Bombs Away Read online

  They brought the big blue truck back to the warehouse a few minutes before five-thirty. Herschel Weissman nodded to them and said, “Go on home, boys. I’ll clock you out at the bottom of the hour.”

  “Obliged,” Jim told him. And he’d resent being obliged, too. His mental circuits would have trouble with the notion of a Jew being generous, and that would make him angry.

  “Thanks, boss,” Aaron added. When they were by themselves, they sometimes talked to each other in Yiddish. Aaron would do that with Ruth, too—but, with her as with Weissman, never when anyone who spoke only English was around. You didn’t want to show American Americans you remembered old-country ways at all.

  He went out and got into his elderly gray Nash. The rented house on Irving was only a few blocks away. Aaron smiled as he lit another Chesterfield. He wondered what little Leon had been up to today.

  —

  Bill Staley parked his behind on a metal folding chair. The seat felt like what it was: steel painted Air Force blue-gray. The chairs must have been ordered by the carload lot, on a contract that put cheapness ahead of everything else—certainly a long way ahead of comfort.

  He had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. General Harrison wasn’t the sort to call all his aircrews together unless he had some urgent reason to do so. Urgent reasons did keep offering themselves, dammit. The Red Chinese went right on pushing forward. They spent men in gruesome heaps for every mile they advanced. The next sign they gave that that bothered them would be the first.

  An American commander who used, and used up, his troops like that would have been court-martialed. He would have won himself a newspaper nickname like “Butcher” before the brass landed on him, too. Bill figured even a Russian general in the last big war would have thought twice before he expended soldiers as if they were cartridges. The Chinese had men to burn, and burned them.

  General Harrison thwacked his lectern with a pointer, the way he had to open the last big meeting. “Gentlemen, I have important news,” he said as soon as the officers and noncoms quieted. “President Truman has authorized the use of atomic bombs against the Chinese inside China. He has not directly ordered us to use them, but he has given General MacArthur permission to send out such strikes if, in his view, the situation on the ground can be improved in no other way.”

  Sighs, whistles, and soft hisses floated up from the aircrews. Just like everyone else, Bill Staley knew what that meant. The only word for the present situation on the ground was fubar. The Red Chinese were in Seoul. North Korea’s flag flew above the city, or what was left of it, but the men who’d taken it didn’t belong to Kim Il-sung. They got their marching orders from Mao Tse-tung.

  If they hadn’t done such horrible things to the UN forces after they swarmed across the Yalu…If they hadn’t, maybe some kind of stalemate would have developed. Stalemate wasn’t the smashing victory Douglas MacArthur had looked for, but it beat hell out of the fiasco he’d got.

  Bombing on this side of the Yalu hadn’t kept the Chinese from flooding down into Korea. No ordinary weapons had. But the United States had extraordinary weapons, and it had decided that repairing things here was important enough to be worth using them.

  “So…What we wait for now is the command from General MacArthur,” Matt Harrison said. “I don’t know when that will come, but I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long.”

  Bill didn’t think they’d have to wait long, either. MacArthur’s military reputation had been on a roller-coaster ride the past few months. He’d looked like a genius after the Inchon landing. That had retaken Seoul and forced the North Koreans to pull back out of the south to keep from getting cut off by the forces suddenly in their rear. He’d planned on wiping Kim Il-sung’s army—and maybe Kim Il-sung’s country—off the map right after that.

  But he hadn’t planned on the Chinese incursion when the forces he led neared the Yalu. He hadn’t planned on it, and he hadn’t been able to stop it. Only stragglers had escaped from the army in the north. Resupplying by air just prolonged the agony, as it had for the Germans trapped in Stalingrad. And the German cargo planes hadn’t needed to worry about jet fighters tearing into them.

  So if he was going to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, he’d have to break some Chinese eggs instead. Which was fine if nobody could retaliate. Japan hadn’t been able to when fire fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao didn’t have any atomic bombs. But Stalin did.

