A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he would say, staring into the cold, oily surface of his coffee, shaking his head as though he almost believed what he was saying. Which, all things considered, wasn’t difficult. It was like nothing he’d ever seen because he hadn’t actually seen anything. He was just talking so that he didn’t have to talk about Lefty.

  That, he had seen. And Porter didn’t want to think about that ever again.

  OPS: Medical to the field. Clear C. Clear the infield aprons.

  TWR: Bad Dog, pull up and out. Come left, east by east, and we’ll walk you home.

  HOT-2: Fenn?

  HOT-1: Hold post, Porter. Stay with me.

  Carter had ammunition belts rubbing against his ankles. Clawing for altitude, running from the airfield as though from a fire, and with the rest of his hodgepodge wing trailing behind, he felt the weight of the bullets subtly altering the flight characteristics of his fighter. There was the weight of the fuel in the tank behind his head, sloshing backward toward earth as his pitch increased, and the weight of the bombs he carried. The cannon rounds in their flimsy metal clips (which broke constantly, keeping the machine shop forever busy at mending) weighed him down as he struggled for the shifting, clotted soup of the clouds. There was the weight of his guns, the weight of the machine dragging behind him—of flaps and rudder and wings and tail and his seat and the radio and instruments, all of it being yanked forward and upward by the chopping of the propeller, the firing of the pistons in their cylinders. There was the great, solid weight of the engine itself. And there was the weight of him. Of his damp, cold leathers, his helmet, his jumpsuit, his sidearm and pocket lint and gloves and boots; of his blood and bone and brains.

  All of it wanted to fall. Everything wanted to go to ground—the most natural thing in the world. And Carter would let it. He would give to gravity what it wanted soon enough. When he came to the apex of the parabola he was describing, the highest point in the hump of air he climbed over the distant earth, he would hang an instant—weightless, like he’d been two years ago in the instant the dropship that’d brought him here had fallen clear of the clamps—then roll over and descend like wrath. He would go, dropping weight as he went, spitting out bullets and shedding bombs, burning fuel and loosing the weight of held breath and expectation as he howled down upon the enemy that had been chosen for him. To fight them, finally, with fairness and equanimity. Guns with guns and bombs with bombs. To give them their fair shot at him, meet them in the interstices between sky and ground, see them in the open where neither of them could hide.

  Carter called in his flight to rally. He circled to let them gather and form up. Below him, terrible things were happening. And as he reached his chosen point in the sky, he rolled over, pointed his nose toward the ground, and became a terrible thing himself.

  HOT-3: Tower…

  HOT-1: Ops? What are we doing here?

  HOT-3: I gotta… Down, down, down.

  TWR: Bad Dog, this is control. Do you copy?

  HOT-1: Ops! I saw entry flares. Ten and two, high, coming in and headed for the moors near Southbend. Past, maybe.

  OPS: Jackrabbit, hold one.

  OPS: A flight, this is Ops. Form up.

  HOT-3: [Coughing] I need a… [Unintelligible] (Doctor?)

  OPS: Jackrabbit, Ops. Do you have a visual of the target?

  HOT-3: I can’t… Oh God. There’s so much blood. I don’t…

  HOT-1: What target, Ops? The landing site?

  TWR: Bad Dog, you are drifting. Come back on your heading.

  HOT-3: I’m gonna try to…

  OPS: The ground fire, Jackrabbit. The weapons. What landing site?

  HOT-3: Down. Put down.

  HOT-3: I don’t want to die. I don’t… I don’t want to die now.

  HOT-1: No. Not unless they’re shooting at us, Ted.

  OPS: Not now.

  HOT-1: We’re at almost twenty thousand feet here, Ops. No, I can’t.

  HOT-3: Not now. Not now.

  OPS: A flight, any visual?

  HOT-3: No. No. No. [Coughing]

  Hot-4: No, Ops. No visual.

  HOT-3: No!

  HOT-3: Tower, Bad Dog. Coming around to two-eight-zero. I’m coming home.

  TWR: Copy that, Bad Dog. Can you—

  HOT-3: Blood all over the thing. I’m hurt pretty bad.

