A Private Little War(98)

“We’re going to be overrun?” Fenn asked from the door. The wind blowing in around him was positively frigid, seeming to suck the blasting heat right out of the stove glowing in the center of the tent.

Eddie leaned forward, blinking away the smoke that curled directly into his eyes. “Actually, if the Lassateirra really want this place, they can pretty much take it whenever they want. What’ve we got to stop them, really?”

“Ten thousand friendlies and forty miles between them and us,” Carter said. He thought about Ted in the mess tent. Gas the fuckers and go home.

“And nine thousand nine hundred of them armed with sticks and stones, concentrated mostly on the flanks of the line, who’ll run away the minute someone comes at them shooting. And with Garcia moved out, once the Lassateirra cross the river, there’s nothing at all between them and us but us. Fourteen planes if we put every pilot in the air at once. The fight would be over in a day. Maybe less. And we’d lose. Bet on it.” Eddie grinned with a sudden, dark humor that didn’t suit him and looked, in fact, almost like a soldier’s—albeit a different sort of soldier. “Matters of consequence, right? I know because I did the calculations for Loewenhardt at corporate. I gave us a thirty percent chance of holding out at this location for another month if the Lassateirra are being supplied now through foreign contractors. And I was being optimistic. Assuming every best possible break in our favor. Past thirty days, our odds drop off rather precipitously.”

“They have, what? Actuarial tables for this kind of thing?”

Eddie nodded. “I wrote them.”

Carter and Fenn lapsed into another silence then. Eddie smoked inexpertly and, for the moment, Carter decided to forgive him for what he’d first seen as a pretender’s affectation toward toughness. Those were rough numbers. Heavy dope that Eddie’d been carrying around alone, in his head, and, in them, there was death the same as in any bomb or machine gun. Worse, they described his own life and possible fate as accurately as they did the pilots’. They did not discriminate between the pilot in his plane, the controller in the tent, the lawyer behind his desk. It occurred to Carter that the actual difference here was that Eddie had already fought their battles for them, seen them (and himself) lose seven times out of ten. He’d seen himself die in a pie chart, on a table, as a statistical abstract.

Carter hoped Eddie was bad at his job, but probably he wasn’t. If there was one thing Flyboy was good at, it was hiring damnably competent men. But because he didn’t know, he asked.

“Eddie, are you bad at your job?”

“You know, it’s funny. I’ve been asking myself that same thing all day.”

Quiet returned to the night. Down on the field, engines died with a sputter. The dark swallowed voices. Carter thought again about home and remembered, all in an instant, the lay of his childhood and his house and his brothers’ rooms and how it felt to walk in the night through a place he’d known since birth, to be warm and safe and protected on all sides, and to feel the comforting wisdom of knowing every step before he took it. He thought about what he’d traded for that. What he’d lost in the exchange.

“Well,” said Fenn from the doorway. “Well.”

“Sorry,” Eddie said. “You wanted the family secrets.”

“Sobering thought.” Carter stood and started working his way out of his gear, fumbling with the buckles, his fingers gone stupid with shock.

“Poor choice of words.” Fenn stepped away from the door, and it blew shut with a bang, loud in the hushed gloom. “Should we be expecting any help from on high?”

Eddie opened his little mouth, then shut it again with a snap. For a moment, he seemed to be considering his answer, which, to Carter, meant debating whether or not to lie. Carter unstrapped the pump from his arm and bent his elbow back and forth, running his fingers over the sore places. He unbuckled his belt and dropped it, clattering, onto the bed.

“Do you really want to know this?” Eddie finally asked, his voice having taken on something of a plaintive tone. And he held up a hand to stall off the obvious response. “I mean, I know. I have to know. It’s my job. Ted knows and, Captain Carter, you’ve seen what it’s done to him. But you don’t have to know.”

Fenn looked at Carter. He dropped his jacket on the bed behind him and rolled his shoulders. “We had a moment,” Carter said to him, shaking his head and remembering Ted’s eyes in the mess, the way he’d jinked his face in front of Carter’s every time Carter’d tried to look away. Gas the fuckers. Let ’em choke. “There was never a good time to tell you about it. Anyway, it was nothing.”