Bombs Away Read online

“This may not quite be the end of the world, Sasha,” Zorin said, “but you can sure see it from here.”

  “In more ways than one,” Boris agreed. They were all silent for a moment after that. None of the B-29s that landed in the USSR had been modified to carry an A-bomb. The Americans had figured out how to do that later. Soviet engineers had had to work out the details for themselves. They’d done it, too.

  The rest of the crew also left the plane. Counting the radioman, the navigator, the radar operator, and the gunners, the Tu-4 carried eleven. “Come on, folks,” called the groundcrew noncom with the lantern. “Let’s get you somewhere a little warmer.” He led them toward one of the huts near the runway.

  Meanwhile, other soldiers spread white cloth over the bomber to make it hard to spot from the air. Russians had always taken maskirovka seriously. What an enemy couldn’t see, he couldn’t wreck.

  That hut wasn’t much warmer than the wintry air outside. It was out of the wind, though; that wind seemed to blow, and probably did blow, straight down from the North Pole. A couple of kerosene lamps gave what light there was. Boris wondered whether Provideniya had electricity at all.

  But a samovar bubbled in a corner of the room. Once he got outside of some hot sugared tea, the pilot felt better about the world. Some jam-filled blini sat on a table by the samovar. They weren’t terrific blini, but they were better than the iron rations the crew had downed on the way east. Gribkov assumed there had to be vodka somewhere on the base; there was vodka somewhere all over the Soviet Union. There wasn’t any in that hut.

  A middle-aged man came in. He was too heavily decked out in winter gear to let Boris read his rank, but the pilot wasn’t surprised when he said, “Welcome, men. I am Colonel Doyarenko. This is my base.” He had the accent to go with his Ukrainian name.

  “Thank you, Comrade Colonel. This is…quite a place, isn’t it?” Gribkov did his best to stay polite.

  “It’s the Soviet Union’s asshole, is what it is,” Doyarenko answered, which was only too true. He went on, “But it’s also about as close to the United States as this country comes. I don’t mean Alaska—I mean the real United States. We can strike part of it with some hope of coming back to the rodina again. From most of our air bases, attack missions are strictly one-way.”

  Gribkov licked his lips. “I hope it doesn’t come to that, sir.” He wondered how many crews sent on such a one-way mission actually would drop their bomb at the end of it. He didn’t ask the base commandant his opinion. Ask a question like that and the MGB would start asking questions of you. They wouldn’t care whether you felt like answering, either.

  Colonel Doyarenko shrugged. “I hope it doesn’t, too. Only somebody who’s never seen a war is stupid enough to want one. But I serve the Soviet Union. If the imperialists strike at our Chinese allies, we have to show them they can’t intimidate us. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Boris said. You might not want a war, but once you were in one you were all in. If Hitler had taught the Russian people anything, he’d taught them that.

  —

  I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made. Cade Curtis was absolutely, one hundred percent certain A. E. Housman had never been on the run from the Red Chinese in wintertime North Korea. Housman, if he remembered straight, had had a comfortable career teaching classics in English universities and writing poetry on the side. No other eleven words, though, could have better summed up how Cade felt now.

  He was filthy. He was scrawny. He’d grown a scraggly, rusty beard. He was cold. He wasn’t so cold as he might have been, though. He wore a Chinese quilted jacket under his GI parka. He had some excellent felt boots that fit over his American winter footgear. He’d tied more quilting around his trousers. The enemy soldiers who’d furnished those supplies would never need them again.

  He’d taken all the food they had, too. He only wished they’d had more. He’d stolen whatever he could find in wrecked villages. But he wasn’t the first scavenger who’d gone through them. No place in North Korea had much worth stealing left in it.

  He kept working his way south as best he could, moving by night and hiding during the day. For all he could prove, he was the only American left alive and free north of the thirty-eighth parallel. He probably wasn’t. Other stubborn, resourceful souls had to be doing the same thing he was, singly and in small groups. But he hadn’t seen another white man since the Chinese overran his platoon as they were overrunning the whole overconfident American force up by the Yalu.

  He chuckled harshly as he waited in a hillside cave for darkness to fall. No matter how bad things were, you could always imagine them worse. The next white man he saw might speak Russian, not English.

