A Private Little War

by Jason Sheehan

  Conversations of tactics obsessed the pilots now. Miniature Trenchards and Hoeppners, they crouched in the dirt and drew pictures with sticks, pounded their fists on tables, jiggling the saltshakers and glasses of whiskey they used to denote fallback positions and axes of advance. They would move here, of course, then set up a secondary field there. They imagined turning Immelmans over the fortified walls of Riverbend, the shriek of twenty-five-pound bombs being dropped from a height. Everything looked simple to them from here on out: They had only to take the towns, take the moors, take the high plains, jump over the mountains, and then fall on the coastal cities. Two years, they’d been wasting their time out here in the back of beyond. The coast was where the action was, where this thing would be decided. It was like they’d spent all their days bombing and machine-gunning a bunch of farmers, furry hillbillies with pointed sticks and poor personal hygiene, while the lights of an alien Manhattan burned, just out of sight, over the distant horizon.

  So fuck the NRI. Fuck the off-worlders sticking their noses in at this late date. Fuck everyone but, most important, fuck the Lassateirra and the Akaveen and all the indigs, whatever they called themselves. The pilots were going to take this goddamn planet if they had to bomb every inch of it into submission. And it was all starting now. It was all going well now.

  Except for one thing, which was the nagging refusal of the other side to show up to the fight. The pilots—some of them—were beginning to take this whole God thing to heart, Carter thought. Because, to look at the situation another way, Riverbend and Southbend were the two opposing jaws of the vise that the entire friendly indig army had just charged headlong into, and the next time any of them saw the glittering cities of the east and that coastline would be from orbit again, in chains, in the brig of the Colonial Marine transport shipping them all off to prison.

  That was what Carter thought. It was a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty kind of thing and, for the most part, he kept his speculation to himself. The important thing was, for several days, nobody died and all of their planes came home whole.

  Five days passed. Six. Things were growing frantic. The no-contact missions, the no-fire policy—it was eating at everyone. On top of this, there was Ted’s sudden, desperate need to keep every square inch of ground under constant surveillance. In daylight, it was all big talk and victory and men shooting each other vicious smiles as they made Vs with their fingers. But in the dark, the pilots granted mystical powers to the enemy indigs. They could vanish and appear at will. They could move faster than Superman. They had networks of tunnels under the ground through which they traveled like moles. In the morning, the men mocked them the same as they always had, but when the sun went down and the moons rose, it was different, malicious, spooky. Sometimes they spoke of the enemy in tones of reverence or respect for the amount of punishment they’d endured from their heretofore untouchable tormentors. Sometimes it was plain fear. Sometimes it was more. “The wogs,” Carter’d heard David Rice say one night, his voice full of awe after returning from another night flight where nothing had been seen and nothing had been killed. “They’ve gone imaginary. The wogs understand it all.”

  Nights were when the pilots feared the most about the least. Nights were really starting to fuck them up.

  On the seventh day, it rained. A mist at first that was close to freezing so that walking in it felt like brushing up against snow and even a fast jog between, say, one’s tent and the mess for hot coffee and the thin pleasure of dull company—of, at least, hearing one’s own language spoken in this alien place—left a man feeling as though he’d just fallen into a bathtub full of icy water.

  Ted ordered up regular patrols but kept them near to home in case the weather worsened. And when it did—the rain, at first, falling like little silver needles from a sky that was dark, close, and bruised with sickly light—no one went anywhere. All flights were grounded and the men mostly sat in gray silences, watching the drops of rain grow fat and begin to pour down with a kind of vengeance, to shatter themselves against the cold, hard ground until it seemed to be raining upward as well as down.

  “If it keeps up,” Carter heard Ernie O’Day say, “he’ll have to cancel the night flights. No one would fly in the dark and freezing rain.”

  “Ted might,” said George Stork.

  “And the indigs might march in it,” added Wolfe, from first squadron, holding a white mug of hot coffee between his palms and rolling it slowly back and forth. “How much ground do you figure they could cover in twelve or fourteen hours, unmolested by airplanes?”

