Bombs Away Read online

  A plane buzzed by overhead. Buzzed was the word, all right. The Chinese flew Po-2 biplanes, ancient Russian wood-and-cloth trainers pressed into service as night harassment aircraft. They fired machine guns and dropped little bombs and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone could do anything about it. Bedcheck Charlie, GIs called them. The Russians had used them the same way against the krauts, sometimes with woman pilots.

  This Po-2 wasn’t much above treetop height. Cade could feel the wind of its passage as it flew by. And the pilot must have spotted his guides and him walking along in the moonlight, because he swung the little plane around for another look at them.

  But how much could he really see, no matter how hard he tried? Cade and one of the Koreans were big men, but what did that prove? In moonlight, would the SOB up there be able to tell Curtis was white? Cade didn’t believe it. He held his PPSh up in his left hand to show it to the flyer and waved his right hand as if to someone he knew was a friend.

  And damned if the pilot didn’t waggle his wings in a friendly greeting of his own and fly away. Once he was gone, both Koreans whooped and hollered and thumped Cade on the back. The words were just gibberish to him. He was glad he had on the parka and the quilted jacket underneath it. Chances were they saved him some bruises.

  “Vir sapiens!” said the one who knew some Latin.

  “Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens ego sum.” Cade thought it was funny. He knew what the scientific name for human beings was.

  Since his guide didn’t, the Korean didn’t get the joke. Pointing at Cade, he said, “Vir es.” You are a man.

  “Sic. Vir sum. Et homo sum.” Yes. I am a man. And I am a human being. Vir and homo both meant man, but they didn’t mean the same thing. In English, man did duty for most of the meanings of both Latin words.

  Cade didn’t think he could explain any of that to the Korean in Latin. His wasn’t up to it, and neither was his guide’s. He turned out not to have to. The Korean kind of shrugged, as if to say he wasn’t even going to try to understand this inscrutable Occidental. He pointed south and started walking again. Cade and the fellow with the almost-blunderbuss followed.

  A quarter of a mile outside the next village, someone called softly from the cover of some pines. Both Koreans answered. They went back and forth for a little while. The one who knew Latin pointed to the pines and said, “Vade cum.” That just meant Go with. Maybe he’d forgotten the word for him.

  It did get the message across. Approaching the trees, Cade said, “Ave.”

  The greeting fell on uncomprehending ears. A man with a rifle came out and spoke in Korean. Cade sighed. He spread his hands to show he didn’t get it. The local sighed, too. He gestured toward the collection of beat-up houses and outbuildings. With a nod, Cade went that way.

  He got hidden in a privy. It wasn’t the first time on his way south. Nobody had used this one for a while, but it was still fragrant. He muttered, but not for long. Pretty soon, his nose noticed the stink much less. He curled up and got ready to sleep through the dangerous daylight hours.

  —

  “Pechenga.” Harry Truman spat out the unfamiliar name as if it were the filthiest word in the world.

  “That’s right, Mr. President.” George Marshall nodded. Truman thought the Secretary of Defense was almost as much a Great Stone Face as Andrei Gromyko. Dorothy Parker had famously said that some actress ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Truman hadn’t seen that actress perform. But by comparison to her, Marshall got stuck halfway between A and B.

  “Pechenga!” Truman said it again, even more disgustedly this time. “It sounds like the noise a pinball machine makes.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.” Marshall sounded resigned. He was an extraordinarily able man. As Secretary of State, he’d developed the Plan that bore his name and helped keep Western Europe’s ravaged postwar economies from collapsing. Before that, he’d been a five-star general and Army Chief of Staff under FDR.

  Truman wondered whether Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. No, on second thought, Truman didn’t wonder any such thing. He knew damn well Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. The man would have been even less human than he was if he didn’t. What Truman really wondered was what Marshall thought, comparing him to his illustrious predecessor.

  He didn’t ask. He would never ask. He would go on the rack and let a torturer tear out his fingernails before he asked. But he wondered. He would have been less human than he was if he didn’t.

