A Private Little War(82)
Instead of flying, instead of taking the fight to the enemy, Ted had devised a new tactic and hunted Fast Eddie instead. Apparently convinced, in opposition to all available intelligence, that the airfield was going to be overrun at any moment, he wanted defensive weapons: razor wire and land mines, field lasers, motion trackers, and caterpillar mortars. He wanted more planes to take the place of the three lost in the past two years. He wanted better planes. Jets, fighter/bombers, transatmospherics, and the technicians, crews, and equipment necessary to keep them flying. He would spy Eddie in the mess or moving between the tent line and the field house and fall onto his tail like it was a dogfight, shouting at the little lawyer to make it work. To find a way. He wanted Flyboy to hire another mercenary company to provide airfield security because he thought that the camp indigs (of which there no longer were any) were all spies planted by the other side, and possibly secret assassins. Come to find, it’d been his bright idea to have the lot of them escorted off the premises in the first place; had drafted the first dozen willing (all too willing) humans he’d come across to be his muscle, then had sat (much like Carter had sat) and watched the whole thing get done. It’d been stupid. Now who was going to wash everyone’s shirts?
He told Eddie he wanted sheaf rockets and cruise missiles. He told Eddie to buy them, beg them, or steal them somehow. To conjure them from thin air. Carter hadn’t heard that conversation, but Emile Hardman had. He’d told everyone about it in the mess one morning, doing a fair impression of Ted and a very good one of Eddie, with his shoulders hunched and his ass in the air, running the hell away. Ted wanted the raw materials to build and outfit a patrol boat for the river (he had even drawn up the plans for one in a careful and surprisingly competent draftsman’s style that he’d shown to Fenn while Fenn was trying to eat his breakfast), and one night he got on the tight-beam FTL relay himself, called corporate, and tried to ask for sixty canisters of Virox nerve gas.
Carter was alone in the mess tent drinking cold coffee and playing solitaire with a deck of Charlie Voss’s girlie cards (which made it more like fortune-telling than card playing) on the night after Fenn had made his kill, the night Ted had tried to call home. He came storming in with Eddie, now hot on his six, in kill position. Eddie was yelling—something Carter had never seen him do before—and Ted was in retreat—something else he’d never seen. They both hung up at the doorway when they saw Carter, likely not expecting to find anyone in the tent at such a late hour while, across the camp, everyone else seemed to be celebrating a productive night’s work. For his part, Carter froze, too—redheaded Irene, the queen of hearts, in his hand. Suddenly, he wished he weren’t there either.
Ted broke first. “Carter,” he barked. “Nerve gas.”
“None for me, thanks. I’m fine with coffee.”
Ted made for his table, slapping his hands down hard on its surface, leaning down, eyeballing Carter with crazy, sparking intensity like his eyes were two lightbulbs shorting in the socket. Eddie stood where he was in the doorway, shaking his head and mouthing, “No.”
“Don’t get smart, Captain. Virox. Fifty or sixty cans. We can just kill them all. Gas the fuckers. Let ’em choke. Then we can all just go home before anyone else shows up to ruin our little picnic here, right?”
Carter looked at Ted. He was a man badly in need of reinforcement. He looked past Ted at Eddie, who was silently waving his hands like an umpire signaling safe, shaking his head, mouthing, “No, no, no.”
Ted jinked his head on his neck, bringing it back in front of Carter’s with a snap. “Don’t look at that little snake, Carter. Don’t you look anywhere but right here. I am your goddamn commander. You look at me.”
He did. Irene was still in his hand, biting her lip, sitting on her heels amid a rumple of pure white sheets. He laid her down in her place and stood up. Ted followed him, tight on his every move. There was a serious fear in Ted. Carter could smell it on him like rotten lemons. See it in his fixated, unblinking, red-eyed stare. He folded his arms and turned to face Eddie across the empty room.
“I’m with Ted,” he said. “Nerve gas. Nukes. Burn all the little savages right the fuck up.”
He did it because Ted was his chief, no matter what. He did it because Ted flew (and well) and Eddie didn’t at all. He did it because if he hadn’t, he honestly believed Ted would have lost his shit right then and there, and because, frankly, going all crazy and just carpet bombing this whole boondock nowhere, raining nuclear fire down on it from on high, really ripping and torturing the land, sounded like big fun. Mostly he did it because he didn’t like lawyers.