Bombs Away (39 page)

As time went by, though, they got smoother. More people who really spoke English started giving spiels for them. If somebody who sounded like you said you were fighting for the wrong cause and that things on Mao's side of the line were wonderful, you could be tempted to listen to him. You'd be a prime jerk if you did, but what army didn't have some prime jerks in it?

Uneasily, Cade wondered how many American prisoners the Reds had taken south of the Chosin Reservoir. Not everybody they overran there would have died. When you were surrounded and cut off, you might throw down your M-1 and raise your hands and hope for the best.

And then, once you were a POW, what if they said they'd feed you better if you did some talking for them? What if they said they wouldn't feed you at all if you didn't? What if they worked on you the way O'Brien worked on Winston Smith in
1984
? Would some prisoners start to love Big Brother? The garbage that sometimes came from the loudspeakers argued they would.

The Americans used loudspeakers themselves. What they shouted across the barbed wire sounded to Cade like cats in a sack when you kicked it. He didn't find Chinese a beautiful language.

Every so often, though, one of the Reds would sneak across no-man's-land and give himself up. It didn't happen every day, but it happened often enough for Cade to notice. When his battalion CO came to the forward trenches to see how things were going, Cade asked, “Sir, what are we yelling at the Chinks? It seems to do something, anyway.”

Major Jeff Walpole grinned a sly grin. “Ah, you haven't heard that story, huh?”

“No, sir,” Cade answered. “What is it?”

“What we yell on the loudspeakers is something a psy-ops colonel named Linebarger cooked up. He speaks perfect Chinese—he's an American China big shot's kid. I mean somebody with clout. Sun Yat-sen was Linebarger's godfather, for cryin' out loud.”

“Wow! Really?” Cade said.

“I wasn't there to see it myself. I haven't met Linebarger. From what I gather, he's not an easy guy to meet. But that's what I hear. And anyway, what we're telling them is, they can come in to our lines yelling Chinese words like
love
and
virtue
and
humanity.
And when they yell 'em in the right order, it sounds like
I surrender
in English. Lets 'em give up without losing face, you know?”

“Wow,” Cade said again. “That's one sneaky guy. I thought I heard something like
I surrender
in all the Chinese jibber-jabber, but who can tell? I mean, it's Chinese, sir.”

“Yeah, it's Greek to me, too.” Walpole grinned. Cade winced. The older man continued, “We drop leaflets on 'em with the same message. It works. From what they tell me, it works better than most of the rest of our propaganda.”

“If it works, we ought to stick with it,” Cade said.

“Feels the same way to me.” Like Curtis, Walpole wouldn't look out at the Red Chinese positions from any of the loopholes set up so American soldiers could do exactly that. Nine times out of ten, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, you'd get away with it. The odd time, a sniper would be waiting and put one through the eye you used to do the looking. The battalion commander found his own observation points. “Quiet for the time being,” he remarked.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Curtis replied. “They tried that armored assault on us, and the Corsairs came in and smashed it up. They were like kids with new toys—they'd got some tanks through! Then we went and broke the new toys, so they've been sulking ever since.”

“People who outrank me weren't very happy when those tanks showed up,” Walpole said. “I mean to tell you, son—they were
not
happy. We dropped an atom bomb on Harbin, remember, and on the rail line through Harbin. And now the line's a going concern again. Nobody figured the Chinks could drive it through there anywhere near so fast.”

Nobody had figured the Red Chinese would swarm over the Yalu the way they had, either. Nobody had figured they would be able to do such horrible things to the Americans and other UN troops south of the Chosin Reservoir. If they hadn't cut them off from Hungnam and started grinding them to bits, maybe Truman wouldn't have decided to use atom bombs in Manchuria. Underestimating Red China came with expensive consequences.

The major, though, wouldn't care about the political and strategic views of a shavetail first looey too young to vote or buy himself a drink. So all Cade said was, “Lord help the poor suckers who rebuilt that railroad. I bet every one of 'em glows in the dark.”

