A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  The call came in from comms: “No friendlies reported. Guns are free.”

  Carter addressed the squadron: “Tallyho, motherfuckers. Get some.”

  And they did, swarming around the area and then dropping like stones from the sky on short strafing runs, hitting the line from both ends with machine guns like museum-grade antiques so the monkeys wouldn’t know which way to run, making them dance.

  When the indigs on the ground finally got their shit together, they abandoned their carts and their packs and whatever else they’d been hauling and hustled back into the trees, so Carter ordered those pilots so equipped to switch to cannons. They shredded the trees for a while—splitting the stumpy trunks like balsa and blowing the ever-loving shit out of the flora. And when that had less of an effect than he’d hoped, he ordered the squadron to switch to incendiary ammunition in hopes of lighting the stand of trees on fire and smoking the little fuckers out into the open.

  The planes flew around for a time crazily, like gnats disturbed in the fading sun, while the pilots strained to pop the covers on their guns, unbreech their belts of standard AP, dig out the red-tip ammo from boxes secured by shock cords and stashed under or behind seats, then reload with control sticks pinned between their knees and their wings waggling like a bunch of spastics.

  Somewhere to their west, three squadron was chasing heffalumps—the native equivalent of a water buffalo, but about the size of an elephant and with glossy black skin like oil floating on water. It would sometimes take an entire belt of ammo to bring one down, screaming and kicking up the earth. And even in the cold they rotted and stank. First squadron had taken up a blocking position near the water, hoping for stragglers panicked by all the fire and flying, but they were unlucky and went home early, blue-balled and angrier and more bored than they’d been before climbing into their planes.

  Down on the ground, the indigs had come to the edge of the trees again to see what was happening. They’d formed a line, and when the planes started to dive again, they loosed flights of arrows and stones.

  Slings and arrows, Carter thought. Actual slings and fucking arrows… It never ceased to amaze him how persistent the dumb monkeys could be. How stupidly brave and tenacious like the clap.

  In any event, firing on the planes made them bad indigs (no matter what they’d been before Carter’s squadron had opened up on them, they were bad now), so in recognition of their foolhardy monkey courage and dedication to this dumb game of war, two squadron dove and dove and killed every single one of them.

  When it got too dark to play, the pilots came home and retired themselves to the field house or mess where, by lantern light, they commenced (or continued) drinking, watched movies that they’d all seen a hundred times, played cards. The camp was under radiation blackout—part of the terms of operating in this place—so there were no soft calls home to sweethearts with weeping, declarations of love, or apology for terrors committed, witnessed, or cheered; no mail, no news, no stealing of entertainment from the distant ether. Iaxo was a war without cliché, it sometimes seemed to them, and it annoyed everyone to no end.

  For a time, Captain Carter chose to linger among the boys, playing a few hands of poker in the mess with cards gone soft from passing through so many fingers. At one point, he saw Vic and Willy McElroy come in, laughing over some private joke. Vic was the mission’s chief mechanic on Iaxo. Willy was one of the ground crew who did double duty on the lathe and stamping press when he wasn’t walking planes around.

  They’d been in the machine shop together, were blacked to the elbows and smudged about the face with engine oil and grease. Carter looked and Vic was there, standing in her rumpled jumpsuit and tattered leathers, smiling, eyes the color of new leaves, black hair tied back and spilling over her collar. He looked again and she was gone, having ducked out a different door, her brief passage leaving a burn on Carter’s retinas like his gaze passing across the hot light of a distant sun. Willy, too, stood confused as if wondering where she’d gone. Shrugging, he went to scrub up. Carter stood and made for his tent, consciously choosing a different door than Vic.

  “Fastest disengage I’ve seen in a year,” he heard someone behind him say as he stepped out, then a cloudburst of laughter.

  THE NIGHT PASSED AND THEN IT WAS DAY. Carter was off the roster, so he slept mostly, woke, flipped through an electronic copy of Rickenbacker’s book. He was looking for the good parts, the killing parts, as he thumbed through the page tabs out of habit, eyes gliding across the words like grease until there were no more and then switching to a manual on air-to-ground combat maneuvers, nicely illustrated. He told himself that he wasn’t going to get out of his bed all day, but then he did because there was no reason to stay in it. Less reason to get up, but he was bored and, somewhere, he smelled the greasy smell of hot food cooking. Meat.

  It wasn’t food. The camp indigs were seeing to the mortal remains of the one that Stork had killed. They were burning him in some ooga-booga ceremony up on a hill, and the smell blowing down across the field was like hot fat and barbecue, which immediately made Carter lose his appetite. He went looking for a drink instead, and found one. Then another. Planes went up and planes came down. He saw Fenn moving between the flight line and the tents, walking like his gear weighed a wet ton, but only because he thought no one was looking. The camp indigs rattled around the rutted paths between tents in ones and twos, not seeming to be doing anything useful, not talking, just shuffling across the land like hairy ghosts, stinking like wet carpets and touching tent pegs, marking posts and the metal of generator bodies with their twitching fingers. Everything was sodden and cold, and Carter felt like he was rotting from the outside in.

