Air Force Eagles (25 page)

Visibility from the bathtub canopy was superb. Glancing down, he was amazed as always that the ground looked so different from the maps. On the flat surface of the briefing charts, the squiggles representing mountains were overrun with a well-defined circulatory system of neat red highways and blue rail lines. Yet the Korea spread out below him resembled an upended bowl of greenish-brown Wheaties, a topologist's dream of endlessly convoluted surface where roads and rail lines were just evanescent traces, disappearing with every turn. Occasionally, there would be a soft fragile smear of bluish vapor, wood smoke from a village that had been a self-important yellow square on the map.

Around him, the bright, impartial blue shed its death-cold light on two battle lines. One was the artificial Line Kansas, just dots marked on a map to show where the Eighth Army had been told to stop and where the Communist and the United Nations forces now stood in wary deadlock. The other was the natural battle line of the Yalu River, which formed the upper boundary of the craggy quadrangle making up MiG Alley.

Bones disliked flying number two behind Stan Coleman as much as the other man resented it. He'd been promised his own flight, and it was galling to be flying Coleman's wing like some kid just out of gunnery school, even though the CO. had asked him to do it.

The first day Coleman had set him straight.

"Look, Marshall, I know what Ostrowski is doing, siccing you on me like a goddamn watchdog. So you just do your job in the air and keep your goddamn black ass out of my business on the ground."

His attitude didn't bother Marshall—he already knew how he felt, and Coleman's open dislike was easier to handle than hypocrisy. Yet he knew that something had happened to Coleman—his habits were totally different. He seemed driven, preoccupied, with all the old bullshit polish gone. Not much of a drinker before, now he was swilling it down. Most of the guys took an occasional drink, and lots of them would get completely snockered when they knew there was a stand-down, but Coleman drank steadily, standing at the bar until it closed, singing the inane fighter pilot songs, then puking his way back to his hut. Even the younger troops were avoiding him, and the CO.—who did more than a little drinking himself—was worried about him.

But the most fundamental change was in his racist attitude toward Marshall. He had never concealed how he felt about Negroes in the past, but now he took pains to insult him. At first he had done it quietly, in private. Lately, he'd been bolder, especially in front of Fitzpatrick, goading Marshall like a schoolyard bully pressing for a fight. Well, if it came to that, so be it.

On the way up to MiG Alley, they flew in their close-knit "show formation," individual aircraft within three to four feet of each other, flights no more than seventy-five feet apart. Now they were in combat formation, listening to "Dentist," the radar site above K-14, tracking the various gaggles of MiGs. Traffic was heavy, as Dentist called, "Bandit Flight Number One over the Mizu," "Bandit Flight Number Two now on a heading to Race Track," and "Bandit Flight Number Three at Angels thirty-five over Antung." The calls made Marshall's mouth water—there were lots of MiGs out there to fight with. The Mizu was the big Sui-Ho reservoir on the Yalu, easy to pick out. Race Track was in the center of North Korea, where their formations tended to converge.

Coleman, hung-over and probably breathing 100 percent oxygen, chose instead to fly a routine patrol, watching across the Yalu. There, the MiGs from Antung were flying their usual parallel instructional parade, as peaceful as a Central American paseo.

Cruising across the river, Marshall counted eight flights of sixteen fighters each, 148 MiGs. Yet the MiGs were skittish, wary as streetwalkers worrying about an unmarked police car. As much as the bait tempted them, they didn't dare take on twenty-four American Sabres.

MiG Alley had become a Communist training ground, just as Spain had been in the thirties. The Russians had a regular curriculum to train their pilots at their protected Manchurian airfields. Each new class began with familiarization flights in the local area. Then came instructional patrols like this one appeared to be, just a promenade up and down the Alley. Toward the end of the course, they'd have a graduation exercise, and a few of the MiGs would take a plunging dive across the Yalu in a sixty-second hit-and-run attack. Then there'd be a few weeks of regular battles, the old class would graduate, and the new guys would come in. The Sabres flew at the very limits of their range, so patrols were often cut short or battles broken off. The MiGs took off and climbed in great sweeping circles over their own airfields. Their greater service ceiling always gave them a height advantage which easily converted into speed, and when the battle was over, they could glide home if they had to.

