Bombs Away Read online

  As Stan Chambers went on with the news, Aaron thought about the prize fight he’d just watched. If America and Russia kept slugging each other like this, would either one still be standing at the final bell?

  —

  Boris Gribkov wished he could get drunk. That was what Red Air Force pilots commonly did when they weren’t flying and were stuck at a base someplace in the middle of nowhere. Provideniya wasn’t just the middle of nowhere. If nowhere ever needed an enema, Provideniya was where they’d plug it in.

  Provideniya was so far from somewhere, from anywhere, it didn’t even have a brothel. Whores gave pilots something to do when they weren’t pouring down vodka, anyhow.

  But alcohol—any alcohol, even beer—was off-limits for flight crews for the duration of the emergency. Tu-4s carried atomic bombs. They had to be ready to fly at a moment’s notice. Outrage by outrage, the fight the Americans had called the Cold War was heating up.

  The base commandant made sure he got the point across. After summoning all his aircrews, Colonel Doyarenko said, “No booze. Fuck your mothers, you cocksuckers, do you hear me? No booze! None. Not a fucking drop. You know what will happen if you screw it up? You’ll go to Kolyma, that’s what. You think you’re far north now, assholes? There, you won’t see the sun for six weeks at a time. You’ll mine coal and dig for gold when it’s fifty below. You’ll find frogs and salamanders frozen in the ice for a thousand years and you’ll eat ’em raw, on account of they’ll taste like caviar next to what the camps usually feed zeks. No…goddamn…booze!”

  Somebody didn’t listen. Put a bunch of people together and there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the message. One aircrew quite suddenly vanished from Provideniya. Boris didn’t know the MGB had hauled them off to the wrong side of the Arctic Circle. He didn’t know they were slamming picks into the permafrost and hoping for frozen salamanders.

  No, he didn’t know any of those things. All he knew was, they were gone. An Li-2—which was almost as close a copy of the American DC-3 as the Tu-4 was of the B-29 (though the transport, unlike the bomber, was licensed)—flew in a new crew for the plane that found itself without one. Life went on.

  Oh, he knew one other thing. No matter how bored he got here at Provideniya, he wouldn’t drink. Kolyma was a name Russian mothers whispered to scare kids who wouldn’t behave. It was the worst place in the world. A snootful of vodka wasn’t worth the risk of going there.

  He read books. He played cards. He played chess. He watched the Northern Lights. When he got five minutes by himself, he jacked off. And he waited for the order to fly his Tu-4 against the Americans. He didn’t think he would come back. If they sent him against the U.S. proper, he didn’t see how he could come back. Well, if you were going to go out with a bang…

  None of the planes from Provideniya had flown against the U.S. Air Force base in Alaska. That perplexed him enough to talk to the commandant: “Comrade Colonel, what are we doing here? Are we decoys, lined up like wooden ducks on a pond so the imperialists can waste weapons on us?”

  “Don’t believe it, not even for a minute,” Doyarenko answered. “When the time comes, we will hit them, and we’ll hurt them when we do it, too.”

  Unless they wipe us off the map first. But Gribkov didn’t say it. You didn’t want to borrow too much trouble. He did ask, “Well, sir, since we were closest to this Elmendorf place, why didn’t we fly against it?”

  “Because we’re also closest to the American radars at Nome and on St. Lawrence Island,” Colonel Doyarenko answered. “They would have spotted us taking off, and the enemy would have been alert and ready for us. When the gloves come all the way off, if they do, we’ll have fighter-bombers pound those radar stations to blind the enemy. Then we can do what we need to do.”

  “Ah, I see,” Gribkov said. “Where did the planes that hit Alaska come from, then?”

  Doyarenko sent him a hooded look. That wasn’t anything he needed to know, even if he might want to. Then the colonel shrugged. “Well, what difference does it make? It’s not as if the Americans don’t already know we also have planes up on Vrangel Island.”

  “Ah,” Boris Gribkov repeated. The island lay north of the Siberian mainland, between the parts of the Arctic Ocean the maps called the East Siberian Sea and the Chukchi Sea. There wasn’t even a gulag on it, which said something, though Boris wasn’t sure what. He hadn’t known the USSR flew bombers off of it, but he wasn’t astonished to learn as much. It was within range of Alaska, certainly, yet even more isolated and able to hold secrets than Provideniya.

