A Private Little War (32 page)

That night, they all heard explosions in the distance—artillery, almost definitely.

Carter and Fenn lay awake in their racks, smoking and listening to the faraway cacophony. For a long time, neither of them said a word.

It was only a few shells, and they never figured out who was shooting at whom. But that didn’t matter. The fact that someone had been shooting at all was enough. And when it was done, someone had come and stood a moment just outside the flap of their tent. Didn’t knock. Didn’t come in. Just stood there for a few long seconds, then was gone. It was too dark to see who it was, but Carter knew.

A while after, he asked Fenn who it was that had Morris in their betting pool.

Fenn just lay there breathing for a minute. Carter could see him only by the glow of his cigarette. “Ted,” he finally said. “Ted had Morris.”

But Carter was pretty sure he was lying.

The next morning, Ted made another appearance in the mess. Most of the outfit was there, everyone on edge, delicate, moving as if afraid absolutely anything had the potential to upset a fragile peace that wasn’t peace at all, but was just nothing having gone wrong for a minute, then two, then three.

“New orders,” Ted had said. “Effective now.” He dropped a few sheets of paper on the table closest the door through which he’d entered. Then he exited through the same without saying anything more.

No one looked. Not immediately. No one got up, no one went to examine Ted’s leavings. By unspoken consent, they all pretended he’d been a bad dream best banished by ignoring it’d ever come.

But eventually, people had to leave. Had to go out into the cold and the world. And when they did, everyone went out through the door Ted had used and, on their way, looked at the papers he’d dropped.

Carter was no different. He walked a deliberately long path around the mess, but the table, the papers, they had gravity. They drew him. And when he looked, he saw a new roster, handwritten in a small, fiercely controlled hand; three pages so crowded with times and patrol orders and map coordinates that they all ran together into a bramble. There were day flights and night flights. Overlapping coverages. Crossing radials. So fat now with fuel and bombs and bullets, why not? Ted’s plan was plain. He’d written it at the top of the first page, in letters scribbled in so heavy and dark that they’d torn the paper.

NO ONE DIES.

Later, Carter found Tommy Hill from his squadron and Charlie from Fenn’s third in his and Fenn’s tent, viciously stoking the fire in the little potbelly. They were jamming stick upon stick into the thing, working in tandem, each urging the other on. Tommy and Charlie both had night flights on the new roster—two of the first, and due to lift in a few hours. Fenn was on his bed, aimlessly thumbing a smartpaper copy of
Wind, Sand and Stars
, regularly touching the flip button without looking at the pages. Cat was backed into a distant corner, looking suspicious and pissed.

Charlie and Tommy took no notice of Carter as he came in, sidled around the perimeter of the tent, and hauled up close to Fenn’s side.

“What are they doing?” he asked, squatting beside Fenn’s rack, whispering because there was something so focused and unreal about the sight of the two of them blindly jamming lumber into the stove, stoking a fire that was already throwing off waves of blistering heat.

“Haven’t the slightest idea,” Fenn said, brushing the paper with his thumb and making it turn another page. “They showed up about a half hour ago. Said it was too cold in Tommy’s tent and wanted to make a fire. Been at it ever since.”

“And you don’t think that’s a little weird?”

Fenn looked at Carter, looked down at his lap, looked back at Carter. Carter looked down. Hidden by the paper was Fenn’s sidearm—cocked and loaded—lying on his belly.

“I think it’s a lot weird,” he said, and went back to turning pages.

Carter stood, then stepped forward. “Tommy,” he snapped. “The fuck are you two doing over there? Drop the lumber and step away from the stove.”

Neither of them slowed. Neither acknowledged Carter had spoken. He looked back at Fenn and rolled his eyes. Fenn shrugged.
“‘La vérité pour l’homme, c’est ce qui fait de lui un homme,’”
he said, and tapped the page without looking at it.

Carter shook his head, walked over to them, laid a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. Tommy, who was closest to him, feeding sticks to Charlie. Tommy, who’d been his friend and his squadron mate for two years, been solid and dependable, been always on Carter’s wing.

Tommy, who felt the touch of Carter’s hand on his shoulder, spun and laid the snapped end of an inch-thick branch across the side of Carter’s head with a snarl and shouted, “Get off me, you fucker!”

The stick did no damage, but it hurt like a lash, and Carter staggered back, mostly out of surprise. For an instant, his brain seemed torn between laughter and rage. His breath snagged in his throat in half a giggle. Then the red veil dropped over his eyes and he charged in, swinging. He hooked Tommy (who’d gone back to hunching over the rapidly diminishing woodpile) under one arm, spun him around, and gave him a jackhammer punch in the eye, his whole body weight behind it, dropping it on him from a height. Tommy went down to his knees and Carter hit him again. He tried for a third, but Tommy’d gotten his arms up, so he kicked him instead—heel of his boot into Tommy’s side, pushing him over and stepping across him. When he looked up, he saw Charlie, his two fists, squeezed together, coming around like a bat.

