Bombs Away Read online

  He eyed the bartender. The fellow was about thirty-five. He had a scar of his own, on his forehead. Chances were he hadn’t picked it up playing tiddlywinks. “What did you do during the war?” Morozov asked him in Russian.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” the Fritz answered. And maybe that was true, and maybe it was horseshit. Maybe he just didn’t want to admit to whatever it was.

  Well, too damn bad if he didn’t. Konstantin asked the same question in German. If he didn’t like the answer he got, he’d knock the bastard into the middle of next week. It was possible for a Red Army senior sergeant to get in trouble for roughing up a German. It was possible, yeah, but it sure wasn’t easy.

  But the bartender said, “Oh! During the war!”—so maybe that was what he hadn’t got. “I fought in the Low Countries and France. Then I went to North Africa. I got this there.” Konstantin thought he was going to touch that scar, but he did more. He popped his right eye out of its socket. It lay in the palm of his hand—it was glass.

  “It’s a good match for the one you kept.” Morozov meant that. He hadn’t noticed it was artificial. It had to be German work. Russian glass eyes looked like, well, glass eyes. The tankman gestured. “Put it back. You aren’t so pretty without it.”

  “Sie haben Recht,” the German agreed gravely. Back went the eye. He blinked a couple of times to settle it in place. Now that Konstantin knew, he could tell the eye was false. But he never would have thought so had the Fritz not shown him.

  He downed the beer. He’d drunk enough to feel it, not enough to get tipsy. After the daily combat ration of a hundred grams of vodka, beer seemed like water going down the hatch. It did taste nice, though; he had to give it that. Good vodka didn’t taste like anything much. Bad vodka reminded him of an accident with a chemistry set.

  Drinking beer, you had to work to get smashed. It was easy with vodka. The whole point to drinking vodka was getting smashed. Maybe the point to drinking beer was drinking without getting smashed. If so, it was a point too subtle for Konstantin to fathom.

  He drained the mug, tipped the barkeep, and went back to the toilets. They were cleaner than they would have been in a Russian dive, but not a lot cleaner. The ammonia reek of stale piss stung his nose.

  After leaving the tavern, he walked back to the tent city outside of town. It was cold. Some snow lay on the ground. He’d known plenty worse, though. The Red Army didn’t worry about the weather. Whatever it happened to be, you did what your commanders told you.

  Now, instead of loading in a T-34, he commanded a T-54. He wished the Red Army’d had these during the last war. They would have made the Hitlerites roll over onto their backs and show their bellies in jig time. Thick armor, that elegant turtle-shell dome of a turret, a 100mm gun that would have smashed up every Tiger or Panther ever made…

  Someone waved to him. He came to attention—it was Captain Oleg Gurevich, the company commander. “What do you need, Comrade Captain?” he asked.

  “Is your tank ready for action, Sergeant?” Gurevich demanded.

  “I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Morozov said, which was never the wrong answer. “The tank is ready to roll as soon as we climb aboard.” That wasn’t quite true, but it came close enough. They wouldn’t move forward right this minute. Konstantin didn’t think they would, anyhow. “But what’s gone wrong now?”

  “It’s the stinking Americans,” Gurevich said. He was even younger than Konstantin. He’d come into the Red Army after the war ended. He didn’t remember, or care to remember, that the Americans had been allies against Hitler. Konstantin did, though he didn’t say so—admitting such things wasn’t just dangerous, it was suicidal. The officer went on, “It’s looking more and more as though they think they’ll have to use atomic weapons to stop the advance of the victorious Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In his wisdom, Comrade Stalin has decided that the Soviet Union will not sit idly by while the imperialists assail a fraternal socialist state.”

  One of the signs Gurevich was still wet behind the ears was that he could bring out propaganda slogans as if they were part of his ordinary language. He hadn’t seen enough of the real world to know that slogans were like the old newspaper you wrapped around makhorka to roll yourself a cigarette. They held things together, but they weren’t why you smoked. The tobacco was.