  The colonel went on, “I’ve heard the Tu-4s that hit the American air base flew over the ocean, no higher than a cat’s testicle above the waves. If you’re going to beat radar, that’s how you do it.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which meant he’d do it that way if and when the bell tolled for him.

  But Doyarenko hadn’t finished. “I’ve also heard—unofficially—that our Tu-4s were painted in U.S. Air Force colors.” He steepled his fingertips. “They do look quite a bit like the American B-29s.”

  Gribkov couldn’t help snorting, but he managed not to guffaw. The Tu-4 was as close to a copy of the B-29 as Soviet factories could make. There was a story that, because the interior paint jobs on two of the interned B-29s that formed the Soviet plane’s pattern differed, Tupolev asked Beria to ask Stalin which scheme to use. The aircraft designer didn’t dare choose on his own. The way Stalin chuckled when he heard the question told Beria the answer.

  That was what Boris had heard, anyhow. Was the story true? He had no idea. He’d never met either Stalin or Beria, and didn’t want to. But that the story could be told as if true spoke volumes abut how closely the Tu-4 resembled its American inspiration.

  Something else occurred to Gribkov. “Isn’t it against the laws of war to fly a plane under false colors, sir?” he asked.

  “Officially, yes,” Colonel Doyarenko answered, which told Boris everything he needed to know. Doyarenko went on, “But what’s the worst thing the imperialists can do to a plane like that? Shoot it down and kill everybody on it. And what’s the worst thing they can do to a plane plastered with red stars and with For Stalin! painted on the fuselage? Shoot it down and kill everybody in it, da?”

  “Da,” Gribkov agreed. “Comrade Colonel, what if a Tu-4 plastered with red stars and with For Stalin! painted on the fuselage turns out to be a B-29 in disguise, though?”

  Doyarenko opened his mouth. Then he closed it without saying anything. When he did speak, it was in musing tones: “If we can think of it, the Americans can, too. I’ll talk with Colonel Fursenko, the air-defense commander. The MiGs will have to be extra alert.”

  “Yes, sir,” Boris said, his own voice not altogether free from resignation or worry. Extra-alert MiG pilots were liable to shoot down Tu-4s to make sure they didn’t let a B-29 sneak through. That might even serve the cause of the rodina. Whether it served the motherland or not, though, it wouldn’t do a Tu-4’s eleven-man crew any good.

  No B-29s struck Provideniya. It was well below freezing, with snow flurries every other day or so. That didn’t keep groundcrew men from getting rid of the Soviet markings on the Tu-4s hiding at the airstrip here and turning them into bombers that looked even more like B-29s than they had already.

  When Gribkov asked a sergeant about it, the man replied, “Sir, your eyes must be playing tricks on you. This isn’t happening at all.” He laid a paint-stained finger by the side of his nose and winked.

  “No, eh?” Boris said.

  “No, sir.” By the way the sergeant sounded, butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.

  “All right.” Gribkov wondered if it was. But Colonel Doyarenko had to be right about one thing. Either way, the worst the Americans could do was kill him.

  YOU GOT USED TO things. Vasili Yasevich supposed that was how people kept fighting wars. The horror built up to a certain level, and after that it wasn’t horror any more. It was just something you dea
lt with every day, the way people who made shoes dealt with the smell of leather.

  Going through the wreckage of what had been Harbin was like that. Vasili did wonder how radioactive he was getting and what that was doing to his health now and in the future. Wondering was all he could do about it. If he tried to escape, Chinese secret police or soldiers who were just as radioactive as he was and didn’t seem to wonder about it a bit would have shot him. So he stayed there and he worked.

  The bomb had gone off near the center of town. Ever since the early days of the twentieth century, Russians in Harbin had built substantial churches and offices and blocks of flats in that part of the city, so that central Harbin had been a reminder of what a prerevolutionary Russian city was like.

