A Private Little War(29)

Carter was having a fracture experience—a moment of unconscious denial of the obvious owing to a lack of belief in the potentiality of change. A quick sum: Take one hundred rifles in the hands of one hundred native infantrymen, add seven mercenary officers well versed in the intricacies of commanding indigenous forces and one dark night on foreign shores. Subtract one radio contact. What is left?

Disaster. With Durba himself, a first sergeant, three lieutenants (one of whom owed Carter money), a medic, and Tony Fong all on the ground, all human and all English-speakers, that meant that either one large catastrophe or seven individual and highly unlikely catastrophes must have occurred in order to leave an indig holding the radio. But Carter simply could not imagine any event or series of events that would’ve seen all seven of these men incapacitated at the critical moment. Because while the other side was fighting with bows and arrows, pointy sticks, and rocks, Antoinne Durba had goddamn rifles. Granted, they weren’t anything fancy. One hundred reproduction Martini-Henry, lever-action 11 mm long rifles and three museum-piece compressor-driven light machine guns. But still: rifles. Ask the American Indians what kind of difference a few white men with boom sticks had made in their lives, he thought.

Carter’s mind raced. He was breathing heavy. He fiddled with the radio dials. Put a knee into the bottom of the flight computer, hoping to jog its microchips into making this all better.

Fracture experience. All evidence to the contrary, his first thought was that Tony must’ve been out having a piss or something. Meanwhile, all around him people were silently moving the furniture in his darkened bedroom. Everything was about to change.





Carter passed clear over what should’ve been Durba’s position, clicked the stopwatch, slammed the throttle forward and laid Roadrunner over into a steep, spiraling climb. On the other end of the radio, the indig voice was still chittering away. Tough to tell when those fellows were in a panic, Carter knew. Everything they said sounded like a death rattle. But he heard no gunfire in the background, no sounds of distress. Was the indig in his ear begging, crying, praying for him to smite down his enemies from the sky? A bored, disconnected, and indifferent god, Carter switched his radio back over to the command frequency, pointed his prop toward the clouds, and let the altimeter spin.

He called in: “Control, this is Roadrunner. Radio check, copy?”

“Copy Roadrunner. This is air control. Hold one.”

A woman’s voice. Carter knew her but couldn’t quite remember her name. Donna? He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with the night shift.

“Donna?” he asked.

“Diane, Carter.”

Shit. Of course, Diane. Short, froggish, used to go around with the men for a bit, Carter recalled, then didn’t. At which point she’d taken over the tent on night shift to keep away from the pilots entirely.

He keyed the channel again. “Sorry, Diane. I’ve got a problem here. Can’t raise Durba.”

Diane mumbled something cruel about males in general.

“Repeat that, control. Didn’t quite catch it.”

“Hold position, Carter. And shut up for a minute while we get you sorted out. Monitor this channel. Control out.”

He climbed to five thousand feet, leveled out, and circled.

And circled some more.

Billy’s channel was closed. Hopefully, he clicked over to what should’ve been Durba’s, but the indig on the other end was still carrying on. Back to control, then, and silence as he eased the throttle and fuel mix down near stall and started box-waltzing the area, laying out mile-long trails broken by ninety-degree left breaks. It was at this point—exactly far too late—that Carter thought to himself how it might’ve been a good idea to have made at least a passing attempt at learning the language of the animals for whom he’d been fighting these past months. Something more than the curse words anyhow. It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the time.

He locked the stick between his knees and stretched, his back popping all in a line like a zipper. He yawned, dug the scope out of his jacket again, shed altitude until he was cruising a thousand feet off the deck, and took another look around. The forest below remained the same sea of blobby color cut through by the squirming black snake of the river. The UV light amps turned everything shimmering silver tarnished with electric verdigris. In the dark, at altitude, an ocean and a forest looked the same. Both dull. Carter closed his eyes, talked just to hear himself speaking.

“Control, this is Roadrunner. What am I doing here, Diane?”

“Flying ’round in circles, looks like. Just keep it up. And keep an eye out for anything unusual.”