Fallout Read online

  He showed Zorin the note. Then he fumbled in his own pockets till he found a matchbook. He lit a match and touched it to the edge of the paper. He held it till it scorched his fingers, then dropped it and let it burn itself out. Once it did, he kicked at the ashes till nothing discernible was left.

  “Good job,” the copilot said. “Now they won’t be able to go after his family.”

  “Right,” Gribkov said tightly. The world would never know just why Leonid Tsederbaum had killed himself. Boris wished he didn’t know. Better not to start thinking about things like that. You only got into trouble when you did. He had to keep flying. He wondered how he’d manage.

  —

  First Lieutenant Cade Curtis wondered where the devil he was. Oh, he knew in a general sense: he was in Korea, and in the southern part of it. He even knew in some detail—he was south of the town of Chongju, which lay southeast of Seoul. The Americans (if you wanted to get fancy about it, the United Nations forces, but most of them were Americans) and the Republic of Korea had been attacking “in the direction of Chongju” for quite a while now. They hadn’t got there yet, and didn’t seem likely to any time soon.

  When Curtis got to Korea in the fall of 1950 as a newly minted shavetail straight out of ROTC, it was the most important fight in the world. He’d been part—a tiny part, but part nonetheless—of General MacArthur’s triumphant drive to the Yalu River. That drive was going to take care of North Korea and Kim Il-sung once and for all.

  It was going to, but it didn’t. Winter and the Red Chinese made sure of that. The UN forces—there were Englishmen and Turks along with the Americans—had reached the Chosin Reservoir, near the Yalu. Then the mercury dove somewhere south of twenty below, and Mao’s band of merry men drove south across the Yalu.

  MacArthur hadn’t figured they would. It was one of the nastiest surprises in the history of surprises, especially if you happened to be on the receiving end, as Cade was. He’d got lucky. He’d slipped through the Red Chinese net, one of a handful who did. The Reds destroyed three or four divisions trying to retreat to safety at the port of Hungnam.

  Because they did, Truman dropped A-bombs on several Manchurian cities to fubar their logistics. Because he dropped them on Red China, Stalin dropped them on the USA’s European allies. Because Stalin did that…the Free World and the Communists had been climbing the ladder of devastation one rung at a time ever since.

  Those Manchurian cities, and several in the Soviet Far East, glowed in the dark now. So did ports on the American West Coast from Seattle all the way down to Los Angeles. Both sides had trouble getting men and weapons into Korea these days. Both sides had trouble caring, too—the big fight now was in Europe.

  But the war here, the little war that had touched off the bigger one, ground on with whatever was at hand and whatever Truman and Mao and Stalin could spare. The outside world forgot it? You hurt just as much if you got maimed in a fight nobody back home gave a damn about, and you were just as dead if you got killed in that kind of fight.

  Cade walked along the trench, here somewhere south of Chongju. Dust scuffed up under his boots. When he noticed, he could smell his own stink, and the stink of his fellow dogfaces. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. If the wind blew down from the north, he could smell the different but no more pleasant stinks of the Red Chinese and North Koreans. And the stench of death was always in the air. It was sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but it never went away.

  To get it out of his nose, he lit a Camel. He hadn’t smoked at all before he got here. Of course, he’d been just nineteen. He sure smoked now. Like so many other soldiers, he hardly knew what to do without a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  He ground the match out under his bootheel. The smoke did let him forget about the other charming aromas for a little while. And it made him more alert and relaxed him at the same time—for a little while. Pretty soon, he’d fire up another one to get the same effect all over again.

  In the meantime, he cautiously stuck his head up out of the trench to make sure the Reds weren’t up to anything. He looked around for a couple of seconds, then ducked down again. A few seconds after that, a rifle bullet cracked past, not far enough above where he’d just been. If he’d shown himself for much longer, that sniper might have put a round through the bridge of his nose.

  “Anything cookin’ out there, Lieutenant?” asked Sergeant Lou Klein. He was old enough to be Cade’s father. An Army lifer, he’d fought in North Africa and Italy the last time around. He could have run the company at least as well as Cade did. They both knew it. Since the days of Hammurabi, one of the many things veteran sergeants were for was riding herd on eager young officers.

