RDO-1: I am going to OPS frequency now. Tower, scramble the fighters. Close C for takeoffs. Landings only. Emergency crews and equipment to the field.
RAM: [More chimes, increasing engine sounds]
HOT-4: I have three unidentified captures. Are these targets?
HOT-4: Four now.
OPS: A flight inbound, maintain course and heading. Rally at ten thousand, over the bridge at the third nav beacon. Box it.
HOT-4: Roger, Ops.
RDO-3: All fighters to ready position.
RAM: [Sound of siren from ground]
HOT-3: Cavalry is breaking up, Porter. See that there?
RDO-3: Fighters in taxi. Ground crews are still on the strip. Field crews shifting. Ops, do you want them to finish loading the fighters?
HOT-2: Yeah, come out and around, Lefty. We’ve got altitude. Just stay clear.
OPS: No. Put ’em in the air. We’re re-forming by wing in the air at… Give them north by north, five miles clear. Form up and hold for attack orders.
RDO-3: Copy that.
TWR: A flight inbound hold and box at ten thousand at nav three. Jackrabbit and one-two inbound, crossing the river and going to ceiling.
RAM: [Sound of click from HOT-3—similar to rudder maximizing]
HOT-3: We’re going to come back and—
RAM: [Sound of tearing]
RAM: [Sound of stick shaking begins. Sound of solid metallic impacts]
HOT-3: Oh God.
Carter had seen Ted taking off like a dart for the comms tent. He’d been waiting on fuel, hunched down in Roadrunner’s cockpit, sitting on his hands to keep them warm. He was listening to the radio.
Raoul came with the gas—hand pump on a dolly meant for moving file cabinets or furniture. He got a call to taxi to ready-one. He responded with a negative. “Waiting on the fuel truck, baby,” was what he’d said.
He had machine-gun rounds. Belts of them, and then extras stashed in folds behind his seat. Max was walking the stubble field, passing out bombs like Halloween candy. Carter had eleven rounds for the cannon and could’ve stood ten or twenty more. He was heavy, but unconcerned. Breathing through his mouth, he felt dizzy with anticipation and frozen by the scattered action on the field, like he was looking in on it all from outside. Like they were in a snow globe he was shaking, far beyond the concerns of the tiny people inside. He heard Fenn yelling at Porter and Porter yelling at Lefty. They were having fun. He didn’t want to miss it. He wanted to play, too.
Raoul finished with the gas, slapped Roadrunner on the flank, and moved on. Carter pulled a hand free and stuck his thumb up. He called ground control. “Ready for taxi,” he said, and got no response. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine sunbeams on his face, the smell of anything green and living. The new engine growled like something caged and sent rumbles of power jittering up through Carter’s tailbone. It made him have to pee.
Lefty saw something; he was yelled at some more. No one knew what he’d seen. Lefty was an idiot. Fine pilot, but an idiot. Jumpy. Bad eyes. He’d been Carter’s drogue man since day one on Iaxo—fifth pilot in a squadron that generally sortied in pairs—and it never seemed to bother him. Carter snuggled down deeper into his seat, ducking his chin down to his chest and breathing into the fur of his collar. He pursed his cold lips. “Lefty,” he whispered. “Lefty, Lefty, Lefty.” His radio reception was spotty. It popped and crackled in his ear.
Orders began coming through. “Roadrunner, clear to taxi. Runway B left. Splendor, Havoc—three and nine at runway B left. Three squadron shift to runway A left. Ground crews away. All clear runway C.”
Carter checked his mirror. He straightened his legs and squeezed up against his restraints, looking across the cowling and through the spinning prop before goosing the throttle and trying to rumble forward. The plane bumped and went nowhere. He was chocked. Keying his radio to the ground crew frequency, he felt a sudden sparkle in the air, an aliveness and tension that was like a fog lifting, a sudden adjustment in some global focus knob that brought everything into bright and sharp contrast.
“Roadrunner to ground. I’m chocked. Somebody pull these fuckers.”
He thought he might be hyperventilating. Or having a heart attack. “This is just one of those things,” he said to himself, aloud, and watched, wide-eyed, the swirls of waxy snow drifting and spinning across the field. The bare branches of trees like skeleton fingers on the verge. Rockwell kicking viciously with his steel-toed boots at the wheel mount of George Stork’s Fokker, Iaxo Hustler, and the remains of first squadron, Albert Wolfe and Billy Stitches, wheeling their planes, Havoc and Splendor in the Grass, into their places in the taxi order, and Vic, somewhere out there, stopped like a wound-down toy, head cocked, one ear to the wind—paused in midstride because, as Carter knew, she’d felt it, too. A physical change in the atmosphere, like a pressure drop. Max was flagging planes, wearing a wide, gap-toothed smile. Meleuire came at a run, jinked around Roadrunner’s spinning prop at the last second, yanked the chocks, and then popped up on the other side of the fuselage, spinning the chocks on their cord. He signaled Carter to roll.