Bombs Away (44 page)

Ushakov's voice came back through the intercom as the loader returned to his place: “I killed it. Thanks!”

“Pass the body back here,” Morozov said. “I'm going to look around again, so I'll chuck it out.”

He threw the bottle onto the sidewalk. Watching it smash, he nodded to himself. No enemy would send it back full of burning gasoline. Just then, the T-54 in front of his belched more stinking black smoke from its exhaust and lumbered forward.

“Hey, Zhenya!” Konstantin called over the intercom. “They're moving!”

“I see it, Comrade Sergeant.” The driver put the tank in gear. Whatever rubble lay in the streets, the tracks rolled over it with effortless ease. They ground most of it to dust.

A recovery vehicle had pulled a burning tank off into a side street to let the rest of the Soviet armor advance up the wider way the tank had blocked. It was a Stalin: the hardest tank to kill that the USSR knew how to make. Hard didn't mean impossible, though.

The Soviet Union might have been able to make tanks that were tougher yet. But it couldn't have made them in numbers worth putting in the field. In the last war, German tanks had had far more advanced engineering, most ways, than the good old T-34. But when there were five or six T-34s for every highly engineered Tiger or Panzer IV or Panther, what difference did that make? Quantity took on a quality of its own.

To Soviet planners, tanks were as expendable as bullets or rations. That was hard on the crews, but it made sense from a military point of view. Why waste too much quality on something that was sure to get smashed up pretty soon anyway? Turning out two or three of the pretty good instead of taking the time for the best worked out just fine.

In the same way, a swarm of half-trained soldiers spraying lots of lead in front of them would eventually wear down the smaller number of hardened professionals who faced them. The men who lived through their first few battles would learn their trade and leaven the new swarm that got seined into the Red Army after them.

That kind of approach had worked for Stalin the last time around. It was expensive, but the USSR had more men and more machines than it knew what to do with (by the way some generals performed, that was literally true).

A head popped up in the ruins. The helmet on the head was an American pot. Konstantin saw that just before he saw the bazooka tube on the broken masonry. He squeezed his PPD's trigger at the same time as the tube spat fire.

He never found out whether he got the American or German or whoever the son of a bitch was. The bazooka slammed into his T-54's frontal armor. He thought it hit near or on the patch the repair crew had welded on. The blast that consumed his crewmates flung him out of the turret and through the air instead.

He just had time to realize that his boots and the legs of his coveralls were on fire before he hit the sidewalk, hard. The thick leather tankman's helmet probably kept him from fracturing his skull. He rolled and beat at himself, trying to put out the flames before they burned him too badly.

A corporal jumped on him and rolled up and down his legs, smothering the fire. The infantryman also had the mother wit to yell for a medic. He got one faster than Konstantin had thought he would. Between them, the medic and the corporal lugged him away from the front. “Do you want morphine?” the medic asked him.

The burns and the bruises all started to hurt at once. “Fuck your mother, yes!” Morozov exclaimed. The medic stuck him. The pain went away, or maybe Konstantin did.

Now that it was May, the snow had melted in Korea. The countryside turned muddy, then green. “Ain't that sweet?” Sergeant Lou Klein said. “Spring is in the air. La-de-da!”

“Nice to know you're enthused about it,” Cade Curtis said.

“Fuckin'-A…sir,” Klein replied. “The birdies'll be singing their heads off. And us and the Chinks, we'll be blowing each other's heads off.”

“How long do you think this war can go on?” Curtis asked.

“I'm just a dumb sergeant. I don't know nothin'. I don't want to know nothin',” Klein said.

“You're a sandbagging dumb sergeant, is what you are,” Cade told him. “C'mon—give.”

“Well, I guess it kind of depends,” the veteran noncom said. “Sooner or later, they're bound to run out of cities to plaster. When they do, I guess things'll just peter out. Not much point to blowing up forests or prairies or anything. That's how it looks to me, anyway. How do you see it?”

“I don't think we can last even that long,” Cade said. “As soon as the logistics get so bad we can't support the armies, we've got to quit.”

