So the Colonial Council—underfunded, undermanned, universally disliked and overly fond of sticking its bureaucratic nose in other people’s business—was out there trying to keep watch over the million little flyspeck nothings in the sky; trying to make sure that companies like Flyboy, Cavalier, Eastbourne, and men like Carter, Ted, Durba, and Connelly didn’t go around botching up developing cultures with their ray guns, litter, and bad habits.
But as dim and bumbling and near-sighted as the council was generally assumed to be, though, it did have at its disposal the whole of the navy and fifty-six divisions of Colonial Marines who, for the most part, just sat around waiting for an excuse to kill things. That was no small threat. And so, everyone simply tried to avoid the attention of the council and its muscle because they were the law and the law was best avoided whenever possible.
At its most basic, what this came down to was not drawing attention to one’s self. To anyone else, moving a couple dozen replicas of antique engines, some titanium, canvas, computers, simple machinery, and a few old guns (disassembled, of course) through customs and shipping security in the belly of a two-hundred-million-ton freighter looked a lot like taking out the trash. Who was going to look at a broken-down copy of a Spandau machine gun or the ribbing assembly of a Morane pusher and think it was anything but a bunch of crap someone forgot to unload a thousand years ago? No one, that’s who. Which was, more or less, the Flyboy business plan on Iaxo. To anyone else, the company’s best gear looked like garbage. But to the indigs? Pure fucking magic.
These were all good reasons, Carter knew. They made sense. They’d been discussed, turned over, discussed again, endlessly, by the pilots and the crews. It went on and on: an argument perennially favored among those forced by penury, circumstance, and politics back into the avionic stone age, when the zenith of killing technology was a man with a gun riding a 140-horsepower engine through the sky.
All the good reasons in the world didn’t make it any less cold, though. And for the time he spent hanging there in the frigid dark, fighting with an aircraft that didn’t want to be doing nothing, Carter dreamed of a vacuum suit, a closed cockpit, the relative comfort of sterile, modern warfare. He rolled over and felt the weight of his body straining against the restraints, tilted his head to look down on the world below him, and spit at it out of spite.
“Roadrunner, control. Four minutes actual.”
It was Diane again. Carter righted himself. She was using her professional voice once more, sounding sulky to Carter’s ear. He thought maybe Ted had lit into her, but he doubted it. Ted didn’t have much to do with the girls on the mission. Fraternization and all that, or so he would occasionally claim. Among the pilots, speculation had run rampant for a time, until it got dull. The boss’s sexual predilections—whether he preferred the ladies or the fellas, the boots and leather or maybe the whip—became gross sooner rather than later. And Carter’d always assumed the man was simply asexual, assembled by the company out of spare parts without any manly tackle at all. A command-eunuch. It would explain a lot.
“Make your run at two minutes, then remain on station for fire control, Roadrunner,” Diane continued. “Use channel four to talk to wing command, this channel ground. Ted’s on two to coordinate. Out.”
Carter put his stopwatch on countdown and began spiraling toward the deck, circling out on drift and rudder, his thumb on the fuel cutoff, manually choking the engine, starving it of fuel. The sudden quiet was eerie, but also comforting—a strange tranquility after all the night’s action. At two minutes, he would make his run, coming down onto the target in a silent, dead dive in hopes of surprising the indigs or whoever else was down there, not giving them time to run before the bombers came in.
At seven thousand feet he caught a swirling updraft and rode it while he checked the hills through his scope. The targets were easy to pick out now on the bald terrain—a distended yellow blob on a blue-green rise, hot gun barrels throwing out heat like crazy. Another circle, wind rushing along the cowlings, and at five thousand feet the blob separated into four separate heat signatures, tightly grouped, twenty feet between them.
Carter clicked the radio, switched over to the wing frequency. “Bomber night flight, this is Roadrunner, copy?”
“Kevin? This is flight command.”
“Evening, Charlie.” Carter wondered what Fenn, rightful captain of three squadron, must’ve had on poor Charlie to shunt off on him a night run that, by all rights, ought to have been his. “Figured you’d be sleeping.”
