Bombs Away (19 page)

As soon as Gribkov was installed in the left-hand seat, he started running through checks with Zorin and Gennady Gamarnik, the engineer. The engines powering the Tu-4 were only cousins to those the B-29 used, but they had the same problems. They ran hot, and they were barely powerful enough to get a fully laden bomber off the ground. You had to be careful with them, or you wound up dead—to say nothing of all over the landscape.

When the engines started, the roar and vibration filled the cockpit. One by one, the Tu-4s in B-29's clothing rumbled down the runways and climbed into the air. None of them climbed very high. They all turned southwest after takeoff: away from the questing radars near Nome and on St. Lawrence Island. Fighter-bombers were attacking those, but who could say if they'd knock them out?

After the Tu-4s had flown that way for twenty minutes or so, they swung to the southeast, toward the United States. They scattered across the North Pacific like wandering albatrosses, separating from each other one by one. Even if the Americans should spot them and come hunting, they wouldn't have an easy time knocking them all down. And every single bomber packed a massive punch.

The sun sank behind Boris Gribkov. His Tu-4 flew almost half as fast as the line of night traveled. Since he was moving against the cycle, sunset came on sooner than it would have otherwise. Now it would be up to Leonid Tsederbaum, the navigator, to get them where they needed to go.
He's a smart Jew,
Gribkov thought.
He'll take care of it.

He kept his fuel mixture lean and the throttles as low as he could while staying airborne. His target wasn't at the far end of the Tu-4's range, the way so many were. He wasn't necessarily on a one-way trip. Not necessarily, no, but he knew damn well that remained the way to bet.

“Want to hear something funny?” Vladimir Zorin said.

“I'd
love
to hear something funny, Volodya,” Gribkov answered. “What have you got?”

“I was just thinking—if this really were a B-29, we could fly it.”

“Bet your cunt, we could!” Gribkov exclaimed. The dials and labels would be in English, but he knew what they did without reading them. The measurements would also be in the English units that had driven Tupolev's aeronautical engineers to distraction. That could prove a bigger problem, but as long as the indicators stayed out of the red it wouldn't be anything he needed to worry about.

Tsederbaum's voice on the intercom sounded in his earphones: “Comrade Pilot, please bring the plane two degrees farther north. I say again, two degrees farther north.”

“I'm doing it.” As Gribkov spoke, his hands on his yoke and his feet on the pedals made the course correction with next to no conscious thought from him. He kept his eyes glued to the altimeter, the artificial horizon, and the angle indicator. You had to trust your instruments when you flew at night. Your senses would fool you and betray you. You'd think everything was fine till you went into the drink.

When he yawned, Zorin passed him a flat pressed-tin package of benzedrine tablets. He dry-swallowed one. “Shame I can't wash it down with some vodka,” he said. His copilot gave back a crooked smile.

Gribkov's eyes opened wider. His heart pounded harder. His mouth got dry. He'd been sniffling a little, but his nose dried out, too. His gaze darted from one instrument to the next like a hunted animal's. The little white pill was on the job.

“You should take one, too,” he told Zorin. The copilot did. Benzedrine made you pay later, but that would be later. For now, Gribkov felt like a new man. And, right now, what would happen when he came down from the pep pill was the least of his worries.

He flew on. He saw nothing through the windshield but darkness and his own reflection, faintly lit up by the lights from the instrument panel. It might have been better that way. The USSR hadn't tried making Plexiglas—much less curved sheets of Plexiglas—till it set out to duplicate the B-29. The result wasn't perfect. In the daytime, you got a distorted view of the world. Darkness looked the same any which way, distorted or not.

More than three thousand kilometers from Provideniya to the target. More than two thousand miles, if you were going to think like an American. More than seven hours of flying. You just kept going. You monitored the course as best you could. Every so often, Tsederbaum gave you another small correction. You applied it.

How many more Tu-4s were in the air, from Provdeniya and Vrangel Island and other Soviet Far East bases? Gribkov had no idea. But the number wouldn't be small. How many of those eleven-man crews would ever see the
rodina
again? He feared the number wouldn't be large.

“Comrade Pilot, time to gain altitude for the attack run,” Tsederbaum said.

“Thank you, Comrade Navigator.” Gribkov pulled back on the yoke. The Tu-4's nose rose. This was where things got tricky. He had literally stayed under the Americans' radar on the way across the Pacific. But he had to rise to deliver the bomb. They'd spot him. His IFF would have outdated codes. If they were on their toes, they could scramble fighters. If the
maskirovka
didn't fool them, they could shoot him down.

But there was the western coast of the USA, dead ahead. It was supposed to be blacked out, but it wasn't. With the radar in the plane, that wouldn't have mattered much, but a proper blackout would have made things harder. As they were, he could guide himself as if by a road map.

“Are we ready, Comrade Bombardier?” he asked as they flew 9,000 meters over sleeping Seattle.

“We are, Comrade Pilot,” Lavrov said. “I bomb at your order.”

“Bomb!” Gribkov said. The Tu-4 got five tonnes lighter as the egg of death fell free. He banked toward the ocean and mashed the throttles to the red line.

