The Hunters (20 page)

Pell shrugged happily.

“It's what everybody thinks,” he muttered.

The sound of engines being run up filled the room slowly. They stared toward the window. A mission was leaving. They could see the ships marshaled on the end of the runway.

“Look at that,” Imil said.

They watched intently. The first ships started to go, and the air in the room trembled.

“There go your boys, Monk,” Imil cried, sweeping a hand in their direction. He upset his glass. The drink spilled out over the bar. He ignored it. “Gives you the feeling, doesn't it?”

Moncavage agreed.

“Always does when you don't have to go,” Imil said. He knocked the overturned glass to the floor with an abrupt movement. It bounced to the wall but did not break. Moncavage reached behind and got another one out.

The noise of engines finally receded. Pell was leaning on both elbows. He stirred himself to wave a hand meaninglessly

“The way it is,” he said indistinctly.

“What?”

“You know,” Pell said. “I thought of something.”

“What is it?”

“His receiver could have been out,” Pell said. “Right?”

“Ah, forget that. It's finished with.”

“Is it? Really?”

“You did the best you could,” Imil said. “It was one of those things, that's all.”

“I did call him.”

“Look. You got two MIGs, didn't you?”

Pell pulled at an imaginary trigger. He made a sound with his tongue like guns firing.

“Hosed 'em,” he said. “That's the important part, isn't it? What's so hard to believe?”

There was a silence.

“He should've been looking around,” Pell said. “He'd have seen ‘em if he was. You'd have seen 'em, Colonel.”

“Forget it, Pell.”

“I don't know what they told you,” Pell said slowly. He was very serious. “But this is a fact. Just want to get this one thing straight. I called him.”

Imil picked up the bottle and dumped another drink out for the three of them. He paused. Then he began evenly.

“Listen,” he said, “you've got five kills.”

“Right,” Pell cried fiercely.

“That's a real distinction.”

“I know.”

“People'll remember that as long as you live. They'll point you out. Understand?”

“Damned right.”

“Well, don't forget it, Pell. Remember what you are.”

“You and me, Colonel.”

Imil drew an audible breath.

“That's right, isn't it?” Pell asked.

“Yeah.”

“Couple aces,” Pell laughed.

The colonel stared at him, but Pell didn't seem to notice. “You know you'll be going to Tokyo this afternoon,” Imil explained in a different tone.

“Roge.”

“Shaking hands with all the generals. You understand.”

“Shake hell out of 'em.”

“You stay there three or four days, anyway,” Imil ordered. “Get everything off your mind, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Come back when you feel like it.”

“Don't worry,” Pell said.

There was not much talking then, until the glasses were empty; and after Pell had gotten to his feet and made his way to the door, none. Imil watched him leave. He looked briefly at Moncavage and then turned further to stare out the window through which they had seen the ships taking off.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Moncavage asked at last. He was inwardly pleased at the whole affair.

“You're the group commander. What are your ideas?”

“I don't know.”

“Neither do I.”

“Do you still believe him?”

“I don't know,” Imil hedged. “It's the same as what I told him, though. He's an ace. We might as well be proud of it.”

 

Pell left for Tokyo that afternoon to be interviewed by the press and Headquarters people. Hunter and Pettibone went with him. The colonel had granted them permission to take leave and go, too. Pell had requested it, and though it was an unusual thing to ask for, it had been arranged so promptly that the three of them were aboard an airplane for Japan long before the customary telegram from General Muehlke arrived. This was delivered to the room at about five o'clock, a yellow sheet of teletype paper beginning: PERSONAL FROM MUEHLKE TO PELL. It continued with congratulations on Pell's becoming an ace. Cleve saw it when he returned after the last mission of the day, which had been uneventful. He picked it up and read it. The late sunlight was coming through the windows in level, clearly defined rays along which dust as fine as smoke floated. DeLeo, tired, too, from the full day of flying, read it over Cleve's shoulder. They said nothing to each other. Cleve tossed it back on the bed.

