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 now. 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.