Armistice Read online

  “Remember it, then,” Morozov said.

  “I do, Comrade Sergeant. I serve the Soviet Union.”

  “When you feel like it. When you can’t get away with anything else.” In a different tone of voice, that would have been a denunciation. As it was, Konstantin was ribbing Eigims, and doing it broadly enough so neither one doubted that was all he was doing.

  Eigims said, “I remember, sure, but this is different. The Americans can hit a lot harder than Hitler did.”

  “So can we,” Konstantin said. “We’ve talked about this before, Juris. Do we need to do it again?”

  “Do we need to get killed for nothing?” the gunner returned. “We had the USA and England on our side the last time. Who’s on our side now?”

  “China is,” Morozov said loyally. Eigims rolled his pale, cold eyes. Konstantin added, “And the satellites.”

  “They’re trying to get out of orbit, and you know it. The brass are pulling men away from the line here to fight back there. Is that good news?”

  “You think I’m an idiot? Of course it’s not good news,” Konstantin said. “But what are we supposed to do about it? You think the enemy will give a shit about your politics? If you don’t blow his dick off first, he’ll sure as hell blast yours.”

  German sergeants must have been saying the same thing to the men they led from about 1943 on. And the junior Fritzes must have listened, too, because they’d fought the Red Army like mad bastards till they couldn’t fight any more. Now maybe it was the Red Army’s turn to fight like that. Sometimes all your choices were bad.

  Juris Eigims’ mouth twisted. He didn’t want to listen to what Morozov was saying. He didn’t want to be in the Red Army, either. Had he been a little older during the last war, he might have picked up a rifle and tried to keep the Russians out of his tiny, worthless, tinpot country. Konstantin could read him much too easily.

  He said something else: “Don’t bug out, man. You might have one chance in four of making it through the line to the other side without getting caught. The other three, some bored Chekist puts down his cigarette long enough to plug you in the back of the neck. Then he picks it up again and finishes it. Even if you sneak over to the Yankees, fifty-fifty they get overeager and shoot you before you can give up. C’mon. You’re no dope. You know fucking well I’m right. Are those betting odds?”

  “Nooo.” Eigims said what he obviously didn’t want to.

  Konstantin stood up, walked over to him, and thumped him on the back. “So it’s a fuckup. A lot of soldiering’s a fuckup. Hell, a lot of life’s a fuckup. Ride it out the best way you can and hope it gets better, that’s all. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “Fuck your mother, Comrade Sergeant,” Eigims said sadly. With mat, how you said something was more important than what you said. Not everyone who hadn’t grown up speaking Russian got that, but the tank gunner did.

  So Morozov had no trouble translating the all-purpose obscenity into something like Well, you’re right, goddammit. “Yours, too. In the mouth,” he said, which meant, more or less, Damn straight I am. He continued, “Shall we see if they’ve got any fuel and ammo for us?”

  “Pretty hard to fight a war without ’em,” Juris Eigims agreed.

  That was also true. The uprisings in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia did more than siphon off men who should have kept fighting the imperialists. They kept supplies from getting through to the troops who were still fighting the imperialists. As Eigims said, not good news.

  Vazgan Sarkisyan looked up from the T-54’s engine. He and Vladislav Kalyakin were poking around in there with wrenches. The diesel had been farting out too much black smoke even for a motor of its kind. If the enemy spotted your exhaust long before you could see his, he had plenty of time to cook up something nasty for you.

  “Thanks, Comrade Sergeant,” Eigims said. “You let me blow off some steam, anyhow.”

  “Everybody needs to do that once in a while,” Konstantin answered. “I know you don’t love Russians. But you’ve got to remember, you are where you are. You go off the rails, you won’t like what happens after that.”

  Revetments camouflaged with usual Red Army attention to detail protected the ammunition store and the fuel bowsers. Morozov and Eigims had almost got to the fuel-storage area when the shriek of jet engines low overhead sent them both diving for cover.

  The planes were American F-80s with unswept wings. They were almost as outmoded as FW-190s…except when no more modern fighters were around to shoot them down. Now, for instance. They had rockets under their wings. They carried heavy machine guns. Each one hauled a bomb below its fuselage. They unloaded their ordnance on the tank regiment.

