A Private Little War(117)
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.