A Private Little War (26 page)

“Call the meeting, Ted. Gather them up. Dig them out. I don’t care. I have information now. We need to talk.”

IT WAS THE SOUND OF THE DAWN PATROL LANDING
that woke Carter and triggered the instant onset of a brutal hangover that made him wish he’d never been born. A just punishment, perhaps, for the previous evening’s indiscretions. But still, it was mean.

Most everyone had gotten drunk as hell the night after Morris Ross was killed. Spooky drunk, mostly. Quiet and focused, at least at first, but by midnight the quietness had worn off and the party spilled out of the mess and the field house, across the airstrips and up and down through the longhouse. To those involved, it must’ve felt like an affirmation of life in the face of the death of one of their own and, in that spirit, they broke things, hit one another, and accidentally burned one of the tents to the ground. To the camp indigs, it seemed like something else entirely and, in quiet places, away from the quaking epicenters of grief, they gathered to softly discuss it among themselves, hunkering in the shadows cast by guttering flames, away from the shouting, casting their eyes occasionally skyward as if expecting heavenly reinforcement or, perhaps, retribution.

As should have been expected, Carter woke up beneath Vic at some point during the night with her knees straddling his hips, her fine, pale skin glowing ghostly in the moonlight. He didn’t remember going
there, getting there, nor being there, but he did remember Vic, that was sure. He remembered warmth, softness, aliveness, and her dark hair running like oil through his fingers when he reached for the back of her neck to pull her down closer on top of him.

Now it was only cold. And in the thin, watery blue light of morning, waking wrapped in a blanket out in the tall grass next to B strip, they were both probably half-dead from hypothermia. Leaning over her, Carter saw Vic’s hair crunchy with frost, her lips pale in the bitter, hard chill.

A truly awful landing by Wolfe in Roadrunner nearly ended the war for both of them, but the near-death passing of his wingtip over Carter’s head when he sat up only made him laugh, goggle-eyed with wonder. He recognized the insignia of his plane and said aloud to himself that he really shouldn’t be flying in his condition.

He spent the next twenty minutes throwing up beside the longhouse, and when he came back, weak-kneed and stark naked, to the spot where he’d been lying, Vic had gone and taken the blanket with her. There were no clothes to be found. He knew for stone certain that he’d been fully dressed at the start of the night, was less sure at what point he’d become undressed, and hadn’t a clue as to where those clothes might be now. It was precisely these sorts of things that Carter felt ought to concern him more, but they didn’t. Maturity, one might say, is always knowing where one’s pants are, but weak-kneed and naked was how Carter’d stumbled back to his tent that morning.

Morning at the Flyboy camp looked like the aftermath of a bad night fight with no survivors. There were bodies everywhere. Max had fallen asleep locked inside the armory. Tommy was found by Doc Edison, the Carpenter mission’s medic and least busy man on all of Iaxo. He was facedown in the middle of C strip, arms and legs spread like he was trying to make a puke angel. Davey Rice was sprawled close to the remains of the burned tent, smears of blood dried across his nose and cheek. Charlie wasn’t far away, half-frozen in all his gear. They discovered Emile inside an empty shipping container beside the machine shop, buried like a tick in cast-off packing materials, his head pillowed on a mound of slick pornography.

Raoul and Lori Bishop, having obviously picked up where they’d left off the last morning, were all tangled together on a table in the mess
like a horrible accident at a contortionists’ school and were left alone to wake to their own misery, the growing search party of mechanics, ground crews, and communications personnel led by Doc Edison backing out quietly, smothering grins behind their hands.

Carter found Fenn in the tent where he belonged, but stretched out in the dirt beneath his rack with his boots off and his helmet on, a halo of empty beer cans ringing his head. Cat had taken a predatory interest in one of his bare feet and was stalking it with a cold and lethal intensity.

Slowly, they put themselves back together and got on with the painful business of being the living.

Carter and Fenn could feel Ted coming before they saw him. It was like a game. Once a man got the feel for it, he could sense Ted coming a hundred yards off, and the first one to say his name won. Or lost, depending.

It was a few hours past dawn and the two men were recovering, not really doing much of anything and most surely not in the mood for company. They could barely tolerate each other’s; they weren’t speaking, breathing too loudly, or even looking in each other’s direction. Cat lay curled in a tight ball on Carter’s stomach, snoring while Carter scratched between where he thought some of the little monster’s shoulders ought to be. It would wake periodically, just long enough to open one eye and spit at Fenn before dropping back into a heavy, blissful slumber. For a while, Fenn had been spitting back, but he’d quickly lost interest.

Carter said, “Ted.”

Fenn said, “Fucker.”

Ted walked straight in. He didn’t knock.

“Captains,” he said.

“Commander,” said Fenn.

“Ted,” said Carter.

“Good to see you both conscious.”

They both nodded. Neither saluted or came to attention or even sat up, for that matter. Ted stood straight as a rail, was showered, clean, and shaven so close and so recently his chin and cheekbones looked blue. It was, in Carter’s opinion, obscene.

