Ted said, “I’m ready. What’s the message?”
Diane figured she was going to be yelled at. This was obviously just some bit of paperwork or some small detail that plainly didn’t rise to the level of involving the commander. Stupid, she said to herself and bit down on the inside of her cheek until the pain became sharp and clarifying. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
But when Ted disconnected a few seconds later, he said nothing. He stood, straightened his uniform, looked briefly around the room, then turned and strode purposefully toward the door without saying a word. When he walked out, a blast of cold air whipped in and, briefly, Diane luxuriated in it, feeling like she’d dodged a bullet that had come almost close enough for her to hear.
IN THE MORNING, word had come down that they would fly in the early afternoon.
“Reconnaissance, they reckon,” Charlie’d said, and that was his idea of a joke. The pilots laughed because there was nothing else worth laughing at. The coffee was terrible and most of them were still hungover from the night before. Then Charlie threw up in the dirt next to the officers’ table in the mess tent they’d pitched two years ago and called the Flyboy O Club, and everyone laughed at that, too.
They pulled the planes out, the pilots pitching in to help drag them into position, and they argued over who was going where and what plane needed what and when. The morning light, the false dawn, was strange and silvery and got into everyone’s heads, making tempers short and sharp. Charlie Voss and Lefty Berthold got into it outside the big sliding doors of the longhouse and almost went after each other, but a couple of the mechanics pulled them apart at the last minute.
Kevin Carter, captain of two squadron, was sitting on the lower wing of his biplane, forearms resting on his knees while he hummed some snatch of nonsense to himself. Fennimore Teague, captain of number three, stood near him, leaning back against the stiff, doped skin of the fuselage, watching the excitement with a careful eye. Charlie was in his squadron, Lefty in Carter’s. Neither man could be spared if one or the other got in a lucky punch.
“Lefty’s a prick; you know that,” Fenn said.
Carter looked up and watched the two men shoving each other—their faces twisted in sudden rage over nothing. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting at each other over the burr and cough of engines starting up, choking out, burning through idle fuel, but he knew that it didn’t matter. There was nothing of consequence anywhere on this planet; therefore the argument couldn’t be about anything of substance. About air. About breath. About blood. Plenty to go around.
“Your Charlie is no better,” Carter said.
“He is, though,” Fenn replied. “Much.”
Carter considered that a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “He is. But I think Lefty could take him.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What can you bet?”
Carter thought for a second. “Whole jar of peanut butter. What do you got?”
“My virgin sister’s cherry.”
Somewhere an engine caught and coughed to life. Carter sniffed. “Those are high stakes.”
“Not when I know I’m going to win.”
Carter watched Charlie Voss take a wild swing at Lefty and miss by a country mile. Both men were being held back now by three or four other men, and neither of them seemed to be trying too hard to break free. “If I’m not mistaken, I believe you said your sister was forty and had two kids.”
“Yup. And you don’t have any whole jar of peanut butter.”
“You’ve also said you didn’t have a sister.”
“And I don’t much like peanut butter anyway.”
Carter chuckled and eased himself to his feet. He was in all his gear. Had slept in most of it like the filthy, careless barbarian that he half wanted to be. They watched as the scrap broke up of its own heat—the offended parties spinning off across the cold field like atoms being split—and then Fenn looked away. When he saw Ted come banging out of the comms tent with his eyes fixed on some distant horizon, making straight for the evacuated tent line, Fenn tracked him with squinted eyes, like he was watching an enemy coming down high out of the sun.
“That’s bad news walking, right there,” Fenn said.
Carter glanced in Ted’s direction, then stretched. His back was killing him and, as far as he knew, Ted Prinzi was never anything but bad news—sometimes walking, sometimes not. He just wanted to get up in the air and kill something.
Time passed. By afternoon, a damp fog had settled in the lowlands and rain was expected—so, obviously, the planes couldn’t fly.