Ascent by Jed Mercurio (10 page)

Shelves of stratus streaked the eastern dome of sky. A blue haze coloured in the gaps. The wind sock was fluttering but pointing toward them, to the west. “There’s still a chance,” Kiriya said.

He took back the binoculars. He was hoping Yefgenii had broken free of the Thunderjets. He could’ve outclimbed them and at 10,000 or 15,000 metres been flying in the best configuration to conserve fuel. He’d be running on vapors for a time and then his jet would stutter and flame out. About now he’d be entering a glide. There was still a chance he could stretch it all the way home. With the airplane held in the precise gliding attitude, with every control force trimmed out to perfection, with airspeed gauged against altitude, with the wind in the right direction… with all these things, there was still a chance. He was the spirit of the 221st.

The Starshina was marshaling fire trucks onto the airfield. They were lining up at the end of each taxiway with their lights flashing, waiting.

Every man and woman of the Antung VVS Station seemed to be out on the airfield now. No one said a word. Even the pilots of the next wave who were supposed to be taxiing out had climbed down from their cockpits and were peering into the east. The widow ensured the chocks were fixed against the mainwheels and the pitot-head covers were in place. Hers was the one head not turned up to the sky.

The Starshina ran to Kiriya bearing a short-wave radio. A message was being relayed from the tower. “There’s no reply to his call sign. There’s been no reply for twenty minutes.”

With a tilt of his head Pilipenko ordered the Starshina to give them some privacy. “Boss, I’m as sorry as anyone, but there’s a whole base away from their stations and six ships waiting for the order to roll out.”

Skomorokhov was pacing up and down, unable to settle. He said nothing.

Kiriya gazed into the east. Some of the men had stopped looking into the skies. Their heads were down. Some looked ready to fall to their knees.

Then the Starshina pointed. A drop of mercury was condensing out of the haze.

Kiriya trained the binoculars on the sighting. The MiG was floating down from 5,000 metres. It left no trail — he was long out of fuel, in the long glide back to earth.

“Yo-Yo.”

The pilots and ground crews gasped, then a cheer went up. Skomorokhov’s hands managed a clapping action. The weeping boys wiped their faces, laughing in embarrassment. The widow looked up from her work. She could see him now. He was over the paddies and, even if he didn’t make it back to the runway, he could eject over friendly territory.

Pilipenko took a turn with the binoculars. “He’s going to make it.”

Skomorokhov mumbled, “Worse. The fucker’s going to hit the runway.” Maybe what he hated most about Yefgenii Yeremin was that he was tall enough to see his bald patch even from the front.

The MiG floated down the glide slope toward the airfield. For a minute or two it looked as if he might sink into the undershoot but he held his nerve and his wheels struck the dirt at the very beginning of the strip. The plane rolled about a quarter of the way along before coming to a halt.

Fire trucks sped toward the plane. Kiriya signaled to a tow truck and leapt aboard. People were hanging off the sides and waving their arms as if the war had been won.

The widow squatted in the back of a jeep. As it hurtled over the dirt, a rush of air scrambled her hair into her eyes. She blinked and brushed it aside.

That night in her bunk as she smoked a cigarette she said, “Did you ever think you wouldn’t get back?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you chase the Americans?”

“‘Why?’”

“If you knew you might not get back?”

“If I didn’t chase them, who would I be?”

Ivan the Terrible had claimed both Thunderjets he’d pursued south to the P’yŏngyang-Wŏnsan line and five more Sabres in the month that followed. He was by for the Ace of Aces. Cheering ground crews carried him on their shoulders from his cockpit; that night Kiriya toasted him in the bar and then in private he said, “Your honour is the honour of the 221st. I’m going to recommend you for a second Gold Star or a second Order of Lenin. Name it.”

“If I can name it, then I name it for Gnido. He earned it. Make it his.”

Kiriya gazed back at him. He would have to inform the authorities that new information had come to light. Gnido was already forgotten by just about every man in the Polk, a rookie who’d come and gone and made no mark. It was a considerble inconvenience for a matter he regarded as so unimportant. But he nodded. Who could refuse Ivan the Terrible?