“Passed out apparently doesn’t count,” said Charlie. “No rest for the wicked, you know. But how’s things with you? Ted told us you saw something scary in the dark that needed blowing up?”
“Artillery. Four tubes on the hill. I’m ready to light ’em up.”
“Taking fire?”
“What? No. Why? You know something I don’t?”
“No, uh…” Charlie coughed into the radio, and Carter flinched away at the booming sound of it. “Not at all. Not a lot of time for a briefing before we lifted. Don’t really…”
“Charlie?”
“Tonight just seems to be the night for new things, doesn’t it?”
Understatement, to be sure. Carter took one more fast look through the scope and fixed the target point in his head. “How far out are you, Charlie?”
There was a sound like growling on the other end of the radio, then Charlie cursing under his breath. “One minute and change, Roadrunner. Approaching east-northeast at ten thousand and falling. What’s the target elevation?”
“Two hundred and ten off the deck. A little less maybe. I’ll leave the porch light on for you. Commencing illumination run. Roadrunner out.”
Things happen very quickly now.
Carter banks out into an elongated turn, a flat, inside loop done slow and graceful, then brings the nose back around and on target for a long glide in toward the guns’ right flank. The ride is bumpy, his speed having dropped off to almost nothing. But now there is no wind. There is no cold. The stick rattles in his hand. His flares are parachute sabots, heavy and pointed like lawn darts, dropped by hand. He’s carrying two dozen attached like shotgun shells in loops hanging from either side of the cockpit. They’ll drop straight like bombs, hitting the ground where a contact trigger will detonate a charge that will fire a parachute flare straight up. Less trouble with drift that way. They can easily punch straight through tree cover. Longer time-over-target.
Carter eyeballs the target in the dark. There’s nothing there, but he feels now as though he can sense the weight of the guns in some middle distance, their psychic signature. They are close. Engine still off, he bleeds away the last of his airspeed, then noses down into a blind, dead-stick dive toward the nonspecific blackness of the ground. He feels no fear, no apprehension. There is nothing but the hum of blood in his ears, the delicate vibration of air slipping over control surfaces and humming through the wire wing stays. Watching the altimeter spin backward, at eleven hundred feet he eases into the stick, drawing it back toward him slowly until he can feel the nose starting to come up, the elevators bite. Then he takes his thumb off the fuel line.
The engine jumps to life with a shuddering kick. It spits and roars like a Saturday matinee movie monster, howling across the sky, and Carter feels pressed back into his seat by a giant, invisible hand. In an original Camel, this would’ve ripped the wings clean off. Killed him, killed the machine. But the future is wonderful. He imagines treetops bending in Roadrunner’s slipstream.
Carter begins his drop, jerking flares out of their loops and throwing them hard so they’ll clear the forward edge of the bottom wing. He can’t see anything, the wing obscuring his view. There is the sense of sudden light bursting behind him. Ghostly shadows flicker on his instrument panel.
Inaccurate, but effective—the lights of the first flares will allow him to spot more precisely on his second run. With six flares out, he pushes the throttle forward, lays his machine over into a tight,
right turn, and checks his aim.
Too high and too short. He’d come in upslope and the parachutes are drifting higher. He rolls out, combat reflexes making him jink and dodge even when there is no fire, no danger, no need. He lays on more throttle and the machine responds, seeming to leap out ahead of him, to leave him dragging along behind as if stretched on a massive rubber band. Pulling Roadrunner around again to the same attack line, he lays a new stick fifty feet low to give the bombers a bracketed target.
Below him, the ground is suddenly alive with light and shadow, the weird, ghostly parachutes drifting across the hill like spirits, burning magnesium flares so white that they turn everything photo-negative and leave purple smudges on Carter’s vision.
