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.
Franz Josef Land
1955–1964
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.
When they landed at Graham Bell Station, the thermometre read minus 20. A huge snow-covered dome of rock stood on the south of the island. Here, the north was considered the hospitable part.
Snow fell, decking the runway and coating the buildings. It gathered round his boots and crusted the fur fringe of his parka hood. But aircraft were moving, snowplows were shifting. Work details were digging up a taxiway to lay underground hot-water pipes. Jets and props howled.
A junior officer had seen his name on the assignments list and word got out at once: Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin was coming to Graham Bell. The younger men hadn’t even heard of him, or if they had they thought he was a myth. The first night in the mess, he ate alone. He understood he’d fallen out of favor and people didn’t dare appear to be his comrade.
For the other fighter pilots, to have among them a man with thirty-seven combat victories, the greatest jet ace of all time, but to ignore him, even to treat him with contempt, was unbearable. So his achievements had to be disregarded. Ivan the Terrible had never existed; if he had, he was not this man among them. Besides, regulations still forbade discussing the Soviet participation in Korea.
Once, in the mess, in whispers, one man claimed to have served at Antung in the year before Yefgenii joined up with the 221st IAP. “Do you remember the heat? And the flies! What I’d give for them now!”
Yefgenii gave the man a small smile.
“And the food. It tasted like shit. And those terrible metal bowls we ate out of. Mine was always rusty.”
“They were wooden.”
“No.” The man glared. “Metal.”
Yefgenii shrugged. “It’s not important.”
The man leaned forward. “It is important. Where was the Ops hut?”
Yefgenii pictured the Ops hut lying alongside the crew hut. He pictured the dispersal and taxiways, dust lifting off the runway in the wake of MiGs, the pine-covered mountains to the west. He smiled. Every man would remember them in his own way. “As you know, comrade, neither of us was there.”
The widow, travelling by icebreaker, arrived weeks later with their belongings, and pregnant. The time apart had been their first since the end of the war. In the beginning he’d missed her hardly at all, but toward the end he understood that he was a little less content, a little lonelier, than before. He met her at the quay and hugged her. He felt her gravid belly push against his crotch, felt something physical he hadn’t expected to.
Soon he was accustomed to her again, and his sentiments for her lost their sharpness. She was his wife but he believed many other women could have fulfilled this place in his life, if they’d chosen to, if he’d chosen them. So this was the understanding, almost a bargain, and the widow set about transforming the small house they were provided with into a home in which to raise a family, while he got to flying.
It snowed most days that first autumn. Nearly all ops below 2,000 metres were on instruments save the bottom 100, under the cloudbase, that they needed to climb out and scoot in under VMC. The Dome’s apex was 500 metres and it was easy for a man to get disoriented. They lost two pilots the first month. Some days, when the weather cleared, Yefgenii could see bits of wreckage littering the peaks and crops of all the eastern isles.
His back ached. On long sorties, he felt the muscles at the base of his spine harden to steel. He’d try rocking his hips in the seat, or turning his shoulders from side to side, but by the time he set down the pain would be excruciating. He suffered in silence. To reveal it would’ve been the end of his flying career. He’d take a few moments longer than the others to get to his feet and descend the ladder. As winter approached, the stiffness got worse. He invented a series of checks and maneuvers to extend the time it took him to leave the cockpit; the ground crew assumed they were superstitions.
The widow rubbed oil into his back. She warmed the flesh with massage and then she’d force her thumbs hard into the muscles that were like steel rods. Sometimes it hurt so much he’d cry out.
Temperatures plummeted further. Some mornings it was minus 30. They couldn’t ignite the jets. One got airborne and, as soon as it hit the runway, the nosewheel and the mainwheels snapped clean off. From the moment he strapped in, Yefgenii felt a slow numbness spread across the base of his back and buttocks. His legs tingled. In the short hours of daylight, it was white on white, earth to sky. From October there was no day at all.
The commanding officer was a bitter little man named Kostilev who rarely flew. In fact he seemed to hate flying, given how often he preferred to sift paperwork in his office with the door shut. When Yefgenii first reported to him, he stood to attention while Polkovnik Kostilev remained seated behind his desk. “Some men come here with a reputation, Yeremin, but first they have to prove themselves to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No one receives any privileges. I treat every man the same.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If a man is part of the team, he’ll get on. If he sets himself apart, well, he won’t.”
Yefgenii was a kapetan, so by rights he should have been made at least a flight leader. Kostilev assigned him to his zveno as a wingman. Yefgenii knew he’d remain a kapetan till the day he died or retired. No one would want to be known to favor him with promotion.
They flew the newest version of the MiG-17, armed with air-to-air-missiles. The days of dogfighting, of close combat, were gone. In the event of war, bombers would cross from one country to the other, their fighters would attempt to intercept as many as they could, but it was a game of numbers, of which country launched more bombers, of which country had more bombers to launch. The great powers were building nuclear arsenals heavy enough to obliterate the other, and the world. This was now how they measured themselves against each other: in weapons production, in the projected millions of civilian casualties, in the certainty of mutual assured destruction.
Snowplows kept the runways open. The MiGs climbed out on instruments, up through dense cloudbanks. Once above them, stars sparkled over their canopies. The aurora shimmered. The planes were invisible apart from their nav lights floating through the blackness. They flew these patrols for hours on end. American bombers were on constant standby to cross the Arctic and press deep into Soviet territory to deliver their payloads. Sometimes a B-52 would skirt Soviet airspace to mobilize their interceptors. On rare occasions, American aircraft penetrated the interior of the USSR, running in and out at high altitude. It was brinkmanship. They were testing each other’s defenses.
Yefgenii lived with the widow in the base’s low redbrick housing that was always cold, but the widow never complained. She’d wanted children right away. He remembered she’d asked him if he wanted to be a father. Then he’d considered his progeny to be the smoke of dying airplanes, the blooms of parachutes and the flames of victory. They were gone n
ow. She’d said, “We must all have children or else there’ll be nothing left behind when we’re gone.”
The first, a girl, came before their first spring on Franz Josef Land. After the birth, the widow grew fat, her face got rounder, her nose more bulbous. He changed too. Though still only a young man, his hair was thinning at the front. He gained a high forehead, those blue eyes set beneath.
With the spring, the Sun opened a small hole in the endless night. The hole widened, the nights shrank. The northern isles remained locked in pack ice but the southernmost were released. Flying down over Hooker Island, Yefgenii could see the colony of seabirds in the bay. South of Northbrook Island, the sea was open; whales were schooling. As his MiG swooped low overhead, walruses flopped onto the ice, their hides slick in the sun. In summer, the temperature rose to freezing, occasionally a few degrees higher. The sea teemed with life. This was the seasonal cycle between ice and water, but always keeping more ice than water, as heavy banks of vapor massed into clouds, releasing liquid that fell as snow or hail but never as rain.
He flew patrols through cloud and wind while supply ships and the vessels of the Northern Fleet trailed frothy white wakes. He spoke little to the other men. He followed orders. He flew the MiG to the best of his ability. From time to time came alerts and the interceptors were launched. So far it was Cold War brinkmanship, not the heat of battle. To the north, banks of cloud blanketed the Pole like a ridge of white mountains, and one day soon the overlying sky would fill with slow-rising lines of silver wings.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union fired Sputnik 1 into orbit. The news came through to Graham Bell the next day. The men toasted its success in the bar that night. Yefgenii raised his glass like the other men. He swallowed his shot of vodka.
The next winter, a second child was born, a boy this time, but Yefgenii felt remote from the event. A space existed between him and other people.
Ascent by Jed Mercurio Page 9