Bombs Away (30 page)

Horrible things would have happened to all the men in the earlier crew. Morozov didn't need to dwell on them, either. If you started wondering whether your tank was unlucky…If you did, you were liable to bring down the curse you were trying to avoid.

“Why don't you get them, then?” the corporal said. “The beast has a full tank, and we bombed it up. You can go straight to regimental headquarters and see what they need you to do.”

“I serve the Soviet Union! Don't go away. I'll be back with them in a few minutes.” He trotted to the far edge of the tank park. Mechanics and welders worked on damaged T-54s and Stalins—and on a few damaged T-35/85s, leftovers from the last war pressed into service again. A cursing crew used a crane to drop a new engine into a T-54. The number on the side of the turret was different, or Konstantin would have wondered if that was his old machine.

“Well?” Pavel Gryzlov asked when Konstantin came up to the crew.

“Well, it's a T-54,” the tank commander reported.

“That's good,” the gunner said. “When I saw some of the old models here, I was afraid they'd try to palm one of those clapped-out cunts off on us. Fat chance we'd have in a T-34 against a Pershing or a Centurion!”

“We didn't do so well in our T-54,” Mogamed Safarli put in between puffs on a pipe.

“We hurt them before they hit us,” Konstantin reminded the loader. “Anyway, this isn't a brand new machine, but I think it's sound.”
Well, except for that patch on the frontal armor, anyway.
“It's got a full load of ammo and a full tank of fuel. We just have to put it back into action.”

“Let's do that, then! We serve the Soviet Union!” Yevgeny Ushakov's voice cracked with excitement. For the veterans,
I serve the Soviet Union!
was a catchphrase with no more meaning than
Yes, sir!
or
I'll take care of it.
Ushakov, still wet behind the ears, said it as if he meant it.

Well, he'd find out. Or maybe he was playing a role, and what seemed like excitement and enthusiasm and patriotism was in fact acting ability. You never could tell to whom people really reported.

“Come on over, then,” Morozov said. “Climb in and fire it up. We'll find out what the regiment wants us to do, and hop back on the merry-go-around again. Doesn't that sound like fun?”

“
Da,
Comrade Sergeant!” By the way Ushakov said it, he
did
think it sounded like fun. Gryzlov and Morozov eyed each other for a moment. Yes, the kid would find out. He'd never had to flee a burning tank. He'd never watched a crewmate suffer and bleed. He'd never watched enemy soldiers machine-gunned from the turret, or seen an enemy tank afire and known it could as easily have been his own.

Safarli's nostrils twitched when he got into the tank. “Smells like the lamps at my grandfather's house,” he said.

Pavel Gryzlov glanced at Morozov again. The loader must not have known why the fighting compartment smelled that way. As plainly, Gryzlov did. “Well, there are worse odors,” he said. He didn't name any of them. In this business, you didn't keep your innocence long. If Safarli and Ushakov had some left, more power to them.

“Start it up,” Morozov called to the driver.

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ushakov replied, as Konstantin had guessed he would. The engine belched to life. It ran more raggedly than the one in Morozov's old machine, but it did run. The new driver shifted well enough. Morozov guided him toward regimental HQ. As they rumbled along, Konstantin watched Gryzlov fiddle with the sights on the main armament and the coaxial machine gun. He couldn't do as much as he doubtless wanted to without some leisure, but he was doing whatever he could.

As it happened, Captain Gurevich was back at regimental headquarters, seeing to something or other, when the T-54 chugged in. Morozov waved to him from the cupola. He didn't ride buttoned up unless he had to. “You've got a runner again, do you, Sergeant?” Gurevich called.

“Sure do, Comrade Captain,” Konstantin answered. “Where do I go with it?”

“We're still trying to break into Arnsberg, four or five kilometers up the road there,” the company commander said. “They'll be glad to see another 100mm gun. Why don't you give them a hand?”

