A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  So Diane laughed. She also thought it was funny because she’d never heard Shun Le say “shit” before. So proper, that one. So quiet, most of the time.

  Ted was saying her name. Diane shook her head.

  “Hold him!” Ted snapped, meaning Jimmy, who’d never done anything mean to anybody. Who’d never said a cross word. And for an instant, Diane thought about kicking Ted instead.

  “No way,” she said back. “Everyone stop yelling right now!”

  Ted’s face was mottled. There was a crust of something at the corner of his mouth that looked like blood. His hair was mussed. Like a boy, like an idiot, he’d been out on the field, running around and playing with the airplanes when he should’ve been inside coordinating. Leading. That was his job. He smelled of cold and exhaust and fuel. Diane had no doubt he’d been getting in everyone’s way, trying to help but doing just the opposite. Like a boy.

  She’d told him before that he shouldn’t be flying anymore. That there was no need. And she could do that, being lead controller. She felt as though she was able to say things to Ted that no one else could—that it was her place to point out things that, maybe, he wasn’t in a position to notice.

  He’d listened to her for a while, but then had stopped. Said who was she to tell him what was needed?

  Lead controller, she’d told him. That’s who.

  You don’t know what’s needed, he’d said. You don’t understand.

  Oh yes, I do.

  He’d been carrying one of the radio handsets outside with him, Ted had. Diane knew that for a fact. She also happened to know that he slept with it in his hand, curled into his fist, his fist on his chest, with the rubber whip antennae sticking up like a lily in the hand of a corpse. Every sound it made, his eyes would snap open like window shades. She’d watched this. She was the one who’d change out the handset batteries in the middle of the night, when it was quiet, so that Ted would never notice. For two hours, sometimes three, she’d leave the fresh batteries out. She’d sit beside him, bouncing them in her palm. It was the only real sleep Ted ever got.

  Lead controller, that’s who.

  Ted was pulling Jimmy’s headphones on. Ted was crouching to Jimmy’s microphone. His eyes were wild in his head. Bloodshot and watering from the cold and the sudden sour, stinging snow that’d blown up.

  Shun Le was slapping her hand on the flat shelf of the radio console—something she did when she was looking for attention.

  Jimmy was scrambling to his feet.

  Jimmy was grabbing Shun Le for leverage and hauling himself up.

  Shun Le was pushing him off.

  Diane was standing, waiting to see what would happen next. The pilots babbled in her ear. Her breath was coming low and in grunts.

  Jimmy—who’d never done a cruel thing, who’d never raised his voice, who’d never been anything but cordial and sometimes had coffee or tea with Diane when she was coming off the night shift and he was coming on—raised a hand. Jimmy made a fist and punched Ted in the back. He put all his weight behind it.

  Jimmy might just as well have punched a rock.

  Diane smiled, her lips parted slightly, tongue touching the tips of her front teeth.

  Ted was suddenly calm. Ted was suddenly in control. His eyes were still bloodshot. He still looked like death walking. But there was some weight in him now. A presence that Diane recognized but couldn’t put a name to. He turned in the chair.

  You don’t understand.

  Oh yes, I do.

  “Hit him…,” Diane hissed under her breath, too quietly for anyone else to hear. “Hit him…”

  HOT-2: Fenn, is your radio down? I’m getting nothing from the controllers…

  There was an order, a method for getting men and airplanes off the ground and into the air. There had been plans—written down somewhere, studied, lost, found, memorized, practiced, debated over. There were words to be intoned and replies to be made, pious gestures and motions to go through, movements to make. Like anything important, it all seemed rote and pointless in those hours and days and years when none of it had been necessary; when a man and his plane might leisurely go up and come down, defying and then succumbing to gravity without schedule. And then, like anything important, in the sudden moment when the plan’s purpose became borne out by the situation for which it’d been designed, the whole thing just went completely to shit.

  In his plane, Carter watched the chaos on the ground and it made him smile. All this action, this furious activity—it was exciting, was what it was. Finally, there was something to do. And it didn’t matter to him if they did it well or did it poorly. He just didn’t want to miss all the fun.

  HOT-1: Control, this is Jackrabbit. Over.

  HOT-1: Porter, come around sharp and put on some fucking altitude. Now. Lefty, you follow.

  HOT-2: Roger that, spotter. Coming around to two-four-five. Breaking.

