The Hunters (8 page)

Robey, of them all, was the most difficult to know. There was never any question of friendship; even a congeniality not much closer than that of two commuters was hard. Cleve made the effort. He had pride, but he forced himself. A drink at the bar, an occasional cool talk at night, always in Robey's room, it progressed slowly until one evening, unexpectedly, he found himself knowing Robey very well indeed.

He had walked in on a discussion of medals. A recommendation for Robey's third Distinguished Flying Cross had just been returned from Fifth Air Force Headquarters.

“I don't give a damn about the medal,” Robey said. “I've got it already. I've got plenty of them. It's just the principle of the thing that smells.”

The new policy was that Air Medals were to be awarded for MIGs destroyed, instead of DFCs, as had been done in the past. Robey was incensed.

“Next, they'll be giving merit badges,” he said.

He had the rejected recommendation crumpled in one hand, and he smoothed it out as he talked. He had to refer to it while he rewrote it with the squadron awards and decorations officer, who was a lieutenant in his flight. They were modifying it.

“You have to make it sound like something for the Medal of Honor just to get a lousy DFC out of them,” Robey said.

The citation had been matter of fact, reading simply “outmaneuvered the enemy aircraft with great skill.” Robey was dictating a more stirring amplification.

“Although under fire . . . from one element . . . of MIG-15
aircraft . . . at the time,” Robey said slowly as it was being copied down, “and in great . . . danger . . . better make that jeopardy; in great jeopardy . . . Captain Robey nevertheless pressed . . . a brilliant . . . timed attack . . . on another enemy element. Do you have that?”

“Wait a minute. Other . . . enemy . . . element. OK.”

“And succeeded . . . in destroying the . . . lead aircraft . . . with a long . . . accurate burst . . . at a high angle off . . . and at . . . extreme range.”

“All right. High . . . angle . . . off . . . extreme . . . range. There.”

Robey picked it up and read it through.

“All right,” he muttered. He could feel Cleve watching him. “That does it, eh?”

“It certainly does.”

“This is ridiculous, isn't it?” Robey confided. “You'll find out though. If you want to get anything out of those desk pilots at Fifth, you practically have to squeeze it out of them.”

“Is that what you're doing?”

“They won't turn this one down.”

“I wouldn't know. Do you really think the DFC is enough, though?”

Robey's expression firmed, but he passed it off lightly.

“Hell, no,” he said. “The way they make you fight to get one, there ought to be an extra medal to go along with it. For valor in the face of great administrative odds.”

“I'd say you'd have earned that one.”

“I wouldn't turn it down. I can tell you that.”

“I don't see how you very well could.”

Robey stiffened.

“I said I wouldn't.”

Cleve got to his feet.

“I know,” he said. “I've been listening to you.”

“You've been talking mostly,” Robey said. “As far as I can see, Connell, that's about all you do in that so-called flight of yours anyway. Why don't you go back and give them a few thousand words on what you think instead of trying to tell me?”

“I haven't told you what I think. I haven't even begun to tell you.”

“Nobody asked you to,” Robey replied.

 

DeLeo and Daughters were in the room when Cleve entered. He lifted one side of the blanket that covered the table and reached beneath it for the shelf where the mission whiskey was kept. It was issued at so many ounces per man per mission, but they usually received it in the form of two or three bottles to the flight, as a monthly dividend. He withdrew one and set it on the table.

“Jim?” he asked Daughters.

“No thanks, Cleve. Not for me.”

He poured a drink for DeLeo without asking. His hand was shaking, and he moved so that he stood between them and the bottle. They mixed the whiskey with cold water from one of the canteens in the window box. Cleve sat back then and looked about him, at DeLeo, and at Daughters on his cot, sitting knees up, writing. He felt closer to them every day as their dimensions deepened for him, and at that moment especially he was sure he would have been lost without them. His so-called flight. Yes, they were that, he thought belligerently.

“Well, here's to the heroes,” Cleve proposed. “Don't ever know one if you can help it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I just spent a few pleasant minutes with Robey,” Cleve said.

“So?”

He told them what had happened. When he had finished, DeLeo spit at the floor.

“That's for Robey,” he said. “Don't let it bother you. If he's a hero, I'm a genius.”

“He's a fighter pilot; that's something.”

“Sure. It means he's a little crazy.”

“Stop being a clown for a minute. He represents this—I don't know what to call it—craft. I use the word loosely. He's accomplished what he's supposed to do, he's shot down airplanes. If it was two or three, it wouldn't be so bad, but he's got five. He's not in the squadron any more, in a way. He belongs to all the fighter pilots, and if they're not so numerous, to anybody that might consider them. So there he stands. They look at him and see us, what we try to be. Robey, with his chest full of medals . . .”

“The medals?” DeLeo said. “They don't mean a thing. He could have a trunk full of medals and it wouldn't mean anything.”

“Not to you, maybe, but you're a primitive.”

“I'm a primitive? Just because I pick my nose?”

“That's the least of it.”

“You're insulting everybody tonight, aren't you?”

Cleve smiled.

“Drink up,” he said. “Don't be so sensitive. I only insult heroes.”

Daughters went back to his letter.

After a while, Pell came into the room. He had been at the club with Hunter and Pettibone, and those two had gone to the nightly movie. They went religiously, no matter what was playing. Pell never did; there were too many other things demanding his time.
At the moment, he was interested in meeting the nurses in the hospital down in Yongdongpo, and he'd arranged to borrow a jeep to go there the following night. His reputation of always having had great success with women was something that required constant renewal. He was intrigued by the prospect of a conquest under difficult circumstances.

Pell poured himself a drink and sat down at the table. He stirred the liquid with his finger. He seemed to be unusually contemplative.