“I bet you're right,” Walpole said. “Considering how the Reds throw soldiers at us the way rich guys throw money at chorus girls—and considering how they lose 'em as fast as the rich guys burn through their cash—is it any wonder if they spend railroad workers the same way?”

“No wonder at all, sir,” Cade said.

Once more, he didn't feel like arguing with his superior. It wasn't even that he thought Jeff Walpole was wrong. But the Red Chinese didn't have planes and abundant artillery and bunches of tanks. They had bunches of men with rifles and submachine guns. The Americans could spend ordnance to kill them. They had to spend men to kill Americans, and did what they had to do. That their commanders did it as cold-bloodedly as if they were snakes lent itself to Walpole's point, but to fight the war at all they would have had to do it whether they cared to or not.

Off in the distance, a rifle banged—once, twice. That was a Mosin-Nagant, probably in a Chinaman's hands, maybe fired by one of Kim Il-sung's finest. A Browning machine gun stammered death back at it. One more bang from the rifle. Another quick, professional burst from the Browning.

Cade hefted his own Soviet submachine gun. If things heated up, he was ready. But they didn't. One of the clowns on the other side had got excited about nothing, and that was as far as it went.

Walpole pointed to the PPSh. “Like that piece better than the carbine they gave you, huh?”

“You bet, sir,” Cade said, in lieu of
You bet your ass, sir.

But all Walpole said was, “You're nobody's fool, kid. The carbine's a piece of junk, but you can do yourself some good with one of those babies.” They beamed at each other. For an old guy, Cade thought, the major was all right.

VASILI YASEVICH SHOOK
his head in what he hoped was a convincing show of regret. “No, sir. I am very sorry, sir, but I have no opium to sell,” he said. “Use of opium is not allowed any more, not under the just laws of the People's Republic.”

“But you are a druggist. You can get medicines like this.” The man was about fifty. His clothes were as plain as Vasili's. No one flaunted wealth in China these days. His voice, though, had the self-assured growl that said he was used to getting whatever he wanted.

He wasn't going to get opium from Vasili. “I am very sorry, sir,” the Russian expatriate repeated. “Having the poppy is a capital crime. It is not the kind of chance a poor man, an honest man, wants to take.”

“Comrade Wang's wife told me you could get her whatever she needed,” the man said.

“Comrade Wang's wife never asked me for opium,” Vasili said, which was true. “I got her
ma huang.
That's legal.”

“She didn't talk about what you got her. She talked about what you
could
get her.” The man bore down hard on the word that made the difference.

Bitch! Cunt! Whore! Fucking whore!
When Vasili swore inside his own head, he swore in Russian, not Chinese. Maybe that was because he'd learned the one language slightly ahead of the other. Maybe it was just because Russian sounded and felt earthier, more obscene, to him.

The bow he gave the important man, though, was Chinese. It was so Chinese, getting it from a round-eyed barbarian, even one who spoke the language of the Middle Kingdom, visibly surprised the fellow. “Comrade Wang's wife is a wise woman,” Vasili said. “I am sad to have to tell you, though, that even the wisest is sometimes mistaken.”

“Curse you, I need the poppy!” the man said. He wasn't telling Vasili anything Vasili hadn't guessed. If the fellow had had the habit for a while, even laws that threatened death to people who used the drug wouldn't get its claws out of his head. He went on, “You want money? I'll give you money! I've got plenty of money.”

He reached into a trouser pocket. When he opened his hand, gold coins from Russia and England and Austria-Hungary gleamed like the sun.

He had plenty of money, yes. What he lacked was sense. The shabby streetcorner where they stood talking hadn't seen that much gold in all the centuries Harbin was there. “Put it away!” Vasili hissed. “Do you want somebody to knock you over the head?”

“Who would dare?” The man had the arrogance of a high official, of someone who was likely to know Comrade Wang and his wife. Again, though, arrogance was no substitute for caution.

“Who? There are people in this part of town who would kill you for that many coppers.” At various times in Vasili's life, he might have been one of them. Not mentioning that seemed smart.

