A Private Little War (48 page)

Out on the field, Ted still had the radio handset gripped in his fist. He’d waited until all his planes were on the ground. He’d gotten all the intelligence he could from the pilots. He’d waited as long as he could wait, had walked off, had given it as much thought as he could, and then had given the order. He’d called in to Diane at comms, told her to hit the button, and now was just waiting for the scramble siren to sound. He felt like he was being pulled in half and stood now, his face upturned, his eyes closed. He flinched as if burned by a hot ember when the first heavy, waxy flake touched his cheek.

“Is that snow?” he asked. There was no one around to answer him.

Charlie interrupted Emile in the middle of saying something that didn’t matter a bit to anyone.

“Check that out,” he said, pointing out the mess tent’s window. “Snow.”

Carter told Max he’d see him around and headed for the mess tent at a quick jog. Inside, Fenn saw him break suddenly from the edge of the strip, move into the grass of the infield. The clouds were all massed behind him, rolling in. Windblown flakes of snow danced in the air between them.

He didn’t make it even halfway to the mess tent door before the scramble siren went off.

THE LAST DAY

TEN MINUTES LATER, CARTER IS BACK IN A PLANE
. Strapped down hard. Idling on the taxiway at ready-one while the rest of the flight takes up post positions behind him. He has Jack Hawker, Tommy, Lefty, Stork, and Porter Vaughn on him. Fenn wrangles the remainders, the stragglers; lining them up right-oblique at the action end of A strip. There are choking clouds of smoke, much shouting, and the flat slaps of hands beating the sides of planes like anxious jockeys whipping horses still in the paddock as Vic and Raoul and Rockwell, Willy McElroy, little Paul Meleuire and Max, and anyone else with a free hand, come charging through the swirling, waxy snow at a dead run, dragging bomb sledges and ammo boxes and helmets and gloves, bits of stray gear forgotten in the haste of siren panic. The radio is a disaster of voices.

Carter is back in Roadrunner, so fresh out of the shop she still smells of oil and love and the arc flame of the welding gun. So fresh that, when the siren had gone off and he’d gone running to her, he’d found her just coming off the crane in the longhouse and had had to help put wheels on her—the pneumatic squeal of the driver almost deafening, the first buck of it jerking the pistol-grip right out of his hand.

The new engine is like a boy’s heart put into an old man’s body. Its rhythm—the sound of it—is different. To Carter, it sounds like his
plane’s voice has changed, her expression, mood, temper, all wrong. He is wearing combat restraints, a six-point harness, all his gear, his helmet, collar, injectors. He has no map. There’d been no time. His flight electronics have been repaired, recalibrated. The airspeed indicator is new. The pedals are stiff.

All over the field, electric ignitions bring engines choking and banging to life. The pilots yell, “Contact!” anyhow, just because it feels good. There is no time to drag or wheel planes into position, so the pilots drive them onto the trim of the strip, wiggle and inch them into place. Wheels are chocked and unchocked as the snow falls and sticks to goggles and windscreens or is blasted by prop wash. Flags wave. They go staggered: Carter getting the first green, then Fenn crossing behind him, then Jack and Tommy together crossing behind him, then Charlie Voss and Billy, and on like that until everyone is airborne; Fokkers and Camels crisscrossing, straightening course; mean, wicked slashings of color across the tumbling clouds as paint jobs whip into the sky, roll, curl and climb, clawing for the close, claustrophobic ceiling of the clouds even before the throbbing headset chatter of a dozen simultaneous shouting, cheering, cursing voices expends itself into breathless silence.

Ted is on the command channel: “Flight leaders, make course for Riverbend. You are free-fire cleared.”

Carter has to force Roadrunner to climb, feeling as though he ought to get out and push. He’d needed the full length of the runway before feeling the bite and lift of the air beneath him. The new engine is heavy. Powerful. Big like a god is big, but ponderously, murderously heavy. It needs a pull that it doesn’t have while climbing until he cautiously opens the throttle a little further, then further, listening for the point where the roar will become a scream, a shriek, then silence, seize, stall, and death. There is a sweet spot. He just has to find it. The two of them, he and his plane, will learn together or they won’t. There is no safety net. No one on Iaxo wears parachutes.

