Ascent by Jed Mercurio (12 page)

When they landed at Graham Bell Station, the thermometre read minus 20. A huge snow-covered dome of rock stood on the south of the island. Here, the north was considered the hospitable part.

Snow fell, decking the runway and coating the buildings. It gathered round his boots and crusted the fur fringe of his parka hood. But aircraft were moving, snowplows were shifting. Work details were digging up a taxiway to lay underground hot-water pipes. Jets and props howled.

A junior officer had seen his name on the assignments list and word got out at once: Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin was coming to Graham Bell. The younger men hadn’t even heard of him, or if they had they thought he was a myth. The first night in the mess, he ate alone. He understood he’d fallen out of favor and people didn’t dare appear to be his comrade.

For the other fighter pilots, to have among them a man with thirty-seven combat victories, the greatest jet ace of all time, but to ignore him, even to treat him with contempt, was unbearable. So his achievements had to be disregarded. Ivan the Terrible had never existed; if he had, he was not this man among them. Besides, regulations still forbade discussing the Soviet participation in Korea.

Once, in the mess, in whispers, one man claimed to have served at Antung in the year before Yefgenii joined up with the 221st IAP. “Do you remember the heat? And the flies! What I’d give for them now!”

Yefgenii gave the man a small smile.

“And the food. It tasted like shit. And those terrible metal bowls we ate out of. Mine was always rusty.”

“They were wooden.”

“No.” The man glared.
“Metal.”

Yefgenii shrugged. “It’s not important.”

The man leaned forward. “It
is
important. Where was the Ops hut?”

Yefgenii pictured the Ops hut lying alongside the crew hut. He pictured the dispersal and taxiways, dust lifting off the runway in the wake of MiGs, the pine-covered mountains to the west. He smiled. Every man would remember them in his own way. “As you know, comrade, neither of us was there.”

The widow, travelling by icebreaker, arrived weeks later with their belongings, and pregnant. The time apart had been their first since the end of the war. In the beginning he’d missed her hardly at all, but toward the end he understood that he was a little less content, a little lonelier, than before. He met her at the quay and hugged her. He felt her gravid belly push against his crotch, felt something physical he hadn’t expected to.

Soon he was accustomed to her again, and his sentiments for her lost their sharpness. She was his wife but he believed many other women could have fulfilled this place in his life, if they’d chosen to, if he’d chosen them. So this was the understanding, almost a bargain, and the widow set about transforming the small house they were provided with into a home in which to raise a family, while he got to flying.

It snowed most days that first autumn. Nearly all ops below 2,000 metres were on instruments save the bottom 100, under the cloudbase, that they needed to climb out and scoot in under VMC. The Dome’s apex was 500 metres and it was easy for a man to get disoriented. They lost two pilots the first month. Some days, when the weather cleared, Yefgenii could see bits of wreckage littering the peaks and crops of all the eastern isles.

His back ached. On long sorties, he felt the muscles at the base of his spine harden to steel. He’d try rocking his hips in the seat, or turning his shoulders from side to side, but by the time he set down the pain would be excruciating. He suffered in silence. To reveal it would’ve been the end of his flying career. He’d take a few moments longer than the others to get to his feet and descend the ladder. As winter approached, the stiffness got worse. He invented a series of checks and maneuvers to extend the time it took him to leave the cockpit; the ground crew assumed they were superstitions.

The widow rubbed oil into his back. She warmed the flesh with massage and then she’d force her thumbs hard into the muscles that were like steel rods. Sometimes it hurt so much he’d cry out.

Temperatures plummeted further. Some mornings it was minus 30. They couldn’t ignite the jets. One got airborne and, as soon as it hit the runway, the nosewheel and the mainwheels snapped clean off. From the moment he strapped in, Yefgenii felt a slow numbness spread across the base of his back and buttocks. His legs tingled. In the short hours of daylight, it was white on white, earth to sky. From October there was no day at all.

The commanding officer was a bitter little man named Kostilev who rarely flew. In fact he seemed to hate flying, given how often he preferred to sift paperwork in his office with the door shut. When Yefgenii first reported to him, he stood to attention while Polkovnik Kostilev remained seated behind his desk. “Some men come here with a reputation, Yeremin, but first they have to prove themselves to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No one receives any privileges. I treat every man the same.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If a man is part of the team, he’ll get on. If he sets himself apart, well, he won’t.”

