A Private Little War(119)
She’d told him before that he shouldn’t be flying anymore. That there was no need. And she could do that, being lead controller. She felt as though she was able to say things to Ted that no one else could—that it was her place to point out things that, maybe, he wasn’t in a position to notice.
He’d listened to her for a while, but then had stopped. Said who was she to tell him what was needed?
Lead controller, she’d told him. That’s who.
You don’t know what’s needed, he’d said. You don’t understand.
Oh yes, I do.
He’d been carrying one of the radio handsets outside with him, Ted had. Diane knew that for a fact. She also happened to know that he slept with it in his hand, curled into his fist, his fist on his chest, with the rubber whip antennae sticking up like a lily in the hand of a corpse. Every sound it made, his eyes would snap open like window shades. She’d watched this. She was the one who’d change out the handset batteries in the middle of the night, when it was quiet, so that Ted would never notice. For two hours, sometimes three, she’d leave the fresh batteries out. She’d sit beside him, bouncing them in her palm. It was the only real sleep Ted ever got.
Lead controller, that’s who.
Ted was pulling Jimmy’s headphones on. Ted was crouching to Jimmy’s microphone. His eyes were wild in his head. Bloodshot and watering from the cold and the sudden sour, stinging snow that’d blown up.
Shun Le was slapping her hand on the flat shelf of the radio console—something she did when she was looking for attention.
Jimmy was scrambling to his feet.
Jimmy was grabbing Shun Le for leverage and hauling himself up.
Shun Le was pushing him off.
Diane was standing, waiting to see what would happen next. The pilots babbled in her ear. Her breath was coming low and in grunts.
Jimmy—who’d never done a cruel thing, who’d never raised his voice, who’d never been anything but cordial and sometimes had coffee or tea with Diane when she was coming off the night shift and he was coming on—raised a hand. Jimmy made a fist and punched Ted in the back. He put all his weight behind it.
Jimmy might just as well have punched a rock.
Diane smiled, her lips parted slightly, tongue touching the tips of her front teeth.
Ted was suddenly calm. Ted was suddenly in control. His eyes were still bloodshot. He still looked like death walking. But there was some weight in him now. A presence that Diane recognized but couldn’t put a name to. He turned in the chair.
You don’t understand.
Oh yes, I do.
“Hit him…,” Diane hissed under her breath, too quietly for anyone else to hear. “Hit him…”
HOT-2: Fenn, is your radio down? I’m getting nothing from the controllers…
There was an order, a method for getting men and airplanes off the ground and into the air. There had been plans—written down somewhere, studied, lost, found, memorized, practiced, debated over. There were words to be intoned and replies to be made, pious gestures and motions to go through, movements to make. Like anything important, it all seemed rote and pointless in those hours and days and years when none of it had been necessary; when a man and his plane might leisurely go up and come down, defying and then succumbing to gravity without schedule. And then, like anything important, in the sudden moment when the plan’s purpose became borne out by the situation for which it’d been designed, the whole thing just went completely to shit.
In his plane, Carter watched the chaos on the ground and it made him smile. All this action, this furious activity—it was exciting, was what it was. Finally, there was something to do. And it didn’t matter to him if they did it well or did it poorly. He just didn’t want to miss all the fun.
HOT-1: Control, this is Jackrabbit. Over.
HOT-1: Porter, come around sharp and put on some fucking altitude. Now. Lefty, you follow.
HOT-2: Roger that, spotter. Coming around to two-four-five. Breaking.
HOT-2: Lefty?
HOT-3: Heard him.
RAM: [Increasing engine noise]
RAM: [Navigation capture chime] (possibly from HOT-1?)
HOT-1: What the hell is that?
HOT-1: Control, Jackrabbit. Do you copy?
HOT-4: Fenn? A flight inbound. Is that me you’re reading?
HOT-1: A flight, hold one.
HOT-1: Porter, Lefty, bug out now. Come to ten thousand on any heading.
HOT-2: Ten thousand, roger.
TWR: Jackrabbit, this is control. Are you—
HOT-1: ’Bout fucking time…
HOT-1: Control, I have an unidentified potential target. Off the river at—
RDO-1: Fenn, pull them up and out immediately. Come to two-seven-zero and get back across the river at altitude. Go to ceiling.
TWR: I have the target. Marking it as a navigation point. It’s on the ground at—