Bombs Away (35 page)

“That was fun, wasn't it?” George Watkins called from across the street.

“Now that you mention it,” Daisy said, “no.” They both laughed shaky laughs and ducked back inside.

More sirens sounded in the distance. Daisy tensed, fearing a second wave of Russian planes. Then she realized they weren't air-raid warnings. They were the sirens fire engines used. One thing she could be sure of: with fuel and planes and bombs and buildings, plenty at Sculthorpe would burn.

She didn't know what time it was. The night was clear. She found the moon. By where it stood in the sky, she guessed it was about two in the morning, give or take an hour. She could go back to sleep…if she could go back to sleep.

She decided to try. She had nothing to lose, and it was cold down here. It wouldn't be warm in her bedroom, either. She had a coal brazier and a hot-water bottle, very Victorian but not very effective. Steam radiators and gas heat were little more than rumors in Fakenham.

A glance at the glowing hands of the clock on her nightstand told her it was twenty-five past two. She nodded, pleased her celestial timekeeping had come so close. Then she burrowed under the blankets. They were all wool except for the quilted comforter on top. Nothing wrong with them at all. What the feeble outside heat sources couldn't do, they could.

Whether they could calm her leftover fear and jitters was liable to be another story. Somewhere in the bathroom—or was it downstairs?—she had a packet of fizzing bromide powders. The stuff was supposed to calm your nerves and help you sleep. Getting out to look for it seemed more trouble than it was worth, though. She snuggled under the familiar weight of bedclothes. Either she'd sleep or she wouldn't. If she didn't, she'd pour down tea all day—and probably wouldn't sleep much tomorrow night, either.

The alarm clock's insistent bells woke her at a quarter after six. As she silenced the clock, she realized she hadn't killed it when the air-raid sirens wailed. As fuddled as she'd been then, that was a stroke of luck.

She went downstairs, heated water for her morning cuppa, and fried a banger on the stove. Then she warmed up some leftover mash she had in the icebox: a fine British breakfast. She turned on the wireless to listen while she washed the dishes. If you didn't stay ahead of the game as best you could, you'd be hip-deep in rubbish before you knew it.

“Russian aircraft attacked several landing strips in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland last night,” said a suave BBC newsreader with an accent so perfect, you wanted to sock him in the face. “Relatively little damage was done, and only conventional bombs were dropped. Alert RAF and U.S. Air Force night fighters have claimed three enemy bombers shot down, with two more so badly damaged that they appeared unlikely to make a safe return to their distant bases.”

He made it sound as if the Russians had carried out nothing worse than nuisance raids. It hadn't seemed that way to Daisy. But then, when you measured attacks on air bases against leveling Norwich and Aberdeen, their importance on the grand scale of things shrank.

She readied the pub for another day's business. A fresh barrel of bitter went under the tap. All the ashtrays were clean and empty; all the pints and halves behind the bar gleamed. She ran the carpet sweeper to get rid of ashes and potato-crisp crumbs in the rugs. She kept telling herself she ought to buy a Hoover, but she hadn't done it yet.

As she worked, she wondered whether anyone but the locals would come in. If the airmen at Sculthorpe were confined to base, as they might well be, she'd lose most of a day's trade. She shrugged. She had to get ready. If she was and they didn't come, that would be annoying. If she wasn't but they did, that would be disastrous.

Come they did, as soon as the Owl and Unicorn opened for business. For them, the raid the night before seemed to have been more exciting than terrifying. “We must have irked Ivan, or he'd not have come after us like that,” an RAF flying officer opined between pulls at a pint.

“How bad was it?” Daisy asked.

“Well, it wasn't good,” the officer said. “They hit a barracks and wrecked a couple of planes and smashed up the runways. We'll have bulldozers and steamrollers the way a picnic has ants.”

“A barracks? No, that doesn't sound good at all,” she said.

“It wasn't,” the RAF man said. “Actually, the bomb didn't hit square. It blew in one wall, and then the roof fell down. One bloke—a Yank; this was an American barracks—has to be the luckiest sod ever hatched. He was near the far wall. The blast blew him out of his cot and through the window next to it…and all he has to show is a cut on one cheek. You wouldn't care to play cards against a chap who can do that.”

