Bombs Away Page 6

  Even now, going on six years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, a few bands who’d followed nationalist Stepan Bandera still skulked across the countryside. Ihor kept his eye out for more than crows. He hadn’t seen any Banderists for a while, but you still heard stories.

  These days, they had to know there would be no free Ukraine. As soon as the front started moving west again, that had become clear. But they had also known the secret police would kill them, so there wasn’t much point to giving up.

  When the front came through here at the end of 1943, Ihor stopped being a partisan and joined—or was dragooned into—the Red Army. He ended the war a sergeant, laid up with a leg wound outside of Breslau. They’d done a good job fixing him up. He hardly limped at all.

  He counted himself lucky that they’d let him come back to his kolkhoz after they mustered him out of the army. Plenty of men paid the price for seeing Europe west of Russia by going into the gulag instead. Maybe he had an innocent face. Maybe the Chekists had already filled their daily quota by the time they got to him. Who the hell knew?

  He could have been messing with a tractor engine or putting up barbed-wire fencing or doing any number of other socially useful things. Nobody would use a tractor for six weeks or two months. Fences could wait. Everything on the kolkhoz except his and Anya’s little garden plot could wait. He didn’t see any benefit from most of the work, so he did as little as he could get away with. It wasn’t as if he were the only one.

  He stumped along. After a while, he lit a papiros. His breath didn’t smoke much more when he exhaled than it had before. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular: just away from the other kolkhozniks for a while. Except for his wife, he wouldn’t shed a tear if they all went and hanged themselves. Well, it wasn’t as if they’d miss him if he lay down in the snow out here and died.

  He drew on the papiros again. One thing he’d seen in Europe was that most countries’ machine-made cigarettes were like roll-your-owns: they were all tobacco. Russians mostly preferred a short stretch at the end of a long, useless paper holder. For the life of him, Ihor couldn’t see why.

  A distant rumble made his head come up. He might have heard it sooner if he hadn’t had the earflaps of his army cap pulled down. When he did notice it, his gut twisted in fear too well remembered. “Fuck me in the mouth if those aren’t tank engines,” he said, even if no one was anywhere near close enough to hear him.

  Those were diesels: Soviet tank engines. The Fritzes’ panzers burned gasoline, and sounded different. None of those still in business, but yes, the fear remained. You could still find coal-scuttle helmets around here, and Gott mit Uns belt buckles, and cartridges and shell cases. You could find shells that hadn’t gone off, too, buried in the ground but working their way up frost by frost. And if you messed with them, you could still blow your stupid head off.

  The rumble got louder. Ihor spotted the black exhaust plumes in the distance. Plenty of Red Army tank crews had died because the Germans could do the same thing. The Germans had made better soldiers than his own countrymen. Ihor knew that. But when you took on somebody with three times your manpower and far more resources, better didn’t mean good enough.

  Here came the tanks. Some were dark green; others had whitewash slapped on over their paint. All were dusted with snow. They kicked up white clouds as they rattled west. About half were T-34/85s: the workhorses of the last war. The rest were T-54s, with a curved turtleback turret and a bigger, more powerful gun. They all looked as if they were going somewhere important, and wasting no time doing it.

  Looks, of course, could be deceiving. The commander in the lead tank rode head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could see more. Good commanders did that even in battle. It was one reason you went through a lot of good tank commanders.

  This fellow spied Ihor. His tank swerved toward the kolkhoznik. The rest of the big, growling machines followed. Ihor could have done without the honor, not that he had a choice.

  “Hey, you!” the tank commander shouted as his machine slowed to a stop. “Yeah, you! Who else would I be talking to?”

  Ihor thought about playing dumb. If he answered in broad Ukrainian, he might convince the tank commander he knew no Russian. But the bastard might decide that made him a Banderist and have the gunner give him a machine-gun burst. The risk wasn’t worth it. “Waddaya want?” Ihor would never speak good Russian, but his stint in the Red Army had sure beaten bad Russian into him.

