The Hunters Read Online Free

far is it to Kimpo?” Cleve asked.
    The driver shrugged. He had a plump, dull face framed in long sideburns.
    â€œFifteen miles, maybe,” he said.
    â€œIs the road this bad all the way?”
    â€œIt’s about the same.”
    â€œDo you ever say ‘sir’?”
    The driver looked at him.
    â€œYes, sir,” he said briefly.
    The drive took three quarters of an hour. At the end they passed through a small, impoverished town, which was Kimpo. The airfield was just beyond it. The guard at the gate waved them through. Cleve had the driver take him to the wing headquarters. He got off there. It was a low brick building on the edge of the flying area. The nearest fighters were in sandbag revetments not fifty yards away, showing their clipped tails above the level of the bags, like dorsal fins.
    Inside the headquarters it was reasonably warm. He unbuttoned his coat and took off his gloves, stuffing them into the pockets. A sergeant looked up from his typewriter.
    â€œCan I help you, Captain?”

    â€œI’m reporting in.”
    â€œDo you have copies of your orders?”
    Cleve produced them. The sergeant read them hurriedly.
    â€œYou’re Captain Connell?” he asked.
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œLet me check with the adjutant,” he said, leaving his desk.
    He returned shortly. Cleve would have to wait for a few minutes, he explained. The adjutant was busy. Cleve nodded. He stood by the stove, idly, his thoughts a vague flurry of the journey that was now all behind him.
    He became aware of a familiar sound in the background and turned quickly to the window to watch. A mission was taking off. He saw the first ships moving evenly across a visible length of the runway. Two at a time they went, leader and wingman, booming down the flat strip and then lifting easily up. The thin, dirty panes of glass before him rattled. Two more appeared, then two more, and two by two, in fierce majesty, trailing streams of black smoke, until Cleve felt impelled to try to count them. Colonel Imil was leading, north to the Yalu. A second squadron followed. Cleve watched until the final pair of ships faded in the distance, leaving silence behind them.
    He knew Colonel Imil, the wing commander. He knew that monumental head and walk like a boxing champion. Dutch Imil, the grinning football player even after three teeth had been knocked out of his mouth one afternoon, the fourteen-victory ace of the second war, the first of the jet pilots, the golden boy, no longer really a boy, of the air force. Everybody who had seen him fly said that he was reckless, took too many chances, that sooner or later he was going to kill himself. He never did, though. He killed other men, but never himself. One rainy morning in
Panama—Cleve had flown with him that day—he took sixteen ships up for a formation show over Balboa when the ceiling was only seven hundred feet. He lost two of them in the overcast, slung off against the mountains.
    â€œThe only thing a fighter pilot needs is confidence,” Imil had said at the briefing, “and I’ve got enough for all of us.”
    Everybody had stories about him. They were as well known as old jokes. One Cleve had heard a long time before and never forgotten. Someone had told him that Imil had once been to bed with four different women in the same night. He was a brute, a big man. He was the kind of a man who could eat two steaks at a sitting, a man who found the normal world undersized in the shadow of his imposing body.
    Cleve turned from the window and walked over to the stove again. He stood there, palming his hands to the heat. There was a strange mood here, he felt. He could not be sure what it was, an ill-fitting sobriety perhaps. He could see through an open door into the operations section. There was a large map of the peninsula stapled on the wall in there. It was covered, especially in the vicinity of the front, with military hieroglyphics of