  “Pechenga.” Now Marshall said it. His index finger pinned it down on a large-scale map of Europe, as if he were an entomologist mounting a butterfly on a collecting board. “Formerly Petsamo in Finland, till the Russians took it away when they knocked the Finns out of the war. A little more than fifty miles west of Murmansk. About as far northwest as you can go and stay in the USSR.”

  “And where the goddamn Russians took off from when their bombers blasted Britain and France,” Truman ground out.

  “And Germany,” Marshall reminded him.

  “And Germany,” Truman agreed sourly. “But the Prime Minister is screaming in my ear, and so is the President of the Fourth Republic. The Germans aren’t part of the NATO treaty. I have an easier time ignoring them than I do with the English and French.”

  “The treaty does say that an attack against one signatory is the same as an attack against all signatories.” Marshall knew what it said. It had been negotiated while he was Secretary of State, even if the dickering wasn’t done till Dean Acheson took over for him at the start of Truman’s full term, the one he’d won himself.

  “I know. I know. I know,” Truman said. “And if I didn’t know, they’re reminding me—at the top of their lungs. And so I am going to have to do something to Russia. If I don’t, the treaty is dead in the water, and I can have the joy of watching all the countries in Western Europe line up to hop into bed with Joe Stalin.”

  The slightest twitch of one eyebrow on George Marshall’s craggy face said Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn’t have talked about countries hopping into bed with other countries. FDR would have found some properly diplomatic way to say the same thing. Well, good for FDR. Truman called them as he saw them, and worried about diplomacy later.

  After pulling his features back to expressionlessness, Marshall said, “I’m afraid that’s much too likely, sir. With the Communists already so strong in France and Italy—”

  “I know,” Truman said one more time. “And so I was thinking of striking this Pechenga place. It’s where the Russian bombers came from, so it naturally draws our notice. We can drop a bomb there if we want to, blow up the air base, look heroic to our allies, and not endanger even Murmansk, let alone any of the really big Russian cities.”

  “I don’t know if it’s enough to make England and France happy, and I don’t know that Stalin won’t feel obliged to retaliate against an American target, or more than one American target,” Marshall replied, plainly picking his words with care. “I also don’t know that he won’t order his armies forward—they’re at the border and ready to move, remember.”

  “I do remember.” Truman scowled. “Dammit, George, all my other choices look worse. If I do nothing—we just talked about what will happen then. And if I bomb Russia back to the Stone Age, I know the free half of Europe will get badly hurt, too. We won’t get off scot-free ourselves, either. I don’t believe Stalin can do unto us as we can do unto him, but I don’t believe we’ll stop everything he throws our way, either. If you can tell me I’m wrong and make me believe you, I’ll give you a great big kiss.”

  “Is that a promise or a threat, Mr. President?” Marshall asked, deadpan. Truman guffawed, more from surprise than at the quality of the crack. The Secretary of Defense owned a sense of humor after all!

  “Never mind what it is,” Truman said. “The way it looks to me is, we have three choices: no response, limited response, and all-out response. If the limited response doesn’t seem the best of the three, you’d better tell me right now.”

&n
bsp; Marshall inhaled, then blew out the breath without saying anything. After inhaling again, he said, “When you put it that way, sir, I must agree with you. Whether Stalin will recognize the limited nature of the reply, though, or whether our friends will find it too limited…” He shrugged.

  “God knows what will happen before it does. He’s the only One Who can pull that off,” Truman said. “The rest of us, we have to try something and then see what happens. This isn’t a good choice, but it’s the best one we have now. Since we do agree on that, let’s get rolling.”

  “I was thinking some of the planes should fly out of England and others out of France, sir,” Marshall said. “It seems fitting.”

  “It does, yes.” Truman paused a moment. “Not out of Germany?”

  “What do you think, sir?”

  The President answered his own question: “No, not out of Germany. Okay, get things started. You will know the orders to issue.” If anyone in the whole world knew more than George Marshall about how American armed forces around the world worked, Truman had no idea who it might be.

  “I’ll send them out right away.” Marshall hesitated, then said, “It might have been better to accept the loss of our forces in North Korea, then bring in enough reinforcements to stabilize the situation. The choice we’re facing now wouldn’t seem so…stark.”

