A Private Little War
Page 4
When he reached the door, Eddie was holding it for him. “We aren’t scheduled for another supply drop, Eddie,” Ted said. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing, Commander. I thought maybe you were keeping something from me.”
And Ted had known then for sure—the true knowledge of distant powers deciding his fate from very far away. He’d shrugged because, really, there was nothing else to do. The two of them, Eddie and Ted, stood in the doorway of the comms tent looking up silently into the nothingness of the night, the gleaming fire trail of the smuggler’s ship already just a purple stain in their eyes, fading like a memory, like a scar in fast-forward. They gawped like primitives waiting on lightning, on forces beyond their reckoning. He’d been too high, Ted had decided. If Eddie was right, if this really was an unscheduled resupply coming in hot, the pilot would have to loop out over the distant ocean, come back again to make his drop. That would take some time. Ted fought down the urge to crouch, to buckle under the weight of night and the unknown and go to ground like he was under fire. He shook off the instinct to run, kept his mouth clamped shut and slapped a hand onto the back of his own neck to keep the hairs down. It’d been Eddie who’d finally broken the strange, quiet hoodoo of the moment.
“I also have some new orders from corporate that I don’t quite understand and was hoping you might offer your… wisdom.”
Ted lowered his gaze, leveling it at Eddie like a gun. In the hesitation between your and wisdom, there would’ve been just enough space for Ted to have punched Eddie in the mouth.
Thinking about it later, sitting alone in his tent, Ted kind of wished he had.
In the comms tent, Eddie Lucas had shown Ted the new orders that had come in by burst transmission less than six hours prior, heavily fortified by encryption and translate-at-station code. Eddie had done the laborious work of number, letter, and phrase substitution by hand, hunched over his burn-before-capture code books back in his own private quarters, behind a locked door and under a pin light as if there were spies everywhere. As if the monkeys could’ve even read a billboard announcing all vile intentions of the company and its people here on Iaxo.
Eddie had inserted the breaks. He’d printed a clean copy to puzzle over when, in final draft, the message had been so clotted with jargon, abbreviation, and nomenclature that he’d been unsure of what, precisely, he was being told to do (or not do) by calculating bosses a billion miles away.
But when he’d shoved the clean sheet under the commander’s nose, it’d taken Ted thirty seconds to read the orders twice. To him, the language was music, his native tongue. He’d understood the content of the orders before the end of the first line.
FINAL ORDERS:
Priority to Chief of Ops, Chief of Comms, Carpenter 7 Ep,
TAG 14-447
Report Key: 310B4FC4-AA127-C7EP2365
Tracking Number: None
Attack Code: None
Originator Group: UNKNOWN
Updated by Group: FALSE
SigAct: CCIR Order
1) Please stand by for DIVERT SUPPLY OP by HALO delivery, your LKL, this 2400, +/- 12 hrs local. Inbound CLP as per request this 212/365, London, Earth. Scheduled CLP op of 50/365 next has been scrubbed. REPEAT: op 50/365 next HAS BEEN SCRUBBED per XO, London, Earth.
2) DO NOT RETRANSMIT. Operation Carpenter &c. is under comms/radiation blackout 48 hrs from time of receipt, this message. Duration unknown.
3) Operation Carpenter &c. is under executive blackout upon receipt, this message, immediate. Duration unknown.
4) NEW ORDERS: Super orders of this 300/365, operation Carpenter &c. is ZERO ENGAGE upon receipt, this message, immediate. Duration IAW local command. Operation Carpenter &c. is outside compromised, source unknown ATT. Operation Carpenter &c. now ASG/JOG IAW local command. Duration unknown.
5) Retrieval is NONCOMMIT, ATT. Duration unknown.
6) SigAct 24 hrs, this message, +/- 24 hrs, for final FCOM, London, Earth. Release pending. No retry. REPEAT: NO RETRY.
SPEC ORDERS to follow. OP CONFIRM to follow. Further SigAct by NONCONFIRM XO, dts to follow.
“I have some questions,” Eddie had said when he was sure Ted was finished reading.
