His .303s are nearly dry. He has run completely out of bombs. He calls Fenn as he sees all but two of his fighters chuddering off in the direction of the airfield and asks, “You, too?”
“Dry as dirt. Shot their wads.”
“Hadn’t anticipated this particular problem.”
“Me either. Those odds are beginning to look more and more right. Eddie’s odds, I mean.”
Carter thinks for a moment. His finger strokes delicately at his machine gun’s trigger—not firing, just teasing. “This isn’t that,” he says, finally. “I don’t think this is that.”
“Maybe. But it makes one think.”
Fenn says something to his fighters, and his two remaining wingmen roll over and fall into fierce dives, guns spitting sparks of light—tracers that, when they hit the hard-packed and frozen ground, bounce. Unless, of course, they find a body to embed themselves in. Something soft and warm and welcoming. They’d gone after a small knot of horses milling briefly around a flag. When they are through, there are no more horses. There is no more flag.
Ted’s voice crackles on the radio. “Command to A flight leader. Carter?”
“Copy, Ted. What’s up?”
“What’s the distance between the two parties now?”
“Parties?” As if this were a lark, an outing. Looking down, Carter can see a trail of wrack and ruin and meat and blood and death running back from where the horses are now to where the planes had first engaged them; a track, sometimes thick, in some places thin. A brief flurry of snow swirls between him and the ground—greasy, fat flakes offering a mercy of blindness.
“Between the retreating monkeys and the pursuing force. How far?”
“Mile and a half and closing fast. Maybe two miles.” Carter brings his machine around like reining up a skittish mount. She turns to the left as if bee-stung, the torque of the engine dragging her whole body in a skidding, ferocious inside turn. Carter groans as he is shoved roughly back into his seat, then continues. “Retreating forces are backing up at the river.”
“What about between the pursuing horses and the main body?”
“That’s a long way. Five miles. More.”
“How bad have you fucked up those horses?”
“Bad,” Carter says, recalling in a flash the bomb drop, the screaming he’d imagined, of the damaged and the dead. “But they’re not stopping. They’re taking it.”
“Connelly is not in position to intercept ground forces. If we don’t stop this advance right here, there will be nothing between the Lassateirra and us to slow them up.” There is a pause, static, whistle of distortion. Over the radio, Carter can hear engine sounds, shouts, the husking of the wind. Ted is still on the flight line. Carter pushes a fresh magazine into the cannon—one of his last two—then primes it. He takes a breath and blows it out through pursed, frozen lips, a thin line of steam almost instantly sucked back into the slipstream.
“Carter. A flight is scrambling in bombers. Lay off the horses. All fire to be concentrated on turning back the main body. Hawker will lead the bombers in. Berthold and Vaughn are ahead of them by a few minutes, already in the air.”
“Roger that.”
“Captain Teague is remaining on station to spot for me. Bring everyone else in to reload now—understand?”
“Understood, Ted. Roger and out.”
Carter switches channels, drops his nose, lets two rounds go, curses as the ejected shells spang off his knee and he hits the switch. “Fenn? Carter. You talked to Ted?”
“I did. Lovely man.”
“So you’re staying.”
“Eyes in the sky.”
Carter hears a long rip from Fenn’s guns, muffled but still audible.
“Save those rounds, pal. You’re gonna be all alone up here for a bit.”
“One of them gave me the finger. Had to teach him some manners.”
Carter laughs. “All right then. Porter and Lefty are inbound, but a few minutes off. Call in whoever’s left of your flight and put ’em on my tail. I’m headed for home.”
Fenn does that. They all shoot their guns dry on the way, waggle their wings at the outgoing fighters when they pass, then again at the bombers just making their way to the strip, confusing things, causing delays. Carter calls his mutt flight off approach and puts them into a long, lazy circle. He tries to catch his breath. He hunches down tight in the seat and hides from the wind slipping past the cockpit coamings. His lips are chapped and numb. His nose is running, and when he reaches up with his gloved hand to try and wipe it, he can’t feel his own hand on his face.
