Ascent by Jed Mercurio (11 page)

The first of the three Sabres behind him had closed. Tracers flickered past the canopy. Again he swung hard over to the right and tried to pull round. The Sabre reappeared behind his right wing. Gunfire hammered along his fuselage. Pain exploded in his right leg. A. 22-caliber shell had pierced the cockpit armor and buried itself in his thigh. Blood dribbled over his knee and he could smell the singeing of his own flesh.

He dropped his flaps and throttled back. The Sabre flew by and he managed to fire off a burst into its tail. Black smoke billowed and the American swung south, running for home. At the same time he glimpsed two trails of soot pointing north. Two MiGs were damaged and fleeing for their lives with Sabres in pursuit.

Now he was alone with two Sabres. He throttled up again and the aircraft crabbed and banked to the right. He levelled the wings, kicked in some rudder with his good leg and trimmed it all out again. In despair he pushed and pulled the lever but the tank wouldn’t drop, it was never going to drop.

The Sabre pair locked in behind him. They were leader and wingman. The leader opened fire. Pings and clangs reverberated along the fuselage as Yefgenii swung up and over in a barrel roll. He passed through the inverted and out of the top of his gaze he glimpsed the land tumbling round and the Sabres entering the same maneuver. As he rolled round and then pulled up to the horizon the Sabres appeared on his right wingtip and he jerked the stick across in that direction striking his leg and making himself shriek in pain.

He sliced between the two Sabres. Now he had the wingman on his tail and the lead ahead. He banked hard left and for a fleeting moment had the lead in his crosshairs. His shells tore off the Sabre’s tailplane and the aircraft veered into a flat spin. A second later the canopy flicked up, the pilot rocketed clear and his parachute blossomed.

The remaining Sabre opened fire into Yefgenii’s tail. He pitched forward and began to dive. The Sabre looped in a split-S and followed him down through thickening bands of air and cloud. He made a sudden pitch up, pulling round hard to the right. For a split second the g-meter flicked to 8. Every joint in the aircraft’s body groaned. The hung tank ripped free, shed like a teardrop.

Now he was sleek and maneuverable and, though he was in the weaker position, he had a fighting chance. If he could get the turn going he could kill this Sabre and live to make it home. The MiG began to judder round, nibbling the buffet, pulling 6 g. Yefgenii was gasping and straining, gasping and straining.

The Sabre was making the same turn, describing a circle in the sky. They were at opposite ends of a diameter, canopy to canopy; the pilots could see each other. Their heads were still. Theirs could’ve been the heads of mannequins.

He held the turn tight. Every needle was motionless on its mark of speed or power or altitude. Any small error lost him valuable energy and gave his opponent an advantage of speed or of height or of turn. He was still pulling 6 g and straining. He was getting tired. The gray iris started to close and he had to strain harder to get his eyesight back. He had to settle for tunnel vision. When he breathed in he lost half his field. Still he wasn’t gaining on the American. The turn continued, the great circle in the sky, canopy to canopy, and whoever tired first would perish.

The minutes passed. He felt sick and light-headed. Blood spilled out of his boot. His hands and feet were tingling. His fingers were turning numb inside his gloves. He peered up through a haze of sweat with his field of vision contracted to a narrow coin of light in which the Sabre’s swept wings and yellow flashes were tracking round the diametrically opposite patch of sky.

Neither man was going to surrender. The American was a wingman, probably a first lieutenant with only a few missions to his credit, an officers’ club wallflower. But he could fly. Now he was on the brink of being the man who brought down Ivan the Terrible.

They went on turning at full throttle. They were burning fuel, litre after litre, and maybe the loser would just be the poor bastard who ran out first.

