Orchestra

Chapter 2-1

2

Chance had brought both me and the American colonel to New York. We were both staying in the guest rooms of the Yale Club, a thirty-story building at the intersection of Vanderbilt Avenue and 44th Street, right next to Grand Central Station. These lodgings were meant for graduates of Yale University, though I, unlike the colonel, had gone to medical school in Riga. I was on a business trip, and the Yale Club had agreed to give me a place to stay while I was in New York.

It was chance that brought the colonel and me together. One morning I was taking the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor to have breakfast in the restaurant there, when halfway up the elevator became stuck and I found myself trapped with a tall, lean American, no longer young, but athletic and youthful. He resembled an aged Hollywood actor who had spent his entire life playing cowboys and sheriffs: gaunt face, gray hair cut short and parted to one side.

While work went on to extract us from the elevator, we exchanged a few words on our predicament. I liked the fact that he did not make a great drama out of our enforced confinement. On the contrary, he grinned, and used the intercom to ask how long our sentence might last, and could we possibly be served breakfast there in the elevator. By the time we finally reached the restaurant, we were like old acquaintances. The maître d’ assumed we were dining together and guided us to the same table. Neither of us objected.

As I recall, we were seated in a corner, and on two sides the table was bordered by glass walls, revealing a view of early-morning Manhattan. The streets were like gorges, slashed between the roofs and teeming skyscrapers, down below were crowds of people and an endless flow of cars, and everything was enveloped in exhaust fumes. At the height of the twenty-sixth floor, small clouds hung, light and white, the remaining shreds of night-time fog, while far below us the city sizzled with life.

For those first few minutes, I felt uncomfortable, even afraid. All that separated us from a bottomless abyss on two sides was the glass. Our table, with its checkered cloth, brightly-painted chairs, and the two of us seated opposite each other, seemed to be floating bizarrely in the sky above the city. Merely looking down made one’s heart stop from the height and the endless expanse. The emptiness was frightening, and my head spun; I was not used to this.

“I think we’ve flown too high,” I said, glancing down fearfully once more. “It’s time to land.”

“Maybe we should keep flying a while,” the American countered. “I’m used to this, though I rarely get the opportunity these days.”

“Are you a pilot?”

“I was.”

“Civil aviation?”

“Military. B-17s. I’m Colonel Steven Creighton.”

My new acquaintance had been retired for some years now, and as we ate breakfast I learned that he had fought in World War II, in which he had flown a “Flying Fortress”, bombed Germany, and managed to get through a year and a half of the war unscathed. In the end, however, he had been shot down, and after a time as a POW he had served in the occupying forces, then later in Korea, after which he had gone on to command a strategic B-52 wing over Vietnam. After he had had enough of bombing, he retired. Naturally enough, once the war against Germany was over, the American had done what he could to counter the Communist menace, whether in Europe, the Far East, or Southeast Asia – in whatever place the Reds might choose to descend like locusts.

A Hispanic waiter brought me fresh melon, strawberries, and juices. Colonel Creighton, like all Americans, started his day with a cup of coffee and a roll with jam.

“So,” I asked, “they sent you from Germany to Korea?”

“I volunteered to go,” the colonel answered gruffly, as if my question had annoyed him.

After the war, Germany was like heaven for the occupying forces. Canned meat, a pack of cigarettes, or a bottle of whiskey could be traded for all kinds of wonders. Some of the men made good money, or even a sizable fortune. The post-war devastation created conditions which certain enterprising people found good for doing business.

The colonel did not argue with me when I brought this up. His reply was restrained. “In Germany we didn’t live badly,” he said. “The thing was, though, in those years we were constantly expecting war with Russia. Day in, day out. They had Stalin and we had Truman. A fight could break out at any moment.”

“Who would have won?”

“Frankly, the Soviets could have grabbed all of Europe. Their tanks could have reached the Atlantic in a matter of days. We thought a new world war would start just like that. Our air force in Germany was directed toward the east.”

Waiters moved hurriedly around the floor. Now and again the elevator discharged hotel guests coming from various floors. Some of these found themselves turned away by the maître d’; no admittance without jacket and tie. Well, when in Rome… A jacket and tie it was, then, and only on Saturdays was one allowed to have breakfast in shabbier attire.

Soon the restaurant grew crowded, and a light hubbub floated above the tables. The two glass walls came together at the corner behind me, and the colonel and I leisurely ate our breakfast at a dizzying height in the sky above New York. In front of me and just to my right rose the sharp tip of the Chrysler building, while further afield I caught a glimpse of the famous skyscrapers of the Mobil corporation, the Daily News, and the Ford Foundation. Among the buildings, like a flying saucer, loomed the round dome of Grand Central Station at the corner of neighboring 42nd Street.

“You know, when North Korea attacked the South, we were shocked. While we were still figuring out what to do, Kim Il-sung reached Seoul. Just a little longer, and it would have been too late. I decided my skills were needed.”