He’ll get it, he thinks. The two of them, Carter and his plane, will learn each other’s quirks and tolerances, or they will die. And as he gives the throttle another nudge, he suddenly feels a sense of almost bottomless power in her, a reserve of strength that is massive, dangerous, and comforting. He throttles up again, and the engine barely changes
its tone as, suddenly, the balance shifts and he squirts skyward like a jet, cleaving a path, his flight following in the messy chaos of his prop wash.

“Correction.” Ted again. “Course now below Riverbend, far side of the river. Intercepting a large and moving force, numbers unknown. Hold.”

A pause. Chatter from ground control. Chatter from the pilots. The confusion of the rapid deployment resolves itself after a single turn over the airfield and the flights fall into staggered lines, drifting apart, making space.

Ted: “Our indigs are wearing their asses for hats.”

Brief conversation between Carter and Fenn. Voices upon voices upon voices. They call out their wings, break right and left and, with a mile of space between them, form up into terrible flying wedges, which, to the Lassateirra indigs, must seem the sign of vilest evil; of angry gods, roused to wrath, and bringing nothing but pain.

In a moment, they are at maximum throttle, the fastest machines dragging the slowest, engines howling. The sweetest sound in the world is the metallic clack of a magazine going into the centerline cannon. Carter knows this. The sweetest sound is the
skatch-skatch
of belt-fed machine guns being primed. It is the whip of air across cowlings, the howling of it in the stays, moaning as though he travels with an honor guard of ghosts.

He bounces the palm of his gloved hand over the aluminum fins of the bombs he has hanging in the shotgun loops and calls for a gun check while his flight is still in the clear. Rounds sing by his flanks, gleaming phosphorescent tracers streaking the sky, and he lovingly strokes his own trigger. Death, death, death.

At nearly 200 mph, they are baying down on the river in minutes. Horrifying creatures, raining down fury from on high. Finally, they have been released to do what they do best. Finally. And Carter thinks that, someday, many centuries from now, the indigs on Iaxo will tell stories of dragons that belched fire and smoke, of monsters that flew and murdered and consumed whole towns with their rage.

He thinks that, when they do, they will be talking about him.

Ted once more: “Indig siege force was rolled up forty-five minutes ago by explosives and rifle fire, type unknown. The A.O. is considered hot.
I’ve got a comms intercept saying hand grenades and land mines at least. Gunfire in the trees. Automatic rifles possible. The Riverbend Lassateirra have moved out of the city and are chasing the friendly retreat, moving toward the bridge and northeast on the high flank under tree cover. Enemy in the open near the river and on the ridgeline. Tallyho, gentlemen. Send them the fuck home.”

They cross the river south of the advance in a blink, come north, power down, split-loop out to get their bearings. Carter calls Fenn.

“Fenn, Carter. Play you high-low?”

“Done, Captain,” Fenn calls back. “B flight has the high side.”

“A flight has low then.”

“Happy hunting, Kev. I’ll meet you in the middle.”

Carter switches over to the flight channel and releases his fighters like dogs slipping a chain. “A flight, this is flight leader. Enemy in the open along the river, south of Riverbend. We are free-fire and hot. All fighters, break and attack. Let’s tear ’em up.”

The battle would go on for ten hours.

On their first pass, Carter’s flight descended in formation, swooping down on the vanguard of the pursuing force in a wedge and chewing great, bloody channels into the ranks before rolling out, pulling tight turns, and coming back for another run. And another. And another. They killed, at first, with the wild abandon of animals turned loose from their bonds; out of rage and frustration and anger at having been pent up so long. They killed sloppily, occasionally joyously, sometimes stupidly as though they were very, very parched and only killing could slake their desperate thirst. Before a quarter of an hour had passed, two of Carter’s flight—Lefty Berthold and Porter Vaughn—had to turn for the field because they’d burned the barrels out of their machine guns, dropped all of their bombs, jammed the mechanisms of their weapons beyond all simple repair. On the radio, one of them was sobbing as he turned for home. Crying or laughing so hard that it was almost the same thing. Carter never figured out which it was.

With two men gone, Carter re-formed his diminished flight—turning out high and rallying the remainder of his planes for a precision-bombing run with whatever they had left. The intention was to lay down a stick of hell just forward of the advancing Lassateirra vanguard (mostly light horse) in the hopes of hobbling them, tripping them up, blowing the legs out from underneath the animals, whatever. The planes dropped from the sky like bombs themselves, in hard dives, screaming across the front rank of horses at fifty feet off the deck and dropping their ordinance right where it belonged.