He circles out again and climbs, hanging for a minute at the apogee, turning over so he can look up at his handiwork on the ground. There are two staggered, more or less parallel lines of unnatural light punctuating the dark like ellipses; a thought, incomplete and drifting to pointlessness in the air. And somewhere between them, the artillery.
He rolls back over to true, then calls Charlie.
“Bomber flight, time to target?”
“Thirty seconds, Carter. I can see the lights.”
“Target is bracketed. I’m making one more drop.”
“Make it a fast one.”
He takes one quick peek through the scope, magnification only, and can see the position plainly. The guns are squat, big-bore, dug in. It seems to Carter like he could reach out past the lens of the scope and shove his entire fist into their barrels. Tiny little indigs scramble around in a panic, trying to unchock the wheels of their toy cannons, running after the drifting flares and batting their hands as if trying to chase them away. The flares have them lit up good. Carter is happy. But he knows that Charlie and his flight are going to come in high and not have a chance to spot for themselves. He puts his nose down and goes back in one last time to give the boys a bull’s-eye.
He drops down low and slow, six hundred feet off the deck, then five, then four. His plane chugs and bucks and tries not to fall. Forty-five, maybe fifty miles an hour and he is tickling the bumblebee limit—that point at which it appears impossible that he can still maintain flight. Three hundred feet. He eases the stick down farther.
The ground crawls by below him, and he watches it unroll—leaning, with his chest pressed against the padded lip of the cockpit, straining against the belts. He can count individual trees clustered at the base of the bald hill, can see the sharp-edged shadows cast by the drifting flares. And then, all of a sudden, the artillery position. He pulls a single flare, holds it, waits, then plants it dead in the middle of them.
Then the throttle, the stick. More throttle until it is all the way open, until he is climbing for the cold and distant stars, engine pulling, roaring joyously, carrying him up and away.
“Charlie, Roadrunner. Copy?”
“Gotcha, Kevin. Go ahead.”
“I’m clear. Come in south by five west and drop between the lines. The single flare is bull’s-eye, bracket two hundred north-south, copy?”
“Copy that, and much obliged. This is bomber night-flight coming around to south by five west at five thousand feet, run commencing. Flight out.”
“Roger that. Let ’er eat. Roadrunner out.”
Below and behind him, the explosions are so small that he doesn’t even feel them.
THE BOMBERS HIT THE TARGET BEAUTIFULLY, hand-dropping ten-pound fragmentation devices packed with titanium fléchettes around a core of 8-oxy trinitrotoluene. Six bombs per plane, four planes in the wing. By the time they were done, the remains of the artillery position could’ve been packaged up nicely in several hundred leakproof sandwich bags.
Carter stuck around just long enough to make sure that nothing taller than a foot high was still standing under the ghost-light of the flares, then joined the slow procession of Airco-bodies turning for home. They flew straight. With each bomber sixty pounds lighter after the drop, they were circling home plate within thirty minutes. Generators out, lights on, wheels down—like landing half in a dream already.
Drinks and debrief, short as always. Get some? Got some. Big talk around the halo lamps, but none of it about the enemy, about weapons. A deliberate, studious avoidance. Too soon, and maybe to talk about such a thing would make it too real. Ernie O’Day had fumbled a bomb and dropped it into his own cockpit, but it hadn’t gone off. Drunk’s luck, they all said. Charlie had landed his plane and stepped out crusted in frozen vomit just starting to run. This made Carter think of an old story he’d heard about pilots from the war that’d given birth to the machines they flew now—how they’d used castor oil as a lubricant in their engines and how the pilots, after sitting in the seat, shrouded in clouds of the stuff being blown back into their faces, would suffer from chronic diarrhea from inhaling it, licking it off their lips, whatever. The scarves they wore were originally for wiping the oil from their goggles, for wrapping around their faces to keep their mouths clear, but that never worked—and many of them would find themselves at ten and fifteen thousand feet, sitting on frozen bricks of their own watery shit, knowing that their prize for surviving would only be descending again into lower altitudes and kinder temperatures where it would all start to melt.