  No more. Those buildings were sturdier than the Chinese-style ones surrounding them. They weren’t sturdy enough to survive having a small sun suddenly kindled not far above them. Some of the brick and stone had melted to something very much like glass. Steel and copper had puddled and flowed like water.

  And people…Those substantial Russian buildings had substantial Russian sidewalks in front of them. Here and there on the scorched sidewalks, and on walls that hadn’t quite melted and hadn’t quite come down, Vasili saw what looked like the silhouettes of men and women. He didn’t need long to realize that was exactly what they were. The atom bomb’s flash had printed people’s shadows on those sidewalks and walls. Then, a split second later, it seared the people who cast them to hot gas. The shadowprints were all that remained to show they had ever lived.

  That was bad. Finding charred, shrunken corpses inside ruins a little farther away from where the bomb went off was worse. You stuffed those into burlap bags and carted them away. With water and fat boiled off, with even bones burnt fragile, you could fit several into one sack. You could, and Vasili did, over and over again.

  After the first few days, he wasn’t dealing with the wounded and dying any more. The dying had mostly become the dead. He saw burns worse than anything he’d ever imagined, burns that put him in mind of roast meat forgotten on its spit over the fire. Roast meat, though, didn’t moan and shriek and beg for someone to put it out of its anguish. He took care of that a couple of times, with the knife he wore on his belt. He had dreadful dreams about the things he saw, but not about helping people die. As best he could tell, he was doing them a favor.

  Some of the dying on the edge of the blast area escaped that torment to fall victim to a different one. Their hair fell out. They grew nauseated. They pissed blood. It dripped from their rectums, and sometimes from their eyes and even from the beds of their nails. When they vomited, the black, curded crud they heaved up showed they were bleeding inside, too.

  Nobody could do anything for them except give them opium so they hurt a little less. The Chinese doctors called it radiation sickness. Some of the people with it lived: the ones who bled least or not at all. But the doctors admitted they didn’t have much to do with that. The only thing that mattered was how big a dose the sufferers got to begin with.

  Every evening, when Vasili and the other men and women trying to clean up after the atomic bomb came out of the blast zone, secret policemen searched them. It would have been contrary to human nature not to plunder what the dead needed and protected no more.

  But the secret police were as desperately overworked as everyone else near Harbin and the other shattered Manchurian cities. They didn’t find everything the laborers secreted on their persons. And even the secret police were human beings. Some of them would take a cut of what they did find and let the laborers keep the rest. If they confiscated it all, the laborers might stop plundering. Then they wouldn’t get anything.

  “What have you got today, round-eye?” a tough-looking Chinese policeman with a PPD asked.

  “Here’s your squeeze, pal.” Vasili handed him a jade bracelet and some heavy gold earrings set with pearls and rubies. He spoke the same rough northeastern dialect of Mandarin as his watcher, and spoke it about as well. The older he got, the more he used it. The way things looked, his Russian would be the language that got rusty.

  “Let me check these.” The secret policeman took off a mitten and hefted the earrings. A smile spread across his broad, flat face. “That’s gold, sure as the demons! Go on through.”

  “Thanks. I’m not dumb enough to try to trick you,” Vasili said. He made as if to shrug off his quilted jacket. “You want to frisk me?”

  “No. Just get out of here.” The Chinese gestured with the barrel of the submachine gun.

  Vasili got. The secret policeman turned to see what he could extract from the next laborer in line. Vasili walked slowly, as if he were very tired and his feet hurt. He was very tired, and his feet did hurt. One reason they hurt was that he was walking on gold coins he’d stashed under the soles of his feet.

  The coins were English sovereigns. Most of them bore Victoria’s jowly profile; a few carried her son Edward’s bearded visage. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any: probably before the Sino-Japanese conflict joined the wider river of World War II. His father had used sovereigns, or maybe gold rubles, to get out of Russia, and to do things he needed to take care of after that.

  Even in Mao’s aggressively Communist China, gold was bound to have its place. Gold always had a place. Vasili’s father’d said so more than once, and Vasili didn’t think his old man was wrong. Neither had the people who’d stashed away these coins. But, while gold could do all kinds of things, it couldn’t stop an atom bomb. Those people didn’t need their sovereigns any more. Vasili was sure he’d be able to use them, even if he didn’t know how just yet.

