The Hunters (11 page)

He listened to the curt radio transmissions. The familiar ominous feeling that he could not quell grew within him. He wished he had gone himself. Nothing specific had caused it. That was the way he always felt. It was the old recurring apprehension. Whenever they went off without him, he was certain he had made a mistake. He could not be on every mission, however; it was a question of picking the right ones. But he sat nervously, for no reason that he could isolate, other than a deap-seated doubt.

It was like an alarm sounding when he heard them report the target area being relatively clear. No clouds. He should have known it. The damned forecaster was wrong half the time; if he said fair, it was likely to flood. The fear of having decided badly grew stronger. He waited uncomfortably. Now he was in for half an hour or more of sickening suspense.

He stood up and wandered about the room, trying to occupy himself. He looked over the maps on the walls again, the rows of charts, the claims board. The last he stood before for some time. On it was listed the name of every pilot in the group who had ever had a confirmed claim in Korea. Small red stars marked them. There were separate columns for aircraft destroyed, probably destroyed, and damaged, but it was only the first column that really counted. His eye moved down the trail of names. Many of them he did not recognize. They had left the group long before. Some belonged to dead men. There was Robey's, with five stars after it. Nolan had three. Bengert, seven. Imil, six. Tonneson had thirteen, two full lines on the board. And there was his own name with one, and Pell's. Cleve had seen men come in every day to glance at this board and admire their names on it. It was the roll of honor. Hunter had once told him that he would rather have his there than anything else in the world. It was absurd, and yet impressive.
Anything that men would willingly die for had to be considered seriously. From this board, perhaps, or one like it, could come names a nation would seize in its appetite for heroes. For a truly singular record there might be lasting fame.

Abrupt voices interrupted his thoughts. They had seen something up north. Cleve moved quickly to the radio. He turned up the volume.

“. . . at twelve o'clock, Blue Lead,” somebody said.

“Roger, I have them.”

“Four more at ten high.”

It was garbled for a moment. They were all talking at once.

“They look like MIGs.”

“I don't have them now.”

“One o‘clock! One o'clock!” someone called.

There was brief, unbearable silence. Then, “They're MIGs! Drop tanks, Blue.”

The air filled with voices blocking one another out. He heard other flights cleaning up their airplanes and joining the fight. He had a sensation of drowning, of everything starting to go the wrong way. He felt a terrible impotence. The transmissions overlapped crazily It was difficult to follow what was happening, but somebody had gotten one. He heard a sharp call:

“He's bailing out! There goes the chute!”

He sat quietly, overcome with depression. He tried to rationalize: it was over so little, like a child who has not been invited to a party, brooding. Nothing would help him, though. He listened in despair. The cries of those triumphant beat on him like waves of nausea.

Colonel Imil came in. He frequently dropped by to check on a mission's progress if he was not flying himself.

“Hello, Cleve,” he said. “How's it going up there?”

“Terrible.”

“What do you mean? What's wrong?”

“Nothing. They're in a fight.”

“A big one?”

“It's hard to tell, Colonel. It sounds pretty big.”

“They get any?”

“One at least,” Cleve said. “Maybe more.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

They sat listening together, but not much came over the air. The fight had already begun to dissipate. Like a storm, it was preceded and followed by incongruous calm. The colonel tried the volume control. It was full high.

“It must be over already,” he said. “Do you know who got them?”

“Couldn't hear.”

“Who's flying?” He walked over and read a scheduling board. He grunted. “Nobody much. Maybe Moncavage did some good. He's got a chance with that line-up, anyway.”

“Maybe,” Cleve said. “My flight is up there.”

“Which is that? DeLeo?”

Cleve nodded.

“I can't place him right off. He hasn't done much, has he?”

“Not yet.”

“Is he any good?”

“If he gets the chance.”

“Well, we'll see. Maybe this was it for him.”

“He's due.”

Imil gestured toward the claims board.

“That's what I judge by,” he said. “That's where it shows. You
talk about chances. Look at that, Tonneson for instance. Thirteen kills. That's not like winning a lottery. Nobody can convince me that he just had thirteen chances while some other guy had none. What he did have was the urge to go a little farther than anybody else was willing to, maybe not thirteen times, but most of them. There it is, right on the board.”

“Yes. Of course, he was somewhat above average as a pilot, too.”

“Oh, sure. He was good. The big thing, though, was that little extra courage and pride. That's what makes the difference.”

“I suppose so.”

“I know it,” Imil emphasized. He paused. “Sometimes the ones who've got it don't realize how important they are, how much things depend on having enough men with just that little more. I mean it, Cleve.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel stood there reflectively, rapping the counter lightly with his knuckles. Suddenly the radio began again. Moncavage's voice was recognizable. The first flights were heading back. Imil listened for a minute and then picked up the microphone and called.

“Go ahead. This is Red Leader,” Moncavage replied.

“Hey, Monk, this is Dutch. How'd you make out?”

“Say again.”

“This is Dutch, Monk. How many did you get?”

“Four, I think,” Moncavage said.

“Who got them?”

“I don't know yet. Not me, anyway.”

Cleve stared at the floor. He heard the colonel put the microphone down.

“They got four,” he announced happily to the intelligence and weather officers who stood in the doorway, the clerks behind them.

“They'll be getting back in about twenty minutes,” the colonel continued, looking at Cleve. “Let's go out and watch them land.”

