Armistice Read online

  “Thank you, sir,” Bruce said.

  “I’ll give you your flight plan and your orders,” the three-star general said. “You can brief your crew from them. Good luck to you all.”

  Bruce’s copilot was a burly Texan named Wally Hickman. “Godalmightydamn,” he said. “Reckon I better start praying for real.” He was given to such benedictions as Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the orneriest son of a bitch in the valley. Not this time.

  “Almost sounds like they want us to get shot down,” said Ezra Jacobs, the radioman.

  “Nah.” That was the navigator. Phil Vukovich had got his law degree after the last war, only to put the uniform back on for this one. He was relentlessly precise, as a good navigator and a good lawyer needed to be. “What it sounds like is, they want us to get noticed.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too,” Bruce said. “There’s other stuff going on. Whatever it is, we’re only a piece of the puzzle. Anybody who doesn’t want to join in, you don’t have to. I won’t say boo if you don’t.” The B-29 had a crew of eleven. Nobody backed out. Bruce nodded. “Okay. We’re all a bunch of damn fools. Now we fly the mission.”

  Taking off in a B-29 with a ten-ton bomb in its belly was an adventure. This bomb had DAISY chalked on the casing. The engines were strong enough to get the giant plane airborne…as long as everything went right. Only after the landing gear went up did Bruce’s sphincter unpucker.

  As soon as they crossed the Finnish border, Ralph Sutton, the man in charge of the plane’s electronics, said, “We’re getting radar signals.”

  “Getting queries, too, in English and German,” Ezra Jacobs added.

  “Don’t answer,” Bruce said. “Ralph, start releasing window.” The strips of aluminum foil drifting in the air would confuse radar sets—for a while.

  “Will the Finns tell the Russians we’re on our way?” Wally asked.

  “Answer that one and you win the sixty-four dollars,” Bruce said. “Now that they know we’re here, I’m going down to the deck. No point making things easy for ’em. Ralph, keep the window coming.”

  “I’ll do it,” the radarman replied. He didn’t report any fighters on their tail. That might have meant something, or it might not. The window fouled up his set, too. Other American planes would also be heading for Petrozavodsk, or Bruce figured they would. Putting all your eggs in one basket was dumb.

  The B-29 crossed from Finland to Soviet Karelia between Värtsilä and Sortavala, which had both been Finnish till Stalin took them away in the Winter War. Bruce started puckering again. If Russian radar was vectoring MiG-15s toward him, he’d die. He couldn’t even bail out. The B-29 was too low.

  Phil Vukovich guided the plane toward Petrozavodsk. Al Reynoso, the bombardier, made sure the weapon was up to snuff. It had a two-minute delay to give the bomber a chance to escape. Bruce was glad to give the order to let it go. The antiaircraft guns around Petrozavodsk were waking up. They shot blindly and high, but with a lucky hit it wouldn’t matter.

  A dozen miles behind the B-29, hell blossomed on earth. Two blast waves smacked the plane, one straight through the air, the other, a beat later, reflected from the ground. Bruce weathered them and hoped to make it back to the good old UK one more time.

  —

  Radio Moscow was playing Shostakovich’s symphony about the siege of Leningrad. Boris Gribkov turned up the radio. “I like this one,” he said, a way to ask the other flyers in the barracks outside of Tula whether they minded. Nobody said anything, so he didn’t turn it down.

  Radio Moscow had been playing a lot of martial music lately. The people who ran things were doing whatever they could to get everybody else to want to go on with the war. It wasn’t easy. Tula lay south of Moscow. The Germans had briefly taken it during the desperate winter of 1941, but only briefly. No American A-bomb had touched it. But on the way down from Ukma and Petrozavodsk, Boris had seen more horror and devastation than he remembered from the whole of the Great Patriotic War.

  Halfway through the second movement, the symphony…stopped. Somebody at the studio yanked the tone arm off the record so abruptly, the scratch of needle against grooves seemed almost gunshot-loud. Silence followed. Radio Moscow hadn’t gone off the air. Boris could still hear the hiss of the carrier wave. But that was all he could hear for a minute, two, three, four.

