Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  And that was the heart of the matter. Combat aviators hungered for medals. They took unparalleled delight in the ribbons, the glittering medals which testified to their heroism. Only rarely in the mess did an aviator say anything which indicated that he considered himself a hero, but even the quietest man wanted the decorations which silently proclaimed that fact. For an additional medal, men would lie, exaggerate, falsify, support friends in hopes that friends would support them on some later claim; above all, they would take the most outrageous risks in order to qualify for one more ribbon.

  It was fatuous. It was juvenile. But it was also the essence of the heroic experience, for armies had found that whereas men would fight for many noble reasons—home, country, family, hatred of oppressors—the best men fought best for the good regard of their fellows, and the time-honored proof of their regard was the medal. In the years when John Pope and his fellow officers were flying their night combat missions against enemy flak and the hazards of weather and sudden mountain heights, each man was receiving $263.63 a month, lousy food and cheap whiskey. What compensated them for the enormous risks they were taking was the respect of their fellow pilots and their intense love of aviation.

  That was why John Pope, when he went out one wintry night to test the new strategy of killing trains, was careful to inquire as to whether a photographic plane might be available next morning.

  ‘A Marine from K-3 flew in this afternoon with a souped-up photo Banshee. Raring to go.’

  ‘Tell him to be ready.’ Pope did not predict garrulously that he was determined to bag a train; to do so would have been alien to his pattern, for he was the quiet type, efficient, even retiring. He knew that few men could fly an airplane better than he, or handle it more efficiently at night, but he never spoke of his skills. In a crowd of young men in civilian clothes he would be one of the last to be identified as an aviator, and even in military uniform he resembled an effective staff officer or a photographic reconnaissance interpreter, a photo bird.

  On this night, as soon as dusk fell, he climbed into his F4U, with its massive load of ammunition for strafing and its bombs for heavy work, and taxied to the far end of the runway, where he assumed his position of strip alert. He waited. Staring at the Sea of Japan, he watched the grand procession of stars as they rose from the waters: the Bull reared his horns above the sea, followed by the huddling Twins. At nine the Lion crept out, and at midnight he had a clear view of the bold star he had studied so longingly in the hours before dawn on that first night with the borrowed glasses: red-gold Arcturus flaming like a beacon.

  He slid open his window so that he could lean out and see the stars overhead, and there was Orion the great hunter: I’m a fair country hunter myself, and tonight I get me a train.

  It was well after midnight when the signal came for takeoff, and when he checked the sky one last time to ensure his orientation, he saw that Orion was skidding toward the western hills and dragging with him the heavenly animals: They’re getting out of my way. Thanks.

  Steadily he applied power to his engine and listened approvingly to the swift acceleration of the propeller as it strained against the brakes. Suddenly he lifted his toes, the F4U surged forward, and as he roared down the runway he realized that every pilot within hearing distance was listening to his progress, even though apparently asleep; they were praying that the gasoline would be good and that he would soar aloft, but he was not the least bit uncertain, or afraid, or clenching his teeth. He was supposed to take off from K-22 at 0134 and he intended to do so. To fail would be unthinkable. If there was water in his gasoline, it could wait till he got airborne.

  In more than a hundred precarious landings on the chopping deck of a carrier he had never once supposed that he might fail to engage the restraining cable, or plow into the parked planes on the deck, or plunge off the end of the deck and die trapped in his plane. His job had been to get the plane safely down, and he always did, night or day, storm or fair. His job this night was to prove the efficacy of the new tactic and he roared aloft to do so.

  Since K-22 was positioned well below the battle line to protect its fuel dumps from intruding Communist planes, he spent his first minutes heading due north, which carried him well out to sea, but when his instruments indicated that he must be at least forty miles into enemy territory, he turned west, dropped to a thousand feet, and began searching the valleys.

  In the darkness he saw little, even though his eyes were well accustomed to moonless nights: The Slopes aren’t risking much this time.