  HOT-2: Lefty?

  HOT-3: Heard him.

  RAM: [Increasing engine noise]

  RAM: [Navigation capture chime] (possibly from HOT-1?)

  HOT-1: What the hell is that?

  HOT-1: Control, Jackrabbit. Do you copy?

  HOT-4: Fenn? A flight inbound. Is that me you’re reading?

  HOT-1: A flight, hold one.

  HOT-1: Porter, Lefty, bug out now. Come to ten thousand on any heading.

  HOT-2: Ten thousand, roger.

  TWR: Jackrabbit, this is control. Are you—

  HOT-1: ’Bout fucking time…

  HOT-1: Control, I have an unidentified potential target. Off the river at—

  RDO-1: Fenn, pull them up and out immediately. Come to two-seven-zero and get back across the river at altitude. Go to ceiling.

  TWR: I have the target. Marking it as a navigation point. It’s on the ground at—

  RDO-1: I am going to OPS frequency now. Tower, scramble the fighters. Close C for takeoffs. Landings only. Emergency crews and equipment to the field.

  RAM: [More chimes, increasing engine sounds]

  HOT-4: I have three unidentified captures. Are these targets?

  HOT-4: Four now.

  OPS: A flight inbound, maintain course and heading. Rally at ten thousand, over the bridge at the third nav beacon. Box it.

  HOT-4: Roger, Ops.

  RDO-3: All fighters to ready position.

  RAM: [Sound of siren from ground]

  HOT-3: Cavalry is breaking up, Porter. See that there?

  RDO-3: Fighters in taxi. Ground crews are still on the strip. Field crews shifting. Ops, do you want them to finish loading the fighters?

  HOT-2: Yeah, come out and around, Lefty. We’ve got altitude. Just stay clear.

  OPS: No. Put ’em in the air. We’re re-forming by wing in the air at… Give them north by north, five miles clear. Form up and hold for attack orders.

  RDO-3: Copy that.

  TWR: A flight inbound hold and box at ten thousand at nav three. Jackrabbit and one-two inbound, crossing the river and going to ceiling.

  RAM: [Sound of click from HOT-3—similar to rudder maximizing]

  HOT-3: We’re going to come back and—

  RAM: [Sound of tearing]

  RAM: [Sound of stick shaking begins. Sound of solid metallic impacts]

  HOT-3: Oh God.

  Carter had seen Ted taking off like a dart for the comms tent. He’d been waiting on fuel, hunched down in Roadrunner’s cockpit, sitting on his hands to keep them warm. He was listening to the radio.

  Raoul came with the gas—hand pump on a dolly meant for moving file cabinets or furniture. He got a call to taxi to ready-one. He responded with a negative. “Waiting on the fuel truck, baby,” was what he’d said.

  He had machine-gun rounds. Belts of them, and then extras stashed in folds behind his seat. Max was walking the stubble field, passing out bombs like Halloween candy. Carter had eleven rounds for the cannon and could’ve stood ten or twenty more. He was heavy, but unconcerned. Breathing through his mouth, he felt dizzy with anticipati
on and frozen by the scattered action on the field, like he was looking in on it all from outside. Like they were in a snow globe he was shaking, far beyond the concerns of the tiny people inside. He heard Fenn yelling at Porter and Porter yelling at Lefty. They were having fun. He didn’t want to miss it. He wanted to play, too.

  Raoul finished with the gas, slapped Roadrunner on the flank, and moved on. Carter pulled a hand free and stuck his thumb up. He called ground control. “Ready for taxi,” he said, and got no response. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine sunbeams on his face, the smell of anything green and living. The new engine growled like something caged and sent rumbles of power jittering up through Carter’s tailbone. It made him have to pee.

  Lefty saw something; he was yelled at some more. No one knew what he’d seen. Lefty was an idiot. Fine pilot, but an idiot. Jumpy. Bad eyes. He’d been Carter’s drogue man since day one on Iaxo—fifth pilot in a squadron that generally sortied in pairs—and it never seemed to bother him. Carter snuggled down deeper into his seat, ducking his chin down to his chest and breathing into the fur of his collar. He pursed his cold lips. “Lefty,” he whispered. “Lefty, Lefty, Lefty.” His radio reception was spotty. It popped and crackled in his ear.

