Bombs Away (17 page)

If the Reds caught him, they could shoot him for wearing their clothes. Of course, if they caught him, they could shoot him for the fun of it. They probably would, too.

He didn't worry about it. Whatever happened would happen, that was all. He'd been on the run ever since things went sour south of the Chosin Reservoir. He wondered how many other dogfaces had managed to get away. Not a lot. He was sure of that.

When he started getting close to those red glows, he stepped off the path and began to crawl. Some snow still lay on the ground. He wondered whether Korea was ever free of it. He knew which way he'd bet.

Here and there, snores rose from foxholes. Cade was glad to hear them; they kept him from making what would be his last dumb mistake. A couple of men talked quietly in singsong Chinese. Now he could tell the difference between that language and Korean from only a handful of syllables. He sure hadn't been able to when the fighting here started. He still didn't speak more than a few words of either tongue. Even that little was more than he'd looked for.

The front here wasn't multiple rows of trenches on both sides, the way it had been in France during World War I. Cade gathered it was like that on some stretches of the line. His guide had brought him here because things were looser in these parts.

Somebody called out something. A challenge? Whatever it was, Cade froze—not hard to do in this weather. The Red Chinese soldier called out again. This time, Cade heard, or thought he heard, a questioning note in the man's voice.

Nobody fired off a flare to light up the landscape. Nobody started spraying bullets around as if from a garden hose. After fifteen motionless minutes, Cade slithered forward once more. His thumb hit a pebble. It clicked when it caromed off a bigger rock. He froze again.

Then, to his vast relief, a dog started barking not far away. The beast probably stayed near the soldiers to eat whatever they threw away. It took its chances, though. It would have been safer with the Americans. With these guys, it could end up simmering over one of those makeshift stoves.

But if they went after the dog, they wouldn't stumble over him…unless they found him by accident while they were hunting it.
Bite your tongue,
he thought. He did. It hurt. He was still alive, then. He wanted to stay that way.

On he crawled. His hand hit a metal post. Both sides used them to anchor their belts of barbed wire. He had a wire cutter. He got to work with it. The strands parted with twangs he would have thought you could hear in Guam, if not in Honolulu. No flares hissed out over no-man's-land, though. No machine guns started chattering, either.

A barb on the wire skewered his finger. He howled and swore—inside his own mind. The stuff was bound to be filthy and rusty. His last tetanus shot, just before he went into action, had left him miserable and feverish for a couple of days. Now he was damn glad that bored Army doc had stuck him.

Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Freeze. What was that? Oh—they
were
going after the dog. Crawl. Snip. Crawl.

Suddenly, no more wire to snip. He'd made it through the Reds' belt. If he kept going, he'd find the American entanglements pretty soon. How jumpy were the GIs on the far side? Would they open up with everything they had when they heard him coming?

He dreaded that more than anything else. He'd made it all this way, dodged the enemy's hunters down most of the peninsula. Now, at last, he could see rescue, see safety. How cruel would the irony be if his own side ventilated him, thinking him a Red?

He discovered the American wire with his forehead. The blood trickling down his cheek was warm. He hoped the gash wouldn't leave a nasty scar. Your face usually healed up pretty well, but usually wasn't always.

Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. He moved as quietly as he could. He heard low voices ahead of him. They were speaking English. Not Chinese, not Korean, not even mangled Latin. English!

He cut one more strand and crawled forward again. He didn't come up against any more wire. He was through! Nothing at all stood between him and his own countrymen—except their fear when they finally heard him coming.
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
That had been FDR, back when Cade was a baby. He'd been way too little to remember it himself, but it was the kind of thing you heard all the time.

“Hey!” he called. Why not? The Reds were several hundred yards behind him. “Don't shoot! I'm an American!” Sweet Jesus! English felt strange in his own mouth, it had been so long since he'd used it.

Sudden silence slammed down ahead, silence mixed with scrambling noises. No, they'd had no idea he was out here. If he'd been a Chinese raiding party, a lot of these guys would be talking to their undertaker.

Somebody chambered a round. The sharp
snick!
was much too audible. Then somebody else did. “Don't shoot!” Cade repeated, more urgently than before. “Honest to God, I'm an American.”

Through the silence, someone called, “Okay, asshole, who played in the Series last year?”

They'd asked the same kind of question to trip up English-speaking Japs in the last war. Cade thanked heaven he was a fan. “Yanks and Phillies,” he answered. “Yankees swept.”

After a pause, that same voice said, “Okay. Come on. We won't plug you till you get here, anyway.”

Cade came. He remembered to leave his Russian submachine gun behind. It wouldn't create the impression he wanted. He tumbled into a foxhole. A GI lit him up with a flicked Zippo. The flame was dazzling.

“Fuck me,” the dogface said. “He
is
an American—I think. Scrawny SOB, whatever he is.” The casual scorn was the most wonderful thing Cade had ever heard.

A BUS RAN
from Fakenham to Norwich. It was about twenty-seven miles from the small town to the city. The bus always stopped in Bawdeswell, halfway between. Every once in a while, it would stop without intending to. All the buses on the route dated from the 1930s, and they'd all seen hard service since the day they were built. No wonder they broke down from time to time. The wonder was that they didn't do it more.