To Yefgenii the American appeared to be losing height. He glanced at his instruments. With a massive strain he pushed open the fringe of his vision. As it opened he read the gauges and they told him his turn was flat. The American had made a tiny error in his turning attitude and it had accumulated into a height difference. Yefgenii let the nose sink a fraction toward the horizon. His airspeed increased by 10 kilometres per hour and he used them to tighten the turn. He was pulling 6 1/2g but he was getting inside the American. He sucked in breaths and pushed them out but the nickel of light in which the Sabre sparkled was getting smaller. He fought to keep the straining maneuver going. Sweat pooled in the well of the seat. He could feel the dampness seeping through his pants.

The American was drifting onto his nose past two o’clock then a minute later he was on one o’clock. They kept on turning. He was floating into Yefgenii’s gunsight. His left wingtip brushed the crosshairs. The Sabre was bobbing but Yefgenii held the turn. With every breath in, the iris closed and with every strain out it opened. Every time it opened the Sabre’s tail neared the crosshairs. He breathed in again. Blackness closed round him. He pushed out. The tail was there. He opened fire. His cannons ripped into the American’s tail. He held the trigger even when he was blind and when he could see again he saw black smoke billowing out of the Sabre’s jet exhaust.

The Sabre rolled out of the turn and tried to accelerate away. Yefgenii levelled his wings and let the stick forward. The g-force abated. He could see again. He could breathe again. Blood had congealed into a jelly that coated his seat and boot and rudder pedal. The needle of his fuel gauge pointed at the stark red line at the bottom of the scale. The Sabre was hurtling into the west where the sun had wheeled round and now glimmered through clouds heaping over Korea Bay. The aircraft had dropped to a few hundred metres and was running for the coast. Yefgenii could turn north and see how far he could get before his fuel burned out, but if he went down and the Sabre made it home then the American would be entitled to claim a victory over Ivan the Terrible.

Yefgenii followed the Sabre. Black smoke whipped past the canopy, trailing from the American jet in wisps that from time to time thickened into coughs of soot. Yefgenii closed the gap, sat behind and opened fire. The Sabre ballooned into fire and Yefgenii let out a shriek of triumph and also of anguish. He tried turning back for the coast. Ahead lay a narrow beach, then shale rising to rocky ground. The last gulp of fuel burned and he flamed out. He lifted his dead leg up to the seat and then reached under to yank the black-and-yellow handle.

The canopy blew clear and, in an instant, indistinguishable from it, he felt a kick up the ass and then he was following the canopy through a hurricane of wind and cold. The canopy floated away. His chute opened. The MiG spun to the right and struck the shallows. The red star broke apart but the hammer and sickle jutted out of the water on the tail.

Pain speared his lower back. Yefgenii was swinging over the gray waters on his way down with the beach about fifty metres in front of him. Wreckage bobbed on the waves below. His flying suit was blood-red from hip to boot with the bullet hole in his thigh edged in black. He hit the water with the chute fluttering down above him. An American helicopter would be on its way to the crash site. It might get here before the North Korean ground troops could rescue him. His leg stung in the salt water. He couldn’t move it. His back muscles were locked up by a lumbar fracture. He was going under. The water was just deep enough to drown in. The chute settled on the surface and darkness engulfed him.

The air was silent but for the lapping of waves. The thunder of engines had receded. The names of Jabara, McConnell, Fernandez and Davis were already fading from the skies.

Over the western horizon channels were opening in the clouds. Slanted bands of sunlight fell through onto the sea, like an artist’s strokes of yellow. A giant brush was sweeping over the palimpsest world. A new one was being painted over the old. Neil Armstrong had returned to college to complete his studies in aeronautical engineering; Gus Grissom was promoted to jet flight instructor; John Glenn was going to the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Patuxent River and Wally Schirra to the Naval Ordnance Training Station at China Lake. Schirra was going to help develop an air-to-air missile system called Sidewinder; close aerial combat, gun to gun, man to man, was going to be obsolete as jousting. And, in a few years, Buzz Aldrin would formulate the mechanics by which manned spacecraft might rendezvous in orbit.

This had been the first air war between the great powers and it would be the last. They would find new ways to compete, and the men also.

