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.