  “What the devil?” somebody said, which was exactly what he was thinking.

  Then a voice came on: “Comrades, this is Roman Amfiteatrov.” The newsreader with the mooing southern accent had replaced Yuri Levitan when the first A-bombs struck Moscow. How long ago that seemed now! After another, shorter, pause, Amfiteatrov continued, “Comrades, people of the ever-triumphant Soviet Union, I apologize for the interruption to your musical program. But it cannot be helped, for I bring you the harshest of news.”

  “Bozhemoi!” Boris said, along with three other men. They hadn’t talked that way when Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev sprouted monstrous mushroom clouds. They’d just told people to roll up their sleeves and keep fighting. For the most part, people had, soldiers and civilians alike. So what could make Amfiteatrov sound like…this?

  “The criminal Yankee air pirates have destroyed the city of Omsk, in the southern region of the Ural Mountains. To carry out their murderous assault, they used a bomb of dreadful, unprecedented power, stronger even than the A-bombs that have been the currency of this imperialistic conflict.”

  Amfiteatrov paused again, and gulped. His voice seemed heavy with unshed tears. He sounds like someone whose father just died, Boris thought. Looking back, he realized that moment was the one when he began to understand what must have happened.

  “Here, then, is what I must tell you, my friends—here is what I must tell all the peace-loving Soviet people, and all the peace-loving people of the…world. Please excuse me.” Amfiteatrov’s voice did break then. In the background, funereal music began to play. Gooseflesh prickled up on Boris’ arms. Roman Amfiteatrov went on, “I have to report that the Great Coryphaeus of the Soviet Union, our beloved leader, Marshal Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, by unhappy chance and malignant fate, happened to be in the city of Omsk, encouraging its workers and peasants to continue their brave Stakhanovite struggle against capitalism and Fascism, when the Americans destroyed the city with this new and altogether abhorrent atomic weapon. Thus, my friends, there can be no doubt that Marshal Stalin, unique among mankind in wisdom and courage while he lived, now belongs to the ages and lives no more.” He fell silent. The strains of the mournful orchestra behind him swelled.

  Tears that felt hot as molten lead burned down Boris Gribkov’s cheeks. He buried his face in his pillow and sobbed like a heartbroken child. He hadn’t cried like that when his own father died during the Great Patriotic War. He’d got the news weeks after it happened, but even so….He’d lived almost his whole life with Stalin at the helm of the USSR. Take away that strong hand and who could imagine what would happen?

  For a moment, he felt embarrassed to show his grief so publicly, but only for a moment. Everyone else in the barracks was weeping and wailing the same way. Part of that might have been fear of being seen not to regret Stalin’s passing, but it was only a small part. Everybody had to feel stunned. How could you not, when the man who’d ruled the country the past thirty years was no more than radioactive dust?

  “Who can hold the Soviet Union together now?” someone howled. That struck Boris as much too good a question.

  A moment later, Roman Amfiteatrov did his best to answer it: “Marshal and Deputy Premier Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria has issued the following statement: ‘I am as shocked and as filled with horror and sorrow as every other Soviet citizen at the untimely passing of the great Stalin. Even without him, though, the struggle against imperialist aggression continues. I shall do everything in my power to bring it to a victorious conclusion.’ ”

  No one in the barracks said anything to that or about that. The flye
rs had acquired their sense of self-preservation over a lifetime. Beria sounded as if he was in charge—indeed, as if no one else possibly could be. He’d made Stalin a viciously effective boss of the MGB for years. But did the USSR really want a blubbery Mingrelian telling its more than 200,000,000 people what to do? Even more to the point, did the Soviet Union want to take orders from the leader of all the Chekists?

  Boris knew that that prospect failed to fill him with delight. But he was only a pilot, someone far from the levers of political power. What would the men who could grab for those levers have to say?

  “The country now enters into seven days of mourning,” Amfiteatrov said. “All business not connected with the war or with immediate emergencies of health and safety is suspended for that period. At the conclusion of the mourning, a memorial service in praise of the undying memory of Comrade Stalin will be held. Stay tuned to Radio Moscow for further bulletins.”

  Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony started playing—from the beginning. No one had any notion where the needle had been when some studio engineer jerked it off the record. Boris noticed that Roman Amfiteatrov didn’t say where Stalin’s memorial service would be held. That made more sense than the bomber pilot wished it did. If the Soviet people found out where the service was, so would the enemy. One more American A-bomb, or whatever this super A-bomb was, and the USSR wouldn’t have anybody left to run things.

  Everybody in the barracks started talking at once. The main themes were I can’t believe it, What will the country do now?, and I feel worse than I did when my own father died. Maybe some men thought they had to say such things to keep from drawing suspicion from others. But the ones who spoke sounded as if they meant every word. Boris believed they did. Why not, when he felt that way himself?

  No one said anything about changing how things worked in the Soviet Union now that Stalin was gone. That was one more thing Boris noticed only in retrospect. With Stalin dead, everything else seemed trivial. The reason was simple. With Stalin dead, everything else was trivial.

  WHEN THE CAMP COMMANDANT ANNOUNCED to the assembled zeks, women and men, that Stalin was dead, tears ran from his good eye. Luisa Hozzel stared at him in astonished disbelief. She wouldn’t have imagined that ruined visage would cry if the man’s mother were devoured by starving wolves in front of him.

  The guards at the gulag also wept. And so did the prisoners who came from within the Soviet Union’s borders. Some of the zeks wept louder and harder than the camp guards.

  She wondered if they’d gone insane. How had they all wound up in this terrible place in the middle of nowhere? Obeying Stalin’s orders, his minions had arrested them and shipped them here. Shouldn’t they be celebrating his death, not bemoaning it?

  But then she remembered her younger self, and how she’d felt at the end of April in 1945. “It’s like when Hitler died,” she said to Trudl Bachman in her prison-yard whisper.

  “It is, ja,” the other woman from Fulda agreed. “No one knows what will happen next, and everybody’s scared.”

  Trudl hadn’t been so quiet as she might have been. Most of the time, the camp guards would have made her sorry. Not this afternoon. They were too stunned to do their jobs as well as they might have. They were even too stunned to fuss about the count. When the commandant limped away, they just dismissed the zeks to supper.

  That supper was no different from any of the other horrible suppers Luisa had eaten since coming into the gulag. She finished everything, licking her stew bowl and making sure she didn’t miss a crumb of black bread. Latrine call was the same as always, too. Afterwards, though…

  Some of the women in the barracks couldn’t stop crying. Luisa would have bet they hadn’t wept that way when they lost husbands or lovers or brothers in the last war. When Hitler died, most Germans were too numbed by the disaster overwhelming their country to mourn like this. Not the Russian zeks, though.

  Part of Luisa wanted to cheer because Stalin wasn’t around any more. She had the sense to keep quiet, though. If she was lucky, she’d draw a long stretch in a punishment cell. She’d come out all stooped over and pale as a ghost. If she wasn’t, either she wouldn’t come out at all or the Russians here would mob her instead of turning her over to the gulag administrators.

  “Will they send us out into the woods tomorrow?” Trudl asked. “The order said everything would shut down except for the war effort.”

  She spoke in German to Luisa, but some of the Russian women could follow the language. Nadezhda Chukovskaya said, “That order was for people, ordinary people. We’re just zeks. Bet your cunt they’ll send us out.”

  She was short and chunky and bad-tempered: no one to mess with. She came from what the Russians called the socially friendly elements. She was a thief or a swindler, not a political prisoner. That put her in the upper class of prisoners here in this classless labor camp in a classless society. And she was a dyke as obnoxious as any horny man. She had all sorts of connections, in other words.

  Not surprisingly, then, she knew what she was talking about. After roll call and breakfast the next morning, out the zeks went, with guards carrying machine guns to keep them in line. Luisa and Trudl worked a long saw together, back and forth, back and forth. Sooner or later, the pine whose trunk they were attacking would fall over.

