Ascent by Jed Mercurio Read online

  Two streaks of metal meteored past Yefgenii’s wing. A Sabre was chasing a MiG down to its death. It was Baturin.

  A pair of MiGs had isolated a Sabre. Cannon shells jabbed at its tail. The tips of the MiGs’ guns bloomed in yellowy-white flickers. Tracers were flashing. Bangs cracked the air but became lost in the roar of engines and rush of wind.

  Yefgenii held his turn but another Sabre was sliding in behind him. Its air intake was a dark cave. “Glinka!”

  Kiriya’s MiG soared above him. He was dogging a Sabre that trailed gray smoke. That was five MiGs accounted for, but Yefgenii couldn’t locate the other. “Glinka!”

  Gunfire crackled below. A snake of black smoke wiggled downward, becoming thinner and darker until the plane at its head struck the ground. Baturin had gone in.

  Yefgenii was closing on the Sabre ahead but behind him the other was lining up for a shot. “Glinka, get him off me!”

  Two Sabres swept in behind Kiriya. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw them closing. “I’m in a world of shit!”

  In despair Yefgenii opened fire on the Sabre ahead of him, flown by a wingman only a year out of flight school, named Gus Grissom. Yefgenii’s shells reached out but Grissom was too remote and the shells entered a long arc to earth. Yefgenii rolled into an opposite turn. The borderlands of China and Korea wheeled beneath his nose. Grissom’s Sabre swept across the horizon to safety while the one behind was too wide to stay on him. The Yalu River swung into Yefgenii’s ten o’clock position and settled there. Its waters looked like cold steel and beyond them lay safety.

  The Sabres above weren’t letting Kiriya go. “There’s bastards all over me!”

  Yefgenii turned tail to the river and climbed toward them. The second Sabre — the wingman, the shield — broke off to attack him. Yefgenii watched him arc round and calculated he had a few seconds to remove the one Sabre that remained on Kiriya.

  He swept in beneath the Sabre and pitched up. As his speed bled away he opened fire. 23-mm shells ripped into the Sabre’s belly. The Sabre pulled up and out of the battle and Kiriya was free. “Red Leader, you’re clear!”

  Now Yefgenii’s MiG was slow and sinking, and the American’s wingman was swooping toward him for the kill. Yefgenii rolled to the inverted and pulled the stick hard back into a dive. The Sabre chased him down through thickening shelves of air. Yefgenii held two hands on the stick and planted his elbows on his hips. Straining, he drew back the stick and the g-meter began to climb. Shells clattered his fuselage. In his peripheral vision he glimpsed tiny lumps of metal being gouged out of his wing. He held the g-forces till the world righted itself and the Yalu slid down onto his nose. This time he held course for it. At full throttle he’d be there in two minutes.

  The MiGs hurtled toward the river with the Sabres in pursuit. At this altitude they were equal for speed. Shells peppered his wing but did no serious damage. Far beyond the wingtip he saw Kiriya’s plane flying in parallel.

  Optimistic gunfire spattered from the Sabres’ guns but they couldn’t hope to close in time. As the MiGs neared the Yalu, the Americans, forbidden to trespass into Chinese airspace, broke off and rolled south.

  The MiGs regrouped north of the Yalu. Glinka was circling there. “I got separated. A Sabre was on me. I had to cross the river.”

  Yefgenii waited for Kiriya to challenge Glinka. A few seconds passed. “Recover to base” was all he said.

  The MiGs aimed for home and Yefgenii’s fury rose. His hand began to strangle the stick. He had to force himself to relax.

  In Manchuria the evening was growing cool. A wind was gathering. Yefgenii angled into his space on the dispersal. The widow put up the ladder for him to climb down. “Leitenant Yeremin, welcome home!”

  He unhooked the chain from his helmet and slapped the mask from his face.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  He took a moment, then nodded.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” he said at once. Then he paused as he left her. “Thank you.”

  She smiled.

  Kiriya marched to his office and shut the door. Instead of becoming the Polk’s fourth ace, Kapetan Baturin had gone in. Kiriya began writing the letter that’d be dispatched to some small town where Baturin’s family knew nothing of the air war in Korea. They’d be told their son and brother and husband and father had died in a training exercise. He’d get a gravestone in a backwater cemetery somewhere. It was the irony that haunted all these men. A good pilot like Baturin could die out here and his story never be known.

