A Private Little War (16 page)

There was another pause. Ted never had good news.

“We think Durba got his cork popped, Carter. No contact. None expected.”

“His boys?”

“The same.”

“One of them owed me fifty bucks.”

A pause. “Call it a loss and soldier on.”

That was one of Ted’s favorite phrases. One of the pilots (Carter thought it might’ve been Lefty Berthold) had once tried to make a list of Ted-isms. It hadn’t gone anywhere. Too long. But it’d been a season for lists, for failed attempts at imposing order on the disorderly, of controlling even something so simple as a piece of paper. Everyone had one somewhere.

“Now get there and let’s blow some shit up.”

On the ground, the engines were warming. Dawn was a couple of hours off yet, so generators and lamps were being hauled around, moved from the infield where they’d been lighting the drop to the field where they illuminated men bent double with their fingers down their throats, frantically trying to vomit their way to sobriety. Planes were being wheeled out onto the strips in a jumble, wingtips tangling, gun trucks being overturned in the black slashes of deep shadow. Max rode a cart full of live bombs like a pony at the fair, whooping the whole way.

Fenn had ducked out of the excitement the minute he’d seen Ted hurrying for the comms tent in the darkness, dogging the heels of some slinking flight controller. Reason enough to make himself scarce. Just
playing the odds. He sat on the edge of his bed in his lightless tent now, breath steaming as he stared at the door while pilots tumbled, half-dressed, into their cockpits, pounded the foam-padded cockpit rails while their heads spun, and circled their hands in the air as they shouted to be cleared, to let slip the chains like dogs a-hunting so they could get out there and drop their loads before their hangovers came on and crippled the whole puke-smelling lot of them.

Diane could see them through the netted windows in the control tent and watched while she mouthed commands into the microphone; speaking to ground control, to the pilots, to the mechanics now doing duty as mules—pushing and shoving planes into lift order and hauling to them their consignments of death. Diane sniffed. She loved the smell of the exhaust on the cold air, of the aviation fuel slopped onto the ground by clumsy hands. She loved the smell of the machines warming, and the hot ones returning whole after a flight.

Ten minutes ago, Ted had come roaring into the comms tent like a devil, demanding information from everyone and shouting at the machinery. Diane had felt her pulse quicken. She’d explained the situation in terse, clipped terms: Roadrunner in the air, missed radio contact, explosions, a frantic call-in from Durba’s position ten minutes before Carter had arrived on target, then the screaming. Ted had gotten on one of the other radio sets and started making calls. To Connelly, maybe. Or someone else. Numbers that only he had, working with his head down and his eyes closed and sweat standing out on his head like beads of oil even in the cold. He’d reached out from nowhere, his hand like a snake striking, and grabbed Tanner by the belt without looking, dragged him close, bent him down, talked into his ear, and then sent him on his way with a shove. Tanner hit the door at a run, making for the longhouse like he was being chased. Ted coolly moved onto the next call, then the next. Diane had watched him. And when he was done, he’d gotten up and taken her radio to talk to Carter. When he was done with that, he’d gone to the door to stand and watch.

Diane watched, too, as she gave the first clearance to taxi, to lift. She was the one who controlled these boys, these machines. It was she who sent them off to kill, who guided them to their targets and then talked them home again. She watched the plumes of smoke—white against
the darkness—belching from exhaust pipes as the pilots goosed their planes forward, their ridiculous scarves giving a white flutter.

She watched the white steam of Ted Prinzi’s breath as he stood in the doorway watching the planes rumble down the runway, his hands clenched into furious little fists while his entire body trembled from rage. When he’d turned from the mike while talking with Carter, he’d asked her, “The fuck is wrong with him? He’s not making any sense. Check his biologicals again. Is he damaged?”

Not hurt,
damaged
. Like he was just another part of the machine. And Diane had hissed at Ted through her teeth for being that way until it’d occurred to her that Ted was correct. Of course Carter was hurt. That was obvious. He’d almost died. He’d just seen something terrible. He’d been screaming like a child waking from a nightmare and had been so scared that he would’ve pissed in his pants but for twenty-five cents’ worth of rubber and a plastic bag.
Of course
he was hurt. But the important question was, was he damaged? Was he incapable of performing or too broken to fly? Was he so rattled that he’d begun to fall apart? Ted was asking for a woman’s opinion, maybe. Probably because he had none of his own.

And she’d said no. He wasn’t damaged. Diane had heard plenty of men scream in her time. She’d heard them die. And she knew that those who didn’t almost always came back. They were tough machines. Resilient. She sent them off to kill and loved them when they came home whole—the smell of them, the strength, the power of the machine.

“Get him to the fucking target,” Ted had said. “We don’t have time for him to turn into a girl.”

The artillery struck again and again. Over the ford, Carter found his bearings and took Roadrunner up to five thousand feet in a long, lazy spiral. He loosened his belts enough to scrape his fingers around on the floor until he found his stopwatch, then marked the time, clicked a couple of buttons and, hunching himself into the seat, ducking his head below the screen, and folding his shoulders in against the cold, settled in to wait.