The bombers lumber into the air. Carter brings the fighters down. On the field, every hand is turned to loading death into the idling machines. There is very little talking. This is something they are good at. Carter is scooping spent cannon shells off the floor of Roadrunner’s cockpit with his hands like bailing water. He is bouncing in his seat and slapping at his frozen face—the lower half of it, the part not covered by the helmet. He is straining his muscles as Max hands him up belts of .303 ammo to be stowed and, all the while, he is listening to Fenn’s flight channel.
This is how he hears Lefty Berthold die.
Key
TWR: Transmission from lead controller Diane Willis
RAM: Radio area microphone, voice or sound source
RDO: Transmission from ground control
-1: Identified as Cmndr. Theodore “Ted” Prinzi
-2: Identified as Controller James McCudden
-3: Identified as Controller Shun Le Harper
OPS: Transmission from Iaxo operations control, Theodore Prinzi
HOT: Cockpit or pilot microphone, voice or sound source
-1: Identified as Cpt. Fennimore “Fenn” Teague, call sign “Jackrabbit”
-2: Identified as Sqd. Ldr. Porter Vaughn
-3: Identified as Louis “Lefty” Berthold, call sign “Bad Dog”
-4: Identified as Sqd. Ldr. Jack Hawker, A flight
-?: Voice unidentified
( ): Questionable insertion
[ ]: Editorial insertion
13:22:04
START OF RECORDING
HOT-1: Return flight one-two, I have you inbound.
HOT-2: This is one-two return. Where are you?
HOT-1: Not something a fighter pilot ought to be asking, flight leader. I’m just saying.
HOT-2: Ah, go fuck yourself, Captain. [Laughter] You in the soup?
HOT-1: Roger that. Five degrees your left. Eleven o’clock high at… ten thousand.
HOT-2: ’Kay. We’re incoming.
HOT-1: I’m winking at you. Can you tell?
HOT-1: Descending now.
HOT-1: Passing six thousand. Split out and form on me for formation.
For what time he had remaining, Carter would hear the voices in his head. Ghosts that, once embedded in the soft meat of his brain, could not be dislodged. In bed, in flight, at peace and at war, they would be there, taunting him, joking, dying. There would come nights when he would wake with his ears sore and his scalp bloody from trying to claw off imaginary headphones. To make the voices stop.
HOT-2: One-two inbound to control. We’re on-target. Spotter on capture.
TWR: Copy one-two.
TWR: Ground capture, one-two inbound approach to target.
RDO-3: Thank you, control. I have both targets.
HOT-2: Fenn? One-two inbound. I have you on capture.
HOT-1: Roger. I’ve got visual. I’m maintaining at five thousand. Pass below and come around.
HOT-2: Yeah, I…
HOT-1: Porter?
HOT-2: Yeah.
HOT-1: Cut out there for a minute, flight leader.
HOT-3: Over there. Uh… Your two o’clock-ish. Low. Way low.
On the field, Carter only dimly acknowledged the sound of Lefty Berthold’s voice. He was busy. No idle hands. The ammunition belts passing through his fingers were heavy and cold as if knowing their own freight and destiny. He liked the sound of them slid
ing over the cockpit coaming, a clatter like an abacus rattling. He smelled the snow on the air and the heat radiating off his engine and the sweet, thick stink of aviation fuel from the pumps near him and the pour-cans being run across the field. When he caught himself speaking aloud, under his breath, saying, “Come on, come on, come on,” he willed himself into calm, unclenched his fists, closed his eyes. He barely made note of Lefty’s voice in his ear. Not yet, anyway.
HOT-3: Way low. Passing over now.
HOT-1: One-two inbound, this is Fenn. What’s the problem, gentlemen?
HOT-2: You are seeing things, Lefty.
HOT-1: [Unintelligible] (Fucking cold legs?)
RAM: [Flight sounds, navigation capture chime]
HOT-2: Fenn? Porter. What’s the time to target on the bombers?
HOT-1: Uh… Dunno. Hold one.
RAM: [Clack of frequency change]
HOT-1: Spotter to A flight inbound. Do you copy?
