Bombs Away Read online

  So when the guns started going off in the middle of the night, he thought it had to be either a drill or a false alarm. “I hear planes!” another workman shouted in excited Chinese.

  “You hear farts inside your stupid head,” Vasili muttered, but in Russian. He didn’t think any of the other men he was working with knew the language. Anywhere else in China, he would have been sure that was so. Near Harbin, you couldn’t be quite certain.

  He couldn’t be sure the other workman was hearing brainfarts, either. Through the pounding of the guns, he might have heard engines high overhead, too. Maybe they were his imagination. He hoped they were. But he wasn’t sure, not any more.

  Then he thought the sun had risen. Light—insanely bright light—filled the barracks. He closed his eyes. He jammed his face into the mat as hard as he could. None of that did any good. The light filled him and began to consume him. It was to sunlight as sunlight was to a candle.

  Had it lasted longer than a moment, he felt sure he would have cooked the way a sausage did when you skewered it and thrust it into the fire. But, almost as soon as it was born, the impossible light began to fade and to go from white to yellow to orange.

  “How can the sun come up in the north?” someone wailed.

  “I’m blind!” someone else shouted. He must not have shielded his eyes fast enough.

  Vasili hadn’t even noticed the light came from the north. He did notice that the blast of wind following the flash also came out of the north. And he noticed it was a hot wind, when the only natural gales from that direction came straight out of Siberia, if not straight off the North Pole. There hadn’t been any hot winds near Harbin for months, not from any direction.

  The barracks creaked under the blast. The north wall crumpled and fell in on itself. That brought down part of the roof, too. Men shouted and squalled as planks and beams fell on them.

  Nothing landed on Vasili, though a good-sized chunk of pine kicked up dust about thirty centimeters from his head. He scrambled out through the new hole in the building—the door seemed unlikely to work. Then he stared at the glowing cloud rising above what had been Harbin.

  A Chinese stood beside him, also gaping at the mushroom of dust and who could say what else rising higher into the sky every second. Blood ran down the other man’s face from a cut by his eye. He didn’t seem to notice. His cheeks were also wet with tears.

  “My family,” he whispered, more to himself than to Vasili. “Everyone who matters to me lives—lived—back there.”

  “I’m sorry, pal,” Vasili said. He had no one who mattered to him. Not long before he came down to Pingfan, his latest girlfriend had dropped him like a live grenade. If she hadn’t, he might have stayed in the city. Then he would have been part of that boiling mushroom cloud himself.

  “White men did this.” The Chinese stared at him now, not at Harbin. “Round-eyed barbarians did this.”

  “Americans did it,” Vasili said quickly. If he didn’t talk fast, he could get lynched here. “I’m a Russian. If anybody can get even with the Americans, it’s Russia. The Americans hit China because China couldn’t hit back. Russia can.” He’d always hated Stalin and the mess the Georgian had made of Russia. Now, for the first time in his life, his heritage turned into something that might save him.

  Something went out of the other man’s eyes. “Yes. You’re right,” he said, and Vasili breathed again. “We will be avenged. Or else we will give Russia what America gave us.” China couldn’t do that. If Russia didn’t back her up, though, she was liable to try. That would be unfortunate—for both countries.

  —

  Harry Truman strode into the White House press room. Behind his round-lensed glasses, his eyes narrowed against the TV lights’ glare. Those hadn’t been there when he took over for FDR. You didn’t need a girl to slap pancake makeup on you and cluck at how badly you’d shaved before you went on the radio, either.

  Like it or not, though—and Truman didn’t, not very much—television was the coming thing, and plainly here to stay. If they could, people wanted to see your face when you told them something. He’d be speaking on the radio, too: there was a regular thicket of microphones hooked up to his lectern, each one crowned with a different combination of alphabet soup.

  “Here you go, Mr. President.” Stephen Early, the press secretary, led Truman to that mike-festooned lectern. Early had done the job for Roosevelt, and had come out of retirement to do it again after Charlie Ross dropped dead the previous December. Truman missed Charlie the way he missed a just-pulled tooth. They’d gone back a long way together; Ross was another Independence man. But no one could say Early didn’t know the ropes.