Morris and Billy Stitches had found their way home safe, and Billy was laying fiercely into Morris, laughingly, in the way of brothers who love each other and cover it over with beatings and insults, then cover that over with touches of odd intimacy—Billy reaching out to adjust the collar of Morris’s jacket in the middle of calling him a dumb, syphilitic jerk-blind ox; the two of them sitting side by side and pelting empty shell casings at the indig dish wogs who roamed the field tent and mess mopping spills, gathering cups, and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Every time one of them would look their way, Morris and Billy would make to be looking somewhere else and whistle through their teeth. The indig would do this grin thing that meant not happy, exactly, but embarrassed, uncomfortable, confused. Then he’d clap or bow or clap-and-bow and move on, another bit of .303 brass bouncing off the back of his head as soon as he’d turned away.
Carter sat through it, laughed through it, had a couple drinks and waited for his extremities to thaw, deaf with the echoes of shearing winds and roaring engines still living in his head. The whole time, he half wanted someone to haul back and punch him in the spine to pop the bubble of tension that’d collected there. He didn’t ask though because, had he, someone surely would’ve obliged and slugged him.
It was dawn when everyone found out that Durba hadn’t been killed outright as had originally been suspected. Apparently, the shelling that Carter’d originally witnessed hadn’t been the first to hit his position, but the beginning of the second round, followed by a third and a fourth and a fifth. Barrage upon barrage. It was hard to believe he hadn’t seen the first, what with it being blushes of rosy light in a dark place and all that, but he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d been looking.
“Might as well have been looking for Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, right?” Carter had asked, hardly noticing the odd looks this inspired. “But I’ll tell you: From now on, I’m keeping a sharp goddamn eye out for flying fucking reindeer as well. I mean, artillery on Iaxo? Fuck that.”
Around the tent line, his small soliloquy had been listened to with something like reverence. As though it were poetry, or something finer. Almost a philosophy, though the only part of it that had any resonance was the last line. Fuck that. Like “Think warm thoughts,” for an hour or two, it’d become a saying: “Artillery on Iaxo? Fuck that…” Then there had been laughter that almost always trailed away into uncomfortable silences. Then it’d gone away. Still too soon.
The initial strike had caught Durba’s First IRC completely unaware, either above ground or lounging in their open, shallow fighting positions. Their first thought had been that they were being bombed by the pilots accidentally and Tony Fong had put in a frantic wave-off request to Flyboy
control, which had been taken by Tanner, passed along to Diane, and had been what had inspired her to send for Ted and bring him in. It’d taken less than a minute to get things straightened out, but a minute was all it’d taken for the lot of them to get blown to bloody chunks. A good number of Durba’s men had run, no doubt thinking that the sky was falling—though, in the confusion, they’d advanced rather than falling back and had charged headlong into a unit of bad indigs waiting just out in the darkness. They’d been cut to pieces. Then the artillery had hit the survivors again and again. It was a mess. One of Durba’s indigs had made one final distress call on an open channel, then gone silent.
It took all night, but eventually what was left of Durba’s Rifles—thirty indigs plus two of his command element—found their way back to the headquarters area five miles from the ford on the friendly side of the river. They’d carried about ten of their wounded along with them on their backs. For Durba, they’d made a travois out of rifles and shattered timber, tied with nylon belts. Antoinne had apparently spouted scripture the whole way—raving, promising hell and damnation for those who’d laid him low—and called out for his daughter, Marie. He had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head just above his right eye and a foot-long hardwood splinter run through his guts, but he was alive when they brought him in.
Died not long after, but he was alive when they brought him in.
When Carter’d landed Roadrunner, Vic had been there to do the postflight check. He’d smiled at her (which he knew, in retrospect, had probably been unwise), lifted his goggles, and winked as if to say, Survived another one. Like that was something special. It was just part of the habit of being a pilot—the swagger, the arrogance, the laughing at death once death is safely in one’s slipstream. Reflex. Like running across empty airstrips or rolling through turns as if always under fire.
A Private Little War Page 11