  “Where’s the nearest railhead?” the soldier asked. “Fuck my mother if the map I’ve got is worth shit.”

  If he’d said Fuck your mother, Ihor would have sent him in the wrong direction. As things were, he pointed west and said, “That way—four or five kilometers.”

  “Thanks,” the tanker told him. “I didn’t want to break radio silence to ask the brass. They wouldn’t like that, know what I mean?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ihor said in a way that showed he’d done his bit. Because he’d done the commander a good turn, he asked, “Why are you guys on the move, anyhow?”

  “Whole Kiev Military District is on the move,” the man answered, not without pride. “The imperialists are stirring up trouble against the peace-loving socialist nations. We’ve got to be ready to show them they can’t get away with that crap, right?”

  “Uh, right,” Ihor said. No other reply seemed possible.

  “So—” With a wave, the tank commander got his monster moving. The rest followed. Ihor coughed. The stinking diesel exhaust was fouler than the cheapest, nastiest makhorka you could smoke.

  The whole Kiev Military District? That was a couple of Guards Tank Armies, some of the best troops the Soviet Union owned. Ihor’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on the ground.

  THIS IS THE WAY the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. Bill Staley remembered being impressed with “The Hollow Men” when he first ran into it. Amazing that the fellow who wrote black verse like that and “The Waste Land” could also turn out silly poems about cats. There you were, though.

  And there T. S. Eliot was, in London. As far as Bill knew, he was alive and well and still writing poetry. Good for him, the copilot thought, hurrying toward the big tent where General Harrison was in the habit of addressing his aircrews.

  Eliot was alive and well for the moment, anyhow. If he was in London, how long he would stay that way might be anybody’s guess. “The Hollow Men” was a hell of a piece of poetry—no two ways about it. But Eliot hadn’t got everything in it right. By all the signs, the world was getting ready to go out with a whole bunch of bangs.

  Other Air Force men were also heading for the tent. Bill didn’t like the looks on their faces. They had the air of people heading for the doctor’s office expecting to hear bad news. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his own mug bore the same apprehensive expression.

  He ducked inside. There was a seat next to Major Hank McCutcheon, who piloted the B-29 where Bill had the right-hand seat. McCutcheon took a Hershey bar out of his pocket and disposed of it in two bites. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” he said.

  “We can do whatever they tell us to do,” Bill said, hoping he didn’t sound too much like a man whistling past the graveyard.

  Maybe he did, because McCutcheon answered, “We can, yeah. But I hope like hell they don’t tell us to do it.”

  “Christ! Who doesn’t?” Like a lot of Americans stationed in the Far East, Bill had visited the ruins of Hiroshima. If you flew in a B-29, a plane that might drop an atomic bomb, weren’t you obligated to take a look at what you did for a living? Bill thought so. Even after five years, even with the Japs rebuilding across the vast field of rubble, what the bomb had done was enough to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind. It had finally made Japan realize she was facing something she couldn’t fight back against.

  Of course, what the Red Chinese were doing farther north on this peninsula was plenty to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind, too. Damn few soldiers or leathernec
ks had made it back to Hungnam. The new troops flowing into Korea were trying to keep the enemy from overrunning the peninsula again, not to conquer it up to the Yalu themselves. They weren’t having all that much luck. The Reds weren’t in artillery range of the air base yet, but it wasn’t impossible that they could be one day before too long.

  And atomic weapons might not knock Red China out of the war. Stalin had them, too. He could hit Europe with them, and with his own hordes of soldiers. With his knockoff of the B-29, he might reach America, too. Who had the will, the stamina, to go on after catching a few like that on the chin? There was the question, all right.

  Instead of a candy bar, Bill pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He’d just got one going when Brigadier General Harrison strode to the lectern. Harrison carried a pointer in his right hand. He walked as stiffly as if he’d shoved another one up his rear. The way his features looked didn’t argue against that, either.

