Ascent by Jed Mercurio Page 3

  “I’m not visual. Anyone else visual?”

  “Negative.”

  “Negative.”

  “Neg—”

  “Red Six, none of us are visual. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, boss. In our three, on the hor—”

  “I can’t see shit.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Red Six, is it closing?”

  “Negative. Looks like it’s moving in parallel, maybe even receding.”

  “Well, that’s no fucking use. I’m under min. If there’s anyone out there, he’s 50 kilometres away or more.”

  “I’m ten litres under.”

  “Five.”

  “No way could we chase him down and still make it back over the Yalu.”

  “Shit.” That was Kiriya again.

  The seconds stretched. Yefgenii tracked the tiny gray point as it crept along the horizon. It was getting smaller.

  Still Kiriya didn’t give the order. He was contemplating burning what fuel he had left to hunt down a target he couldn’t even see. He knew Yeremin had sharp eyes. If only he had sharp eyes. If only he’d seen it half an hour ago. He’d been stuck on four so long now. “Fuck it. We’ve got to go home.” He clicked off. “Shit.”

  The MiGs turned north. Yefgenii glanced out past his wingtip at the contact. It was shrinking to nothing, a Sabre of the 16th Fighter Intercept Squadron flown by a Second Lieutenant named Buzz Aldrin. A few moments later the aircraft had gone, leaving only a bare patch of sky. Even the cotton filament of its contrail had vanished. The air was clear, empty and silent. Yefgenii felt the hunger for the first time. It reached down into his gut. It filled the gap between earth and sky.

  THEN, AS IF BY CASTING A SPELL, things changed. The Sun rose like glory. Intelligence had reported a wave of B-29 raids on North Korean hydroelectric plants. PLAAF pilots had engaged the B-29s’ fighter escort over Panghyon. Both sides had suffered losses. Sightings were coming in thick and fast. As fighters clamored to join the action, dust erupted from the runways north of the Yalu.

  Pilipenko scribbled duties onto the board with flourishes of a black marker. The pilots crowded round. Yefgenii read he’d fly with Kiriya once again. It was because of his eyes — Kiriya wanted them picking out targets for him and not for anyone else.

  They sat in their cockpits for an hour. Kiriya called the tower every five minutes. His voice turned shrill. He wanted to know why their orders hadn’t come through yet. He had to get into the fight even if it was only to scavenge for scraps. Just as he was beginning to lose hope, the fighter controller’s voice broke through from the tower: “Clear to taxi.”

  Kiriya had them test-firing their guns almost the second they left the circuit, but when they crossed the Yalu the battle appeared over. The blue was empty. Kiriya could’ve wept. For some men there’d been a sky filled with glorious sport, but for him now there was nothing.

  Yefgenii clicked the button on his stick to transmit a word of Korean: “Contact.”

  “Good boy!” In Russian, Kiriya was almost squeaking.

  No one else replied. Apart from Kiriya they were Kubarev, Baturin, Dolgikh and Glinka. None of them could see it yet. On the ground civilized men could get by without sharp eyes. They had evolved beyond natural selection and were free of it. The men who fought in the sky were not.

  “No contact,” said Kubarev in Korean.

  Yefgenii said, “One o’clock.”

  Each pilot alone in his cockpit peered southward, through banks of cloud scattered like coral, in search of a fleeting glint of metal. They scanned up to the horizon for creeping black specks and then above for contrails. Yefgenii’s eyes were that much sharper that seconds passed without the others acquiring the sighting.

  “Repeat, contact, one o’clock,” Yefgenii said.

  “Red Six, lead.”

  The words didn’t mean anything to Yefgenii. Kiriya’s pronunciation of Korean was idiosyncratic. “Say again.”

  “Red Six. Lead.”

  “Say again.”

  Kiriya snapped in Russian, “Take us to him!”

  Yefgenii slid the throttle to its forward end-stop. The engine roared behind him. It kicked his backside. He held the stick hard forward to keep the nose level and stood on the rudders to hold the aircraft straight. Yefgenii’s airplane accelerated out of formation to assume the lead. The contact was below the contrail level, just a black dot only he could see. As they closed it began to crystallize into its components.

  At last the others could see them. Kirya ordered, “Drop tanks.”