  The cameramen nodded to Truman one by one as he took his place. No reporters sat in the chairs in front of the lectern. He would be issuing a statement this morning, not taking questions. The questions would come later, but later could wait.

  Almost in exact unison, red lights came on under the front lenses of all three television cameras. That meant they were sending his picture across the country, and to parts of Canada and Mexico as well.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Truman said, glancing down at his text. “Last night, the night of January twenty-third local time, to protect United Nations forces battling the unprovoked Red Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula, U.S. Air Force planes used atomic weapons against several Chinese marshaling points in Manchuria.”

  He didn’t say how many places had been attacked. The Chinks had hacked one of the bomb-carrying B-29s out of the sky before it could deliver its cargo. Truman hoped that atomic bomb was an unusable wreck now, but he didn’t know for sure. He also didn’t call the targets cities. Marshaling points sounded much more military.

  “I took this step with great reluctance, but I did take it,” Truman went on. “The bombs were delivered at my order, and under my responsibility as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States of America. I regret the urgent military necessity that forced me to this extraordinary step. I regret it, but I did not, I could not, shrink from it. As I have told you before, the buck stops here.”

  Some people would have set things up so that, if using the atomic bombs turned out not to be such a hot idea, a good chunk of the blame would stick to General MacArthur. Truman was as sure as made no difference that Roosevelt would have played it that way. He admired his predecessor’s subtle political skills without wanting to imitate them. He’d got the job done his own way for almost six years now. He wasn’t as smooth or slick as FDR, but he coped.

  “We have not attacked the territory of the Soviet Union,” he said. “We have not, and we will not, provided that it refrain from any provocative response in the wake of our necessary action pertaining to Korea. We were allies against the greatest menace to freedom the world has ever seen. We do not need to fight each other now. With the weapons in our arsenals, that would be the worst tragedy in recorded history.”

  He wasn’t just talking to the American people. Shortwave radio would carry his words around the world at the speed of light. Joseph Stalin would see them or hear them as soon as they could be translated. Stalin wasn’t the cuddly Uncle Joe we’d made him out to be during the war years. He was as ruthless as Hitler, if less rash. If he had any sense, he would know better than to mess with the USA.

  If. Truman knew he wasn’t the only one going after Stalin’s ear now. Mao Tse-tung would be screaming into it right this minute. Mao would have been screaming into it ever since he got word that big chunks of Manchuria had just gone up in smoke. Well, too goddamn bad for Mao, Truman thought.

  Aloud, he finished the statement: “We do not seek a wider war. All we want to do is restore to Korea its liberty, which came into danger when the North invaded the South without warning. We have a mandate from the United Nations to do exactly that. We serve the cause of freedom and peace, and want nothing more anywhere else in the world. Thank you, and God bless the United States of America.”

  As he stepped awa
y from the lectern, the lights under the camera’s noses went out. “That was a good speech, Mr. President,” the press secretary said. “An excellent speech.”

  “Thanks, Stephen,” Truman answered. He couldn’t imagine calling the plump, dignified, gray-mustached Stephen Early Steve. Charles Ross had been Charlie for more years than he could remember. Truman couldn’t help adding, “I hope it does what I want it to do.”

  “Well, that’s partly in Stalin’s court now, isn’t it?” Early said.

  “Yes,” the President said, not altogether happily. “Now we find out just how good a friend of his Mao Tse-tung is. If Stalin drops bombs on France and England, the NATO treaty says that’s the same thing as dropping bombs on us. I don’t believe Russia and Red China have the same kind of formal alliance—”

  “And Stalin can ignore it if he wants to,” the press secretary put in.

  “He sure can,” Truman agreed. “He has more practice breaking treaties than Babe Ruth did with home-run records. But if he decides he won’t break this one…Well, we’ll do what we have to do, that’s all.”

  “He respects you, sir,” Stephen Early said. “He respects the power of the United States.”

  “Your old boss talked softer to the Russians than I do.” If Truman sounded proud of not being soft, well, he was.