Yefgenii was a
kapetan,
so by rights he should have been made at least a flight leader. Kostilev assigned him to his
zveno
as a wingman. Yefgenii knew he’d remain a
kapetan
till the day he died or retired. No one would want to be known to favor him with promotion.

They flew the newest version of the MiG-17, armed with air-to-air-missiles. The days of dogfighting, of close combat, were gone. In the event of war, bombers would cross from one country to the other, their fighters would attempt to intercept as many as they could, but it was a game of numbers, of which country launched more bombers, of which country
had
more bombers to launch. The great powers were building nuclear arsenals heavy enough to obliterate the other, and the world. This was now how they measured themselves against each other: in weapons production, in the projected millions of civilian casualties, in the certainty of mutual assured destruction.

Snowplows kept the runways open. The MiGs climbed out on instruments, up through dense cloudbanks. Once above them, stars sparkled over their canopies. The aurora shimmered. The planes were invisible apart from their nav lights floating through the blackness. They flew these patrols for hours on end. American bombers were on constant standby to cross the Arctic and press deep into Soviet territory to deliver their payloads. Sometimes a B-52 would skirt Soviet airspace to mobilize their interceptors. On rare occasions, American aircraft penetrated the interior of the USSR, running in and out at high altitude. It was brinkmanship. They were testing each other’s defenses.

Yefgenii lived with the widow in the base’s low redbrick housing that was always cold, but the widow never complained. She’d wanted children right away. He remembered she’d asked him if he wanted to be a father. Then he’d considered his progeny to be the smoke of dying airplanes, the blooms of parachutes and the flames of victory. They were gone now. She’d said, “We must all have children or else there’ll be nothing left behind when we’re gone.”

The first, a girl, came before their first spring on Franz Josef Land. After the birth, the widow grew fat, her face got rounder, her nose more bulbous. He changed too. Though still only a young man, his hair was thinning at the front. He gained a high forehead, those blue eyes set beneath.

With the spring, the Sun opened a small hole in the endless night. The hole widened, the nights shrank. The northern isles remained locked in pack ice but the southernmost were released. Flying down over Hooker Island, Yefgenii could see the colony of seabirds in the bay. South of Northbrook Island, the sea was open; whales were schooling. As his MiG swooped low overhead, walruses flopped onto the ice, their hides slick in the sun. In summer, the temperature rose to freezing, occasionally a few degrees higher. The sea teemed with life. This was the seasonal cycle between ice and water, but always keeping more ice than water, as heavy banks of vapor massed into clouds, releasing liquid that fell as snow or hail but never as rain.

He flew patrols through cloud and wind while supply ships and the vessels of the Northern Fleet trailed frothy white wakes. He spoke little to the other men. He followed orders. He flew the MiG to the best of his ability. From time to time came alerts and the interceptors were launched. So far it was Cold War brinkmanship, not the heat of battle. To the north, banks of cloud blanketed the Pole like a ridge of white mountains, and one day soon the overlying sky would fill with slow-rising lines of silver wings.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union fired
Sputnik 1
into orbit. The news came through to Graham Bell the next day. The men toasted its success in the bar that night. Yefgenii raised his glass like the other men. He swallowed his shot of vodka.

The next winter, a second child was born, a boy this time, but Yefgenii felt remote from the event. A space existed between him and other people.

One year was the normal tour of duty in the Arctic, one year or at most two, but after three and a half years, Yefgenii received orders in the spring of 1959 that he remain in Franz Josef Land for the remainder of his flying career. This was his exile, yet he clung to a fragile hope. One day the American bombers would cross the ice in earnest and Ivan the Terrible would rise again.

Having been beaten by
Sputnik,
the United States declared its intention to send the first man into space. In April they selected a group of seven test pilots to begin training for spaceflight. Among them were John Glenn, Gus Grissom and Wally Schirra; they’d been distinguished supporting players in Korea but now they were the heroic stars of the Space Race. The Americans called them “astronauts” — star voyagers. Magazines carried their life stories. They appeared on television. In interviews some of them referred to God as if he really existed.

