A Private Little War(129)

“Wasn’t your call to make, Captain,” he said.

“Yes it was, Commander,” Fenn replied, curling the fingers of one hand against his palm and examining the ragged crescent moons of his nails, his own madness kept well in check now, bitten back, bound, smothered under a muffling layer of practiced cool ten feet thick.

They were standing in a corner of the longhouse, near the machine shop, and the smell of wounded airplanes was so thick that the air seemed almost chewy. And Fenn would quote to Ted directly from the Flyboy Inc. employee handbook and pilot’s manual: a document almost mythic in its very mention because everyone had one, had been issued one—an actual physical object, words on paper—on the day they signed their contracts with the company, but no one had ever actually read it. In its mystery, powers beyond imagining were sometimes ascribed to it. Promises of vacation time, legal explanations of the sexual harassment policy and payout schedules, details of deployment intervals and the dental plan. Every secretary, every cargo specialist, controller, supply clerk, pilot, mechanic, and junior counselor had been handed a copy on his or her first day. That much they could remember. Some could even describe the logo stamped on the front cover: a swoosh, rampant, over a field of stars, picked out in a very nice silver that would smudge the moment it was brushed against. But everyone, in the hot thrill of new and unusual employment, overawed perhaps by the slick glamour of a steel-and-mahogany boardroom or disappointed by some far-flung cubicle office out in the deep nowheres, had tucked it in among their things and then immediately forgot about it. The Flyboy Inc. employee handbook had never been read by anyone.

Except Fennimore Teague. He’d read every word. Some of it, he’d even memorized.

“Control protocol,” he said to Ted, looking now at some indistinct space above his commander’s head like a schoolboy reciting, like a bad actor squinting at distant cue cards. “‘When engaged in combat operations, the designated wing commander or so-acting officer or pilot has ultimate discretion over tactical orders when a rapidly developing situation in-theater requires his orders to supersede those of any command and control elements operating outside the area of combat operations. Said acting officer or pilot will, when the situation requires it, then assume the duties and responsibilities of the command-level officer or controller until such a time as the situation permits a return of command to out-of-theater command and control.’”

Fenn knew that passage. Fenn loved that passage. It was like poetry to him. Bread and meat. He smiled when it was done, savoring the ridiculous, rolling repetitions of the last line.

Ted was ruffled. More than he had been a few moments ago. “Yeah, well, this wasn’t—”

“No. It was. I’m sorry, Ted. It was.”

“Say that all to me again.”

And Fenn would, word for word. Giving it life this time. Speaking it directly into Ted’s eyes. It truly was a miraculous passage. It formed, in a way, the backbone of all the very little that Flyboy Inc. actually stood for, enumerating the difference between it and an actual military outfit. Armies fought to win. Mercenaries fought to get paid. Armies fought because they were told to. Mercenaries fought because they chose to. A soldier or marine might be told to go stand on a rock and die there rather than leave it. A mercenary might be told to go stand on the same rock and then, when his position appeared to become untenable, step off it and live (maybe) to stand on some other rock, some other day. When things on the rock got hairy, the mercenary might become, even if just for a moment, his own commander and the author of his very immediate fate. He could step the fuck off the stupid rock and go home.

After this second recitation, Ted would push back, half a step, twisting his head on his neck as though to get a better angle on Fenn, appraising him like somehow he’d become dangerous because he’d read a book once. Pulling down sharply at the hips of his jumpsuit to straighten its hopelessly muddled lines and then running a thumb distractedly down one of its wrinkled seams, he would ask, “What was it you said to me right before?”

“Before what?”

“Before Lefty went in.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Before you decided to start giving orders.”

Fenn said nothing.

“Don’t be coy now, Fenn.”

“I said, ‘Fuck you, Ted.’ Just before.”

“Right.”

“Fuck you, Ted.”

“Anger. Spite, maybe.”

“Frustration, call it.”

“That’ll look bad for you, don’t you think? When this comes under investigation?”