  Konstantin used a rugby tackle to take Eigims down. They both flattened out while the planes bombed and strafed before zooming back off to the west. Blast picked Morozov up, then slammed him to the ground like a bad-tempered wrestler. He fought to breathe. Blast could kill you even if no fire or jagged steel touched your body.

  The attack couldn’t have lasted longer than a minute or two. It only seemed to go on forever. When Konstantin doggedly stumbled to his feet, he looked back in the direction from which he’d come. Plumes of greasy black smoke rose to the uncaring sky.

  Eigims’ boots pounded beside Morozov’s. Pretty soon the Balt, taller and with longer legs, outdistanced him. It didn’t matter much. Tree cover or not, maskirovka or not, their tank was one of the machines that burned. Kalyakin and Sarkisyan lay near the flaming corpse like rag dolls tossed aside by a child having a tantrum. Konstantin and Eigims stared at each other. If Eigims wanted to desert now, the sergeant didn’t know what to say that might hold him back.

  —

  Harry Truman had named General Omar Bradley his new Secretary of Defense. The only civilian he could have chosen who had the necessary clout was Dwight Eisenhower. Since Ike was busy running for President as a Republican, that wouldn’t have worked so well.

  Bradley and other new Cabinet members served without Senate confirmation. The Senate wasn’t yet a functioning body again. The House was in even worse shape. Truman understood he set horrible new precedents every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. For all practical purposes, he ruled by decree. He figured the USA would sort things out later if it won the war. If it didn’t, whether things got sorted out stopped mattering.

  Though highly competent, Bradley was a bit of a comedown after George Marshall. Of course, after Marshall anyone this side of God and Winston Churchill would have been. “I have good news, Mr. President,” Bradley said now.

  “Good. I could use some,” Truman answered.

  “Believe me, Mr. President, I understand that,” Bradley said. “Well, the report from the South Pacific is just in. As far as the physicists can tell, the test was successful in every way.”

  “All right. I suppose it’s all right, anyhow.” Truman still wasn’t altogether sure. Even before this war started, scientists had told him there was a step up from the A-bomb. When you talked about A-bomb explosions, uranium or plutonium, you talked about the equivalent of thousands of tons of TNT. One of those bombs could rip the heart out of a big city, or knock a smaller city flat.

  Those were fission bombs. When you added hydrogen to them and used them to trigger the bigger boom, you got what the fellows with the tweed jackets or lab coats called a fusion bomb, or sometimes an H-bomb for the hydrogen. When you calculated how strong they could be, you had to think in terms of millions of tons of TNT, not thousands. One of them wouldn’t just wreck part of Manhattan, the way the Russians’ A-bomb had. An H-bomb would level all five boroughs, with Jersey City and part of Long Island thrown in for a bonus.

  “What’s left of the island where they touched it off?” Truman asked.

  “Eniwetok? Not much, sir,” Bradley said. “That’s the short answer. I can give you a longer one, but that’s what it boils down to. Quite a bit of Eniwetok has boiled down, as a matter of fact.”

  “I believe you. God
help us all,” Truman said. “No sign of any Russian planes close enough to spy the blast?”

  “None picked up visually or on radar,” the Secretary of Defense replied. “Submarines, of course, are much harder to spot, so we can’t be a hundred percent sure the Russians don’t know.”

  “We can never be a hundred percent sure about the damn Russians,” Truman said bitterly. He and his top generals and spies hadn’t dreamt Stalin would strike back if the Air Force A-bombed Manchuria. How many millions had died from that miscalculation? And…“Any notion of how close they are to an H-bomb of their own?”

  “We think they’re still some distance behind us, Mr. President,” Omar Bradley said. “But anyone who claims he’s certain about the Russians isn’t as certain as he imagines he is.”

  “ ‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ ” Truman quoted Churchill on Russia. And Churchill had been talking just after the outbreak of World War II, when Stalin and Hitler were still making like bosom buddies. Uncle Joe’s USSR hadn’t got less opaque since. No one in the West had expected the Bull bomber, the B-29 copy that gave Stalin a plane able to deliver A-bombs. And no one had expected that, two years after he got the Bull, he would have A-bombs to deliver.