  Orders began coming through. “Roadrunner, clear to taxi. Runway B left. Splendor, Havoc—three and nine at runway B left. Three squadron shift to runway A left. Ground crews away. All clear runway C.”

  Carter checked his mirror. He straightened his legs and squeezed up against his restraints, looking across the cowling and through the spinning prop before goosing the throttle and trying to rumble forward. The plane bumped and went nowhere. He was chocked. Keying his radio to the ground crew frequency, he felt a sudden sparkle in the air, an aliveness and tension that was like a fog lifting, a sudden adjustment in some global focus knob that brought everything into bright and sharp contrast.

  “Roadrunner to ground. I’m chocked. Somebody pull these fuckers.”

  He thought he might be hyperventilating. Or having a heart attack. “This is just one of those things,” he said to himself, aloud, and watched, wide-eyed, the swirls of waxy snow drifting and spinning across the field. The bare branches of trees like skeleton fingers on the verge. Rockwell kicking viciously with his steel-toed boots at the wheel mount of George Stork’s Fokker, Iaxo Hustler, and the remains of first squadron, Albert Wolfe and Billy Stitches, wheeling their planes, Havoc and Splendor in the Grass, into their places in the taxi order, and Vic, somewhere out there, stopped like a wound-down toy, head cocked, one ear to the wind—paused in midstride because, as Carter knew, she’d felt it, too. A physical change in the atmosphere, like a pressure drop. Max was flagging planes, wearing a wide, gap-toothed smile. Meleuire came at a run, jinked around Roadrunner’s spinning prop at the last second, yanked the chocks, and then popped up on the other side of the fuselage, spinning the chocks on their cord. He signaled Carter to roll.

  “Roadrunner taxiing, B left.”

  In his ear, the radio bellowed with the clear voice of the ground controllers, ordering all fighters to lift immediately. They were to scramble and re-form, north by north, five miles clear.

  The klaxon, the ground emergency horn, added its voice.

  And Carter was already moving when he heard Lefty get shot.

  HOT-3: Oh God. Oh…

  HOT-2: Uh, control? We have… There’s ground fire here.

  HOT-3: [Unintelligible] (Laughing)

  HOT-1: Iaxo Ops, ground fire. Ground fire.

  OPS: All fighters, pull out to far beacon at ceiling.

  HOT-3: Motherfucker… [Unintelligible]… coming (hard right?)

  HOT-2: Lefty, repeat. Are you hit?

  OPS: A flight, this is Ops. Time to target?

  HOT-4: Ops, A flight. Target or…

  OPS: The bridge, Jack. How far?

  HOT-4: Climbing to it now. Three minutes.

  Carter didn’t love Lefty Berthold. He didn’t even like him in any particular, specific way. Funny that on a planet that hosted maybe a couple thousand humans all told—in a place that encompassed about fifty—there were still people he hardly knew and didn’t much care to. He had flown with Lefty, yes. Fought beside him inasmuch as anyone did anyone when alone in a bathtub at ten thousand feet. And there was, as he understood it, supposed to be this profound and unspoken, unbreakable bond between men who were at war together, a sense that, in having had the shared experience of killing and facing death together, they were bound by some deep and communal connection that would link them for all their given days.

  It was a job. Some people he liked. Some he didn’t.

  He gave Roadrunner some throttle. He wasn’t waiting for any fucking flag. “Lifting now,” he said, radio tuned to a wing frequency. He’d already squeezed through between Wolfe’s Havoc and Billy’s Splendor in the Grass. “Keep up. Stay tight. Let’s go get some.”

  Across the field, B strip, planes were shuffling around one another like bad dancers, trying to find a clear taxi. The system had broken down completely. There was no order, just a deep need to be in the air and doing some damage. There was a bomb dolly lying half on the A strip apron, and he jigged around it until he felt his right wheel biting stubble. Once past it, he was in the clear. Wolfe and Billy would have to come single file. He saw another plane wobble into the air, another Camel that he thought was probably Tommy Hill. Just barely made it airborne, the fool. Carter punched his throttle forward and felt the new engine cycle up and begin to roar.

