A Private Little War (18 page)

“Two hundred and ten off the deck. A little less maybe. I’ll leave the porch light on for you. Commencing illumination run. Roadrunner out.”

Things happen very quickly now.

Carter banks out into an elongated turn, a flat, inside loop done slow and graceful, then brings the nose back around and on target for a long glide in toward the guns’ right flank. The ride is bumpy, his speed
having dropped off to almost nothing. But now there is no wind. There is no cold. The stick rattles in his hand. His flares are parachute sabots, heavy and pointed like lawn darts, dropped by hand. He’s carrying two dozen attached like shotgun shells in loops hanging from either side of the cockpit. They’ll drop straight like bombs, hitting the ground where a contact trigger will detonate a charge that will fire a parachute flare straight up. Less trouble with drift that way. They can easily punch straight through tree cover. Longer time-over-target.

Carter eyeballs the target in the dark. There’s nothing there, but he feels now as though he can sense the weight of the guns in some middle distance, their psychic signature. They are close. Engine still off, he bleeds away the last of his airspeed, then noses down into a blind, dead-stick dive toward the nonspecific blackness of the ground. He feels no fear, no apprehension. There is nothing but the hum of blood in his ears, the delicate vibration of air slipping over control surfaces and humming through the wire wing stays. Watching the altimeter spin backward, at eleven hundred feet he eases into the stick, drawing it back toward him slowly until he can feel the nose starting to come up, the elevators bite. Then he takes his thumb off the fuel line.

The engine jumps to life with a shuddering kick. It spits and roars like a Saturday matinee movie monster, howling across the sky, and Carter feels pressed back into his seat by a giant, invisible hand. In an original Camel, this would’ve ripped the wings clean off. Killed him, killed the machine. But the future is wonderful. He imagines treetops bending in Roadrunner’s slipstream.

Carter begins his drop, jerking flares out of their loops and throwing them hard so they’ll clear the forward edge of the bottom wing. He can’t see anything, the wing obscuring his view. There is the sense of sudden light bursting behind him. Ghostly shadows flicker on his instrument panel.

Inaccurate, but effective—the lights of the first flares will allow him to spot more precisely on his second run. With six flares out, he pushes the throttle forward, lays his machine over into a tight, right turn, and checks his aim.

Too high and too short. He’d come in upslope and the parachutes are drifting higher. He rolls out, combat reflexes making him jink and
dodge even when there is no fire, no danger, no need. He lays on more throttle and the machine responds, seeming to leap out ahead of him, to leave him dragging along behind as if stretched on a massive rubber band. Pulling Roadrunner around again to the same attack line, he lays a new stick fifty feet low to give the bombers a bracketed target.

Below him, the ground is suddenly alive with light and shadow, the weird, ghostly parachutes drifting across the hill like spirits, burning magnesium flares so white that they turn everything photo-negative and leave purple smudges on Carter’s vision.

He circles out again and climbs, hanging for a minute at the apogee, turning over so he can look up at his handiwork on the ground. There are two staggered, more or less parallel lines of unnatural light punctuating the dark like ellipses; a thought, incomplete and drifting to pointlessness in the air. And somewhere between them, the artillery.

He rolls back over to true, then calls Charlie.

“Bomber flight, time to target?”

“Thirty seconds, Carter. I can see the lights.”

“Target is bracketed. I’m making one more drop.”

“Make it a fast one.”

He takes one quick peek through the scope, magnification only, and can see the position plainly. The guns are squat, big-bore, dug in. It seems to Carter like he could reach out past the lens of the scope and shove his entire fist into their barrels. Tiny little indigs scramble around in a panic, trying to unchock the wheels of their toy cannons, running after the drifting flares and batting their hands as if trying to chase them away. The flares have them lit up good. Carter is happy. But he knows that Charlie and his flight are going to come in high and not have a chance to spot for themselves. He puts his nose down and goes back in one last time to give the boys a bull’s-eye.

He drops down low and slow, six hundred feet off the deck, then five, then four. His plane chugs and bucks and tries not to fall. Forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour and he is tickling the bumblebee limit—that point at which it appears impossible that he can still maintain flight. Three hundred feet. He eases the stick down farther.

The ground crawls by below him, and he watches it unroll—leaning, with his chest pressed against the padded lip of the cockpit, straining
against the belts. He can count individual trees clustered at the base of the bald hill, can see the sharp-edged shadows cast by the drifting flares. And then, all of a sudden, the artillery position. He pulls a single flare, holds it, waits, then plants it dead in the middle of them.

Then the throttle, the stick. More throttle until it is all the way open, until he is climbing for the cold and distant stars, engine pulling, roaring joyously, carrying him up and away.

“Charlie, Roadrunner. Copy?”

“Gotcha, Kevin. Go ahead.”

“I’m clear. Come in south by five west and drop between the lines. The single flare is bull’s-eye, bracket two hundred north-south, copy?”

