The Hunters (25 page)

Casey broke left. French curves of vapor trailed from his wingtips. Cleve was behind him, on the inside, turning as hard as he could. The bright pipper of his sight was creeping up on the MIG, jerkily, but moving slowly up to the tail, the fuselage, the wing root. He squeezed the trigger. The tracers arced out, falling mostly behind. There were a few strikes near the tail. He could hardly hold the wild pipper where it was, but somehow he moved it forward, it seemed only inches more.

They were just above the trees. He could not take his eyes off the MIG to look, but he saw from their corners an avalanche of green and brown flashing fatally by. He fired again. His heart ballooned into his throat. He shouted into the mask, not words, but a senseless cry. Solid strikes along the fuselage. There was a burst of white flame and a sudden flood of smoke. The MIG pulled up sharply, climbing. It was slipping away from him, but as it did, he laced it with hits. Finally, trailing a curtain of fire, it rolled over on one wing and started down.

“There he goes!”

Cleve could not answer.

“Head south,” he finally said. “Do you have the other ones in sight?”

“Not now.”

“All right. Let's go.”

They turned for home, climbing, too low on fuel to make it, Cleve was certain. The other MIGs had vanished. They were alone in the sky. He checked his fuel: three hundred and fifty pounds.

“How much do you have?” he asked Hunter.

“Say again, Cleve.”

“What state fuel?”

“I'm down to . . . down to three hundred now.”

“We'll climb as high as we can.”

The engines drank as they climbed. It was a hemorrhage. They were paying for altitude with an open-throated flow. It poured away. The needle of the gauge seemed to fail as Cleve looked at it. The minutes were endless. He suffered through them, trying not to think, restraining himself. He looked out to sea, where they would probably end up. It had always seemed a sanctuary. Now it
was unnerving, a place to drown in. He thought of the bailing out. He had never left an airplane before, and the moment of abandoning that close cockpit for sheer, climactic space chilled him.

They were climbing fast. The ships performed better the emptier they became, and the blackfaced dial then showed just less than one hundred pounds. It was hardly enough to wet the bottom of the tank. They were past Sinanju, but with more than a hundred miles to go.

“What do you have now, Billy?”

“Not enough to mention.”

“Empty?”

“Almost,” Hunter said. “Do you think we'll make it?”

“Well,” Cleve began. He was interrupted.

“Oh, oh! There it is,” Hunter said.

“Did you run out?”

“Yes.”

Cleve looked at his own gauge. It read zero, although the engine was still running. He shut it off. There could not be more than a minute or two of fuel left, anyway.

It was almost absolutely silent, gliding evenly together. They were at thirty-eight thousand feet. It was all up to the winds aloft and the exact number of miles remaining. He looked out ahead. They still had a long way to go. The altimeter unwound: thirty-seven thousand.

They glided south, descending steadily as the unyielding miles fell behind them. The altimeter surrendered feet mechanically: thirty-six thousand five hundred. Thirty-six thousand. He watched it creep and then hurry, like a nightmare's clock, as slowly, gently, they fell from grace. He listened to the valves in
his mask open and close to his breathing. Thirty-five thousand. It all had to happen at the most regulated pace. The airspeed was important. A few knots too high or low meant miles. He guarded it carefully. Thirty-four thousand. Thirty-three thousand five hundred.

He reassessed the chances constantly, checking the altitude against his map. There were things that had to be guessed, but he computed over and over. Thirty-two thousand. The moment he dreaded was when he would have to decide between heading for the water or continuing toward the Han, trying to make it all the way. That was the final commitment. He kept waiting, hoping to be sure. Thirty-one thousand. Finally the time came.

He did not really have to choose. He continued south. Afraid or not, he had decided beforehand. The feeling in his stomach was heavy as mercury. Perhaps he had not decided really, but only failed to decide. It did not matter. The hand of the altimeter was moving a little faster.

At twenty-five thousand, with the field far off, not yet visible, he heard somebody calling. It was Imil, back at the base.

“. . . now, Green Lead?”

“I can't read you. Say again.”

“What's your position? Where are you now, Green Lead?”

“We're about forty miles north.”

“How much fuel do you have?”

“None.”

“What?”

“We're both empty.”

There was a thoughtful silence.

“Do you have enough altitude to make it across the Han?”

“I think so,” Cleve answered. “It's going to be close.”

“Get out if you can't make the field. Don't ride it down.”

“Understand.”

“But try and make it.”

They were passing through seventeen thousand. The air grew thicker all the way down, more viscous, so that they had to keep lowering the nose slightly to maintain speed. The ship felt heavier and heavier as it passed from the abstraction of deep air and slipped closer to the solid, irresistible ground. The field was in sight now. Fifteen thousand.

“Did you get any?” the colonel asked abruptly.

“Roger.”

“How many?”

“One.”

There was no reply.

At eleven thousand feet they were gliding across the mouth of the Han. The water bore the flat gleam of daylight. The backs of the hills were edged with shadows. In the cockpit with the engine dead, the silence was cruel as Cleve alternately abandoned and then retook hope. He altered course slightly to line up better with the runway. If they were able to reach the field they would have to land straight in.

“If it looks like we won't make it,” Cleve said, “get out at two thousand feet. Don't wait any longer than that, Billy.”

“Roger. I think we're going to be all right, though.”

“Maybe.”

Cleve was slightly in front. When he passed through eight thousand feet he was still not absolutely certain, but shortly after that he knew. He could make it. The last thousand feet, coming easily down the path of the final approach he knew so well, was overwhelmingly fulfilling. Dead sticking it in, he landed a little
long but smoothly in the stillness. He felt an emptying relief as his wheels touched the runway. He cracked the canopy open. The fair wind came in to cool him.