  TWR: We’re waiting on you, Bad Dog. You’re going to be fine.

  HOT-3: [Sound of grunting or heavy breathing] Gonna be fine. Coming home.

  RAM: [Sound of banging—similar to engine oil pressure drop or failing cylinder]

  HOT-3: I can see the—

  TWR: Bad Dog, altitude is—

  HOT-3: Flaps.

  OPS: Come on home, Lefty.

  TWR: Altitude is low. Come up. Come up.

  RAM: [Sound of flash-over, engine sound decreases, spooling down]

  HOT-3: [Screaming, unintelligible, continues to end]

  HOT-4: Oh my God.

  TWR: Bad Dog, do you copy?

  HOT-4: Flame out! Lefty’s on fire! On fire!

  TWR: Bad Dog?

  RAM: [Sound of roaring—similar to engine fire or flash-over]

  HOT-1: Fuck you, Ted.

  RAM: [Sound of impact]

  END OF RECORDING

  HOT-1: Fuck you, Ted.

  Fenn had kicked Jackrabbit into a long, dancing turn, standing her high on her wing and watching the wet compass spin before nosing down into a shallow dive. He’d throttled back his engine, the glideslope seeming to pull him toward the ground with a slow-mounting tension of mass and alien gravities.

  “Porter, follow me. Low six.”

  “Roger that, Jackrabbit. Falling in.”

  Lefty was like a dud firework. He was the last flare in the box, drifting to ground unnoticed. Fenn killed his channel. He didn’t need anyone else’s screams to haunt him, though he knew some of the others—Carter—would suckle at them, drain every last decibel like an alcoholic tonguing the neck of an emptied bottle. While he was at it, he killed the Ops channel as well.

  “A flight, this is Jackrabbit. New target information.”

  Fenn explained. Looking up and back across the open spine of his plane, past the shark fin tail, he saw the wing of bombers moving like motes in the diffuse sun, the face shield of his helmet polarizing until he could just make them out waltzing the box.

  They were going to hit the guns that’d got Lefty, easily identified by sporadic radio pickups on the navigation computers and, closer to the ground, by the fact that they’d be the only things shooting back. He felt ridiculous saying it, giving the orders. The tough-guy dialogue coming from inside him staled on his lips, the lusting after pointless vengeance an easily recognized cliché in a heart that spent so much time agonizing over past stupidities and judging the actions of every other organ surrounding it.

  But Fenn did it. He spoke the words and he gave the orders because it was important—because, for a minute, it might make him feel better about having watched Lefty Berthold burn to death and go candling off into the long dark. Hitting these few guns wouldn’t matter in the long run, but Fenn felt it needed to be done regardless. Also, he didn’t believe any of them had much longer to run anyhow, so when they were done with the guns, they would hit something else. And they would keep hitting, Fenn figured, until he didn’t have any punch left in him. Then he’d stop. Then he’d see what happened next.

  “Copy, Jackrabbit,” Jack said once the orders had been given. Then there was a squelch as he switched channels to relay orders to his wing of bombers. Then another as he came back. “Uh… Ted’s giving us orders to stay put, Jackrabbit. To hold for fighter cover.”

  “My radio must be malfunctioning then, Jack, because I didn’t hear that. You have your orders. Come down to visual range and fuck them up. Porter and I will draw fire. You follow.”

  “Roger that, Jackrabbit. A flight is rolling hot.”

  Above him, Fenn watched the bombers drop like stones, makin
g fast for attack altitude. It was lovely sometimes, diving from such height. To come crashing down upon the earth with the promise of such fantastic violence. It wasn’t Fenn’s thing, as such, but he understood it. He hoped, looking up, that Jack had the joy of it. He thought it was about time someone had some fun in this droll little war.

  Fenn turned around then to face the warped air beyond his spinning prop and eased his stick forward.

  “Uh, Jackrabbit?” Porter’s voice, half whispering like he was leaning over Fenn’s shoulder. “We’re gonna do what now?”