  A squad of Chinese soldiers with Soviet submachine guns tramped through the valley below. They weren’t hunting him, not in particular. They were just patrolling. With so much snow on the ground, he couldn’t help leaving tracks. But those felt boots did more than keep his tootsies from freezing. They made his footprints look the same as the Chinks’. The waffle-sole pattern on his American shoes would have betrayed him in nothing flat.

  He had a Soviet submachine gun himself. It was as least as good a weapon as his M-1 carbine, no matter how much uglier it might be. Again, the Chinese who’d lost it wasn’t worrying about it any more. Cade could use it without worrying that the unfamiliar report would give him away.

  But the submachine gun was for emergencies only. He also had a long bayonet he’d taken from a dead Tommy’s Lee-Enfield. It had had blood on it then. He’d blooded it several times since he got it. It made no noise at all. If you were careful, neither did the people you stuck with it.

  Cade yawned. He wondered how far south he’d have to get before he found UN troops. If the Chinese and North Koreans had driven their foes back to the Pusan perimeter again and collapsed it this time…Well, in that case he was completely screwed, so he saw no point in worrying about it. Instead, he rolled over and fell asleep.

  He remembered what a tough time he’d had on maneuvers in basic when he had to curl up on the ground in a sleeping bag. He didn’t have that kind of trouble now. He didn’t have a sleeping bag, either. Just him and the ground, as if he were a stray dog. He was stray, all right, strayer than dogs ever got. And he fell asleep instantly. He didn’t bother turning around three times first.

  When he woke, it was so dark he had to look hard to find the mouth of the cave. Stars blazed down from a black, black sky. Something way off to the east was blazing, too. A house? A barn? A tank? He had no way of knowing. He hoped an American air raid had blown a bunch of Red Chinese to hell, but hope was all he could do. The fire didn’t matter enough to make him go find what it was about.

  His watch’s luminous dial told him it was half past ten. The Army timepiece was Zippo-tough. He’d banged it around like nobody’s business, but it kept ticking. The moon was getting close to last quarter. It would rise soon. When it did, he’d start moving.

  Not many people would be out and about in the dead of night. You had to be crazy to travel then, crazy or desperate. He figured he qualified on both counts.

  He scooped up snow and ate a few mouthfuls. Each one turned to a small swallow of cold water. He would have killed for coffee, or even the tea he was more likely to find here.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to. If he was where he thought he was, and if he remembered his maps right—two good-sized ifs—there ought to be a village not too far south of here. If it hadn’t been too badly picked over, he might find some tea.

  He moved slowly, warily, sliding from one moonshadow to the next. Anyone who glimpsed him might have imagined he was an owl gliding from perch to perch. A low rumble made him dive for cover. As it got louder, he realized it had nothing to do with him. It came from the air, not the ground. It was a formation of B-29s, flying north by night to drop some hell on the enemy’s heads.

  “Luck, guys,” he whispered. The sounds of English startled him. He hadn’t said anything at all f
or a few days. Making noise, especially a kind of noise the locals didn’t make, had to be the quickest way to get yourself killed.

  He found the village about three in the morning. He really was where he thought he was—or this was a different village. Different or not, it was good-sized: on the way to being a town. It wouldn’t make townhood now. It must have changed hands three or four times. The buildings were chewed-up ruins. The carcass of a Pershing tank sat in the village square. Open hatches were more likely to mean the Koreans or Chinese had cleaned out the tank than that the crew had pulled off a getaway.

  Guessing the houses near the square would have been looted first and hardest, Cade went to the ones on the southern outskirts. Damned if he didn’t find some tea. He’d chew it if he couldn’t brew it the ordinary way. Hidden under the floor of the house next to the one with the tea in it, he also found a sack of rice cakes, a sack of sun-dried plums, and a jug of kimchi.

  He started to leave that behind. The fiery pickled cabbage had such a stink, the enemy wouldn’t need a bloodhound to track him if he ate it. But, he decided, so what? What would he smell like? A Korean. They gobbled the shit every chance they got. Most Americans turned up their noses at it. Cade didn’t turn up his nose at anything even vaguely foodlike, not any more. He’d eaten slugs and snails. He might have let a cockroach go, but he also might not.

