Bombs Away (2 page)

“However you please, sir,” MacArthur said.

They did have a big map of Korea, Japan, and Manchuria taped to the conference table. That would help. Truman stabbed a finger at the terrain between the reservoir and the port, the terrain where the American troops were in the meat grinder. “What the devil went wrong here?”

“We got caught by surprise, sir,” Douglas MacArthur said. “No one expected the Chinese to swarm into North Korea in such numbers.”

“There were intelligence warnings,” Truman said. And there had been. MacArthur just chose not to believe them, and made Truman not believe them, either. The general was finishing up his own triumphal campaign. He'd defended the Pusan perimeter, at the southern end of the Korean peninsula. He'd landed at Inchon and got behind the North Koreans. He'd rolled them up from south to north, and he'd been on the verge of rolling them up for good…till the Chinese decided they didn't want the USA or an American puppet on their border. MacArthur'd guessed they would sit still for it. Not for the first time, he'd found himself mistaken.

“Intelligence warns of everything under the sun,” he said now, with a not so faint sneer. “Most of what it comes up with is moonshine, not worth worrying about.”

“This wasn't,” Truman said brusquely. MacArthur's craggy features congealed into a scowl. The President went on, “The question now is, what can we do about it?”

“Under the current rules of engagement, sir, we can't do anything about it till too late,” MacArthur said. “As long as American bombers aren't allowed to strike on the other side of the Yalu, the Chinese will be able to assemble as they please and bring fresh troops into the fight in North Korea without our disrupting their preparations in any way.”

“How much good will bombing north of the river do, though?” Truman asked, holding on to his temper. North of the Yalu sat enormous, hostile Red China. Bomb Red China, and who knew what kind of excuse you were handing Joe Stalin? “Won't they hit our B-29s hard? The Superforts were world-beaters in 1945, but they haven't done so well against North Korean air defenses. The Chinese should be better yet on that score, don't you think?”

“If we use ordinary munitions, we will slow them down to some degree but we won't stop them. You're absolutely right about that, sir.” MacArthur sounded amazed the President could be right about anything. That might have been Truman's imagination, but he didn't think so. His Far East commander went on, “But if we drop a few atomic bombs on cities in Manchuria, not only do we destroy their men and rail lines, we also send the message that we are sick and tired of playing around.”

“The trouble with that is, if we drop A-bombs on Stalin's friends, what's to keep him from dropping them on ours?” Truman returned.

“My considered opinion, your Excellency, is that he wouldn't have the nerve,” Douglas MacArthur said. “He doesn't have that many bombs. He can't—he just dropped his first last year. And he must see we can hurt him far worse than he can hurt us.”

“Once the pipeline gets moving, they come pretty fast, though. And he has a hell of a lot of men and tanks in Eastern Europe, too,” the President said. “They could head west on very short notice.”

MacArthur shrugged. “We can destroy swarms of them before they get into West Germany. And how sad do you think the French and British will be if we have to use a few bombs on West German territory?”

Harry Truman's chuckle was dry as a martini in the desert. “I'm sure they would wring their hands in dismay.” He scratched the side of his jaw, considering. “If we'd been able to get our forces out through Hungnam, I wouldn't think of this for a minute. The atom is a dangerous genie to let out of the lamp—deadly dangerous. But now the Chinese are bragging that they really can do what Kim Il-sung had in mind—they want to drive us into the sea and turn all of Korea into a satellite.”

“Yes, sir. That's exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We'd betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers—China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He's right across the river from the fighting, and we're six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”

“You've got something there.” Now it was Truman's turn to sound surprised. He hadn't expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn't looked for the general's thoughts to march with his own so well. He'd already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?

“Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don't dawdle! We've got to go to the cobbler's and then to the supermarket.”

“I'm coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I'm just putting my coat on now.”

“Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn't have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn't fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”

Linda's blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill's, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.

Young children's sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We'll be away from home for a while.”

A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian's flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn't think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn't done anything. If she was wrong, she'd find out about it.

“It's raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.

“Don't do that indoors! It's bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”

Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot—much plainer than her daughter's, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn't raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.

By what Bill's letters said, Korea wasn't like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.

The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C'mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver's-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.

Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick—who couldn't?—but she didn't believe in working any harder than you had to.

Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren't paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler's was only a few blocks away.

The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler's small hammer painted on it, and a legend:
FAYVL TABAKMAN—COBBLER. REPAIRS & RESOLING.
Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn't read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.

Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.

What he knew, though, he didn't peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he'd learned English since the war, he'd done a bang-up job.

“My name is Linda!” Linda said.

“Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”

“You
had
one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”

“Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler's eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”

“I'm sure they're great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”

Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn't blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.

The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They'd bought the house with the idea that they'd keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn't easy, but Marian had made it work so far.

She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She'd eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn't had to.

She splurged a little—a whole nickel—on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.

When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.

Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn't her idea of fun.

She got everything into the house. Linda didn't feel the urge to play explorer—maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she'd done the things she had to do.

A cup of Lipton's would be nice now,
she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn't worry—so much—about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.

Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of
Tootle
and said, “Read to me.”

Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he'd stop and read when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who'd do the same thing. Marian wasn't quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good—not least because she didn't want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.

“Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”

“Okay!” Linda said.

The Ivans were giving the
Wehrmacht
hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn't save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them—and glanced off the monster's cleverly sloped armor.

Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the
Katyushas
rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there'd be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.

Screams…

Gustav Hozzel's eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.

Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again,
Liebchen,
” his wife said sadly.

“I…I guess I did.” Gustav's voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I'm sorry,” he managed.

“Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.

“It's always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He'd never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her—and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn't come as often as it used to. I haven't had it for a couple of months now.”