  After this long in Korea, Cade might still have been young, but he was eager no more. He shook his head. “All seemed pretty quiet.”

  “Good.” Klein hedged that by adding, “Unless they’re cooking up something sneaky, anyway.”

  “They don’t seem to try cute stuff a whole lot,” Cade said. “When they fight, they just get in there and slug.”

  “That’s on account of most of ’em carry pieces like yours.” Klein pointed at Cade’s PPSh submachine gun, a Russian weapon he liked much better than the M-1 carbine American officers were supposed to carry. The sergeant went on, “Hard to get fancy when you can’t hit anything out past a coupla hundred yards.”

  “Yeah, but when they get in close—” Cade didn’t go on, or need to. An awful lot of combat took place at ranges where the PPSh and its older cousin the PPD were world-beaters. They sprayed a lot of bullets at anything that looked dangerous, they hardly ever jammed, and they were easy to strip and clean. What more could you want?

  “Hey, they ain’t tryin’ to kill me right this minute. I won’t worry about it till they do,” Klein said.

  That attitude was wonderful—if you could manage it. Cade had always been a worrier. He fretted over what would happen next, what might happen next, what could possibly happen next. The sergeant didn’t. Whatever happened, he tried to deal with it as it came up. He was still here, still breathing, still fighting. His way worked as well for him as Cade’s for him, and he probably had lower blood pressure.

  But he wouldn’t be promoted to officer’s rank if he lived to be ninety. Cade didn’t have much chance of making general if he stayed in the Army. Few without a West Point class ring scaled that mountain. But major, light colonel, maybe even bird colonel wouldn’t be unreachable. Men at those ranks needed to care about possibilities, not just take things as they came.

  Off in the distance, an American machine gun spat a burst at the Communist lines. The Red Chinese didn’t have so many machine guns. They had plenty of rifles, though, and plenty of men to shoot them. They shot back. Firing picked up on both sides.

  Klein swore under his breath. “Somebody’s been eating his spinach, so he thinks he’s fucking Popeye,” he said. “If it’s quiet where you’re at, why do you want to go poke it with a stick?”

  “Beats me.” Cade was far more willing to let lying dogs sleep than he had been when he got here.

  Not everybody was. The hothead disease afflicted guys on both sides. They figured Uncle Sam or Chairman Mao had gone to the trouble of issuing them a rifle or a PPSh and the ammo to go with it, so the least they could do was start shooting as soon as they got the chance—or imagined they did.

  Somebody on the American side of the rusty barbed wire started screaming and wouldn’t stop. The noise was horrible, terrible, dreadful, whatever was worse than those. It was the noise a dog makes after a car smashes it, when it’s dead but hasn’t finished dying yet. Sometimes a kind human will cut a dog’s throat when it’s hurt like that, or bash in its head with a brick.

  Cade wished somebody would bash in that poor GI’s head with a brick. The man’s shrieks made him want to stuff his fingers into his ears till his fingertips met between them. The awful cries just wouldn’t stop.

  “Sorry bastard,” Klein said, whi
ch only went to show how useless words were at times like that.

  “Yeah.” Cade’s nod felt every bit as inadequate. General Sherman had known what he was talking about, even if he was a damnyankee (Cade grew up in Tennessee). War was hell.

  —

  Vasili Yasevich looked around the hamlet of Smidovich with unbridled curiosity and amazement. It was a tiny little place compared to Harbin, where he’d lived his whole life up till now. Before the Americans dropped an atom bomb on it, Harbin had held three quarters of a million people. No more than three or four thousand lived here.

  But that wasn’t what was amazing about the place. What was amazing was that everybody here looked like him. In Harbin, he’d been part of a tiny, dwindling Russian minority drowning in a rising tide of Chinese. The past few years, he’d used Mandarin far more often than his birthspeech.

  Here, though, everybody—well, everybody male—grew a thick beard. Everybody’s skin was pink or swarthy, not golden. Some people had black hair. Some people, not just about everyone. Some people had brown hair, some straw-colored like Vasili’s, some even red. There were brown eyes and blue ones and green. Everybody had a big, strong-bridged nose.

