What better way to get fired up for the coming simulation, MiG Alley (from Rowan), than to read one of the great novels of fighter combat depicting that era? "The Hunters," by James Salter, is just such a book, the tale of a daring bunch who soared over the Yalu in F-86 Sabres, thirsty for immortality through acehood, but often meeting their fate in a terse moment of gunfire.

This book harks back to a time when pilots were still pilots, surrounded by an aura of romance, when scoring kills wasn't tainted with shades of moral uncertainty. In Vietnam, the ethos of the fighter pilot as brazen devil was traded for a more sobering image of man at the controls of cold technology. Salter's pilots gamble, drink whiskey, chase nurses, and boast their exploits with red stars painted on a fuselage.

About these kills they are at once vocal and benign, tallying victories on kill boards and nursing huge egos, but feigning casual disinterest in the presence of their rivals. And there's something more visceral and heroic about these guns-only encounters - in this case between the F-86 and the MiG-15 - and pilots who still wore sunglasses for a reason.

One would expect nothing less from the author of the famous text, "A Sport and a Pastime"-a lush book obsessed with green, bourgeoise France, the aimless rich, and a woman named Anne-Marie of astonishing beauty. To not entirely dissimilar territories in "The Hunters," Salter brings his considerable descriptive powers, evoking the daily life of a pilot in Korea, loosely based on the author's own experiences flying in that war. Not only is Salter a specialist in mapping the emotions of such a man, but he's capable of more gorgeous descriptions of the wild blue than you can shake a stick at.

Who needs missiles anyway? In the age of AMRAAM, the idea of closing to within one nautical mile of a MIG and swatting it from the sky with a burst of machine gun fire is particularly exhilarating. To this daunting quest comes Cleve Connell, a glamour-hungry pilot who has already proven himself in training but remains untested in the nasty skies over North Korea. Add to this equation a shy enemy-MIGs that appear and vanish with the beguiling speed of minnows-and you have a frustrated hero who wants to prove his merit to his fellow airmen and, above all, to himself.

The ace, or the man who has scored five air-to-air kills, is treated with nothing short of sainthood in this squadron. It's more than a mark of status in that it is everything Connell lives for: a kind of black magic alters those pilots who attain this number. Connell despairs at the thought of completing his tour without achieving five victories: his missions are often fruitless and boring, the enemy MIGs unpredictable, hard to locate. All the more elusive does his goal seem in the presence of heroes.

Like the hand that bears the orb, the pilots-there were actually not many of them, about a hundred altogether-carried alone the ultimate strength of the wing. In each of the three squadrons there were some thirty, and in the rest of the structure perhaps fifteen others, who flew missions. It was a small complement; but even of the few there were only three who were recognized wherever they went: Imil, Bengert, and Robey. They stood out like men moving forward through a forest of stumps.

Their names were gilded. They had shot down at least five MiGs apiece. Bengert had seven, but five was the number that separated men from greatness. Cleve had come to see, as had everyone else, how rigid was that casting. There were no other values. It was like money: it did not matter how it had been acquired, but only that it had. That was the final judgment. MiGs were everything. If you had MiGs you were a standard of excellence. The sun shone upon you. The crew chiefs were happy to have you fly their ships. The touring actresses wanted to meet you. You were the center of everything-the praise, the excitement, the enviers.

If you did not-although nothing was shameful about it, and there were reasons, allegedly valid, for any man, no matter how capable and courageous, to have failed to get victories-still you were only one of the loose group in the foreground of which the triumvirate gleamed. If you did not have MiGs, you were nothing. Every day as he walked among them, Cleve knew it more truly.

But Connell's problems don't end with the lone kill to his credit. Shortly after his deployment he develops a fierce rivalry with another pilot by the name of Ed "Doctor" Pell. This is the kind of guy who wins inordinate hands of poker, insults women to their faces, and somehow, inexplicably, bags a few MiGs before Connell can blink, adding fuel to an already burning dislike. (These two make Maverick and Iceman look like kids on Sunday squabbling over the last orange creamsicle). 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!"

"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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