A Private Little War(128)

“I found it?”

“You found it,” Fenn had said. “You can be my navigator any day.”

And now, very far from that place, that moment, Fenn knew that if the indigs came, he would wedge the front sight blade of his pistol into the notch of his lower jaw, aim for the horizon behind himself, and pull the trigger. He also knew that if the indigs didn’t come, he wouldn’t. He didn’t know why, and with no good explanations forthcoming, he simply sat and waited to see what came next.





Billy Stitches had come. Billy in his Bristol and Davey Rice flying cover low over their heads. Fenn had looked up at the sound of their engines. He’d even waved. He’d done it with his gun hand.

Billy had brought the two-seater in and landed it a couple hundred feet away, on a nice stretch of grass on the other side of the trees. Fenn had waited for him. The last moments had been the worst. The smell—a terrible, soupy, shitty, meaty stink of violent death—was all over him like he’d rolled in it. Like he’d swum in it with all his clothes on. The final poses of the dead, like terminal contortionists, like fatal lovers locked in shameless, public embraces, had overreached his capacity for metaphor and appeared to him now as only accusatory. When he heard Billy’s footsteps, he’d raised the gun.

“Hey now, Captain. Why don’t you holster that Python, all right? It’s only me.”

“Apologies, Billy. Never can be too careful.”

“Uh-huh. You think I was sneaking up somewhere the other side of your neck?”

“Scratching my chin was all.”

Fenn had smiled. He’d put the safety on. He’d holstered his sidearm and stood on legs that almost didn’t hold him and walked on pins and needles away from his resting place while Billy stripped the guns and ammunition off Jackrabbit, put a bullet through her navigation computer, opened her engine panel, yanked her plug wires, and then delicately balanced a primed hand grenade between the base of the engine block and the firewall, its weight holding down the activator button so that the littlest disturbance would set it off.

“Sad, I know,” Billy had said when Fenn ambled back. “She was a good girl, though. Did you proud.” He laid a gentle hand on her nose. Fenn distractedly stroked a splintered blade of her prop. In the distance, they could hear the tectonic rumblings of impacts, the soft, almost delicate pop of machine guns firing. No way to tell anymore whose was whose. The moons were breaching the distant horizon, the day nearly done. How things had changed in so short a time.

Together, the two of them carried the salvaged guns and ammunition to the Bristol, loaded it all into the spotter’s seat, and then Fenn squeezed in among them. The smell of them was crisp and bitter and mechanical after the savory stink of the dead. All the way home, he rode stroking the warm, oiled body of a .303, rubbing the gun oil between his fingers, touching it softly to his face.

They set down. Fenn sprang nimbly from the spotter’s seat, scrambling down across the lower wing even as Billy was turning the Bristol for a taxi past the longhouse where he would take on a splash of fuel, then get up in the air again. Everywhere he looked, there was such delightful motion. Men running. Machinery moving. The cargo container that Connelly’s drop had come in was sitting like something beached in the middle of the field, the ground around it churned and beaten into a sluggish mud that, overnight, would freeze harder than cement. He saw Emile Hardman walking like a zombie from the longhouse to the mess, which had become a medical tent. He saw David Rice—Davey who was always happy as a puppy to do anything, leaping into planes, panting with excitement; always joking and saying inappropriate things because he still had the Teflon soul of youth, the stored energy of a long life stretching out before him to infinity, untarnished by mortality. Davey stood off by himself, feet rooted, all motion drained from him but for his repeated, frustrated attempts to light a cigarette. He was drooling. The cigarettes kept slipping out of his mouth and falling into the dusting of waxy snow at his feet. Fenn didn’t know it, but Charlie Voss had just died. Exploded out of the air as if by mean wishes. And Ernie, too—Fenn’s faithful wingman. Davey had just heard about it. Every cigarette he stabbed between his numb lips, he would slobber out or drop. Fenn watched him go through five of them before he walked over and lit one for him, placing it carefully in his mouth.

Davey dropped it almost immediately. Fenn had given up then, smiled sweetly at the boy, and left him to gravity. He’d gone to the longhouse and Ted had caught him there to ask him what he’d been thinking, switching off his radio in combat, ordering the bombers in to hit the guns that’d killed Lefty. Ted’s eyes were sick and glossy with the madness of failure.