Yefgenii Yeremin drove himself to the surface and lifted the chute enough to snatch a breath. He began to paddle toward the beach. The water shallowed and he struggled into a crawl. He dragged himself across the beach and curled up on the shale. The tide was coming in, washing away the blood and prints he’d left in the sand, but in the sky great white ribbons commemorated every swoop and twist of the fight. As time passed, winds drew out their edges. They became giant feathers linking one side of the sky to the other. When at last men scrambled along the beach toward him, they looked up and thought them clouds.

SOME THOUGHT he should’ve chosen Kiriya’s way. It was sheer luck North Korean troops reached him before the Americans, and only his extraordinary haul of victories that kept him out of the labor camps. He was stripped of his honours, no longer a bearer of the Order of Lenin, no longer a Hero of the Soviet Union.

But the widow wept with relief. She sought permission to see him. Pilipenko asked why. She lied, “Because we’re engaged to be married.”

She travelled to the Korean northwest, where she found him in a stinking field hospital overrun with military and civilian casualties. He lay immobilized by the fractured lumbar vertebra with a blood-caked dressing on his leg wound that hadn’t been changed in days.

The widow kissed him on the cheek. His only other visitors had been Soviet intelligence officers who’d debriefed him with brutal questions coloured by threats of reprisals. No wonder his smile for her was wide, his eyes beaming.

“You wanted to live,” she said.

He relived sinking under the sea, the rush of salt water into his nose and mouth, the choking, then the darkening as the parachute settled on the surface like a lid being sealed. Maybe the easiest thing would’ve been to give in. But all he’d achieved was not enough. He’d fallen short of perfection. There remained the hunger for one surpassing feat, for one perfect sortie. He craved another mission.

“Yes,” he said, and she didn’t question whether he’d been driven by love for her or by something else.

He didn’t love her. Yefgenii was a young man returning from war, expected to take a wife and start a family, but he found connections difficult. The widow accepted his coldness as part of his nature, instilled by the childhood he never talked about. Instead of a courtship, a sequence of compromises and accommodations accompanied his evacuation from Korea, so that she could remain at his side. He was an officer in disgrace, but given that she was a widow with commonplace looks, status, and personality, he was as strong a marriage prospect as she could hope for.

She acted as an attentive and faithful companion, following as he moved wherever the VVS decreed. More, she was a woman willing to open herself to him in many physical ways. He had little enough experience of women to be overwhelmed by her devotion, yet he had large enough experience of them to reach the same conclusion. So these mutual assessments of their circumstances culminated in marriage, in a small ceremony in her home village.

The wound in his leg soon healed, but it took another year for him to be able to walk without a limp, two for full flexibility to return to his back. He’d been assigned to administrative duties, but, when he was fit again, the question arose of what to do with him. Pilots of his ability were uncommon, and there was no longer a theater of war in which he might cause further embarrassment. He could be posted somewhere remote and continue to serve a purpose, while the legend of Ivan the Terrible, that had passed like a curse through the flight lines of Korea, would slip into oblivion.

In the autumn of 1955 he received a posting to Franz Josef Land. The archipelago lay high in the Arctic Circle, only 1,000 kilometres from the Pole, only 2,000 from American airspace.

He travelled from Murmansk on a transport plane carrying a dozen posted personnel. Some were bound for the “weather station” at Nagurskoye on Alexander Island; they were bomber crews or air defense radar operators. The remainder were assigned to the fighter base on Graham Bell Island. The existence of these bases was a state secret.

The other men said little to one another, and Yefgenii said nothing at all. He gazed out of a porthole as they crossed the Barents Sea. Pack ice swaddled the Franz Josef archipelago. Only Northbrook Island, the southwesternmost, was free of it. The islands ranged from tiny outcrops to enormous plates of volcanic rock bearing ice fields and tundra. Cloud squatted over the eastern islands, where the fighter station lay. The aircraft descended. It was the sinking under the sea once more, the cloud smothering him as his parachute had done, like the lid being sealed all over again.