  Again Yefgenii couldn’t decipher Kiriya’s pronunciation but he saw the others dropping their wing tanks so he reached under his seat and swung the small lever that released them. The fuel tanks broke from the MiGs’ wings and seemed to hold in the air for a moment before tipping over and gathering speed and plunging down toward the green land below. He felt weight fall from the airframe but he held his controls against the rise and pitch the plane wanted to make and then he trimmed out the pressure in the stick.

  The MiGs crossed the sky and in crossing to their prey they descended through thousands of metres. The air grew thicker and warmer. Their exhausts remained steam. No trails formed.

  Yefgenii’s mouth dried with the taste of rubber on his lips. Noise pounded his helmet. He tightened his straps. He toggled down his mask. The mask began to hurt the bridge of his nose.

  They recognized the four aircraft ahead and below as F-86 Sabres of the 334th FIS. The Sabres had snub noses and swept wings. Yellow slashes decorated their tailplanes and midsections. The American squadrons were proud of their identity; each had its own markings, and some pilots even wore individual designs on their aircraft. The MiGs were anonymous.

  The Americans broke formation into two elements. They had seen them. They pulled apart and next released their wing tanks which tumbled like meteorites end over end toward land.

  “Break!”

  Glinka and Dolgikh chased one Sabre element. Under the leader’s canopy a scarlet bonedome glinted in the sunlight. Six stars blurred on the cockpit. The other pair of Sabres streaked between them and Kubarev and Baturin while Kiriya led Yefgenii high above the battle.

  Dolgikh was stumbling over his Korean, unable to get his words out. “Fuck it!” he said in Russian. “Red Six, you’ve got a Sabre element under you, should be popping into your two o’clock anytime now.” Then all at once all the voices were speaking Russian.

  Yefgenii’s hands were shaking. His knees were knocking against the stick. He swung hard to follow the pair that were crossing beneath him. As his plane rolled, the Sabres reappeared below him and arcing round behind. Their wings glinted in the sun as they tilted into the turn. Yefgenii swung the stick over the other way and pulled back to the edge of a stall. The airframe shuddered. The controls felt spongy but he held the turn. Outside the canopy the sky wheeled round. He hung on his straps with one wing pricking the heavens and the other boring into the earth. He pulled harder on the stick, harder, at full throttle, the turn tightening and g-forces driving his ass hard into the seat and weighting his head forward and leadening his arms. The shoulder straps cut into his flesh. Yefgenii tensed the muscles of his neck to keep his head straight as he craned round to follow the Sabres turning behind him. He was turning too. The nose swung along the horizon at the precise angle to give a max-rate turn. The needles were motionless. Every drop of the plane’s energy was driving the turn; nothing was bleeding into a climb or a descent or a roll or a yaw. The MiG shook. The airflow over the wings was on the verge of breaking up. The boundary layer was tearing away. He held the turn, held her on the buffet, pulling round, harder, tighter, pulling, clenching against the acceleration. Grayness crept into his peripheral vision. It turned hard and black and began to close like an iris on the wheeling lens of blue sky and glinting smoky warfare. He strained hard against a closed glottis, the Valsalva maneuver forcing blood into his head and back to his retinas, not letting it drain into his belly and arse and boo
ts. He strained and it pushed open the black iris.

  From under the nose the Sabres reappeared. The nearer of the pair was 100 metres away. Yefgenii lined it up in his gun-sight and clicked the trigger. The 23 mm cannon spat out shells. He felt the recoil in his boots and in his butt. He closed in then fired a second round. Tracers leapt out ahead of his cockpit. They glowed as they crossed the void between him and the Sabre, drifted past it and vanished into the earth.

  The Sabre turned and now Yefgenii followed. He fired again. The shells jumped across space and struck the Sabre’s fuselage. Smoke burst from its tail and flashed past Yefgenii’s canopy. The American aircraft shuddered but did not fall. Trailing wisps of white smoke, it turned in an arc to the south and then straightened up. Now Yefgenii was closing in. He made out a charred gouge of metal at the Sabre’s tail where the shell had struck. Damaged, the American was slow; he was heading for base.

  Yefgenii followed for the kill. He knew it now. He was a killer. He’d join the brotherhood and he’d wear the small red star on the side of his cockpit that was the star of victory and the star of murder.