To Daisy Baxter, Norwich had always been
the
city. It was the one she could easily get to. It was her window on a wider, brighter, more cosmopolitan life than the one she lived in her hamlet near the sea.

Or rather, it had been. These days, Norwich was a synonym for hell on earth, in the most literal sense of the words. No one knew how many had died there, not to the closest ten thousand. No one knew how many were hurt: burned by fire from the skies, poisoned by radiation, or simply crushed or mangled as they would have been in an ordinary explosion. The word the BBC most often used about the devastation was
unimaginable.

Daisy didn't want to imagine it. She wanted to see for herself what the Russians had visited on Norwich. She wanted to see what the enormous American bombers at Sculthorpe might visit on Russia. It was morbid curiosity. She understood that.

She also understood seeing any more than they showed in the newspaper pictures wouldn't be easy. Never mind that she'd lose business, because she was sure getting there and back would take all day. She was willing to sacrifice the day's trade. An atom bomb didn't go off in your neighborhood every day—and a bloody good thing it didn't, too.

But she feared she might not be able to see what she wanted to see any which way. The Army and Scotland Yard had thrown a cordon around Norwich. That was partly to help them deal with the devastation in the sealed-off area. And it was partly to keep away would-be sightseers like Daisy.

Since the bomb fell, the bus ran only half as often. No wonder: now the route ended at Bawdeswell. Far fewer people cared about going there than had wanted or needed to go to Norwich. Bawdeswell had nothing you couldn't find in any other hamlet. And, no doubt, the road from Bawdeswell to Norwich would be blocked.

But there was more than one way to kill a cat. Instead of climbing on the bus, Daisy got on her bicycle and pedaled out of Fakenham early in the morning. It was chilly but not freezing, and drizzling but not really raining. If she waited for better weather, she might still be waiting months from now. Some of the grass was greening up. Spring still lay three weeks ahead, but you could tell it was coming.

Before long, she left the main road. A spiderweb of lesser ways still bound the countryside together. She went down one-lane paved roads that saw an auto or two a week, down graveled tracks, and down dirt paths that might have been shaped by flocks of sheep when the Romans still ruled Britain.

A carrion crow scolded her from an oak still bare-branched. “Hush, you,” she told it. “Haven't you had your fill of dead meat and then some farther east?” Instead of answering, the big-beaked black bird took wing.

Hamlets that made Bawdeswell seem like London by comparison dotted the countryside: places with names like Stibbard and Themelthorpe and Salle. Salle was as close to Norwich as Bawdeswell was. She didn't see any soldiers when she rode past it.

A rabbit darted across the road. A split second later, so did a fox, red as a flame. The rabbit dove into some bushes. The fox went right after it. Daisy didn't wait to see whether the fox came out with its jaws clamped on the rabbit.

When she got within eight or nine miles of Norwich, she saw that the farmhouses she rode past stood empty. The bomb couldn't have killed from so far away…could it? She hoped it was only—only!—that the soldiers and police had made everyone so close to the blast evacuate. But the breeze blew from the east, and it carried an odor—a faint odor, but unmistakable—of meat left out too long.

A black-and-white cat trotted toward her when she stopped to look at one of the abandoned houses. It meowed and flopped down and rolled over and did everything but hold up a
PLEASE TAKE ME WITH YOU!
sign. It didn't know anything about bombs or why its people had gone away. Tears stung at her eyes as she started riding again.

She hadn't got too much farther before she started seeing damage: broken windows, things knocked helter-skelter, scorched paint on the Norwich-facing sides of buildings, cattle and sheep dead and bloated in the fields. Then she came round a corner—and there were two soldiers getting out of an American-made jeep.

Whether she was more startled or they were wasn't easy to guess. One of them started to point his Sten gun at her, then decided she wasn't dangerous and lowered it. “What are you doing here?” he growled. By his accent, he was a Geordie, from Sunderland or Newcastle or one of the smaller towns up in the northeast.

“I'm out for a ride, of course,” she said, which was true enough but didn't say how far she'd come.

The other soldier had a captain's pips on his shoulder straps. “They're supposed to have cleared everybody out of this part of the country,” he said.

“Nobody told me to leave,” Daisy said. That was also true, although, again, it didn't address why.

“Well, ma'am, I'm telling you right now,” the captain said. That
ma'am
put Daisy's back up. She couldn't have been more than three or four years older than the officer. Uncaring, he went on, “You need to get back beyond Bawdeswell. If I tell you to go there, will you?”

“Of course.” Daisy lied through her teeth then.

“Hrmm.” The pause for thought meant the captain knew she was lying.
Damn!
she thought. He turned to the soldier with the submachine gun. “Simpkins!”

“Sir!”

“Why don't you throw the lady's bicycle in the back of the jeep and take her over to Bawdeswell? I can poke about here till you get back.”

“Yes, sir!” Simpkins replied. When an officer said
Why don't you…?,
he was giving an order. He was just being polite about it. Simpkins nodded to Daisy. “Come along with me, then.”