  So Russian physicists and engineers were bound to be working on the H-bomb as hard as their American counterparts were. Underestimating them would be deadly dangerous.

  “Yes, sir,” Bradley replied. “You can’t very well say he was wrong, either.”

  “He sure wasn’t. We’ve found that out the hard way,” Truman said. “Any news from the other big project?”

  “Long Reach?” With obvious regret, the Secretary of Defense shook his head. “We’re doing everything we know how to do to get what we need there, but so far we just haven’t had any luck.”

  “Too bad,” Truman said. “Be sure to let me know the minute we learn anything on that front. The minute, you hear me?”

  “Of course, Mr. President. We have the parallel project running with Red China, naturally. If Mao makes a mistake, it’ll be the last mistake he ever makes.”

  “That would be nice. Chiang Kai-shek would think so; you bet he would. But Chiang either wants Mao’s head mounted on the wall above his sofa or served up medium-rare with an apple in its mouth.”

  “Er—yes,” Bradley said, looking revolted at the idea that the President might mean it literally. And Truman pretty much did. Chiang Kai-shek had gone from running the most populous country in the world to lording it over an island a little bigger than Maryland. Would he hate the man who’d reduced him so? Had Napoleon hated the English after they sent him to Elba? Oh, maybe just a little.

  Napoleon’s second act was mercifully brief. Chiang didn’t want a Waterloo if he invaded the mainland. So far, Truman had kept him from doing any such thing. So had his own sense of self-preservation. If Mao Tse-tung were to have an unfortunate accident, though…

  “I have one more question for you, General. Then I’ll let you go,” Truman said. “If the war should end fairly soon, can we pick up the pieces and make…something out of this mess, anyhow?”

  “We’ve broken an awful lot of eggs, sir,” Omar Bradley answered. “The omelette we end up with will be overcooked and ragged around the edges, but we’ll have to eat it anyway.”

  “Won’t we just?” Of themselves, Truman’s eyes went to the black-framed photos of Bess and Margaret on his desk. So many millions had died. Somehow, he wasn’t astonished God had made him feel that to the fullest. He only wished the Lord had taken him instead.

  Bradley saluted and left his office. Philadelphia, these days, had more ground- and air-based radar sets and antiaircraft guns surrounding it than any other city on earth. The Russians might get through anyhow. You never could tell. All you could do was make things hard for them.

  The President threw himself back into work. Work was the only anodyne he had. The harder he worked at winning the fight overseas and putting the domestic scene back together, the less he’d think about the mess he’d already made of things.

  A report said the harbors in the San Francisco Bay were finally functioning at close to their prebomb level. That was progress. It would help keep the war in Korea, the war that had spawned the bigger war, sputtering along a half-forgotten while longer.

  He read a scrawled letter from a man down in Cajun country who complained that the increase in shipping out of the Mississippi was fouling up his crab and oyster harvest. Truman sighed. Nice to know that someone could get upset about such mundane troubles. He went back to the job, and kept at it nineteen hours a day.

  A week later, the phone rang. It was Omar Bradley. “Sir, we have a Long Reach positive,” he said. “The resources have been in place for some time, all but one, and now we’re in a position to use that, too.”

  “Execute the plan, then,” Truman said. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all. The Russians will feel it whether we get everything we want or not.”

  “I’ll give the order,” Bradley said, and hung up.

  —

  Bruce McNulty had flown his B-29 out of Sculthorpe, west of Norwich, till a Russian A-bomb blew the air base off the map. Now he was stationed at a strip not far from Dundee, up in Scotland. That gave him a few hundred miles of head start when he flew against the northwestern Soviet Union, and let him reach deeper into the vast country.

  He’d delivered as many A-bombs as any pilot still alive. His superiors chose to think that was because he was so damn good at what he did. And he was good; he knew that. He’d been a bomber pilot during the last war, too, though on mediums, not heavies. He was smart. He was careful.