  Like many pilots, he referred to the enemy in impersonal terms. Slopes. Asiatics. Kimchi Kings. K-22 employed many able South Korean workers, and large segments of the front line were defended by Republic of Korea forces whose endurance under attack was legendary, and the pilots maintained amiable relations with these allies. But the North Korean enemy were Slopes.

  He made six long sweeps, then reported in code: ‘Nothing visible.’ Occasionally he inspected the western alleyway leading from the Chinese border to Inchon, hoping to find one of the wooden Slow Boys sneaking south, but he detected nothing. He kept well away from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, where antiaircraft fire was concentrated, and he maintained a prudent watch for Russian MiGs, which had recently been attacking the American night fighters, for as an aviation expert he was aware that the Russian plane was many times faster than his, better armed and capable of flying much higher. He was brave, but not foolhardy, and he recalled the doctrine of his squadron: ‘If you meet a MiG one-on-one, run like hell, because you’re outnumbered.’ It was the job of Air Force F-86s to tackle the MiGs, and he was quite content to have them do it.

  He realized that in his F4U he had a limited time in the air, and it seemed that on this night he would find nothing, but as he checked his fuel and thought about heading home, he saw in the starlight a moving object, deep in a valley, and when he roared down to inspect he found to his delight that it was a Communist engine pulling at least sixty boxcars. But it was heading at top speed for the safety of a tunnel.

  With restraint he ignored the splendid target, so vulnerable to his guns, and disciplined himself to put into effect the strategy his men had agreed upon. Leaving the train with its antiaircraft guns popping away, he wheeled and sped toward the entrance of the upcoming tunnel. There, with fine precision he dropped one of his large bombs, tearing up the track and blocking that tunnel.

  Still he ignored the train, swinging around to the other tunnel from which the train had just emerged. There he laid another heavy bomb smack on the tracks, blocking that escape.

  Gunners aboard the train, realizing what he had done, fired into the night with fury, accomplishing nothing but the clear outlining of their train, which now stood trapped in open space.

  Flying well to the west, Pope turned in a great circle, spotted the train, and roared back at low level, blazing his guns directly at the engine, which he seemed to miss.

  Undaunted, he whispered to himself, ‘Better luck this time.’ He took a wide sweep back toward the west, came in purposefully ignoring the antiaircraft fire, and struck at the engine again. This time his aim was good, for there was an explosion and a vast release of steam, but he suspected that this might be a stratagem calculated to deceive him, and he remembered what the old-timers at K-22 had warned: ‘The best railroad men in the world are those Slopes. They know trains. They can trick you a hundred different ways.’

  Again he flew west, turned and came back, but this time when he lined the engine up he saw that the steam had been no ruse; the train was badly wounded but by no means destroyed. So, ignoring the flak, he came in hard and low, releasing a bomb at the right moment. With a gigantic flash, metal hit metal, the engine teetered, and the first three cars followed it off the track. This train was wrecked.

  Pope wanted to stay on the scene to shoot up the fifty or sixty stranded boxcars, but he knew he had no fuel to spare, so he called K-22, giving other pilots the coordinates of the waiting target: ‘Finish
it off!’

  But now, as he headed south, satisfied that he had performed well, he had two burning concerns: he wanted to find that Marine who had come to K-22 with his photo Banshee and he wanted desperately to see Altair come rising from the sea, his star, his omen to bless this night.

  Just as he approached K-22 from the west, with his nose pointed out to sea, he saw bright Lyra dead ahead and then, low on the horizon, as its eagle wings dropped water, came Altair. He saluted.

  The Marine captain who had brought the photographic plane to K-22 on temporary duty was two years younger than John Pope but some twenty years more experienced. A real football hero from a small Texas town, and not an ersatz underweight like Pope, Randy Claggett had gone to Texas A & M and had fought the entire establishment to get into the Marines rather than the Army, which A & M boys were expected to join. He was taller than Pope but not noticeably heavier, for in high school he had been a fleet end, adept at confusing the opposition. In college he had been too light for the varsity, but as a scrub he was outstanding because of his willingness to tackle even the biggest regulars.