  For the first time in his life, then, Vasili didn’t look like a foreigner—a round-eyed devil, as the Chinese so charmingly put it. You couldn’t tell by looking that he hadn’t been born and raised here.

  Which was funny, only the joke was on him. No matter what he looked like, he’d never felt so alone, so different, so foreign, in all his life.

  He’d been a baby when his father and mother brought him to Harbin after the Reds won the Russian Civil War against the Whites. They’d lived through the Japanese occupation, when Manchuria turned into Manchukuo. Japan and the USSR stayed neutral through the Second World War, which suited them both. Japan worried about China and America, while Stalin was in the fight of his life against Hitler.

  Then Hitler shot himself, the Germans gave up, and Stalin finally turned on the Japanese. After smashing the Nazis flat, the battle-hardened Red Army found them easy meat. Soviet tanks roared through Harbin, bound for Korea and other points south.

  And the NKVD followed the troops. The Chekists didn’t care that the scores they were settling were a quarter of a century old. They had their lists, and they used them. Uncounted thousands of Harbin’s Russians disappeared, either into the gulags or into shallow, unmarked graves.

  Vasili’s parents hadn’t waited for the midnight bang on the door. His old man was a druggist, and knew what to take. They died almost as soon as the poison hit their stomachs.

  For reasons known only to them, the Soviet secret police hadn’t bothered with Vasili. He’d stayed in Harbin, doing carpentry and bricklaying and compounding medicines on the side…till he fell foul of a Chinese big shot when he wouldn’t sell him opium. Mao’s camps were just as delightful as Stalin’s. So Vasili ran away.

  He trudged toward the town hall near the center of Smidovich. He had no Soviet papers, but he was in the process of getting them. Normally, the MGB—the NKVD by a new set of initials—would have jugged or shot any Russian it caught without proper documents. But these weren’t normal times. Atomic fire had fallen on Khabarovsk, not far east of Smidovich. Even the secret police recognized that people might have escaped from the city on the Amur without waiting to gather their paperwork.

  Although Vasili hadn’t, he might have. The Chekists seemed willing to believe he had. A couple of the ones he’d dealt with even seemed like halfway decent human beings. He wondered what they were doing working for the MGB. Then again, Smidovich wasn’t the kind of place where hotshots were employed.

  “Good day, Vasili Andreyevich,” one of those functionaries said when Yasevich walked into the building, which looked like nothing so much as an overgrown log cabin.

  “Good day, Gleb Ivanovich,” Vasili replied. No, he’d never expected to be on familiar terms with an MGB man.

  Gleb Ivanovich Sukhanov waved toward a samovar bubbling on a corner table. “Fix yourself a glass of tea. Then we’ll talk.”

  “Spasibo.” Vasili did. He was used to drinking tea from a handleless cup and without sugar, Chinese-style. But he remembered how his folks had done things when he was small and they still clung to Russian ways as tightly as they could. He brought the tea over to Sukhanov’s table and sat down in the chair on the opposite side. The MGB man’s chair was padded; the one people who saw him used was of plain wood. One way or another, the Reds let you know who ran things.

  Sukhanov pulled a manila folder off a pile. “So let me see,” he said. “You tell me your flat was on Karl Marxa Street near Lenin Square.”

  “That’s right.” Vasili hoped it was. What Soviet city wouldn’t have a street named for the founder of Communism and a square named for the founder of the USSR?

  Frowning a little, Sukhanov said, “It’s a wonder you survived. The bomb went off right above the square, I am told.”

  “I wasn’t home when it went off, sir.” Vasili tried to sound faintly embarrassed. He did have his backup story ready.

  But Gleb Sukhanov’s frown deepened. “Don’t call me sir. I’m just a comrade like everybody else.”