“Copy that, and much obliged. This is bomber night-flight coming around to south by five west at five thousand feet, run commencing. Flight out.”

“Roger that. Let ’er eat. Roadrunner out.”

Below and behind him, the explosions are so small that he doesn’t even feel them.

THE BOMBERS HIT THE TARGET BEAUTIFULLY
, hand-dropping ten-pound fragmentation devices packed with titanium fléchettes around a core of 8-oxy trinitrotoluene. Six bombs per plane, four planes in the wing. By the time they were done, the remains of the artillery position could’ve been packaged up nicely in several hundred leakproof sandwich bags.

Carter stuck around just long enough to make sure that nothing taller than a foot high was still standing under the ghost-light of the flares, then joined the slow procession of Airco-bodies turning for home. They flew straight. With each bomber sixty pounds lighter after the drop, they were circling home plate within thirty minutes. Generators out, lights on, wheels down—like landing half in a dream already.

Drinks and debrief, short as always.
Get some? Got some
. Big talk around the halo lamps, but none of it about the enemy, about weapons. A deliberate, studious avoidance. Too soon, and maybe to talk about such a thing would make it too real. Ernie O’Day had fumbled a bomb and dropped it into his own cockpit, but it hadn’t gone off. Drunk’s luck, they all said. Charlie had landed his plane and stepped out crusted in frozen vomit just starting to run. This made Carter think of an old story he’d heard about pilots from the war that’d given birth to the machines they flew now—how they’d used castor oil as a lubricant in
their engines and how the pilots, after sitting in the seat, shrouded in clouds of the stuff being blown back into their faces, would suffer from chronic diarrhea from inhaling it, licking it off their lips, whatever. The scarves they wore were originally for wiping the oil from their goggles, for wrapping around their faces to keep their mouths clear, but that never worked—and many of them would find themselves at ten and fifteen thousand feet, sitting on frozen bricks of their own watery shit, knowing that their prize for surviving would only be descending again into lower altitudes and kinder temperatures where it would all start to melt.

Morris and Billy Stitches had found their way home safe, and Billy was laying fiercely into Morris, laughingly, in the way of brothers who love each other and cover it over with beatings and insults, then cover that over with touches of odd intimacy—Billy reaching out to adjust the collar of Morris’s jacket in the middle of calling him a dumb, syphilitic jerk-blind ox; the two of them sitting side by side and pelting empty shell casings at the indig dish wogs who roamed the field tent and mess mopping spills, gathering cups, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Every time one of them would look their way, Morris and Billy would make to be looking somewhere else and whistle through their teeth. The indig would do this grin thing that meant not happy, exactly, but embarrassed, uncomfortable, confused. Then he’d clap or bow or clap-and-bow and move on, another bit of .303 brass bouncing off the back of his head as soon as he’d turned away.

Carter sat through it, laughed through it, had a couple drinks and waited for his extremities to thaw, deaf with the echoes of shearing winds and roaring engines still living in his head. The whole time, he half wanted someone to haul back and punch him in the spine to pop the bubble of tension that’d collected there. He didn’t ask though because, had he, someone surely would’ve obliged and slugged him.

It was dawn when everyone found out that Durba hadn’t been killed outright as had originally been suspected. Apparently, the shelling that Carter’d originally witnessed hadn’t been the first to hit his position, but
the beginning of the second round, followed by a third and a fourth and a fifth. Barrage upon barrage. It was hard to believe he hadn’t seen the first, what with it being blushes of rosy light in a dark place and all that, but he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d been looking.

“Might as well have been looking for Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, right?” Carter had asked, hardly noticing the odd looks this inspired. “But I’ll tell you: From now on, I’m keeping a sharp goddamn eye out for flying fucking reindeer as well. I mean, artillery on Iaxo? Fuck that.”

Around the tent line, his small soliloquy had been listened to with something like reverence. As though it were poetry, or something finer. Almost a philosophy, though the only part of it that had any resonance was the last line.
Fuck that
. Like “Think warm thoughts,” for an hour or two, it’d become a saying: “Artillery on Iaxo? Fuck that…” Then there had been laughter that almost always trailed away into uncomfortable silences. Then it’d gone away. Still too soon.

The initial strike had caught Durba’s First IRC completely unaware, either above ground or lounging in their open, shallow fighting positions. Their first thought had been that they were being bombed by the pilots accidentally and Tony Fong had put in a frantic wave-off request to Flyboy control, which had been taken by Tanner, passed along to Diane, and had been what had inspired her to send for Ted and bring him in. It’d taken less than a minute to get things straightened out, but a minute was all it’d taken for the lot of them to get blown to bloody chunks. A good number of Durba’s men had run, no doubt thinking that the sky was falling—though, in the confusion, they’d advanced rather than falling back and had charged headlong into a unit of bad indigs waiting just out in the darkness. They’d been cut to pieces. Then the artillery had hit the survivors again and again. It was a mess. One of Durba’s indigs had made one final distress call on an open channel, then gone silent.