Bombs Away (46 page)

And so, every so often, people spoke up in hearty tones about how wonderful things always had been, were, and always would be in the USSR. Famine in the Ukraine, famine spurred on by fanatical Communist officials? War against Germany so badly botched, the country almost went under? American atom bombs landing everywhere from Leningrad to Petropavlovsk? All those were only bumps on the road to true socialism.

You had to say they were, anyhow, as long as anyone could hear you. You didn't dare say anything else, not unless you were in bed with your wife, in the middle of the night, all alone, with both your heads under the covers—and maybe not then, either, not if you knew what was good for you. You might have opinions about those other bits of business, but having them and voicing them were two different things.

“Great Stalin looks out for all the people of the Soviet Union,” Bohdan said. “Without his care, the country would fall to pieces.”

“He does,” said Ihor and some of the other sowers.

At the same time, others intoned, “It would.” By the way their voices rose and fell in unison, they might as well have been giving responses to the priest in church. That was another point you made only in the dark and under the covers, if you were so crazy as to make it at all.

Ihor had got far enough west with the Red Army before stopping one to see that life in Poland was richer than life in the USSR, while life in Germany was far richer than life in Poland, much less here. For the life of him, he'd never been able to figure out why the Nazis, who already had a country with so much for everybody, tried to conquer one so much poorer. It made no sense.

But then, a lot of what the Nazis did made no sense. If only they'd treated Russians and Ukrainians halfway decently, they would have got more willing workers and volunteers to fight alongside them than they knew what to do with. Instead, they turned everyone they overran into slaves—except for commissars and people like Jews and gypsies, whom they killed outright. Next to that, even Stalin started looking, well, great.

Somewhere off in the distance, in the woods or on the plain, Banderists lingered. They flew the Ukraine's old blue-and-yellow flag, or their own red-and-black one. They still skirmished with the Red Army and the MGB. Sometimes the nationalists had fought Soviet soldiers alongside the Germans, sometimes on their own hook. When they went into the gulag these days, they won twenty-five-year terms, not the tenners that had been more common before.

Ihor wondered what
they
thought of great Stalin after the A-bomb fell on Kiev. He also wondered whether the bomb made people who hadn't been Banderists decide the great Stalin wasn't so great after all and join the rebels. He hadn't seen any Banderist propaganda around here for a while. Would it start showing up again?

Down the field. Up the field again. Wave for a bag of seed. Wait till one of the boys brought it to you. Pause at lunchtime to eat blintzes full of cheese and gulp kvass. Kvass was slightly fermented: on the way to being beer. You'd do nothing but piss for a month if you drank enough of the stuff to get a buzz, though.

Petro Hapochka stood at the edge of the field all day long, shouting encouragement to the men working out there—and occasional obscenities at them when they faltered. He took being
kolkhoz
chairman seriously. You had to, if you were going to do the job at all.

If…Ihor wouldn't have taken Petro's post for a suitcase full of hundred-ruble bills, a motorcar, and a house all his own the size of the communal barracks. Some things came at too high a price. Trying to keep both the
kolkhozniks
and the Communist higher-ups happy seemed to him to be one of them.

He aimed no higher than getting through another day, another month, another year. As long as nobody arrested him or shot him, he was ahead of the game. Oh—and as long as nobody dropped an atom bomb on him, either.

The briefing officer whacked the pull-down map with a pointer. If this had been Korea rather than Japan, Bill Staley would have guessed the light colonel was taking lessons from General Harrison. “Khabarovsk,” the briefing officer said. “Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.”

Sitting in the folding chair next to Bill's, Hank McCutcheon whispered, “Gesundheit!”

Those were pretty good sneeze-names, all right, even by Russian standards. But Bill had to fight not to laugh out loud. You didn't want to get in trouble at a briefing. Sometimes it happened anyway, but not right then: somehow, he managed to hold a straight face.