  Air surged in great rising breaths that could have been the breaths of the mountains themselves. Yefgenii got up and went out into the night. The terminator crept farther west bringing darkness behind it like black oil slicking over half the earth. The stars rose. They sparkled in patterns he didn’t recognize that to him were nameless.

  Wind whistled through the trees and whipped his ears. It squeezed between the buildings and rattled their slats. The first spots of rain dotted his face.

  Voices distracted him. From the mess the women trudged toward their barracks, having dined separate from the men. The widow paused and held out her palm to catch the rain. She leaned back to feel the drops on her face. In that moment Yefgenii didn’t know if she was ugly or if she was beautiful. Perhaps it was true she’d only bring bad luck.

  THAT NIGHT brought the first monsoon rain. Streams of mud dribbled between the buildings. Rainwater swelled the trench under the latrines, making them overflow. Turds floated across the mud field till they bumped to a stop or slipped into gutters.

  In the barracks they fired the oil stoves that had lain idle all summer. Now they burned with a sooty smell that reminded Yefgenii of Stalingrad’s ruins and of its industry.

  It poured for a week. With every dawn he woke longing for the clouds to lift so he could fly. Instead a pale gray unmoving mass squatted on the hills and at times even appeared to clog the treetops. Rain pounded the barracks and hangars. Mud, rain, sewage and oil mixed in puddles sliced by spectral lines. These puddles spread out of every depression of the runway, taxiways and dispersal.

  He passed his time in the crew hut studying maps and manuals and in the hangars, with his flight reference cards on his lap, memorizing his flight checks. Already he missed the rush of engines. Of the aircraft all that remained was the smell on his clothes of oil and kerosene and hot metal. The smell would be there again at dawn and his body would ache for it like a lost lover.

  At night he went to his barrack bed with the feeling that the clouds were suffocating him as much as they were the land. They were denying him his identity. He was a falcon and in the actions of a fighter pilot he expressed his true nature. He wasn’t one to dwell on his past because he considered doing so a sign of weakness, but, as he lay in the dark surrounded by the snores and fidgets of the other men, thoughts of his past scratched at him like mice under the floorboards. Before, he’d been worthless; he’d possessed no skills of value to the surrounding society. He’d existed as the statue conceived in stone but inchoate till the first cuts of the sculptor’s chisel. What he was now had always lain within; flying had only chipped away the pieces.

  The next day the ground crews dug trenches to direct the water off the airfield. Without a word to the pilots who were sitting around the stove repeating old stories, Yefgenii donned his flying jacket and trudged out through the mud to join them. The ground crews paused for a moment to appreciate the spectacle of an officer shovelling mud in the rain, but then they returned to work.

  Gnido went to the clothes store to claim a foul-weather jacket and then he went out too.

  In the crew hut the men were watching and laughing. Kiriya watched Yefgenii bending his back into each swing of the shovel and little Gnido giving his best to keep up.

  Skomorokhov turned to the room. “Let’s arrange a transfer — they obviously want to be sappers.”

  Some of the men laughed but Kiriya’s eyes narrowed. “Get out
there. Get dressed and get out there.”

  The men fell into silent resentment but no one argued. Even Kiriya went. When they saw him, the ground crews stood to attention, holding their shovels like rifles. He grinned at how comical they looked but thanked them for their work and invited them to continue.

  Skomorokhov approached Yefgenii. The shoulders of his flying jacket were already darkened by rain and mud caked his ankles. “Why the fuck are you doing this?”

  Yefgenii said, “The sooner the airfield’s drained, Major, the sooner we can fly again.”

  Skomorokhov snorted and shuffled along the line of men to start digging.

  Kiriya took up work alongside Yefgenii. “We’ve got to get flying again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kiriya breathed a long sigh. A film of rainwater dribbled down his face. His wet hair looked thin. Yefgenii could see patches of scalp through it. All at once Kiriya looked old. His next words failed in the splatter of the downpour. “One day this war’ll be over.” He was racing to clear the water, to open the airfield; he was racing against the inevitability of armistice, and against age itself.

