A Private Little War (14 page)

Disaster. With Durba himself, a first sergeant, three lieutenants (one of whom owed Carter money), a medic, and Tony Fong all on the ground, all human and all English-speakers, that meant that either one large catastrophe or seven individual and highly unlikely catastrophes must have occurred in order to leave an indig holding the radio. But Carter simply could not imagine any event or series of events that would’ve seen all seven of these men incapacitated at the critical moment. Because while the other side was fighting with bows and arrows, pointy sticks, and rocks, Antoinne Durba had goddamn
rifles
. Granted, they weren’t anything fancy. One hundred reproduction Martini-Henry, lever-action 11 mm long rifles and three museum-piece compressor-driven light machine guns. But still: rifles.
Ask the American Indians what kind of difference a few white men with boom sticks had made in their lives,
he thought.

Carter’s mind raced. He was breathing heavy. He fiddled with the radio dials. Put a knee into the bottom of the flight computer, hoping to jog its microchips into making this all better.

Fracture experience. All evidence to the contrary, his first thought was that Tony must’ve been out having a piss or something. Meanwhile, all around him people were silently moving the furniture in his darkened bedroom. Everything was about to change.

Carter passed clear over what should’ve been Durba’s position, clicked the stopwatch, slammed the throttle forward and laid Roadrunner over into a steep, spiraling climb. On the other end of the radio, the indig voice was still chittering away. Tough to tell when those fellows were in a panic, Carter knew. Everything they said sounded like a death rattle. But he heard no gunfire in the background, no sounds of distress. Was the indig in his ear begging, crying, praying for him to smite down his enemies from the sky? A bored, disconnected, and indifferent god, Carter switched his radio back over to the command frequency, pointed his prop toward the clouds, and let the altimeter spin.

He called in: “Control, this is Roadrunner. Radio check, copy?”

“Copy Roadrunner. This is air control. Hold one.”

A woman’s voice. Carter knew her but couldn’t quite remember her name. Donna? He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with the night shift.

“Donna?” he asked.

“Diane, Carter.”

Shit. Of course, Diane. Short, froggish, used to go around with the men for a bit, Carter recalled, then didn’t. At which point she’d taken over the tent on night shift to keep away from the pilots entirely.

He keyed the channel again. “Sorry, Diane. I’ve got a problem here. Can’t raise Durba.”

Diane mumbled something cruel about males in general.

“Repeat that, control. Didn’t quite catch it.”

“Hold position, Carter. And shut up for a minute while we get you sorted out. Monitor this channel. Control out.”

He climbed to five thousand feet, leveled out, and circled.

And circled some more.

Billy’s channel was closed. Hopefully, he clicked over to what should’ve been Durba’s, but the indig on the other end was still carrying on. Back to control, then, and silence as he eased the throttle and fuel mix down near stall and started box-waltzing the area, laying out mile-long trails broken by ninety-degree left breaks. It was at this point—exactly far too late—that Carter thought to himself how it might’ve been a good idea to have made at least a passing attempt at learning the language of the animals for whom he’d been fighting these past months. Something more than the curse words anyhow. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the time.

He locked the stick between his knees and stretched, his back popping all in a line like a zipper. He yawned, dug the scope out of his jacket again, shed altitude until he was cruising a thousand feet off the deck, and took another look around. The forest below remained the same sea of blobby color cut through by the squirming black snake of the river. The UV light amps turned everything shimmering silver tarnished with electric verdigris. In the dark, at altitude, an ocean and a forest looked the same. Both dull. Carter closed his eyes, talked just to hear himself speaking.

“Control, this is Roadrunner. What am I doing here, Diane?”

“Flying ’round in circles, looks like. Just keep it up. And keep an eye out for anything unusual.”

“Unusual like how?”

“Unusual like unusual, Roadrunner. I don’t know. Do you see anything unusual right now?”

“It’s nighttime. It’s dark.”

“Which means you have nothing to report, so clear the channel.”

“Diane, what happened to Antoinne?”