  “A lot,” said Ernie.

  “A lot,” said Stork.

  “Damn right, a lot. This rain would be good for them. Good for their business.”

  “Monkey business,” said Stork.

  “Motherfucking monkey business.”

  And all three of them laughed, the conversation trailing off into the awkward realization that there really wasn’t much else to say. Ted would or he wouldn’t. The pilots would or they wouldn’t. And the indigs, the same. There was no figuring it.

  “Motherfucking monkey business.”

  Later, the mess grew crowded and all the talk was pretty much the same. They discussed the rain and the cold, compared it to other rains and other colds. Johnny All-Around cooked freeze-dried steaks that he rubbed with some purple leaf that tasted a little bit like garlic, but not completely. Everyone sat down to dinner, but Emile Hardman refused to eat his steak, saying he wasn’t going to eat anything that’d been touched by some monkey plant.

  “A patriot!” Fenn shouted from some corner of the mess. Carter hadn’t even known he was there. “I’ll eat his.”

  The pilots laughed. Emile ate six cans of pears in syrup stamped with Earthside expiration dates that’d passed a year ago, and everyone drank cold beers pulled from the well of the ice machine and scotch by the bucket. They talked about fucking an indig lady and how much they’d have to be paid to do it. A hundred thousand dollars was the going rate. Fifty if they could do it from behind.

  And yet still, there was no letup, no stopping. In the night, the rain turned to sleet and everyone cowered from it, hunkering down wherever they were, and the mess became like some big slumber party with everyone huddled up close and intimate and the ovens all turned on to heat the place. Around dawn the next day, the rain finally pissed itself out and the ground all froze. At the first glimmer of light in the sky, Ted came through the doors looking frozen into his uniform and ordered the planes up. They flew missions. They landed. They hopped out of their cockpits into ankle-deep, waxy mud as everything started to thaw, helped the ground crews slog their machines into the longhouse, helped them roll a new plane out onto the apron, ran to the mess for a cup of coffee, to the field house for a couple benzos from Doc Edison’s medical locker, a cigarette, then were back out on the strip again, agitating for clearance to go up, unscheduled, for kicks or for cover.

  The day went on, and then the night, and then another day. And Ted, haunting the comms tent now like some kind of unquiet spirit, pacing the length of the longhouse or the aprons of the airstrips all day and all night, acting as unofficial flight coordinator whenever he wasn’t on the board as official flight controller, always said yes.

  “Up!” he’d yell, jerking two thumbs to the sky. “Gas it and go!” And then a string of map coordinates, a sector to advance, some mystical schedule of ground coverage that existed, organized, in the scrambled-egg mush of his sleep-deprived mind alone. On one day, Lefty Berthold from Carter’s second squadron saw what he swore was an entire copse of trees moving across the horizon. Ted scrambled a bomb run (he’d had to fly one of the DH9s himself, being short on pilots) and blew it to matchsticks. It was nothing. Just trees. They’d only been moving in Lefty’s overheated imagination.

  “Nothing is nothing,” Ted said—his new motto. And anyway, defoliation was denying the enemy valuable cover.

  Eight hours later, Albert Wolfe, against orders, machine-gunned a rock that
’d looked a little like a tank from a thousand feet up and in just the right light. To be safe, Ted ordered Wolfe home and had the rock bombed, inflicting casualties only on the surrounding flora and whatever fauna might’ve been unfortunate enough to have chosen that particular outcropping on which to warm itself in the thin, inconstant sunlight.

  “Nothing is nothing.”

  The men began to wonder whether Ted was losing it. Knowing that they were afraid of something (even if that something had no specific name), they began to wonder what had him so scared. What he knew that he wasn’t telling them.

  Fenn got lucky. He was the first to receive the clearance, to be loosed against a positive target in badland, and to vent some of his fear and fury through the chattering breech of his guns.

  He was flying close to the river, had spotted six wagons and thirty horses running across open ground for the cover of trees just on the other side. They’d no doubt heard his engine too late and gotten caught out.