“I can have everyone in this part of town machine-gunned tomorrow morning,” the man snapped. “Don't play games with me.”

“Do you think they care what you can do, Comrade Commissar?” Vasili didn't know the man's title, but that seemed a good bet. “They've had an atom bomb fall on them. After that, what are some machine guns?”

For a wonder, what he said seemed to get through to the Chinese. To Vasili's relief, the man closed his hand and got the intoxicating gold out of sight. He also seemed to slump a little. How bad were the demons in his head? How soon before his brain felt emptied from the inside out, before every muscle in his body knotted, before snot flooded out of his nose, before he started shitting himself?

“You have to get me the poppy,” he said, but now with the first touch of doubt and pleading in his voice.

“Sir, please forgive this unworthy one, but he cannot do what he cannot do,” Vasili said. “Before the glorious People's Republic triumphed, the eastern dwarfs”—a snide Chinese gibe at the Japanese—“wanted people to use opium, because it made them tame. Not many of those people still walk under the sun. Mao's justice is fast and sure.”

The commissar slapped him in the face. Vasili had the straight razor in his pocket and a knife in his boot top. Had he thought he could pay back the commissar without being seen, he would have done it. On a street corner in a Chinese city, though? No. He made himself stand still.

“You stinking turd!” The man's voice rose to something close to a scream. He wheeled and stormed away. Vasili didn't follow him. With any luck, before long the man's own body would do worse to him than he'd done to the Russian.

A skinny fellow with a tray of millet cakes held to his front by a rope around his neck said, “That guy didn't like you.”

“Da,”
Vasili agreed absently. The skinny fellow nodded; everybody in Harbin followed that. Vasili went on, “But he's a big man, so what can you do?” The phrase meant
an important person.

“What did he want from you?” the cake-seller asked.

“Something I don't have. Something I can't get,” Vasili said.

“Not so good when a big man wants something like that from you,” the skinny fellow said shrewdly. “Especially when you're a round-eye. You stand out in a crowd.”

Other Russians did still live here, but not so many of them. Vasili shrugged. “Nothing I can do about how I look.”

“No, but if he wants to make you sorry, his friends won't have much trouble finding you.”

Vasili bowed to him, too. “Thanks a lot, pal. You just made my day.” It wasn't that the man who sold millet cakes was wrong. From now on, Vasili would have to worry every time somebody knocked on the door of the tumbledown shack where he was staying.

He did have some poppy juice there. He told himself he'd have to stash it somewhere else for a while. The commissar might come after it himself. Or he might send the secret police to search. If they found any, Vasili was out of business for good.

He decided to take care of that right away. He kept ducking into doorways on his way home, checking to see whether anyone was tailing him. As best he could tell, nobody was. He stopped at a little teahouse and drank a cup, watching Harbin go by in front of the shop. Harbin didn't seem to care at all about Vasili Yasevich. That suited him fine.

“Do you want another cup?” the serving girl asked. She was pretty, even if she only came up to the bottom of Vasili's chin. He'd hardly noticed her when he asked for the first cup. He'd just wanted to keep an eye on things for a few minutes.

He noticed her now. With regret, he shook his head. “Sorry, dear. I have to get somewhere. Maybe I'll come back.”

“Khorosho,”
she said, so she knew a bit of Russian. She smiled after him as he left.

He stayed careful all the way to his place. He made sure he barred the door after he went inside. The opium was in a glass jar with a ground-glass stopper. His father had had dozens like it. He'd got this one in a junk shop. He stuck it in his pocket and left.

His hiding place wasn't wonderful, but it would do: a hollow under half a brick in a blacksmith's place that had been falling in on itself since before Harbin belonged to puppet Manchukuo. He didn't think anyone saw him go in. He left through a hole in the side wall. It was three blocks to his shanty. That was far enough, he hoped, to keep secret policemen from coming here when they didn't find anything in the place.

Of course, if they wanted him enough, they could plant their own opium and kill him on account of it. He couldn't do anything about that. With luck, he was too unimportant for them to bother. He headed back to the teahouse. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “What do I call you?”