  The American plunged south. In normal conditions the Sabre might outperform the MiG at lower altitude. The American knew, however, he had no hope of outmaneuvering the MiG and his dive was to gain speed. The twisted shrapnel on his aircraft’s fuselage made him less aerodynamic. An aileron was damaged. His controls were sluggish. His aircraft had become too clumsy for a fight. He was racing for the line between Wŏnsan and P’yŏngyang where Yefgenii would be forced to turn back and the American would live to fly another day.

  Yefgenii shoved the throttle to make certain it shunted its end-stop. He fingered the trim tabs on the control column and to the side of the cockpit. Over and over again he trimmed out the controls to make his MiG as sleek and fast as possible. He watched the needle of the Mach meter nudge 0.9. The MiG snaked at this speed but with each minute and each adjustment the American appeared closer and more vulnerable.

  The two fighters raced southward, rupturing the air with a blasting of jets and slashing of wings, while the clouds that lay in clumps crept along the horizon like slugs and a patchwork of green fields and brown hills lay still and quiet below. The Nan River drifted toward them. The welcoming land of the South beckoned to the American. In only a few minutes he’d be safe; even if he couldn’t land, he could eject.

  Yefgenii hunched into the gun-sight. He glimpsed the Sabre duck and bounce through the crosshairs but never for even a second settle in them. The American swung left and right. His plane was fat and weak and he must’ve known the end was coming.

  Diving through thousands of metres, to them the earth grew big again. Soon it cradled their expanding shadows that skimmed over steepening hills and slithered through widening valleys.

  A third shadow appeared. A fighter bobbed into Yefgenii’s slipstream. Yefgenii glanced up into his rearview mirror ready to roll hard away but instead of a Sabre he glimpsed a blunter snout with an air intake divided by a vertical septum — a MiG. “Retreat,” Kiriya ordered.

  Now the flat dark buildings of P’yŏngyang were beginning to fall under the leading edge of his right wingtip. In a few more seconds, when the Nan River slipped under his belly, the American would be safe across the border.

  Kiriya had not made a turn as tight and accurate as Yefgenii’s and had missed the chance to strike the Sabre. Now he struggled to hold position behind. The Sabre’s jet-wash buffeted Yefgenii’s aircraft but Yefgenii held true to the American’s tail. Over and over again Kiriya bobbed in and out of line and at times he overcorrected. He tried to believe that his position was the more difficult one but the truth was plain: this nineteen-year-old virgin was the greater master of his craft.

  Yefgenii had closed to point-blank range. He drew back the throttle. On the instrument panel gauge needles swung over as the rush of the engine diminished. The plane steadied and Yefgenii’s finger crooked round the trigger.

  “Retreat.” Kiriya’s voice rose. “Retreat!”

  The American slid into the crosshairs and Yefgenii held him there. Only a second passed but this was an age, this was a pilot’s lifetime and his death. Yefgenii could claim his radio had failed. He could kill this American and then he would be at base with the red star upon his fuselage.

  Kiriya cut through in Russian. “Get the fuck out of there, Yeremin. He’s mine.”

  Yefgenii let out a long profane scream but didn’t click on the radio for Kiriya to hear it. With his mouth gaping in a shriek that no one heard he tilted the wings and throttled back and so Yefgenii drifted aside into the quiet of a calming engine and a slowing rush of air. A moment later Kiriya’s tracers were burning into the Sabre’s tail and a short moment after that a shell tore open the American’s fuselage.

  A wing crumpled. The Sabre slid sideways then spun and toppled. Metal sheared away in chunks. As if in tranquil recovery an amputated section of wing straightened all of a sudden and took flight again. It rose and glinted in the sun but then it flipped and then it twisted and then it began the long sink to earth.

  With the battle over, the survivors were dispersing. Streaks of ice pointed north into Manchuria and south to the 38th Parallel. The Americans would report their contacts as North Koreans or Chinese. Most they met were ill-trained and, to the U.S. pilots, the war in the main was a duck shoot. If they thought different they saved it for later and the dark quiet corners of the officers’ club. Some had picked up enemy R/T that didn’t sound like Korean or Chinese, but they called the best of their opponents Honcho or Casey Jones, never anything else. The Soviets weren’t in the War. That was official. They weren’t here nor were their seasoned jet pilots.