Hunter misjudged. He had been off to one side and a little lower than Cleve, and when he saw that he was going to be short, he tried to stretch his glide, turning very low at the last with not enough speed left. There was that moment of immense awkwardness, as when a wall begins to fall outward into a crowd. He crashed just north of the field. There was no fire. It was a dry, rending disintegration that plowed up a storm of dust.

They towed Cleve's ship in from the end of the runway. Halfway back, Colonel Imil came driving up. He jumped onto the wing.

“Well, you made it, anyway,” he said.

“Is Hunter all right?”

“They're out there now. I haven't heard.”

“I thought he was going to make it,” Cleve said.

“He was half a mile short. It wasn't even close.”

In the parking area they were gathered, pilots and crewmen. They pressed close as the plane came to a stop. Cleve looked out at the rash of faces. He recognized some. Others were like those at a station, seen from a moving train. He could hear the armorers clearing his guns. The bolts clapped forward.

“How did it happen?” the colonel asked.

“We were jumped on the way back,” Cleve said. They were all listening. He was conscious of that. They were stretching their necks to hear. “There were four of them, tough babies. They finally ran us out of fuel.”

“You got one, though?”

He felt his heart skip and his hands become weightless from
what he was about to cast before them, to hold high like a severed head. One? He was not in complete control of himself. He could have laughed with tears running from his eyes. Had he gotten one? They were all packed close, looking up, the strong and the slight, the famous and the unfulfilled. He opened his mouth a little to prevent the words from forming there and bursting out. He knew how to say it, the phrase that stilled trumpets, that fell like a great tree; but he had to wait. He gazed out over their open faces.

Somebody was pushing through to the airplane. Cleve watched. He saw Pell just below, his hands in his hip pockets, his expression querulous. Somebody squeezed past Pell. It was Colonel Moncavage. He had come from the wreck.

“Is he all right?”

Moncavage was trying to get up on the wing.

“Is Hunter all right?”

Imil took his arm and pulled him up.

“He's dead,” Moncavage said.

“Nice going,” Pell's voice rose piercingly.

Cleve stepped slowly over the side of the ship down to the wing. Suddenly he was tired, not physically; his whole body was still quickened with what had been done and the accident of being alive, but he was tired of everything else.

“You got one of them, anyway,” Imil said flatly.

“Yes.”

Below, near the nose of the ship, there was an exclamation.

“The film didn't run, Colonel,” somebody called.

The magazine was handed up. Imil turned it over, inspecting it. He scratched at the little green footage window with his thumbnail several times.

“Not a foot,” he said, passing it to Moncavage. “There goes the damned confirmation.”

“It doesn't matter,” Cleve said.

“Don't be so goddamned casual. Of course it matters.”

“Not this time.”

“What are you talking about?” Imil asked sharply.

“It was Casey Jones.”

There was a moment of catastrophic silence, and as Cleve watched, he knew it was one for which he would not be forgiven.

“Are you sure?”

Cleve nodded. He hardly heard the words. He was listening to the murmur that had started to run like wind through deep grass.

“Are you sure?” Imil repeated.

Pell interrupted.

“There's no film, Colonel,” he cried.

“That's right,” Imil said uncertainly. He looked at Moncavage, who shrugged.

“There's no one to confirm it now, either,” Pell said.

“No,” Imil agreed. He decided quickly. That was certain enough. “There's not.”

Cleve looked at them, one by one. Nothing was real. He heard a short, insane cough of contempt leave his lips. He did not know what he was thinking, only that he was far removed, farther than he had ever believed possible.

“Oh yes, there is,” he said blindly.

“Who?”

“I can confirm it.” He drew a sudden breath. “Hunter got him.”

It had come out almost subconsciously. Malice had brought it, and protest, and the sweeping magnanimity that accompanies
triumph, but, as soon as he said the words, he realized there were no others that would have made it right.

Billy Hunter would have his day as a hero, and in memory be never less of a man than he had been on his last flight. Cleve could give him that, at least—a name of his own. It was strange. In all that had passed, he had never imagined anything faintly like it, to have searched the whole heavens for his destiny and godliness, and in the end to have found them on earth.

He had kept a pledge. His heart cried out to go among them and tell them how he had fulfilled whatever promise he had, how in the clean sky he had met and conquered a legend. He lay on his cot that night, the draining finally effective, unable to move. He was conscious of nothing except his weakness and surrender to a great fatigue. With his eyes closed to make a double darkness, he lay awake in the still summer night, victorious at last and feeling as little a desire to live as he had ever known.

At the close of June, he had only four missions left. A winter had gone by, a drowsy spring, and part of a summer. In time, the mornings would be cool again with another autumn. To Cleve it seemed as if years and not months had passed. His first days in Korea now were like the vague, distant ones of childhood, simple and carefree. It was hard to associate himself with them. His memory faltered as he tried to retreat to that time so long ago and served him only with unreal, overlapping scenes and conversations.

It was near the end for him, and, as if in its final throes, the terrible fever to win that had held him was stronger than it had ever been. He no longer suffered, though. He had endured it too long. It was a part of him, permanently burned in. He felt untroubled, not satisfied but insensitive at last. He had been cleansed.

Hunter was going to be awarded the Silver Star. Imil had promised that. With a solitary red star beside it, Hunter's name was listed on the claims board where he had always wanted it. That was not much, compared with Pell's galaxy, but it would have meant everything to Hunter. And Cleve was at lonely peace with himself. He felt as if he had finally passed from youth into a real maturity, one in which he soberly realized the price that had to
be paid to abide by the ideals that were once so bright and compelling. The reckoning was dear; but for all that they had cost him, he held them even more fiercely. He had nothing frivolous remaining to believe in then, only an obdurate residue more precious than a handful of diamonds.