Armistice Read online

  It wasn’t just that the S-71’s crew was so much larger than a Tu-4’s. Gribkov was much more a tsar than Vavilov. Sure, Vavilov had and used command authority. But he used it more as a team captain than as an autocrat. He had to depend more on the sailors to get what he wanted done than Gribkov did 9,000 meters up in the sky.

  Vavilov climbed the steel ladder up to the top of the conning tower and opened the hatch up there. “Bozhemoi!” he said. “We’ve been submerged a devil of a long time. That first whiff of fresh air smells extra good!”

  A few seconds later, the fresh air got down to Boris. It seemed wonderful—and then, all of a sudden, it didn’t. Gribkov got some of the moist, salt-smelling air from outside and, as the atmosphere inside the boat eddied, a lungful of what he’d been breathing for so long. That was twice as nasty after getting out of his nose for a moment.

  “Comrade Captain, permission to come up?” he called.

  “Granted, of course,” Alexei Vavilov said. “Not much to see, but you’re welcome to what there is.”

  Up the ladder Gribkov went. When he stuck his head out of the open hatch, he screwed up his face and narrowed his eyes. He blinked several times and had to wipe away tears anyhow. He’d lived a long time in a twilight world of dim orange lightbulbs. That big bright thing up in the sky—that was the sun. Even through sea mist, it overwhelmed his startled vision.

  “The sky, the water…They’re pretty wide, aren’t they?” he said. He wasn’t used to being able to see more than a few meters down in the bowels of the S-71. The passageway that led from the forward torpedo tubes back to the batteries and the engine room had irregular zigs and zags for no reason he could find, and was barely wide enough for two men going in opposite directions to squeeze past each other.

  Land lay dead ahead. A signal lamp on the end of a pier was flashing Morse at the submarine. Vavilov uncovered the boat’s lamp and click-clacked its shutters. Boris had learned Morse once upon a time, but his was rusty from disuse. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Landing instructions,” the skipper answered. “Oh, and they’ll take charge of you and your men as soon as you disembark. They’ve got a train waiting to take you down to Petrozavodsk.”

  “Khorosho,” Boris said, hoping it would be good. Petrozavodsk was a medium-sized town—bigger than Kem, smaller than Murmansk (or at least Murmansk as it had been)—somewhere to the south. Just how far to the south, he didn’t know; he’d never heard of Kem before the S-71 proposed stopping there.

  He and his men could leave Petrozavodsk by rail. Or, if the authorities were in a hurry, they could fly out. Petrozavodsk would have an airstrip, maybe even an airport. Plainly, the Americans hadn’t knocked it flat with an A-bomb. That was good. If atomic hell descended on places as unimportant as Petrozavodsk, nothing would be left of the USSR by the time this war finally ended.

  Nothing may be left of it any which way, Gribkov thought unhappily.

  Vavilov called orders down through the open hatch. He guided the S-71 alongside one of the piers that thrust out into the White Sea from the low, swampy ground edging it. A mosquito buzzed. Boris automatically swatted at it.

  Longshoremen tossed lines to sailors trotting along the sub’s deck. They made the boat fast. It was much the biggest vessel tied up at Kem. The rest were fishing boats and one slightly larger gray patrol boat that sported a heavy machine gun and was probably manned by the MGB’s border guards.

  He wondered whether Chekists would be waiting for him and the rest of the Tu-4’s crew. He’d had an earlier run-in with the secret police, when his then-navigator stuck a pistol in his mouth after they A-bombed Paris. But the officer waving from the pier wore khaki with sky-blue arm-of-service colors on his cap and shoulder boards. He belonged to the Red Air Force, then.

  Commander Vavilov called down into the S-71. The flyers who’d bombed Washington with Gribkov came up one after another. None of them had any more than the clothes on his back. They were all shaggy and none too clean. Boris could tell they smelled bad. He realized he had to smell bad himself.

  Longshoremen shoved a couple of planks from the pier to the sub to let the airmen off her. Since she’d cruised under the sea, not on it, Boris didn’t have to get his land legs back when he took a few steps on the pier, whose boards and pilings were black with creosote.