  “Sorry, Comrade Sukhanov.” Vasili cursed himself for his slip. He might speak Russian, but he didn’t speak Soviet Russian. The exiles in Harbin kept gospodin and gospozha, sir and madam. In the USSR, those were counterrevolutionary. Everybody was a tovarishch, a comrade. Even the written language looked funny to Vasili—the Reds had simplified the alphabet, getting rid of several characters.

  “Hmp,” the MGB man said. “Where exactly were you, then?”

  “Comrade”—Vasili did his best to look shamefaced—“I was coming back from visiting a woman on the edge of town. A building shielded me from the worst of the flash and the blast, or I wouldn’t be talking with you now.”

  He could talk with conviction about what happened when an A-bomb went off. He’d been working near Pingfan, outside of Harbin, when the Americans hit the Chinese city. However much he wished he didn’t, he knew what happened at a time like that.

  “You should have kept your identity card with you,” Sukhanov said severely.

  “Have a heart, Gleb Ivanovich,” Vasili said. “She was somebody’s wife, but she wasn’t mine. I wanted to keep everything as quiet as I could. How was I supposed to know the Yankee sons of bitches would choose that particular night to murder people?”

  “ ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ ” Sukhanov sounded like a man quoting something, but Vasili had no idea what. He must have looked puzzled. The MGB functionary let out a self-conscious chuckle and said, “Now I know I’ve worked in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast too long.”

  Vasili had had Jews for friends in Harbin, though times got harder for them after the Japanese seized the city. Here in Smidovich, some of the shop signs were in Yiddish instead of or along with Russian. It made less sense to him than Chinese would have: he read that language less well than he spoke it, but he could manage.

  He could manage a chuckle of his own for the Chekist, too. He wanted Gleb Sukhanov to like him. If Sukhanov did, maybe he’d quit asking so damn many questions and making Vasili tell so many lies. If anyone who really did live in a block of flats near Lenin Square on Karl Marxa showed up in Smidovich, he was screwed.

  For now, though, he was golden. Sukhanov signed an official-looking document, stamped it in red ink with a hammer-and-sickle rubber stamp, and slid it across the table. “Here is a temporary identity card,” he said. “Keep your nose clean while you’re in these parts and everything will be fine. If you cause trouble…” He let that hang.

  “I’m no troublemaker, Comrade,” Vasili said. He even meant it. Why not? He had a place here, and he didn’t any more in China. Now he was a Russian among Russians. What would come of that?

  RUSSIAN TANKS RUMBLED PAST Luisa Hozzel’s flat in Fulda. She was close to a window, so she looked out. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have bothered. It w
asn’t as if she’d never seen tanks before.

  During the days when Hitler ruled the Reich, there’d been military parades through town. Goose-stepping soldiers in Stahlhelms and panzer crewmen in black coveralls and black berets ornamented with the Totenkopf were plenty to set a girl’s heart aflutter.

  She’d married one of those soldiers. Gustav had gone off with millions of others to knock the Soviet Union over the head. Unlike so many of those millions, he’d come home again after the Russians—with American and English help—knocked Germany over the head instead. Fulda became part of the American occupation zone, though the border with what the Russians still held didn’t lie far to the east.

  She’d seen plenty of American tanks over the next few years. The Amis said they were protecting this part of Germany from the Red Russians. They even seemed to mean it. The Marshall Plan helped western Germany get up off its knees after the war, the same way it helped the rest of shattered Western Europe.

  Then this horrible new war started. If Russian tanks were going to make any progress in western Germany, they had to break out through the flat country of what people called the Fulda Gap. The Americans fought hard to hold them back, but couldn’t do it.

  So now the red flag with the gold hammer and sickle flew here, not the black, red, and gold of the new Federal Republic of (West) Germany and of the old Weimar Republic. The black, red, and white of Hitler and, back in the day, of the Kaiser didn’t mean Germany any more.

  Like everybody else, she’d heard stories about the Russians’ rapes and murders when they swarmed into the Reich at the end of the last war. She was one of the lucky ones. She couldn’t judge those stories from personal experience. She’d never seen a Russian in her whole life till this past winter.

  The Ivans in Fulda didn’t drag women off the streets or shoot people for the fun of it. That was about as much good as any of the locals could find to say about them.