  He was flying Jackrabbit. Was loaded with incendiary rounds. Had plenty of fuel and a solid identification, support from the rest of his wing, and about fifteen minutes of daylight left. The situation was perfect for an engagement. It wouldn’t get any better. The closest bomber was ten minutes away, minimum—having been called out to bomb Wolfe’s tank rock—and in less than five, the caravan would’ve reached the cover of a heavy wood less than a mile from them. There was an almost subconscious sense among the pilots listening in on their radios that if Ted didn’t release Fenn on this target, then there was something more to his reticence than plain caution, something more than a sudden unwillingness to allow his fighters to engage ground targets or spend them against anything more dangerous than the landscape.

  There was a pause—a gap of silence between Fenn’s lackadaisical request for free-fire clearance and the response. A gap of doubt, perhaps, into which everyone poured their worry that Ted had gone soft, gone insane. Everyone silently hoped it was a gap of somber, calculated, and bloodthirsty thought.

  Then the call came back from Diane, fresh on her shift, sitting in the radio chair and with the scent of Ted Prinzi all over her voice. “Jackrabbit, control. Order is engage. Repeat: Engage, engage, engage.”

  It was over in less than a minute. Three close passes. Three hundred rounds of ammunition from Fenn’s twin Spandaus. He hit everything that moved and then, to be sure, hit everything that didn’t move. The phosphorous rounds burned blue in the air, sparked as they hit the ground, bounced, and danced. The wagons caught fire. All observers reported secondary explosions. And then it was done.

  In the tent, Diane had gotten the call from Captain Teague. Ted was already there. It’d been him who’d sent Ernie O’Day in to bomb that rock. Coughing, red-eyed, drinking coffee from a filthy tin cup, Ted had checked the maps, the computer projections. He’d leaned close, putting a hand on Diane’s shoulder that’d made her want to recoil, partly. Partly wanting to lean into it. He squeezed, probably without thinking about it. His breath was awful.

  Then he’d stood back, as if to get a long view, as if this were momentous. Jimmy McCudden was there. He’d been afraid to leave the comms tent for days and had set up a disgusting little nest in the ready room. Tanner, the backup radioman, was there. Shun Le, the second controller, watching the split flight of three squadron over the near-south sector. They all watched him. Diane looked up at him, something pleading in her eyes, her own sweet breath coming low and rough.

  All Ted had done was nod once sharply. Then he immediately turned and left the tent.

  “Jackrabbit, control,” Diane had said, something like a butterfly beating its wings against the cage of her ribs. “Order is engage. Repeat: Engage, engage, engage.”

  But what she’d really been saying was kill. Kill, kill, kill.

  Ted had gone directly to the strip and stood there, unmoving, watching the sky until every plane touched down safe and sound.

  After that, the action came easier for a time.

  AT TELLER S-2, during the guild troubles, Carter’d flown missions off a naval carrier. It was a huge thing, like a city in orbit. He’d fly—mostly defensive patrols, guarding the carrier and other blockade ships against a terrestrial splinter government that had no space fleet—and then he’d come home, back to his steel and plastic apartment near the center of the massive ship. He had better accommodations than any navvie below command grade could’ve dreamed of. He lived alone. Two rooms. Private bath. Murphy bed and an entertainment center. It was just him and fifty Flyboy mercenaries, only nominally under the authority of the Colonial Council, the Terran navy, and spacers guild, and they were generally left to their own devices. It would take him most of an hour to get from hangar seven where his squadron was berthed to the tier where he was quartered. It was like commuting. There was a train—two trains, actually—and a lot of walking involved.