MARIAN STALEY GOT LINDA
to bed a little past eight o'clock. Linda didn't much want to go to bed—when did she ever?—but she didn't pitch one of the famous fits that make four-year-olds lucky to live to five, either. After a while, the wiggling and soft singing from her bedroom settled down toward quiet. After a little while longer, surprisingly deep snores floated out. Marian smiled. Linda was down for the count.

To celebrate, Marian went into the kitchen, took a can of Olympia out of the icebox (actually, it was a refrigerator, but the old name stuck), and opened it with a church key. She started to pour the beer into a glass, then shook her head and drank from the can. She didn't have anybody to impress. Besides, this way she wouldn't have to wash the glass.

She always remembered savoring that beer. It had been a busy day, with a lot of running around: the grocery, the bank, the laundry, a secondhand bookstore. Linda'd been…not terrible, but enough to keep Marian on her toes. She felt she'd earned the Oly.

Everything else about the day seemed the same way. She worried about Bill, over there in Korea. She worried about the war in Europe, too. But all of those concerns lay thousands of miles away. They were noises from another room, like her daughter's snores.

She turned on the radio to catch some news. “It's nine P.M. on Thursday, March 1, 1951,” the broadcaster said. “Mayor Bill Devin has announced that Seattle's civil defenses are being beefed up. Air-raid warnings are scheduled to begin next week. Mayor Devin said, ‘We did this after Pearl Harbor, too. We turned out not to need it then. I don't expect we'll need it now, either. But, as the Boy Scouts say, it's always better to be prepared.' ”

Everett actually lay about twenty miles north of Seattle. Unless the suburb did the same thing as the big city, the air-raid alerts wouldn't matter here.
Just as well,
Marian thought. If the sirens weren't enough to throw Linda into a tizzy, she didn't know what would be.

The broadcaster bragged about how many planes the Boeing plant was turning out. “Full speed ahead for the war effort!” he said. As Boeing went, so went business in Seattle and all the bedroom communities. Sometimes you wondered which was the tail and which the dog.

She listened to the radio till nine o'clock, then turned on the TV. KING-TV was the only station in Seattle—the only station in the Pacific Northwest, come to that. They'd beaten Portland to the punch. Unfortunately, the comedian prancing around on it lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny. She gave him five minutes, made a face that would have got Linda a swat on the fanny, and turned him off again.

Maybe a murder mystery would be more interesting. It was, for ten or fifteen minutes. Then she found herself yawning and reading the same paragraph three times. Was the beer making her that sleepy? Or was it taking care of a little girl by herself while her husband fought a war on the other side of the Pacific?

Whatever it was, going to bed before ten o'clock seemed a depressing way to end the day. When she was a kid, staying up as late as she wanted seemed one of the big attractions of turning into a grownup. No bedtime! What could be better than that?

Marian yawned. Not being so goddamn tired could be better than this. She yawned again. Staying up as late as you wanted could also mean going to bed as early as you wanted. It could, and tonight it did. Linda would be up at the crack of dawn, one more habit that failed to endear little kids to their parents.

The bed was cold. She often thought that when she slid into it by herself after Bill got summoned to active duty. It seemed especially bad tonight, though. She shivered under the covers till her own body heat warmed things up a little. Then, with a sigh, she gave up and went to sleep. That was five minutes after she lay down—six, tops.

She woke in the middle of the night from a confused dream of howling dogs. The howling went on after she stopped sleeping.
Sirens?
she thought, more confused than ever. But Mayor Devin had said they would start next week, and that was in Seattle, not here. A couple of guns went off. Big guns. Cannons.

All the windows were closed. The shades were down to the bottom. She'd made sure of that—there'd been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood the year before. The curtains, dark ones, were drawn. The light that filled the room was brighter than the sun even so, brighter than a thousand suns. If a flashbulb the size of a car had gone off in front of her nose, it might have felt something like that. Her left cheek felt as if someone had pressed a hot iron to it.

She screamed and buried her face under the covers, which helped not nearly enough. Blast hit the house while she was doing that. Had the Jolly Green Giant put on hobnailed boots before kicking the place, that might have come close. It slid off the raised foundation as all the windows broke and everything that could fall down did. The bed suddenly developed a tilt. The roof beams creaked and groaned and then shrieked as they pulled apart. Chunks of plaster rained down. One, luckily not a big one, hit her in the head.

“Mommy!”
High and shrill and terrified, the squeal overrode everything else. “Help, Mommy,
help
! It hurts!”

Marian jumped out of bed. “I'm coming, darling!” she yelled, and ran toward the bedroom door. Halfway there, she tripped over a fallen nightstand she couldn't see in the now-returned dark and took a header.

She landed on her face—luckily, not on the burned side. When she brought her hand up to her eyebrow, it felt wet. She tried to blot the cut with the sleeve of her nightgown. She smelled gas. She also smelled smoke. She didn't see fire anywhere, but that proved nothing. They had to get out of there right now.

“Linda?” she called.