  Food in hand, submachine gun slung on his back, he started south out of the village, happier with himself than he’d been in a while. He’d find somewhere to lie up during the day, and then he’d go on….

  Someone behind him coughed.

  He whirled, knowing it would do no good. The food fell in the snow. The jug of kimchi didn’t even break, not that it mattered. Three Koreans or Chinese, widely separated, had the drop on him. He was history, nothing else but.

  Understanding he was history, he didn’t make a useless grab for his PPSh. He crossed himself instead, and gabbled out a quick “Ave Maria, gratia plena—” If you were done in this world, might as well worry about the next.

  The Koreans stood as if carved from stone. Then they crossed themselves, too. One of them came out with his own Hail Mary. His Latin sounded odd to Cade, but Cicero wouldn’t have followed either one of them. The Koreans ran up and clasped his hands. Little bits of Latin were the only language they had in common with him. They managed to tell him Kim Il-sung persecuted Christians of all creeds even worse than Stalin did. Any Christian they found was a friend of theirs.

  Dizzily—but not too dizzily to pick up the victuals he’d dropped—he followed them out of the smashed village and off toward wherever they lived. Till that moment, he’d been fighting a rearguard action against death, slowing it down, holding it off. Now he began to think he really might live after all. Like an orchid pushing up through snow, hope flowered past despair.

  GRUNTING AS HE SHIFTED the weight, Aaron Finch got the washing machine moving on the dolly. “Plenty of room,” Jim Summers said between puffs on a Camel. He’d earned the chance to play sidewalk superintendent—he’d just loaded the matching dryer into the back of the Blue Front truck.

  “Okay,” Aaron said. He grunted again when the washer started up the ramp. He wasn’t a big man—five-nine, maybe a hundred fifty pounds. But he had the kind of whipcord strength that came from working with your hands and your back your whole life long. He’d be fifty on his next birthday. He couldn’t believe it. His hair was still black, even if it had drawn back at the temples to give him a widow’s peak. But his craggy face had the lines and wrinkles you’d expect from anyone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun and the open air. At least he wasn’t shivering now, though he wore no jacket over his Blue Front shirt. It was in the mid-seventies in the middle of January. You couldn’t beat Southern California for weather, no way, nohow.

  The dolly with the washer bumped once more when it bounced down off the wooden ramp and into the bed of the truck. Aaron paused a moment to settle his glasses more firmly on his formidable nose. Without them, he couldn’t see more than a foot past its tip.

  To his disgust, that had kept him out of the Army. He’d tried to volunteer right after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t take him. He was too nearsighted and too old (he’d turned forty less than a week before the attack). So he’d joined the merchant marine instead. He’d been on the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific. He’d done more dangerous things than a lot of soldiers, but he wasn’t eligible for any of the postwar benefits. That disgusted him, too.

  He wrestled the washer into place by the dryer. It was one of the new, enclosed models. He and his wife still had a wringer machine. One of these days…He’d been married three years now. He’d got into middle age as a firm believer in why-buy-a-cow-when-milk-is-cheap. But after the war he’d come down to Glendale to stay with his brother, Marvin, for a while. He’d met Ruth there and fallen, hook, line, and sinker. They’d run off to Vegas to tie the knot. And now they rented a house in Glendale themselves. Leon was eighteen months old, and looked just like his old man.

  “You gone to sleep in there?” Jim called.

  “Keep your shirt on,” Aaron answered without heat. He draped a tarp over the washing machine to keep it from getting dinged and secured the cover with masking tape. He laid the dolly flat and walked down the ramp to the warehouse floor. He lit a cigarette of his own—a Chesterfield. He thought Camels were too harsh, especially when you went through a couple of packs a day the way he did.

  Jim Summers got the ramp out of the way. He was a redneck from Arkansas or Alabama or somewhere like that. He had a red face to go with his neck, and an unstylish brown mustache. He was four or five inches taller than Aaron, and outweighed him by sixty or seventy pounds. But he was soft; his belly hung over the belt that held up his dungarees. In a brawl, Aaron figured he could hold his own.