  Ted spent the day down on the flight line making a nuisance of himself—tapping the fuel tanks and counting bullets and bombs and guns and trigger fingers. He asked for maintenance reports, then refused to read them—slapping the folded sheafs of hard copy against his leg and walking around each plane individually, running his fingers over joints and plucking at stays like guitar strings, opening engine compartments, and looking for signs of wear that he wouldn’t have recognized had they been labeled. When he was done, Vic, Willy McElroy, and Manny had to go over everything again just to make sure Ted hadn’t fucked anything up with his fussing.

  In the back rooms of the mess, Ted counted the scant supplies remaining while Johnny Roberts, the quartermaster, cook, and part-time mechanic who everyone called Johnny All-Around, watched over his shoulder and tried not to act nervous. Ted scratched down numbers on a fold of paper he kept pulling out of his pocket and then putting back in. He counted beans and he counted bags of egg powder. He sniffed at the purified water tanks. He counted rolls of shit-paper. Nothing seemed to please him. It’d been a long time since they’d last been resupplied, and they were short on just about everything, which, if nothing else, made the counting go quicker.

  Around lunchtime, Ted drank instant coffee in the mess and no one came to his table to join him. Something in him burned, slow and smoky, and the smell was enough to make people change their path when they got close to him. For amusement, Ted counted tent poles and panels of canvas. He counted mugs and plates and silverware. The silverware reminded him of the hammers, and he made a note on his piece of paper to go back and count the hammers again—to see if any were still missing.

  Mostly, Ted counted time: days and hours; minutes like pebbles held in the palm; seconds like grains of sand. The call he’d gotten was eating at him. He’d tried to place a couple more of his own in the time since—quietly, in the slack hours, pretending that the maddening lack of connection was precisely what he’d expected, for the benefit of anyone who might be taking notice. The calls were like smoke signals in the night. Either the other Indians were all looking in the wrong direction, or they were willfully ignoring him. Privately, he suspected that it was the latter. Was almost sure of it.

  After lunch, he stepped outside. The abos were up on Signal Hill—the only rise of land in the
area, a pimple on an otherwise flat plain—and they were burning something. They stood clustered in a tight circle around the fire and when Ted squinted, he thought he could see them swaying together.

  “Kumbay-fucking-ya,” he said out loud. He’d heard that George Stork had shot one of the friendlies in an argument and figured that this was the logical conclusion of that probably unwise action. He counted the abos and that was simple: the normal number, less one.

  Ted knew that today, tonight, maybe tomorrow, another call would come. An official call, laying out the bad news in the simplest terms, the most mechanical of language. It wouldn’t come to him, but he’d hear of it. These were the ways things worked. The call would come and then he would know exactly how fucked they were. Right now, he could only guess. An educated guess, but still. If someone were to stop him right now and ask him, Hey, Ted. How fucked are we? he could say several things.

  He could say, We are somewhat fucked, I think.

  He could say, We’re pretty well fucked.

  He could say, We are not fucked at all. Nothing is fucked here.

  He could say, We are so fucked you don’t even know.

  All of those things would be equally true. All of them would be equally untrue.

  When he’d gotten his call, the message had been only this: The accounting division at the London office needed an updated roster of all active-duty employees currently involved in the Carpenter 7 operation. This was to include all combat personnel, all operational and support personnel, all outside contractors and civilians under recurring payment arrangements, and all management-level employees. Those who were dead or rotated out-of-theater were not to be included in this list. This was not a personnel roster, but a duty roster, understood?

  Understood.

  Upon receipt of this updated roster, all pay and benefits occurring from employment by Flyboy Inc. would be suspended, pending executive review, understood?

  Understood.

  “Are you sure?” the assistant clerk on the other end of the line had asked him.

  “Are you fucking questioning my hearing?” Ted had asked. “Are you saying I can’t fucking understand what you’re telling me without it being spelled out?”

  “No, I mean it says here that I’m supposed to ask if you’re sure you understand.”

  “It says that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Ted had sighed. “I understand. Just tell them that I understand.”

  In the time since that call, Ted had not organized a roster. He had not included all combat personnel, all operational and support personnel, all outside contractors and civilians under recurring payment arrangements, and all management-level employees. He had not made a list and would not be submitting it to the accounting division. Instead, he counted tent poles and gallons of clean water and rolls of shit-paper. The counting he was doing was purely for his own edification. He had to know where things stood. He felt that he needed to get a handle on things—on the situation, as it were—and to know with some specificity how many bullets, how many beans, how many grains of rice and dead abos and days and hours and minutes there were, just so he could know. It was important, or at least felt that way. Also, he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  The night was the night. Then there was the day. Carter’s roster position came up and he flew. He and Fenn talked about girls and then they talked about weapons delivery packages and then they talked about a movie that neither of them could completely remember, but they told the story of it to each other until they realized they were each talking about a different movie and decided that their version, with the two movies mashed together, was better than either of the original stories had been. When Fenn went up to fly his patrol, he killed three horses (or what passed for horses here) and two indigs and a cart, but that was only a fraction of what his squadron had killed in total. Carter killed nothing. Some days are lucky and some are not.