Skomorokhov died the following week. He got a kill — his sixteenth — and was just turning to see what was behind when a shell ripped through his canopy and opened a 10-centimetre gash in his neck. In reflex his hand went up to the wound but he was unconscious before he’d even looked at the blood on his glove and dead before his plane hit the ground.

Spring bloomed at last. The fields lay like felt. In the trees, eggs were hatching. Chicks shivered into the world, their feathers sticky with yolk; it was impossible to believe they’d be taking wing in only a few weeks. The MiG with the great red star on its body and the hammer and sickle on its tail soared above it all. Ivan the Terrible churned the air into a vortex that no one could see but that could turn the wings of any aircraft that came his way.

NEWS CAME FROM MOSCOW. Joseph Stalin had suffered a stroke. Kiriya took the morning’s briefing himself and broke the news to the men. Some wanted to grieve, some to rejoice, but they kept their sentiments to themselves. It was as if they were waiting to receive a diktat on what to feel.

That night Yefgenii lay with the widow under the stars. They made love while above them planets crept along the line of the ecliptic. As usual he withdrew at the last moment and his semen congealed in the grass.

She peered at him. “You don’t want children?”

He didn’t answer. The smoke of dying airplanes, the blooms of parachutes, the flames of victory — they were his children.

“We must all have children. One day. Or else there’ll be nothing left behind when we’re gone.”

In that moment he thought that, though he didn’t love the widow, perhaps he should marry her. He should marry her because she understood that men must die.

Four days later Stalin did. Within a month prisoners of war were exchanged at Panmunjom. Though hostilities continued between Communist and UN forces, it seemed an armistice was nearing. Eager to analyze Soviet technology, the Americans announced a reward of $100,000 and political asylum to any Communist pilot who delivered a MiG-15 into UN hands.

Kiriya invited Yefgenii into his office. “Any day now, this war will be over.” He waited for Yefgenii’s reaction. The Ace of Aces had thirty-four kills. Perhaps he still expected to claim his thirty-fifth.

“I know.”

Kiriya unlocked a cabinet in the corner of the room and took out a bottle of vodka. “Not the piss they’ve got in the bar. I’ve been keeping it for a special occasion. I thought maybe when I became an ace… then I thought maybe when you became Ace of Aces… still… let’s drink now, Yo-Yo, before it’s too late.”

He poured shots into two glasses. “To war.” They looped their drinking arms and downed the shots.

Kiriya refilled the glasses. This time they sipped. “I never opened this bottle because I thought none of those occasions was an end in itself. But now I know for certain they’ll finish, these days of sport and glory.”

He poured two more shots. They looped arms and gulped. Kiriya studied his empty glass. “Sometimes, in life, we don’t win or lose. We just run out of time.”

Kiriya took off alone without filing a flight plan. The tower requested his intentions. “A general handling sortie. I’ll be operating this side of the border.” Of course the controller cleared him and Kiriya climbed into the east, over the Yalu into North Korean airspace. He turned south along the coast and opened the throttle. He surged toward P’yŏngyang and soon the city passed under his port wing. He crossed the Nan River and continued south, soaring over the 38th Parallel.

Eventually an airfield drifted onto his nose. He could make out the Kimp’o flight lines — Sabres with their silver backs, some with yellow flashes and some with black-and-white checkerboards on their tails, their wings swept back like darts. Soon a pair rolled out and climbed up toward him.

Kiriya clicked through the frequencies. He passed a squeal and dialed back to it. American voices were exchanging messages in volleys. He understood none of it, of course. Even when someone addressed him in Korean, it remained futile.

The Sabres were sitting out on each of his wings. He could see the pilots signaling to him. Each was jabbing a single finger down toward the airfield below. Kiriya understood. They wanted to escort him down.
They thought he was defecting!

Kiriya threw back his head and laughed. He released his drop tanks and let down into the thicker air to give them an even greater advantage. The Americans dropped their tanks and swept in behind him for the kill but the first evasive turns he made were quick and tight and successful and it occurred to him then that he should at least make some sport of it all. More Sabres were scrambling off the Kimp’o tarmac. Soon four of them were chasing Kiriya north, west, south, whichever way he swung. He was running out of fuel and if he ejected there was always the chance his pistol would jam. That would be his luck.

