A Private Little War (34 page)

To the north, the Akaveen indigs pushed their lines until they were in sight of Lassateirra-held Riverbend, then called a halt—massing troops in a huge encampment on the friendly side of the river and spotting smaller, provisional units under off-world command out ten miles on the other side to cut off roads and any quick reinforcement from the south. Trouble was, there just weren’t that many human officers left. Fewer every day. So the blockade of Riverbend became the worst siege in the history of sieges, the lines full of holes and gaps that a tank division could’ve rolled through.

But organization was not the natives’ strong suit. The Akaveen militia spent their days shouting up at the walls of Riverbend while the regular army marched back and forth on their side of the river, shaking their shields and spears and making occasional one-man charges on horseback—riding their mounts into the water, splashing through the low current, and rearing the beasts up to wave their too-many feet at the city walls. Every time one of the company’s planes flew overhead, the Akaveen went nuts, whooping and cheering and waving their weapons in the air.

The prevailing wisdom in the field house was that the Akaveen must’ve thought Flyboy had done this—driving back their age-old enemies or whatever, and sending them running for the hills and the safety of their walled cities. Whether or not this was true was debatable, though not, actually, debated, save in private. The indig commanders and elders and officers dealt only with Fast Eddie because, besides Billy Stitches (who spoke a little), Eddie was the only one who spoke any indig at all. And since the pilots still believed that Fast Eddie answered to the company, which in turn depended on him (and Ted) to make sure the fight was going well and all their investments would someday pay off, no one thought Eddie was going to try very hard to convince the wogs that the pilots weren’t, in fact, the heroes they thought they were.

Thus, any display by the Akaveen indigs became cheering and adulation. Any sounds at all became utterances of love and faith and thanks and, as with the supplies, the pilots grew fat with that as well—bloated and waddling with adoration.

And they sucked it up as though starving, hoping silently that this blind presumption was right and that it would sustain them even as the Lassateirra haunted their dreams, vanished in daylight, and their own camp indigs were stealing away in the middle of the night and lighting out for badland.

Still, they told themselves that they were winners. Terrifying and impervious as stone. They told themselves that they were loved as only liberators could be loved, a boon to friends and death to their enemies. They roared low over the lines and made the indigs jump. In the mess, they circled around Morris Ross’s coffin and used it as a table for cards and drinks and breakfast. It was just a box. What was inside no longer mattered.

On the fourth day of the new patrol schedule, Connelly’s 1
^st
(now Garcia’s Horse Rifles) and 2
^nd
companies were pulled forward to the bridge, his 3
^rd
moved across the ford and up to the base of Mutter’s Ridge where the artillery position had been, while his 4
^th
—which had
seen the most action recently—fell back all the way to just east of the airfield, now a good thirty or forty miles to the rear of the new front lines.

And the pilots flew. They flew constantly. Once Connelly’s 4
^th
moved in, they burned lights on the field without fear of being spotted because there was nothing that could approach their position under cover of darkness without being spotted itself, nothing that could come in range of them without being utterly destroyed.

Carter looked at the maps. He knew that the Akaveen Something-or-Others were solidly in control of nearly eighty miles of river now, including the bridge and the ford. They had troops covering the forests on the far side all the way up to Mutter’s Ridge, cavalry patrolling the two cut roads that ran through the area, and their forces were in sight of Riverbend to the north and just a day’s hard march from Southbend to the south. Those two fortified towns were the anchors of the other side’s presence in the area, and if they fell, or were taken, the river would open back up again for three hundred miles. The fight would then move back up to the high ground east of the river again, back onto Sispetain. From the moors, it would be on to the plains beyond, then the mountains beyond that, the cities that crouched at their feet, the far coast, which none of them had seen except briefly when they’d arrived from orbit.

Conversations of tactics obsessed the pilots now. Miniature Trenchards and Hoeppners, they crouched in the dirt and drew pictures with sticks, pounded their fists on tables, jiggling the saltshakers and glasses of whiskey they used to denote fallback positions and axes of advance. They would move
here
, of course, then set up a secondary field
there
. They imagined turning Immelmans over the fortified walls of Riverbend, the shriek of twenty-five-pound bombs being dropped from a height. Everything looked simple to them from here on out: They had only to take the towns, take the moors, take the high plains, jump over the mountains, and then fall on the coastal cities. Two years, they’d been wasting their time out here in the back of beyond. The coast was where the action was, where this thing would be decided. It was like they’d spent all their days bombing and machine-gunning a bunch of farmers,
furry hillbillies with pointed sticks and poor personal hygiene, while the lights of an alien Manhattan burned, just out of sight, over the distant horizon.

So fuck the NRI. Fuck the off-worlders sticking their noses in at this late date. Fuck everyone but, most important, fuck the Lassateirra and the Akaveen and all the indigs, whatever they called themselves. The pilots were going to take this goddamn planet if they had to bomb every inch of it into submission. And it was all starting now. It was all going well
now
.

