Out on the field, Ted still had the radio handset gripped in his fist. He’d waited until all his planes were on the ground. He’d gotten all the intelligence he could from the pilots. He’d waited as long as he could wait, had walked off, had given it as much thought as he could, and then had given the order. He’d called in to Diane at comms, told her to hit the button, and now was just waiting for the scramble siren to sound. He felt like he was being pulled in half and stood now, his face upturned, his eyes closed. He flinched as if burned by a hot ember when the first heavy, waxy flake touched his cheek.
“Is that snow?” he asked. There was no one around to answer him.
Charlie interrupted Emile in the middle of saying something that didn’t matter a bit to anyone.
“Check that out,” he said, pointing out the mess tent’s window. “Snow.”
Carter told Max he’d see him around and headed for the mess tent at a quick jog. Inside, Fenn saw him break suddenly from the edge of the strip, move into the grass of the infield. The clouds were all massed behind him, rolling in. Windblown flakes of snow danced in the air between them.
He didn’t make it even halfway to the mess tent door before the scramble siren went off.
PART 3
THE LAST DAY
TEN MINUTES LATER, CARTER IS BACK IN A PLANE. Strapped down hard. Idling on the taxiway at ready-one while the rest of the flight takes up post positions behind him. He has Jack Hawker, Tommy, Lefty, Stork, and Porter Vaughn on him. Fenn wrangles the remainders, the stragglers; lining them up right-oblique at the action end of A strip. There are choking clouds of smoke, much shouting, and the flat slaps of hands beating the sides of planes like anxious jockeys whipping horses still in the paddock as Vic and Raoul and Rockwell, Willy McElroy, little Paul Meleuire and Max, and anyone else with a free hand, come charging through the swirling, waxy snow at a dead run, dragging bomb sledges and ammo boxes and helmets and gloves, bits of stray gear forgotten in the haste of siren panic. The radio is a disaster of voices.
Carter is back in Roadrunner, so fresh out of the shop she still smells of oil and love and the arc flame of the welding gun. So fresh that, when the siren had gone off and he’d gone running to her, he’d found her just coming off the crane in the longhouse and had had to help put wheels on her—the pneumatic squeal of the driver almost deafening, the first buck of it jerking the pistol-grip right out of his hand.
The new engine is like a boy’s heart put into an old man’s body. Its rhythm—the sound of it—is different. To Carter, it sounds like his plane’s voice has changed, her expression, mood, temper, all wrong. He is wearing combat restraints, a six-point harness, all his gear, his helmet, collar, injectors. He has no map. There’d been no time. His flight electronics have been repaired, recalibrated. The airspeed indicator is new. The pedals are stiff.
All over the field, electric ignitions bring engines choking and banging to life. The pilots yell, “Contact!” anyhow, just because it feels good. There is no time to drag or wheel planes into position, so the pilots drive them onto the trim of the strip, wiggle and inch them into place. Wheels are chocked and unchocked as the snow falls and sticks to goggles and windscreens or is blasted by prop wash. Flags wave. They go staggered: Carter getting the first green, then Fenn crossing behind him, then Jack and Tommy together crossing behind him, then Charlie Voss and Billy, and on like that until everyone is airborne; Fokkers and Camels crisscrossing, straightening course; mean, wicked slashings of color across the tumbling clouds as paint jobs whip into the sky, roll, curl and climb, clawing for the close, claustrophobic ceiling of the clouds even before the throbbing headset chatter of a dozen simultaneous shouting, cheering, cursing voices expends itself into breathless silence.
Ted is on the command channel: “Flight leaders, make course for Riverbend. You are free-fire cleared.”
Carter has to force Roadrunner to climb, feeling as though he ought to get out and push. He’d needed the full length of the runway before feeling the bite and lift of the air beneath him. The new engine is heavy. Powerful. Big like a god is big, but ponderously, murderously heavy. It needs a pull that it doesn’t have while climbing until he cautiously opens the throttle a little further, then further, listening for the point where the roar will become a scream, a shriek, then silence, seize, stall, and death. There is a sweet spot. He just has to find it. The two of them, he and his plane, will learn together or they won’t. There is no safety net. No one on Iaxo wears parachutes.
He’ll get it, he thinks. The two of them, Carter and his plane, will learn each other’s quirks and tolerances, or they will die. And as he gives the throttle another nudge, he suddenly feels a sense of almost bottomless power in her, a reserve of strength that is massive, dangerous, and comforting. He throttles up again, and the engine barely changes its tone as, suddenly, the balance shifts and he squirts skyward like a jet, cleaving a path, his flight following in the messy chaos of his prop wash.