Whack!
“Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk,” the lieutenant colonel repeated. “As you see, gentlemen, both cities lie along the Amur River, on the Russian side of the border with Red China.” The U.S. government still didn't recognize that Mao had won the Chinese civil war. As far as it was concerned, he remained a usurper and Nationalist Chiang the legitimate President of China, even if all he held was the island of Formosa.

Then again, as far as the American government was concerned, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were independent countries, not parts of Stalin's USSR. To Bill, the one seemed as surreal as the other. He wasn't a striped-pants diplomat. He didn't want to be any such silly thing, either.

He also didn't want to copilot Major McCutcheon's B-29. When the Department of Defense recalled him to active duty, though, what other choice did he have but to put the uniform on again? Refuse and go to jail? He'd thought that was worse. He still did—except when the Commies were shooting at him.

“Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” One more time!
Whack!
“Both cities are also important centers through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. By striking them, we will help interdict Soviet supplies flowing through Red China and down into the Korean peninsula. We will help the men on the ground by reducing the pressure the enemy can bring to bear against them.”

When the briefing officer said
striking them,
he meant
sending them up in atomic fire.
That was what this mission was all about. Neither Siberian city had yet had A-bombs visited upon it. There were reasons why they hadn't, too. Khabarovsk lay about three hundred miles north of where Vladivostok had been. Blagoveshchensk was another three hundred miles farther west. Bill didn't know what kind of air defenses the cities boasted. To the best of his knowledge, neither did any other Americans. The crews on this mission would find out…the hard way.

“We are expending three atomic devices on each city.” The briefing officer used the peculiarly bloodless language so beloved of militaries around the world. “We want to ensure that the interdiction process is successful. Other B-29s will carry high-explosive bombs to take out anything the large explosions happen to miss. They will also serve to divide the attention of the Russians' defensive personnel.”

They would be decoys, was what they would be. No one—except the crews in those Superforts and their families back home—would care if the pilots in the MiGs knocked them down. The more effort the Russians put into shooting down the planes that couldn't hurt them badly, the better the chance of getting through the B-29s with the atom bombs had.

Bill was sure he wouldn't be on a plane loaded with ordinary bombs. Hank McCutcheon had already brought his B-29 back from repeated missions with A-bombs. To the brass, that would argue he was good at it, better than some rookie would be. And maybe the brass were right, and maybe they were full of crap. You could toss heads six times in a row, and it wouldn't mean a thing—just a statistical hiccup.

I'm a fugitive from the law of averages,
Bill thought. That wasn't the way you ought to go into a mission. You needed confidence. Just because you needed it, though, didn't mean you'd have it.

“Any questions?” the briefing officer asked. Nobody said a thing. The men knew what they were getting into. This was what they'd bought when they let Uncle Sam teach them to fly. The officer with the silver oak leaves on his shoulders looked out at them. “Anyone who doesn't care to fly the mission?”

Some people in South Korea had walked out. Bill wondered if he should have. It was the fastest way he could think of to escape the Air Force. But it was also letting down his crew and his country. He'd sat tight then. He sat tight now. So did everybody else.

“Very good,” the briefing officer said briskly. “Pilots—come forward to receive your orders for the mission.”

Since Bill was but a copilot, he went on sitting right where he was. McCutcheon walked up to get the envelope with the bad news in it. Whatever the news in that envelope held, it was bound to be bad. The only question was, which kind of bad would it be?

“So who wins the Oscar?” Bill asked when McCutcheon came back. He hadn't broken the seal yet. Maybe he wasn't jumping up and down to find out, either.

“Funny, Billy-boy. Funny like a busted leg,” he said, as if a broken leg was the worst they had to worry about. He slid his right index finger under the edge of the flap to make it come free. The noise of the glue breaking away from the paper reminded Bill of a small animal scratching to be let out. McCutcheon pulled out the folded sheet inside and unfolded it.