“I don't know. He may have used it all up there,” Daisy said. “If he were a cat, that would be eight lives out of nine, wouldn't it? Eight and a half, maybe.”

“Hadn't looked at it like that. You may be right.” The flying officer flashed what he no doubt thought of as his best lady-killing smile. “You're as smart as you are pretty, dear.”

“Oh, foosh!” Daisy said. That and the look on her face made the flyer deflate like a punctured inner tube. Later, she thought she might have let him down more easily. But sometimes such a stale line made her not care what she came out with.

Bruce McNulty strode in that afternoon. He had a bandage taped to his left cheek. For a moment, Daisy thought nothing of it. Several RAF men and Americans had shown up with one minor injury or another—or with one and another. But then she made a guess: “Are you the bloke who went through the window during the raid?”

“Oh, you heard about that, did you?” He made as if to chuckle, but his face clouded over instead. “Yeah, I made it. Some buddies of mine didn't. I almost feel like I shouldn't be here myself—know what I mean?”

“I suppose I do.” She drew him a pint. “Here. This is on me.
I'm
glad you're here.” He tried to argue. She wouldn't let him.

BILL STALEY WATCHED
the ordnance men bombing up his B-29. The bombs had yellow rings painted on their noses. They were ordinary high explosives. The Superfortress didn't always visit radioactive hell upon its targets. Sometimes ordinary hell was thought to be enough.

Hank McCutcheon stood beside him. The pilot reached for his breast pocket, as if to take out the pack of cigarettes in there. An ordnance sergeant wagged a finger at him. Major McCutcheon dropped his hand. “Yeah, I'm too close to all this good stuff to smoke,” he said sheepishly. “But I still want to.”

“Can't imagine why,” Bill said. “Pyongyang's a milk run, right? A piece of cake. Nothing to it.”

“Nothing to it,” McCutcheon echoed, his voice doleful.

The North Korean capital wasn't far. They could get there and back in a couple of hours. Whether they could get back at all, though, was very much an open question. Stalin had lavished on Kim Il-sung air defenses stouter than any city had enjoyed during the Second World War. Radar to spot approaching bombers, radar to direct the fire from the antiaircraft guns, radar-carrying night fighters to hunt through the black skies and attack with heavy cannon of their own…Yes, the B-29s carried window to make the enemy radar operators' lives more difficult. Yes, the radar-carrying F-82 Twin Mustangs escorted them and tried to keep off the North Korean La-11s.

Tried
was the word, though. It wasn't the way it had been going against the Japs, some of whose fighters couldn't even climb up to the B-29s. Japan was on the ropes before the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki knocked it through them. With their big Red brothers helping out, the North Koreans remained much tougher customers.

“I should've driven a milk truck instead of one of these babies. That'd be a milk run for sure.” McCutcheon sounded like a man kidding on the square.

“Hey, I'm a bookkeeper,” Bill said, “or I would be if Uncle Sam let me.” He imagined a gloomy office full of dusty ledgers, none of which added up the way it should. Next to what the plane would be facing tonight, he wouldn't have minded spending several weeks—or years—in a place like that.

They took off around 2300. This wasn't anything like a lone-wolf mission, the way some of the atomic strikes had been. A swarm of Superfortresses would visit Pyongyang. With luck, something from one of them would blow Kim Il-sung to kingdom come. Just because it hadn't happened yet didn't mean it couldn't. Without Kim telling them what to do, the North Koreans might just throw in their cards and give up the war. Quite a few Americans—some with stars on their shoulders—thought it could happen.

Bill wished he could believe it, but he didn't. With Kim Il-sung gone, he figured the North Koreans would find some other hard-nosed bastard to order them around. And, even if they didn't, the Red Chinese seemed here to stay. Short of turning all of North Korea into radioactive glass—an approach which, if you'd been fighting here for a while, definitely had its points—this war wouldn't dry up and blow away any time soon.

Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the glowing instrument panel in front of him. B-29 engines had run hot in the last war, making every takeoff an adventure. Sitting in mothballs for half a dozen years hadn't improved their performance one bit. When everything worked, they hauled the big plane off the ground. When it didn't…that happened some of the time, but, in the brutal economics of war, not often enough to make the authorities quit using them.

Bill had heard that the Soviet copies of the B-29 didn't duplicate the American engines, but used a Russian powerplant of about the same performance. He wondered if it had the same trouble, too. He guessed it did. A B-29 copy wouldn't have been a real copy without overheating engines.

As they crossed the front, a little antiaircraft fire came up at them. They were up past 33,000 feet; most of it burst well below them. Front-line flak was there mostly to make enemy fighters show a little respect when they strafed trenches.

But the sons of bitches down below would have radios or telephones or telegraph clickers. In case the radar operators farther north had decided to turn in early, somebody up there would know to wake them up and put them back to work.

The country down there was pretty well blacked out. Electricity hadn't been widespread in Korea before the war started. Many of the generators that supplied it had been knocked out as fighting ground up and down the peninsula. Soldiers on both sides would shoot without warning at houses showing lights they shouldn't. No wonder the blackout was good.

Hyman Ginsberg's voice resounded in Bill's earphones: “The Twin Mustangs have picked up what have to be Lavochkins heading our way,” the radioman reported.

Hank McCutcheon heard that, too, of course. He glanced over at Bill. Bill nodded back. They were nearing Pyongyang. They had to expect a welcoming committee. Here it was, evidently. The Lavochkin La-11 was a neat little fighter, its lines not too different from a German FW-190's. It was about as good a prop job as anybody could make, in other words. Not its fault that the rise of the jet had left it obsolete.

Of course, the rise of the jet had left the B-29 even more obsolete. Like the La-11, it soldiered on regardless. Small jet engines helped the even larger B-36 get off the ground. The B-47 was all-jet. Neither of those planes had been manufactured by the thousands, though. Lots and lots of leftover B-29s around. Why not use them? Why not use them up?

Flak rose toward the Superforts again. This stuff came from the heavy guns, the guns designed to throw it so high. It didn't burst below the bombers. It burst among them. The big plane shook from near misses, as if on a potholed road.

Out through the Plexiglas windshield panels, Bill also spotted tracers zipping back and forth across the sky. The B-29s and Twin Mustangs spat .50-caliber cartridges. The La-11s carried four 23mm cannons apiece. Their tracers, though scarcer, were more impressive.

Fire burning from engine to engine along the left wing, a Superfort spun toward the ground. “How much longer till we can drop, dammit?” McCutcheon demanded of the bombardier. The gunners were firing at something out there.

“Another minute, sir,” Charlie Becker answered. A fragment sliced through the plane's aluminum skin; Bill heard the snarling clang.

“Fuck it,” McCutcheon said. To Becker, he added, “Get rid of 'em, Charlie!”

“They're gone!” the bombardier said from the nose. The plane grew lighter as the bombs fell free and more aerodynamic as soon as compressed air shoved the bomb-bay doors closed. Hank McCutcheon pulled it into a tight turn to port, a turn designed to get away from Pyongyang and all the unfriendly people there as fast as he could.

Another B-29 took a direct hit and blew up. The flash of light left Bill night-blind for several seconds. Blast buffeted his Superfort—not the way it had right after an A-bomb burst, but noticeably all the same. The big engines roared as they got out of there. The roaring wouldn't help with an La-11 on their tail, though. The Russian fighter had something like an extra hundred miles an hour on them.

No fat shells blew out their pressurization or smashed up an engine or tore a crewman to bloody shards. Bill began to breathe normally again.
Another mission down,
he thought.
Sooner or later, they have to let me quit.

They were talking with the flight controllers at the strip north of Pusan when the men there suddenly started cussing a blue streak. Bill could see explosions ahead. Somebody's planes—North Korean? Red Chinese? Russian?—were pounding the field.

