A third shadow appeared. A fighter bobbed into Yefgenii’s slipstream. Yefgenii glanced up into his rearview mirror ready to roll hard away but instead of a Sabre he glimpsed a blunter snout with an air intake divided by a vertical septum — a MiG. “Retreat,” Kiriya ordered.
Now the flat dark buildings of P’yŏngyang were beginning to fall under the leading edge of his right wingtip. In a few more seconds, when the Nan River slipped under his belly, the American would be safe across the border.
Kiriya had not made a turn as tight and accurate as Yefgenii’s and had missed the chance to strike the Sabre. Now he struggled to hold position behind. The Sabre’s jet-wash buffeted Yefgenii’s aircraft but Yefgenii held true to the American’s tail. Over and over again Kiriya bobbed in and out of line and at times he overcorrected. He tried to believe that his position was the more difficult one but the truth was plain: this nineteen-year-old virgin was the greater master of his craft.
Yefgenii had closed to point-blank range. He drew back the throttle. On the instrument panel gauge needles swung over as the rush of the engine diminished. The plane steadied and Yefgenii’s finger crooked round the trigger.
“Retreat.” Kiriya’s voice rose. “Retreat!”
The American slid into the crosshairs and Yefgenii held him there. Only a second passed but this was an age, this was a pilot’s lifetime and his death. Yefgenii could claim his radio had failed. He could kill this American and then he would be at base with the red star upon his fuselage.
Kiriya cut through in Russian. “Get the fuck out of there, Yeremin. He’s mine.”
Yefgenii let out a long profane scream but didn’t click on the radio for Kiriya to hear it. With his mouth gaping in a shriek that no one heard he tilted the wings and throttled back and so Yefgenii drifted aside into the quiet of a calming engine and a slowing rush of air. A moment later Kiriya’s tracers were burning into the Sabre’s tail and a short moment after that a shell tore open the American’s fuselage.
A wing crumpled. The Sabre slid sideways then spun and toppled. Metal sheared away in chunks. As if in tranquil recovery an amputated section of wing straightened all of a sudden and took flight again. It rose and glinted in the sun but then it flipped and then it twisted and then it began the long sink to earth.
With the battle over, the survivors were dispersing. Streaks of ice pointed north into Manchuria and south to the 38th Parallel. The Americans would report their contacts as North Koreans or Chinese. Most they met were ill-trained and, to the U.S. pilots, the war in the main was a duck shoot. If they thought different they saved it for later and the dark quiet corners of the officers’ club. Some had picked up enemy R/T that didn’t sound like Korean or Chinese, but they called the best of their opponents Honcho or Casey Jones, never anything else. The Soviets weren’t in the War. That was official. They weren’t here nor were their seasoned jet pilots.
Yefgenii watched the Sun slide down to the Yellow Sea. It threw back a glow as if a great red fireball had toppled off the edge of the world, causing a golden crust to simmer at the clouds’ edges and colouring their undersides pink like the bellies of salmon. The aircrafts’ condensation trails were evaporating into the thin dry air. Soon the ice crystals would condense again and someday they’d fall as rain.
IN DUSK the last pair of MiGs reappeared over Antung. White landing lights and blinking red and green navigation lights glowed, while in gloom the planes themselves had turned to ghosts. The lights floated down to the runway. They were spirits returning to earth; they were demons creeping back into the underworld.
Yefgenii landed with despair cladding the cockpit. His mask reeked of it. It was in his gloves. It was in his boots. His wheels flung up a plume of dust and, behind the aircraft, the jet engine whipped it into a vortex that scattered and drifted and, by the time Yefgenii turned off the runway onto the taxiway, the dust had sown itself once more into the ground.
He snap-turned his QRB to release his harnesses. Because the ground crews were massing round Kiriya’s plane, only one of them stayed back to help Yefgenii. She was a pear-shaped girl perhaps five years older than him with dirty blonde hair and oily skin. The men said she was a widow. None of the senior pilots wanted her in their ground crews. A woman was bad luck; a widow, twice so. The junior pilots tolerated her till they got a kill or bribed the Starshina with a bottle of vodka, then she’d be moved on to someone else’s crew farther down the pecking order.
The widow said nothing to Yefgenii as she placed the ladder for him to step down. He paid her no attention. He didn’t much believe in luck or in superstition.
Pilipenko was leading the celebration for Kiriya’s kill. He had his arm round Kiriya and was kissing his cheek. Kiriya raised his arm in triumph while the ground crews applauded. The Starshina was already stenciling a small red star under the cockpit of Kiriya’s jet. Five now lay in line, proclaiming him the newest ace of the world’s first jet war.
Yefgenii turned away. Hunched under his aircraft, Yefegenii fought hard not to sob.
The widow peered at him. She wondered if he might’ve taken ill. “Leitenant, are you all right…?”
Yefgenii swallowed his tears. Without a word to her he marched across the dispersal toward Kiriya’s celebration with the hose of his PEC slapping sharp against his thigh.
Pilipenko and Skomorokhov and Kiriya were numbered among the brotherhood. They were sunning themselves in their glory. They laughed as only gods can laugh.
Yefgenii stood on the periphery. At one point Kiriya caught his gaze and something passed between them. In that tiny moment Kiriya’s expression softened. Yefgenii’s hands came together and he joined in the applause for his commanding officer’s triumph.
Later, in the crew hut, Glinka claimed he’d been close to downing one of the Sabres. “You know, Yeremin, the more I think about it… I might even have damaged him. The pilot who wore red—”
“Red…?”
“A red bonedome. That was Jabara.”
Major James Jabara had become the first ace of the war, the first jet ace in history. He’d appeared in a newsreel standing at his Sabre’s wing wearing his Mae West and his parachute pack buckled over it, with his hands clasped across his groin holding that famous scarlet helmet. His jet kills had made him as famous as a movie star or a world champion, the most famous American aviator since Lindbergh.
Yefgenii shrugged. He felt numb and all he wanted was to be alone. To desert the crew hut before duty’s end would invite disapproval, so he wrote up the mission in his logbook and hung around till the ground chief’s report was ready to sign.
At night he returned to barracks. In the polished scrap of aluminum they used for a mirror he registered for the first time the burst capillaries mottling his face, neck, and chest. They had ruptured under high g. He peeled off his undershirt. The straps of his harness had grazed red bands into his shoulders. They were sticky and beginning to scab. He dabbed them with iodine. It scalded so much he wanted to scream.
As the men strolled through the humid night air to the mess, Yefgenii could hear Glinka trying it on with Dolgikh. “You know, Kapetan, the more I think about it… I’m pretty sure I damaged Jabara’s Sabre.”
“The only way you could’ve done that was if he’d shot off your tail and accidentally flown into it.”
Those who heard laughed.
“No, I’m serious, there’s so much going on in the heat of battle, I wasn’t sure at the time, but now I can remember seeing my tracers hit him—”
“Well, I was sure at the time, and I’m sure now. Jabara’s eating a Texas steak and your tracers are floating on the Yellow Sea.”