A Private Little War(84)
It’d been another solid kill, he learned—a maneuver element moving under cover of darkness on the extreme edge of the engagement zone, deep in Indian country, target approved by Ted. Vaughn had estimated a file of a hundred indigs, passing through a three-mile-wide gap in the siege lines, humping big packs, and making for Riverbend, double time. Machine guns, cannon, and ten-pound white phosphorous bombs had settled them. They’d left nothing standing. Carter watched McCudden pour whiskey straight into Hardman’s open mouth. He heard someone say, “All that hair, they burn like goddamn candles.” Cheers all around.
Carter’d walked off, avoiding the hot glare of celebration like tiptoeing around the glow of a lamp in the dark. He’d wandered the tent line and found himself at Ted’s, with light burning inside and spilling out through the windows in a way that seemed, after the worries of the past few days, almost obscene.
He heard Eddie talking in low, angry tones while still in the lee of the walls, standing with his hands in his pockets, in the shadows.
“You can’t do this, Commander. The blackout was put in place for a reason, and you breaking it is not helping our cause with the home office.”
“We have no cause. No one is coming, Eddie.”
“They will. We just have to hold out. You just have to let me do my work and not be sabotaging it every time I look away.”
Ted coughed violently. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strained. “Your work? What work have you done? Have you called in one of the other companies before they’re all gone? Found us some smuggler that’ll take us out of here?”
“No. Absolutely not. There are channels, Ted. There are ways that these things are done.”
Carter crept closer. Hunched down below the bottom edge of one of the flap windows, he peeked inside the tent and saw the wreck of Ted’s quarters—maps and papers covering every surface, his bed a mess of tangled blankets and odd bits of gear. It was the room of someone who was still at war, and Ted sat in the middle of it with Eddie hovering over him, both of their backs to the window. Eddie had his hands balled into pale fists, the muscles of his jaw standing out like iron cables. And Ted did nothing but stare at a clock on his bedside table, seeming to mouth out the seconds as they ticked past.
Carter’d tried to sleep. Failed. Done dawn patrol. Landed. He was angry at everything, bored, so tired, coiled up inside from impotently waiting (there’d been no action that morning, none that he could even invent), and knotted with stress. He had a sick, empty cramp low in his belly that felt like sexual frustration and was, though for a different kind of intercourse entirely—wanting so badly just to fuck something up. The thing with Ted and Eddie last night had put him on edge. It’d put in his head the thought that there really was something more wrong than he understood. Since he did not know, his imagination had filled in the blanks with a hundred worst scenarios, all of them corrosive, eating away at him slowly until all he wanted was to go up in the air and destroy everything he was afraid of—to kill this place before it killed him.
But there’d been nothing. Just sky and earth and nothing between. And when he’d come down, he’d almost been doubled over with the pain of it—violent blue balls cramping him into a ferocious thing, crippled with aching, directionless, frightened fury.
On the ground, Vic saw all of that in him. She watched him surreptitiously, from distances—pacing a perimeter the way he’d walked the edge of the light last night. Carter could see her. And when he couldn’t see her, he could feel her. The weight of her attention like a hand on the back of his neck. She circled him like a carrion bird, waiting.
For lack of anything better to do, Carter went up again. Extracurricular. He cobbled together a three/two/one reconaissance party with Charlie, Wolfe, and Tommy Hill and made straight for the river. Three D.VIIs and him in the Vickers with no one in the second seat, freezing half to death in the draw from the pusher-mount prop, the carriage garlanded with fragmentation bombs and jellied kerosene napalm with magnesium contact igniters. They found nothing. Six hours in the air. Absolutely fuck-all.
The ground crews were wasted. There were fewer of them than there were pilots, so with all the pilots going up and coming down all the time, it meant that they didn’t get any rest, any sleep, any time away. Machinists were conscripted onto the flight line, controllers on their downtime. Even still, when Carter brought his flight home, circling low and lazily in cover position while Charlie, Wolfe, and Tommy brought their machines thumpingly back to Earth—there was no one there to meet them.