James Salter - The Hunters

“Oh, splendidly. The only question is, are there enough of them?”

“Everybody has to go through the same thing, Cleve.”

“I know, I know. Will I be able to fly today?”

“If we have ships to spare, you will.”

“I feel like I’ve been here a month already.”

The radio interrupted. It was nothing, however, except a few laconic comments.

“It’s still too early,” Desmond decided, looking at his watch. “Usually, if there is a fight, it starts right on the river.”

“Don’t the MIGs ever come south any distance?”

“Not very often.”

“Why is that?”

“They don’t have to, unless they’re out to get the fighter-bombers, say. They know we’ll come to them wherever they are. It’s even to their advantage. We have to fly two hundred miles up there to fight and then two hundred miles back, but they’re always within sight of their own fields.”

Cleve nodded. There was a pause. Running his thumb along the edge of the desk, as if testing its sharpness, he said, “How good are their pilots?”

“It depends which you’re talking about, the good ones or the bad ones.”

Cleve did not interrupt.

“When they’re good,” Desmond said, “they’re damned good; but there aren’t too many of those. The rest are pitiful, worse than students sometimes. I’ve seen them bail out just because they were scared. The only trouble is, well, take Tonneson, for instance. He didn’t think much of them. He used to say there were none of them worth a damn. They couldn’t fly, and they couldn’t shoot. He was convinced of that, and then he ran into some that could. The trouble is, you never know what you’re up against, so you can’t afford to make mistakes. On the other hand, there’re some guys like Abbott.”

“What about Carl?”

“He doesn’t know there’s a difference. He’s afraid of them all.”

“He shot down six Germans.”

“That was years ago. I’m telling you the truth. Everybody knows it. He just hasn’t got it anymore.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“You will,” Desmond assured him. He laughed bitterly. “He’s the only man I’ve ever seen who could abort from a mission and then write up the airplane as OK when he landed. I’m not exaggerating a bit, either. It’s a sad case. There are good MIG pilots, but after all…”

“What are the good ones like?”

“They’re tough. If they get behind you, you don’t shake them off with one hard turn. They’ll stay with you, all the way down to the deck a lot of times. It’s happened to me. About all you can do then is hope they fire out or run low on fuel, or that somebody shows up to help you. If it’s really one of their honchos back there, you’re just out of luck. All you can do is turn as hard as you can and keep hoping.”

“That’s what makes it a war, I suppose,” Cleve said. “You shoot at them, they shoot at you.”

“That’s right. What could be fairer?”

“Nothing.”

“The only thing is to play it smart. You never know who you’re running into. It’s probably some cull, but it might be old Casey himself.”

“It might be who?”

“Casey Jones.”

“Who’s that?”

“Do you mean it?” Desmond said. “I thought he was pretty well known.”

“Not to me. Who is he, the great Russian champion?”

“I don’t know. He flew a black-striped ship, very distinctive. Ask Imil about him sometime. He can tell you. Only don’t believe everything he says.

“He came back with three cannon hits on his ship one day. He was lucky to even get back. There was one right in front of the cockpit that left a hole you could stick your head through, and two more just as big in the wing. That was Casey. According to the story, they fought for about twenty minutes, and the colonel didn’t even get a chance to fire his guns. He looked like he’d had a heart attack when he landed, I know that much. I saw him at the debriefing.

“When I first got here, every time Casey flew, there was a big fight. They used to know when he was taking off, I don’t know how, but ground control would call him off by name. The MIG formations were trains, so they called him Casey Jones. Train number one, or whatever it was, leaving Antung, Casey Jones at the throttle. When you heard that, you started watching yourself, too.”

“What became of him?”

“I guess he finished his tour and went home. He just stopped flying. It’s been a long time since anybody’s seen him.”

They listened to the mission then, but Cleve sat preoccupied, with thoughts of a vanished enemy. He had gone, this man whose name no one knew, taking his excellence with him. The skies were empty now of the fever of his presence; and Cleve, though he had not fought, resisted a feeling of personal loss. Something irreplaceable had been taken from the war. He felt cheated. It was only after some time that he was able to suppress the whole thing as illusion. It was always the old ones who were the greatest.

Nothing much seemed to be going on, up north. There were long periods of silence, broken only by turns being called and fuel checks. Finally, they began heading back, no sightings. Desmond turned the radio off.

“How often do you get into fights?” Cleve asked.

“You can’t ever tell when there’ll be one. Sometimes there are three a day, and sometimes a week will go by without one. It’s like trying to pick the horses. You check everything, the past performances, who’s up that day, the weather, the odds. You get it all doped out, and then it’s luck after that. How’s your luck, Cleve?”

“It’s been pretty good. Nothing exceptional.”

“That’s all you need. I’ll take a lucky man every time, myself.”

There was a pause. Desmond sat looking out the window toward the mountains that rose in the north. The ships would be returning over them in fifteen or twenty minutes.

“If you really want to get them, Cleve,” he said at last, “more than anything else, that’s the biggest thing. You can play it safe and never get in a tight spot, and you’ll go home after a hundred missions with the usual medals and, who knows, maybe a couple of victories, just by waiting for the sure things. On the other hand, you can take chances, and you’ll probably be a hero when you go back. And you’ll probably go back. It just depends on what you want most. You’ll see for yourself. After ten missions everybody is an expert.

“Victories mean a lot, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s something more important to be gotten out of Korea.”

“What’s that?”

“My ass.”

Cleve laughed.

“That’s the way I feel,” Desmond said.

For a naked moment, they looked at each other. It had been a genuine confidence, and Cleve knew then how good his chances really were. Whatever the advantages of ability, there was something even more important. It was motive. He had come to meet his enemy, without reservation. The discomfort was there, even after talking to Desmond, of perhaps encountering one that would prove his equal; it was always a chance, but, even so, he felt encouraged. He had not come merely to survive. He suddenly felt the uplift of being that much above those who had, who lived on a subordinate plane of endeavor.

At 5:15 in the morning it was piercingly cold, with an icy moon still bright in the sky. The windows of the barracks were dark as Cleve walked down the road to where a truck waited in front of the mess, its parking lights on and an asthmatic smoke wreathing from its exhaust. The mud beneath his feet was frozen into hard ridges and swirls. The cold bit at the tips of his fingers through his gloves. He had given up eating breakfast on mornings like these. The result was an insistent hunger later on, but he preferred the extra sleep. He had finished all the training flights and indoctrination. During the week past he had started flying missions. There had been four of them, all uneventful. This was to be his fifth. He was scheduled on Desmond’s wing.