  Whether he’d use them or not…was something everybody would find out. Maybe the show of force would overawe him. Maybe he would think Mao had gone in over his head and deserved what he got. Or maybe the world would find itself in the middle of a new big war when not all the scabs from the old big war had fallen off the wounds.

  Brigadier General Harrison rapped the lectern one more time. “Something else you need to know, gentlemen,” he said. “Aerial reconnaissance shows that the Russians are moving fighters and bombers onto airstrips in southeastern Siberia, and in Manchuria as well. They are getting ready for trouble, and we are the trouble they’re getting ready for.”

  “Great,” muttered a man sitting behind Bill Staley. That was about what he was thinking himself. By World War II standards, the B-29 was indeed the Superfortress. But World War II was over, even if its maladies lingered on. It was 1951. The state of the art had advanced.

  In 1917, the Sopwith Camel had been a world-beating fighter. Run it up against a Messerschmitt 109 and it wouldn’t last long. For that matter, a Messerschmitt’s life expectancy against an F-86 would be just as brief.

  Bill wished he didn’t think that way. A lot of guys simply did what they were told and didn’t worry about anything past the mission. His mind jumped here and there, every which way, like a frog on a hot sidewalk.

  He wasn’t the only one. A flyer stuck up his hand and asked, “Sir, what happens if they try and bomb this air base before we move?”

  “Then they involve themselves directly in the fighting and have to take the consequences of that,” Harrison replied. Everybody knew most of the enemy MiG-15s that harassed American pilots had Russians in the cockpit. But those were unofficial Russians, as it were. You couldn’t stay unofficial when you dropped bombs on somebody’s head…could you? Harrison went on, “We do fly a day-and-night combat air patrol, and we have radar sweeping the sky. We won’t make it easy for them.”

  Something occurred to Bill. He raised his hand. General Harrison aimed the tip of the pointer at him. He said, “Sir, their heavy bombers will be Bulls, right?” Bull was the NATO reporting name for the Tu-4. “If they paint some of them to look like B-29s, will our fighter jockeys up there recognize them soon enough to shoot them down?”

  The base commander opened his mouth. Then he closed it without saying anything. A few seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a…better question than I wish it were. With luck, IFF will alert us that they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. But, if they look like our planes, we may take them at face value.” His expression looked like that of a man halfway through eating a lemon. “You’ve given me something new to lose sleep over. Thanks a bunch.”

  A major who wore the ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters came up to Bill as the gathering broke up. “Good job,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing the Russians are liable to do. They take camouflage seriously. They don’t just play games with it, the way we do half the time.”

  “You sound like somebody who knows what he’s talking about, sir,” Bill said.

  “Too right, I do. We flew back-and-forth missions a few times, from England to Russia and then the other way. I was on one of them, piloting a B-24. Man, you wouldn’t believe what all they’d do to make an airstrip disappear. We didn’t fly many of those, though. The Reds were nervous about ’em. Partly for what we’d see of theirs, I guess, and partly because they didn’t want their people meeting us. Russians are scared to death of foreigners.”

  “I bet I would be, too, if
I had Germans on my border,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, they’re good neighbors, aren’t they?” The major rolled his eyes. “No wonder Stalin wanted satellites between him and the krauts. But now he’s got us on his border, and he doesn’t go for that, either.”

  “And we have the bomb,” Bill said.

  “We sure do. So does Stalin.” The major grimaced. “Ain’t life grand?”

  —

  “Time, gentlemen, please!” Daisy Baxter had run the Owl and Unicorn since her husband’s tank stopped a Panzerfaust in the closing days of World War II. Tom’s picture still hung behind the bar. In it, he looked young and eager and brave, ready to do whatever it took to get rid of the Nazis once for all. He’d never get any older now.

  And I’ll never get any younger, Daisy thought discontentedly. She’d been only twenty-two when she got the telegram from the Ministry of War. Hard to believe that would be six years ago in a couple of months. Not at all hard to believe she was getting close to thirty. As tired as the pub could make her, some nights she felt close to fifty.

