A Private Little War(97)

The three of them were silent for a minute. Carter found it somewhat more difficult to dislike Eddie now that he knew something about him. Now that he knew they had something vaguely in common. He still hated him but had to work a little harder at it, which was forever the problem in getting to know the enemy.

“Well,” Fenn finally said. “Not the kind of family secrets I was talking about, but if a man is willing to admit to a name like Eden, I think the drink has done its job.”

“Not yet,” Eddie said. He took the bottle and tipped it in Fenn’s direction. “Here’s to damnation.” He drank deeply. Carter thought to tell him to take it easy, to be careful, but he bit his tongue. When Eddie was done, he gasped, cleared his throat loudly, and passed the bottle along to Fenn, who rolled its squat neck thoughtfully between his palms.

Once he’d recovered the power of speech, Eddie asked, “Have you seen Connelly lately, Captain?”

Carter thought for a second. “Not since… No. Not for a while. Months, at least.”

“He’s gone a bit around the bend, I think. Captain Teague saw him. He can tell you.”

“Gone bwana,” Fenn said, his eyes focused on something else. “Long gone. He was always a little bit, uh… close, you know? To his indigs. But now it’s something different.”

“He orders the Akaveen around like dogs. ‘Sit here,’ ‘Stand there,’ and every time he gives an order, they do the clap-and-bow thing for him like he was one of their own. Like they’ve adopted him.”

“Looks it, too,” Fenn added distantly. “Filthy. Hairy. Always lumped up in a pile of his officers. Paints up his face. Carries a big stick with all this junk hanging off—beads and batteries and shell casings and chicken bones. I don’t know.”

Eddie nodded. “He’s big magic these days. Talks just like a native—far better than I do. He forgets himself midsentence and just starts going on. That really pissed Ted off.”

“You were in there with them?” Carter balled up his two thin pillows behind his back and reclined as best he could. He could already feel the liquor working its evil voodoo, a warm, liquid numbness licking at the edges of all his aches, leaching the spite out of him like drawing deep splinters out of his skin.

“For over an hour,” Eddie said. “They were—”

Fenn held up a hand to shush him. For a second, Carter couldn’t hear anything. Then he could. It was the buzzing of another flight coming home.

“Is that first squadron?” Carter asked.

“Too early,” Fenn whispered. “It’s the two/three, I think. Lefty, Charlie, and Stork.”

“They’re late.”

Fenn nodded and all three of them waited, heads cocked as they listened for the engines to roar over the tent line so they could count them. The fire was crackling in the potbelly, the lantern light guttering. It was a slow approach and there was the sensation of the entire camp waiting, breath held, silent, until the communal exhalation—one, two, three, everyone home safe. They could breathe again, and did.

Eddie’d waited politely, his eyes pinballing back and forth between Fenn and Carter as the drink settled into him. Fenn had gotten up and gone to the door, standing poised, waiting still—looking out into the dark and listening for the scramble siren, for raised voices, signs, omens, perturbations in the false calm of the night like vibrations in a high-tension wire. He was tall, Fenn was. With one hand resting on the scrap-wood lintel of the door, he was able to lay his forehead against his knuckles—a pose as old as worry.

Carter silently motioned for Eddie to continue. He was waiting, too; had edged forward on the bed until his feet were on the ground again, one hand stuck inside his jacket, caught searching for another cigarette and frozen that way. Iaxo had no crickets, but Carter imagined their chirping anyway, overlaying memories of a familiar night’s silence over this wholly unnatural one.

“They’re cutting a deal,” Eddie said, voice low, almost conspiratorial. “Ted and Connelly. You didn’t hear right in the tent that night, Captain. Not completely. It’s not just me trying to get us out of here. The commander,” he said, singing the word mockingly, “is convinced that we’re going to be overrun any minute and wants to be able to defend the airfield.” He started picking at the filters of the cigarettes he’d stuck back into his pack, inexpertly trying to extract one. Carter, his hand breaking free of its entropic ice, took the pack from him, slapped it against his knee, and took out two cigarettes. He handed one to Eddie, who placed it delicately between his lips with all the grace of someone for whom the action still felt somewhat awkward. He nodded his thanks and began fussing with a Zippo lighter. “Not that I blame him, actually,” he added awkwardly, around the filtertip in his mouth. “He’s probably right, too.”