It was very quiet, the part of the day when time was at top dead center, the hours when everybody always seemed to have gone somewhere. He could hear the gentle fluttering of the damper in the stovepipe as the wind moved it. He was tired. His body felt as if it were wrapped uncomfortably in his skin. He took off most of his clothes and lay down on top of the blanket on his cot. Suddenly he was very mortal. The sun coming through the window warmed his face and chest, where the band of it fell upon him. He closed his eyes. They were dry, but slowly the fluid came to soothe them. The sun felt good. It lay like a balm on flesh that was
so easily pierced and torn. It smoothed out the perspective of life somehow. His thoughts drifted free.

And his heart ached for Daughters. He could feel, as if it were happening to himself at that moment, the last terrible anguish as the dark, vacant maw of the MIG swung in behind, fat and merciless, pumping out shells, the lashes of tracer sailing past like high voltage or third rails to be touched by. He shrank as Daughters must have to avoid them, straining to look back, turning hard but too late through the heavy fire. Perhaps he had been hit in the cockpit. If that were true, it would not have been too bad. A man was small in the airplane, though. He might not have been hit when his ship was, but have been trapped instead, sitting there fighting the gone controls, the airspeed winding up higher and higher, the green earth rushing fast to meet him. On a warm day, and all alone, it was not easy to die. Death could be slighted or even ignored close by; but when the time came to meet it unexpectedly, no man could find it in himself not to cry silently or aloud for just one more reprieve to keep the world from ending.

His thoughts lingered over his own chances to live. It was not the first time, but he had never been so isolated before, so open to the tortures of imagination. Every contact, from the lieutenants he led to the commanders he followed, had been severed. The reputation he had worn so lightly had vanished into dust, and with it any strength he had drawn from disdaining it. He felt assailed from every side and unable to force his thoughts away from himself. The difficult thing to think about was having to bail out deep in North Korea and being hunted in enemy country. What mattered most in a case like that was the sustained will to live, much different from the instinctive will. He was not sure he
had enough of that in him any more to survive, if it happened to him. It was like being a hemophiliac and competing for a boxing championship. He listened to the hordes of sparrows chattering under the eaves. Spring, he thought, and then all of a long summer.

And Casey Jones. He thought of him. He had questioned DeLeo dry and for the first time felt the possession of hard knowledge, the thrill and disappointment of finding an enemy to be human. Alone now, retreating, hating them all, drawing off as if down a long corridor continuous but concealing, away from them and the things they admired, he could almost feel the presence, dark and strong, of his chosen enemy, more than that, his friend. He had never seen him. Imil had, though. DeLeo. It was almost as if he were working closer, along a chain of men. He could not help dreaming of it. Casey Jones, whoever he was, to meet and take him high in the piercing blue of those northern skies, and then to stand up spitefully before them, to earn that gesture, that final voice. He discarded it as narcotic again and again, but it kept returning, one thing of merit, out of anonymity, out of failure. One clean mark for them all to see. To kill a champion. To know once more the breath of excellence, compared to which everything else was dross.

Even time stood still for Pell, and the constellations froze. During the five days he was in Tokyo, there was no major fight, hardly even a sighting. The very skies hung quiet while he was gone. When he returned, his accomplishments were still the freshest, his name the most spoken. Everything was exactly as it had been when he left, with one exception. He was not. He had changed. That triumphant week had given him something he had never possessed, a hard luster for his assurance. He had become the final Pell, full grown, immutable. If he had seemed frail, he was no sturdier, but that flicking slightness now had an infrangible quality, like cable. He was established. If still shadowed by the ordinary perils, there was one at least he was now fully beyond: disregard. Everybody knew Pell, and he gloried in it. He drank it, like the can of cold beer that his crew chief would hand up to the cockpit when he taxied in, following a mission at the end of the day. He ate it, beneath his picture in the mess, framed and titled along with those of the other aces there had been, all of them indestructible and dramatic in grays and blacks. He wore it, the aristocratic shield that every man recognized, a line of five red stars painted on his plane just beneath the cockpit.

