player, too.” The little blue triangles were frozen against the map, an instant away from the sharp end. Ted coughed and cleared his throat. “Anyway, as per standing orders, Porter, as spotter, takes point. Fokker four—that’s Morris—is on your wing. Fokkers two and three dive to come in on your tail. The whole squadron turns out wide and comes in to, what, Porter?”

  “To investigate.”

  “To investigate. Fucking right.”

  “They were waiting for us,” Porter said quietly. Carter looked over at him. His hands were folded in front of him, his eyes on the floor. Pose of the penitent, of regret.

  “Of course they were waiting for you,” Ted said. “We’ve been blowing the shit out of these dopey, primitive shits for months. You think they haven’t been watching what we do? I guaran-fucking-tee you, gentlemen, our planes have been the single most carefully observed thing on this whole stupid planet since the day we showed up, so every one of those shit-eating monkeys out there knows exactly what we’re going to do before we do it. And we did just like they expected, didn’t we?” He slashed at the map with his laser pointer. “The flight drops speed, comes in low and slow from the north to investigate Porter’s nothing in the trees, puts them in the kill box here, in the ideal position to be shot at. Porter? You want to take us through what happens next?”

  “No,” said Porter.

  And Ted whirled, his body a taut wire of rage, like something inside him was afire. “Yessir, you mean. Yes fucking sir. Porter, take us through what happens next.”

  For a minute, Porter worked his jaw without any sound coming out. When the words finally came to him, they dropped leadenly from his mouth, in short, clipped sentences with a breath between each. “They opened up on us as soon as we crossed the strike zone.” Breath. “Three guns in the near tree line.” Breath. “Fourth at the northeast end. To our flank. We were down close to the treetops—”

  “Three-seven-five feet,” Ted clarified, turning back to the display.

  “At choke speed.”

  “Ninety miles per,” Ted said. He was close enough to the projection to read the indicators.

  “The forward guns got Morris and me on approach. They had tracers. We flew right straight up on them. Impossible to miss. I think the flanking gun tried for Billy and Albert. It missed. They just got lucky with Morris and me.”

  “That’s not luck, Porter. That’s planning. That’s wanting really, really badly to kill you right goddamn dead.” Ted turned to face the room once more. He tucked away his pointer. “What’s luck is that you aren’t.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, drew himself up with a breath, and finished out the narrative. “First squadron breaks for evasive with two planes damaged, overshoots the site, climbs to safety, and changes course for home.”

  On the map behind him, both Porter’s and Morris’s triangles had turned to red.

  “Fokker four had serious engine trouble, splintered prop, oil leaks. He was shot to shit and probably would’ve never made it back even if Morris hadn’t also been hit. He took seven rounds we could count. His suit stopped five, but he took one penetrating wound in the belly and one in the hand that mostly took it off at the wrist. Morris passed out from blood loss before going in and wrecking eight miles short of the field. Upon investigation, he was found KIA on-site.”

  Morris’s triangle turned black, fell out of formation, then winked out.

  “Everyone here knows the rest.”

  Eddie jumped in. “I don’t want to be a prick about this, guys, but odds are airman Ross would’ve survived until a pickup could be scrambled if he’d been wearing his emergency gear. I can’t understand why he wasn’t, actually. But I’ve been informed that this has become common practice over the past year, and it ends right now. This stuff is here for your protection, so from now on, no one goes up without a complete kit. That means helmet, protenolol and hemosclerex injectors, web gear—everything. That’s a direct order, understood?”

  “They get it, Eddie,” Ted said, then to the pilots, “And we’re back to putting our Danny on as well, gentlemen. Just in case.”

  Off to the side, Eddie nodded as if he had any idea what Ted was talking about. Ted shrank the map image to half size. He fiddled with this and that. Carter was feeling sick to his stomach. Probably, it was just the hangover.

  Point five.

  “Speculation,” Ted announced, and then began talking about weapons—those that Durba had lost in the rout, those that had gotten Morris, and how, odds were, these were not the same weapons. He talked of guns and bombs and said many tough things that were lost on Carter just then because all Carter could think about was the image of Morris’s hand blasted away by a bullet, by a kicked-back shard of prop or engine shrapnel punching through the firewall. He couldn’t get his head around the pain it must’ve caused, but he could see the wound in his head, Morris’s face at the moment of realization, the sickly feeling of suddenly seeing a piece of one’s self shattered, blown into hamburger, missing. The faces around him, with the exception of Fenn’s, were all gray. Porter was almost white and was shaking gently in his chair, still nodding, his mouth working even though he’d gone silent again.

  At the front of the room, Ted was backing away, turning to Eddie, who had laid a hand on his shoulder and was taking the floor with a grin. Eddie had a laser pointer of his own—small and metal and about the size of a bullet. He toyed with it, walking it back and forth across his knuckles while he talked. It was a trick he probably did in bars to impress girls in places where there were bars and girls to impress.

  “All right, guys. Here’s the situation…”

  Fuck you and your situation, Carter thought.

  “Had the fire come from the guns captured from the rifle position, it would’ve been bad news, but not awful. We would know they had only the three light machine guns and a finite amount of ammunition for them. Only now, we know that the fire came from four guns, not three, and that the rounds recovered
from flight leader Vaughn’s plane were of a larger caliber than those used by Antoinne. They were…”

  He paused, looked back at the podium where Carter thought he probably had a stack of notes stashed: Be casual. Smile. Curse more. And a list of nomenclatures under the double-underlined heading, NOMENCLATURES. He aimed his pointer at the projection screen. A picture of a Federated Arms light support gun came up, a belt-fed 8 mm.

  “Nope,” Eddie said. “Not that one. Dammit.” He waved the pointer around until another image swelled: a water-cooled .30 caliber antiaircraft machine gun. Simple but tough, efficient, easy to maintain, and the least necessary application of force to counter the advantage given by the company’s heretofore uncontested command of the skies over Iaxo.

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “There we go. It was probably something closer to this.”

  Ted grumbled something under his breath that none of the pilots could hear. Carter silently measured in his head. A .30-caliber round was about as long as his middle finger, as big around as his pinky. Almost identical to the ammunition in his own plane’s guns, the difference essentially cosmetic. Eye for an eye.

  “We also know from Captain Carter’s flight that the Lassateirra faction had field artillery pieces at their disposal. Reports from survivors of Antoinne’s unit estimate something in the…” Eddie checked his notes again.

  “One-oh-fives,” Ted said. “Modern shells, trained gunners or computer rangefinders, imported tubes and hardware mounted with native carriage. Least force, most bang.”

  Eddie nodded. “Exactly. There were four that we hit, but there’s no reason to think there’s not more out there. Also, on the night you guys hit the artillery position, Captain Carter took ground fire from crossbows using imported arrows.”