Free The Hunters by James Salter Page B

that made the difference. By the time Cleve went to bed, Pell was winning more than twenty dollars.

8
    When the ships returned from a mission, everybody watched for them. Usually, they came lining back to the field in flights of four, flying tight show formation with the black smoke fading in parallel streams behind as they turned in toward the runway and landing pattern. They seemed to be most indestructible then. They were of frozen silver. Nothing could possibly dim that grace. No enemy could deny them. Departures were stirring; but every return, even the most uneventful, was somehow transcendent and a call to the heart to rise in joy. Out of the north they had come again, brief strokes of splendor.
    If they carried their drop tanks back with them, nothing much had happened on the mission. That was the first sign. If they came back without tanks, and broken up into pairs and occasional singles instead of fours, there had been a fight. As they trailed down the final approach and landed, it was possible to look closely and see whether or not the gun ports were blackened and the ship had fired. If many noses were black, it had been a big fight. The news of what had occurred on a mission often came from the radio monitoring in combat operations long before the planes were nearing the field, but not many heard it there. Most found out by watching the ships return.
    Cleve had flown twenty-four missions. Except for his fifth on
Desmond’s wing, he had seen no real action. They were always far off, going away, if he saw them, or overhead no bigger than flies, or sometimes as big as wrens; but to get up to them was like trying to jump off the ground and catch a bird—the altitude disadvantage meant that much. For a while he simply called it luck, but after too long a time of that there was nothing to call it. And there seemed to be nothing that he could do, no way to change things. He felt himself caught in a trough of despair. Day after day, unreasonably, he was on those missions that encountered nothing.
    The evenings came early to end the short afternoons. Standing on the hill of barracks in the cold, with the watery sun almost down, he saw them returning from the late mission. The chill of the earth came through his feet and then edged up to make even his ears ache. His eyes wept from the wind as he watched. They were coming back in pairs. None of them had tanks. There had been a fight. An intense sinking feeling came over him. There was only one flight of four in the whole group. It hurt him to watch, and it was too dark to see their noses, but he waited stolidly through it as ship after ship came in, whistling smoothly down to meet the ground. The worst part, he knew, was what lay ahead, the empty hours of melancholy that would not be filled until he flew again. It was like the start of a relentless headache with its unavoidable hours of pain.
    The word came, as it always seemed to, from nowhere. Cleve heard it as he walked down toward the line. A truck drove by, and somebody called out. Colonel Imil had shot down his sixth. Nolan had gotten another one. Four had been destroyed altogether.
    The colonel was standing just inside the door of combat operations,
smoking a cigarette, when Cleve saw him. His face was still half-mooned under the eyes where his oxygen mask had bitten into the skin. He was listening to the last of the mission reports.
    â€œI heard you got another one, Colonel,” Cleve said. His voice sounded flat to his own ears.
    â€œThat’s right. How about you? Where were you anyway, Cleve?”
    â€œI wasn’t even on the mission.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI just wasn’t scheduled, Colonel.”
    â€œHell. You should have been there. They were everywhere today, some of them down at twenty-five thousand.”
    â€œNext time, I guess,” Cleve said.
    â€œYeah. Maybe. You can’t get them if you don’t fly, though,” Imil said, shaking his head.
    Cleve did