In the evening they stopped by the room to have a drink and
talk or to hear Pell soliloquize, smoking his cigars. They sat around him, and the smoke rose in a canopy beneath the ceiling. They listened. It had been a george deal, Pell told them. He had met the top brass in Tokyo, the boys who were really running this war. He just wished he'd had the chance to follow up on all the fat leads. There was no telling what couldn't be done. All they had to do was flick the ash off their cigarettes and pick up the telephone to arrange anything, and they were all calling him Doctor. There was this admiral, for one, who wanted him to come out to the carriers on a kind of exchange deal and fly with them for a while. The admiral had said he could easily fix the whole thing up with the commander of the carrier force, if Pell agreed to do it. A few strings might have to be pulled, of course, but it could be arranged. The colonels who were handling things for him in Tokyo didn't think too much of the idea, though, Pell said. One of them wanted him to finish his tour and then go into operations in the States. He would get him a good job in Air Defense Command Headquarters. They needed someone who knew the fighter business, and there was a good future in it, quick promotion and all that.

“I told him I'd think it over,” Pell explained. “He was an old-timer. I didn't want to make him feel bad.”

“What's his name? I wouldn't mind a job like that.”

“You wouldn't be in an airplane from one year to the next.”

“Maybe not. Who's the colonel, though?”

“Never mind,” Pell said. “I'm still thinking it over.”

Colonel Imil had already advised him to continue in a tactical unit when he finished up in Korea. That was good advice, Pell admitted, but it was hard to be sure. It paid to look into everything.

He smoothed his shirt, tucking it in around his belt. Even his uniform seemed to have become distinctive, with the gun belt loose enough so that the loaded holster tugged heavily at his waist and the red satin baseball cap pulled slightly to the side. In a group of any size he could be picked out immediately, even with his back turned. He puffed lightly on the long cigar that was so damaging to illusion. His hands were too effeminate to hold it, and his mouth and face too thin. It was like seeing a jockey with a family.

“We won a few and lost a few, eh, Petti?” Pell said.

Pettibone reddened. He had been quieter than usual since the return.

“How's the old wound?” Pell asked.

“Never mind.”

“Don't be that way. Everybody's interested.”

“Oh, lay off, will you?”

“Let's have a look,” Pell insisted. “Get under the light here.”

“No.”

“Don't be like a girl. What are you so shy about?”

“Nothing.”

“You showed it to at least half of Tokyo.”

“Come on, Petti,” someone joined in.

“Lay it on the table.”

“Why don't you cut it out?” Pettibone said unhappily.

In Tokyo, Pell had gotten him a woman for the first time in his life. It had been in some rambling hotel in the middle of the night, and there had been a great commotion in Pettibone's room. They rushed to see what it was. When they entered, he was standing testily in the center of the room in only his shorts. Blood was running down his leg. Stains of it were all over the floor and his
clothing. Somehow he had split his foreskin, it developed, and he stood there not knowing what to do, while the girl ran for help. In the midst of the confusion, she returned with the hotel manager and others, most of them girls. They stood observing closely, until some bandages were brought. Everyone served as a consultant, examining the progress, and it was almost an hour before the room was cleared.

It was a great story, very funny. Pell told it to everybody. There were stories about him, too, of course. He attracted numbers of them, as a magnet affects metal filings. A whole train of legends had begun to appear.

Hunter spread them. Everything that Pell had said and done he amplified, especially the reception in Tokyo. Actually, he admitted, they had not seen too much of him. It had been a tight program. In the evenings, though, they heard a recounting of who he had been in to see, what he had told them, and what was in the offing. Pell saw nobody but generals, Hunter said. An admiral or two, maybe. He even put in a few good words for the flight, for all of them, Hunter emphasized, with General Muehlke himself. He spent a whole afternoon in the general's office while colonels waited outside.