  There was an instant—the interval between the first bright flash of the guns opening up and the first hiss and spanging doppler of their bullets’ arrival—when Fenn was able to think what a fantastically bad idea this was.

  There was an instant to wonder whether he’d underestimated the skills of these novice gunners, rolling their pieces out for the first time, stunned (Fenn hoped) by the savagery the pilots had shown and stricken (Fenn prayed) by the slaughterhouse ambiance they’d made on the ground. An instant to wonder at their ability to hit a fast-moving target with a nearly flat approach angle, their excitement at finally being able to get their licks in—firing at the first thing that showed up in their offset gun sights even if that thing happened to be him. Smart gunners, adroit or artful gunners, would wait for the following targets lumbering down slowly upon them. They’d hold their fire for the good kill. The defensive burst. But Fenn had told himself a story about these enemies laid out before him, already sparking their cannon at him—that they would be scared and angry and anxious and bloodthirsty all at the same time and, because of this, would be less excellent than he was, and so would die. It’d been a reasonable gamble at five thousand feet. Seemed less so at five hundred.

  There was an instant to think how this might be his last instant, and that one seemed to last forever, encompassing all the other instants, leaving him plenty of time to think of anything he wished. The faintly remembered touch of yellow sun on his face. A view of Iaxo from on high that might’ve been the view of any one of a dozen worlds. The dim, almost childish image of home—a geodesic over an abandoned pressure container, a boy, a mom, and a dad standing like stick figures before it, hands linked in scribbles, smiles on each round face. A conversation he and Carter had once had about toast and the simple, dumb, sweet and easy longing it’d invoked, like magic, into their hearts in place of the grief there on the day after Danny Diaz had died.

  Toast, his last memory.

  Danny.

  Carter.

  And then the instants all shattered around him, blowing back in a rooster tail of turbulence because he was through the gauntlet he’d made for himself and, behind him, all his doubts became nothing but the past as, behind him, the bombs were falling.

  In the end, they’d driven the enemy back. They’d saved the day, at least for today, and then kept at it, beating the indigs not just to beat them, but to cripple them. To put the fear in them. And even after the worst of it—in those moments when the indigs had seemed to turn tail, melt into the ground, disappear into the terrain like ghosts—they’d chased them. Trying to make it so they’d be afraid to ever walk on the land again.

  The pilots had attacked for a time, firing their guns dry, burning their barrels red. They’d been organized. They’d been disorganized. They’d flown in terrifying, meticulous formation and then, losing control of themselves, no human tenderness left in them, had broken, here and there, into cataclysms of rage—destructive, wasteful orgies of bombs and bullets—and flown around madly until the sky was tattered with smoke and the ground bruised by fury.

  When the enemy advances had been turned back, the pilots had attempted to block avenues of retreat and counterattack. They would run back to the field for fuel, for ammunition, and then get right back in the air again—each time returning a bit more battered, holed, ripped and pocked with wounds that made their machines bleed and creep closer and closer to failure. They’d fought machine guns on the ground, hidden in stands of bush and copses of trees already shattered by bombs that would only need to be shattered again. They’d chased feints, advances that must’ve been meant as withdrawals, confused by the day when all directions went wrong—up being down and back being forward because, in the charnal house of that field, every direction was death. There was panic, some of it even from the enemy.

  And they fought not only the Lassateirra. As the day wore on, cobbled-together squadrons would run after ground trucks that’d been seen whipping out in mad flanking maneuvers, around the backs of the horsemen and the infantry. For the first time, the Flyboy pilots mingled the blood of men with that of indigs—tearing up both together until they lay entangled in wet, vital solidarity. It was NRI. They knew it. And almost all of them felt that death was just exactly what they deserved. On the walls of Riverbend, they’d met rifle fire from disorganized packs of humans when they wheeled too close and, once or twice, saw the twisting columns of smoke upon which rode the hard, bright hammers of surface-to-air missiles that went corkscrewing off into uselessness or exploded low in white spiders of smoke. There was something in the fuel mix that was bad—burning sickly in the alien air and damp—but everyone knew it was a mistake the other side would not make again.