Blagoveshchensk,
Bill read. He bit the inside of his lower lip. They'd spend an extra couple of dangerous hours over Russia, compared to the guys who'd hit Khabarovsk. The next line told him the B-29
would
be carrying an A-bomb. By now, he wondered how much it mattered. His dreams couldn't get any worse than they already were. He'd killed his tens of thousands. What were a few more tens of thousands after that?

The rest of the sheet detailed courses and altitude. They'd stay as low as they could as long as they could, to give Soviet radar sets as much trouble as possible.
In the event that you should be intercepted, you will of course utilize your best judgment to extricate yourselves from the emergency,
the orders finished primly.

Bill pointed to that last sentence. “Nice of them, isn't it?”

“As a matter of fact, it is,” Hank McCutcheon answered. “If we were Russians, that bit'd go
Keep following your assigned course no matter what.
”

“I guess it would,” Bill said, but he wondered how much difference it would make. If a MiG-15 or even an La-11 came after them, they were dead meat. They could push the throttles over the red line. They could jink and dodge as much as they pleased—and as much as an elephant could tap-dance. None of it was likely to do them any good. Why not hold course? It wouldn't cost more than a few minutes of life.

All the B-29s took off in swift succession and roared northwest through the night toward the Siberian coast. It was as routine as anything else the crews had done before. Bill's nerves still twanged. That extra time over land gnawed at him.

He wondered if they would have done better to fly over Manchuria and hit Blagoveshchensk from the south. When he said so, Major McCutcheon replied, “Think the Chinks don't have radar there and down in Korea? Think they don't have jets ready to scramble? How much you wanna bet?”

“I'm already betting my neck,” Bill said. “What else can I throw into the pot?”

They droned along not that far above what seemed endless taiga: pine forests that ran from west to east just below the frozen tundra. Khabarovsk lay somewhere south of their flight path. Just when Bill was wondering whether they'd come that far into Russia yet, flashes of blinding light in the distance told him some other Superfortresses had found their targets.

“One down, one to go,” McCutcheon said.

“If they didn't know we were around before, they probably have a hint now,” Bill said.

“Think so, do you?” the pilot answered.

Twenty minutes later, Bill wondered if he'd jinxed them. The radar operator started yelling about bogies. The B-29's defensive guns hammered. And shells from a night fighter's cannon ripped into the bomber. One of them tore off the left side of McCutcheon's face. The plane was suddenly Bill's, only it wouldn't answer the controls. There was fire—fire everywhere.

“Bail out!” he yelled. He couldn't himself, and it wouldn't have mattered. Not only were there flames between him and his escape hatch, but his parachute was already burning. So was he. The B-29 tumbled down toward the black, snow-dappled pines.

Marian had just dropped Linda off at the camp kindergarten. She didn't know why school had taken so long to get started in this miserable place. No, actually she could make a pretty good guess: too many other things for the authorities to worry about. But they'd finally noticed the swarms of kids too often running around in screaming packs.

So they said
Let there be school,
and there was school. And the parents looked on it, and they saw that it was good, and there was much rejoicing—among them, anyhow. And if their little darlings had a different opinion, too goddamn bad. Linda was out of Marian's hair for several hours a day. Somebody else could ride herd on her for a while.

Having left her own flesh and blood at the kindergarten tent, Marian walked away, wondering what she would do with time to herself and to herself alone. She hadn't had any since the bomb wrecked the house and left her and Linda with a Studebaker as a place to sleep. She kept looking behind her for the daughter who wasn't there.

The camp loudspeakers crackled to life. They did that every so often. Like everybody else, Marian paid them no more attention than she had to. She walked along for half a dozen steps before she realized they were blaring, “Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately! Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately!”

Again like everybody else, she had as little to do with the camp administrative center as she could. You went there if you were in trouble or if you wanted to get someone else in trouble. She'd testified against Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to break into her car. She hadn't gone back since.