Ted was up when Tanner, one of the other flight controllers, knocked on the door of his tent. Unable to rest and sick with a knot of worry that felt like a stone in his throat, Ted had gotten into the gun cases between which he normally pressed his shirts and trousers and had begun pulling out files and papers, maps, supply logs and repair records. He needed to make some kind of plan. On his table, the clock mocked him with every negative number. He’d removed his sidearm and put it away in a drawer.

Ted got up and jerked open the door. Tanner stood with a hint of attention still in him. He was young, so recently out of service (which one, Ted couldn’t recall) that the tatters of discipline still clung to him like the rags of a uniform he couldn’t quite completely remove.

“At ease, Tanner,” Ted said. “It’s the middle of the night. Why are you bothering me?”

“Diane told me to come get you,” he said, swallowing the “sir” only with visible difficulty.

“She have a reason?”

“Something wrong with Captain Carter’s mission, I think.”

Ted closed his eyes, sucking a deep breath through his nose. He suppressed the urge to cough, so choked instead, strangling on the shit in his lungs.

“She said she needs you now.”

“About face,” Ted croaked.

“What?”

“Turn the fuck around!”

Tanner did, and Ted doubled over—half coughing, half vomiting in the dirt outside his tent with his shoulder pressed into the frame of the door. He did it quickly, coughed again, then stood, shot the cuff on his jacket, wiped the back of his mouth with his shirtsleeve, straightened his jacket, and told Tanner to turn back around.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Tell me the problem while we walk.”

Carter just happened to be looking over the side of the plane—out past the forward edge of the lower wing—when the world ended. He was squinting down into the big black nothing below him, comparing it in his head to the big black nothings in front of him and to either side, trying to make it resolve into some kind of answer by force of exasperated will alone when, quite unexpectedly, it did.

For just an instant, as the first bright blooms of the explosions flared blindingly below him, Carter thought that somehow he had done this: that his hatred of this place and its people had suddenly been made impossibly manifest in scourging fire from his eyes. He watched, dumbstruck and gawping like a yokel, frantically touching hands to all of his controls, wondering, in a panic, if he’d accidentally triggered a bomb drop even though he wasn’t carrying bombs and none of the planes here were capable of carrying anything large enough to look like Alfred Nobel’s wrath from a mile up.

And then, suddenly, Carter’s fracture experience—last vestige of the peace of the ignorant and all-powerful—is ripped from him, carried away on the rising energy of the shock wave that lifts them up, the
man and his plane, and carries them briefly free of gravity and airflow and elevator control; lifting them as if on top of a bubble, expanding the sky around them into a torrent of disturbed molecules that, if they had a color, would be like the halo around an angel’s head. A shade of preternatural grace and fury.

Together, they billow straight upward, then are dropped like something vile. Carter stomps and throttles Roadrunner into a wide, falling inside bank and flies straight into the collapsing bubble of a second wave that swats them toward the ground with the weight of atmospheres righting themselves. Air cascades onto them like a waterfall, rushing down to fill the pressure void. Carter doesn’t even realize he is yelling until he splits back east, comes out of the mess, and feels the control surfaces find some traction.

He levels out into a choppy glide. His throat hurts. His mouth is dry as bone. Ducking behind the windscreen, he pulls his goggles down, says a brief thanks to the man who invented the condom catheter, and then pants like a dog until he gets his breath back.

The radio squawks. Carter’d never closed the channel. Diane was probably deaf now, he thinks. Maybe it served her right.

The flight computer is out, screen black and cold as a dead eye, and Carter is lost, bubble altimeter holding at eight hundred feet, compass nosing east-nor’east. His stopwatch rattles around somewhere by his feet and the radio is clacking now—
squelch, squelch, squelch.
Distress sign. Diane asking if he is dead or dying or knocked brainless or what.

But Carter just breathes, holds the stick in fingers gone numb with shock, keeps his feet away from the pedals because his legs are shaking so badly. He looks out at the night. All around him, the peace of darkness has returned. It is like nothing ever happened at all.

In the comms tent, Diane cranes her neck and looks toward the door. “Did someone go to get the commander?” she asks. “Because we need him in here. Now.”