  Up strode the young lieutenant. He and Gribkov exchanged salutes. He gave his name as Arkady Medvedev and pointed to a truck at the end of the pier. “If you and your men will come with me, sir, we’ll go straight to the waiting train.”

  “Is there any chance we can clean up first?” Boris stroked his beard with his left hand.

  But Lieutenant Medvedev shook his head. “Sorry, sir, but my orders are to put you on the train the instant you come in to Kem.”

  Gribkov sighed. Whoever’d given Medvedev those orders had probably never come within five hundred kilometers of a submarine, and had no idea what life inside one was like. Boris hadn’t known anything about that till he boarded the S-71, either. But what could you do? “We serve the Soviet Union!” he said, speaking for his men. The stock phrase could mean anything from Yes, sir! to We’re stuck with it, which was what he used it for.

  The train had only one car. Medvedev got in with the flyers. The engine driver blew a blast on his steam whistle and chugged out of Kem. The powers that be were treating the aircrew like very important people. For a few kilometers, Boris supposed that was because they were heroes, men who’d avenged Moscow on Washington. Then it occurred to him to wonder just how many well-trained, successful bomber crews the Soviet Union had left. He wished he hadn’t had that thought. Once it lodged in his head, it didn’t want to go away.

  —

  Herschel Weissman nodded to the men who drove and installed appliances for him at Blue Front. “Well, they’ve finally got the Hollywood Freeway and the Pasadena opened up again,” he said. “Took ’em long enough—months longer than they promised.”

  Along with most of the other guys, Aaron Finch nodded. He’d seen the announcement in yesterday afternoon’s paper, and heard it on the TV and radio news. The freeways, which had been one of L.A.’s larger claims to fame, had been out of commission since the Russians A-bombed the city more than a year before.

  “For some of the routes we use,” his boss went on, “we’ll be able to save a lot of time now, getting to where we need to go. The more deliveries we can make, the better off we’ll be.”

  Aaron nodded again. Since the bombs fell on downtown and the port at San Pedro, business had been crappy. That was putting it mildly. Weissman hadn’t canned anyone, but he’d cut everybody’s hours. Aaron liked that no better than anyone else who’d been an adult during the Depression. You wanted as much work as you could possibly grab. When you had a wife and a son who’d just turned three back home, you really wanted as much work as you could grab.

  Next to him, Jim Summers stuck up a hand. Weissman nodded. “What do you want, Jim?” he asked.

  Aaron wondered the same thing—apprehensively. He and Summers crewed a Blue Front truck together. Summers was a lot bigger and heavier than his own trim five-nine and 150 pounds, but he was also much less fond of hard work. He did what he had to do to get by, but not a nickel’s worth more. A nickel’s worth less? Yes, sometimes, because he counted on Aaron to bail him out. And Aaron always did.

  Now Summers asked, “Boss, do we got to go through downtown on them damn freeways? Can’t we keep goin’ around like we been doin’? I bet them roads glow in the dark from all the atoms in ’em, y’know?” The way he talked said he came from Arkansas or Alabama or some place like that. It also said he hadn’t had much education while he was there.

  “All the officials and the scientists say it’s safe to drive on the freeways now, Jim.” The way Herschel Weissman talked, he was holding on to his patience with both hands.

  “Huh! Who trusts them folks? All they give a damn about is linin’ their pockets.” Jim didn’t—quite—add just like you
. He didn’t like Jews almost as much as he didn’t like Negroes. He’d only recently realized Aaron (whose father had changed the family name from Fink to duck such problems) was Jewish. That made working with him…interesting.

  “Jim, you don’t have to use the freeways if you don’t want to,” Weissman said. Summers started to grin. Then the man who’d started Blue Front went on, “I’m sure you can find another job where you don’t need to go near them at all.”

  The grin curdled on Jim’s face. Aaron half hoped the redneck would turn and walk out. In that case, he’d have to get used to working with someone else. He didn’t look forward to doing so; he wasn’t the most outgoing of men. But he wouldn’t have been heartbroken, either.

  It turned out not to matter. Summers had gone through the Depression, too. A job in hand was worth a dozen in the bush. “Well, I reckon I got to take my chances, then,” he muttered.