  Yefgenii watched the Sun slide down to the Yellow Sea. It threw back a glow as if a great red fireball had toppled off the edge of the world, causing a golden crust to simmer at the clouds’ edges and colouring their undersides pink like the bellies of salmon. The aircrafts’ condensation trails were evaporating into the thin dry air. Soon the ice crystals would condense again and someday they’d fall as rain.

  IN DUSK the last pair of MiGs reappeared over Antung. White landing lights and blinking red and green navigation lights glowed, while in gloom the planes themselves had turned to ghosts. The lights floated down to the runway. They were spirits returning to earth; they were demons creeping back into the underworld.

  Yefgenii landed with despair cladding the cockpit. His mask reeked of it. It was in his gloves. It was in his boots. His wheels flung up a plume of dust and, behind the aircraft, the jet engine whipped it into a vortex that scattered and drifted and, by the time Yefgenii turned off the runway onto the taxiway, the dust had sown itself once more into the ground.

  He snap-turned his QRB to release his harnesses. Because the ground crews were massing round Kiriya’s plane, only one of them stayed back to help Yefgenii. She was a pear-shaped girl perhaps five years older than him with dirty blonde hair and oily skin. The men said she was a widow. None of the senior pilots wanted her in their ground crews. A woman was bad luck; a widow, twice so. The junior pilots tolerated her till they got a kill or bribed the Starshina with a bottle of vodka, then she’d be moved on to someone else’s crew farther down the pecking order.

  The widow said nothing to Yefgenii as she placed the ladder for him to step down. He paid her no attention. He didn’t much believe in luck or in superstition.

  Pilipenko was leading the celebration for Kiriya’s kill. He had his arm round Kiriya and was kissing his cheek. Kiriya raised his arm in triumph while the ground crews applauded. The Starshina was already stenciling a small red star under the cockpit of Kiriya’s jet. Five now lay in line, proclaiming him the newest ace of the world’s first jet war.

  Yefgenii turned away. Hunched under his aircraft, Yefegenii fought hard not to sob.

  The widow peered at him. She wondered if he might’ve taken ill. “Leitenant, are you all right…?”

  Yefgenii swallowed his tears. Without a word to her he march
ed across the dispersal toward Kiriya’s celebration with the hose of his PEC slapping sharp against his thigh.

  Pilipenko and Skomorokhov and Kiriya were numbered among the brotherhood. They were sunning themselves in their glory. They laughed as only gods can laugh.

  Yefgenii stood on the periphery. At one point Kiriya caught his gaze and something passed between them. In that tiny moment Kiriya’s expression softened. Yefgenii’s hands came together and he joined in the applause for his commanding officer’s triumph.

  Later, in the crew hut, Glinka claimed he’d been close to downing one of the Sabres. “You know, Yeremin, the more I think about it… I might even have damaged him. The pilot who wore red—”

  “Red…?”

  “A red bonedome. That was Jabara.”

  Major James Jabara had become the first ace of the war, the first jet ace in history. He’d appeared in a newsreel standing at his Sabre’s wing wearing his Mae West and his parachute pack buckled over it, with his hands clasped across his groin holding that famous scarlet helmet. His jet kills had made him as famous as a movie star or a world champion, the most famous American aviator since Lindbergh.

  Yefgenii shrugged. He felt numb and all he wanted was to be alone. To desert the crew hut before duty’s end would invite disapproval, so he wrote up the mission in his logbook and hung around till the ground chief’s report was ready to sign.

  At night he returned to barracks. In the polished scrap of aluminum they used for a mirror he registered for the first time the burst capillaries mottling his face, neck, and chest. They had ruptured under high g. He peeled off his undershirt. The straps of his harness had grazed red bands into his shoulders. They were sticky and beginning to scab. He dabbed them with iodine. It scalded so much he wanted to scream.

  As the men strolled through the humid night air to the mess, Yefgenii could hear Glinka trying it on with Dolgikh. “You know, Kapetan, the more I think about it… I’m pretty sure I damaged Jabara’s Sabre.”

  “The only way you could’ve done that was if he’d shot off your tail and accidentally flown into it.”