A Private Little War (50 page)

HOT-3:
Way low. Passing over now.

HOT-1:
One-two inbound, this is Fenn. What’s the problem, gentlemen?

HOT-2:
You are seeing things, Lefty.

HOT-1:
[Unintelligible] (Fucking cold legs?)

RAM:
[Flight sounds, navigation capture chime]

HOT-2:
Fenn? Porter. What’s the time to target on the bombers?

HOT-1:
Uh… Dunno. Hold one.

RAM:
[Clack of frequency change]

HOT-1:
Spotter to A flight inbound. Do you copy?

HOT-4:
Copy you, Fenn.

HOT-1:
Jack?

HOT-4:
Yeah. We’re on our way. Do you have a heading for us?

HOT-1:
Yeah, no. What’s your time to the river?

HOT-4:
Uh… Let me…

HOT-1:
Jack?

HOT-4:
Wait a second.

HOT-4:
Ten minutes. Less, maybe. We’re heavy.

HOT-1:
Okay.

RAM:
[Sound of engine cycling up RPM]

HOT-1:
Okay. Make for the river. Call in when you’re in sight.

HOT-4:
Roger that. A Flight out.

HOT-1:
Spotter out.

RAM:
[Frequency change, groaning]

HOT-1:
Porter? Ten minutes or less.

HOT-2:
Okay, well…

HOT-3:
Let’s go already!

HOT-2:
Uh…

HOT-1:
One-two, what’s the fucking problem?

Earlier in the day, on dawn patrol in the sky above Riverbend, Fenn had seen all he needed to of his future on Iaxo. He’d flown up with Charlie Voss and Stork and Emile Hardman. At play, they’d been. Their guns (and their everything else) cold in the thin morning air and thin morning light.

Scouting. Ted’s new way of winning the war. As ridiculous as every other. Bored, Fenn had been thinking of home. His last real home, green among the gray. Volcanoes sketched in the hand of a child—three of them like inverted Vs. His wife, Rose, under the dome of geodesic glass. Round face with a permanent smile.

Fenn had thought about Eddie while he flew a route so common that his plane seemed to know the way all on its own. He thought about what Eddie had said in the tent a million years ago. A few hours ago. All his numbers. His matters of consequence and paper and figures of murderous accuracy. The cigarette he couldn’t keep lit. He thought about standing in the cold with Carter.

What did you do before you joined the company?

Two years they’d been together. Carter had never asked him this before. A strange thing only in the realization of its absence.

Nothing
, he’d said, mostly because he was suddenly angry that it’d never come up before. That Carter hadn’t asked. That they’d talked of socks and toast and where they’d fought and the money they’d made or hadn’t made and which rock was better than this rock—Carter’s notion of meaningful conversation.
You
?

And Carter hadn’t answered either. Maybe for the same reason. Maybe for his own.

They’d flown, line abreast, he and Stork and Charlie and Emile. Patrolling the nothing. The patchwork. The stupid ground. Orders from King Ted had been to stay well clear of the indig cities, but orders were only orders.

So Fenn had approached, dragging the wing along with him, and ten thousand feet became nine, then eight. The river had split the living ground laid out below them and then the walls of the city had risen; beyond it, the stepping land, the tabling moors. The horizon was smudged with dust in the slanting, early rays of the young, glassine sun, and Fenn had touched a little rudder, meaning to skid by, over Riverbend and the Akaveen siege force laid out around it, just to the east. The wing had responded smoothly. And then they’d seen—Stork had seen—the last of the braking flares, carving a hairline gleam just off the temporary arc of the rising sun’s ecliptic.

“Was that…”

“Jesus.”

“Altitude,” Fenn had ordered. “Get up there. Everyone.”

Planes had scrambled, reaching for height and a recovery from glare-blindness. It was the panic of small animals suddenly scared out of their wits, fighting for angular geometries of safety and vision they understood only in their most secret, animal hearts. The planes had snapped past Riverbend without giving it a second look, moving more deeply into Indian country as they poured power into their machines and ran for altitude. The only safety they’d ever known.