THE SOPWITH CAMEL
was never an easy plane with which to do nothing. It wasn’t the easiest plane with which to do anything, but doing nothing came unnaturally to it and seemed to bring out every quirk and idiosyncrasy of its nature.

In its day, its first youth, the plane (with its puny Clerget nine-cylinder rotary and radically nose-heavy construction) was not a great climber. It was murder in a dive. Smooth and level flying was tricky. Because of its weight distribution and the torque of its engine, it wanted always to pull right, to roll over like a dog that wouldn’t stop doing its favorite trick. Taking off and landing were not its strong suits. Among the pilots who first got to know her, the Camel was known as a trainee killer, taking the lives of many before they’d completed their first flight, before they’d even gotten off the ground. And like an angry pet not quite tamed, the Camel would often maim or kill those who’d come to know her well out of pure, almost animal cussedness.

But to a careful, respectful, and conscientious pilot, there was no machine in the world so fine as the Sopwith F.1. Because of her touchy and unbalanced state, she could out-turn to the right any plane twice, outrun most, out-dive all, out-loop any but the most mad, and out-maneuver anything in the sky in a straight-up fight. In the dawning
moments of the twentieth century, she could throw more weight of lead farther and faster than any predator yet devised, and like some dark, panting, and live thing, seemed to grow faster, neater, and more savagely beautiful whenever there was blood in the air. The Camel was the plane that killed the Red Baron, April 21, 1918. It was the Camel that brought down the most enemy planes during the course of that war: 1,293, not counting Richtofen. Highest scoring ace of that war: Donald MacLaren with fifty-four kills. His plane? The bloody Camel.

This was the litany. Carter knew it as well as anyone. He and the other pilots, they’d read the books. They’d committed the facts to memory. The Fokker D.VII sometimes caught fire from running too hot and exploded. The Nieuport’s wings could tear off in a dive.

Like bad gene expressions, some of these foibles and intricacies of operation had been carried forward across the centuries. Titanium framing members, modern electronics, laser-milled engine components, high-octane aviation fuel—despite all this, Roadrunner was still more Camel than not: tricky, complex, cruel. But along with her eccentricities, so, too, had she been reborn with all the predatory heat and killing want that’d once been the original Camel’s pride. So now, in the icy skies above an alien world hundreds of light-years and centuries distant from the aeries and workshops where she’d been originally conceived, Kevin Carter was left to wrestle with his Camel as she pitched and bucked, growling in frustration as he walked her back and forth and back and forth across the black stretch of night.

Hunched, half-frozen in his seat, he keyed the radio again. “Control, Roadrunner. Time to target for the rest of the wing?”

Twelve minutes, he was told. Then nine, then eight.

“Six minutes, Roadrunner. Two minutes less than when you asked me two minutes ago.”

His fingers felt frozen inside his gloves; his face ached. To stay warm, he would duck lower, sit on his hands, breathe into them, and then press them to his cheeks or cup them over his ears. None of this worked. He remembered a joke that had run through the camp for a week or two in the depths of last winter’s cold, started inadvertently by Ted. When they’d shipped out for Iaxo, hidden in among their supplies had been four dozen little lozenges of smooth stainless steel—the kind of things
that looked like they’d belonged in a surgery. No one had known what they were for the longest time, until someone had figured out that they were actually catalytic hand warmers. Just pour in a drop of fuel, light an internal wick, then cap the thing, and it would give off a steady warmth for twelve hours. The pilots, of course, went nuts for them. They’d keep them in their pockets, shove them inside their gloves, drop one down the front of their knickers so that it rested under their balls, between the cloth and their armor. For two weeks, maybe three, no one complained of the cold.

Then they started to fail. The wicks burnt out. The fuel reservoirs began to leak. When they were down to two or three working units, the men who held them were like the camp’s millionaires—lucky beyond all reasonable measure. And when the last one finally gave out and someone asked Ted what they were supposed to do now that they had no way to stay warm in the air, Ted had said, “Think warm thoughts.”

Think warm thoughts.

They’d laughed and laughed until they’d realized how unfunny it really was.

There were good reasons why the company flew planes into combat on Iaxo that’d last seen action over the walls of Malaga. First, a biplane was a simple machine. Discounting its engine and guns, it had only about two dozen moving parts. Rudder, flaps, the stick, throttle linkage, interrupter gear, some simple hydraulics. Nothing more. They could be assembled in the field with the most rudimentary tools and maintained with a minimum of effort. In comparison, a modern transatmospheric fighter/bomber had twenty-two moving parts that made up its cockpit latch. Even the earliest twentieth- and twenty-first-century air superiority fighters consisted of thousands of parts, hundreds of interlinked systems, bonded construction airframes. The failure of one little piece meant the machine was grounded. Useless until the part was repaired or replaced. But one of the company’s planes on Iaxo? A man could beat on one for an hour with a lead pipe, shoot it full of holes, then light half of it on fire, and the odds would be good that it’d still fly. Sneeze on a modern vacuum fighter and it would be in the shop a week.