  The first delivery Aaron and he made was of a washing machine. It was in Glendale, only a couple of miles from the Blue Front warehouse—and even closer to the house in the hills where Aaron’s brother Marvin lived. Jim grumbled all the way there. “I still say it ain’t right,” he told Aaron. “Who knows how much o’ that fallout shit ain’t fallen out yet?”

  “Not me.” Aaron didn’t feel like listening, and tried to deflect him. “But they’ve got to be checking all the time. That’s their job.”

  “Harry goddamn Truman’s job was not gettin’ us into a big ole brawl to begin with, an’ look how good he done it,” Summers retorted. “Just on account of you’re smart don’t mean you can’t fubar somethin’.”

  That held just enough truth to leave Aaron without a ready comeback. He let Jim bitch till they got to the house with the Spanish-tile roof. Grunting and swearing under his breath, Jim wrestled the new washing machine onto a dolly and down the ramp at the back of the truck.

  Aaron did the installation. Before he could, he unhooked the old wringer machine in the laundry room and lugged it out to the curb. “I hope somebody steals it for scrap metal,” said the housewife who’d ordered the new one. “Every time I used it, I was scared it’d eat my hand. These automatic washers, they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “I hope you’re happy with it, ma’am,” Aaron said diplomatically. His wife still used a wringer washing machine. Ruth talked about getting a new one, but they weren’t cheap, and the Finches had other things they needed worse. She treated the wringer with respect, but she wasn’t afraid of it like Mrs. Tompkins here.

  Jim went right on pissing and moaning when they drove back to the warehouse. Now, though, he wasn’t bellyaching about the radioactive freeways. “Miserable cheap bitch,” he said. “She didn’t tip us a lousy dime. Jesus Christ, she didn’t even give us a glass o’ lemonade.”

  “I thought you didn’t like lemonade.” Aaron shoved in the truck’s cigarette lighter so he could fire up one of the many Chesterfields he went through each day.

  “I don’t,” Summers said, “but she coulda offered.”

  Aaron thought about saying something to that, but after a moment realized he had no idea what. It made more sense than some of the things Jim came out with, not that that was saying much. And, as Jim intended, it did say something about Mrs. Tompkins. It also said something about him, though chances were he had no idea about that.

  For the next delivery, though, they did need to go through downtown. They had to take a TV set to Boyle Heights, on the east side of Los Angeles. It was a big Packard-Bell, with a twenty-one-inch screen in an Early American cabinet. It was, in fact, quite a bit like the one Aaron had bought for himself, though with innards a bit more modern. Still, you could save yourself a good bit of money when the picture had trouble by taking the vacuum tubes to a testing machine in a drugstore and putting in your own replacements when you had to. Only after you found you couldn’t fix it on your own was it time to call the repairman.

  When they got close to downtown on the Pasadena Freeway, Jim pulled an old blue bandanna out of the pocket of his gabardine work pants and tied it over his mouth and nose to make an improvised surgical mask. He’d done that before when they went through places he thought to be contaminated. Aaron doubted it did him any good, but didn’t suppose it hurt, either.

  He did say, “That thing makes you look like a bank robber on Hopalong Cassidy.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Jim replied.

  “Well, take it off before we bring in the TV set.”

  “I will. We’ll be out of the worst of it by then anyways.”

  The freeways might be working again, but downtown still looked like hell. City Hall was a melted stub, half its former height. Most of the rest was still a field of rubble. Bulldozers and steam shovels kicked up clouds of dust as they leveled things further. They kicked up so much dust, Aaron wondered if he should wear a bandanna, too.

  Boyle Heights, by contrast, was a going concern. It was a mixed neighborhood, Jewish and Japanese and Mexican. Some of the shops had Yiddish signs. Aaron spoke Yiddish, but he could no more read it than he could the Oriental characters on other storefronts.

  Mrs. Lois Hanafusa accepted delivery on the TV. She offered them orange juice from a tree in her yard, and gave them two dollars each as they headed back to the truck. “Ain’t that a hell of a thing?” Jim said when they were on their way back to the warehouse. “A Jap nicer’n a white lady! What’s the world coming to?”

  “They’re all people,” Aaron said. By the look Summers gave him, he had no idea what Aaron was talking about.