Steven Creighton had piloted a bomber over the 38th parallel and had been lucky: his plane was never shot down. American B-29s hammered North Korea, and the front was gradually pushed back. Then the Chinese became involved, saving Kim Il-sung from total defeat. There were so many Chinese that the allies pressed up against them as if they were a living wall. The UN forces barely managed to restore the border between North and South. Yes indeed: a million Chinese soldiers proved to be a serious obstacle; even the American army and air force could not manage to demolish this wall, built as it was out of Chinese cannon fodder.

“In November ’50 we first met the Russians in the skies,” the colonel said. “They were protecting Kim Il-sung from the air. I remember those days well. We’d been flying almost without cover, and suddenly the Koreans started shooting us down. We figured out right away that it was Russians flying with Korean markings.”

“Did they shoot down a lot of planes?” I asked, trying to sound completely clueless in order to conceal my interest. “Were there major losses?”

“Yes, major losses,” the colonel bowed his head and fell silent, as if now fully absorbed in his memories; then he began to speak again. “They had MiG-15 fighters. We were covered by F-80 Shooting Stars and F-84 Thunderjets, but their MiGs shot them down. We were completely gobsmacked. Our boys were taking off and flying straight to the slaughter. American taxpayers and the government had to shell out for new F-86 Sabrejets.”

“Did it get easier then?”

“It did, but things were never as calm as they had been before. We knew all the Russian aces by name. Ten or fifteen guys. We’d get warning over the radio when any of them took off. Everyone was on the alert for them.”

I knew that the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps had shot down a large number of American planes in Korea. Well, war is war. Many of my patients from Division X had passed through the Korean school. In little more than three years, nine air divisions had fought in Korea, though our involvement had been kept carefully hidden. Now I had an opportunity to talk to an American pilot who had fought in Korea. Without any hurry or anger, we calmly, discussed these events from long-ago.

It was hard to say that any one plane was superior to the others. The MiG-15 could take off faster, it had a shorter run-up and gained altitude swiftly, and it would have the advantage from above. The F-86 Sabre, on the other hand, maneuvered better and could fly longer distances.

“What do you remember best from the war?” I asked, when we had compared planes.

Colonel Creighton thought deeply for a moment, then took his knife and fork and simulated a dogfight.

“You might know how counter-attacks work. The Russian could come swooping down from high altitude – up there, the MiG was the master. But at low altitude, Sabrejets had the edge. When we were on a collision course, closing speed could be 1,200 miles per hour. We were coming at each other so fast, the pilots had no time to react.”

“Now they fly even faster,” I remarked.

“They do. Every generation of pilots does better than its training. Back then we thought a dogfight was the limit of what we could achieve. I’ve got to hand it to the Russians, though – they fought pretty well. They had this pilot, Captain Nikolai Sutyagin. He shot down twenty-two of our planes. All our aces went after him, especially our top boys, Joseph McConnell and James Jabara. But even they couldn’t get Sutyagin. Our commander, a chap named Colonel Harrison Thyng, set every squadron onto it in a different way, but no one could shoot Sutyagin down. I hear he’s already a general. Honestly, the MiG-15 was better equipped than the Sabrejet.”

I felt a certain pride at hearing that: the colonel had recognized the skill of our weapons designers. He was right, of course. The MiG-15 had been armed with two 23 mm and one 37 mm cannon. These were distinguished by their high rate of fire and precise aim, and they could penetrate any armor plating. The six Colt-Browning machine guns with which the Sabre was equipped were inferior by every measure.

In Korea, Colonel Creighton had flown a B-29, the famous long-haul bomber, which was equipped for night flights. Pilots would sleep during the day, go up at night to drop their bombs under cover of darkness, and return to base by dawn. The Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps gradually became masters of night-time dogfights, which led to a marked increase in American losses of B-29 bombers. A certain Major Karelin had managed to shoot down six Flying Fortresses on night fights. Recalling his name, the colonel grew visibly upset; clearly he had taken part in those battles and lost some of his comrades. He looked around distractedly, his pale eyes wandering around the New York skies, ringed by skyscrapers on this morning in late summer. I can still picture that scene in my mind now. A time that the Russians called “old lady’s summer” and the Americans “Indian summer”.

The colonel suddenly broke off our conversation and inexplicably disappeared, though physically he did not budge from his place, remaining seated at the table exactly as before. He was far away though, off in some unknown place beyond the horizon, his mind roaming in time and space. Steven Creighton was lost in thought, in his reminiscences, but I listened to the silence, tuning in to another frequency. This ability is something that the Chinese Taoists have, adept as they are in the wordless intercommunication of souls. In Division X we had intently studied the secret abilities of the followers of the Tao, which means the Way, and their teacher Lao Tzu, called by his contemporaries, all those thousands of years ago, the “Ancient Child”.

We were seated together in New York at a single table, but Steven Creighton was flying at a dizzying height in the night-time skies. The crew of his B-29 were working a little sleepily but still competently in the darkness dimly lit by the glow of their instruments. None of the crew members knew what might be waiting for them. Abruptly, the skies lit up with gunfire. Anti-aircraft rounds could not reach the plane at that altitude, but it was obvious that the alarm would have already been sounded at the airfields, and the Russian pilots who had been on duty and waiting would already be taxiing to the runway.