Charlie was wearing his gloves. Lucky for Carter. But when the impact came, he saw stars anyway and fell hard, back and across Tommy, which, in any event, kept Tommy from getting up and laying in as well. Charlie was still coming for Carter as he went down.

Next thing, nothing. Charlie stopped in his tracks. Squirming beneath Carter, Tommy shoved him off and struggled to his feet. Carter rolled to his stomach, then scrambled up, bringing his hands in front of his face like a boxer, trying to look better than he felt. Then he saw Fenn standing with his legs spread, shooting hand braced, his gun leveled at his own squadron leader.

“Stand down, Charlie,” he said, voice calm, unhurried. “You know I won’t kill you, but I’ll put one in your leg that’ll have you in the sick line for a week.”

Charlie actually whipped his head back and forth a couple of times as if he’d been possessed by something and needed to shake it off. He looked at Tommy, at Carter, at Fenn and Fenn’s pistol. He smiled sheepishly, which was not a look that came easily to him because he was older and had a veteran’s hardness about him. Tommy, on the other hand, had none of this. He was twenty-two. Iaxo was his second tour with Flyboy, his first with Carter, and he looked about to cry or laugh or throw up or all three at once. He’d had a cut opened below his eye—a ragged tear that was just starting to leak a film of blood into the sheen of sweat on his face. He reached a hand out to Carter, and he felt it scrabbling at the sleeve of his coat.

“We were cold, Captain. That’s all. I don’t…” His voice trailed off. From the look of them, Carter didn’t even think they’d been drinking. “We were just trying to get the fire banked, and…”

Charlie stepped up. “Put it away, Fenn. It’s done and we’re sorry. I don’t know what got into us.”

“Nerves,” said Fenn, carefully laying down the hammer on his pistol and lowering it. “Happens.” He paused. “Not to me, of course.” And then he grinned. Charlie laughed. Tommy did the same. Carter’s head hurt, but he felt the anger whirlpooling out of him like water down a drain. Everyone was sweating. It was hot as an oven.

“Okay,” Fenn said, then repeated himself. “Okay. Now that we’ve all got that out of our systems…,” and let it hang, incomplete. Without taking his eyes off Tommy or Charlie, he laid the pistol down on his bed, on top of his book.

“It’s going to be cold up there tonight,” said Tommy. “We were just trying to get a big fire going and—”

“It’s all right, Tommy,” Carter said, reaching over and cupping the back of his head in his hand. He did it with the one he hadn’t hit the boy with. The other one hurt almost as much as his head. “Just drop it. You and Charlie feel a bit more civilized, you’re welcome to sit awhile. You’ve got some time yet.” He checked his watch. “Night flights don’t lift for another few hours.”

Charlie asked Fenn if he minded and Fenn said no, provided everyone made a solemn promise not to hit anyone else. And so they sat, the four of them, while their bruises swelled and blackened and their aches receded and the heat bloomed from the overstoked potbelly.

No one liked flying at night. It made a man strange, knowing it was coming. But in the end, Fenn and Charlie and Tommy and Jack all made their patrols and came back shaken but not dead. Carter, having finally found the knack for it, slept while they were gone, waking from a dream of flying just enough to count their engines as they passed over the tent line—one and two, three and four—then dropping back again into an exhausted slumber that seemed to last for days.

AT FIVE HUNDRED FEET
, when flying at nearly two hundred miles an hour, the landscape became a very personal thing. One got to know it intimately, though not as this tree or that bush, but rather as a minute of green blur here, a few seconds of brown over there. It was like a fondness for maps—for looks, not land. It was like the distracted passion of a man who loves pornography but loathes an actual warm and real woman. The land, the pilots must’ve come to hate because they’d done so much violence to it. The topography, though, was spectacular.

Roadrunner was in the shop. Over the following three days, Carter got friendly with Li’l Red Rooster—a hinky Fokker reproduction that was both slower and less graceful, but easier to fly. Together, the two of them got to know a whole lot of terrain. Hundreds of square miles of it, crossed and recrossed and re-recrossed by defensive patrols taking off and landing nonstop, all around the clock. Artillery was their big concern. The airfield could be crippled by one solid barrage, decimated by concentrated fire. After artillery, they were concerned with troop movements, supply caravans, lone riders who might be scouts or forward observers. And after artillery, troops, caravans, and scouts, they were worried about everything else.

The new orders were followed. No one died. Gone were the days of just flying around like idiots and banging away at random. Everything was methodical now. Businesslike. No hunting parties, no harassment, no provocation of any sort. On Ted’s orders, no fighters were to engage any targets under any circumstances. If they were shot at, if they saw anything, if they were even looked at funny by anything on the ground, they were to call in the location to the bombers (who circled constantly at ten thousand feet, specks of dust on the lens of the sky), then get the hell out of Dodge most fucking ricky-tick.

They worked the sky in three-man teams, split squadrons, with two fighters low and a bomber high, each sortie moving them fractionally deeper into Indian country; observing, reporting, everyone checking roads and forest paths, hilltops, and their favorite hidden landmarks for signs of movement, for gun emplacements, for fortification—looking everywhere for anything. Nothing was nothing anymore, just like Ted had said.