  They never hurried, except when the guards made them. Most of the time, they clung to the age-old pace of slaves the world around: the slowest they could go without getting in trouble. Today, the guards yelled less than usual. The men seemed as overwhelmed by Stalin’s death as the Russian women were.

  One of them kept dabbing at his dark, narrow Asiatic eyes with his tunic sleeve. “Terrible thing,” he said, over and over. “Terrible thing.” He spoke better Russian than Luisa did, but not much better.

  “Too bad Stalin is dead,” Luisa said: as much sympathy as she had in her.

  “Too bad, da,” the guard agreed. “He great man. He make great country. Now he gone.” He wiped his eyes again.

  Luisa couldn’t even tell him he was wrong. Without Stalin’s driving energy, the German invasion would have crushed Russia, and the world would have been a different place. Better? Worse? It all depended on who you were. But different.

  “What do you think will happen now?” Luisa asked. “Will the war go on? Will there be peace now?”

  “Inshallah.” The guard shrugged skinny shoulders. He wasn’t a hulking Slav; his uniform was all right as far as length went, but hung loosely on his shoulders and chest.

  “I’ve heard that word before, but I don’t know what it means,” Luisa said. “It’s not Russian, is it?”

  “Not Russian, no,” the swarthy man agreed. “Is Arabic. Means is the will of God.” He suddenly remembered he was supposed to be a symbol of atheistic Communism. With an embarrassed cough, he continued, “Only old saying now. Whatever happens, happens—like that.”

  “I understand.” Luisa wondered if she could use the guard’s slip against him. MGB men weren’t supposed to spout religious sentiments. From what she’d gathered, they especially weren’t supposed to spout Muslim sentiments.

  Even if the USSR was supposed to be godless and classless and free from national turmoil, the Russians were the big wheels. They were nervous about Kazakhs and Uzbeks and Kirghiz and Chechens: Muslim groups the Tsars had conquered and the commissars still controlled. Had Hitler overcome Stalin, the grandchildren of his settlers probably would have been nervous about Byelorussians and Russians and Ukrainians the same way.

  As things were, Germans had plenty of other reasons to be nervous about Byelorussians and Russians and Ukrainians—and about Kazakhs and Uzbeks and Kirghiz and Chechens.

  “You forget I say, hey?” the guard said. “I not work so hard you, all right?”

  So he recognized that he’d put his foot in it, too. “However you want.” Luisa made it sound as if she were going along without thinking much about it. The guard’s smile showed a gold front tooth. Sometimes you didn’t need to p
ut on a fancy show to finish a bargain. You didn’t even have to say it was a bargain…as long as you both knew.

  Almost apologetically, the swarthy man said, “You still gots to do somethings, or you gets in trouble and I, too.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” Luisa said. The best bargains were often the ones other people didn’t notice at all.

  “You know, one time I see Stalin,” the guard said proudly. “I in Victory Day parade in Moscow. March past reviewing stand, him on it.”

  Luisa had seen the Führer at a rally or two. Admitting that, these days, was bad form. If this war ended with the USSR giving in to America, would admitting you’d once seen Stalin turn into something you didn’t want to do? Would whoever took charge of Russia—it looked like Beria now—try to pretend Stalin and everything he’d done had never happened?

  She wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it worked like that here. It sure had in Germany. Any tree bent the way the wind was blowing. Either it bent, or it broke.

  She’d bent herself. She’d had to. If you didn’t bend at all, the gulag would kill you. It might kill you anyhow. But she hadn’t broken. She wasn’t sleeping with a barber, say, for the sake of an inside job and better food. She could still look at herself in the mirror. Or she could have, if only she’d had one. It might have been just as well that she didn’t.

  —

  Somewhere behind Cade Curtis, the American loudspeakers started howling in Chinese. Cade had always thought Chinese was a godawful language. Hearing it through loudspeakers at ear-hurting volume did nothing to improve it.

  Cade had learned the little bits of Chinese a soldier from the other side would naturally pick up, and no more. He could say things like Drop your weapon!, Hands up!, and You stupid piece of shit! Somebody had told him the last one was literally You stupid turtle! He didn’t know whether he believed that or not.