  A cumulonimbus loomed. The men watched the great black anvil of cloud slide into the overhead. Wires of lightning cut the sky. Thunder clapped. At once Pilipenko waved the men indoors. They staked their shovels in the ground and began scrambling toward the huts.

  Yefgenii stood alone among the rows of shovels pointed into the heavens like lines of crosses over makeshift graves.

  Lightning flashed. For a fleeting moment it cracked the sky like eggshell and, as Yefgenii gazed into the cracks, it seemed to him that in that instant he was receiving a glimpse of a great light beyond.

  THE RAIN STOPPED after four more days. At last the MiGs soared again out of the damp Antung plain. Below them streams had broken their banks. Fields were flooded. Bogs had swelled into small lakes with ducks skimming their tops.

  Yefgenii’s mask molded to his face. His harness felt snug. The aircraft fitted him and he fitted it. The picture outside the cockpit represented a universe in its most comfortable and understandable aspect: a patchwork land below, a sky above, and in between a sport of death and survival for men to play.

  The rains had given him a glimpse of life without flying, of his life as it would be without his becoming any more than he already was. In an ordinary life, opportunities never come, or they come and aren’t taken, or they’re taken and squandered. Whatever the reason, the obituary is blank.

  Out of the clouds he reappeared into the tall sky. His true self was reborn in this place where his uncommon abilities had both a purpose and a value and he could express that self in the splitting of air and the tearing of metal.

  Flying on Kiriya’s wing, he spotted the enemy when they were still only black points inching along the horizon. Kiriya gave him the lead till the other pilots could see them too. By then the six of them — Yefgenii and Kiriya, Kubarev, Gnido, Skomorokhov and Glinka — were swooping into combat. As hoped for they were Americans. They were close and Yefgenii was expected to relinquish the lead but he held on to it. Kiriya transmitted, “Red Six, drop back—” but his voice was lost as the aircraft joined in chaos.

  Soon a Sabre’s tail rose into Yefgenii’s crosshairs. He opened fire. He felt the jolts of the guns and then he was passing through clouds of black smoke. When he emerged the Sabre had toppled nose down and was plunging to earth. Seconds later the canopy blasted free and the pilot rocketed clear on his ejector seat.

  Yefgenii pulled left with Kiriya now above him and Glinka tracking round on his right wingtip. The g-meter’s white needle flicked to the right. He looked all around with his head as heavy as a medicine ball. A Sabre crossed left to right from his ten o’clock position into his two and Yefgenii rolled hard right, holding the nose level with the stick and controlling yaw with right rudder. The stick juddered on the buffet. His shells ripped open the Sabre’s wing. The tailplane was bobbing in his crosshairs. Debris broke free and fell behind in a stream of confetti. The American knew his aircraft carried a mortal wound and he was in the long desperate struggle to make it home or else abandon ship. Yefgenii closed for the kill, but silver wings glinted as they swooped in behind him, so with a shriek of anguish he had to let him go. Yet again he twisted his head round. A black rim spread into his visual field. It crept in like liquid. He strained to push the virtual iris back open. He was searching for his shield but Glinka was gone.

  Glinka had broken from his wing to pursue the damaged American. The Sabre was making a sluggish turn to get away but Glinka was on him with cannon fire and the American plummeted.

  Bursts of R/T were colliding.

  “Got him! Got him! Got him!”

  “Fuck, fuck, Yeremin, four o’clock, fuck!” It was Gnido, doing Glinka’s job for him.

  Now Yefgenii swung left into a max-rate turn with a pair of Sabres in pursuit. Yefgenii twisted round to acquire the Americans and then glanced front to judge attitude and instruments. Hunched into a turn, pulling 6 g, his head flicked left and forward, left and forward. Then Gnido scissored between his tail and the Americans. The Sabres broke off to avoid a collision and Yefgenii was saved, but in a slick move the Sabres switched to Gnido. Gunfire hatched dotted lines along Gnido’s fuselage from nose to tail and gouged a lump of flesh and rubber out of his boot. Soon his plane was struggling for height.

