A Private Little War(33)

“Carter, don’t you think?”

“Yes, Ted. I do,” Carter said. You crazy fucker, he didn’t say. No fucking bullshit indig monkey suddenly smacked two rocks together and invented what happened down there, he didn’t say. “Though I bet Durba found it more shocking than you do.”

“Right,” Ted said, cleared his throat into the mike—an incredibly annoying habit—and moved on to page two. “We don’t know how many there are, but—”

“Four,” Carter interrupted. “There are four. I’m watching them hit the ford right now. Just watched.”

“Four… Well, that’s not very many now, is it?”

Carter wanted to bomb Ted in his tent. Terrified, he wanted very badly to kill something, and his mouth tasted sour. He spit out the flashlight instead, its steel body trailing a string of his spittle.

“Anyway, Carter, it looks like someone out there is trying to level the playing field a bit, and the last goddamn thing we want around here is a level playing field. Bad for business. Bad for you, bad for me. Bad for the company. Means we might have to work for a living instead of getting drunk and just flying around. No fun. That line of hills is your new illumination area, got it?”

He imagined that to the indigs on the ground, for whom anything more technologically advanced than a catapult was astonishing and something like a cigarette lighter inspired pure fucking awe and wonderment, an artillery barrage by one gun would’ve been enough to scare them out of their gourds. Four had probably been something like the end of the world. He didn’t bother speculating to Ted, though. In Carter’s experience, Ted was unimpressed by things like the feelings of people who were not Ted.

“Carter?”

“Illumination,” he parroted.

“Carter. That hill. On the map. That’s your area of operation. Illumination run.”

“Illuminating for what?”

“For the bombers. Just gotta find the little rinky-dink fuckers first, yeah? So find them, pilot. And light ’em up.”

Without thinking, Carter had brought the plane around again, boxing the compass until he’d come into line with the new target almost by feel. He coughed. His right leg was shaking like it had its own battery. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Ted?”

“What?”

“What’s, like, going on here. I don’t know, just tell me…” The explosion, the shock, the pretty lights—they’d knocked something loose in Carter. Through clenched teeth he said, “Tell me what’s this done. What’s happening.”

Even Carter knew he was making very little sense, but the stick was alive in his hand. His feet were working the pedals.

“Going on? Since when is ‘going on’ any of your goddamn business, pilot? Ending this—that’s your business. Go end it.” Whistle of feedback, muffled chatter of voices in the tent, then Ted again. “You’re on the clock, pilot. Go fly.”

“Roger that.” Carter pawed at his face with his free hand, dragging fingers down the rough stubble on his cheeks and pressing them into the frozen skin along his jaw.

“Flare the area, try to sort out where those guns are at, then remain on target as air spotter for the rest of the flight. They’re on the field now, wheels up in sixty seconds or I’ll murder the bunch of them. They should be at your A.O. in less than fifteen. Copy?”

“Copy that, control. Where’s Antoinne?”

There was another pause. Ted never had good news.

“We think Durba got his cork popped, Carter. No contact. None expected.”

“His boys?”

“The same.”

“One of them owed me fifty bucks.”

A pause. “Call it a loss and soldier on.”

That was one of Ted’s favorite phrases. One of the pilots (Carter thought it might’ve been Lefty Berthold) had once tried to make a list of Ted-isms. It hadn’t gone anywhere. Too long. But it’d been a season for lists, for failed attempts at imposing order on the disorderly, of controlling even something so simple as a piece of paper. Everyone had one somewhere.

“Now get there and let’s blow some shit up.”





On the ground, the engines were warming. Dawn was a couple of hours off yet, so generators and lamps were being hauled around, moved from the infield where they’d been lighting the drop to the field where they illuminated men bent double with their fingers down their throats, frantically trying to vomit their way to sobriety. Planes were being wheeled out onto the strips in a jumble, wingtips tangling, gun trucks being overturned in the black slashes of deep shadow. Max rode a cart full of live bombs like a pony at the fair, whooping the whole way.