  He glanced down at his watch. Reflexively, Bill checked his own wrist. It was 1458; things were supposed to start at 1500. People were still coming in. Bill guessed anyone who showed up late for this particular dance would catch several different flavors of hell.

  At 1500 on the dot (well, twelve seconds after, by Bill’s Elgin), Matt Harrison smacked the lectern with the pointer. “Let’s get started,” he said. “You may have guessed why I’ve called you together again. I’m afraid I have to tell you your guesses are likely to be good.”

  “Aw, hell,” Hank McCutcheon whispered. Bill nodded; he couldn’t have put that better himself.

  To leave no possible room for doubt in anyone’s mind, Harrison went on, “I have received orders from General MacArthur, with the approval of President Truman, to initiate the use of atomic bombs against several cities in Manchuria and other areas of northeastern China. We are going to stop Mao from flooding Korea with Red Chinese troops. We will destroy the rail lines they use and the bases and barracks within China where, up until this time, they have been immune from attack. Are there any questions?”

  A pilot stuck his hand in the air. Harrison aimed the pointer at him as if it were a rifle. “Sir, what happens if the Russians start throwing A-bombs around, too?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Brigadier General Harrison said. “The best answer I can give you is, if they want to play the game, they can play the game. And we’ll see who stands up from the table when it’s over. Does that tell you what you want to know, Miller?”

  “Yes, sir,” the flyer answered. What else could you say when your CO came out with a question like that?

  Bill wondered whether Harrison would give men the chance to decline to fly in a plane loaded with atomic weapons. The general didn’t. He assumed that they’d already done whatever talking with their consciences they needed. “I will call pilots up here one by one to give you your targets and the supporting information related to completing your missions. You may open your orders as soon as you return to your seat.”

  Hank McCutcheon was the fifth man he summoned to the lectern. The major came back with the envelope in his right hand. He didn’t touch the seal till his behind was on the folding chair again; he took Harrison literally. When he did open the envelope, Bill saw a name in big black letters: HARBIN. Below the name, a note read This plane will carry the device. Others in the flight will support and decoy.

  Harbin. Bill knew it was a good-sized city in Manchuria. How many tens of thousands of people would he help fry tonight? Better not to think about some things. This plane will carry the device. How could you not think about that?

  He tried to turn himself into a machine. Along with the other ten men in the crew, he spent the rest of the daylight hours checking out the B-29. The engines ran hot; they always had. If one failed while you were taking off fully loaded, you had to try to put the plane down.

  And if that happened, Marian and Linda would collect on his government life insurance. Pilots had done it and walked away, but the odds lay somewhere between bad and worse.

  They took off after dark. The Japs hadn’t been able to shoot down day-flying B-29s. The North Koreans and their Russian and Chinese pals damn well could. Radar, better guns, more and better planes…A MiG-15’s big guns could tear a bomber to bits in nothing flat.

  Twin Mustang F-82s flew escort for the bombers. The night fighters carried their own radar. They had more range and more speed than almost any other prop jobs. Put one up against a MiG, though, and it was in deep. The guys in those cockpits had to know it. They climbed in and flew anyhow.

  A little flak came up at the planes as they droned north. When they got over North Korea, it grew heavier. B-29s had often bombed Red positions there.

  They took a dogleg to the east to skirt MiG Alley. When they crossed the Yalu instead of turning back, the radioman came forward from his position aft of the cockpit and said, “I’m getting all kinds of hysterical traffic in Russian and Chinese. They know something new has been added.”

  “Understand any?” Bill asked.

  “Not a fucking word, sir,” Sergeant Hyman Ginsberg answered proudly.

  Harbin lay a little more than four hundred miles north of the river: just over an hour’s flying time. The Reds had time to scramble only a few planes. Sergeant Ginsberg reported the F-82s clashing with MiG-9s: second-string Russian jets, a lot like the German Me-262 from the end of World War II. Even a second-string jet could shoot down a none-too-new bomber. Bill was glad the Twin Mustangs were on the job.