  He would get home, strip out of his ready blues, shower. He would pick a restaurant at which to eat, because there were forty or fifty different messes on the carrier and each was different, nicknamed something like Lucky Louie’s or the Eggery, good at some stuff, bad at the rest. Just like real restaurants. He’d hop a train. He’d eat. Maybe he’d see some Flyboys out, maybe not. He’d decide: Did he want drinks? A movie? Company? A quiet cycle at home? He could go to the gym, the simulators. If he wanted some action, he knew where to find it. Sometimes he’d find a girl. Sometimes not. There were 12,344 people living and working aboard the TEF Alabama. Navals, contractors, families, officers and enlisted men and women. A man could get swallowed up in that, easy. When he was tired, he’d go to sleep, wake up, make his call time, fly, do it all again. One sortie per thirty hours, no more than five sorties in any seven-day stretch. It was a job. Like working in an office, except that Carter’s office could fly and kill you from a thousand miles away.

  Strapped into the acceleration couch of his ship (a pure space fighter, no gear for making atmospheric translation), he’d had more electronics in his helmet than the company had shipped, in total, down to Iaxo. If he thought hard and closed his eyes, he could still remember what that kind of boredom had been like. Totally different. He could remember his call sign, his radio protocols. Alabama-indy seven-oh-one calling home: Boxing one thousand and coming back to formation. Nothing to report. He could remember the thrill of exo-atmospheric maneuvering, the different skill set, the isolation of being one ship in a thousand square miles of space, and the blood scent of catching the reentry burn of a blockade runner from one hundred degrees of arc away. Alabama-indy seven-oh-one to Alabama actual: Target acquired making entry. Permission to engage.

  Permission granted, Alabama-indy. Weapons clear for free fire.

  And then the rush of falling, throttles open, nosing down toward the death that the atmosphere represented (the same as falling toward the earth); skipping like a stone across the hard halo of firming gasses and reaching fingers of gravitation; following a ballistic arc described for him by the targeting computers, rushing to make a firing solution against a closing angle of arc.

  Finally, the sweet tone of a positive lock, in range. One button: weapons away. Maneuver engines blowing clouds of vaporizing LOx as he pulled up and out in a backspin spiral, eighty self-tracking darts of molybdenum-alloy flaring outward toward a distant point of convergence, to slam into the body of a blockade runner at a velocity of ten thousand feet per second. One touch was lethal; could punch an inch-wide hole in a ship’s heat shielding, knock a tile loose. When they died, the ships flared like shooting stars. It was instantaneous.

  Then home. He carried only one weapon, one offensive package, one shot. After a kill, five days off. A reward. He’d watch movies, sleep late, eat well. After five days, it was back to the grind.

  It was strange, the entire experience. There was always this moment of odd domesticity, like wanting to brag about a good, successful day at the office. Signed the contract. Sealed the deal. Made a kill. There’d been a deep sense of accomplishment in it. All the wa
iting, the flying, the training, the endless patrols—all of it, paying off in that gratifying chug the ship would take as the kinetic weapon detached and went screwing off through space toward the inevitable. Once the siege had done its job, the carrier had dropped its complement of Colonial Marines onto the surface: one brigade, plus support elements. It took them one day to organize on the surface, one day to crush the opposition government’s forces. When they came back, the marines had seemed hardly out of breath. There was a small ceremony, a banner in the carrier’s assembly area that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Carter and the rest of the Flyboys were paid off and stayed aboard to catch a ride back to the nearest station.

  It was a job, Carter knew. Like this one. But it was different. And if he knew how, he’d explain it to himself—sit himself down and clarify—but he didn’t. He couldn’t understand it at all.

  Ted was no longer flying with his squadron at all, leaving them two men short after losing Morris and, technically, three short since Danny Diaz had flown with the 1st until he died and didn’t anymore. Bad luck to be in Ted’s flight, it seemed. He refused to make any transfers on the roster because the 1st had been overweighted by one pilot to begin with (originally having six men rather than five, with Ted holding the commander’s slot) and because they’d been operating as support for most of the tour anyhow. He wanted two full combat squadrons on hand no matter what, and was running split flights on the roster—short three/one and two/one combinations—so that there would always be five pilots at the field and ready to fly should anything requiring their immediate attentions pop up. Carter thought he had a screw loose—perhaps more than one.