That applied with special force here in Korea, something he made a point of not mentioning to Lou Klein. The only functioning port on the West Coast was San Diego. All the ones north of there had taken A-bombs. With the Panama and Suez Canals gone, the harbors on the East Coast couldn't quickly take up the slack. Everything that didn't leave through San Diego would go around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. It would be only two or three days less than forever on the way.

Red China, in the meantime, sat right across the Yalu, right where it had always been. The logistics of a war in Korea had always been bad for America. With the ports and the canals destroyed, they'd gone from bad to worse.

Sergeant Klein looked amused. “Anybody can tell you're an officer,” he said. “Officers go on and on about logistics.”

“You've got to,” Cade said. “They're important.”

“As long as I've got ammo for my M-1, as long as the guys in the battery behind us have enough shells for their 105s, I won't worry about it.”

Cade started to explain that that was what logistics were all about, that things would go horribly wrong if you didn't worry about making sure dogfaces had plenty of cartridges and howitzers had plenty of shells. He started to, but a glint in Klein's eye shut him up before the words came out. The sergeant was sandbagging again.

When Cade didn't walk barefoot through the obvious, Klein looked disappointed for a moment. Then he grinned a grin that showed off his nicotine-stained choppers. “You're learning, sir, damned if you ain't.”

“Baby steps,” Cade said. “Baby steps.”

A moment later, they both dove for the dugout. Those screams in the air were incoming Red Chinese 105s. Klein dove no sooner than Cade—the young lieutenant really was learning. The dugout was cramped for two; it might have been cramped for one. As they huddled together, Klein said, “You come any closer, Lieutenant, you're gonna kiss me.”

“No, thanks,” Cade said. “I've been overseas a while, but not
that
long.” The way they were twisted up with each other, he could just about whisper in Lou Klein's ear. They both laughed. It wasn't that funny, but Cade was glad for anything to take his mind off the artillery fire.

U.S. guns opened up, too, but they didn't shoot back as hard as he would have liked.
Save ammo
was the new watchword. With the troubles back home, it had to be. Stalin might give the Chinks only what he didn't feel like using himself, but he had plenty of old howitzers and rounds to shoot out of them. Artillery had always been an American advantage. It had been, but the balance was tilting.

When the shelling let up, Cade and Sergeant Klein untangled from each other and jumped up onto the firing step to see if the Red Chinese would follow it up with a ground attack. Not this time: no dun-colored wave of men slogging forward to get cut down. They'd shelled for the sake of shelling, because they had the tubes and ammunition. They'd made the Americans keep their heads down, and hurt or killed a few at no great cost to themselves.

By baby steps, they were learning, too.

A hundred yards down the trench, some unlucky GI was wailing for his mother. Curtis and Klein looked at each other. Their faces both wore the same expression. “Christ, but I hate that,” Klein said. “Just dumb luck I ain't the one making those noises.”

“Uh-huh,” Cade said. “I've come too close to that too many times.”

“Ain't we all?” Klein said. Cade remembered he had been wounded, and more than once. What kind of noises had he made when he got hit? Nothing so horrible as the ones rising now, or Cade hoped not. Those were the cries you let out when you were in agony, and death or lots of morphine were all you had to look forward to.

After what seemed like forever but was actually five or ten minutes, the wounded man fell silent. Either he was dead or they'd doped him not just to but past the eyebrows. Whichever, he wasn't making that horrible racket any more. Cade didn't care about anything else.

Klein lit a cigarette. He held the pack out to Curtis. “Want one, sir?”

Cade hadn't smoked at all till he put on the uniform, or, in fact, till he came under fire. He hadn't smoked much then; he hadn't really got the habit before he was cut off from the Army's logistical horn of plenty. So it wasn't as if he needed a butt. He took one anyway, saying, “Thanks. Now watch me cough my head off.”

“I sure as hell did when I started smoking.” Klein pulled a Ronson that had seen plenty of hard use out of his pocket. Cade leaned over to get a light. “There you go,” the sergeant said when he took his first inexpert drag.

