The Hunters (22 page)

“Two hundred and twenty hours,” Kiser said.

“I have about the same, two hundred and thirty-eight,” the other added.

“Have you flown this airplane?”

“Yes, sir. In gunnery.”

“That's good. How much time do you have in it?”

“Let's see. About forty hours, isn't that right?”

The second one nodded.

“How long will it be before we go on missions, Captain?” he asked.

“Well, there's a transition course you have to go through here. Three or four rides, normally.”

“That's what we heard.”

“Sometimes it takes a while to get the rides in,” Cleve warned.

“Lieutenant Pell said it wouldn't be more than a couple of days.”

It was that all the time now. Everybody knew him. As they passed him in the evenings or at noon, they would interrupt their conversation. They would turn to see him, to say something. The greetings followed him like wet grass clinging to footfalls in a meadow.

“Hey, Doctor,” they said.

“Hello, Doc, Pell, buddy. Hi there! How's it going? Hello!”

Hunter and Pettibone were more and more with him. They echoed him when they talked. They appropriated fragments of his speech. It was like some law of the jungle. When he entered, they were behind. When he left, they followed. They gathered to him to protect themselves from oblivion and perhaps discover how to be blessed also. Whether with the innocence of children or in full understanding of what they were accepting, they were his undoubted disciples. With a cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth and looking like a boy imitating his father, Pell would give them advice.

“The most important thing now, Billy Lee, is to build up a lot of flying time—and to get promoted.”

“I don't see how there's any chance of promotion,” Hunter argued. They had all become first lieutenants less than a week previously.

“There isn't. That's why it's so important.”

“I don't see how it's possible, though.”

“There's always an angle,” Pell said. “You ought to know that by now.”

“I suppose so.”

Cleve was alone. That was the life he almost seemed to have chosen. The time had gone by when it was easy to make friends. He walked by himself, the web of the past on him like a tangle of invisible rigging.

You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle. If you wanted to speak, you used the radio. You were as isolated as a deep-sea diver, only you went up, into nothing, instead of down. You were accompanied. They flew with you in heraldic patterns and fought alongside you, sometimes skillfully, always at least two ships together, but they were really of no help. You were alone. At the end, there was no one you could touch. You could call out to them, as he had heard someone call out one day going down, a pitiful, pleading “Oh, Jesus!” but they could touch you not.

He wrote to Eiko:

 

 

It was not all he wanted to say but he was anxious to remind her that he was at the front, alone, as it were, defiant.

Heat and endless days. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. He could not decide. Was it courage or enthusiasm, or something even more vital, life itself, that was draining out of him so steadily day after day mission after mission, as if a man were born with, or acquired, only so much of it, never to be replenished?

The days became hot buzzing. Long, dusty walks crossed them. Shoes scuffed at the dry earth, and the sun shone down heavy as mist. Voices at night carried far through the swollen air, and the weak glow of electric lights lasted late in the rooms. It was not easy to sleep—not like the winter with its hushed, blanketed hours and the metal of the stove creaking from the heat. The insects were bad, and there was only Korean ice.

Picking his missions carefully because he had so few remaining, Cleve went on. He chose only those that he calculated or guessed might be fruitful, deciding often at the last minute, trusting what was now a hardened, various instinct. There were not many fights, though. The failures added to each other, one by one. He went back over them frequently, all the opportunities lost. How many times had he chased after them when they were already above him, their bellies silver, sailing steadily away. Or gone down low to try and catch them climbing after takeoff, using up all his fuel in a gamble, so that when they did come from somewhere at the very end he could not stay and fight. Or doubled his bets, like a man at a roulette table, by compounding fruitless missions, one after the other, with the certainty that averages would finally work in his favor; but they did not. Or not seen them soon enough when they were there, and missed the critical
moment that never returned. He thought of the next chance, if there was to be one, and alternated between bitter hope and despair. The nearly stagnant stream of days moved by.

On his eighty-fifth mission he went only because it was going far north and inland, away from the friendly water. He took it to discipline himself.

The day was cloudy; and they flew a long way past Huichon, in an unfamiliar northeasterly direction, to a junction where the fighter-bombers were hitting bridges across a river that the railroad followed. There was a level deck of clouds at twelve thousand feet. When they dropped down through it, it was like going beneath the surface of the sea. Everything in that submerged world was dim, cool, and unreal. The rugged hills were smothered with greenery like velvet, and the sagging roof of clouds close above made it like being in a great translucent cave. It was a place where he felt he could almost hear the sound of MIGs if they came, but they never did.

The time passed slowly. Every morning early and in the sweaty stillness of every night, he struggled with himself, stemming the weakness that seemed to come then. Open-eyed on his cot, he suffered through the darkness. Then, more than at any other time, there was the constant feeling that he was being consumed, drained; and he did not know the extent of his reserves. It was like flying with the fuel gauge reading zero, waiting for the silence that hit like a hammer. In the air, he did not lack aggressiveness. His determination was never missing there, but during the enormous hours in between he felt himself adrift and helpless. The fifteen, fourteen, thirteen missions ahead seemed many times more dangerous than those that had gone before, when he thought about them, which was often; and yet he simultaneously wished
that he had back every one that had been wasted. He drove himself doggedly on.

Pell, by direction of Colonel Imil, was always leading an element, at least, on the missions.