  He was profane, tough and make-believe illiterate. A first-team fullback had knocked a small corner off one of his big front teeth and the dentist had ground down its mate for symmetry, which gave him a raffish gap-toothed grin, which he delighted in flashing in the heat of any argument. His logbook showed that he had piloted fifty-nine different aircraft types and was expert in sixteen, including the best Navy types: F4U-4, AD-2, F9F-4 and the heavy F3D-2. He had a mania for airplanes, and if sober men like John Pope could justly be considered experts, he was three or four magnitudes more advanced, for in some strange way he was an airplane. When he sat in his cockpit he became attuned to its set engine, a part of its guidance system, an extension of its flaps; he did not fly the plane, he flew himself.

  It was therefore a humiliation that he had been diverted into reconnaissance work: ‘Goddamn baby-sitting, that’s what it is. Y’all know that when I go up there, I got no guns, no bombs, no nothin’? Takin’ pitchers like some clown at a carnival.’

  The Marine brass had not been stupid in assigning Claggett to the Banshee, for it was a major asset in the American arsenal. Stripped to essentials and with no armament of any kind, it could ascend to 52,000 feet, and with miraculous cameras, photograph large sections of enemy terrain with an accuracy that seemed incredible: ‘I can drive this bucket of bolts so high I can take a snapshot of God at work.’ He had taken photographs from maximum altitude which showed North Korean soldiers working at a transport depot and he swore that a good photo interpreter with proper microscopes could determine the make of the automobiles, and certainly whether they were cars or trucks: ‘Don’t you bastards try nothin’ down here, because I’ll be watchin’ you from up there.’

  He was in bed when Pope broke into his quarters a few minutes before sunrise. ‘Are you Claggett? The photo-puke?’

  ‘Who in hell are you?’

  Like many serious pilots, Pope never swore and it startled him sometimes when a fellow officer let loose with a chain of profanity, but he needed Claggett, so he said, ‘I’m John Pope. Temporary duty off the Brandywine.’

  ‘I’m Claggett. Perpetual temporary duty.’

  ‘I just destroyed a train. We’ve got to have good photographs.’

  ‘I know, I know. You destroyed a train. I fly my ass off to get a pitcher, turns out to be a two-wheel manure cart, shit all over the landscape.’

  ‘This was a train … with at least sixty boxcars.’

  ‘It’ll be the first.’

  ‘It is the first. We devised a new tactic. Block up the tunnels to prevent escape …’

  Claggett sat up, running his thin fingers through his heavy, matted hair. ‘You blocked ‘em off?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That I must see. Those goddamned Slopes bombed our dump the other night.’

  ‘One of the wooden Slow Boys?’

  ‘The same.’ He twisted his scrawny body out of bed, worked his shoulders as if they had recently been broken, and looked at himself in the mirror with disgust: ‘I better shave.’

  In the morning twilight, as Altair faded from view, the two pilots shaved, Pope heavy from sleeplessness, Claggett drowsy with too much, one ready for bed, the other for enemy skies. With precision Pope designated where the train must still be, unless the incredible North Koreans had cleared one of the tunnels and muscled the undamaged boxcars inside.

  ‘I can find it,’ Claggett said, and when the two men reported to operations they found great excitement because the dawn patrol had located Pope’s train and had shot up the stranded cars.

  ‘Everything’s ablaze,’ an intelligence officer said. ‘Claggett, we want pictures.’

  ‘You got ‘em,’ Randy said, and within minutes he had his Banshee in the air, headed northwest toward the valley where the boxcars were aflame, but the Russian pilots who flew some of the North Korean MiGs had anticipated that when the train was set afire, other American planes would stop by to confirm, and they were waiting.

  They came at Claggett from due north as he was heading west, four of them with powerful armament and great speed.

  It seemed that he was doomed. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he called to base. ‘Four MiGs right at me. I’m headed upstairs.’ Pulling the nose of the Banshee almost straight up, he poured on the juice and took off like a purposeful hawk. 24,000 feet with the MiGs closing fast. 28,000 and no escape. 32,000 and the first MiG makes a pass with tracers decorating the sky just ahead. 35,000 and three MiGs hammering at him. 37,000 and he has a fleeting suspicion that one of the MiGs has fallen behind. 40,000 and he breathes deeply, for all the MiGs are trailing. Up, up he goes, to well above 45,000 feet above the frozen hills of North Korea, and as he rests there for a moment, in absolute safety, for no other military plane in the world can fly so high, he watches a most beautiful sight.

