The Hunters (17 page)

There was not much time to decide. He started pulling his nose up sharply to get a snap shot perhaps, as they went by above him. If he was lucky, he might damage one and slow it down. It was all an act of balance. He had his nose high enough, but his speed was falling off rapidly. He would be slow and vulnerable.

“Am I clear?”

No response. He glanced about. Nothing. At the last second he could hold that steep pitch, the trailing MIG moved into his gunsight. He squeezed. The tracers floated out. His heart burgeoned. Part of his burst was hitting near the tail. A thin line of smoke began to follow the MIG.

He dropped his nose. As it came down heavily, he completed
his turn. He was not too far behind, about ten thousand feet, and two or three thousand feet below. He watched the MIG intently. Smoke was still coming from it, and then he saw that it was dropping behind the leader. He had crippled it. He could feel himself gaining, although he was unable to actually detect it yet. Then he heard Pell.

“I can't keep up with you.”

“Keep me in sight,” Cleve ordered.

“You're pulling away.”

“Goddamn it, stay with me!”

“I've got a hung tank. I can't.”

Now he could see that he was closing the distance between himself and the MIG. He looked back quickly. Pell was falling behind, as far back as Cleve was from the MIG.

“Try shaking it off,” Cleve said.

“It won't come off.”

“Try again,” he said angrily.

He watched the MIG. The smoke had almost stopped, but he was still drawing closer to it. There was no question about that. He had nearly halved the original distance already.

“I can't get it off, Black Lead,” Pell complained.

There was only one thing to do.

“Go home, Pell,” he said. “Get out of the area.”

There was no answer. Cleve looked back. He could not see any wingman. Finally he made him out, far behind.

“Did you get that, Black Two?”

“There's twelve MIGs back here,” Pell said clearly.

“Get out of there, Pell. Head for home.”

“Do you have me in sight, Cleve?”

“Negative. Withdraw, Pell! That's an order.”

“I can't. You'd better come back here.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, oh,” Pell said.

Cleve looked at the MIG. He was very close to it, almost close enough to fire. He could not have been more than two thousand feet behind it, and just about level. It was only a matter of a little more time, perhaps twenty seconds or thirty. He began lining up to fire, leaning into the moment of climax.

“. . . two of them on me,” he heard Pell shout. “Do you have me yet, Lead?”

“Negative.”

“Outmaneuver them, Pell,” somebody interrupted icily. It sounded like DeLeo.

“. . . can't turn with this tank on . . .”

Cleve sat watching the ship grow very slowly in his gunsight. “He's outturning me!” Pell cried. “Cleve!”

Before he even answered, Cleve began turning back. He had not fired.

“Don't let them get away, Pell,” he said coldly, “I'm on the way now.”

He looked over his shoulder. He had not completed ninety degrees of turn, but the MIG was already disappearing rapidly, sailing off into the size of a ship he would not see again, shrinking to a speck. When he rolled out, he glanced back once more. It was gone. He searched the sky ahead to find Pell.

“How high are you, Pell?”

He heard no reply.

“Pell, what altitude are you at?”

“Thirty-eight, no, twenty-eight, twenty-seven thousand! I can't shake him! He's turning inside me!” It was a clear, chilling voice.

Cleve trimmed the nose down. They were slightly below him. He was at thirty-three.

“Where are you, Pell?” somebody in another flight called.

There was the noise of overlapping transmissions.

“Did you get that?” somebody shouted.

“Negative.”

Just then Cleve saw two ships, or three, off to his left and low, turning with each other. He rolled down toward them, straining to be able to identify them at the earliest moment. They were still too far off, as anonymous as insects.

“What's your position, Pell?” somebody asked again.

They were MIGs, two MIGs and Pell's ship. Cleve could see them positively now. He looked high, but he did not notice any others above him. He looked behind himself, on both sides.

“It just came off,” Pell shouted. “I got rid of the tank!”

“Somebody tell me where he is.”

“About ten miles east of Antung,” Cleve said.

“Thanks.”

Suddenly, as he was diving down toward them, Cleve saw the MIG immediately behind Pell snap and begin to spin. The pilot had pulled too hard to stay in the tighter turn. It was common enough with inexperience. Cleve looked for the second MIG. It took him a moment to pick it up again. He could not tell at first, but then he was certain. It was going away. He could not catch it. He started a turn to keep Pell in sight. Did he see it? Pell was shouting. He was turning outside the spinning MIG, ready to close. Cleve watched the MIG spin down from twenty-five thousand
feet, leisurely, like a piece of paper. A parachute finally appeared. Even after that, it seemed minutes before, in some wooded hills, the shadow of the MIG grew quickly to meet it. There was a soft explosion. The smoke began to rise, gray and leaning.

“Did you see him hit?” Pell shouted.

“Roger.”

“Who went in?” It was Imil calling. “Are you all right, Pell?”

“Sure. No sweat.”

“Who went in?”

“It was a MIG.”

“Did you get one?”

“Roger,” Pell said.

“Good show.”

Back at Kimpo, at debriefing, the colonel stood with his arm around Pell and his other hand hooked by the thumb in his cartridge belt. At the opposite end of the table, for the short time that he remained, DeLeo was like all the unheard voices of the world. His face was expressionless. He would not say anything. Even under the obligation of that, however, of those who believed in him, Cleve could not bring himself to try to explain. Nothing could possibly have been made different by then, anyway. Pell had credit for the MIG, his third.

They swarmed around him, to be near him because the colonel was, and to hear what had happened. They came to see the magician, to wonder at the sleight of hand and be fascinated by the glibness. Toward the end, in a quiet moment, Pell walked up to Cleve.

“I haven't had a chance to thank you,” he said.

“Don't bother.”

“If you hadn't come back like you did . . .”