The high moors had been covered with men and materiel and machines, all arriving by the first blinding light of dawn when the
radiance of sunrise would wash out the fires of their arrival. It’d looked to Fenn as though they’d been coming for days, though that, he was willing to admit later, might just have been the shock. It might have only been hours. It might have been forever—all of them arranging themselves behind the lines, just out of view, waiting.

Fenn went to call it in. He’d been reaching out to fiddle with the radio. And that was when the disastrous assault on Riverbend had begun. He had wheeled the wing clear at altitude. He’d talked to ground control, and then to Ted. Everyone was chattering on the radio, talking over one another. He dialed in the wing frequency and overrode them all. “Home,” he’d said.

There was no response, but everyone followed him as he leaped on the shortest radial for the return flight. On the ground, the natives were getting their asses handed to them. They were experiencing hand grenades, learning about the wrong ends of rifles, discovering land mines in the worst possible way, all courtesy of the Lassateirra indigs and their NRI friends inside Riverbend. Fenn was too high to see the worst of it, and he’d been glad for that.

HOT-1:
Porter, talk to me.

HOT-2:
One-two to spotter, requesting permission to break and investigate.

HOT-1:
We are fighter cover, one-two. Bombers are on their way. Come up to five thousand and form up. Now.

RAM:
[Static. Increased engine sound]

HOT-1:
Investigate what?

HOT-2:
Fucked if I know.

HOT-2:
Lefty?

HOT-3:
Can’t see it.

HOT-1:
Lefty, this is Fenn. Talk to me.

HOT-3:
[Unintelligible]

HOT-1:
Bad Dog, repeat. What did you see?

HOT-2:
Coming back, one-eight-zero degrees. Idiot. Fuck, Lefty. Break and come back.

HOT-1:
Somebody say something useful, please? One-two, I have visual of you. Break and come around and ascend to five thousand.

HOT-3:
There!

HOT-1:
Porter, get him back now or I’m going to shoot his dumb ass down myself.

HOT-2:
Copy that, spotter.

HOT-2:
Hear him, Lefty? Think he’s fucking around? Not today, if we…

HOT-3:
There! There! Guns in the field. Repeat, weapons on the field. I’m passing over right now. Directly below me.

HOT-2:
No way. How could they… Spotter! You copy, Fenn?

RDO-2:
One-two inbound, did you [unintelligible]

RDO-?:
[Unintelligible] (Sound of struggle?)

HOT-1:
I copy you, flight leader.

HOT-2:
Did you…

HOT-1:
I heard him. Can you confirm?

RDO-?:
… Off the fucking thing… Hold him!

HOT-1:
Porter! Can you confirm?

Ted came through the door to the comms tent at a dead run, shouldering his way through and cracking the thin wood at the frame, never slowing down. He ran until he hit the radio boards and then clubbed Jimmy McCudden right out of his chair with his forearm. Tore the headphones off him by the wire.

Diane saw it all from the tower seat. She screamed when Ted hit the door, but she didn’t have her microphone keyed. For just a second, she thought they were being invaded, and it’d been like all of her nightmares were coming true.

Jimmy fell out of his chair. He’d been talking. Diane tried to fix all of these details in her mind in case they became important later. Ted had hit Jimmy from behind, swinging his arm like a bat. Jimmy fell into Shun Le, who was coordinating ground traffic and taxi orders. She yelled, too. Diane was on her feet, her microphone off, and she tried to shush Shun Le because she was in charge—lead controller—and there
wasn’t supposed to be any talking on the radio line that wasn’t integral to each controller’s duties. People got distracted so easily. They lost track of what was important. So Diane tried to shush Shun Le. She stood up and she waved her hands.

But Shun Le wasn’t listening.

Ted was yelling at Jimmy: “Get off the fucking thing!” And he was yanking at the headphone wire.

Shun Le was saying that she’d had just about enough of this shit and was going to file a complaint.

In the air, the pilots were all shouting at each other. A flight—the bombers—were on the wrong radial and having to duck down below the lowering cloud base to get themselves straightened out.