The MiGs could fly higher because they were lighter by almost four thousand pounds and powered by a derivative of a Rolls-Royce engine sold to them by the Brits. The Sabre had more armor, redundant systems, and better gunsights. In effect, the Russians were flying hotrod Fords while the Americans were flying Lincoln Continentals.

Bones watched Coleman begin his turn, flashing the 61st's broad bands of yellow edged in black on wing and fuselage, little wisps of vapor coming from the wingtips.

Lordy, what pretty airplanes. Too bad they couldn't cross that stupid river and wax some Communist ass.

Three hundred feet away, the flight's other element crossed over, Dave Menard flying on Fitzpatrick's wing. The remaining flights were strung out behind them, like cars on a toy train. Combat was supposed to be exciting, but not with Coleman leading.

No tiger, Coleman kept his patrol at a distance, never placing it where it might offer a tantalizing cheap shot to lure the MiGs into battle. There were fights going on elsewhere—they could hear the yips of the guys in the 4th, calling out the breaks, yelling when they got some hits.

Coleman was content to watch the enemy across the Yalu. It would have been a decent tactic if the aim was to keep them across the river—but the name of the game was to kill MiGs.

The Communists exercised an iron control over their fighters from the ground. Lately they'd taken to sending out two groups of MiGs, fifty or sixty in a pack. One would go down the west coast of Korea, another down the center. The planes would be strung out in long lines, quickly called "trains" by the U.S. radar sites observing them. The two groups would converge over Pyongyang, then let down as they headed back north, trying to pick off any U.S. fighter-bombers they could find. It was muscle, pure and simple, and the Russians knew it.

Marshall looked up to see his dream come true, two sections of MiGs diving toward them, their external fuel tanks fluttering behind them like plucked feathers.

Marshall called, "Red Leader, break right!" and Coleman responded immediately, turning into the MiGs, as the F-86s sent their own tanks tumbling away.

Marshall followed, heart pounding, fingers already trembling on the firing button, as the targets slipped away—it had only been a feint. The MiGs were already diving across the Yalu, secure in their Simon Says war, just taunting the Sabres.

Coleman's voice, suddenly high-pitched and nervous, said, "Red Flight, let's go home."

The four Sabres had just turned ninety degrees when the second flight of MiGs roared through them, their cannons burping little incandescent balls of fire that seemed to slow almost to a halt as they approached. Coleman reversed to follow them, and Marshall groaned. He should have gone up and over, they'd never catch them this way. Marshall kept on his wing, protecting his six o'clock position, feeling the G-forces build as the turn tightened.

Another flight of MiGs passed ahead of them, diving after Fitzpatrick and Menard. Breathing hard, Marshall called, "Red Three, break left," and Coleman swung in, changing places to fly as his wingman as Marshall flattened out into a turning circle behind the pretty brown MiGs.

"Take it easy, don't hyperventilate," Marshall told himself, trying to slow his breathing down as he kept the stick back. The Sabre's right wing had a tendency to stall in a turn, and he knew he'd have to flatten out a bit to keep his speed up. But with the F-86E's new slab tail, he had this pigeon cold—he could turn inside the MiG, no matter what the other guy did.

The MiG flight began to separate as they scrambled home toward the Yalu. Marshall fought off the urge to fire, even as he wished he had someone other than Coleman as his number two. He glanced back quickly, didn't see him, thought—The bastard's gone—and turned back to the MiG. He was at 410 knots at twenty thousand feet, not caring that the airspeed was above the red line. He reeled the MiG like a fish on a rod into his sights and fired, the six . 50s hammering in the nose, knocking a couple of knots from his airspeed.

Fuel leaked from the MiG's wing and hot licks of white vapor streamed back out from the fuselage. Marshall's tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he watched his bullets sparkling on the brown surfaces, the enemy airplane making rough amateurish jinks to right and left, good for nothing more than slowing it down.