  Next stop after the secret-police check was the feeding station. He got a small bowl of rice with a few vegetables on top. No soy sauce—nothing to flavor the mess. Another bowl of the same, or sometimes noodles or a roll, was breakfast. That was it. Along with cash and jewelry, the laborers took whatever canned goods they came across.

  “You didn’t fill this bowl as full as the one I got yesterday!” groused the man in front of Vasili. Vasili never complained. Getting along in a country where hardly anybody looked like you was hard enough without doing anything to make it harder.

  “You’re right. It isn’t,” the guy on the other side of the kettle answered. “Not as much came in today. With the railroads all smashed up the way they are, it’s heaven’s own miracle we’re getting anything.”

  “But I do hard work every day,” the laborer said. “How can I keep it up if I’m hungry all the time?”

  “Plenty of people hungrier than you.” The server jerked a thumb in the direction the line was moving. “Get out of here, you greedy turtle. You’re holding up the works.” Glaring, the man walked on. Vasili came up and held out his bowl. Glaring, the fellow with the ladle said, “You going to give me a hard time, too?”

  “No, not me.” Vasili definitely knew better than to piss off anybody who worked in the kitchens. Plenty of people around Harbin were hungrier than the laborers. The government was trying to keep them from starving to death. It didn’t worry about anything past that, not yet.

  But men and women who handled food never starved. If that wasn’t a law of nature, it should have been. This guy wasn’t fat, but he sure wasn’t starving. If you annoyed these people, they’d find ways to make you sorry. “Well, here, then,” the server said. He gave Vasili a little more than the other fellow’d got.

  “Thanks!” Vasili sounded as if he meant it. A little grease on the axle helped the wheels go round.

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko ate pickles and drank vodka. Pickles, salt fish, meat dumplings…Those were the kind of zakuski that gave the booze some style. He wasn’t smashed yet, but he was getting there.

  He raised his glass. “Here’s to good old antifreeze!” he said, and knocked back the snort at a gulp. The vodka was icy cold, which made it burn less on its way down the hatch.

  “To antifreeze!” echoed the kolkhozniks drinking with him. They downed their
toasts, too. His wife giggled. Anya was a little bitty thing. She didn’t need to drink much to get plastered.

  The next guy who stood up was missing half his left hand. One look at Volodymyr’s face, though, would have told you he was a veteran. You didn’t need to see the mutilation to know. “To our glorious leader, Joseph Stalin, and to victory!”

  “To Stalin! To victory!” everyone chorused, louder than people had toasted antifreeze. You had to show your enthusiasm for the glorious leader. Someone would notice and rat on you if you didn’t. Bad things were liable to follow soon after that.

  Before too long, the snow would melt. The land would turn to soup for a while. Then it would be time to plow and plant. There’d be more work to do, even if no one would do it with any marked enthusiasm. There wouldn’t be so many chances for a bunch of people to get together and get drunk. (It was a Soviet collective farm. There would always be some.)

  Ihor eyed Anya. Maybe later on he could get her off by herself, and then…. Or maybe, by the time they got done here, he’d be so fried he couldn’t get it up with a crane. He wasn’t going to worry about it now. He wasn’t worrying about anything now.

  Pyotr stood up, glass clutched in his meaty fist. He was a Russian, but people on the kolkhoz mostly didn’t hold it against him. “Here’s to the soldier’s hundred grams!” he said loudly, gulping the toast.

  Everyone whooped and cheered at that one, especially the men who’d fought in the war, which was almost all of them. They’d gladly gulped their hundred grams every day then. You needed something to numb you and make you not think so much before you rushed the Germans’ trenches. After a while, there weren’t enough Germans left to stop the Red Army, but the Hitlerites always made their khaki-clad foes pay a hefty butcher’s bill.

  Was the Red Army still feeding soldiers the daily dose? The Americans wouldn’t be much fun without it, would they? You could toast victory all you wanted, but they’d dropped an atomic bomb inside Soviet territory. Yes, the radio said the USSR had retaliated, but even so….