On the bitter, blue November morning when Captain Henry Robbins landed in Seoul, he recognized almost no one. Reservists were distributed piecemeal among the regular units. The men who were to be his fellow pilots were all young. They were boys in their twenties who, having missed their first chance at a war, had eagerly signed up for the next one. They had come of age in a time of ticker tape parades and welcome bands. Everything they’d learned about battle came from Sunday matinees starring Robert Mitchum and John Wayne.
In the years since the war, Robbins had worked to grow his small portrait studio into a full camera shop, selling lenses and easels, projectors and timers—a business finally beginning to turn profitable just as he was recalled. His renewed invitation from Uncle Sam caused a storm of distress in his soul that he was at a loss to put into words. If asked, he would not have admitted to feeling cheated. When his young wife pointed out that Mr. Truman’s new Selective Service rules permitted thousands to elude military service while he was being summoned a second time, Robbins did not indulge her. That he was not permitted to defer his enrollment because, unlike many of his GI friends, he’d gone to work instead of to college, was a point that likewise failed to elicit his outspoken bitterness. Though there were no more ticker tape parades, patriotism was still an inviolate sentiment in 1951, and Robbins was a man of his generation, accepting his privilege to disagree but not to disobey.
And yet from the time he arrived at his Reserve Center in Charlotte, and even after he got to Korea, he found himself in the grip of foreboding. He’d had to scrape and hustle just to get his camera shop off the ground. Now he worried that in his absence his business would collapse, and his equipment and tools would be repossessed by the bank. He had a wife and a three-year-old, and another child on the way. His father was dead; his mother was old. He did not know how long this war would go on or if it was even a war. The generals called it “a police action,” which suggested he was being sent over to handcuff folks or hand out speeding tickets, when in fact he knew full well it was just going to be more killing.
In spite of the jadedness creeping into his spirit, Robbins did not consider his sentiments political in nature. Over a decade would have to pass before Americans would begin burning up their draft cards in public for lesser grievances, and national sentiment would begin to swing in the opposite direction from sacrifice and duty. He tried to muster up old courageous feelings but all he could summon was a vague sense that he was being punished for his loyalty to his country.
Then again, there was the jet. The F-86 Sabre had nothing in common with the B-24 he’d flown in the last war. Her takeoff was smoother than the fur of a cat, her wings tapering to the razor width of a Ritz-Carlton sandwich. Her new curved design got her racing almost to the speed of sound. In the anterior of the cockpit was hidden a trio of computers that let her radar eye aim at targets at night or in bad weather. Instead of aiming at the enemy manually, all Robbins had to do was center the target, correct for mirror tilt, and wait for the Sabre’s magic eye to supply range, deflection, and lead time, everything necessary for a good shot. If civilian life had taken the will of the warrior out of him, the jet was giving it back.
Officially, Robbins’s squadron had been told they’d be flying against Korean and Chinese pilots. This was not so. It took Robbins two missions to understand what everyone knew: that the MiGs he was up against were being piloted by Russian aces who’d cut their teeth in the last war fighting the same enemy he had. In spite of the Sabre’s advantages, the lighter MiGs could climb faster and escape at the first signs of a good fight. At a distance, their contrails were like the waving cape of a matador taunting a bull in an open arena, luring the F-86s deep into enemy territory, until the moment the MiGs dropped their noses and disappeared over the Manchurian horizon.
It was on Robbins’s sixth patrol mission, while flying wingman to a young commanding officer and getting another good look at the snowy mountainous Korean terrain (no decent markers, and nowhere flat enough to land in a pinch), that he saw them: a dozen MiGs speeding southward to where the American fighter-bombers were carrying out low-key operations against the communist communication lines. A cold moon was fading in one corner of the sky while the sun in the other made the Yalu River flash like a mirror.
Robbins did not have time to be surprised about what happened next. Ignoring the numerical superiority of the MiGs, the lead pilot, a twenty-five-year-old wild buck from Idaho, did then what might be described, in a history text or an obituary, with words like “indomitable valor” or “heroic spirit against formidable odds,” but which Robbins might have called, had he had time to think of any words while he turned the velvety controls to follow, “pointlessly dooming vanity.”
—
Colonel Timur Kachak was having a bad year. A Georgian of indifferent, but not irrational, brutality, Kachak considered his appointment to the top security post of Perm—made up of 150-odd labor camps near the Siberian border—a vicious insult. He had worked as a detective in the Cheka before being cherry-picked by Beria for interrogation work. He was not, in his own opinion, a dumb fuck who could be relegated overnight to being a glorified security guard in an Arctic wasteland from which nobody could escape if they were stupid enough to try.
Kachak (previously Kachakhidze) was one of Beria’s boys—recruited and groomed by Lavrenti himself. But Beria had fallen out of grace. Stalin had appointed Abakumov, another member of the Georgian Mafia, to curb Beria’s power. Now a battle for control was raging inside the secret police. An upstart by the name of Ryumin had bypassed both Beria and Abakumov and gone directly to Stalin with the report of something called the Jewish Doctors’ Plot—an expediently ingenious concoction that was certain to get Abakumov tried and brutally killed for “inaction.” Kachak had been transferred to Perm while Beria waited for the smoke to clear and tried to rebuild his position; if there was going to be a purge of the old guard, he needed a few of his men a good distance away from the guillotine.