Ted sniffed. “You have a copy for me?” he’d asked. He tapped the single sheet with a fingertip. “This was marked CCIR—Commander’s Critical Information Requirements. That means you should have a second copy for me.”
Eddie produced one, neatly folded in thirds, from inside his jacket and handed it over. Then he repeated himself. “I have some questions.”
Ted had straightened up. He’d carefully slipped the copy into one of his own pockets and then smoothed the fabric over it with the palm of one hand. “Corporate is going to be calling you tomorrow,” he said. “Ask your questions then. It’ll be your last chance.”
And then Ted had walked out. There were things he needed to do. He had to go to the field house, organize a party to unload the drop when it landed. He had a request outstanding from Antoinne Durba for air support, so would have to go to the longhouse and have a plane rolled out and readied for a night mission. He would have to tear through the drop, find flares (which they’d been out of, save for a few pistol-fired signal flares, for weeks), get them pulled and hung in a hurry.
Most of the rest of the camp was still or already awake, gathered either in the mess or in the field house—trying to stay warm, rubbing their hands and slapping their own arms, dancing around in the cold, drinking. It was becoming a party. Another stage of the party that’d been going on for as long as they’d been here. Somewhere in the dark, the boys were shouting at one another, running around like savages. In the dirt by the mess, Charlie Voss from three squadron, Raoul, the mechanic, and the armorer, Max, were playing chickenshit with a thumb-sized piece of explosive compound taken from a bomb head and an indistinct length of fusing wire hidden under a helmet. The game was to light the fuse and have everyone start with their hand on the helmet. First one to jerk his hand away—to turn, run for cover, panic in the face of possible grievous injury—was chickenshit and mocked roundly by his braver, stupider companions. In the end, everyone lost more than they won.
At the field house, Ted had sat alone in a corner with his copy of the final orders but did not open them. He ran his thumbnail along the creases that Eddie had put in the paper, turning the single, folded sheet over and over in his hands. Between it and the call he’d gotten, he knew exactly what was happening: They were being lost. Forgotten. No more pay, no more supplies, no more communications. The shipment currently on its way in had likely been freightered months ago and was now being dumped on them early to clear it off the corporate books. Their final pay would be banked somewhere so the lawyers could claim that the mission had been officially terminated at any point in the past three or four months—whatever was required if they were ever called to testify.
Ted felt a sick giggle rising up in him but swallowed it. Bit it off and held it behind the palisade of his teeth. He was an employee. A contractor. Mercenary. There were rules governing nearly everything he was supposed to do under circumstances both bizarre and mundane but very little in the handbook to cover this sort of eventuality. This sudden removal of the parental gaze of his distant bosses. His hands were shaking on the table. He smoothed the paper in front of him again—petting it like a cat. He chewed his lip. He knew what was happening now, but he was very unclear on what he was supposed to do next. There were no rules for this. No procedure. He was, as they say, in the dark.
At a certain point, Lefty Berthold from two squadron had ambled over, stood swaying, close to Ted with a drink in his hand, and asked him what he was playing with.
“Love letter, Commander?”
“Something like that,” Ted had said.
“It’s been some time since anyone here got any mail. Must feel nice.”
For a moment, Ted thought Lefty was being sincere, but when he looked up at him, he saw a vacant, dumb smile on
the man’s face. Berthold was an idiot and a pig. Ted hated him more than a little and only loved him as much as he loved the most generic of his men—as he imagined a father must a child who is a complete and endearing disappointment. He tolerated him the precise distance that blood required.
“Go fuck with someone else, Lefty,” he’d said. “I’m in no mood.”
Eventually, Ted had stood. He’d spent twenty minutes or more watching men come and go. He had accounted for nearly all of the pilots, so had asked, “Where’s Captain Carter?” and the men in the field house had all shrugged, looked away. Ted had stared at them, or tried to. “Lugs,” he’d said. “Drunk goddamn mothers.” His eyes had been bright. He spit a little when he talked and no one would meet his eye. “There’s work to do. None of you go anywhere.”
