A Private Little War(123)
Carter called in his flight to rally. He circled to let them gather and form up. Below him, terrible things were happening. And as he reached his chosen point in the sky, he rolled over, pointed his nose toward the ground, and became a terrible thing himself.
HOT-3: Tower…
HOT-1: Ops? What are we doing here?
HOT-3: I gotta… Down, down, down.
TWR: Bad Dog, this is control. Do you copy?
HOT-1: Ops! I saw entry flares. Ten and two, high, coming in and headed for the moors near Southbend. Past, maybe.
OPS: Jackrabbit, hold one.
OPS: A flight, this is Ops. Form up.
HOT-3: [Coughing] I need a… [Unintelligible] (Doctor?)
OPS: Jackrabbit, Ops. Do you have a visual of the target?
HOT-3: I can’t… Oh God. There’s so much blood. I don’t…
HOT-1: What target, Ops? The landing site?
TWR: Bad Dog, you are drifting. Come back on your heading.
HOT-3: I’m gonna try to…
OPS: The ground fire, Jackrabbit. The weapons. What landing site?
HOT-3: Down. Put down.
HOT-3: I don’t want to die. I don’t… I don’t want to die now.
HOT-1: No. Not unless they’re shooting at us, Ted.
OPS: Not now.
HOT-1: We’re at almost twenty thousand feet here, Ops. No, I can’t.
HOT-3: Not now. Not now.
OPS: A flight, any visual?
HOT-3: No. No. No. [Coughing]
Hot-4: No, Ops. No visual.
HOT-3: No!
HOT-3: Tower, Bad Dog. Coming around to two-eight-zero. I’m coming home.
TWR: Copy that, Bad Dog. Can you—
HOT-3: Blood all over the thing. I’m hurt pretty bad.
TWR: We’re waiting on you, Bad Dog. You’re going to be fine.
HOT-3: [Sound of grunting or heavy breathing] Gonna be fine. Coming home.
RAM: [Sound of banging—similar to engine oil pressure drop or failing cylinder]
HOT-3: I can see the—
TWR: Bad Dog, altitude is—
HOT-3: Flaps.
OPS: Come on home, Lefty.
TWR: Altitude is low. Come up. Come up.
RAM: [Sound of flash-over, engine sound decreases, spooling down]
HOT-3: [Screaming, unintelligible, continues to end]
HOT-4: Oh my God.
TWR: Bad Dog, do you copy?
HOT-4: Flame out! Lefty’s on fire! On fire!
TWR: Bad Dog?
RAM: [Sound of roaring—similar to engine fire or flash-over]
HOT-1: Fuck you, Ted.
RAM: [Sound of impact]
END OF RECORDING
HOT-1: Fuck you, Ted.
Fenn had kicked Jackrabbit into a long, dancing turn, standing her high on her wing and watching the wet compass spin before nosing down into a shallow dive. He’d throttled back his engine, the glideslope seeming to pull him toward the ground with a slow-mounting tension of mass and alien gravities.
“Porter, follow me. Low six.”
“Roger that, Jackrabbit. Falling in.”
Lefty was like a dud firework. He was the last flare in the box, drifting to ground unnoticed. Fenn killed his channel. He didn’t need anyone else’s screams to haunt him, though he knew some of the others—Carter—would suckle at them, drain every last decibel like an alcoholic tonguing the neck of an emptied bottle. While he was at it, he killed the Ops channel as well.
“A flight, this is Jackrabbit. New target information.”
Fenn explained. Looking up and back across the open spine of his plane, past the shark fin tail, he saw the wing of bombers moving like motes in the diffuse sun, the face shield of his helmet polarizing until he could just make them out waltzing the box.
They were going to hit the guns that’d got Lefty, easily identified by sporadic radio pickups on the navigation computers and, closer to the ground, by the fact that they’d be the only things shooting back. He felt ridiculous saying it, giving the orders. The tough-guy dialogue coming from inside him staled on his lips, the lusting after pointless vengeance an easily recognized cliché in a heart that spent so much time agonizing over past stupidities and judging the actions of every other organ surrounding it.
But Fenn did it. He spoke the words and he gave the orders because it was important—because, for a minute, it might make him feel better about having watched Lefty Berthold burn to death and go candling off into the long dark. Hitting these few guns wouldn’t matter in the long run, but Fenn felt it needed to be done regardless. Also, he didn’t believe any of them had much longer to run anyhow, so when they were done with the guns, they would hit something else. And they would keep hitting, Fenn figured, until he didn’t have any punch left in him. Then he’d stop. Then he’d see what happened next.
“Copy, Jackrabbit,” Jack said once the orders had been given. Then there was a squelch as he switched channels to relay orders to his wing of bombers. Then another as he came back. “Uh… Ted’s giving us orders to stay put, Jackrabbit. To hold for fighter cover.”