  Summers didn’t like Negroes, and said so at any excuse or none. He didn’t like Jews, either. He knew Herschel Weissman, the guy who ran Blue Front, was Jewish. He bellyached about it every now and then. He had no idea Aaron was. Jim Summers didn’t come equipped with a hell of a lot of ideas. Aaron Finch’s name didn’t look Jewish, even if his face did, so Summers didn’t worry about it.

  Aaron chuckled as he blew out smoke. His father had turned Fink into its English equivalent when he came to America. His dad’s brothers hadn’t, so Aaron had Fink cousins. His old man had figured Finch was easier to carry. From some of the things Aaron had seen, his old man had figured pretty straight.

  “Where we gotta take these fuckers?” Jim asked.

  “Pasadena, I think.” Aaron reached for the clipboard with the order form. He nodded. “Pasadena—that’s right.”

  “Not too far,” Summers said, and it wasn’t. Pasadena lay only a few miles east of the Glendale warehouse. They were two of the older, larger suburbs north of Los Angeles. In sly tones, Jim went on, “If we take it easy, we can stretch the delivery out so as we knock off as soon as we get back from it.”

  “We’ll see.” Aaron had grown up believing you always worked as hard as you could: it was the only proper thing to do. How were you going to get ahead if you didn’t work hard all the time?

  He stepped on the cigarette butt, then climbed into the truck with Summers. He shook his head once or twice. How were you going to get ahead even if you did work hard all the time? He and Jim earned the same pay for doing the same job. Jim was as lazy as he could get away with. If that was fair…

  Well, a lot of things in life weren’t fair. You couldn’t bump up against fifty without seeing as much. Some of Aaron’s relatives—and some of Ruth’s, too—had become Reds, or damn close anyway, on account of it. Aaron had voted Democratic since the early 1920s, and he was proud of the Teamsters’ Union card in his wallet. He left it there, though.

  With the world as tense as it was, you could get into big trouble for admitting you liked the Russians. As Jim piloted the truck out of the Blue Front warehouse, Aaron asked him, “Hear any news since this morning?
”

  “Heard the Sacramento Solons hired Joe Gordon to manage ’em and play second base,” Summers answered. “He was goddamn good in the big leagues. I bet he’ll tear up the PCL.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Aaron was a fan, too, but he hadn’t been looking for baseball news. He tried again: “Anything about what’s going on in Korea?”

  “Not much. Far as I can make out, the Chinks are still goin’ great guns, the fuckin’ bastards. We oughta blow ’em into the middle o’ next week, teach ’em they gotta be crazy to mess with white men.”

  “Stalin’s a white man,” Aaron said dryly, “and he’s on their side.”

  “Screw him, too,” Summers said. “He wants to take us on, he’ll be sorry.”

  “No doubt about it,” Aaron agreed. “What scares me is how sorry we’ll end up being. He’s got the bomb, too, remember.”

  Joe Summers offered a suggestion about where Stalin could put the bomb. Aaron thought it was too big around to fit there, even if the boss Red greased it the way Jim said he should. He let the subject drop. You did better talking politics with Jim than you did if you talked with your dog, but not a whole lot.

  They drove east on Colorado Boulevard, then south on Hill Street past the California Institute of Technology. Jim Summers’ comment on that was, “Buncha Hebes with hair they forgot to comb playin’ with slide rules.” He wouldn’t have known what to do with a slide rule if it slid up and bit him in the leg. Aaron didn’t know much himself, but he’d picked up some when he got promoted to acting assistant engineer on one of the Liberty ships he’d crewed.

  The house that got the washer and dryer was of white-painted stucco with a red Spanish tile roof. Aaron was smoother than Jim at hooking up the water and gas connections, so he did that. He showed the housewife both machines were in good working order. “You have any trouble, you just call us,” he told her. “The number’s on the carbon for your form there.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said, and tipped each of them a dollar. Aaron didn’t like taking money for doing what he was supposed to do, but Jim pocketed his single with the air of a man who wouldn’t have minded a fin. Declining after that would have been awkward, so Aaron kept quiet. One look at the size of the house and at the furniture told him the lady wasn’t giving them anything she couldn’t afford.