Bill Staley mooched away from yet another mail call with no card or letter from Marian. He wished she'd write. They had paper and pens in refugee camps…didn't they?

Or maybe she had written, but the Air Force hadn't figured out that he was in Japan, not at the field north of Pusan. One of the things he'd learned was that stuff could go south a million different ways. The poor sap for whom they went south wouldn't know which. He'd just know the world was fubar'd.

The field outside of Fukuoka was more like a base behind the lines and less like a forward airstrip than the one his B-29 hadn't been able to land at. The runways were paved. People slept in Quonset huts and prefab wooden barracks, not under canvas. A radar dish did spin to warn of trouble, but far fewer flak guns poked snouts toward the sky.

Hank McCutcheon noticed the same thing. “We're back in the peacetime Air Force,” he said.

“Cripes, we've earned it,” Bill answered. “We came way too close to buying a plot on that last run to Pyongyang.”

“Place got bombed,” McCutcheon said. “That's all Harrison and the other guys who give the orders care about. Lose some bomber crews? Hell, that's just the cost of doing business, like new spark plugs on a delivery truck.”

“Cripes,” Bill said again, on a different note this time. “Man, I don't like the idea of putting casualties on one side of the ledger.”

“That's what those guys do. That's what they're supposed to do,” the pilot said. “They go, ‘if we can do this much damage and only lose that many men, then hey, it's worth a shot.' ”

“How many cities have we lost? How about the Russians?” Bill said. “Whoever was working the cost-benefit analysis, he should have taken off his shoes so he could get the decimal point straight.”

“Not like you're wrong,” McCutcheon said. “But you were the one who reminded me a while ago that we haven't exactly been washing our hands with Ivory. Some of those mushroom clouds, we raised the mushrooms.”

“Uh-huh. You try not to think about it. Sometimes I feel like Lady Macbeth just the same.”

“Planning that shit is the generals' job. Doing it's ours,” McCutcheon said. “The other choice is getting shot down. Bombing's better.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bill nodded. “I don't think I was ever so scared as I was on the last run over Pyongyang. How many Superforts did we lose that night?”

“Half a dozen,” McCutcheon said, as if Bill didn't know that as well as he did. “And those two Twin Mustangs. And the airport down in the south. We didn't pay cheap for anything. But we plastered the target, and I promise we hurt Kim Il-sung worse'n he hurt us.”

“Sure we did. We can blow up tons and tons of gooks. But they can only blow up one Bill Staley, and they came too goddamn close to doing it. I felt the goose walking over my grave.”

McCutcheon studied him the way he might have looked over a nose wheel with a slow leak, wondering whether he could take off on it. “Bill, old son, you think maybe you ought to sit out a few missions? You don't sound like you're in A-number-one shape right this minute.”

“I'm not eager any more—I'll tell you that. I'll go, though,” Bill said. “Yeah, I will. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou fliest, I will fly: thy crew shall be my crew, and thy Superfortress my Superfortress.”

He hadn't thought he would—or could—go on butchering the Book of Ruth so long, but he got all the way through to the end of the passage. Hank McCutcheon eyed him with a mix of admiration and horror. “You're crazy as a fucking bedbug, Staley, you know that?”

“Marian always tells me so, yeah,” Bill answered, not without pride. “ 'Course, she must be nuts herself, or she wouldn't've married me.”

“I was gonna point that out in case you didn't,” the pilot said. “Seriously, though, man, are you good to fly? I don't want you in that seat if you aren't up to doing the things you need to do.”

Bill examined himself as he would have examined the instrument panel in front of the copilot's seat. Some of his internal dials didn't register as they would have if everything were running smoothly, but none was in the red. “Like I said, I'm not gung-ho these days. I've been shot at in two wars, and it never was any fun. I've got a wife and a little girl Stateside, and I want to see them again. I'm an old copilot, but I'm not an old, bold copilot. So I can do it. You want me to jump up and down about doing it, that ain't gonna happen.”