HOT-4: Copy you, Fenn.
HOT-1: Jack?
HOT-4: Yeah. We’re on our way. Do you have a heading for us?
HOT-1: Yeah, no. What’s your time to the river?
HOT-4: Uh… Let me…
HOT-1: Jack?
HOT-4: Wait a second.
HOT-4: Ten minutes. Less, maybe. We’re heavy.
HOT-1: Okay.
RAM: [Sound of engine cycling up RPM]
HOT-1: Okay. Make for the river. Call in when you’re in sight.
HOT-4: Roger that. A Flight out.
HOT-1: Spotter out.
RAM: [Frequency change, groaning]
HOT-1: Porter? Ten minutes or less.
HOT-2: Okay, well…
HOT-3: Let’s go already!
HOT-2: Uh…
HOT-1: One-two, what’s the fucking problem?
Earlier in the day, on dawn patrol in the sky above Riverbend, Fenn had seen all he needed to of his future on Iaxo. He’d flown up with Charlie Voss and Stork and Emile Hardman. At play, they’d been. Their guns (and their everything else) cold in the thin morning air and thin morning light.
Scouting. Ted’s new way of winning the war. As ridiculous as every other. Bored, Fenn had been thinking of home. His last real home, green among the gray. Volcanoes sketched in the hand of a child—three of them like inverted Vs. His wife, Rose, under the dome of geodesic glass. Round face with a permanent smile.
Fenn had thought about Eddie while he flew a route so common that his plane seemed to know the way all on its own. He thought about what Eddie had said in the tent a million years ago. A few hours ago. All his numbers. His matters of consequence and paper and figures of murderous accuracy. The cigarette he couldn’t keep lit. He thought about standing in the cold with Carter.
What did you do before you joined the company?
Two years they’d been together. Carter had never asked him this before. A strange thing only in the realization of its absence.
Nothing, he’d said, mostly because he was suddenly angry that it’d never come up before. That Carter hadn’t asked. That they’d talked of socks and toast and where they’d fought and the money they’d made or hadn’t made and which rock was better than this rock—Carter’s notion of meaningful conversation. You?
And Carter hadn’t answered either. Maybe for the same reason. Maybe for his own.
They’d flown, line abreast, he and Stork and Charlie and Emile. Patrolling the nothing. The patchwork. The stupid ground. Orders from King Ted had been to stay well clear of the indig cities, but orders were only orders.
So Fenn had approached, dragging the wing along with him, and ten thousand feet became nine, then eight. The river had split the living ground laid out below them and then the walls of the city had risen; beyond it, the stepping land, the tabling moors. The horizon was smudged with dust in the slanting, early rays of the young, glassine sun, and Fenn had touched a little rudder, meaning to skid by, over Riverbend and the Akaveen siege force laid out around it, just to the east. The wing had responded smoothly. And then they’d seen—Stork had seen—the last of the braking flares, carving a hairline gleam just off the temporary arc of the rising sun’s ecliptic.
“Was that…”
“Jesus.”
“Altitude,” Fenn had ordered. “Get up there. Everyone.”
Planes had scrambled, reaching for height and a recovery from glare-blindness. It was the panic of small animals suddenly scared out of their wits, fighting for angular geometries of safety and vision they understood only in their most secret, animal hearts. The planes had snapped past Riverbend without giving it a second look, moving more deeply into Indian country as they poured power into their machines and ran for altitude. The only safety they’d ever known.
The high moors had been covered with men and materiel and machines, all arriving by the first blinding light of dawn when the radiance of sunrise would wash out the fires of their arrival. It’d looked to Fenn as though they’d been coming for days, though that, he was willing to admit later, might just have been the shock. It might have only been hours. It might have been forever—all of them arranging themselves behind the lines, just out of view, waiting.
Fenn went to call it in. He’d been reaching out to fiddle with the radio. And that was when the disastrous assault on Riverbend had begun. He had wheeled the wing clear at altitude. He’d talked to ground control, and then to Ted. Everyone was chattering on the radio, talking over one another. He dialed in the wing frequency and overrode them all. “Home,” he’d said.