But the Soviets had more powerful and reliable rockets. Recruitment teams were already travelling out from Moscow. In utmost secrecy they toured VVS bases across the Soviet Union in search of pilots with the talent and courage to venture into space. No one came to Graham Bell.

Yefgenii flew long, lonely patrols. Afterwards, he stowed his kit in his locker and hung his helmet on the rack. He took the base bus home. A light glowed in the little redbrick house, snow matted the roof, and icicles glistened off the gutters. In the sitting room, the widow nursed their infant son, while their daughter lay sleeping in the bedroom. This was his life. This was him now.

THE SEASONS CYCLED. Ice moved in great shifts up and down the islands. Snows fell and melted. Yefgenii changed too, the face becoming gaunter, the forehead higher, and so did the world. Both nations had missiles now, not only capable of carrying a bomb from aircraft to target, but rockets that could carry nuclear warheads over oceans and across continents. They were building enough ICBMs to destroy every major city in their enemy’s homeland, enough to destroy civilization. If war came, the missiles would soar high over Franz Josef Land. The fighters were redundant; the job of air defense lay in the gloom of radar stations and SAM silos.

Two bomber squadrons were removed from Nagurskoye, a fighter squadron from Graham Bell. The crew rooms were airier, the streets and schools quieter. Empty cabins were pulled down, others were left to rot.

Yefgenii remained, of course. He feared he’d be kept here even if there was only one aircraft, only one man. He looked to the north, the cap of ice and cloud shrouding the curve of the earth like a ridge of white mountains. He longed for a sky filled with metal, but he knew the American bombers would never rise, Ivan the Terrible would never rise again.

That winter, the winter of 1960–1961, the darkness fell fast. The aurora’s spectral lights shimmered on the cloud tops and on the gleaming metal of his wings and the clear plastic of his visor. His blue eyes swam behind a flickering cascade of reds, greens and blues.

Icicles glistened on the gutters of the redbrick house. Snow blanketed its roof. The house smelled of cooking. He shook snowflakes off his coat and slapped them off his hat. The widow stood at the stove. The boy slept in the bedroom. As Yefgenii pulled off his boots, the girl told him her news. Yefgenii smiled. Anything that wasn’t flying struck him as unimportant, but he indulged her. The widow took the girl to bed. Yefgenii kissed her as she went and then he sat at the small wooden table in the single downstairs room while a meat stew bubbled on the stove.

When the widow returned she said, “She keeps asking about the dog.”

“What dog?”

“The one in space. What’s this one called?”

“Chernushka.”

“We were so sad about Laika, but this one will come back, won’t it? That’s what I told her, anyway.”

Soviet rockets were carrying dogs into space; the Americans sent chimps. Soon it would be a man. Both nations proclaimed the man would be theirs. The winner would secure the advantage of the military high ground; they would also lay claim to the superior ideology; and the man himself would be renowned for the remainder of human history, longer than there’d be countries.

The widow put out two bowls and ladled the stew into them. Steam rose from the surface. He stirred the liquid. They sent dogs into space. He felt lower than a dog. “This is good stew,” he said. “Just what I needed,” he said.

Yuri Gagarin flew into space aboard
Vostok 1
on April 12th. Crammed inside a capsule too small for a man of average size, he made one orbit of the earth then landed near the city of Saratov, on the Volga. Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself greeted Gagarin when he returned to Moscow. They stood along with leading Party members atop Lenin’s Mausoleum while the crowd in Red Square cheered in jubilation.

At Graham Bell that day, Yefgenii Yeremin didn’t fly. The whole country was celebrating the victory over the Americans. Yefgenii admired Gagarin’s valor, admired the qualities he must’ve had in order to win selection ahead of all the other cosmonauts.

He drank toasts with the other men. They were young, they were full of vigor. Many of them wanted to apply for the space program. It was a new world, and theirs. Yefgenii felt aged beyond his years. The cold and emptiness of the Arctic had bit by bit desiccated the life out of him. He swallowed vodka and studied his reflection floating in the veneer of the bar top.