What emerges from the battle is an exploration of how fragile, how ephemeral the desire of a pilot to win fame, since his brush with glory is almost always an equal shot at early death. In the mouth of one pilot, "Without the MiGs, the rest doesn't matter . . . . In this greatest life of yours, you have to win."

Scenes that stand out beautifully in this book include those when Connell is left behind from a mission and must abate his desire for combat-missions where his compatriots invariably end up betwixt "a circus of MiGs". These moments find Connell pacing in front of the radio, despairing as he listens to the garbled transmissions of triumph from his friends. More often than not it's the human heart upon which Salter trains his gimlet eye, tracking these emotions of bitterness and desire with the instinct of one long experienced in such matters.

When I was playing hockey in college-in my official capacity of riding the pine as a dedicated backup goaltender-I had something of the same feeling as Connell: left out, doomed to the bench. (No, Olaf Kolzig never exactly found me a threat to his job with the Caps). But most compelling about Connell is his sensitivity. He watches the skies for the planes returning from their missions; he inhabits a dream realm of doubt and mystified silence. He observes his own lonely course in the war with wonder and fear.

Nor does this tale make empty promises for action. The appearance of the enemy is chilling, like the arrival of sharks in still waters.

Somebody called out contrails north of the river. Cleve looked. He could not see them. Then he heard, "They're MIGs."

He heard Desmond: "All right, drop them."

He dropped his tanks. They tumbled away. He looked north. Still he saw nothing. He was leaning forward in his seat, intently. He stared across the sky with care, inch by inch. "How many of them are there?" somebody asked.

"They're MiGs!"

Click to continue . . .

"How many?"

"Many, many."

He looked frantically. He knew they must be there. He began to suffer moments of complete unreality. . . . Then at last he saw them, more than he could count. He could not make out the airplanes, but the contrails were nosing south unevenly, like a great school of fish. They were coming across the river. They were going to fight.

This isn't a novel about gee-whiz gadgetry: you won't learn much about the F-86 in these pages that you didn't already know. What this book will do is transport you to a time in our recent history when downing three enemy birds on one mission was still feasible. The closure of this era represents the extinction of the gunfighters with their leather jackets and the dawn of the colder, more remote-and certainly less romantic-warfare soon to follow.

Salter's prose style is spare, exacting-decidedly Hemingwayesque. The chill and clarity of his sentences are forged from the barracks of a Korean winter, from the fleet passage of fighters through empty sky. It's fair to say that pilots make good writers; Saint-Exupéry, Robert L. Scott, and others. It's logical that they would be: their attention to detail, their sharp vision, their lyricism inspired by vast landscapes, their instinct for the romantic. Salter is all of these, and judging from the coarse visage staring from the jacket photo of this book, one would guess he made a pretty good pilot, as well.

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