A Private Little War (37 page)

“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.

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.

The scramble sirens went off at thirteen o’clock, and if anyone noticed Carter arriving from the direction of Vic’s tent, no one made any mention of it. He was still warm from her skin, wet from her, drunk on
her—except that he was technically sober. That’d been a first for him, coming to her without the soft armor of drunkenness and its excuse. It was different.

The alarm had been nothing. Chasing ghosts. Vic had lain for a time, not knowing, watching the path Carter’s plane had followed at takeoff as if its motion had torn a hole of emptiness in the night that she could still see—the fading track of his passage from her and into the sky. She’d been naked, of course, and chilled by the suddenness of his absence as if something almost precious had been taken from her.

The planes all came home and Vic, dressed now and aching, had put her boys under the whip—lighting the strip, flagging down pilots, wheeling machines into bed. She motivated them like they were under fire. Drove them, stopping only every now and then to look up into the cold, hard sky, barely lit by the shards of the double moons, to try and spot Carter’s plane. It was no good, though. Painted up for night fighting, she was as good as invisible.

In the air, Carter was doing the same thing, trying to pick Vic out of the play of harsh shadows, the severe glare of runway lamps, and shifting beams of nightsticks. He knew she was down there somewhere in the baffling dark. He could feel her and imagined that, circling, stacked up six deep, now five, that he was circling only her. Like there was a string tethering him, its knot tied high in his throat like something he couldn’t quite swallow.

On the ground, Vic counted three planes, then four. The accounting was in her head—the order of things, tomorrow’s busywork—but she didn’t allow much room to this collection of simple numbers, mental spreadsheets, constantly pressing against the soft walls of the movie playing behind her eyes.

The sex hadn’t been nice. There’d been nothing friendly about it. It was rough and it was hard and that’d been fine. It’d been good because that was what he’d needed and she’d wanted and, so, what she’d taken from him. After the longhouse, he’d followed her back to her tent like a puppy—slinking, shy—and that’d been a disappointment. But once
inside, behind a closed door, there’d been a moment. A spark like a starbursting short. The closing of a switch. She’d been doing something. He’d been doing something else—moving across the tent, talking some kind of nonsense. And then suddenly he’d stopped and she’d stopped, and their eyes had brushed each other and his hips had twitched around as though she’d caught him with a fishhook in the belly and pulled.