Morozov sketched a salute. “I'll do it, Comrade Captain,” he said, and ducked inside to deliver the word to the men who couldn't have heard it. The tank headed for Arnsberg. Morozov's belly knotted. Another chance to serve the
rodina.
And another chance to get horribly killed.

Bill Staley cherished the postcard as he'd never cherished any piece of writing before.
The house is a wreck, but Linda and I are OK,
it said.
At the refugee camp, sleeping in the car.
Will get out when we have somewhere to go. Much love, Marian.
Not a long message, but more precious than rubies to him.

The night after he got the card, he slept well for the first time in he couldn't remember how long. He found himself too much reminded of
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Bad dreams he had. They woke him, again and again, in one kind of a cold sweat or another. Sometimes his wife and little girl went up in radioactive fire. Sometimes he did himself—till he woke with thundering heart. Sometimes all the Chinese and Russians he'd helped incinerate rose from the graves they mostly didn't have, hungry for revenge.

How many people had died from the bombs his B-29 dropped? He couldn't begin to guess. When he was awake, he didn't try. Indeed, he did his best not to think of what he did on his missions. When he couldn't help calling it to mind, he told himself he did it strictly in the line of duty—and shoved it out of his thoughts as fast as he could.

All of which worked fairly well…while he was awake. But the more he shoved things aside by day, the more they came out at night. He'd woken up screaming only once. The cold sweats bothered no one but himself. That didn't make them—and the nightmares that spawned them—any less horrible to him.

Once, over frosty-cold Falstaffs at the officers' club, he asked Hank McCutcheon, “Sir, do you ever, um, dream about any of the things we've done?”

“Dream?” The pilot paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Oh, maybe once or twice. Nothing too much. Nothing too bad. How about you?”

“A little more than that,” Bill said, which was true in the same sense that water was moist or a jet of molten metal was warm.

“Ah.” For all they showed, Major McCutcheon's eyes might have been made from green and white glass. “Still able to handle your job okay when you aren't sleeping?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Bill answered quickly. That was true, too. True or not, though, it wasn't what he wanted to talk about.

Regardless of whether he wanted to talk about other things, Hank McCutcheon plainly didn't. “That's good, Billy-boy,” McCutcheon said. “That's what you need. Can't let the hobgoblins and fantods get you down, right?”

“Sure,” Bill said tonelessly, and emptied his own beer. He'd been drinking more than usual lately, in the hope that it would dull or blot out the nightmares. It hadn't, but he hadn't cut back again, either.

“There you go. You're a good man, Bill. Nothing to worry about, not in the long run, hey?” Without waiting for an answer, McCutcheon stood up, patted Staley on the shoulder, and walked out of the club: back straight, stride long, the image of a professional military man on the move.

Fuck.
Bill silently mouthed the word. He wasn't a professional military man himself, and didn't want to be. Maybe that made the difference.

Or maybe there was no difference. Maybe Hank jerked awake in the middle of the night with icy rivers running down his back, too. Or maybe his bad dreams got to him some other way. Maybe he just didn't feel like admitting that to Bill. Maybe it felt too much like showing weakness. Maybe Hank didn't feel like admitting it even to himself.

Maybe. How could you know? You couldn't, not when Hank didn't want to talk about it. For all Bill could prove, the pilot really did sleep the sleep of the just every goddamn night.
If you do, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din,
Bill thought.

He raised his right index finger. A waiter—a colored Army private—came over and put the empty beer glasses on a tray. “You like another one, suh?” he asked.

“You bet I do,” Bill said. “Thanks.” Beer might not be the answer, but he kept hoping it would deflect the question.

“Comin' right up,” the kid said.

Bill drank the next one a little more slowly. As he did, he looked around the inside of the officers' club. Just by looking, he couldn't have proved that he was in Korea rather than, say, Milwaukee or Portland.

He grimaced and shook his head. He could tell he wasn't in Portland, all right. Portland was one of those West Coast cities that wasn't there any more, along with Seattle and so many others. He was anything but happy about the job the Air Force had done defending the American mainland. It had screwed that up even worse than the Navy botched Pearl Harbor back in 1941.

