He drops down low and slow, six hundred feet off the deck, then five, then four. His plane chugs and bucks and tries not to fall. Forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour and he is tickling the bumblebee limit—that point at which it appears impossible that he can still maintain flight. Three hundred feet. He eases the stick down farther.
The ground crawls by below him, and he watches it unroll—leaning, with his chest pressed against the padded lip of the cockpit, straining against the belts. He can count individual trees clustered at the base of the bald hill, can see the sharp-edged shadows cast by the drifting flares. And then, all of a sudden, the artillery position. He pulls a single flare, holds it, waits, then plants it dead in the middle of them.
Then the throttle, the stick. More throttle until it is all the way open, until he is climbing for the cold and distant stars, engine pulling, roaring joyously, carrying him up and away.
“Charlie, Roadrunner. Copy?”
“Gotcha, Kevin. Go ahead.”
“I’m clear. Come in south by five west and drop between the lines. The single flare is bull’s-eye, bracket two hundred north-south, copy?”
“Copy that, and much obliged. This is bomber night-flight coming around to south by five west at five thousand feet, run commencing. Flight out.”
“Roger that. Let ’er eat. Roadrunner out.”
Below and behind him, the explosions are so small that he doesn’t even feel them.
THE BOMBERS HIT THE TARGET BEAUTIFULLY, hand-dropping ten-pound fragmentation devices packed with titanium fléchettes around a core of 8-oxy trinitrotoluene. Six bombs per plane, four planes in the wing. By the time they were done, the remains of the artillery position could’ve been packaged up nicely in several hundred leakproof sandwich bags.
Carter stuck around just long enough to make sure that nothing taller than a foot high was still standing under the ghost-light of the flares, then joined the slow procession of Airco-bodies turning for home. They flew straight. With each bomber sixty pounds lighter after the drop, they were circling home plate within thirty minutes. Generators out, lights on, wheels down—like landing half in a dream already.
Drinks and debrief, short as always. Get some? Got some. Big talk around the halo lamps, but none of it about the enemy, about weapons. A deliberate, studious avoidance. Too soon, and maybe to talk about such a thing would make it too real. Ernie O’Day had fumbled a bomb and dropped it into his own cockpit, but it hadn’t gone off. Drunk’s luck, they all said. Charlie had landed his plane and stepped out crusted in frozen vomit just starting to run. This made Carter think of an old story he’d heard about pilots from the war that’d given birth to the machines they flew now—how they’d used castor oil as a lubricant in their engines and how the pilots, after sitting in the seat, shrouded in clouds of the stuff being blown back into their faces, would suffer from chronic diarrhea from inhaling it, licking it off their lips, whatever. The scarves they wore were originally for wiping the oil from their goggles, for wrapping around their faces to keep their mouths clear, but that never worked—and many of them would find themselves at ten and fifteen thousand feet, sitting on frozen bricks of their own watery shit, knowing that their prize for surviving would only be descending again into lower altitudes and kinder temperatures where it would all start to melt.
Morris and Billy Stitches had found their way home safe, and Billy was laying fiercely into Morris, laughingly, in the way of brothers who love each other and cover it over with beatings and insults, then cover that over with touches of odd intimacy—Billy reaching out to adjust the collar of Morris’s jacket in the middle of calling him a dumb, syphilitic jerk-blind ox; the two of them sitting side by side and pelting empty shell casings at the indig dish wogs who roamed the field tent and mess mopping spills, gathering cups, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Every time one of them would look their way, Morris and Billy would make to be looking somewhere else and whistle through their teeth. The indig would do this grin thing that meant not happy, exactly, but embarrassed, uncomfortable, confused. Then he’d clap or bow or clap-and-bow and move on, another bit of .303 brass bouncing off the back of his head as soon as he’d turned away.
Carter sat through it, laughed through it, had a couple drinks and waited for his extremities to thaw, deaf with the echoes of shearing winds and roaring engines still living in his head. The whole time, he half wanted someone to haul back and punch him in the spine to pop the bubble of tension that’d collected there. He didn’t ask though because, had he, someone surely would’ve obliged and slugged him.