  “Harbin dead ahead,” the navigator reported. He had a radar screen to guide them to the target. Hank and Bill had lights on the ground. Harbin wasn’t blacked out—the Red Chinese hadn’t looked for American visitors. Some flak climbed toward them. They were up past 30,000 feet, but even so…

  “Let it go!” McCutcheon called to the bomb bay through the intercom. The B-29, suddenly five tons lighter, heeled away in a sharp escape turn to starboard. The bomb was on a parachute, to give them enough time to get away before the pressure-sensitive switch set it off.

  —

  When the antiaircraft guns started going off and woke him up, Vasili Yasevich thought it was the knock on the door for which he’d been waiting so long. He’d been a toddler when his father and mother fled from Russia to Harbin after the Whites lost the civil war to the Reds and their foreign backers pulled out.

  For a while, Harbin had been as much Russian as Chinese. Cyrillic signs were as common as ideographs. Vasili’s father ran a pharmacy. His mother, a talented seamstress, made clothes for her exiled countrywomen. The family got along.

  Then the Japanese burst out of Korea. Manchuria, loosely connected to the rest of China, became Manchukuo, a puppet of Japan’s. Life grew harder. But Japan and Russia weren’t officially at war. The Yaseviches weren’t Jews, as many of the exiles in Harbin were. They still managed to get along.

  Vasili’s father taught him what he needed to know about compounding drugs. He learned fast but, like his mother, he was better with his hands than with his head. Give him a saw, an adze, a chisel, or a hammer and he couldn’t be beat. He helped his father now and then, but he made a better carpenter than a druggist, and they both knew it.

  All at once, in August 1945, Japan and Russia—Manchukuo and Russia—were at war after all. The Red Army rolled into Harbin. The NKVD rolled in with it. The Soviet secret police had lists of people to execute or to send to the gulag. Instead of going with them, Vasili’s father and mother swallowed poison. They knew what to use. They were dead in less than a minute.

  The NKVD didn’t bother with Vasili. He didn’t show up on their lists. Maybe they thought he was born after his folks came to Harbin. Maybe they decided making his parents kill themselves counted for enough to settle their score against the whole family.

  He stayed on even after the Chinese Reds took over for their Russian tutors in 1946. He spoke Mandarin as well as he spoke Russian. He knew a couple of trades people needed. Even if he was a round-eye with a po
inted nose, the Chinese in Harbin had got used to such folk.

  He drifted from one job to another. The Red Army’s thunderous occupation of the city had made sure a carpenter wouldn’t lack for work. He picked up bricklaying as he helped rebuild what the Russians had knocked down.

  One of these days, he supposed, Stalin’s flunkies would come back and take him away. Like any other wolves, they didn’t give up a trail. In the meantime, he did his best to keep going.

  They were finally getting around to repairing the train station at Pingfan, twenty-five or thirty kilometers south of Harbin. It had been big and fancy during the war years—the Japanese had had some kind of secret project going on outside the little town. Vasili didn’t know, or want to know, the details. He just hoped he would get back to the city alive. Workers kept coming down with horrible things like cholera or the plague. A couple of them had caught smallpox, too, but he’d been vaccinated against that.

  He lay on an old, musty sleeping mat in a barracks hall that couldn’t have been much flimsier if it were made of cardboard. You could see stars between the planks that made up the walls. When it rained, it was just as wet inside as out. Dung-burning braziers did little to fight the icy breezes.

  And, of course, those ill-fitting planks—Vasili could have done much better if only someone had asked him to—did nothing to hold out the noise of gunfire. Vasili had snorted to see antiaircraft guns poking their snouts to the sky here. No one would want to bomb Pingfan. He didn’t think the Americans wanted to bomb Harbin, either. Had they wanted to, wouldn’t they have done it by now? The Chinese volunteers had gone into Korea months ago.

  Vasili chuckled to himself, the way he always did when he thought of “volunteers.” He’d seen how the Japanese got them in Manchukuo. Volunteer or we’ll kill you worked wonders every time. His father had told stories that showed the Soviets understood the same principle.