  —

  “Your rifle clean, Jimmy?” Cade Curtis asked.

  “Oh, you bet, Captain!” Jimmy answered, and eagerly thrust his M-1 at Cade. Curtis had to inspect it then. As he’d known beforehand it would be, it was sparkling, the woodwork polished and the barrel gleaming. He checked the action. It worked with oiled perfection.

  Cade tossed the rifle back. “Way to go!” he said, and gave Jimmy a thumbs-up.

  “Thank you, sir!” Jimmy grinned like Christmas morning with a Schwinn under the tree.

  Lieutenant Howard Sturgis fell into step with Cade as the regimental CO walked down the muddy trench. Everything seemed quiet for the moment in this little piece of South Korea. Red Chinese trenches zigzagged the earth a few hundred yards to the north. But the Chinks weren’t doing more than squeezing off a shot every minute or so, just to remind the UN forces they were still around. They weren’t blaring propaganda from their loudspeakers, either. It wasn’t peace, or even a truce. On the other hand, it also wasn’t stark terror.

  Sturgis lit a Camel. He was ten or fifteen years older than Cade, who was getting close to his twenty-first birthday. Sturgis had been a senior noncom in the war against the Nazis. He’d won a battlefield promotion—which he hadn’t much wanted—here on the other side of the world.

  When he held out the pack to Cade, Cade took one with a murmur of thanks. He hadn’t smoked when he came to Korea as a green, green second lieutenant. He sure did now.

  “That Jimmy!” Sturgis said, shaking his head. He kept his voice down even though they’d gone far enough so Jimmy couldn’t hear. “Fuck me up the ass if he’s not a piece of work and a half!” He still talked like a noncom, sure as hell.

  “Why? Just because his weapon would pass a white-glove inspection back at boot camp?” Cade said. “Just because he respects officers? Just because he even likes them?”

  “Damn straight…uh, sir,” Sturgis said stoutly. “It’s un-American. It ain’t natural, not even a little bit. C’mon, you know as well as I do the guy’s Asiatic.”

  Asiatic was Army slang for squirrely, around the bend, nuts. Cade was sure that was how the veteran meant it. But the word had other meanings, too. “Of course he’s Asiatic, for cryin’ out loud,” Cade said. “He can’t help it, you know.”

  “There is that,” Howard Sturgis admitted. “Till he pulls a stunt like he did back there, though, you forget about it. I don’t even notice what he looks like
any more. He could be an ordinary draftee.”

  “Uh-huh.” Cade doubted that Sturgis would have forgotten what Jimmy looked like had he been a Negro. He doubted whether he would have himself. Born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee, he knew the difference between white and black. He didn’t get as excited about it as some people from his part of the country did, but he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there.

  That wasn’t what made Jimmy Asiatic, though. Jimmy damn well was Asiatic. He’d been born Chun Won-ung, and was serving as a private in the Republic of Korea’s army when he drew Cade’s notice. Cade stopped the kid’s captain from knocking him around. ROK officers had mostly learned to be soldiers from the Japanese, who’d ruled Korea till 1945. Jap officers and sergeants treated their men worse than the SPCA let Americans treat a dog.

  After Cade came to Chun Won-ung’s aid once, the kid couldn’t stay in his unit. His captain would have made him pay and pay and pay. So he’d stayed with the Americans instead. Now the only way—apart from his looks—you could tell he didn’t come from Knoxville or Rochester was that he believed in spit and polish and treated officers (especially Cade) with more respect than they deserved.

  Off to the east in the distance, somebody’s artillery woke up. Cade and Howard Sturgis cocked their heads to one side, listening to that faraway thunder. “Those’re Russian 155s,” Sturgis said. “Nothin’ we got to worry about unless they get a lot closer, but….”

  “Yeah. But,” Cade agreed. Those were some of the heavier guns Stalin had donated to Mao’s soldiers. The Red Chinese didn’t have a lot of them, and had to watch how they used the ones they did have. When they trotted them out, serious attacks often followed.

  It was funny, in a macabre way. When Cade got to Korea, late in the summer of 1950, it was the biggest show in town. The whole world watched the fight with breathless attention, wondering where the confrontation between Communism and the United States would go.