A Private Little War(51)

Sitting, waiting, Carter could see the tail and body markings of Fenn’s plane, Jackrabbit. It was the best of the company’s D.VIII models, square-bodied, boxy, with the odd little fin on the tail and Fenn’s painting of a rabbit, running, just below the cockpit. A huge penis had been added, drunkenly, by someone who may or may not have been Fenn, at some later date. So, too, had a top hat. A cigarette holder poking crookedly from the rabbit’s mouth.

Lined up with him were Charlie Voss and George Stork in the company’s two Airco DH.2 pushers, each loaded down to the axle stops with 250 pounds of bombs. It’d been a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, the aerial tactician, October 28, 1916. Boelcke had written the book on air-to-air combat, was a genius, died at twenty-five. Carter’d read the book. So had everyone else.

Carter knew that it wasn’t really a DH.2 that’d killed Boelcke, but rather a collision with his wingman during a dogfight with a squadron of DH.2s, but that was close enough. The DH.2 was what pilots had flown before there was anything else to fly—one of the first planes that didn’t kill them instantly.

Behind Voss and Stork were Emile Hardman and Ernie O’Day at the sticks of two Vickers Gunbus F.B.5s, two-seaters, with Max, the armorer, and Willy McElroy, the machinist, on the guns in the forward observer seats. There was no legend to the Vickers. They were ugly, cranky, and slow. No one liked them at all.

Two squadron was in formation. Carter and Jack Hawker, the squadron leader, were sitting side by side with fourteen feet of space between their wingtips. Tommy Hill was behind Carter. David Rice was behind Jack. Lefty Berthold was in drag position.

They were trained to lift this way, five seconds between pairs, which was dangerous but quick. When Carter looked again, he saw Fenn’s third squadron laid out on the south end of B strip with their bombers and ground support planes, arranged the same way. With two squadrons using both strips, the controllers could lift ten planes in less than a minute. It’d never been necessary before, but they’d practiced it. A few times. A long time ago. They’d drilled things like fast lifts and combat descents, squadron flying, rush envelopments, and all the nasty tricks of the dogfighter. After a while, it’d seemed ridiculous, so they’d stopped, comforted a little by thinking that they could probably still do it if they had to. Now it was what was on everyone’s mind: whether they could and whether or not they’d have to. Whether this, finally, was the moment when it might matter.

Except that they weren’t doing anything but sitting. On the ground, they were useless, harmless, vulnerable. Ask Danny Diaz. Though they might play at it with their feet rooted to the earth, it was only in the air that they became elder gods, avenging angels of decrepit technology, all roaring engines and blazing guns, raining fire from the heavens, death from the clear blue sky. In the air, they were wrath. They were furious might. They were power without bounds.

On the ground, though, it was all backaches and leg cramps, boredom, the wasting nervousness of sitting, clenched and waiting.

Carter recalled a month or a year ago sitting in the tent with Fenn, talking bullshit. Not even about anything because neither had anything to say, but just talking. About socks, say. Or weather. Didn’t matter.

But he recalled the moment it’d turned. When, in the middle of the bullshit, Fenn had stopped and said, “Now Vic… Vic is…”

Carter’d said, “What? Vic is what?” because it’d occurred to him then that of everything they’d talked about—and they’d talked about everything—Vic was something they hadn’t. As though sacrosanct. Or maybe precisely the opposite.

Still, hearing her name on Fenn’s lips had gotten Carter’s hackles up for some reason. A gut reflex, her name like a slow lightning bolt touching him, climbing the ladder of his spine.

“Vic is…”

And Carter’d waited for it. Vic is unlucky. Vic is a death sentence. Vic is bad for business. He’d heard it all before—the kinds of conversations that dried up the minute someone realized he was close enough to maybe hear. Him and Vic—that was no secret. Especially not from Fenn. Him and Vic had been him-and-Vic ten feet from him, just one bed away. Fenn knew everything.

And at the time, it’d been almost nothing. A conversation instantly forgotten, except that it hadn’t been, because now, a month or a year later, it was all coming back to Carter. Another thing they’d talked about that wasn’t what Carter now wished they had talked about: Fenn’s secret wisdom.

Instead, he remembered Fenn saying, “Jesus Christ, Kevin.” Using his full name, which Fenn only did when he was very drunk or very serious or both.