Ted had walked out the door. He would send Captain Carter to fly tonight. This was his plan. Carter was not among the revelers, not in the mess or the field house or running around in the cold and dark. Ted knew this because he’d counted. He imagined that Carter was at home, tucked up warm in bed and sleeping like a good soldier. That was the best he could hope for—that Carter wasn’t drunk or sick or out of his head. All he needed was one man.
Outside, Ted had found Fennimore Teague staring daggers at the retreating back of Billy, who was headed out for the flight line with Morris Ross in tow.
“Captain,” he’d said.
“Commander.”
“What’s this all about? You look in a stabbing kind of mood.”
Fenn had shaken his head. “Nonsense is all. Billy’s going up.”
“He does that.” Ted had briefly considered having Billy run the flares but had thought better of it. Billy, he thought, wouldn’t go. Billy, he thought, would just tell him to fuck off to his face, requiring a reaction from Ted that would end in bad feelings, disciplinary action, worse. Billy was a great pilot, the best of the night fliers, but had, at some point, slipped beyond the point where he took orders easily. With another option available, Billy wasn’t worth the trouble. “You seen your boy Carter?”
“Yes,” said Fenn, but nothing more.
“Not drinking with the boys.”
“No.”
“There a problem?”
Fenn had paused, turned his head with a strange, slow deliberation, and looked Ted up and down. “That seems a strange question. I don’t know how to answer it.”
Ted shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Forget it. Look, I need someone to fly. Someone sober, who’s not going to shit himself or crash his fucking machine. Durba called in movement to his front last night, in the hills. Same thing tonight. Monkey noises, trees going down, whatever. There’s something going on, and he wants an illumination mission run so he can stop it before someone has a bad morning.”
“Illumination seems in short supply here, Commander.” Fenn smiled like someone had stuck fishhooks in his cheeks and pulled—a false, dead thing.
“Was going to do it with signal flares, but now we’ve got something better. Supply is coming in. And we need friends at the front.”
“Tonight?”
“An hour, maybe less. It’s inbound right now.”
“That’s unexpected.”
“Not completely.”
“Largesse from our corporate masters. Presents from on high…”
“Something like that.”
“Gifts from wise men.”
“Just love hearing yourself talk, don’t you, Captain.”
“It’s Christmas, Commander. I’m getting in the spirit.”
Ted straightened up, jerking back just a little from Fenn and eyeing him carefully, trying to ferret out the lie in him. “It is not.”
“Is,” said Fenn. “Back home. I just enjoy the irony is all.”
“Well…”
Ted had found himself at a momentary loss for words. He cursed. That explained the twenty-four-hour delay in the confirmation of the final orders, he supposed. The junior accountant on the phone. Beside him, Fenn was humming something. It was “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and Ted had to turn away for a second to stop from laughing, more bubbles of sick mirth rising in him and tasting of rot and vomit.
“Look,” he said, after recovering himself. “I have to be at comms. Someone needs to fly. Someone else needs to run the off-loading. Which guy do you want to be?”
Fenn had clucked his tongue, tilted his head just so. “Cruel,” he said. “Very, very cruel.” He was one of those people who had total control over his face. An actor’s control. A high-functioning sociopath’s. He was handsome and knew it, had cutting blue eyes and wheat-straw hair like an overgrown boy with an ancient, cunning old man inside pulling his strings. He used the planes and angles of his face like a second language, with a deliberation that made a person feel like there was always a joke being told that he didn’t quite understand and that was, maybe, being told at his expense.
Ted saw none of this, though. Never had. “Just the way of things,” he said. “So which is it going to be?”
“Kevin’s at home, in the tent. Sleeping, I think. Alone.”
“Wise choice,” Ted had said. “Everyone’s staying put back at the house until the load comes in. Round them up, oversee the off-loading. I’ll have someone get Carter’s plane ready.”
“Vic is around somewhere,” Fenn had said. “I’m sure she’d be happy to do it.” There’d been a coldness in his voice that, again, completely failed to impress Ted.
He’d gone to wake Carter.
It was dark. Carter was asleep and, like a child, dreaming of soaring without a plane. Of flying, which he loved, and of a place that wasn’t this place, which he hated in many lusciously complicated, well-chewed-over ways.