  “If I’d let the Red Chinese get away with slaughtering them all, McCarthy and Taft and the rest of the Republicans would have crucified me, and who could blame them?” Truman said. “Don’t get me wrong. You have a point, and a good one. All I can tell you is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. You didn’t say no then, not that I recall.”

  “No, I didn’t,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “Now we’ve got a tiger by the ears, though, and we’d better hang on tight or it will swallow us.”

  “We’ll need to put Alaska on highest alert,” Truman said. “If Stalin does decide to play tit for tat, that’s a likely place for him to do it. Plenty of space, not many people—it’s a lot like Pechenga. If we can keep the Russians from getting through, that’s a feather in our cap.”

  “Good point. I think we’re already at the maximum there, but I will make sure,” Marshall said. “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “Not off the top of my head. I’ll phone you if I think of something,” the President said.

  The Secretary of Defense nodded, dipped his head once more in lieu of saluting, and strode out of the White House conference room.

  “Pechenga.” Truman still made the name sound like an obscenity. He scowled at the map. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Not a big enough eye or tooth to make the Europeans happy. Well, wasn’t diplomacy the art of leaving everyone dissatisfied? If it is, I win artist of the year, Truman thought.

  —

  Leon carried a blue book up to Aaron Finch. He climbed into his father’s lap in a rocking chair and said, “Read!” He was only a little more than a year and a half old. He didn’t say a whole lot of words yet. He had that one, though. And he always seemed sure of what he wanted—in which he took after Aaron.

  “Okay, kiddo.” Aaron tousled Leon’s curly hair. Leon indignantly shook his head. He didn’t like that for beans. He never had. Aaron did it anyhow. He thought those curls were funny as hell. Leon got them from Ruth. Aaron’s hair was straight. His son looked like him most ways, but not there.

  He lit another cigarette. He wasn’t a chain smoker to the point of having two going at once, but he burned through a couple of packs a day. Leon put up with the wait as well as a toddler could: which is to say, not very well. “Read, Daddy!” he barked, like a squeaky top sergeant.

  Aaron started reading about Peter Rabbit and Grandfather Frog and the Merry Little Breezes and Bowser the Hound and the rest of the edge-of-the-woods world Thornton Burgess had made. He thought the tales were tedious. They repeated themselves a lot. They’d originally run as newspaper serials, which made recapping every so often a must. Burgess hadn’t bothered cleaning them up when he turned them into books.

  Leon didn’t care. Little kids liked hearing things over and over. Aaron wasn’t always sure how much of the stories his son got. But whether Leon got everything or not, he liked sitting in his daddy’s lap and listening. That was plenty to keep Aaron going.

  When Lightfoot the Deer made an appearance, Aaron asked, “Do you know what antlers are, Leon?”

  His son didn’t say a lot, no. But Leon was nobody’s dope. Far more words and ideas lodged in his brain than came out of his mouth. He stuck his thumbs above his eyes and spread his hands wide. Sure as hell, he knew what antlers were.

  “That’s right,” Aaron said, and, “That’s good.” Aaron went on, “Deer have antlers. They’re kind of like horns, except they fall off every year, so the deer have to grow new ones. Horns stay on all the time.”

  Leon nodded. Maybe it was going in one ear and out the other, but maybe not, too. Yeah, the kid was smart. Some of that was good—it helped you get along. Too much was liable to turn you into a white crow. No need to worry about that for a while, though.

  The water in the kitchen stopped running. Ruth walked into the living room. She was smoking a cigarette, too. She didn’t puff away all the time like Aaron, but she smoked.

  Leon lit up like a lightbulb. “Mommy!” he exclaimed, as if he hadn’t seen her for ten years, not ten minutes.

  “How many other kids who still make messes in their diapers know what antlers are?” Aaron asked proudly.

  “Does he?” Ruth said.

  “Show Mommy,” Aaron told Leon. “Show her what antlers are.” Damned if the kid didn’t do his thumbs-to-the-forehead-with-fingers-spread gesture again.