There was no response, but everyone followed him as he leaped on the shortest radial for the return flight. On the ground, the natives were getting their asses handed to them. They were experiencing hand grenades, learning about the wrong ends of rifles, discovering land mines in the worst possible way, all courtesy of the Lassateirra indigs and their NRI friends inside Riverbend. Fenn was too high to see the worst of it, and he’d been glad for that.
HOT-1: Porter, talk to me.
HOT-2: One-two to spotter, requesting permission to break and investigate.
HOT-1: We are fighter cover, one-two. Bombers are on their way. Come up to five thousand and form up. Now.
RAM: [Static. Increased engine sound]
HOT-1: Investigate what?
HOT-2: Fucked if I know.
HOT-2: Lefty?
HOT-3: Can’t see it.
HOT-1: Lefty, this is Fenn. Talk to me.
HOT-3: [Unintelligible]
HOT-1: Bad Dog, repeat. What did you see?
HOT-2: Coming back, one-eight-zero degrees. Idiot. Fuck, Lefty. Break and come back.
HOT-1: Somebody say something useful, please? One-two, I have visual of you. Break and come around and ascend to five thousand.
HOT-3: There!
HOT-1: Porter, get him back now or I’m going to shoot his dumb ass down myself.
HOT-2: Copy that, spotter.
HOT-2: Hear him, Lefty? Think he’s fucking around? Not today, if we…
HOT-3: There! There! Guns in the field. Repeat, weapons on the field. I’m passing over right now. Directly below me.
HOT-2: No way. How could they… Spotter! You copy, Fenn?
RDO-2: One-two inbound, did you [unintelligible]
RDO-?: [Unintelligible] (Sound of struggle?)
HOT-1: I copy you, flight leader.
HOT-2: Did you…
HOT-1: I heard him. Can you confirm?
RDO-?:… Off the fucking thing… Hold him!
HOT-1: Porter! Can you confirm?
Ted came through the door to the comms tent at a dead run, shouldering his way through and cracking the thin wood at the frame, never slowing down. He ran until he hit the radio boards and then clubbed Jimmy McCudden right out of his chair with his forearm. Tore the headphones off him by the wire.
Diane saw it all from the tower seat. She screamed when Ted hit the door, but she didn’t have her microphone keyed. For just a second, she thought they were being invaded, and it’d been like all of her night
mares were coming true.
Jimmy fell out of his chair. He’d been talking. Diane tried to fix all of these details in her mind in case they became important later. Ted had hit Jimmy from behind, swinging his arm like a bat. Jimmy fell into Shun Le, who was coordinating ground traffic and taxi orders. She yelled, too. Diane was on her feet, her microphone off, and she tried to shush Shun Le because she was in charge—lead controller—and there wasn’t supposed to be any talking on the radio line that wasn’t integral to each controller’s duties. People got distracted so easily. They lost track of what was important. So Diane tried to shush Shun Le. She stood up and she waved her hands.
But Shun Le wasn’t listening.
Ted was yelling at Jimmy: “Get off the fucking thing!” And he was yanking at the headphone wire.
Shun Le was saying that she’d had just about enough of this shit and was going to file a complaint.
In the air, the pilots were all shouting at each other. A flight—the bombers—were on the wrong radial and having to duck down below the lowering cloud base to get themselves straightened out.
And Diane was laughing. She was laughing at Shun Le because she knew there was no one left to file a complaint to. She’d overheard enough from the pilots—in particular the ones who never even noticed she was there; the ones who, after two years, didn’t even know her name. She’d listened to them talk. She’d watched the Ted-and-Eddie show often enough and had placed many of Eddie’s early-morning calls on the secure uplink. Maybe she hadn’t always switched her channel as quickly as she ought to. Maybe she knew more than anyone thought she did. Like she knew for sure that no one was going to listen to any harassment complaint from little Miss Shun Le Harper, who was always finding something to scowl about anyhow. To make faces at.
A Private Little War Page 32