“I want him in a firing position,” the colonel said, not to Cleve. It had come down through the squadron commander and Nolan. “Leading flights if possible. I don't care if you have to put captains or even majors on his wing. He gets kills I want him out in front.”

“He doesn't have very much experience, Colonel.”

“To hell with the experience. I've got men with all the experience in the world and still not worth a damn.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fly him in the lead from now on.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hunter and Pettibone both flew as his wingman. They were not especially happy to do it, but they didn't complain. Pell found MIGs, or, if he did not, they found him.

“I'm going to get one before I leave,” Hunter said. “I don't care how. It doesn't matter whose wing I'm on. Just so I get my chance.”

“He'll do all the shooting, though,” Pettibone said.

“Not all of it. He's hot, that's the important thing. He's running into them all the time.”

It was true. There seemed to be a fight only when Pell was in the air. For Cleve, there was an inevitability of the ships returning in twos, their noses blackened, their tanks gone, if the mission was one on which Pell went and he did not.

There was an escort for a photo-reconnaissance ship, and Pell filled in with another flight. He was leading the element in the
close-cover group. Suddenly, there was a MIG nobody had seen coming in to make a pass on the photo ship. It leveled out right in front of Pell, not a thousand feet away His sixth kill. When he taxied back in and parked that day Colonel Imil jumped up on the wing of his ship and swore, impulsively, to get him the Distinguished Service Cross.

It was phenomenal. He was a wonder, a growing myth. He was, at that time, the most famous pilot in the Air Force, and it had all been accomplished in only fifty-odd missions. The bulk of his tour was still ahead of him. Letters containing clippings and photographs from newspapers in the States came almost daily. He read them and then filed them carefully away in cigar boxes. There was always something in the mail for him. Stamp collectors wrote, enclosing printed covers, and requested that he carry them to the Yalu and then endorse them back. Girls in cities he had never been to wrote, some sending their pictures. A periodical wanted an autobiography or at least an article. The president of an aircraft company sent congratulations.

They were already talking about who would get the flight when Cleve was gone. He had only eleven missions left. It would be soon.

“There isn't but one man in this group who can take over,” Hunter announced.

Kiser was interested.

“Who's that?” he asked.

“Why, it's obvious.”

“Pell?”

“Sure. See if he doesn't.”

“Do you really think he'll get it?”

“He has to.”

Kiser whistled.

“That's something. He was a brand-new second lieutenant when he came over, wasn't he?”

“A lot's happened since then.”

“But don't they usually pick captains?”

“Not over a man with six kills.”

“Say,” Kiser asked, “were you with him on any? Did you see them?”

“Sure.”

“What was it like?”

“Just like the combat film they show you.”

“Yes,” Kiser insisted, “but how did it start? How did he actually get them?”

“All kinds of ways,” Hunter said. He was uncomfortable at having spoken too quickly. “Look, you'll see kills yourself; I guarantee you that.”

There was a pause.

“Have you gotten any?”

“Not yet,” Hunter said.

“I hope I'm along when you do.”

“Maybe you will be.”

Schramm came over and sat down with them. He was a quieter, more threatening fellow than Kiser.

“Has Cleve had the flight all along?” he said.

“Ever since the beginning. He's been here a long time.”

“Since before Pell got here?”

“Oh, sure.”

“How is it that he only has one MIG, then? Isn't he any good?”

“It's not that,” Hunter said.

“How do you explain it then?”

“I don't know. He's old, for one thing.”

“How old?”

“Thirty-five, maybe.”

“He's a regular grandfather, isn't he?”

“He's a good pilot,” Hunter said, moved by conscience. “You'd be better off with him than with anybody else, except you probably wouldn't find anything.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I just know that the Doctor is the one who gets them, and that's what counts. He's right in the thick of it every time. Once his leader got shot down right alongside of him, but he made it back.”

“Is that right?”

“And got two MIGs while he was at it.”

“What a mission that must have been,” Kiser said.

“Yes, sir. I wasn't on that one, myself. If Pell doesn't get himself killed, though, he'll wind up top ace of the war. Mark my words. I've seen them come and go.”

“You really think he'll get the flight?” Kiser said. “That would be something.”

“He'd be a mean one to try and beat. He's a smart operator. Wait until you get to know him some.”

“He looks mean,” Schramm said. “I notice he's smoking on those cigars all the time.”

“All fighter pilots smoke cigars,” Hunter said.

In June came ponderous heat and mornings like eggshells, pale and smooth. Perhaps there might be a bit of early wind, warm but tantalizing, that was never repeated throughout the day. The heat was tremendous. It made the feet ache and clothes feel like abrasive. Even sheets were hot, concrete floors and water pipes. There was no place to go to escape it. The days were interminable. But the mornings, the eternal mornings! They were dawns of doomsday, already burned to transparence while still beyond the horizons over which they came. The mind was threatened by their emptiness. The face wrinkled instinctively against them. They were silent, like the dawns over vast sleeping millions, perfectly still, threatening, deathful. In their silence, premonitions bred like vermin, while red as a tomato the sun rose from behind the eastern hills, throwing down thick blankets of heat.

It was on such a morning that the first-light reconnaissance, which flew along the Chinese border visually checking the enemy fields, returned to report an awesome display. The strips were jammed with aircraft, a rash of silver MIGs strewn as thickly as pebbles on a shore. They had counted almost seven hundred of them, parked wingtip to wingtip.