  “Time, gentlemen!” she said again. Would a male publican have to repeat himself four or five times a week to get noticed or believed? She didn’t think so. Tom hadn’t needed to, nor had his father before him. But they were gone and she was here, so she did what she needed to do.

  Grumbling, her customers drank up, paid up, and filed—sometimes lurched—out into the chilly night. Most of them wore the RAF’s slaty blue or the slightly darker uniforms of the U.S. Air Force. If not for the air base at Sculthorpe, three or four miles west of Fakenham, she didn’t think she would have been able to keep the Owl and Unicorn going. Fakenham was only a small town; there weren’t many big towns in northern Norfolk. But the men who flew planes for his Majesty and their Yankee counterparts did like to take the edge off whenever they got the chance. The way they drank, they could have kept someone a good deal less thrifty than she was comfortably in the black.

  Closing time meant her customers had to go. It didn’t mean her day was done—nowhere near. She had to clean off the bar and the tables. She had to empty the ashtrays. Why was it that so many people who drank hard smoked hard, too? She’d never got the habit herself. She thought it was nasty, in fact. Nasty or not, with so many puffing away in there, she might have been smoking a packet a day. And nothing was more disgusting than the stink of stale tobacco ashes.

  Once she got rid of those and the rest of the rubbish, she washed and dried the pint mugs and the smaller glasses that held stronger brew. The Americans said a British pint was bigger than one of theirs—not that they complained about the difference when they were pouring down her best bitter. But it bothered her. Shouldn’t a measure with the same name on both sides of the Atlantic also be the same size?

  She was low on potato crisps. She’d have to get more before she opened tomorrow. Potatoes, thank heaven, weren’t rationed. Too many things still were, all these years after the war ended. England might have been one of the winners, but she’d beggared herself in the process. France was better off these days, and France had packed it in straightaway. From things Daisy heard, even the western part of Germany was better off. That seemed bitterly unfair.

  Not that she could do anything about it, regardless of whether the damned Germans ate caviar for breakfast and beefsteak for supper every day. By the way the airmen talked, the bloody Germans were liable to get theirs pretty soon.

  By the way the airmen talked, the whole world was liable to get its pretty soon. And even a place like Fakenham, far from any big city, could get its along with the rest of the world. The Nazis hadn’t bothered it; the only industry in town worth mentioning was printing.

  But Fakenham lay much too close to Sculthorpe. Some of the planes that flew out of the base there were B-29s: bombers that could carry a deadly payload all the way to Russia. Daisy had no idea whether the Russians knew that. If they did, though, they would want to find ways to keep it from happening. She was no general, but she could see that.

  Daisy yawned. What she couldn’t see right this minute was straight. She’d either fall asleep here, next to the gleaming glassware, or she’d go upstairs to the flat over the pub and do it somewhere a little more comfortable. Upstairs won, though the weary trudge felt a lot longer than it really was.

  The sun had risen when she sat bolt upright in bed, but it was much too early. “Bloody hell!” she said, even if no one was there to hear her swear. “I forgot to clean the stinking toilets!”

  They would be stinking, too. Beer made men piss more and aim less. She didn’t think anybody’d puked the night before—no one had complained about it. The job would be bad enough anyhow. She could see why she’d forgotten about it. It was nothing anybody would want to remember.

  Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t have to do it, even before she brewed her first cuppa and grilled a bloater for breakfast. Those were part of today’s business. The toilets still belonged to yesterday’s, so they came first.

  Sighing, she went downstairs and into that dark, smelly little room to do what wanted doing. The toilets were an afterthought in the pub, put in when indoor plumbing came to Fakenham some time late in Queen Victoria’s reign. It would have been Tom’s granddad or great-granddad who added them, and he cost himself no more space than he could help. When things were busy, as they had been last night, that made crowding and messes worse.

