A Private Little War (23 page)

Ted had followed his feet across the field, thinking
Christmas
with each step.
Christmas
, step-step.
Christ-mas, Christ-mas
. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He felt as though he should look like he knew what he was going to say. But he had no earthly idea.

He pushed through the flap door and into the mess, his face bruised by exhaustion. And for a broken second, he stood there, just inside the door, swaying slightly, drinking in the warmth of bodies, of breath. He felt like a drowning man suddenly given one more gasp of air. His back was straight. His eyes were bright. The rest of him felt like it could turn to liquid at any second.

“First squadron took fire over Mutter’s Ridge five minutes ago and are coming home hot. Two planes damaged. One pilot wounded.” He swallowed. His throat felt hot and distended, like he’d swallowed
a billiard ball halfway. “I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know sweet fuck-all, so don’t ask me any questions. I want crews on the field with emergency gear and all pilots to their planes double-quick.”

Ted looked around. He tried to catch each man’s eye. There was a lot of blinking but for one terrible, long moment no one spoke, no one moved, no one even breathed.

And Ted could’ve yelled. He knew he could’ve screamed his head off to snap everyone out of their collective trance. And maybe he should have done that, but he was so tired, so spent. Scared. Sick with it.

So instead, Ted just spoke. One word, dropped with all the intensity of an atom bomb as, in the background, everyone heard the grinding moan of the scramble siren beginning to wail.

“Now,” he said.

And the tent was empty before the word hit the floor.

CARTER WAS ON THE FIELD WITH ENGINES HOT
, the squadron arranged behind him in scramble formation, and the ground vibration was enough to shake his vertebrae like dice. They were ready to go, ready to fly, but instead they sat, boxed together for fast takeoff, idling impotently on the west end of A strip with orders to go exactly nowhere.

Carter was still thinking about breakfast because breakfast was preferable to death. Breakfast was preferable to most anything, and death, obviously, was among the worst things in the world.

Carter was thinking about toast. About real toast. Not too long ago—less than a year, maybe—he and Fenn had had a long conversation about toast. Real white toast made from real white bread by a machine, perfected across centuries and made to do nothing else.

Toast. Seriously, they’d talked for hours. How toast, made well, was one of those things a person didn’t ever think about missing until it was gone and then missed with an ache that was incalculable. How toast might be the one thing he’d wish for if he were suddenly granted one wish and, of course, couldn’t wish to leave, to go home, to be just gone and, of course, wealthy and, of course, dog-piled by naked girls.

Ridiculous, sure. Ask them on any other night and it would’ve been
something else, some other stupid little thing that no one ever thought about until it was unavailable.

Toast. Golden brown, still hot from the toaster, dripping with butter until the middle of a piece of it got a little wet and squishy but the edges stayed crisp. How even
bad
toast was great toast when compared with having no toast, and was fucking phenomenal toast when measured against the coarse, gritty, heavy local bread toasted over a fire or in a pan on the gas stove in the galley. The bread on Iaxo was terrible. What bread must’ve been like when bread was first invented, before anyone knew better. It tasted green and almost moldy even when fresh. And the toast made from it suffered accordingly.

Toast. Hours of talk about toast until they were mad for it. And now, all Carter could think was that this was one of the things they’d talked about, wasted their time on, when Fenn wasn’t saying whatever it was he’d claimed to have known about for a year. If it’d been important, he thought—important enough to mention now, important enough and right enough that he’d copped to it just a minute before Ted had opened his big mouth—motherfucker should’ve
said
something.

Carter hadn’t been able to ask Fenn about it in the mess. No time. Certainly, he hadn’t been able to ask when they’d broken in a frantic sprint for the tent line—for their gear, their gloves, their warm coats and collars; scrambling for them and then running out again, whooping and cursing, for the flight line where the planes were being shoved out of the longhouse like boarders late with the rent. And now it was bothering him. And now he really wanted some toast, too.

First squadron had come down on the southern tip of C strip, which was the emergency strip, while Carter and two squadron were taxiing into position and before Fenn and his squadron had even gotten their planes out of the longhouse. Consequently, no one had seen what sort of shape they’d been in. No one had been able to count planes and guess at who was hurt, who was down, or anything. No one in the control tent was taking questions. Ted couldn’t be raised on the radio.

Sitting, waiting, Carter could see the tail and body markings of Fenn’s plane, Jackrabbit. It was the best of the company’s D.VIII models, square-bodied, boxy, with the odd little fin on the tail and Fenn’s painting of a
rabbit, running, just below the cockpit. A huge penis had been added, drunkenly, by someone who may or may not have been Fenn, at some later date. So, too, had a top hat. A cigarette holder poking crookedly from the rabbit’s mouth.

Lined up with him were Charlie Voss and George Stork in the company’s two Airco DH.2 pushers, each loaded down to the axle stops with 250 pounds of bombs. It’d been a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, the aerial tactician, October 28, 1916. Boelcke had written the book on air-to-air combat, was a genius, died at twenty-five. Carter’d read the book. So had everyone else.

Carter knew that it wasn’t really a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, but rather a collision with his wingman during a dogfight with a squadron of DH.2s, but that was close enough. The DH.2 was what pilots had flown before there was anything else to fly—one of the first planes that didn’t kill them instantly.

Behind Voss and Stork were Emile Hardman and Ernie O’Day at the sticks of two Vickers Gunbus F.B.5s, two-seaters, with Max, the armorer, and Willy McElroy, the machinist, on the guns in the forward observer seats. There was no legend to the Vickers. They were ugly, cranky, and slow. No one liked them at all.