The Sabres pushed him down to the deck and the first tracers began flickering past his canopy. He levelled the wings and raised the tail to make it an easier target. Even if they could piece his body together, with no insignia on his uniform and no papers, they’d never know who he’d been in life, or what he’d achieved, if anything.

IN APRIL OF 1953, during a raid against the Suiho Dam, Joseph McConnell had been shot down but had steered his stricken plane out over the East China Sea, where he’d ejected and been pulled out of the water. His conqueror that day had flown a MiG-15 bearing markings of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and had been officially recorded as being of Chinese or North Korean origin. The pilot had been Kapetan Semyon Fedorets of the 913th IAP.

McConnell went on to amass sixteen victories, surpassing the tallies of Jabara and Fernandez and the late George Davis to become the Korean War’s assumed Ace of Aces, celebrated as the leading jet ace of all time. All three men — McConnell, Jabara and Fernandez — were posted home early to eliminate the risk of their being lost in combat, such was their propaganda value.

Unsung pilots weren’t just Soviet. There were many fighting on the UN side who remained nameless. They knew McConnell’s score lay beyond their powers. His wasn’t the name on their lips as they launched into MiG Alley. Another was being whispered on the flight lines and in the officers’ clubs late at night, whispered as if it were a curse. That name was Ivan the Terrible, and, for every pilot who dreaded ever meeting him, another hungered to vanquish a legend and in so doing become a legend himself.

On the last day of the war, the MiG-15, displaying the great red star on its body, the hammer and sickle on its tail, and thirty-four little red stars on its cockpit, accelerated down the Antung strip. Behind him the clouds of dust raised by the aircraft were settling back onto the ground. Within seconds they’d vanished, become part of the earth again.

He led a
zveno
of six MiGs east to the Yalu and then over the border. The air was saturated with damp and their trails of ice crystals weren’t vaporizing, but instead were spreading into ribbons of cirrocumulus artifacta that feathered all the way back into Manchuria.

Hurtling north to intercept them were eight ships of the 25th FIS. An exchange pilot from the U.S. Marine Corps led one element. His name was Major John Glenn and he’d already bagged two kills in the last week. His wingman in the Marines had been Ted Williams. Ted Williams was a baseball star. In the season of 1941, Williams achieved the highest batting average of all time, while his rival Joe DiMaggio amassed a fifty-six-game hitting streak. The seasons light up, but then they’re gone forever.

Ivan the Terrible saw the Sabres first, of course. They were sailing 5,000 metres beneath. He recognized who they were by the checkerboard patterns on their tailplanes. “Drop tanks,” he said.

He pulled the lever and as he did so he felt a clunk and the airplane lurched to the right. The port tank was tumbling down to earth but the other remained slung under his wing. He’d got a hung tank. The asymmetrical weight and drag were tilting the right wing down into a turn and swinging the nose round in the same direction. He trimmed out all the forces and threw the lever again, but the tank wouldn’t drop.

“Fuck it. Let’s go.”

They swooped down into the Sabres. He picked out the trailing plane and his guns hammered down at its tail and spine and shattered the glass of the canopy. He saw the pilot’s helmet cracking open like a nutshell and the spurt of blood before the aircraft listed and began the long fall.

He sailed over the others but they were already splitting into element pairs. He called, “Break!” and the MiGs astern selected their opponents; it was the last order he gave; from now on it was every man for himself.

As he began his first turn back into the arena, he glimpsed over his right shoulder that three Sabres were following but were crossing each other’s lines to get on his tail. They’d seen the red star. They were battling each other to be the one who conquered Ivan the Terrible.

He rolled hard right, as the drag of his hung tank would help the turn. Ahead of him appeared a Sabre side-on. His cannons ripped into its fuselage from wings to tail and an orange globe ballooned out of its rear. Its forward section broke off and plummeted. As it fell, it crossed a trail of black smoke being left by a MiG that was also on its way down.

A Sabre barrel-rolled in behind a MiG and its guns began ripping apart the tailplane. That was Glenn scoring his third kill. Another Sabre nailed another MiG; a MiG was chasing a damaged Sabre to its death.

Above him a Sabre floated into view. He pitched up and opened fire. Metal showered from its belly. Pieces the size of hubcaps were tumbling down, spinning fine threads of smoke as they went. The Sabre banked hard left and Yefgenii struggled to match the turn.