A Private Little War Read Online Free Page B

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 touchingtent 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