Except for one thing, which was the nagging refusal of the other side to show up to the fight. The pilots—some of them—were beginning to take this whole God thing to heart, Carter thought. Because, to look at the situation another way, Riverbend and Southbend were the two opposing jaws of the vise that the entire friendly indig army had just charged headlong into, and the next time any of them saw the glittering cities of the east and that coastline would be from orbit again, in chains, in the brig of the Colonial Marine transport shipping them all off to prison.

That was what Carter thought. It was a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty kind of thing and, for the most part, he kept his speculation to himself. The important thing was, for several days, nobody died and all of their planes came home whole.

Five days passed. Six. Things were growing frantic. The no-contact missions, the no-fire policy—it was eating at everyone. On top of this, there was Ted’s sudden, desperate need to keep every square inch of ground under constant surveillance. In daylight, it was all big talk and victory and men shooting each other vicious smiles as they made Vs with their fingers. But in the dark, the pilots granted mystical powers to the enemy indigs. They could vanish and appear at will. They could move faster than Superman. They had networks of tunnels under the ground through which they traveled like moles. In the morning, the men mocked them the same as they always had, but when the sun went down and the moons rose, it was different, malicious, spooky.
Sometimes they spoke of the enemy in tones of reverence or respect for the amount of punishment they’d endured from their heretofore untouchable tormentors. Sometimes it was plain fear. Sometimes it was more. “The wogs,” Carter’d heard David Rice say one night, his voice full of awe after returning from another night flight where nothing had been seen and nothing had been killed. “They’ve gone imaginary. The wogs understand it all.”

Nights were when the pilots feared the most about the least. Nights were really starting to fuck them up.

On the seventh day, it rained. A mist at first that was close to freezing so that walking in it felt like brushing up against snow and even a fast jog between, say, one’s tent and the mess for hot coffee and the thin pleasure of dull company—of, at least, hearing one’s own language spoken in this alien place—left a man feeling as though he’d just fallen into a bathtub full of icy water.

Ted ordered up regular patrols but kept them near to home in case the weather worsened. And when it did—the rain, at first, falling like little silver needles from a sky that was dark, close, and bruised with sickly light—no one went anywhere. All flights were grounded and the men mostly sat in gray silences, watching the drops of rain grow fat and begin to pour down with a kind of vengeance, to shatter themselves against the cold, hard ground until it seemed to be raining upward as well as down.

“If it keeps up,” Carter heard Ernie O’Day say, “he’ll have to cancel the night flights. No one would fly in the dark
and
freezing rain.”

“Ted might,” said George Stork.

“And the indigs might march in it,” added Wolfe, from first squadron, holding a white mug of hot coffee between his palms and rolling it slowly back and forth. “How much ground do you figure they could cover in twelve or fourteen hours, unmolested by airplanes?”

“A lot,” said Ernie.

“A lot,” said Stork.

“Damn right, a lot. This rain would be good for them. Good for their business.”

“Monkey business,” said Stork.

“Motherfucking monkey business.”

And all three of them laughed, the conversation trailing off into the awkward realization that there really wasn’t much else to say. Ted would or he wouldn’t. The pilots would or they wouldn’t. And the indigs, the same. There was no figuring it.

“Motherfucking monkey business.”

Later, the mess grew crowded and all the talk was pretty much the same. They discussed the rain and the cold, compared it to other rains and other colds. Johnny All-Around cooked freeze-dried steaks that he rubbed with some purple leaf that tasted a little bit like garlic, but not completely. Everyone sat down to dinner, but Emile Hardman refused to eat his steak, saying he wasn’t going to eat anything that’d been touched by some monkey plant.

“A patriot!” Fenn shouted from some corner of the mess. Carter hadn’t even known he was there. “I’ll eat his.”

The pilots laughed. Emile ate six cans of pears in syrup stamped with Earthside expiration dates that’d passed a year ago, and everyone drank cold beers pulled from the well of the ice machine and scotch by the bucket. They talked about fucking an indig lady and how much they’d have to be paid to do it. A hundred thousand dollars was the going rate. Fifty if they could do it from behind.

And yet still, there was no letup, no stopping. In the night, the rain turned to sleet and everyone cowered from it, hunkering down wherever they were, and the mess became like some big slumber party with everyone huddled up close and intimate and the ovens all turned on to heat the place. Around dawn the next day, the rain finally pissed itself out and the ground all froze. At the first glimmer of light in the sky, Ted came through the doors looking frozen into his uniform and ordered the planes up. They flew missions. They landed. They hopped out of their cockpits into ankle-deep, waxy mud as everything started to thaw, helped the ground crews slog their machines into the longhouse, helped them roll a new plane out onto the apron, ran to the mess for a cup of coffee, to the field house for a couple benzos from Doc Edison’s medical locker, a cigarette, then were back out on the strip again, agitating for clearance to go up, unscheduled, for kicks or for cover.