Yefgenii hesitated. “The film?”
“Yes, Leitenant.” The Starshina studied him.
The widow showed him the reel. She smiled at him almost like mother to child. “Do you want it developed, Leitenant?”
Yefgenii shook his head. He was a dark body. He gave off no light. “Destroy it,” he said.
IT WAS THE HEIGHT OF SUMMER, the summer of 1952. Sunlight blazed from the early hours till evening, the sky was blue and open, and the pilots of the 221st were seeing action almost every day. Yefgenii flew as Kiriya’s wingman. He sighted four Sabres operating beneath the contrail level. They were specks, not even cotton threads. While Kiriya and Skomorokhov scored kills he held back to guard their tails with no chance of getting any for himself. Kapetan Baturin got one, his fourth. One more kill and he was an ace.
On another excursion they made contact with the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing of the U.S. Air Force. Yefgenii recognized them by the yellow slashes on their midsections and tailplanes. Four Sabres of the 334th FIS swung below them, luring the MiGs down into the thicker air. Kiriya ordered the MiGs down. Yefgenii tipped his nose over, opened the throttle and Glinka rolled in behind his wing. The Sabres saw them all the way and splintered into elements. Another flight burst out of the Sun and then it too split up.
At once the noise struck Yefgenii. Men were screaming into their radios in Russian without even a thought of stumbling through words of Korean. A hurricane of air rushed over the cockpit. Shells banged hot stipples into the fuselage like the rivet guns in the factories where the MiGs were built. He strained round to find Glinka. Glinka had left his wing. A Sabre filled the gap. Yefgenii rolled hard over to the left with the Sabre matching the turn. He continued the roll, passing through the inverted and then he was derry-turning right. Over his right shoulder he could see the Sabre tipped over on its side trying to pull round but slipping wider and wider till it disappeared. Yefgenii was straining to hold the turn and gasping with fear. Again he glanced over his left shoulder but saw nothing; he could only hold the turn tight and strain to keep the black iris from closing over his eyes. Then the Sabre came into view. He was off Yefgenii’s left wing and wide and loose in the turn. The Sabre had lost a few seconds in misreading the maneuver and now Yefgenii was turning inside him. Acceleration hung weight on Yefgenii’s arms and clawed his oxygen mask down his face. If he could hold the turn he’d soon come onto the American’s tail and he’d have a shot at him.
Two streaks of metal meteored past Yefgenii’s wing. A Sabre was chasing a MiG down to its death. It was Baturin.
A pair of MiGs had isolated a Sabre. Cannon shells jabbed at its tail. The tips of the MiGs’ guns bloomed in yellowy-white flickers. Tracers were flashing. Bangs cracked the air but became lost in the roar of engines and rush of wind.
Yefgenii held his turn but another Sabre was sliding in behind him. Its air intake was a dark cave. “Glinka!”
Kiriya’s MiG soared above him. He was dogging a Sabre that trailed gray smoke. That was five MiGs accounted for, but Yefgenii couldn’t locate the other. “Glinka!”
Gunfire crackled below. A snake of black smoke wiggled downward, becoming thinner and darker until the plane at its head struck the ground. Baturin had gone in.
Yefgenii was closing on the Sabre ahead but behind him the other was lining up for a shot. “Glinka, get him off me!”
Two Sabres swept in behind Kiriya. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw them closing. “I’m in a world of shit!”
In despair Yefgenii opened fire on the Sabre ahead of him, flown by a wingman only a year out of flight school, named Gus Grissom. Yefgenii’s shells reached out but Grissom was too remote and the shells entered a long arc to earth. Yefgenii rolled into an opposite turn. The borderlands of China and Korea wheeled beneath his nose. Grissom’s Sabre swept across the horizon to safety while the one behind was too wide to stay on him. The Yalu River swung into Yefgenii’s ten o’clock position and settled there. Its waters looked like cold steel and beyond them lay safety.
The Sabres above weren’t letting Kiriya go. “There’s bastards all over me!”
Yefgenii turned tail to the river and climbed toward them. The second Sabre — the wingman, the shield — broke off to attack him. Yefgenii watched him arc round and calculated he had a few seconds to remove the one Sabre that remained on Kiriya.
He swept in beneath the Sabre and pitched up. As his speed bled away he opened fire. 23-mm shells ripped into the Sabre’s belly. The Sabre pulled up and out of the battle and Kiriya was free. “Red Leader, you’re clear!”
Now Yefgenii’s MiG was slow and sinking, and the American’s wingman was swooping toward him for the kill. Yefgenii rolled to the inverted and pulled the stick hard back into a dive. The Sabre chased him down through thickening shelves of air. Yefgenii held two hands on the stick and planted his elbows on his hips. Straining, he drew back the stick and the g-meter began to climb. Shells clattered his fuselage. In his peripheral vision he glimpsed tiny lumps of metal being gouged out of his wing. He held the g-forces till the world righted itself and the Yalu slid down onto his nose. This time he held course for it. At full throttle he’d be there in two minutes.
The MiGs hurtled toward the river with the Sabres in pursuit. At this altitude they were equal for speed. Shells peppered his wing but did no serious damage. Far beyond the wingtip he saw Kiriya’s plane flying in parallel.
Optimistic gunfire spattered from the Sabres’ guns but they couldn’t hope to close in time. As the MiGs neared the Yalu, the Americans, forbidden to trespass into Chinese airspace, broke off and rolled south.
The MiGs regrouped north of the Yalu. Glinka was circling there. “I got separated. A Sabre was on me. I had to cross the river.”
Yefgenii waited for Kiriya to challenge Glinka. A few seconds passed. “Recover to base” was all he said.
The MiGs aimed for home and Yefgenii’s fury rose. His hand began to strangle the stick. He had to force himself to relax.
In Manchuria the evening was growing cool. A wind was gathering. Yefgenii angled into his space on the dispersal. The widow put up the ladder for him to climb down. “Leitenant Yeremin, welcome home!”
He unhooked the chain from his helmet and slapped the mask from his face.
“Is everything all right, sir?”
He took a moment, then nodded.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” he said at once. Then he paused as he left her. “Thank you.”
She smiled.
Kiriya marched to his office and shut the door. Instead of becoming the Polk’s fourth ace, Kapetan Baturin had gone in. Kiriya began writing the letter that’d be dispatched to some small town where Baturin’s family knew nothing of the air war in Korea. They’d be told their son and brother and husband and father had died in a training exercise. He’d get a gravestone in a backwater cemetery somewhere. It was the irony that haunted all these men. A good pilot like Baturin could die out here and his story never be known.
Air surged in great rising breaths that could have been the breaths of the mountains themselves. Yefgenii got up and went out into the night. The terminator crept farther west bringing darkness behind it like black oil slicking over half the earth. The stars rose. They sparkled in patterns he didn’t recognize that to him were nameless.
Wind whistled through the trees and whipped his ears. It squeezed between the buildings and rattled their slats. The first spots of rain dotted his face.
Voices distracted him. From the mess the women trudged toward their barracks, having dined separate from the men. The widow paused and held out her palm to catch the rain. She leaned back to feel the drops on her face. In that moment Yefgenii didn’t know if she was ugly or if she was beautiful. Perhaps it was true she’d only bring bad luck.