They drove out to the runway and parked beside the control truck. They did not have long to wait. Soon afterward, the first ships began to return and enter the landing pattern. Cleve watched them streaking in on the initial approach against a background of pearl-shell clouds that seemed to accelerate them, like trout crossing a bright brook bottom. They were all elements of two, with occasional singles. As they came in over the end of the runway to land, the dust puffed up behind them. He looked closely when they swept by him, reared with their nose gears still held off the ground. He did not see many that had fired. He listened and watched for his own flight as more and more ships appeared, school-like, around the field. Finally, he heard them. They had been split up like the rest. Daughters and Pell came in first. They broke almost directly overhead. He watched them fly the pattern. Their gear came down. They turned onto the base leg. Then they were banking steeply on the final turn and dropping fast. One close behind the other they settled in on the runway. Cleve could see it from far off. It was as if he had known beforehand that it would be. Pell's gun ports were carbon black.

It was true. When they drove in after the last ships had landed, they heard that Pell had gotten another MIG. He had seen it, very low, heading along the Yalu on the deck. He'd called it out to Daughters, but Daughters had not been able to spot it and told Pell to take it. Pell did, going down all the way from thirty-five thousand feet. At the last minute, he saw there were two MIGs
and that he had misjudged and was going to overshoot; so he'd started firing from far out of range, holding the trigger down as he closed, and had managed to spray in enough hits so that the pilot ejected himself just as they flashed past.

“Pell got another one,” Colonel Imil said. “That boy must be really hot. He's the one in your flight, Cleve, isn't he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He's a comer. He'll be one of our next aces.”

Cleve said nothing. He was experiencing a sense of imprisonment. He felt a deep yearning to be outside, where he would not have to hear about it.

Desmond had been on the mission, too.

“What do you think of your boy now?” he asked Cleve.

“Pell?”

“I told you he was going to be good. Remember?”

“I remember, all right.”

“He did a fine job this morning.”

“Yes,” Cleve said. “He can fly. I may be wrong about the rest.”

“I think you are.”

“We'll see. It won't be the first time.”

He walked to where his flight stood around a table, giving its account of the mission.

“Hey, Cleve,” Pell grinned, “you missed a good one. You should have come along.”

Cleve did not answer. He took Daughters aside.

“How did it happen?” he asked.

He wanted to hear a first-hand account. Daughters told him the same story he had heard already.

“I don't know how he ever spotted him,” Daughters admitted. “We were down to twenty thousand before I saw him. That Pell has a pair of eyes.”

It came to that, time after time, who could see the farthest. Cleve was determined not to submit to it. He argued automatically: “He might have caught a flash of sun on him.”

“I don't think so, Cleve. I believe he can see a bird's nest from forty thousand. I really do.”

The furor of debriefing was at its peak. It had been a big morning, and excitement ran high. Everybody was anxious to find out the details of what had happened, or to make their claims. Shouted congratulations crossed the room. It turned out, when the fragments of the fight had been consolidated, that five MIGs had been downed altogether. The reconnaissance ship had not gotten its photographs. The enemy had been up in such strength that Colonel Moncavage had ordered the photo ship to turn back; but it had been a great victory, despite the abandonment of the original mission. Five kills and no losses. Cleve stood listening to the undercurrent. Everybody was talking about Pell: a second lieutenant, a wingman, with two kills. It was an extraordinary achievement.

“It had to be him,” DeLeo said mournfully. “Christ. Now we suffer.”

“Daughters thought he was pretty good,” Cleve said.

“Daughters is probably covering up for him.”

“He's not. I talked to him.”

“Just between us,” DeLeo said, “Jim is a fine type, but he ought to be back teaching school somewhere. I know Pell. I've seen dozens like him. The wise ones. Where I come from, they end up in alleys, on their faces. Either the cops or the big boys take care of them. Pell's one. You're not going to change that.”

“How about giving him half a chance, Bert?”

“I already have.”

Cleve smiled mirthlessly.

“You're a tough one,” he said.

In the mess hall that noon, Pell sat with Hunter and Pettibone, telling them about the fight. They listened absorbed. They were not eating, but Pell was, hungrily, as he described the action.

“I was lucky as hell,” he said confidentially. “That pass I made on him: tom. Strictly tom. If I hadn't gotten him that first time, either he or his wingman would probably have gotten me. I really hit him good, though. You should have seen the flashes. He lit up all over. Then, just as I went by him, pouf!”

Pell exploded his fist into fingers. That was the pilot going out.

“That was good shooting, Doctor,” Hunter said.

Pell flicked his hand in a dispelling gesture to show how difficult it had been.

“I just hosed him from three thousand feet all the way in,” he explained. “I was closing too fast to do anything else. I can't wait to see the film, though. If it comes out, it'll be terrific. I told those boys in the photo lab to take special care of it.”

“How come Daughters didn't get the second MIG?”

“Daughters?” Pell laughed. “He's lucky it didn't get him.”

Throughout the meal they were stopping at the table to say something to Pell, to pay their respects. Many of them were merely curious, and a few were seeing Pell for the first time. It was not a ritual, but there was a certain formality involved. The words were always the same. The tone was reserved. Hunter and Pettibone sat quietly through it, watching with envy and also—they could not resist it—pride. They were wingmen together, in the same flight. Regardless of what happened, he was one of them, and he had shown them hope.

The next morning there was rain and a low ceiling. It was the beginning of a spell of bad weather. There were days of no flying whatsoever. Time passed slowly or seemed to have stopped. Through the dismal, dragging afternoons they sat, waiting for the sky to appear once more. In the cell-like rooms they read or talked, the radio playing incessantly. It was like a succession of Sunday mornings in a small town. The hours of idleness were long. In the beginning, Cleve was able to endure them, but inactivity was a relentless grinding stone. A few days of it in a row could bring the calmest man to touchiness and irritability.

There were a few isolated missions, but in marginal weather and through shrouded skies. There were never any sightings. Things seemed dead. It was a time of unreality, and expectations quickly disappeared, like a bet compounded on a dice table and then suddenly lost. It was hard to remember fair days, nor did it seem that they would ever come again.