Fenn saying, “That is the saddest goddamn woman I have ever known.”
Fenn saying, “For real,” and “Kevin?” and “You okay, Kev?”
Two squadron was all arrayed in Camels like Carter’s Roadrunner. Fighter cover for the bombers. And the noise of those five sputtering engines grinding all around him was like an earthquake that wouldn’t stop, hitting him right in the guts, throbbing through him in waves, almost hypnotic but for being so loud that he couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think clearly.
Carter closed his eyes, trying to love the droning noise, trying to climb inside it like a blanket of sound. It was the reverberation of death, fast approaching; the language of the machine that he cherished. He spoke to himself, to his plane, in words that were drowned by the throbbing, crashing walls of noise. He slapped the breech on the cannon open and closed, open and closed. He adjusted his safety belts. He lowered his head and pressed it against her instrument panel, thinking how, after all that coffee, he wished he’d taken the time to put on the catheter.
Twenty minutes passed, became thirty. Only after all that did Carter finally hear the squawk in his ear of the radio calling him. He’d been sleeping, he thought. Just a little.
“Two squadron clearing for takeoff.”
“Jack?”
“Yeah, Carter.”
“I was sleeping, I think.”
“That’s weird.”
Looking up, Carter saw Lambert and Rockwell, two of Vic’s ground crew, come jogging out of the comms tent to flag him for takeoff. He shook his head, pawed at his eyes with fingers gone numb from the vibration.
Rockwell pulled his chocks, then Jack’s. Lambert, walking backward, held two yellow flags crossed in one hand, giving them the slow caution. Carter and Jack began to roll—a lazy, creeping taxi, hard wheels bumping over the close-cut grass and a million small stones.
Finally, Carter thought. Finally.
He’d done this hundreds of times before, but his stomach still boiled with butterflies. Modern jets, transatmospheric fighters, shuttles, dropships, spacecraft especially—they were all designed to remove the pilot from the experience of flying; to insulate him from the elements, from wind, weather, engine noise, exhaust fumes, and that sickening, giddy, here-we-go sensation of actually leaving the ground and taking to the air.
But in an open cockpit, there were no illusions. Every bump, roar, clatter, and stink came directly at the pilot. Burning oil, wet leather, the screaming of an over-revved engine in a dive, the throaty chugging of machine guns firing and tac tac tac tac of spent brass caught in the slipstream bouncing off wings and cowling. In his plane, Carter was loudly, plainly, often painfully aware that he was trusting his life to little more than an uncomfortable chair bolted onto a lawn-mower engine, surrounded by nothing but a rickety, sparse conglomeration of sticks and fabric, bombs, bullets, and modern aircraft fuel. Everything around him was flammable, explosive, or both. And once he was up, he knew that there was nowhere to go but down.
Lambert gave them the green and, in unison, Jack and Carter throttled up. As he watched the speed indicator starting to climb, Carter was still thinking how crazy it was to do what he did and how very much fun. He gnawed at his lip with his teeth and felt the churning of nervous adrenaline in his stomach. He passed critical speed (that point at which there was too much forward velocity and not enough runway left to slow down should something go terribly, catastrophically wrong) and spared a quick look at the rearview mirror mounted to one of his wing struts just to make sure that David and Tommy were under way and in sequence.
But they weren’t. Lambert had red-flagged them both, and Carter could see the cottonball puffs of blue-gray smoke drifting away above them, a sure sign that they’d killed their engines.
Carter and Jack reached speed. Carter felt the shudder of breath on control surfaces, and he and Jack lifted together, both at full throttle, easing away from each other and nosing up into thirty-degree climbing turns for a circle around the field as planned.
Tipped over on their wings, they both had a good view of the east end of C strip and the field house where first squadron had come to rest. There were three D.VIIs, all jumbled up on the runway skirt, and people rushing to and fro. Vic was down there somewhere in that mess. Carter couldn’t pick her out individually, but he could feel her moving through the personal space of his own swelling panic. He knew that three D.VIIs were one plane too few for the number that ought to have come home. Heavy smoke clung tightly to the ground like fog, getting whipped into rococo curls behind Jack and Carter as they turned close overhead.