  Out of the morning sky to the east come three Air Force F-86s. For the moment they are well below the capable MiGs and they are outnumbered, but by the time the Russian pilots realize that they will soon be under attack, the F-86s have gained altitude, so that the battle will be an even one, and Claggett sees that the powerful American planes will have a good chance of bagging a couple of MiGs.

  Before the battle can be joined, the Russians, under strict orders to bring their precious planes back safely, withdraw, retiring speedily and in good formation to their sanctuary north of the Yalu. Claggett can come down and finish his job.

  The F-86s, suspicious of the Russians and aware that they might sweep in unexpectedly to down the photographic plane, signal to Claggett that he must stay with them, which he is quite willing to do: ‘Don’t want no MiGs up my ass.’

  And so the four American jets fly out toward the Yellow Sea, drop low and come in at a perfect angle so far as sunlight is concerned. The sixty photographs, when developed, will show a T-69-type Chinese engine, heavily armor-plated, blown off the tracks near the entrance to a tunnel, followed by sixty-seven loaded boxcars, three off the track, twenty-one aflame, and all seriously damaged.

  For this episode Lieutenant (j.g.) John Pope will receive his monthly pay of $263.63, a medal with ribbons, and a recommendation for promotion to full lieutenant, and the squadron will be satisfied that it has at last devised a tactic for knocking out Communist trains.

  Randy Claggett, Marine captain, was a new experience for Pope, who had watched many braggarts wilt when demands were great, and many quiet men display great talent when called upon, but he had never before encountered a military man as loud-mouthed as Claggett who was in every respect a better flier than himself. At the bar, after the wrecking of the train, Claggett was especially effusive: ‘Boy, I have seen many trains knocked on their ass, but never one better than this. Whoever hit that baby made the crap fly. I came in low and sweet to get the pitcher, when I see four MiGs comin’ right up my bucket. What do I do? I shift gears and say, “Randy, son, you better get to Dallas before they do.” At 4
0,000 they drop off. Remember that, fellows, you get to 40,000 they call it quits.’

  He laughed rather noisily at this suggestion, because few American planes except his could approach that altitude. ‘There I am at 50,000, eatin’ gas like it was popcorn, with them four MiGs jess awaitin’ for me, and I say, “Randy, you fart, them foxes down there got you treed and they gonna chew you up, if’n you come down.” And then I see the sweetest sight ever, three F-86s comin’ out of the sunrise. Bartender! Give every Air Force man in this bar a free beer.’

  Claggett was not always so kind to the Air Force: ‘This K-22, it’s a cesspool. You ought to see K-3 down at Pusan. We live down there. We got Jo-sans.’

  ‘What’s a Jo-san?’ Pope asked.

  ‘Korean girls. They wait in the mess. Best screwin’ this side of Fort Worth.’ He rummaged in his wallet for a photograph of a Korean Jo-san, but came up instead with a fine color photograph of his wife, a handsome blonde.

  ‘That’s Debby Dee,’ he said. ‘Married her the day I got my wings and been flyin’ ever since.’

  The pilots drinking Randy’s beer passed the photograph around and each man appraised Mrs. Claggett with professional skill. She was beautiful, no question about that, in a cheerleader way, but she seemed older than Claggett, perhaps because her beauty was the florid type that fades quickly. Pope wanted to ask how old she was, for she seemed infinitely older than Penny, but he said nothing.

  In the days that followed he often found himself in Claggett’s company, which was surprising in that Pope flew at night, Claggett in daylight, but Randy required so little sleep that he often went along on Pope’s ground duties, talking incessantly: ‘How did I get stuck with photographic duties? Man, you know I could fly fighter planes better than them Air Force clowns we have to put up with.’