  Then it was night again. No one flew at night. Carter and Fenn went to find some amusement among their mates but ended up disappointed. In his tent, on the soft edge of sleep and dreaming of sleep, Ted counted seconds because there were no sheep in this godforsaken place. When he got to ten thousand, he started over again at one.

  And this was the way the days accumulated, like wet stones dropped into a pail. Eventually, it would become full. Eventually, it would overspill.

  THIS WAS LATER. A day, maybe two. Sometimes it got hard to keep track.

  In his tent, Ted sat on the edge of his cot like a windup mannequin mostly run down. He sagged in every way a man could—his shoulders sloped and his head hanging like a weight between them, arms dangling like dead limbs on a lightning-struck tree, feet scraping at the wood flooring, spine bowed.

  He was exhausted. His lamps were all extinguished. In the dark, every edge of the simple geometry of his quarters shone silver: a bed frame, desk, chair back and stacked gun cases, metal shelves. There was a gentle loveliness to the collected starlight, the diffuse moonglow filtering through a scrim of clouds. It was an enchanting hour. But Ted saw none of it because he sat with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully to keep from coughing while tracing in his mind the white plastic bow of a hospital bed rail he’d once gripped until his knuckles were as pale as it was. Pretty thing. Perfect. He’d had a long night already. Something in him knew that it wasn’t over yet.

  The supply drop, when it’d come, had been a surprise even to him. He’d been in the mess with the pilots for a time, jaw working, words coming out. Then he’d been in the machine shop where McElroy had been hunched before the lathe, slowly turning out the axle bore of a fourteen-inch wheel hub in order to make it fit the larger post of a Spad mounting. They’d chatted briefly, he and McElroy. Ted had seen him before with Vic, the chief mechanic—the two of them goofing around like kids, laughing. There’d been some kind of edge there, though. Ted had seen it. A lingering like weak magnetism, and Ted had been concerned.

  “So,” he’d said. “Vic, huh?”

  McElroy had nodded his head. He still had his goggles on. It was impossible to see his eyes. “She’s good. Great mechanic, ’specially with these old machines.”

  “Right.” Ted had nodded. “Right… You fucking her?”

  Willy had whitened. Ted had seen it in his jaw and along the back of his neck. He’d stood up from the bench.

  “Just asking, son.”

  McElroy’s mouth had been a bloodless line. He still had the wheel hub in his hand, and it’d looked to Ted like he might brain him with it. Throw it maybe. He was a small man, but his blood was up.

  “Man to man,” Ted said.

  “No.”

  “No, you’re not fucking her?”

  “No, I ain’t interested in your man-to-man.”

  “Then just answer the question.”

  “No.”

  “No, you won’t answer?”

  “No, I’m not… fucking her. She’s my friend. I have a wife. Back home.”

  “Back home,” Ted repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Far from home, boy. Just a question.”

  “And I answered it.”

  “Hmm.”

  And that had been that. Personnel issues always bothered Ted. They were not his strong suit. But he was saved from having to pursue this particular issue any further by Eddie Lucas, a company lawyer and lord of the tight-beam relay; a man in regular, high-level contact with London and sent in to do boonie time as mission manager and corporate communications liaison. He’d found Ted in the machine shop with Willy McElroy, walking straight into the middle of their conversation at the point where it’d petered out into a lopsided staring contest.

  “Commander,” Eddie had said. “A minute of your time?”

  Ted had been convinced enough that Willy McElroy wasn’t lying to him (not telling the truth, necessarily, but not lying either), so had nodded and turned away. He agreed to follow Eddie back to comms at his request and, going out the door, Ted had heard McElro
y finally throw that wheel hub he’d been holding—the clatter of it going into the side of a toolbox with some force was unmistakable—so he supposed he had Eddie to thank for that. Another minute and it might’ve been his head.

  Outside, Eddie had hurried—trotting as though afflicted with a wicked case of the shits and a long way from comfort. Ted hadn’t bothered trying to keep up until, in the air above them, he’d heard the dull, thudding booms of frantic deceleration. Of a ship making orbital translation with no notion of sticking around. The sound was like hitting a hollow plastic bucket with a hammer, only vast and echoing and distant in a way that only those who live in the sky might understand. And when Ted looked up, he saw the comet’s tail arc of something hot and fast carving its way through the upper strata.

  “Supply!” Eddie had called out from the door of the comms tent, pointing skyward, then gesturing for Ted to come inside.

  “What?” Ted had yelled back. They’d gotten their last supply drop months ago, dead on the schedule detailed in the corporate ops plan, and weren’t due for a re-up for some weeks yet, at right about the time they would run out of everything altogether, which was also precisely according to plan. Forced austerity was a foundational tenet of the company, worshipped like a psalm by its distant bookkeepers. Do more with less. The alternative: Die.

  Now Ted broke into a jog, one eye on the sky—looking for the black-among-blackness of the insertion containers, the floating ghosts of tear-away drag chutes—and felt something in his belly twist up like cold fingers curling into a fist. This is it, he’d thought. This is when it all goes bad.