A Private Little War(61)

“Well done, Kev,” Fenn had said. “Nice trick you taught it.”

“Fuck you,” Carter had said, feeling bad enough already and turning his back on Cat, staring at the wall.

“No, really. You taught it to be just like you.”

This moment came back to Carter when Fenn told him that it was the sound consensus of all the other pilots on Iaxo that if anyone was likely to die here, maybe deserved to die here, it was him. That was some heavy dope. It would hang on him for a good, long time. He recalled the smell of Cat burning. The crazed fixity of the little monster when, hideously wounded, it’d gone back under the stove a second time for no better reason than it hadn’t yet gotten what it’d gone in after. The ridiculous pride he himself had felt when Cat’d come back inside to sit, waiting for another turn.

You taught it to be just like you, Fenn had said. But Carter knew that was wrong. He was nothing like that. He told himself that he’d quit in a minute if there was a way he could finesse it. That he’d gladly walk away. The day that their ride off-planet finally showed up, Carter told himself he’d be the first one aboard. Bulkhead seat, no baggage. And he’d never look back. Not ever.

That was what he told himself. When asked, that was what he would say: First one aboard, motherfucker. Race me. He pretended like he dreamed of that moment every single night.





CARTER, FENN, AND THEIR CHARGES MADE IT to the comms tent in under a half hour, and they were only that quick because they’d found Charlie Voss and Billy together by the machine shop trying to coax Jack Hawker down off the roof by poking at him with long sticks. Porter was in the longhouse with the mechanics seeing to his planes, and they collected him along their way. Vic wasn’t there, and Carter was thankful for that at least.

The comms tent was part of what was generally referred to as the field house—a large, square, pavilion-like affair with canvas walls, a metal roof, and grate flooring to keep everyone out of the mud. It might have been festive if it’d been colorful and garlanded for Christmas, but it wasn’t. It was military-regulation gray-green, the color of mildew, of Chongju or the Marne, and festooned with ratty camouflage netting. Since no one was flying, the ground control electronics were going unmanned, though Jimmy McCudden, one of the day controllers, sat off in a corner with his head down and fat, coconut-shell phones over his ears, ostensibly monitoring the radio and microwave traffic, but probably just sleeping. Every device in the place had some manner of alarm attached to it so that whenever anything at all happened, one gadget or another would immediately start screaming. A human head between the earphones was more a backup system than anything else. A brain to parse the static and background radiation for whispers in the dark. And Jimmy’s head was as good as any. The company didn’t miss much.

At the back of the tent there was a ready area—the kind of arrangement one almost always saw in movies about fliers, where the pilots all sit in chairs with desk-arms and listen in rapt attention while some crisply uniformed senior officer tells them how the day’s bombing and mayhem is supposed to go and then warns them all not to be heroes.

Here, the area was supposed to be used for preflight briefings, tactical and strategic planning, pep talks by management. It was intended to buzz with talk and busy action, to be full of young men pushing chits around a map and talking in hushed tones about axes of advance and diversionary maneuvers. And in anticipation of such productive use, it’d been outfitted with whiteboards, tables, maps, computers, fancy and expensive projection equipment. There was even a podium, as a setup like this would’ve seemed naked or incomplete without one.

Mostly, the space was used for card games, office space, storage of extra equipment, or as a bivouac for off-duty controllers sleeping between shifts. No one gave the Flyboy pilots pep talks. Their strategy and tactics consisted entirely of shooting anything that moved and bombing anything that didn’t. Preflight briefings—if they occurred at all—were normally held over drinks or consisted of orders screamed at a pilot as he jogged out onto the strip toward his plane and, in either case, were invariably misheard, misunderstood, or just plain ignored. The pilots knew what they were doing most of the time anyhow. Things had not been complicated here. And as recently as this morning, all of the expensive war gear had been covered with tarps and dust covers, pushed off into corners, ignored. To make plans for fighting the indigs, it was thought, would’ve been giving them altogether too much credit. Simpler just to kill them and be done with it.

But now, just a very few hours gone from the freewheeling innocence and egotism that’d died with Morris Ross, there was Ted, standing surrounded by all this gleaming, uncovered technology, glaring at it like he was afraid that if he took his eyes off it even for a second, it would all slink off into the woods somewhere and defect to the enemy. Fast Eddie stood with him, but Eddie was behind the podium because Eddie was the sort of man who, if there was a podium around anywhere, seemed most natural behind it. He was leaning easily on its top when the men all stumbled in, looking as comfortable and at ease there as some men do behind the wheel of a car or with their elbows down on top of a bar. Had he been feeling better, Carter would’ve laughed. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if he were to find that Eddie’d brought the thing with him as personal baggage.