  “It was wartime,” Early replied. “He always worried that, if he got too sticky, Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. That would have fouled up the war effort beyond all recognition.”

  “Would the Russians really have done that?” Truman hadn’t paid much attention to the ins and outs of diplomacy till he got tapped for the Vice Presidency and saw Roosevelt wasn’t likely to live out his term.

  “We heard that Molotov and Ribbentrop did talk after Stalingrad,” Early said. “But Hitler wanted to keep a good-sized chunk of Russia, and Stalin insisted on the status quo ante bellum. So the war went on another two years.”

  “Hitler would have done better to take whatever he could get then, the way it turned out.” Truman paused to light a cigarette. With a reminiscent chuckle, he went on, “After one of our little wrangles, Molotov told me he’d never had anyone talk to him that way in his whole life.”

  “He’s a difficult man,” the veteran press secretary said. “The few times I had anything to do with him, I saw that plainly.”

  “Somebody should have knocked the applesauce out of him when he was younger. He wouldn’t be such a blasted nuisance now if somebody had,” Truman said.

  “Probably not. But if he wasn’t, Stalin would have found some other son of a bitch to fill that slot instead of him,” Early said.

  Truman laughed. “Boy, have you got that right! If you work for Stalin and you aren’t a son of a bitch, you don’t last. Even if you are a son of a bitch, a lot of the time you don’t last. I’m not saying Molotov isn’t good at what he does. But, Lord, he’s a hard-nosed so-and-so. At the UN, Gromyko is the same way.”

  “Mister Nyet? Grim Grom?” Early trotted out the Soviet ambassador’s nicknames. “Well, you’ve given him something new to be grim about.”

  “Good,” Truman said. “I’d sooner worry the other guy than let him worry me—every day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

  —

  Wilf Davies stuck his head into the Owl and Unicorn and stared in surprise at how empty it was. “Where’d all your Yanks go, Daisy?” he asked.

  “Confined to base,” she answered morosely from behind the bar. “They’re on alert, and my trade’s in hospital because of it.”

  Wilf stepped all the way in. His left hand was a hook; he’d lost the one he was born with on the Somme in 1916. Daisy Baxter had known him like that her whole life. She wouldn’t have had any idea what to make of him had he had two ordinary hands. She might not even have recognized him.

  “I’ll buy me a pint of best bitter,” he said.

  Daisy made as if to faint. “Catch me! Now I can holiday on the bloomin’ Riviera!”

  “Well, if you don’t want my money, you don’t have to take it.” Wilf set a shilling and a smaller silver sixpence on the bar. The pint was one and three. When Daisy tried to give him his threepence change, he shook his head and slid the tiny coin back at her with the tip of the hook. A finger couldn’t have done it more neatly.

  “You’re a gent, Wilf,” she said.

  He snorted. “You need your head candled, to see if you’ve got any working parts in there. My missus knows better, she does. Daft old bugger, she calls me. Eh, it’s not as though she ain’t daft herself, mind. Would she have put up with me all these years if she weren’t?”

  “Not likely,” Daisy answered. They smiled at each other. Wilf’s father had been the town blacksmith and farrier. Wilf still worked out of the same shop. He styled himself a blacksmith, though. People brought autos and lorries and tractors to Fakenham from as far away as Swaffham and Wells-next-to-the-sea, sometimes even from Norwich, to have him set them right.

  He raised the pint in his good right hand. By the smile on his face, he started to give some kind of silly toast. But the smile slipped. What came out of his mouth was a simple, “Here’s to peace.”

  Daisy drew herself half a pint. She lifted her little mug. “I have to drink that with you,” she said.

  After a long pull at his bitter, Wilf said, “It’s a rum old world, ain’t it?”

  “Too right, it is!” Daisy said.

  “Last war not half a dozen years behind us, and here we’re staring another in the face,” he said. “So the Yanks are on alert, are they?”

  “They are, and the RAF, too,” Daisy answered sadly. “So you can see why the snug’s not full to the brim.”