  Yefgenii shrieked, “Fucking eject, fucking get out of there!”

  The MiG fell in a long arc. Gnido wept with pain and with foreknowledge of the end. They were a good way south of the Yalu, operating over UN-controlled territory. He could still eject but to be captured would betray the presence of the VVS. If captured and then returned, no doubt he’d be persecuted as a traitor. He stayed in his straps and rode the jet all the way down. When it hit the ground it shattered. The splinters were so small and they were wrought so fast that the aircraft appeared to vanish.

  Yefgenii glimpsed Kiriya and Skomorokhov turning in parallel with a pair of Sabres. Glinka had relocated to Kubarev’s wing but was operating too high to protect him from attack. A moment later a Sabre punched in behind Glinka. Yefgenii thought of Gnido and of his body smashed because of Glinka’s dereliction of duty. Had they been on the ground he could’ve abandoned Glinka. On the ground his acts meant nothing. But how he conducted himself in the air expressed his values, and in the air a countryman remained a countryman even if he was a coward.

  Wisps of smoke trailed past his cockpit as Yefgenii soared back into battle. Some of the wisps curled. Some stretched. Jet-wash had churned this piece of sky into a hundred vortices that kicked his nose and belly and tried to spin his wings. He was still rocking when his guns opened on the Sabre. Fumes puffed out of its engine like a giant string of beads. Yefgenii kept on him. Shells kicked out from his nose into the American’s wings and tail. They were ripping up his ailerons and elevators. The Sabre began to buck out of control. Seconds later the pilot ejected. Yefgenii and Glinka were clear.

  “Glinka, follow me down!”

  With Glinka covering his tail, Yefgenii sank behind the Sabre pair that was scissoring in and out of engagement with Kiriya and Skomorokhov. He opened fire and the wing of the rear Sabre sheared clean off. It spun off to the side and on the second or third spin its fuel tank ruptured. A point of light expanded into a sphere of flame that burned itself out in less than a second. The surviving Sabre swung south for the P’yŏngyang-Wŏnsan line.

  Someone was transmitting. “Min fuel.”

  Kiriya clicked. “Shit, me too, we’ll have to let the fucker go.”

  The MiGs disengaged. Soon the Sabres and the MiGs were pointing home, leaving behind them a sky beaded by puffs of gray and black smoke and beneath the smoke a shower of metal and far beneath that two parachutes blooming like new white flowers on the green and brown oblongs of earth.

  In the tower they took Kiriya’s transmission that, of the six aircraft that set out, only five were returning to base. The widow looked into the east
. She wondered if the young blond leitenant was among the ones coming home. She recognized his plane, felt something this time, for the first time.

  Ground crews watched them angle onto the dispersal. All the guns were blackened. All the fuselages were pockmarked. The ground crews dragged chocks on short thick ropes, then, when the pilots cut their engines, wedged the chocks under their wheels.

  The widow held the ladder as Yefgenii stepped down the rungs. “Any luck, Leitenant?”

  He gazed down at her. He was the biggest of the pilots and he was two rungs off the ground. “Two and a half.” He grinned.

  She’d never seen him smile. He had a big boyish smile. “Half?” She laughed. “What happened to the other half?”

  He realized she had an image in her mind of half an airplane flying home, maybe cut off at the wing roots with the pilot’s bare ass hanging out behind the cockpit. “No!” he laughed. She started laughing too. He said, “When the actions of two pilots lead to a kill, each gets half.”

  Now she blushed for not having known. “Yes, of course, how silly of me.” She ducked away and pretended to examine the tires for cuts and creep.

  Yefgenii wondered if perhaps he’d sounded too arrogant, too flippant. He’d enjoyed her laughter. He wanted to hear it again soon.

  He dropped to the ground and began to stride across the dispersal. The other pilots converged on him from all angles. He glanced over his shoulder. The widow’s bottom was large and round. Her back hunched. Her hair was tied back and dirty. She rose from her haunches and as she did so she glimpsed him looking at her.

  Glinka was crossing toward him fastest. He was pulling off his glove, holding out his hand. “Yeremin, that Sabre was all over me, you saved my fucking life!”