A Private Little War (7 page)

Ted felt a sick giggle rising up in him but swallowed it. Bit it off and held it behind the palisade of his teeth. He was an employee. A contractor. Mercenary. There were rules governing nearly everything he was supposed to do under circumstances both bizarre and mundane but very little in the handbook to cover this sort of eventuality. This sudden removal of the parental gaze of his distant bosses. His hands were shaking on the table. He smoothed the paper in front of him again—petting it like a cat. He chewed his lip. He knew what was happening
now
, but
he was very unclear on what he was supposed to do next. There were no rules for this. No procedure. He was, as they say, in the dark.

At a certain point, Lefty Berthold from two squadron had ambled over, stood swaying, close to Ted with a drink in his hand, and asked him what he was playing with.

“Love letter, Commander?”

“Something like that,” Ted had said.

“It’s been some time since anyone here got any mail. Must feel nice.”

For a moment, Ted thought Lefty was being sincere, but when he looked up at him, he saw a vacant, dumb smile on the man’s face. Berthold was an idiot and a pig. Ted hated him more than a little and only loved him as much as he loved the most generic of his men—as he imagined a father must a child who is a complete and endearing disappointment. He tolerated him the precise distance that blood required.

“Go fuck with someone else, Lefty,” he’d said. “I’m in no mood.”

Eventually, Ted had stood. He’d spent twenty minutes or more watching men come and go. He had accounted for nearly all of the pilots, so had asked, “Where’s Captain Carter?” and the men in the field house had all shrugged, looked away. Ted had stared at them, or tried to. “Lugs,” he’d said. “Drunk goddamn mothers.” His eyes had been bright. He spit a little when he talked and no one would meet his eye. “There’s work to do. None of you go anywhere.”

Ted had walked out the door. He would send Captain Carter to fly tonight. This was his plan. Carter was not among the revelers, not in the mess or the field house or running around in the cold and dark. Ted knew this because he’d counted. He imagined that Carter was at home, tucked up warm in bed and sleeping like a good soldier. That was the best he could hope for—that Carter wasn’t drunk or sick or out of his head. All he needed was one man.

Outside, Ted had found Fennimore Teague staring daggers at the retreating back of Billy, who was headed out for the flight line with Morris Ross in tow.

“Captain,” he’d said.

“Commander.”

“What’s this all about? You look in a stabbing kind of mood.”

Fenn had shaken his head. “Nonsense is all. Billy’s going up.”

“He does that.” Ted had briefly considered having Billy run the flares but had thought better of it. Billy, he thought, wouldn’t go. Billy, he thought, would just tell him to fuck off to his face, requiring a reaction from Ted that would end in bad feelings, disciplinary action, worse. Billy was a great pilot, the best of the night fliers, but had, at some point, slipped beyond the point where he took orders easily. With another option available, Billy wasn’t worth the trouble. “You seen your boy Carter?”

“Yes,” said Fenn, but nothing more.

“Not drinking with the boys.”

“No.”

“There a problem?”

Fenn had paused, turned his head with a strange, slow deliberation, and looked Ted up and down. “That seems a strange question. I don’t know how to answer it.”

Ted shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it. Look, I need someone to fly. Someone sober, who’s not going to shit himself or crash his fucking machine. Durba called in movement to his front last night, in the hills. Same thing tonight. Monkey noises, trees going down, whatever. There’s something going on, and he wants an illumination mission run so he can stop it before someone has a bad morning.”

“Illumination seems in short supply here, Commander.” Fenn smiled like someone had stuck fishhooks in his cheeks and pulled—a false, dead thing.

“Was going to do it with signal flares, but now we’ve got something better. Supply is coming in. And we need friends at the front.”

“Tonight?”

“An hour, maybe less. It’s inbound right now.”

“That’s unexpected.”

“Not completely.”

“Largesse from our corporate masters. Presents from on high…”

“Something like that.”

“Gifts from wise men.”

“Just love hearing yourself talk, don’t you, Captain.”

“It’s Christmas, Commander. I’m getting in the spirit.”

Ted straightened up, jerking back just a little from Fenn and eyeing him carefully, trying to ferret out the lie in him. “It is not.”

“Is,” said Fenn. “Back home. I just enjoy the irony is all.”

“Well…”

Ted had found himself at a momentary loss for words. He cursed. That explained the twenty-four-hour delay in the confirmation of the final orders, he supposed. The junior accountant on the phone. Beside him, Fenn was humming something. It was “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and Ted had to turn away for a second to stop from laughing, more bubbles of sick mirth rising in him and tasting of rot and vomit.

“Look,” he said, after recovering himself. “I have to be at comms. Someone needs to fly. Someone else needs to run the off-loading. Which guy do you want to be?”

Fenn had clucked his tongue, tilted his head just so. “Cruel,” he said. “Very, very cruel.” He was one of those people who had total control over his face. An actor’s control. A high-functioning sociopath’s. He was handsome and knew it, had cutting blue eyes and wheat-straw hair like an overgrown boy with an ancient, cunning old man inside pulling his strings. He used the planes and angles of his face like a second language, with a deliberation that made a person feel like there was always a joke being told that he didn’t quite understand and that was, maybe, being told at his expense.

Ted saw none of this, though. Never had. “Just the way of things,” he said. “So which is it going to be?”

“Kevin’s at home, in the tent. Sleeping, I think. Alone.”

“Wise choice,” Ted had said. “Everyone’s staying put back at the house until the load comes in. Round them up, oversee the off-loading. I’ll have someone get Carter’s plane ready.”