  They’d flown to make recoveries of the lost. Lefty (who was easy) and then Stork (who was shot from the sky again, but lived) and Fenn, too, who’d been up longer than almost anyone and who was brought down by a failing engine, purely mechanical, but glided to a peaceful stop near a stand of squat, bluish trees and was found sitting cross-legged on the ground with his pistol in his hand. Waiting.

  Fenn, they would say later. You know Fenn. Sitting there waiting on us, happy as can be. Might as well have been getting a tan or admiring the scenery Stood up when we landed, said, “Gentlemen, fancy seeing you here,” like some kind of lord or dandy.

  Later, Fenn would see Carter and say that the only thing he could remember was the smell. Even in the cold, the stink was terrible. The dying had been enormous, and he’d landed in a still-warm Golgotha.

  “There were brains on my tires, Kev,” he’d say. “There was no ground to land on that wasn’t full of them.”

  They’d flown until they couldn’t fly any more, exhausting themselves and their machines in a spasm of violence that just wouldn’t quit until engines seized, eyes clouded over, mechanisms failed, and their guns gave forth only smoke. At the end of it, those still able had been reduced to flying low over the flood plain and assaulting the dead with harsh language. And when it was done, the pilots had blown icy breath through frozen lips and wondered where the energy had come from. They all felt so tired.

  Ten hours, then they’d come down. All of them. It was night. No one would fly at night. Everyone was crazed, exhausted, deaf, shot, sick, in pain, shattered, haggard, doom-struck, and lolling. Pilots would drop in their tracks, these youngish men—healthy and well fed—just going down like they were under sniper fire, to sleep for five minutes or ten in the mud and icy grass. It was scary the first time you saw it. The second time, you just stepped over the body and shuffled on.

  George Stork was shot. So were Jack Hawker and Billy. George was missing a leg before morning and could no longer fly. Only the injectors had saved him—alien clotting factors and blood-thickeners keeping him from bleeding out completely before he could put his plane on the ground. Billy, too, though Billy hadn’t even known he’d taken a bullet until somebody’d pointed it out to him—the back of his jumpsuit, tail of his jacket, even the tops of his boots all wet and sticky with blood that Billy hadn’t even known was missing from him until he saw it, then stalked, cursing, to the shattered mess-turned-medical-tent, demanding explanations, ballistics, muzzle velocities, and shedding gear like he meant to go streaking.

  Charlie Voss was dead. Porter was shot, too, but lived. Ernie O’Day had been shot in the face but was saved by his helmet. Doc Edison had taped a combat dressing that still smelled of the packing case it’d sat in fo
r two years over the gouge in his cheek, then Ernie’d gone up again, where he’d been pinned in the sky by tracer fire, exploded, and fell like a comet crashing to Earth. Raoul was burned from a lashing of fire that’d flared out of an overheated manifold when he’d touched it with aviation fuel soaking his sleeve. He wasn’t expected to survive.

  Shun Le Harper was dead. She’d eaten the business end of a sidearm, but no one would say whose it’d been. She’d finished out the battle from her seat in the comms tent. She’d seen all the planes down and organized the first triage of men and equipment, coordinated all the messy taxiing of aircraft into the longhouse, and then she’d gotten up, found a gun somewhere (it wasn’t like there was any shortage), walked out toward the verge, past the stopway of C strip, put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Among the pilots, the question of whether or not she’d been loving Lefty on the sly seemed settled by this one determined act. By the fine spray of blood frozen into the grass like a pointillistic rendering of some hot, exotic flower and the shroud of snow she was wearing when found. There was a lovely storybook finality to it. An ordered progression of grief that, in its way, was comforting to those being fucked around by uncontrollable circumstance.

  Diane was not so sure. True, Shun Le had been sleeping with Lefty Berthold. They lived together, the two women. It wasn’t something Diane could not know. But sitting on her bed, in their tent, beginning the process of going through Shun Le’s things and stealing anything she thought might be useful or valuable, Diane told herself that because she knew Shun Le, she knew Lefty wasn’t the reason.