She did, however little she wanted to. After she got off the bicycle, the soldier lifted it into the jeep with effortless strength. Then he gestured invitingly for her to climb aboard. That was when she really noticed the passenger's seat was on the right side. “It's got left-hand drive,” she said in surprise.

“Aye, it does,” the Geordie answered. “The Yanks build 'em that way, on account of they drive on t'wrong side o' t'road.”

“How do you like it?” Daisy asked.

Simpkins shrugged broad shoulders. “Took a bit o' gettin' used to—you see things from funny angles. But it's all right now.” As if to prove as much, he put the jeep in gear and made for the main road from Norwich to Bawdeswell.

As he turned on to that wider—not wide, but wider—road, Daisy asked, “How close have you gone to the center of Norwich? How bad are things there?”

“Not good, and that's for certain.” With his accent, the last word came out
sartin.
Shaking his head, he went on, “Some o' the ground right under where it blew, it's all fused to glass, like. Not much left in the way o' buildin's. A few, you can see where they used to be and even some o' what they used to be, but most of 'em's just…gone.
Kaput.
You know what
kaput
is?”

“Oh, yes,” Daisy answered. “My husband was a tankman. He picked that up from Jerry prisoners.”

“Was?” Simpkins heard the past tense.

“Was,” Daisy repeated. “Not long before the war ended, his tank got hit, and that—was the end of that, I'm afraid.”

“I'm sorry,” the soldier said. “A cousin o' mine, he didn't come home, neither. I wasn't old enough to take the King's shilling, or it could've been me. If your luck's out, it's out, that's all.”

“Too right, it is,” Daisy said bleakly. They didn't say much more till he stopped the jeep in Bawdeswell. He gave her the bicycle. She got on and started back to Fakenham. It was well past noon by then. B-29s rumbled by low overhead, eastbound out of Sculthorpe. Daisy wondered where they'd be by the time darkness fell.

Harry Truman studied the situation map thumbtacked to a bulletin board in a White House conference room. Red pins in western Germany, in Austria, and in northeastern Italy made the map look as if it had come down with a bad case of the measles. The more he looked, the worse things seemed.

“This is terrible!” he exclaimed. “Terrible!”

“I'm afraid you're right, sir.” George Marshall nodded gravely.

“They keep coming forward,” Truman said. “We knock out the first wave of tanks and drunken infantrymen. They send in another one, just as strong and just as ferocious. We knock that out, too. Then they send in the third wave, and it rolls over whatever we have left after we took out the first two.”

“It's standard operating procedure for the Russians, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Germans found out all about it. One of their generals said, ‘A German soldier is worth two or three Russians—but there's always a fourth one.' ”

“There sure as hell is.” Truman scowled at the map. “What are we going to do? The way it looks to me is, we don't have enough men to stop them, not even with England and France doing their best to help.”

“It looks the same way to me,” Marshall said.

“We can't let them gobble up our piece of Germany. They won't stop there, either. They'll take the Low Countries, too. And they may take France. What have we got then? Europe Red all the way to the Atlantic. That isn't a disaster, George. That's a catastrophe!”

“There are things we can do about it,” Marshall reminded him.

“Atom bombs. It comes down to more goddamn atom bombs.” Truman did some more scowling. “You were right—I made a mistake when I authorized using them in Manchuria. And the whole world is paying because I did.”

He might have found a way to blame the decision on Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur had agreed with it, certainly. He'd thought it would help his troops in North Korea. It probably had. The Red Chinese were having trouble bringing men and supplies into Korea. Aerial reconnaissance and intercepted radio transmissions proved as much.

But MacArthur and Truman had both miscalculated—guessed wrong, if you wanted to get right down to it—about how Stalin would react. And, in the end, the responsibility lay with the President. It always did. If you took the responsibility, you also had to shoulder the blame. The buck really did stop here.

“No point dwelling on what might have been. We've got to deal with the world as it is,” Marshall said. “And the world as it is has too many Russians in it, and they're too far west.”

“I just got a cable from Adenauer in Bonn,” Truman said. “From Adenauer in a bomb shelter in Bonn, which he took pains to point out.” The President made a sour face. Konrad Adenauer was a confirmed anti-Nazi, which had made him a good man to lead the new, hopeful Federal Republic of Germany. But he was also stiff-necked and sanctimonious.

“And what did he say from his bomb shelter in Bonn?” Marshall rolled his eyes. When he was Secretary of Defense, he'd also had to deal with the German politico. His expression argued that he hadn't enjoyed it.

“He begs me—that's his word, not mine—not to use atom bombs on the territory of the Federal Republic,” Truman answered. “He says the damage they would cause outweighs any military advantage they'd give. He says his people would have a hard time staying friends with a country that did that to them.”

“If we don't do it, in another week or two there's liable to be no Federal Republic to worry about,” Marshall said.

“I understand that,” Truman said, with another harassed glance toward the map. “The trouble is, I'm sure Adenauer understands it, too. He may have the tightest asshole in Western Europe, but he's no dope.”