Charlie was wearing his gloves. Lucky for Carter. But when the impact came, he saw stars anyway and fell hard, back and across Tommy, which, in any event, kept Tommy from getting up and laying in as well. Charlie was still coming for Carter as he went down.
Next thing, nothing. Charlie stopped in his tracks. Squirming beneath Carter, Tommy shoved him off and struggled to his feet. Carter rolled to his stomach, then scrambled up, bringing his hands in front of his face like a boxer, trying to look better than he felt. Then he saw Fenn standing with his legs spread, shooting hand braced, his gun leveled at his own squadron leader.
“Stand down, Charlie,” he said, voice calm, unhurried. “You know I won’t kill you, but I’ll put one in your leg that’ll have you in the sick line for a week.”
Charlie actually whipped his head back and forth a couple of times as if he’d been possessed by something and needed to shake it off. He looked at Tommy, at Carter, at Fenn and Fenn’s pistol. He smiled sheepishly, which was not a look that came easily to him because he was older and had a veteran’s hardness about him. Tommy, on the other hand, had none of this. He was twenty-two. Iaxo was his second tour with Flyboy, his first with Carter, and he looked about to cry or laugh or throw up or all three at once. He’d had a cut opened below his eye—a ragged tear that was just starting to leak a film of blood into the sheen of sweat on his face. He reached a hand out to Carter, and he felt it scrabbling at the sleeve of his coat.
“We were cold, Captain. That’s all. I don’t…” His voice trailed off. From the look of them, Carter didn’t even think they’d been drinking. “We were just trying to get the fire banked, and…”
Charlie stepped up. “Put it away, Fenn. It’s done and we’re sorry. I don’t know what got into us.”
“Nerves,” said Fenn, carefully laying down the hammer on his pistol and lowering it. “Happens.” He paused. “Not to me, of course.” And then he grinned. Charlie laughed. Tommy did the same. Carter’s head hurt, but he felt the anger whirlpooling out of him like water down a drain. Everyone was sweating. It was hot as an oven.
“Okay,” Fenn said, then repeated himself. “Okay. Now that we’ve all got that out of our systems…,” and let it hang, incomplete. Without taking his eyes off Tommy or Charlie, he laid the pistol down on his bed, on top of his book.
“It’s going to be cold up there tonight,” said Tommy. “We were just trying to get a big fire going and—”
“It’s all right, Tommy,” Carter said, reaching over and cupping the back of his head in his hand. He did it with the one he hadn’t hit the boy with. The other one hurt almost as much as his head. “Just drop it. You and Charlie feel a bit more civilized, you’re welcome to sit awhile. You’ve got some time yet.” He checked his watch. “Night flights don’t lift for another few hours.”
Charlie asked Fenn if he minded and Fenn said no, provided everyone made a solemn promise not to hit anyone else. And so they sat, the four of them, while their bruises swelled and blackened and their aches receded and the heat bloomed from the overstoked potbelly.
No one liked flying at night. It made a man strange, knowing it was coming. But in the end, Fenn and Charlie and Tommy and Jack all made their patrols and came back shaken but not dead. Carter, having finally found the knack for it, slept while they were gone, waking from a dream of flying just enough to count their engines as they passed over the tent line—one and two, three and four—then dropping back again into an exhausted slumber that seemed to last for days.
AT FIVE HUNDRED FEET, when flying at nearly two hundred miles an hour, the landscape became a very personal thing. One got to know it intimately, though not as this tree or that bush, but rather as a minute of green blur here, a few seconds of brown over there. It was like a fondness for maps—for looks, not land. It was like the distracted passion of a man who loves pornography but loathes an actual warm and real woman. The land, the pilots must’ve come to hate because they’d done so much violence to it. The topography, though, was spectacular.
Roadrunner was in the shop. Over the following three days, Carter got friendly with Li’l Red Rooster—a hinky Fokker reproduction that was both slower and less graceful, but easier to fly. Together, the two of them got to know a whole lot of terrain. Hundreds of square miles of it, crossed and recrossed and re-recrossed by defensive patrols taking off and landing nonstop, all around the clock. Artillery was their big concern. The airfield could be crippled by one solid barrage, decimated by concentrated fire. After artillery, they were concerned with troop movements, supply caravans, lone riders who might be scouts or forward observers. And after artillery, troops, caravans, and scouts, they were worried about everything else.