  He was lucky. He knew only too well how lucky he was. Every time you went up there over Russia, you played Russian roulette. So far, the loaded chamber hadn’t come up when he spun the cylinder and pulled the trigger. Plenty of men just as good as he was had flown against the Reds and not come back. As far as he could see, skill had damn little to do with that.

  As long as the brass thought otherwise, he didn’t waste time telling them they were full of shit. He accepted promotions and decorations. But why had that goddamn chunk of flaming wreckage come down on Daisy Baxter’s head instead of his? Dumb luck, nothing else but.

  Because he was hot stuff to the brass, he got sucked into Operation Long Reach. He was one of the decoy pilots: that was what he got for sticking with an obsolescent aircraft. But even the decoys in Long Reach carried A-bombs.

  The briefing officer was a lieutenant general. Bruce had never seen that before. He didn’t suppose he would ever see it again, either. He didn’t know everything there was to know about Long Reach. What his superiors didn’t tell him, the MGB couldn’t pull out of him in case he got shot down and captured.

  He knew for a fact, however, that whoever’d hatched Long Reach wasn’t thinking small. You didn’t use an A-bomb to distract the enemy or a three-star general to explain a mission unless something pretty juicy was in the works.

  Something, say, that made D-Day look like a beach party by comparison.

  “Petrozavodsk—that’s where you’re going.” The general pointed to it on a map. He hadn’t offered Bruce his name. Bruce had the feeling that, if he asked for it, the senior man would refuse to cough it up. The officer continued, “It’s east of Leningrad, on the western shore of Lake Onega. The railroad up to Murmansk goes through it. So does some shipping—that’s a big lake. It has, oh, 125,000 people, something like that.”

  “It won’t after we get through with it,” Bruce said. “Looks like a decent target, all right. How come we haven’t hit it sooner than this?”

  Instead of answering, the three-star general said, “You tell me.”

  Bruce eyed the map. He didn’t need long. “Oh,” he said. “Bad air route. Finland shields the short trip.”

  “There you go.” The general nodded. Like Switzerland, Finland was a neutral. When Stalin knocked her out of the last war, he could have turned her into another Communist satellit
e. He hadn’t. He’d let her stay free and democratic…as long as she didn’t tick him off. She repaid him by banning military flights through her airspace, and by going after violators with her small but ferocious fighter force.

  “So you’ll want me to go down through Karelia?” Bruce asked. The Reds had a lot of flak guns and air bases up there. Odds of coming back didn’t look great.

  But Mr. Three Stars said, “Nope. You have our permission to attack by way of Finland. In fact, you are ordered to do so. How you get out, of course, will be up to you.”

  “By way of Finland?” Bruce echoed, wondering whether he’d heard straight. The lieutenant general nodded—he had. He said, “But the Finns have radar—they’ll spot me. And, chances are, they’ll let the Russians know we’re coming.” This time, the general only shrugged. Bruce threw his hands in the air. “Sounds like you want the Reds to know we’re on the way, dammit!”

  The senior officer sat mute for several seconds. At last, grudgingly, he said, “You do need to bear in mind that you are just one part of a larger operation.”

  “A trout grabs a worm, and a fisherman has himself a fish supper,” Bruce said.

  “That’s about the size of it,” the three-star general agreed.

  “But the worm still gets eaten,” Bruce observed. The lieutenant general might have been carved from basalt. Sighing, Bruce continued, “You have to forgive me, sir. I’ve never been a worm before.”

  “Are you declining the mission?” the three-star man asked. “If you are, tell me right now, so I can assign it to someone else.”

  If you are, tell me right now, so you can kiss your Air Force career goodbye. The general didn’t say that. Bruce had been in the service long enough to hear it even so. He sighed again. “No, I’ll take it on. What the hell? The Finns and the Russians may be laughing too hard to shoot straight.”

  “I can’t talk about the Finns. If Long Reach goes according to plan, I swear to you that the Russians won’t think it’s funny,” the lieutenant general said. “You will be playing a major role in the war, I promise. I shouldn’t tell you even so much, but you’re going into danger for your country, and I think I owe it to you.”