  Afterwards, Daisy wished she could scrub her hands with steel wool. Washing them like Lady Macbeth was the next best thing. She did that every night after cleaning the toilets. Because she did, her hands were red and rough all the time in spite of the creams and lotions she rubbed in.

  No matter how tired she got, she was still on the chipper side of thirty. She sometimes dreamt that, in spite of rough, red hands, an American pilot would sweep her off her feet and take her back across the Atlantic to Wyoming or Arkansas or Nevada or one of those other states with a romantic-sounding name. She was sure she’d be happier in some town there than she was in out-on-its-feet Fakenham.

  The flyers chatted her up. They would have loved to take her to bed for the fun of it. Going to bed with a man was fun; she remembered that only too well. You stayed warm afterwards much better than you did with a flannel nightgown and a pile of blankets and a hot-water bottle on your feet.

  But if you went to bed with men for the fun of it, word got around. And they said women gossiped! Plenty of flyers would want to sleep with that kind of woman. Not a one of them, though, would want to take her back to the United States when his tour here finished.

  And so she smiled behind the bar as she worked the tap. She made pleasant conversation. She swatted hands away when she carried pints to tables. If she had to, she spilled things on people too stupid to get the message any other way.

  She slept by herself, in a flannel nightgown, under a pile of blankets, with a hot-water bottle on her feet. If, one night or another when she wasn’t too exhausted, her hand sometimes slipped under the nightgown and took care of certain needs, she was the only one who knew that. By now, she’d got over feeling guilty about it, or even very embarrassed. It was just something she did. Under the clothes, people were animals. She slept better on nights when she scratched that particular itch.

  She did tonight, even though she was tired. But bombers flying low overhead woke her before sunup all the same. When those engines thundered just above the housetops, a body would have had trouble staying dead, much less asleep.

  “Daft buggers,” Daisy muttered through a yawn. They weren’t supposed to land or take off right above Fakenham. The American colonel in charge of the planes at Sculthorpe made noises about how he wanted his men to be good neighbors.

  Good neighbors didn’t shake people out of bed at whatever heathen hour this was. Of course, good neighbors also didn’t fly thousands of miles across the North Sea and Europe to deliver incandescent hell on people they judged to be not such good neighbors. And those not-such-good neighbors didn’t pay return visits. Da
isy hoped like blazes they didn’t, anyhow. She yawned again and tried to go back to sleep.

  —

  Ihor Shevchenko’s valenki made the snow crunch as he walked across the field. A hooded crow hopping along looking for mice or whatever else it could get cocked its head to one side and studied him, trying to figure out whether he was dangerous. He was a good twenty meters away and not heading straight toward it, so it decided he wasn’t.

  Which only proved the crow was dumb. When he was a kid, he would have killed it and proudly carried it home for his mother to cook. He’d eaten crow often enough during the famine years, and been glad every time. He’d eaten anything he could get in those days, and thanked the God in Whom he wasn’t supposed to believe any more at every swallow.

  Stalin had wanted to purge the Ukraine of prosperous peasants, and to collectivize the rest. As usual, Stalin had got what he wanted. If a few million people starved to give it to him, he lost not a minute of sleep over that.

  No wonder so many Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt when they invaded. Ihor had been fifteen then. He hadn’t celebrated when Hitler’s men drove out Stalin’s; he’d already learned wariness. But he hadn’t been sorry, either.

  Not at first. It didn’t take long to see, though, that the Nazis made an even worse set of masters than the commissars. Ihor at fifteen had watched. Ihor at sixteen had slipped away to join one of the partisan bands operating west of Kiev.

  There were bands, and then there were bands. Not all the men in the Ukraine thought Hitler was a worse bargain than Stalin. Some wanted to break away from Russia come hell or high water, and tried to use the Germans as their tools, never seeing that the Germans were actually using them. Some saw and didn’t care. They could rob and plunder, settle scores and murder Jews, and they were happy enough doing that.