  He hardly knew Lefty, save that he lived two tents down the line from him and Fenn, loved eggs, cut hair for some of the men (though not for Carter), had fought a day or two or ten ago with Lambert from the ground crew, had once bragged of laying Shun Le Harper, one of the controllers, which was a complete lie because Shun Le didn’t even talk to pilots, let alone whatever else. Davey Rice had called Lefty on it, Carter remembered, during one of the slow seasons when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but talk shit and scrounge for excitement.

  “That one,” Davey had said, meaning Shun Le, “doesn’t even open her mouth to pilots, let alone her legs.”

  “Not to you, maybe,” Lefty had said.

  “Not to anyone,” Davey shouted. “Motherfucker, I bet you got Shun Le Pussy written on your fucking hand.” And everyone had laughed, even Lefty, because damn if that wasn’t funny no matter what the truth was.

  In the air, Carter checked his six, his twelve, and then his thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, too, just for good measure. He would do a lazy circle, collect his wing, then go fuck some shit up. This was the new plan. His.

  Lefty Berthold had once played out a lucky streak at the poker table for almost twelve hours until he fell asleep on his winnings and woke with shell casings and boot laces and coins from a dozen worlds stuck to his face. He had a family back home (though Carter didn’t know where home was for him, exactly) who sometimes gave him problems and sometimes didn’t. Lefty’d hurt himself once, drunkenly picking a fight with a horse. Lefty’d asked him once about Vic, and Carter’d told him to shut up. Lefty had an actual first name. Carter thought it might’ve been Hugo. He didn’t know the man at all.

  And now he loved him. Now he was going to risk his life saving him, helping him, avenging him, because Lefty was shot and being shot was special and different and, if he did die, Carter would mourn him like they’d been lovers or brothers—already, he felt rage and grief packing up like a hot ball in his chest.

  That bond, that mystical whatever that soldiers and pilots were supposed to have? Carter knew it only meant that they would die for one another. But until the moment of dying came, it didn’t really mean much of anything at all.

  HOT-2: Lefty?

  HOT-1: Tower, this is Jackrabbit. Bad Dog inbound is showing smoke.

  TWR: Copy that, Jackrabbit.

  TWR: Bad Dog, this is tower control. Are you damaged?

  HOT-3: [Laughing]

  HOT-2: I see that smoke. Coming back…

 
RAM: [Increasing engine noise. Stickshaker, indicating a hard climb]

  HOT-2: Control, more ground fire.

  OPS: Do you have a location on that ground fire?

  TWR: Bad Dog, respond.

  HOT-2: Right below and behind me. Um…

  RAM: [Two clicks, rapid decrease in engine noise]

  HOT-2: Jesus, fucking accurate, too. Multiple contacts. All over the bad side of the river here.

  RAM: [Engine noise increasing. Two clicks—similar to flaps locking.]

  HOT-2: Taking fire.

  HOT-1: What the hell—

  HOT-4: Ops, A flight. Two minutes. A.O. in sight.

  HOT-1: Ops, I have… Is anyone else seeing this?

  HOT-4: Jesus…

  HOT-4: Ops, permission to engage immediately.

  HOT-3: Tower, Bad Dog. I’m hit. I’m hit.

  OPS: Negative, A flight. Climb and hold.

  HOT-3: Oh mother…

  TWR: Copy, Bad Dog. Come around to two-eight-three at any altitude. Bring it home.

  HOT-3: Bleeding.

  HOT-1: Ops, I’m seeing what looks like… I don’t know. Orbital flares?

  HOT-2: Lefty? Speak, pal. What’s happening?

  HOT-3: [Laughing]

  HOT-3: [Unintelligible]… Fucking shot. I can’t…

  HOT-1: Insertion flares, maybe.

  TWR: Bad Dog, control. Make any return heading, any altitude. Find a—

  OPS: Bad Dog, repeat.

  HOT-2: Repeat, Lefty. Come on, man.

  HOT-3: Oh God. I’m gonna die.

  Porter didn’t see them—the flares. Later, he would say he had, but he hadn’t. He would sit with Emile Hardman in the ugly, rancid remains of the mess and, over coffee that was cold before they poured it, describe the beautiful, arcing comets of light. How they’d lit like fireworks, dragging long tails of fire across the cloud-stricken bowl of the sky. How, in fact, they’d almost seemed to boil the clouds as they passed through them—punching holes like wounds into the clotted masses of wet, gray banks and then sizzled along their bellies like worms made of fire.