At least Marian and Linda came through in one piece. He'd hoped they had. He'd prayed they had. He was pretty rusty at things that had to do with prayer, but he'd given it his best shot. Still, not knowing had eaten at him till Marian's card finally got here. Probably the mail service in Seattle was as snafued as everything else in the shattered city. The card had taken more than a month to cross the Pacific in spite of its Air Mail stamp.

One piece! He had a family to go home to if he managed to live through the war. After this stretch, he promised he would never put on another uniform for the rest of his life. He'd get a bookkeeping job and be happy—ecstatic—about columns of figures in ledgers. A dark blue flannel suit, a fedora, a topcoat in the wintertime…That would be as much uniform as he needed.

If he landed a place at a big company, it might have its own softball team. He'd never been good enough to try out for the pros or anything like that, but he made a pretty fair middle infielder. He'd played baseball during the last war, softball when he went back to civilian life, and baseball again here in Korea. Even the gooks were starting to pick up the game.

If they let him play in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, he'd join the company team. If the firm that hired him was big enough to pay for uniforms, though, he figured he'd look for some rinky-dink neighborhood team instead. The ball wouldn't be as good, but he'd feel free.

Whatever neighborhood he'd live in. By the couple of lines from Marian, he wouldn't be in the house he'd left when Uncle Sam called him back to active duty. If that house was smashed, his wife and daughter were extra lucky to have lived. Not only would the place have done its best to fall down on them, but they would have been close enough to ground zero to pick up a nasty dose of radiation.

He grimaced once more, not caring for that thought at all. If they'd got radiation sickness, Marian hadn't mentioned it. Even if they had, they should be better now. But who could guess what that kind of thing might do to you years down the line?

Grimacing yet again, this time in a new way, he drained the glass of beer. He'd wondered before how many Russians and Chinamen died when the Superfort dropped its bombs on them. But that wasn't the real question, was it?

No. It wasn't. It was tiptoeing around the real question. It was ducking the responsibility the real question held. The real question was
How many people have we killed?
Or, more directly,
How many people have
I
killed?
Or, more directly yet,
How much blood is on my hands?

That was the real question, all right. And, with that being the real question, was it any wonder he had nightmares? How could you not have nightmares with a question like that weighing on you? The only way he could see was to have no conscience at all, like the Nazis who ran the gas chambers and crematoria at their extermination camps.

Fortunately or unfortunately—however you chose to look at it—he came equipped with that invisible but inescapable piece of his moral fiber. And, because he did, he wondered whether he might not do best by taking his service pistol and sticking it in his mouth.

The colored enlisted man appeared out of nowhere. “Want I should fetch you a fresh one, suh?”

“Why the hell not?” Bill answered. He wasn't going to fly today. If he felt like getting snockered, he could. If he did, maybe he wouldn't think so much about that real question.

He was doubly glad he'd got the postcard from Marian. Knowing he did have people to go home to, people who loved him, also helped armor him against the temptation to start fiddling with his .45.

Boris Gribkov and his Tu-4 crew took the train from Kuibishev to just east of Moscow. From there, they climbed aboard an Li-2 for the trip to an airfield not far from Leningrad. In normal times, they would have gone the whole way by train. But almost all of the European Soviet Union's rail lines ran through Moscow. Kilometers of those lines were twisted, melted metal now. Till workers replaced them, rail transportation was going to be, in technical terms, a mess.

That was one of the reasons saving the capital from the Nazis had been so important. Yes, Moscow was the USSR's biggest city. But it was also the country's transport hub. With it in enemy hands, too often you really couldn't get there from here.

Hitler hadn't been able to seize it or damage it badly. The
Luftwaffe
wasn't up to the job. The United States Air Force, by contrast, damn well was. Gribkov used his rank to ensure that he had a window seat when the military transport flew low above Moscow on its way west and north. The weather was good. Here a month after the equinox, spring was coming for real as opposed to on the calendar.