  “If the Americans use atomic bombs, we will, too?” Morozov asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t know much about them. But from everything he’d heard, the best way to live through one was not to be there when it went off.

  “We will take whatever steps the wise Comrade Stalin decides we have to take,” Captain Gurevich replied, so he didn’t know, either. Chances were no one did, except the longtime leader of the Soviet Union.

  Something else occurred to Morozov: “If our tanks head west and go over the border, will the Americans drop one of these bombs on us? Or more than one?” One will be all it takes, he thought unhappily.

  “We will not go forward alone if we get the order to liberate the American zone,” Gurevich said. “The Red Air Force will move with us, and will give us the air support we need.”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said once more. That was more polite than You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind, sir, even if, here, it meant the same thing. By the way Captain Gurevich turned red, he understood the words behind the words. That could be good. Maybe he wasn’t a total dope after all.

  —

  An Air Force base was like a little bit of the Midwest plopped down in whatever foreign country happened to hold it. First Lieutenant Bill Staley had been born and raised in Nebraska before moving to Washington state. He knew the Midwest when he ran into it, even if he ran into it in South Korea near the port of Pusan.

  Scrambled eggs. Fried eggs. Bacon. Coffee with cream and sugar. Hash browns. Toast with butter and jam. Ham sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Fried chicken. Steak. Baked potatoes. Canned string beans. Canned peas. Apple pie. Canned fruit salad.

  Movies. Touch football in the snow. If there was barbed wire around the perimeter, if guards with grease guns kept North Korean infiltrators from getting too close, you didn’t have to think about that. You also didn’t have to remember that your Aunt Susie would have hanged herself for shame at the miserable mattresses on the cots in the barracks.

  The one un-Midwestern thing about the base that you couldn’t ignore was the B-29s. Without them, after all, the base wouldn’t have been there to begin with.

  They were also too damn big to ignore, sitting there like a herd of four-engined dinosaurs at the end of the snow-dappled runway. The trouble was, they were like dinosaurs in more than just size. In a world of quick, nimble biting mammals, the hulking brutes got more obsolete by the day.

  They’d flattened Japan. They’d had the Japs on their knees even before the A-bombs that cooked Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War. But what the generals who gave orders in Korea hadn’t understood was that Japan was already staggering even before the B-29s zoomed in to finish the job.

  Day bombing raids against air defenses that hadn’t been smashed? Against guns and planes and radar tougher and more modern than any the Japs had had? Those didn’t work so well. The American commanders took longer than they should have to figure that out. A lot of four-engined dinosaurs and a lot of good aircrews got lost teaching them the lesson.

  Bill thanked heaven he hadn’t gone down in flames or had to hit the silk over North Korea. Night missions gave the Superforts the chance to come back and try again. Even with fighter escorts, though, they were no piece of cake. He assumed Russian pilots flew the enemy’s night fighters. The North Koreans were brave, but they didn’t have the sophisticated training that kind of mission took.

  When the Russians got in trouble, they scooted back across the Yalu into Red China. American planes weren’t allowed to follow them. The Russian pilots had a sanctuary on the other side of the river. Chinese troops? Same story
.

  No wonder they were kicking our tails in North Korea. Letting them have free rein till they crossed the Yalu made no military sense. None. Zero. Zip. You didn’t have to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to see that. It was as clear as clear could be to First Lieutenant Bill Staley, and to any American private on the ground up there—any the Chinks hadn’t killed or captured, anyhow.

  So far, Harry Truman had said it made political sense. The President hadn’t wanted to get the United States into a big Asian war. Bill Staley could see that, too. The logistics of a war like that would have to get a lot better to reach merely terrible.

  But not getting into a big Asian land war didn’t mean losing the smaller Asian land war the USA was already in. Or it had damn well better not, anyway. The horrible things the Chinese had done to the American ground forces up near the Yalu—and to the British and other UN troops that fought at their side—made losing the war and the peninsula seem much too possible.