He did cough. It tasted terrible, as if he'd inhaled the smoke from burning leaves—which was just what he had done. He got dizzy and light-headed—no, he hadn't tried this for quite a while. He gulped as his stomach did an Immelmann.

“You okay, sir?” Klein asked with what sounded like genuine concern. “You look kinda green.”

“I believe it.” Spit flooded into Cade's mouth. His body was convinced he'd just gone and poisoned himself. Gulping again, he wasn't so sure it was wrong. “Hope I don't lose my lunch. Been too long since I did any of this.”

“Yeah, you gotta stay used to it,” Lou Klein agreed. “Even when you are, it ain't like you get drunk or nothin'. Just kinda, I dunno, takes some of the edge offa things. Gives you somethin' to do when you got five minutes with nothin' goin' on, too.”

“I guess so.” Cade nodded and cautiously inhaled again. It was almost as rugged as his first try. He turned his head and got rid of some of that outpouring of spit. Klein chuckled, but softly. Cade said, “The Indians must have been crazy when they started doing this.”

“I ain't gonna argue with you,” the noncom said. “But the whole goddamn world sucks on coffin nails these days.” He smoked in quick, harsh drags, and ground out his cigarette on the callused palm of his left hand.

Cade took more time between puffs. He didn't want to start puking his head off. His hands were hard, as any soldier's had to be, but not hard enough to do duty for an ashtray. He killed his cigarette with the sole of his boot.

“Here ya go, sir.” Klein tossed him the opened pack. “I got plenty more.”

“Thanks—I think,” Cade said. The sergeant laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

Behind the lines, more American guns started going off. Those were 155s, with plenty of range to strike the smaller Chinese pieces. As the 105s had before them, they stopped firing sooner than Cade would have liked. Yes, ammunition here was in short supply. Everything here was in short supply—everything except Red Chinese soldiers. With that on his mind, Cade warily lit another cigarette.

Marvin Finch had a swimming pool in his back yard. Even in Southern California, that was an uncommon luxury. When Aaron Finch took Ruth and Leon over to visit his brother's family, he looked at that pool with a proprietary air. And well he might have. When he moved in with Marvin right after the war, digging that pool was part of his rent.

He still had the shovel he'd used. About a third of the blade was worn away. He intended to keep it as long as he lived, as a reminder of the hard work he'd done.

Marvin was a couple of inches shorter than he was, and stockier, too. He had a double chin and a comfortable little pot belly. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and smoked a pipe. He had a million schemes, none of which had paid off the way he'd wished they would. He could talk anybody into anything…for a little while. After that, his charm wore thin. Aaron reflexively liked him—they were brothers, after all—but he'd learned to keep a hand on his wallet when Marvin started charming.

“No hatchet today, hey?” he said when he opened the door to let in Aaron and Ruth and Leon.

“I dunno. Got any wood you need chopped?” Aaron didn't let on that Marvin irked him. The accident was forty years old now, and Marvin hadn't forgotten it. He never forgot anything anybody did to him.

He squatted down in the front hall and tickled Leon. Leon giggled. He thought Marvin was great. Of course, he wasn't quite two, so his judgment left something to be desired.

“Hello, Aaron. Hello, Ruth,” Sarah Finch said. Olivia's mother was a washed-out woman in her early forties. She'd been a Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Arkansas. Then she met Marvin, fell in love with him…and vanished into his shadow. If you gave him half a chance, he'd do that to you.

“Hi, Sarah,” Aaron said. He liked Marvin's wife. By all the signs, he liked her better than Marvin did. Of course, he didn't sleep in the same bed with her.

He squeezed Ruth's hand. If he hadn't been living with Marvin, he never would have met her. That made him more forgiving than he would have been otherwise.

“Is Roxane here yet?” Ruth asked Marvin. Roxane Bauman was her first cousin, the gal who'd introduced her and Aaron. She was married to a working but not enormously successful actor named Howard Bauman. Their politics were very pink, almost if not altogether red.

Aaron hadn't seen them since the war started. Just before it did, Bauman had had to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee. Aaron wondered what they thought of Stalin now. That ought to be interesting…one way or another.