Ted stood a moment, surveying. The two pilots and one cat-snake, the empty bottles, cigarette butts crushed into the dirt, the wreckage and general slobbishness of their bachelor officer quarters. There was no doubt that everything in his sight offended Ted—from Fenn’s socks drying on the potbellied pig-iron stove they heated the place with to the tattered, vicious girlie spreads and war porn hung everywhere by way of decoration. But when he spoke, he did so slowly, as if trying to initiate a friendly conversation but not exactly sure how to go about it.

“So… Morris, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Carter.

“Morris,” said Fenn.

“It’s a shame about him. He was a…” Ted sniffed, but apparently thought better of breathing too deeply, so grunted instead. His hands were clasped behind his back, but Carter could see the twitch of the muscles in his shoulders and arms, as though he were wringing his hands behind him or digging his nails into his palms hard. “He was a good man. No sense of direction and not the best flier, but a good… a good guy.”

“Not very lucky at cards,” added Fenn.

“Social skills of a walnut,” said Carter. “But a good guy.”

“Yup,” said Fenn.

“Yeah,” said Ted, then, “Right,” and, “A good man.” He looked from Fenn to Carter to Fenn again, squinted his eyes, then, to the pilots, seemed to shake off whatever momentary bit of human compassion had seized him. “Right. So anyway. Enough fucking eulogizing. We’ve got a fight coming, so I want you two, all the squadron leaders, and Billy in the comms tent with me in fifteen minutes, got it? Senior staff. Go dig ’em up from whatever holes they crawled into last night and carry them if you have to. Fast Eddie wants a word or two about… something…”

Ted’s voice trailed off. His eyes drifted around the tent again, head revolving on his neck like a turret traversing and his tongue clicking against his fake teeth. Fenn and Carter shot quick glances at each other but kept quiet. Ted wobbled a little on his feet but, again, seemed to recover himself—to jink free of whatever kept grabbing at him.

“Well, anyway, the man wants a word,” Ted finished. “Get it done.”

“Right,” said Fenn.

“Aye aye,” said Carter.

“Good,” said Ted, then turned and was out the door without hesitation.

“Such a pleasant man,” Carter said to Fenn after he was sure Ted was out of earshot. Cat got up, stretched, then slunk off to its bed by the door.

“Yes. We should really have him over more often. Lends a bit of class to the place, don’t you think?”

They both reclined quietly on their cots, Carter smoking, Fenn gnawing the ragged end of one thumbnail, neither in any rush to jump to Ted’s orders, and still not so sure about speaking. Carter couldn’t recall what they were mad at each other about. Could’ve been any one of a million things, he thought. Didn’t much matter.

“I think he was sizing us up,” Fenn finally said, spitting a sliver of thumbnail off the tip of his tongue and into the dirt. “Don’t you think so? Coming in here, talking about Morris and all that?”

Carter considered that a moment, having to cast Commander Prinzi into a whole new man just to get his head around the thought of him doing anything calculating or emotional. “What did he think we were going to do? Weep?”

“Quit, maybe? Give up our commissions?”

“And forgo all this splendor?” Carter put out his cigarette, popping the ember off with a finger and stashing the dog-end in his pocket.

“It is a war, after all, isn’t it? People get hurt.”

“People get killed. It’s to be expected.”

“But not the good people.”

“—Good people.”

“The good guys.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Not us.”

“We’re the
good
people?” Carter hucked out a short laugh. “Christ help the wicked.”

“I just mean that none of us expected
this,
” Fenn said, swinging his feet over the side of his cot and planting them firmly in the dirt in probable expectation of eventually getting up and doing as Ted had asked. “At least not like the way it went. And not Morris, certainly.”

Carter opened his mouth to speak, closed it, looked up curiously. “What do you mean, ‘not Morris’? Why not Morris?”

“I just mean no one expected Morris to be the first to go.” Fenn paused. His brows came together to make a single straight wrinkle in the middle of his forehead. A fresh topography, as though no wrinkle had ever perturbed that place before. “Or next to go, rather.”

“But why’d you say it like that? Like ‘of course, not
Morris
’?” Carter stretched, popping joints from toes to fingertips, and it felt good. He wanted to sleep just two or three more years, he thought. Two or three more years and then maybe he’d be able to find the energy to get up and fight this war in proper good humor. “You’re talking like there was a pool going or something.”

“There was,” Fenn said.

“What?” Carter pushed himself up on one elbow, actually facing Fenn. “Why didn’t you tell me about it? You know I would’ve kicked in.”

Fenn stood. “Because you were on the top of the list, Kev.”

Carter thought about that for a moment, then bounced to his feet all in one quick motion—a trick he had for fooling his brain into accepting a new orientation before the lingering hangover could make him all dizzy and nauseated. And it worked, more or less. At least he didn’t fall over.

“You should’ve told me about it anyway,” he said. “I would’ve put fifty bucks on me, too.”

It hadn’t been what he’d wanted to say, but it was what he said. Then he clapped Fenn on the shoulder and led the way through the door and out into the world.