Suddenly, the MiG's rear fuselage blossomed like an opening flower as the little spade-shaped panels of the speed brakes popped out to slow it further. Marshall fired, and the MiG spouted smoke like blood from a harpooned whale. The burbling jet wash from the MiG jostled his Sabre as he fired again. The MiG seemed to smash into an invisible wall, disappearing into its own smoke and flames like a handkerchief into a magician's hand as Marshall roared past it, zooming up to the right, searching for Coleman, then reversing to come down for the kill.

Heading back, he found only a circle of white smoke and red flame marking the explosion.

Marshall was yelling, "Whooee, number four!" when his Sabre shuddered from cannon hits. Two MiGs were on his tail where Coleman should have been; they broke off as Menard came thundering after them.

Marshall tried to roll level and check the damage but could not; he was diving at Mach .95, his hydraulic pressure gone, his controls frozen. Now just a passenger in an aluminum sled, he tugged at the stick, trying to break the tight diving spiral, to escape the brown and green Wheaties earth spinning upward at him.

Throttle back, Marshall pulled with all his strength at the stick, trying to bring the wings level and get the nose up as the battered Sabre bumped at the speed of sound, the G-meter pegged. With no hydraulic pressure to help him, the violent pressure of near-sonic-speed air clamped a rock-solid lock on his controls. His oxygen mask slipped down as the sustained G-forces drained his vision away like a Hollywood fade-out.

Altitude melted as Marshall fought the airplane.

"Eject at twelve thousand feet," he told himself.

As the F-86 plunged through thirteen thousand feet, he actuated the canopy release. The pyrotechnic charge blew the canopy, but the python grip of G-forces kept it from clearing, jamming it into the fuselage structure like a chip into dip, sticking it up behind the cockpit in a great transparent air brake.

The shuddering Sabre slowed down abruptly, the speed falling through three hundred knots. Marshall evaluated the hazards of ejection over North Korea versus riding the airplane down and murmured, "Take a shot at it!"

Delaying the rest of his ejection sequence, he felt control grudgingly come back to his full-strength pull on the stick. By the time he reached 2,500 feet, he had the airplane flying again, heading back toward Suwon.

Marshall sat shivering in the cockpit, sucking on oxygen to fight off a nauseating fear of death. His fourth kill had been within seconds of being his last.

At Suwon, he made a long, careful approach, lowering the gear with the emergency system and landing without any brakes. He was towed in by a cheering ground crew, happy to see the black powder-marks of combat smeared back on the fuselage—they'd hold a drunken celebration tonight—and amazed to find the canopy sticking up aft of the cockpit like the lid of a sardine tin.

Marshall walked away, the pleasure in his own kill gone. Instead of sticking to his wing, that goddamn Coleman—he should watch it; he was beginning to swear a lot—had gone hunting for stuff that was obsolete in World War II.

Later that afternoon, he had another private session with Colonel Ostrowski.

"What is there to say, Ozzie? He wasn't aggressive up at the Yalu, and when we swapped positions, he handed my ass on a platter to the MiGs. But then, he got his kills."

"Don't be too hard on him. He might have got slung out of position when you were turning with the MiGs, and then got carried away when he saw the bombers."

Knowing he didn't really mean it, Ostrowski shook his head. The wingman was there for one purpose, to cover the leader's ass, and nothing, not an easy shot at a target, nothing should intervene. The old "two holes in the ground" idea was the only rule—anything else and all the combat tactics became meaningless.

"Okay, you've got your own flight. Menard is coming along fast, and he has a lot of promise. Take him as your wingman. And I want you to know, I've got nothing personal against Coleman. Maybe being this close to being an ace will get him to start fighting. I'm too short-handed to send a veteran home. If he gets aggressive and starts mixing it up with the MiGs, that's all I ask for."

*

The Pentagon/August 15, 1952

Ruddick was not a generous man, but he gave Coleman credit for common sense. Stan could have made a lot of trouble about that insane business in Little Rock. Instead, he'd taken a gentleman's way out, simply leaving, going back to Korea.

Burying his face in hands he asked himself what was the matter with Ginny. How could she do that to him? Thank God she was only a stepdaughter.