There was a sound like growling on the other end of the radio, then Charlie cursing under his breath. “One minute and change, Roadrunner. Approaching east-northeast at ten thousand and falling. What’s the target elevation?”
“Two hundred and ten off the deck. A little less maybe. I’ll leave the porch light on for you. Commencing illumination run. Roadrunner out.”
Things happen very quickly now.
Carter banks out into an elongated turn, a flat, inside loop done slow and graceful, then brings the nose back around and on target for a long glide in toward the guns’ right flank. The ride is bumpy, his speed having dropped off to almost nothing. But now there is no wind. There is no cold. The stick rattles in his hand. His flares are parachute sabots, heavy and pointed like lawn darts, dropped by hand. He’s carrying two dozen attached like shotgun shells in loops hanging from either side of the cockpit. They’ll drop straight like bombs, hitting the ground where a contact trigger will detonate a charge that will fire a parachute flare straight up. Less trouble with drift that way. They can easily punch straight through tree cover. Longer time-over-target.
Carter eyeballs the target in the dark. There’s nothing there, but he feels now as though he can sense the weight of the guns in some middle distance, their psychic signature. They are close. Engine still off, he bleeds away the last of his airspeed, then noses down into a blind, dead-stick dive toward the nonspecific blackness of the ground. He feels no fear, no apprehension. There is nothing but the hum of blood in his ears, the delicate vibration of air slipping over control surfaces and humming through the wire wing stays. Watching the altimeter spin backward, at eleven hundred feet he eases into the stick, drawing it back toward him slowly until he can feel the nose starting to come up, the elevators bite. Then he takes his thumb off the fuel line.
The engine jumps to life with a shuddering kick. It spits and roars like a Saturday matinee movie monster, howling across the sky, and Carter feels pressed back into his seat by a giant, invisible hand. In an original Camel, this would’ve ripped the wings clean off. Killed him, killed the machine. But the future is wonderful. He imagines treetops bending in Roadrunner’s slipstream.
Carter begins his drop, jerking flares out of their loops and throwing them hard so they’ll clear the forward edge of the bottom wing. He can’t see anything, the wing obscuring his view. There is the sense of sudden light bursting behind him. Ghostly shadows flicker on his instrument panel.
Inaccurate, but effective—the lights of the first flares will allow him to spot more precisely on his second run. With six flares out, he pushes the throttle forward, lays his machine over into a tight, right turn, and checks his aim.
Too high and too short. He’d come in upslope and the parachutes are drifting higher. He rolls out, combat reflexes making him jink and dodge even when there is no fire, no danger, no need. He lays on more throttle and the machine responds, seeming to leap out ahead of him, to leave him dragging along behind as if stretched on a massive rubber band. Pulling Roadrunner around again to the same attack line, he lays a new stick fifty feet low to give the bombers a bracketed target.
Below him, the ground is suddenly alive with light and shadow, the weird, ghostly parachutes drifting across the hill like spirits, burning magnesium flares so white that they turn everything photo-negative and leave purple smudges on Carter’s vision.
He circles out again and climbs, hanging for a minute at the apogee, turning over so he can look up at his handiwork on the ground. There are two staggered, more or less parallel lines of unnatural light punctuating the dark like ellipses; a thought, incomplete and drifting to pointlessness in the air. And somewhere between them, the artillery.
He rolls back over to true, then calls Charlie.
“Bomber flight, time to target?”
“Thirty seconds, Carter. I can see the lights.”
“Target is bracketed. I’m making one more drop.”
“Make it a fast one.”
He takes one quick peek through the scope, magnification only, and can see the position plainly. The guns are squat, big-bore, dug in. It seems to Carter like he could reach out past the lens of the scope and shove his entire fist into their barrels. Tiny little indigs scramble around in a panic, trying to unchock the wheels of their toy cannons, running after the drifting flares and batting their hands as if trying to chase them away. The flares have them lit up good. Carter is happy. But he knows that Charlie and his flight are going to come in high and not have a chance to spot for themselves. He puts his nose down and goes back in one last time to give the boys a bull’s-eye.