  By all the signs, losing the smaller war wasn’t going to happen, not if Truman had anything to say about it. Just that morning, a convoy from Pusan had entered the air base. Columns of trucks bringing in food and fuel and ordnance came in all the time. Bill hardly even noticed them.

  This one was…different. Trucks full of chicken pieces or crates of .50-caliber ammo, tanker trucks full of avgas, were usually escorted by nothing more than halftracks or jeeps. This convoy was only three or four trucks long. It had halftracks riding shotgun fore and aft, sure, and clearing a path through the snow. And it had four top-of-the-line Pershing tanks in front of the trucks and four more behind.

  Whatever that convoy was bringing in, the people who’d sent it wanted to keep it safe till it got where it was going. Those people sure as hell knew how to get what they wanted, too.

  Bill Staley suspected he knew what the trucks were carrying. He wasn’t sure. He could easily have been wrong. He kept telling himself how easily he could be wrong. He hoped like anything he was.

  Two days later, Brigadier General Matt Harrison, the base commander, summoned all the B-29 crews to a meeting. Some of the men—even some of the officers who sat in the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs—wondered out loud what was going on. Maybe they hadn’t seen the convoy coming in, though even a dead man should have had trouble missing it. Maybe they just had trouble adding two and two. Bill didn’t, and not just because he was a bookkeeper in the civilian world. He was pretty sure he knew why Harrison had called the meeting, no matter how he wished he didn’t. Ignorance really would have been bliss.

  Harrison was in his late forties. Among the ribbons on his chest was one for the Distinguished Service Cross. The only higher decoration was the Medal of Honor. He’d done something special in the last war.

  He whapped the lectern he stood behind with a pointer. It wasn’t quite a judge using his gavel, but it came close enough. Harrison drew all eyes to himself.

  “Some of you will be wondering what came into the base the other day,” he said. “Well, I’ll tell you. Our A-bombs now have pits. We can use them. If the President gives the order, we will use them.”

  A few of the men—the clueless ones—exclaimed in surprise. Bill Staley only sighed and nodded; that was what he’d expected. The pit looked like an hourglass outline in steel. It had radioactives where the sand would have run from one side of the glass to the other. The bombardier manually inserted it into the bulky casing of an atomic bomb while the bomber was on its way to the target. Without it, the bomb wouldn’t vaporize a city. With it in place, hell could literally come forth on earth.

  “The Chinese and Russians may think they’re safe on the other side of the Yalu,” Harrison went on. “They have been, but they aren’t any more. Or they won’t be after the President gives the word. They think they can get away with slaughtering our troops and shooting down our planes and hiding where we won’t go after them. We haven’t yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t or we can’t. When the order comes, we’ll show them as much.” He looked out at the bomber crews. “If anyone has qualms of conscience, he may withdraw now. No black marks will go into his service record if he does, I promise.”

  That was bullshit. Everyone knew it, promise or no. The Air Force would neither forgive nor forget a withdrawal now. Several flyers left anyhow, including a pilot and a copilot. Bill Staley sat where he was. The Red Chinese were killing too many of his countrymen. Whatever he could do to stop them, he would. He didn’t care what kind of weapon he used. It wasn’t as if they were fussy about such things.

  By Harrison’s scowl, he hadn’t expected anyone to walk out. “All right,” he said. “The rest of us will go on. We are going to interdict the Chinese and the Russians at a much deeper level than they’re looking for. Once that’s done, we’ll finish cleaning up the Korean peninsula.” He looked out at them again. “Any questions, gentlemen?”

  “What happens if Stalin starts using atomic bombs, too, sir?” a major asked.

  “He’ll be sorry,” Harrison replied. The flyers bayed laughter. He went on, “Anything else?” No one spoke. He nodded. “We’ll get ready, then.”

  —

  Boris Gribkov eased the Tu-4’s yoke forward. The heavy bomber’s nose came down, just a little. Easy does it, the pilot thought as he gave the plane a hair less throttle. You couldn’t fly this thing with your dick, the way you could—the way you were supposed to—in a fighter. Well, you could do that, but you’d splatter the plane, and yourself, all over the countryside if you tried.