At the same time, Linda was calling, “Mommy?” They ran into each other in the pitch-black hall. They both screamed. Then they both laughed. Marian snatched up Linda and ran for the back door. It was closer than the front door, and also downhill in the new, off-kilter world inside. As she ran, she noticed her feet hurt. Then she wondered how much broken glass she'd stepped on, and how much was still in her feet. Glass didn't show up on X-rays.

That was the least of her worries about X-rays. How big a dose of them had the bomb just given her…and Linda? She couldn't do anything about that. That she couldn't do anything about it made her hate herself.

The back door stood open. She'd locked it, but atom bombs, like love, laughed at locksmiths. She stumbled out into the chilly night.

“What's that, Mommy?” Linda pointed to the southern sky.

“It's the horrible bomb that did this to us,” Marian answered. The mushroom cloud, still swelling, still rising, towered high into the night sky. Though fading, it glowed with a light of its own. The colors had a terrible beauty: goldenrod, peach, salmon. She also discovered that Linda had a flash burn on her neck like the one on her own cheek.

Here and there, fires were beginning to burn, some on her block. How far from the terrible cloud were they? Too far to be erased in an instant, like the people peacefully sleeping under the bomb when it went off. Too close to get off scot-free.

Neighbors were calling to one another. People were screaming, too, people who'd had pieces of furniture or big pieces of their house fall on them and people who were burning. A man ran skrieking down the street. His hair was on fire—bright yellow flames shot up at least six inches. Maybe he used too much greasy goop. Maybe he'd slept with an uncurtained window facing south. Maybe, maybe, maybe…Whatever exactly had happened, it was dreadful and funny at the same time—unless you happened to be him, in which case it was just dreadful. He shrieked and tried to beat out the flames with his fists as he dashed along the street in his pj's.

With a sudden thrill of horror, Marian recalled that
this
was what her husband did to other people. He did it for a living. He incinerated them and smashed their houses and set them on fire. You took that for granted when it happened to other people, dirty Japs or Commies, thousands of miles away. Of course you did. It didn't seem real then.

But when it happened to
you
…That was when you saw what atom bombs were all about. They were city-killers, nothing else but. And the Russians had killed her city. Sirens began to wail. But there wouldn't be enough fire engines or ambulances on the whole West Coast to deal with the disaster here.

A sudden, hot rain pelted down on her and Linda. “Eww! That's disgusting!” her daughter said. It was bound to be radioactive, too.

“Come on. We'll get in the car and roll up the windows,” Marian said. That might help a little. Or they both might already be cooked in a fire invisible, but no less deadly—more so, in fact—because of that.

Leon Finch was still a little guy. He wouldn't turn two till the end of May. He didn't always sleep through the night. When he woke up, he usually needed to be changed. Sometimes he wanted a bottle. Sometimes he just needed cuddling till he could go back in his crib.

Except once in a while on weekends, Ruth took care of all that. Aaron went out and made a living; she stayed home with the baby. More often than not, Aaron didn't even wake up when Leon fussed. He was tired enough to have a good excuse for staying asleep till the alarm clock bounced him out of bed.

Ruth would take Leon out to the living room and rock him in the rocking chair till he settled down. Sometimes she would turn the radio on softly and listen to music or the news. It didn't bother Leon, and it gave her something to do without turning on the lights, which would have.

The first thing Aaron did when Ruth shook him awake was grab his glasses off the nightstand. It was still dark, but that had nothing to do with anything. He had to be able to see, and without them he damn well couldn't.

“What is it?” he asked as soon as he had them on his nose.

“They've bombed Seattle,” she said, “and Portland, too.”

“Oh, Lord!” he said. He had relatives near Portland. Or maybe he had had relatives near Portland.

“I almost dropped Leon when I heard,” Ruth said. “The news from Seattle had already come in when I got him. Portland just happened, or they've just said it happened, anyhow.”

“What time is it?” Aaron looked at the glowing hands on the alarm clock. It was a few minutes past four. He yawned. “Well, I'm awake. Thanks for telling me. You want to put some coffee on? I'll get by without an extra couple of hours today, that's all.”

“Okay. I'm sorry, dear,” Ruth said.

“So am I.” Aaron turned on the lamp on his nightstand. After blinking against the sudden light, he grabbed his cigarettes and lit the first one of the morning. The first drag made him cough. After that, it felt wonderful. As he got out of bed, his wits started working. “Honey!”

“What is it, dear?” Ruth asked.

“They bombed Portland after Seattle, not at the same time?”

“That's right. Or I think so.”

“If they had warning in Portland, why were they asleep at the switch?”

“Because nobody really believed anybody could attack the United States, I guess,” Ruth said. “We got caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor, too, and then the next day the Japs were still able to bomb the airports in the Philippines.”

“They should have court-martialed MacArthur for that.” Aaron had never been an admirer of the general's. But Ruth's brother, who'd been in the Army in the South Pacific and come back to the States with malaria, swore by MacArthur, not at him.

“They must have decided they needed him.” Except for marrying a man ten years older than she was, Ruth showed good sense. Aaron had quickly learned to respect her judgment.

He said, “If Portland got it about an hour after Seattle…” He paused to picture distances. “If all their planes took off together, San Francisco should get hit about two hours after Portland, and we'll catch it an hour or an hour and a half after San Francisco.”