  Wilf drank some more of his pint. “They fly the big bombers out of there,” he remarked. “If I was the Russians, that’s one of the places I’d want to knock flat, bugger me blind if it ain’t.”

  “Bite your tongue!” Daisy told him. “If they do that, how much’d be left of Fakenham?”

  “Probably not a lot, I reckon,” he said. “We were lucky the last go-round—not enough here to put the Luftwaffe’s wind up. But a bomb with them atom things inside…” He shook his head. “I don’t know much about that business, or want to. I’m thinking, though, the only question is whether there’d be enough left of us to bury.”

  “You say the cheeriest things!” Daisy’d got to the bottom of her half-pint. She filled it again.

  Wilf’s pint was empty, too. He slid it across the bar for his own refill. As Daisy worked the tap, he fished in his pocket for silver. He gave her another one and six, and again returned the change. “Sorry, ducks,” he said. “I’d like it better if I was talking moonshine, too. I wish I was. But that’s how it looks to me.”

  Far overhead, a thin banshee whine resounded. That was a jet fighter high, high in the sky. In the last war, England and Russia had fought side by side. As soon as Hitler attacked Stalin, Churchill had declared that any foe of Hitler’s was a friend of his. That lasted till Hitler was beaten. No, a few months longer—till atomic fire blossomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the plane up there was watching out for enemies who’d been friends not so long before.

  “They won’t come by day,” Wilf Davies predicted. “We’d spot ’em and shoot ’em down. No, they’ll sneak across the sea at night, the way the Jerries did after they saw they couldn’t knock us flat.”

  “That’s how the Americans did it when they bombed China,” Daisy said. “That’s what the radio says, any road.”

  “That’s how you’ve got to go about it nowadays. Even in the last war, didn’t the Yanks pay a beastly price for bombing Germany by day?” Wilf said. “And it’s worse now. The jets are so much faster than bombers, and that radar or whatever they call it lets you see in the nighttime almost like it’s noon.”

  “You make me want to sleep down in the cellar tonight,” Daisy said. “Not that that’d do me half a farthing’s worth of good if the bomb came down on Fakenham, would it?”

&n
bsp; “You could do worse,” Wilf said. “By all I hear, only way to live through one of them bombs is not to be there when it goes off. But if it blows a ways away, the cellar’s best chance you’ve got. Put some blankets on a bench and hope you see tomorrow morning. Pray, if you think it does any good. Me, I gave up on that rot a while ago.” He held out the hook. Catching a packet like that could easily put you off prayer for life.

  Daisy wondered whether Tom had prayed, there inside his tank. If he had, it hadn’t done him any good. And if she prayed and a bomb came down on the little town here, that wouldn’t do her any good, either. She’d given up praying, anyhow, when her husband didn’t come back from the Continent. She hadn’t had much faith in prayer before the black day, and none was left now.

  The flash of light and, four or five minutes later, the roar like the end of the world didn’t come from Sculthorpe. The runways and Nissen huts lay almost due west of Fakenham. The blast in the middle of the night was south and east of the hamlet.

  Still in her nightgown, Daisy ran downstairs and out into the chilly darkness. She knew what a mushroom cloud looked like. Anyone who picked up magazines or watched newsreels at the cinema would. She’d never dreamt she would see one blazing in the night sky—a very black night in more ways than one, this February first—of East Anglia.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God!” a neighbor choked out. “That’s Norwich, all gone to destruction!”

  Sure enough, the direction was right. The bomb wouldn’t have come down anywhere else in this part of the country. Norwich was the only real city East Anglia boasted. If you needed a hospital, or treatment fancier than the local quack knew how to give, Norwich was where you went. If you needed to buy an auto, you went to Norwich. If you wanted a dress in last year’s style, Norwich was the place to get it. Local shops could be three or four years behind what they were wearing in London right now.

  Norwich was…gone to destruction. Daisy’s Catholic neighbor had got that one spot on. What the countryside would do without the city, Daisy had no idea. She also had no idea whether other bombs were going off farther away than her senses reached, or whether the Russians would come back tomorrow or the next day to visit fire and destruction on Sculthorpe.