“Divert! Divert! Divert!” the controllers chorused. Diverting, here, meant diverting all the way to Japan. Bill glanced at the fuel gauge. They had enough in the tanks. They could go. They could, and they would—McCutcheon swung the B-29 to the east. But getting hit, here as anywhere else, was a lot less fun than hitting.

Konstantin Morozov saw the Centurion crawl out from behind the battered barn about the same time as the tank commander in the English machine spotted his T-54. But his gun pointed right at the Centurion, while the other tank had to traverse its turret ninety degrees to bear on him.

“Armor-piercing!” Morozov screamed. “Range—five hundred! Give it to him!”

Clang!
The round slammed into the breech.
Blam!
“On the way!” Pavel Gryzlov shouted.

“Another!” Morozov commanded. Even as Mogamed Safarli muscled the shell into the breech, the tank commander knew it wouldn't matter. If the first one hit, the Centurion wouldn't get a shot off. If it missed, the limeys would smash them before they could fire again.

But Gryzlov knew his business. That first round caught the English tank before its main armament reached the T-54. It slammed through the thinner side armor and hit some of the ammo stowed in the fighting compartment. The Centurion brewed up. Smoke and fire burst from every hatch. Morozov couldn't imagine how the turret stayed on after a hit like that, but it did. The British built tough machines, even if this one hadn't been tough enough.

The men inside would hardly have had time to realize they were dead. That was good. Better to go out fast than to cook and know you were cooking. This side of being shot by an outraged husband when he was 104, Konstantin hoped he'd die the same way.

“Good job!” He thumped Gryzlov on the shoulder. “Fucking good job! We'll paint a fresh ring on the cannon barrel when we get the chance.”

“My dick was on the block, too, Comrade Sergeant,” the gunner said, which was true. The Englishmen wouldn't have missed. Morozov was sure of that. More Americans fought in western Germany, but the limeys seemed more dangerous. They were professionals, the Yanks brave amateurs still learning their trade.

In aid of which…“Back us up into cover, Yevgeny. Those sons of bitches may have friends up there.”

“I'm doing it,” Yevgeny Ushakov said, and the T-54 moved back toward the little apple orchard from which it had emerged.

“Mogamed, swap out that AP round and load us with HE instead,” Morozov said. “It'll still hurt a tank, and confuse it—and it'll tear up infantry.”

“Whatever you say, Comrade Sergeant.” If Mogamed Safarli sounded like a man trying not to show he was irked, that had to be what he was. Those shells were heavy. Taking one out of the breech and slamming in another with your closed fist (to make sure you didn't snag your thumb in the mechanism) was hard physical labor. Safarli might have loaded the HE round with a little extra oomph to drive the point home.

Morozov sympathized…up to a point. The tank commander had started as a loader himself during the Great Patriotic War. Almost every crewman did. Loader was the slot that needed nothing but a broad back and strong arms. If you happened to have a brain, too, you'd get promoted out of it pretty quick. With the way the Hitlerites chewed up Soviet armor during the last war, there were always plenty of places to fill.

The T-54 stood a better chance against the latest American and British tanks than the T-34/85 had against the Panther and Tiger. But Morozov had fought on a broad front before, where Soviet armor could usually find a weak spot in the Germans' overextended lines and force a penetration.

Western Germany wasn't like that. Everything here was compact. If you outflanked some of the imperialists, you just ran into more when you tried to break through. They'd have tanks of their own nearby. Their foot soldiers would have bazookas. A bazooka wouldn't always kill a T-54, but it had a chance. And the USAF and RAF had rocket-firing fighter-bombers—not quite the same as Shturmoviks, but plenty to pucker your asshole and send your balls crawling up into your belly.

When peering through the periscopes set into the sides of the commander's cupola didn't show Konstantin what he needed to see, he put the Zeiss binoculars around his neck and stuck his head out of the cupola for a proper look around. It was the turtle's problem. As long as he stayed inside his shell, not much could get him, but he didn't know what was sneaking up to try. He was more vulnerable while he stuck his neck out, but he could see trouble a long way off.