“Vic is around somewhere,” Fenn had said. “I’m sure she’d be happy to do it.” There’d been a coldness in his voice that, again, completely failed to impress Ted.

He’d gone to wake Carter.

It was dark. Carter was asleep and, like a child, dreaming of soaring without a plane. Of flying, which he loved, and of a place that wasn’t
this place, which he hated in many lusciously complicated, well-chewed-over ways.

In his sleep Carter didn’t hear Ted Prinzi come through the door. He didn’t hear Ted approach his cot and, for just a moment, stand and watch him sleeping with a careful eye. He didn’t see Ted tighten down his lips as though doing difficult math in his head, looking around at the cramped, despicable shadows of looming filth and clutter in the tent, or square his shoulders or squint down at him in the dark. It wasn’t until Ted cleared his throat wetly and began to speak that Carter was jerked suddenly out into rude, unwelcome consciousness.

“On your feet, pilot. Time to earn a paycheck.”

Carter stirred, throwing an arm across his face and screwing himself deeper down into the coarse blankets.

“You drunk, Carter?” Ted barked, though he knew full well that Carter was not. He lashed out with a foot and kicked one of the legs of Carter’s cot in a way that he felt was comradely but really wasn’t at all. “Liquid rations for dinner again, yeah?”

Carter opened his eyes. He saw Ted standing over his cot with a blackout lantern in his hand, playing its shuttered beam across his face. “Go fuck yourself, Ted,” he said.

“Orders, pilot. Orders is orders.”

“It’s dark. We don’t fly in the dark.”

Ted chuckled damply, a sound like mud cliffs giving way to gravity. Carter knew he’d had a trench cough for months that he couldn’t quite shake.

“We do tonight, sweetheart,” he said. “Illumination mission. The indigs want some light to kill each other by. You drew the short straw.”

Carter sat up with a grunt, rubbed at his eyes, coughed, scratched himself.
Fucking lice
, he thought. “I didn’t draw any straw, Ted. I was sleeping, in case you didn’t notice.”

“I know that, pilot. That’s why I drew for you.” From the breast pocket of his uniform blouse, Ted took two cigarettes—manufactured, filter-tip cigarettes from a private stash—and put them both in his mouth, lighting them over the smoke-blackened chimney of the lantern. He reached down and stuck one between Carter’s lips like he was planting a stake.

Ted said, “See what you get for not staying up and drinking with your mates?” And even though Ted had meant it as a good thing, it made Carter want to punch him straight in his gin blossoms, but he didn’t. He took a drag instead and felt himself grow light-headed, sinking back into his thin pillow and stinking blankets.

Ted drew back the lantern and grinned hugely, face lit in harsh angles, head round like a Halloween pumpkin with wet, sucking lips opening like a wound and pulling back into a graveyard smile. The man had teeth like ivory headstones, not one of them his.

“On the flight deck in ten, Carter,” he said, then closed the shutter on the lantern with a tinny snap. Everything went dark again. There was just the red tip of Ted’s cigarette, glowing from the middle of his face. Then the sound of the door opening. Then the sound of it closing again.

Outside the tent, Ted took a breath. Then another. He’d counted: One pilot, sober. His chest rattled and hurt from the cold air, but it felt good to be clear of the stinking closeness and claustrophobia of Carter’s quarters. He wanted to wash and looked longingly off in the direction of the shower tent, but there wasn’t time. With a grunt of disgust, he threw away the cigarette he’d lit and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers as if trying to stave off a headache that was far away yet but coming at a gallop.

Two years, he’d been on Iaxo. Nearly. It’d been seven hundred days, give or take a few hours, as measured by London, Earth. Fewer here, where a day and a night took thirty-one hours and some number of minutes annoying enough that no one bothered counting them. Seven hundred days, each counted and duly logged, marking nothing but an inexplicable and, ultimately, unforgivable failure.

His men were falling apart. Almost all of them. He’d chosen Carter to fly because Carter was the only pilot sleeping, one of the few not drunk or crazed or liable to lose it in the long reach of the night. And if, right now, Kevin Carter was the best of them, Ted knew how poorly that spoke of their situation in general, because Carter had the black cross on him and everyone knew it. Everyone except maybe Carter.
He gave off the pall of death wherever he went, throwing it off like an infection so that Ted had seen other pilots refuse to sit in chairs that Carter had recently vacated or drink from bottles that he had touched. But after seven hundred days here, everyone was coming apart at the seams. Everyone was losing their stuffing.

And now this. He’d spoken to London—been passed down through the ranks to some junior clerk in the accounting department stuck working over Christmas, who’d unknowingly told him that they were being lost here, laid off. He’d received confirmation of that same thing through channels, the lethality of it buried in jargon, clotted with acronym, but none of that making it any less of a death sentence. He touched the pocket with the letter in it. He imagined it like a bullet, slowly crawling its way toward his heart. All of their hearts. Ted knew something that none of the rest of the men did. Not even Eddie. A secret that, for the time being, he would carry alone.

Fucked once again by time—stuck hundreds of light-years from home with a handful of men, a few antique airplanes, a certain number of bombs and hammers and shit-paper and beans and a supply drop coming that he alone now knew was going to be the last one, ever.

Ted had no politics. No philosophy beyond the sure knowledge that seeing the hammer coming down reduced all of life’s complications to the simplest equation: Survive or don’t. Twenty years of corporate war had taught him many lessons, but this was the one he’d taken most to heart. This was what he believed. Or what he believed that he believed, anyhow. He’d seen the hammer, so what did he have to do next? And when that was done, what came after?