  The Americans said there were bold pilots and old pilots, but no old bold pilots. Gribkov had no use for the Americans. He wouldn’t have been landing his Tu-4 here at Provideniya if he’d liked them. Like them or not, what they said there was true.

  And, like them or not, they built some goddamn impressive airplanes. Behind his oxygen mask, Boris’ lips skinned back from his teeth in a mirthless grin. He knew exactly how impressive some American planes were. For all practical purposes, he was flying one.

  During the USA’s war against Japan, several damaged B-29s made emergency landings near Vladivostok. Till the very end, the USSR and Japan stayed neutral; Stalin had plenty on his plate fighting the Nazis. He interned the crews (after a while, he quietly gave them back to the Americans) and kept the bombers.

  Russia had nothing like them, which was putting it mildly. Russian World War II heavy bombers were leftovers from the early 1930s, slow and lumbering and useless in modern combat. Stalin ordered exact copies of the B-29. He ordered them and, because his word was law in the Soviet Union, the Tupolev design bureau gave them to him in less than two years.

  This machine had Russian engines. It had Russian cannons instead of American heavy machine guns. Everything else came straight from the Superfortress. Gribkov had heard that more than a few Russian engineers, used to the metric system, had driven themselves squirrely learning to work with inches and feet and pounds and ounces.

  Lights marked the edge of the snowy runway outside the little town on the edge of the Bering Sea. Gribkov couldn’t see the frozen sea. Provideniya sat less than a hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Winter daylight was brief at best. The sun had set long before, even if it was only late afternoon.

  “Cleared to land, Plane Four,” the ground-control chief said.

  “Message received. Thank you,” Gribkov answered. No one mentioned what kind of plane he was flying. Alaska lay just over the horizon. You had to figure the Americans were listening to everything they could pick up. The less they knew, the better for the Soviet Union.

  He glanced over to his copilot. Vladimir Zorin nodded back. “All fine here, Comrade Captain,” he said, gesturing to his side of the complicated instrument panel.

  “Good.” Boris lowered the landing gear. The hydraulics worked smoothly. On most Soviet planes, you had to do the job with a hand crank. More could go wrong with this system, but he took advantage of it just the same.

  The Tu-4 was the only Soviet bomber with a nosewheel.
A few new jet fighters also had them. If you’d started out keeping your nose up and using your tailwheel, the way Gribkov and every pilot trained during the Great Patriotic War had, doing things this way took some getting used to.

  There. They were down—more smoothly than he’d expected. He gently tapped the brakes. The Tu-4 needed a lot of room to stop any which way. He didn’t want to send it skidding by slowing down too quickly on this slick airstrip.

  “Nicely done, Comrade Captain,” Zorin said.

  “Spasibo,” Boris answered. Zorin had landed the Tu-4 himself. He knew it wasn’t easy. A compliment from him meant more than one from someone with no understanding of how things worked would have.

  A groundcrew man bundled up like an Eskimo waved red and green lanterns to guide the bomber off the runway. Not having his nose elevated because of a tailwheel made seeing where he was going easier. The revetment to which the man led him was made from snow rather than dirt. After he killed the engine, he patted the arm of his leather flying jacket and said, “I’m glad we have this stuff. Usually, we start toasting as soon as we’re on the ground, but not today.”

  “No, not today,” Zorin agreed. “What do you suppose it is out there? Twenty below?”

  “Something like that.” Gribkov tried to turn Celsius to Fahrenheit in his head. With so many funny measurements going into the Tu-4, funny temperatures seemed fitting, too. The only trouble was, he had no idea how to make the conversion.

  Alexander Lavrov crawled back from the bombardier’s station in the glassed-in nose of the plane. “Welcome to the end of the world,” he said as he, the pilot, and the copilot climbed down the ladder and their boots crunched on snow.