  Ruth laughed. “He does know! What a smart thing you are, Leon!”

  Leon poked at the book. “Read!” So Aaron read. Pretty soon, Leon started rubbing his eyes. Aaron checked his diaper. Leon was dry. As far as Aaron was concerned, that also made the little boy pretty darn clever. Aaron started rocking a little more.

  In spite of himself, Leon’s eyes sagged shut. Aaron kept reading a little longer. If he quit too soon, sometimes Leon wouldn’t be quite out. He’d wake up again at the sudden silence, and be cranky and hard to settle. But when Aaron stood up with his son in the crook of his arm, Leon didn’t stir. Aaron carried him into the bedroom and set him in his crib. Getting the baby down was another danger spot. Leon muttered something, but he went on sleeping.

  Aaron walked out to the living room. “Hi, babe!” he said. “Nobody here but us chickens.”

  “Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!” Ruth said. The Armenian family two doors down raised chickens and ducks in their back yard. Ruth bought eggs from them, eggs that were better and cheaper than you could get at the grocery store.

  Aaron sank down into the rocker again and lit a fresh Chesterfield. He could yawn and smoke at the same time—he kept the cigarette in one corner of his mouth while the rest opened wide. “Only trouble is, I’m worn out, too,” he said. “I’ll be ready for bed in an hour or two.”

  “I know what you mean,” his wife said. And he had no doubt that she did. He moved washers and driers and TVs and iceboxes all day long. She chased after Leon and kept him from smashing his head or swallowing a match or doing any of the other stupid things children did.

  Ruth had an Agatha Christie on the table next to her chair. A couple of issues of Popular Mechanics sat on the one beside Aaron’s rocker. He was a dedicated tinkerer, and used ideas from the magazine every chance he got.

  But he didn’t feel like reading now. Tired as he was, he didn’t have the brainpower to concentrate. He turned on the TV instead. It was a big Packard Bell console: an Early American TV set, if something so modern could also be Early American. Television was even better than radio for giving you something to do when you didn’t feel like thinking.

  The tubes took a minute or so to warm up and show him a picture. He turned the channel-changing dial to see what all was on. Los Angeles had seven stations, as many as
anywhere in the country and far more than most places. He found a fight on Channel Five and went back to the chair to watch.

  He did so with a critical eye. He hadn’t been a bad man with his fists in his own younger days. In bar brawls, some people dove under the table, while others grabbed a beer bottle and waited to see what happened next. He’d always been a bottle grabber himself.

  One of these palookas—middleweights—hit harder. The other was a better boxer. Neither, on his best day, would make Sugar Ray Robinson break a sweat. The boxer was plainly ahead on points halfway through the ninth round. Then the other guy, even though his face looked like steak tartare, landed a left hook square on the button. The boxer slumped to the canvas as if his legs had turned to Jell-O. The bow-tied referee counted him out. He didn’t come close to standing again. In the neutral corner, the slugger raised his gloves in beat-up triumph. He looked about ready to fall over, too.

  Commercials followed. Because the fight hadn’t gone the distance, there were a lot of them. The station had to fill time till the news came on at the top of the hour. Aaron did reach for a Popular Mechanics then. He found TV commercials even more annoying than the ones on the radio.

  “This is Stan Chambers, reporting on Wednesday, February the seventh,” the young reporter behind the desk said when the news started. “Our growing conflict with Russia has taken a dangerous new step. You will recall that, three days ago, American bombers vaporized Pechenga, the northern air base from which Red planes smashed the cities of our European allies. Within the past half hour, we have received word that Elmendorf Air Force Base, outside of Anchorage, Alaska, has vanished in what is being described as a quote tremendous explosion unquote. Radio Moscow, in an English-language broadcast, calls this quote justified retaliation unquote. There is no comment yet from the President or the Defense Department.”

  “Jesus!” Aaron said. After a moment, he added, “Gevalt!”

  “Vey iz mir!” Ruth agreed. They’d both picked up Yiddish from their immigrant parents. They found themselves using it more these days than they had for a while, to keep Leon from knowing what they were talking about.