Two squadron was in formation. Carter and Jack Hawker, the squadron leader, were sitting side by side with fourteen feet of space between their wingtips. Tommy Hill was behind Carter. David Rice was behind Jack. Lefty Berthold was in drag position.

They were trained to lift this way, five seconds between pairs, which was dangerous but quick. When Carter looked again, he saw Fenn’s third squadron laid out on the south end of B strip with their bombers and ground support planes, arranged the same way. With two squadrons using both strips, the controllers could lift ten planes in less than a minute. It’d never been necessary before, but they’d practiced it. A few times. A long time ago. They’d drilled things like fast lifts and combat descents, squadron flying, rush envelopments, and all the nasty tricks of the dogfighter. After a while, it’d seemed ridiculous, so they’d stopped, comforted a little by thinking that they could probably still do it if they had to. Now it was what was on everyone’s mind: whether they
could and whether or not they’d have to. Whether this, finally, was the moment when it might matter.

Except that they weren’t doing anything but sitting. On the ground, they were useless, harmless, vulnerable. Ask Danny Diaz. Though they might play at it with their feet rooted to the earth, it was only in the air that they became elder gods, avenging angels of decrepit technology, all roaring engines and blazing guns, raining fire from the heavens, death from the clear blue sky. In the air, they were wrath. They were furious might. They were power without bounds.

On the ground, though, it was all backaches and leg cramps, boredom, the wasting nervousness of sitting, clenched and waiting.

Carter recalled a month or a year ago sitting in the tent with Fenn, talking bullshit. Not even about anything because neither had anything to say, but just talking. About socks, say. Or weather. Didn’t matter.

But he recalled the moment it’d turned. When, in the middle of the bullshit, Fenn had stopped and said, “Now Vic… Vic is…”

Carter’d said, “What? Vic is what?” because it’d occurred to him then that of everything they’d talked about—and they’d talked about
everything
—Vic was something they hadn’t. As though sacrosanct. Or maybe precisely the opposite.

Still, hearing her name on Fenn’s lips had gotten Carter’s hackles up for some reason. A gut reflex, her name like a slow lightning bolt touching him, climbing the ladder of his spine.

“Vic is…”

And Carter’d waited for it.
Vic is unlucky. Vic is a death sentence. Vic is bad for business.
He’d heard it all before—the kinds of conversations that dried up the minute someone realized he was close enough to maybe hear. Him and Vic—that was no secret. Especially not from Fenn. Him and Vic had been him-and-Vic ten feet from him, just one bed away. Fenn knew everything.

And at the time, it’d been almost nothing. A conversation instantly forgotten, except that it hadn’t been, because now, a month or a year later, it was all coming back to Carter. Another thing they’d talked about that wasn’t what Carter now wished they
had
talked about: Fenn’s secret wisdom.

Instead, he remembered Fenn saying, “Jesus Christ, Kevin.” Using his full name, which Fenn only did when he was very drunk or very serious or both.

Fenn saying, “That is the saddest goddamn woman I have ever known.”

Fenn saying, “For real,” and “Kevin?” and “You okay, Kev?”

Two squadron was all arrayed in Camels like Carter’s Roadrunner. Fighter cover for the bombers. And the noise of those five sputtering engines grinding all around him was like an earthquake that wouldn’t stop, hitting him right in the guts, throbbing through him in waves, almost hypnotic but for being so loud that he couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think clearly.

Carter closed his eyes, trying to love the droning noise, trying to climb inside it like a blanket of sound. It was the reverberation of death, fast approaching; the language of the machine that he cherished. He spoke to himself, to his plane, in words that were drowned by the throbbing, crashing walls of noise. He slapped the breech on the cannon open and closed, open and closed. He adjusted his safety belts. He lowered his head and pressed it against her instrument panel, thinking how, after all that coffee, he wished he’d taken the time to put on the catheter.

Twenty minutes passed, became thirty. Only after all that did Carter finally hear the squawk in his ear of the radio calling him. He’d been sleeping, he thought. Just a little.

“Two squadron clearing for takeoff.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah, Carter.”

“I was sleeping, I think.”

“That’s weird.”

Looking up, Carter saw Lambert and Rockwell, two of Vic’s ground crew, come jogging out of the comms tent to flag him for takeoff. He shook his head, pawed at his eyes with fingers gone numb from the vibration.

Rockwell pulled his chocks, then Jack’s. Lambert, walking backward, held two yellow flags crossed in one hand, giving them the slow caution.
Carter and Jack began to roll—a lazy, creeping taxi, hard wheels bumping over the close-cut grass and a million small stones.

Finally
, Carter thought.
Finally.

He’d done this hundreds of times before, but his stomach still boiled with butterflies. Modern jets, transatmospheric fighters, shuttles, dropships, spacecraft especially—they were all designed to remove the pilot from the experience of flying; to insulate him from the elements, from wind, weather, engine noise, exhaust fumes, and that sickening, giddy, here-we-go sensation of actually leaving the ground and taking to the air.

But in an open cockpit, there were no illusions. Every bump, roar, clatter, and stink came directly at the pilot. Burning oil, wet leather, the screaming of an over-revved engine in a dive, the throaty chugging of machine guns firing and
tac tac tac tac
of spent brass caught in the slipstream bouncing off wings and cowling. In his plane, Carter was loudly, plainly, often painfully aware that he was trusting his life to little more than an uncomfortable chair bolted onto a lawn-mower engine, surrounded by nothing but a rickety, sparse conglomeration of sticks and fabric, bombs, bullets, and modern aircraft fuel. Everything around him was flammable, explosive, or both. And once he was up, he knew that there was nowhere to go but down.