“Forget it, Pell.”

“. . . I don't know how I'd have gotten that MIG confirmed, I didn't have any film of it, naturally. Of course, somebody else might have seen it crash, but you never know.”

Colonel Imil appeared beside Pell.

“Let's go on up and grab some lunch,” he said. “How about you, Cleve? Want a ride?”

“No, thanks.”

He watched them stroll out together and climb into the jeep. They backed into the road and then lurched away, as the colonel put it into gear.

 

“What's eating him?” the colonel asked Pell over the clatter.

“He's a little hard to get along with.”

“You're the first one that's ever said that.”

“It's not just me. It's the whole flight, sir, more or less.”

“That's bad.”

“I don't think he goes for this combat flying too much, Colonel, if you want to know the real truth.”

“Come on, now,” Imil denied.

Pell shrugged. There was a silence. The jeep rattled through it.

“It's just too bad you can't have a flight,” the colonel mused thoughtfully.

Pell did not reply. He preferred to leave that hanging, unadorned, in the air. Later, when he returned to the room, he found Cleve writing a letter. He drew a chair close to the table and sat down. Cleve did not look up.

“Dutch certainly thinks a lot of you,” Pell said.

“Some other time, Pell. I'm busy.”

“He thinks you've got the best flight in the group,” Pell continued. “He said that more than once.”

“That's good.”

“You knew him before this, didn't you? In Panama.”

“Not as intimately as you do. I used to call him Colonel Imil.”

“Oh, I don't call him Dutch to his face.”

Cleve went on writing.

“He mentioned that he'd known you for a long time,” Pell said. “He thinks you're going to get MIGs, too. He has a lot of confidence in you.”

“Where do you get your nerve?”

“I mean it.”

Cleve said nothing.

“I think he'd like to see me leading elements now instead of flying wing,” Pell continued. “He asked about that.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I thought I would be after I told you about it.”

“Well, go back and tell him you were wrong,” Cleve said, “because you're in my flight, and you'll be a wingman until I say otherwise. If you ever lead, it will be when I think you're able to.”

“Maybe.”

“Don't talk to me like that. Not maybe. Absolutely.”

“Afraid of what I might do if I had the chance?”

“Get out of here,” Cleve ordered.

Pell smiled. He stood up, not in the least awkwardly, and left the room.

Cleve sat at the table for a time without moving. Then he tore the letter he was writing into pieces and threw them away.

The fresh days had arrived, the high winds. A sweep of seasons was rustling across the peninsula. It was a clamorous spring. The windows rattled incessantly through bright hours, and doors were ripped open when the wind slipped behind them. Through the rolling hills toward Seoul the scrub pine and occasional willows now seemed to shine. Everywhere were plots of ground that had been carved out and plowed. The earth looked rich but worn in the sunlight. Beside huts along the road the first signs advertising ice for sale appeared. The Koreans cut blocks of it out of the river all winter long and buried it in sawdust to sell when the weather turned hot. It was among the most abundant of their crops.

Daughters's heart was no longer with them, but in the future, ten, nine, eight missions away. He had finished with the war, except in fact. The days were intolerably long for him. Even dreams could not fill them. He thought of nothing now but his sons and his wife, yearning to be with them again. He had cherished at one time, like the rest of them, visions of glory, but they had faded at last and seemed pale indeed beside the prospect of going home.

Daughters had succumbed. He was strolling with his sons
through summer afternoons, taking them to streams and lakes he knew, showing them where the trout hid, the bass.

When he had been a boy himself, he had loved the fields best. He was always keeping animals he found while wandering home from school on autumn afternoons. Spring and summer, too, it was turtles and rabbits, snakes in a burlap bag, field mice, ducks, and dogs. Once it was three young hawks stolen from their nest. He trained them to his hand. When he went to college, the animals in the backyard remembered him from one holiday to the next.

The war took him away, and then marriage. When he was gone for good, his family set everything free. The rabbits went back into the meadows, the snakes slithered off, the field mice and chipmunks vanished, the turtles sunned their withered extremities in their old ponds. The hawks flew away to hunt for themselves. In letters from home, sometimes he would hear about them. They were the only ones that came back, returning singly to perch for a haughty minute or two on the backyard fence, recognizable by the peculiar, jerky movements of their heads. He often felt they were still his.

Something about him made Chung, the houseboy approach him more readily than any of the others, head bowed, talking in small, uncertain English. Chung. Even Daughters did not know his surname. He was only Chung, always dressed in discarded fatigues with everything too big for his thin frame. The sleeves were turned up, and the trousers, and his feet must have rattled within the heavy field shoes. He came from somewhere, some broken family, some hut in a poor village. They hardly noticed him as the days went by. He seldom spoke. He worked shyly. He
shined shoes, made beds, washed glasses, swept floors, cleaned windows, scrubbed, polished, and dusted, and sometimes, when his work was finished, emerged from his unblinking timidity to play catch with the other houseboys. Off to the rear of the area, where they were not seen, they had erected a kind of chinning bar, and he might be there with them, laughing over things said in their own, birdlike language, competing with them in various contests. A call, however, and he would come immediately, throwing down the ball, or slipping on his jacket and leaving the chinning bar to come running. He was there every day from about eight in the morning until five at night. Where he ate or what, Cleve did not know. Sometimes they would give him a couple of candy bars, and though he might have been pleased to receive them, there was no telling from the poised, wide-eyed expression whether he took them out of politeness or with real gratitude. He was a strange boy, a tamed animal in many ways, and in others pitifully human and poor.

“He wants to go home for a few days, Cleve,” Daughters explained.

“Where's your home, Chung?”

“Ansong.”

“Where's that, Jim?” Cleve asked.

“About fifty miles south of here,” Daughters said.