HOT-2: Lefty?
HOT-1: Tower, this is Jackrabbit. Bad Dog inbound is showing smoke.
TWR: Copy that, Jackrabbit.
TWR: Bad Dog, this is tower control. Are you damaged?
HOT-3: [Laughing]
HOT-2: I see that smoke. Coming back…
RAM: [Increasing engine noise. Stickshaker, indicating a hard climb]
HOT-2: Control, more ground fire.
OPS: Do you have a location on that ground fire?
TWR: Bad Dog, respond.
HOT-2: Right below and behind me. Um…
RAM: [Two clicks, rapid decrease in engine noise]
HOT-2: Jesus, fucking accurate, too. Multiple contacts. All over the bad side of the river here.
RAM: [Engine noise increasing. Two clicks—similar to flaps locking.]
HOT-2: Taking fire.
HOT-1: What the hell—
HOT-4: Ops, A flight. Two minutes. A.O. in sight.
HOT-1: Ops, I have… Is anyone else seeing this?
HOT-4: Jesus…
HOT-4: Ops, permission to engage immediately.
HOT-3: Tower, Bad Dog. I’m hit. I’m hit.
OPS: Negative, A flight. Climb and hold.
HOT-3: Oh mother…
TWR: Copy, Bad Dog. Come around to two-eight-three at any altitude. Bring it home.
HOT-3: Bleeding.
HOT-1: Ops, I’m seeing what looks like… I don’t know. Orbital flares?
HOT-2: Lefty? Speak, pal. What’s happening?
HOT-3: [Laughing]
HOT-3: [Unintelligible]… Fucking shot. I can’t…
HOT-1: Insertion flares, maybe.
TWR: Bad Dog, control. Make any return heading, any altitude. Find a—
OPS: Bad Dog, repeat.
HOT-2: Repeat, Lefty. Come on, man.
HOT-3: Oh God. I’m gonna die.
Porter didn’t see them—the flares. Later, he would say he had, but he hadn’t. He would sit with Emile Hardman in the ugly, rancid remains of the mess and, over coffee that was cold before they poured it, describe the beautiful, arcing comets of light. How they’d lit like fireworks, dragging long tails of fire across the cloud-stricken bowl of the sky. How, in fact, they’d almost seemed to boil the clouds as they passed through them—punching holes like wounds into the clotted masses of wet, gray banks and then sizzled along their bellies like worms made of fire.
“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he would say, staring into the cold, oily surface of his coffee, shaking his head as though he almost believed what he was saying. Which, all things considered, wasn’t difficult. It was like nothing he’d ever seen because he hadn’t actually seen anything. He was just talking so that he didn’t have to talk about Lefty.
That, he had seen. And Porter didn’t want to think about that ever again.
OPS: Medical to the field. Clear C. Clear the infield aprons.
TWR: Bad Dog, pull up and out. Come left, east by east, and we’ll walk you home.
HOT-2: Fenn?
HOT-1: Hold post, Porter. Stay with me.
Carter had ammunition belts rubbing against his ankles. Clawing for altitude, running from the airfield as though from a fire, and with the rest of his hodgepodge wing trailing behind, he felt the weight of the bullets subtly altering the flight characteristics of his fighter. There was the weight of the fuel in the tank behind his head, sloshing backward toward earth as his pitch increased, and the weight of the bombs he carried. The cannon rounds in their flimsy metal clips (which broke constantly, keeping the machine shop forever busy at mending) weighed him down as he struggled for the shifting, clotted soup of the clouds. There was the weight of his guns, the weight of the machine dragging behind him—of flaps and rudder and wings and tail and his seat and the radio and instruments, all of it being yanked forward and upward by the chopping of the propeller, the firing of the pistons in their cylinders. There was the great, solid weight of the engine itself. And there was the weight of him. Of his damp, cold leathers, his helmet, his jumpsuit, his sidearm and pocket lint and gloves and boots; of his blood and bone and brains.
All of it wanted to fall. Everything wanted to go to ground—the most natural thing in the world. And Carter would let it. He would give to gravity what it wanted soon enough. When he came to the apex of the parabola he was describing, the highest point in the hump of air he climbed over the distant earth, he would hang an instant—weightless, like he’d been two years ago in the instant the dropship that’d brought him here had fallen clear of the clamps—then roll over and descend like wrath. He would go, dropping weight as he went, spitting out bullets and shedding bombs, burning fuel and loosing the weight of held breath and expectation as he howled down upon the enemy that had been chosen for him. To fight them, finally, with fairness and equanimity. Guns with guns and bombs with bombs. To give them their fair shot at him, meet them in the interstices between sky and ground, see them in the open where neither of them could hide.