“I'm in a rut,” he complained. “Three missions, and I haven't been in a fight yet.”

“You have a few left,” Cleve said.

“Ah, the damned war may end any time, though. Did you hear the news broadcasts tonight? They've worked their way down to disagreeing on just one little point at the truce talks.”

It was the first time that Cleve felt any shame himself at not caring whether it ended or not. There was a period of increasing pall. Pell had come, and the intimate mood had fled.

“Anybody feel like a few hands of gin?” Pell finally asked.

“How about it?”

“No thanks,” Cleve said.

DeLeo shook his head.

“What's wrong?” Pell complained. “Doesn't anybody around here play?”

There was a silence. Daughters folded the letter he had been writing and swung his legs to the floor.

“I'll play a few hands with you, Pell,” he said.

He sat down at the table in his quiet way and watched as Pell picked up a deck of cards and began shuffling them with lean,
expert fingers. He did not even seem to be aware of them whispering between his hands.

“What'll we play for?” Daughters asked unexpectedly. He was not given to gambling.

Pell lit a cigar, pushed his hat back, and slumped down comfortably in the wooden chair. He shrugged.

“Just make it easy on yourself, Jim,” he said. “I don't care.”

“How about half a cent a point?”

“Sure. That's fine with me. I don't want your money.” He smiled. “I just need the practice.”

Pell dealt out the hands quickly.

It started out as a fairly close game. Cleve sat watching it for about three quarters of an hour, surprised at how well Daughters was doing, and hoping for him. Compared with Daughters's gentle, almost resigned, attitude, though, everything about Pell's game was polished and cool. He seemed at least moderately pleased with every card he drew, and he discarded with confidence. He gave the impression of indeed only practicing. Daughters was a good player, but Pell seemed to have the luck when it counted, and that made the difference. By the time Cleve went to bed, Pell was winning more than twenty dollars.

When the ships returned from a mission, everybody watched for them. Usually, they came lining back to the field in flights of four, flying tight show formation with the black smoke fading in parallel streams behind as they turned in toward the runway and landing pattern. They seemed to be most indestructible then. They were of frozen silver. Nothing could possibly dim that grace. No enemy could deny them. Departures were stirring; but every return, even the most uneventful, was somehow transcendent and a call to the heart to rise in joy. Out of the north they had come again, brief strokes of splendor.

If they carried their drop tanks back with them, nothing much had happened on the mission. That was the first sign. If they came back without tanks, and broken up into pairs and occasional singles instead of fours, there had been a fight. As they trailed down the final approach and landed, it was possible to look closely and see whether or not the gun ports were blackened and the ship had fired. If many noses were black, it had been a big fight. The news of what had occurred on a mission often came from the radio monitoring in combat operations long before the planes were nearing the field, but not many heard it there. Most found out by watching the ships return.

Cleve had flown twenty-four missions. Except for his fifth on
Desmond's wing, he had seen no real action. They were always far off, going away, if he saw them, or overhead no bigger than flies, or sometimes as big as wrens; but to get up to them was like trying to jump off the ground and catch a bird—the altitude disadvantage meant that much. For a while he simply called it luck, but after too long a time of that there was nothing to call it. And there seemed to be nothing that he could do, no way to change things. He felt himself caught in a trough of despair. Day after day, unreasonably, he was on those missions that encountered nothing.

The evenings came early to end the short afternoons. Standing on the hill of barracks in the cold, with the watery sun almost down, he saw them returning from the late mission. The chill of the earth came through his feet and then edged up to make even his ears ache. His eyes wept from the wind as he watched. They were coming back in pairs. None of them had tanks. There had been a fight. An intense sinking feeling came over him. There was only one flight of four in the whole group. It hurt him to watch, and it was too dark to see their noses, but he waited stolidly through it as ship after ship came in, whistling smoothly down to meet the ground. The worst part, he knew, was what lay ahead, the empty hours of melancholy that would not be filled until he flew again. It was like the start of a relentless headache with its unavoidable hours of pain.

The word came, as it always seemed to, from nowhere. Cleve heard it as he walked down toward the line. A truck drove by, and somebody called out. Colonel Imil had shot down his sixth. Nolan had gotten another one. Four had been destroyed altogether.

The colonel was standing just inside the door of combat operations,
smoking a cigarette, when Cleve saw him. His face was still half-mooned under the eyes where his oxygen mask had bitten into the skin. He was listening to the last of the mission reports.

“I heard you got another one, Colonel,” Cleve said. His voice sounded flat to his own ears.

“That's right. How about you? Where were you anyway, Cleve?”

“I wasn't even on the mission.”

“Why not?”

“I just wasn't scheduled, Colonel.”

“Hell. You should have been there. They were everywhere today, some of them down at twenty-five thousand.”

“Next time, I guess,” Cleve said.

“Yeah. Maybe. You can't get them if you don't fly, though,” Imil said, shaking his head.

Cleve did not reply. He fought down his pride and turned away. He knew what was happening. Even as an ordinary flight leader he was expected to get kills; but he had to live up to more than that. Everybody was watching him, many of them cynically. Everybody was waiting for proof of his ability, and somehow he had not been able to give it. He could sense the ebbing respect. It was showing up more frequently as the days passed.

He was overcome by a lonely, hopeless feeling. He did not want to talk to anybody, only to be by himself. Later, he might have a drink if the club was not too crowded, or perhaps even see the movie. Slowly the mood would abate, leaving finally only its invisible scar. Years ago, losing a football game away from home, he had walked like this, slowly, off the hard field, away from the crowd and the noise. The cleated shoes sounded hollow as they scraped down the long hallway to the locker room, and there were
very few words that did not sound hollow, too. The ride home in the chartered bus seemed endless. Nobody talked, but only slept fitfully or stared out the cold, misting windows.