A Private Little War(115)

The precision application of explosives slowed the pursuit briefly but did not stop it. The enemy was determined. Or perhaps crazed. With two years of practice, of knowing what waited for them whenever they crossed open ground, they absorbed the casualties like scratches to the body and just kept coming. At that point, the indigs were roughly thirty-five miles from the Flyboy encampment and closing fast.

Carter signaled for his flight to re-form on him, took them up to five thousand feet, and ordered his remaining planes back to the field for reloading. He would remain on station until Jack Hawker returned to take his place, allowing him, then, to go home, rearm, reload, come back. The flight could not maintain the consistent, withering, demoralizing fire that Carter would like because they simply could not carry enough bullets and bombs and cannon rounds to keep up the fight for more than thirty minutes at a stretch. Carter crossed the center of the moving battlefield, tangling briefly with B flight’s pattern, then rolled out to get a look at the larger picture and prime his cannon. In the strange, hanging gravity of the combat dive, he tried to place his shots with care, aiming for standard bearers or large concentrations of horses; but following the first pass by the fighters, the enemy had immediately spread itself out, lessening the ratio of shots to kills, to wounds, to cripplings and maimings and terrible slow, cold death.

His .303s are nearly dry. He has run completely out of bombs. He calls Fenn as he sees all but two of his fighters chuddering off in the direction of the airfield and asks, “You, too?”

“Dry as dirt. Shot their wads.”

“Hadn’t anticipated this particular problem.”

“Me either. Those odds are beginning to look more and more right. Eddie’s odds, I mean.”

Carter thinks for a moment. His finger strokes delicately at his machine gun’s trigger—not firing, just teasing. “This isn’t that,” he says, finally. “I don’t think this is that.”

“Maybe. But it makes one think.”

Fenn says something to his fighters, and his two remaining wingmen roll over and fall into fierce dives, guns spitting sparks of light—tracers that, when they hit the hard-packed and frozen ground, bounce. Unless, of course, they find a body to embed themselves in. Something soft and warm and welcoming. They’d gone after a small knot of horses milling briefly around a flag. When they are through, there are no more horses. There is no more flag.

Ted’s voice crackles on the radio. “Command to A flight leader. Carter?”

“Copy, Ted. What’s up?”

“What’s the distance between the two parties now?”

“Parties?” As if this were a lark, an outing. Looking down, Carter can see a trail of wrack and ruin and meat and blood and death running back from where the horses are now to where the planes had first engaged them; a track, sometimes thick, in some places thin. A brief flurry of snow swirls between him and the ground—greasy, fat flakes offering a mercy of blindness.

“Between the retreating monkeys and the pursuing force. How far?”

“Mile and a half and closing fast. Maybe two miles.” Carter brings his machine around like reining up a skittish mount. She turns to the left as if bee-stung, the torque of the engine dragging her whole body in a skidding, ferocious inside turn. Carter groans as he is shoved roughly back into his seat, then continues. “Retreating forces are backing up at the river.”

“What about between the pursuing horses and the main body?”

“That’s a long way. Five miles. More.”

“How bad have you fucked up those horses?”

“Bad,” Carter says, recalling in a flash the bomb drop, the screaming he’d imagined, of the damaged and the dead. “But they’re not stopping. They’re taking it.”

“Connelly is not in position to intercept ground forces. If we don’t stop this advance right here, there will be nothing between the Lassateirra and us to slow them up.” There is a pause, static, whistle of distortion. Over the radio, Carter can hear engine sounds, shouts, the husking of the wind. Ted is still on the flight line. Carter pushes a fresh magazine into the cannon—one of his last two—then primes it. He takes a breath and blows it out through pursed, frozen lips, a thin line of steam almost instantly sucked back into the slipstream.

“Carter. A flight is scrambling in bombers. Lay off the horses. All fire to be concentrated on turning back the main body. Hawker will lead the bombers in. Berthold and Vaughn are ahead of them by a few minutes, already in the air.”

“Roger that.”

“Captain Teague is remaining on station to spot for me. Bring everyone else in to reload now—understand?”