At its most basic, what this came down to was not drawing attention to one’s self. To anyone else, moving a couple dozen replicas of antique engines, some titanium, canvas, computers, simple machinery, and a few old guns (disassembled, of course) through customs and shipping security in the belly of a two-hundred-million-ton freighter looked a lot like taking out the trash. Who was going to look at a broken-down copy of a Spandau machine gun or the ribbing assembly of a Morane pusher and think it was anything but a bunch of crap someone forgot to unload a thousand years ago? No one, that’s who. Which was, more or less, the Flyboy business plan on Iaxo. To anyone else, the company’s best gear looked like garbage. But to the indigs? Pure fucking magic.
These were all good reasons, Carter knew. They made sense. They’d been discussed, turned over, discussed again, endlessly, by the pilots and the crews. It went on and on: an argument perennially favored among those forced by penury, circumstance, and politics back into the avionic stone age, when the zenith of killing technology was a man with a gun riding a 140-horsepower engine through the sky.
All the good reasons in the world didn’t make it any less cold, though. And for the time he spent hanging there in the frigid dark, fighting with an aircraft that didn’t want to be doing nothing, Carter dreamed of a vacuum suit, a closed cockpit, the relative comfort of sterile, modern warfare. He rolled over and felt the weight of his body straining against the restraints, tilted his head to look down on the world below him, and spit at it out of spite.
“Roadrunner, control. Four minutes actual.”
It was Diane again. Carter righted himself. She was using her professional voice once more, sounding sulky to Carter’s ear. He thought maybe Ted had lit into her, but he doubted it. Ted didn’t have much to do with the girls on the mission. Fraternization and all that, or so he would occasionally claim. Among the pilots, speculation had run rampant for a time, until it got dull. The boss’s sexual predilections—whether he preferred the ladies or the fellas, the boots and leather or maybe the whip—became gross sooner rather than later. And Carter’d always assumed the man was simply asexual, assembled by the company out of spare parts without any manly tackle at all. A command-eunuch. It would explain a lot.
“Make your run at two minutes, then remain on station for fire control, Roadrunner,” Diane continued. “Use channel four to talk to wing command, this channel ground. Ted’s on two to coordinate. Out.”
Carter put his stopwatch on countdown and began spiraling toward the deck, circling out on drift and rudder, his thumb on the fuel cutoff, manually choking the engine, starving it of fuel. The sudden quiet was eerie, but also comforting—a strange tranquility after all the night’s action. At two minutes, he would make his run, coming down onto the target in a silent, dead dive in hopes of surprising the indigs or whoever else was down there, not giving them time to run before the bombers came in.
At seven thousand feet he caught a swirling updraft and rode it while he checked the hills through his scope. The targets were easy to pick out now on the bald terrain—a distended yellow blob on a blue-green rise, hot gun barrels throwing out heat like crazy. Another circle, wind rushing along the cowlings, and at five thousand feet the blob separated into four separate heat signatures, tightly grouped, twenty feet between them.
Carter clicked the radio, switched over to the wing frequency. “Bomber night flight, this is Roadrunner, copy?”
“Kevin? This is flight command.”
“Evening, Charlie.” Carter wondered what Fenn, rightful captain of three squadron, must’ve had on poor Charlie to shunt off on him a night run that, by all rights, ought to have been his. “Figured you’d be sleeping.”
“Passed out apparently doesn’t count,” said Charlie. “No rest for the wicked, you know. But how’s things with you? Ted told us you saw something scary in the dark that needed blowing up?”
“Artillery. Four tubes on the hill. I’m ready to light ’em up.”
“Taking fire?”
“What? No. Why? You know something I don’t?”
“No, uh…” Charlie coughed into the radio, and Carter flinched away at the booming sound of it. “Not at all. Not a lot of time for a briefing before we lifted. Don’t really…”
“Charlie?”
“Tonight just seems to be the night for new things, doesn’t it?”
Understatement, to be sure. Carter took one more fast look through the scope and fixed the target point in his head. “How far out are you, Charlie?”