In his sleep Carter didn’t hear Ted Prinzi come through the door. He didn’t hear Ted approach his cot and, for just a moment, stand and watch him sleeping with a careful eye. He didn’t see Ted tighten down his lips as though doing difficult math in his head, looking around at the cramped, despicable shadows of looming filth and clutter in the tent, or square his shoulders or squint down at him in the dark. It wasn’t until Ted cleared his throat wetly and began to speak that Carter was jerked suddenly out into rude, unwelcome consciousness.
“On your feet, pilot. Time to earn a paycheck.”
Carter stirred, throwing an arm across his face and screwing himself deeper down into the coarse blankets.
“You drunk, Carter?” Ted barked, though he knew full well that Carter was not. He lashed out with a foot and kicked one of the legs of Carter’s cot in a way that he felt was comradely but really wasn’t at all. “Liquid rations for dinner again, yeah?”
Carter opened his eyes. He saw Ted standing over his cot with a blackout lantern in his hand, playing its shuttered beam across his face. “Go fuck yourself, Ted,” he said.
“Orders, pilot. Orders is orders.”
“It’s dark. We don’t fly in the dark.”
Ted chuckled damply, a sound like mud cliffs giving way to gravity. Carter knew he’d had a trench cough for months that he couldn’t quite shake.
“We do tonight, sweetheart,” he said. “Illumination mission. The indigs want some light to kill each other by. You drew the short straw.”
Carter sat up with a grunt, rubbed at his eyes, coughed, scratched himself. Fucking lice, he thought. “I didn’t draw any straw, Ted. I was sleeping, in case you didn’t notice.”
“I know that, pilot. That’s why I drew for you.” From the breast pocket of his uniform blouse, Ted took two cigarettes—manufactured, filter-tip cigarettes from a private stash—and put them both in his mouth, lighting them over the smoke-blackened chimney of the lantern. He reached down and stuck one between Carter’s lips like he was planting a stake.
Ted said, “See what you get for not staying up and drinking with your mates?” And even though Ted had meant it as a good thing, it made Carter want to punch him straight in his gin blossoms, but he didn’t. He took a drag instead and felt hims
elf grow light-headed, sinking back into his thin pillow and stinking blankets.
Ted drew back the lantern and grinned hugely, face lit in harsh angles, head round like a Halloween pumpkin with wet, sucking lips opening like a wound and pulling back into a graveyard smile. The man had teeth like ivory headstones, not one of them his.
“On the flight deck in ten, Carter,” he said, then closed the shutter on the lantern with a tinny snap. Everything went dark again. There was just the red tip of Ted’s cigarette, glowing from the middle of his face. Then the sound of the door opening. Then the sound of it closing again.
Outside the tent, Ted took a breath. Then another. He’d counted: One pilot, sober. His chest rattled and hurt from the cold air, but it felt good to be clear of the stinking closeness and claustrophobia of Carter’s quarters. He wanted to wash and looked longingly off in the direction of the shower tent, but there wasn’t time. With a grunt of disgust, he threw away the cigarette he’d lit and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers as if trying to stave off a headache that was far away yet but coming at a gallop.
Two years, he’d been on Iaxo. Nearly. It’d been seven hundred days, give or take a few hours, as measured by London, Earth. Fewer here, where a day and a night took thirty-one hours and some number of minutes annoying enough that no one bothered counting them. Seven hundred days, each counted and duly logged, marking nothing but an inexplicable and, ultimately, unforgivable failure.
His men were falling apart. Almost all of them. He’d chosen Carter to fly because Carter was the only pilot sleeping, one of the few not drunk or crazed or liable to lose it in the long reach of the night. And if, right now, Kevin Carter was the best of them, Ted knew how poorly that spoke of their situation in general, because Carter had the black cross on him and everyone knew it. Everyone except maybe Carter. He gave off the pall of death wherever he went, throwing it off like an infection so that Ted had seen other pilots refuse to sit in chairs that Carter had recently vacated or drink from bottles that he had touched. But after seven hundred days here, everyone was coming apart at the seams. Everyone was losing their stuffing.