They’d rolled, on ground once again frozen stiff with the chill of winter rolling down out of the mountains, edging their planes onto the sidelines of the strip, goosing their engines, and trying to give Carter room enough to land the clumsy, overloaded, skid-foot Vickers.
But something had seized hold of him—all his rage and frustration compounded by the lack of a ground crew, by his wasted day, wasted hours aloft. Compounded by nothing worth killing. Compounded by the image of Vic tossing her hair, of Vic smiling, Vic stalking him through the tumult of the field, that’d kept fogging his vision all day, insinuating itself into his view across the Vickers’ sloped nose until he was periodically blind from it; jerking his head back and forth like he was trying to get his bearing around the hazy edges of his own traitorous memory or just shake it free from his brain like a burr.
So he’d slammed the Vickers down into the close grass, dead center of the strip, doing a forced combat descent the overloaded antique had never been built for. He hadn’t been thinking about the bombs he carried. Hundreds of pounds of fused explosive wrapped in brittle aluminum ribbon and fragile shells of home-brew napalm. He hadn’t been thinking about the death that, in the instant he touched down, brushed perilously close.
He felt something in the skid assembly snap when he hit, pulling up out of the sharp dive, belly flopping the plane. She’d tried to catapult on him, end over end, but carried most of her weight in her middle and had enough forward velocity left that Carter was able to bog her front skids and slap her tail back down, burying the rear-end gear, slewing off to the right, clipping the ground with her lower wing, and crumpling the straight braces. The wheels at the back end of the skids were twisted on their short axles; Carter and the Vickers limped to a halt ten feet short of where Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie sat frantically scrabbling at their safety belts, trying to get themselves untangled from their own planes lest Carter be unable to prevent himself from smashing straight into them.
He didn’t, though. And once the machine was down and stopped, he pulled the emergency release, hopped out of the cockpit, and walked away, turning his back on the plane as though he’d never seen it before.
Vic had been in the longhouse. She’d seen the flight come down, seen Carter’s landing. She’d rounded up Rockwell and Meleuire, woken two of her other mechanics (asleep in the grease pits, heads pillowed on bolts of patch cloth) to act as crew, and helped Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie push their planes through the doors and into the house.
Carter’d stomped off, twenty feet maybe—clear of the smell of aviation fuel, the stink of hot oil. He stared silently past the southern end of B strip, attempting to compose himself, clear his head, control his breathing. When he thought about how close he’d come to killing himself, he had to fight not to laugh. He lit a cigarette, coughed until his eyes teared. He tried to think of nothing.
After a while, he could hear Vic behind him, looking the Vickers over, banging on this, shoving at that. He wouldn’t turn around. He heard her curse at it once. The sun was almost down. It was dark and getting cold. B strip was quiet. Wolfe and Tommy and Charlie had retired, backing away from Carter without a word, like he was a wounded animal, although one of them had thrown a helmet at him and missed by a mile. Vic’s mechanics had gone back to the house. It was just her and Carter, but he still wouldn’t turn around.
“Something wrong with your plane, Captain,” she finally said, her voice conversational.
“Yeah. It’s broke,” Carter said.
“Was it broke before you landed it?”
“Probably not.”
She was quiet for a minute. So was Carter.
“We’re gonna have to leg this. Brace up the wing. Need light and some tools.”
Carter said nothing.
“Come with me, Kev. I need an extra set of hands.”
And he did. They didn’t talk any more. She had to bring out the tractor to tow the generator lights. Carter walked. For an hour, they worked in silence with jacks and splints, raising the tail, getting a temporary wooden strut under the crushed straight braces of aircraft-grade aluminum, cutting away the broken skid plate and axle and putting a gimp on it. When she hooked the tractor’s tow chain to the Vickers, Carter killed the genny, waited for her to drag the half wreck into the house and then come back for him. He attached the lights and generator to the tractor and hopped up onto the foot plate for the ride back. When, in a crosswind, a bit of her hair brushed across his neck, he felt as though he’d been whipped by fire.
Inside, Vic pulled the big sliding door shut. Together, the two of them muscled the Vickers over into one of the repair bays and got to work rebuilding everything Carter had broken. They talked a little, just hand-me-that and where’d-you-put-my-whatever. It took another hour to get a new front skid mounted, twenty minutes to leg the tail. The wing was more serious. They stood side by side staring at it and then, without any discussion, got to work with cutting torches and strutters. It was the middle of the night before they’d finished, and Carter felt empty. He felt good.