Bombs Away (18 page)

Marshall sent him a quizzical look. Truman had seen a few of those from the distinguished soldier and diplomat since succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew exactly what they meant: that FDR never would have said such a thing.
Well, too stinking bad,
the President thought. When he slogged through Tacitus in the Latin, he'd been horrified to discover that the Roman historian called a spade an implement for digging trenches. As far as Truman was concerned, a spade was a spade, or maybe a goddamn shovel.

“Of course, sir,” Marshall said, “if we drop atom bombs all over the Federal Republic, Adenauer won't have much left even if they do drive the Russians back.”

“That's what he said in the wire.” The President sighed. “It's his country.”

“Only about as much as Japan is Hirohito's.” As usual, Marshall had a point. The United States called the shots in western Germany. Or the United States had called the shots till the shooting started. The Secretary of Defense went on, “He doesn't say anything about atom bombs on the Russian zone?”

“No. I told you, he's no dope. He knows he can't make us pay attention to him on anything outside his borders.” Truman drummed his fingers against the side of his leg. Then, suddenly, he grinned. “I bet he hopes like anything the wind's blowing from west to east when we bomb his ex-countrymen.”

Marshall's face twitched in a sort of vestigial smile. “I bet you're right, Mr. President.”

“If we do it again, it won't just be the Russian zone there,” Truman said. “We'd better clobber the other satellites, too. That will slow the reinforcements going through them, and it may give them a hint they're backing the wrong horse in the race.”

“I wouldn't count on that, sir.” Marshall explained why he sounded dubious: “Those regimes are full of Stalin's hand-picked men. Rokossovsky, the Polish Minister of War, was a Russian marshal during the war.”

“I understand,” Truman said. “But you'd hope that, after a few atom bombs, even people with the MGB sitting on them might get frisky. No guarantees—I understand that, too. Still, you'd hope.”

“Ah. I see what you're saying.” Marshall nodded. “Yes, you would hope—you do hope. At the end there, the Italians rose up and shot Mussolini and his mistress and Achille Starace.”

Truman snapped his fingers. “Starace! Thank you! I never remember that Fascist bastard's name.”

“He was a big wheel in Italy once upon a time,” Marshall observed.

“Sure he was. But he's not important enough for anybody to want to keep him in mind now—anybody who doesn't have your head for details, I should say.” The President sent what was almost a bow in Marshall's direction. Then he continued, “Those Red bosses in Warsaw and Prague and Budapest and East Berlin, they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall. If it looks like people are gonna shoot them and hang them upside down from lampposts, how long will they stay in love with Stalin?”

“That's a good question, all right,” George Marshall said. “If we bomb Warsaw and Prague and Budapest and East Berlin, those people won't be around to worry about it. Stalin will have to find someone else to pass on his orders.”

“I don't want to do that. It would be like dropping a bank vault to squash an ant. Most of the people in those cities despise Communism as much as we do.” Truman hadn't worried about such things when he ordered the Manchurian cities hit. Europeans were people to him, people who could have ideas like his. Chinese were just…Chinese.

“So you want to take out smaller towns, then? More places with important rail lines?” Marshall said. “Shall I make a list for your approval?”

“Yes, do that. We'll break a lot of eggs, but I don't want to drop the whole bushel basket at once, not if I can help it,” Truman said. “And it will get Adenauer off my back—for a while, anyway.”

Konstantin Morozov stuck his head out of the cupola and warily peered ahead. His T-54 sat hull-down behind a low swell of ground nobody who hadn't been a tank commander for a while would even have noticed, much less exploited. You got to be a veteran commander by starting to notice such things—and by killing the new fish and the jerks who didn't.

The T-54, he was discovering, had a design flaw nobody in the Red Army'd talked about. Talking about it would have cost some engineer his cushy dacha or his Stalin Prize or maybe his neck. Not talking about it meant tank crews had to find out about it the hard way, in combat…or buy a plot before they could.

Trouble was, the 100mm gun wouldn't depress as far as the main armament on the American and British tanks the swarms of T-54s were facing. That meant the Soviet machines, when they were on a reverse slope like this, had to come farther forward and expose more of themselves when they fired. The enemy had an easier time getting a clean shot at them than they did at him.

He studied the terrain ahead with Zeiss binoculars he'd taken off a dead German major somewhere in western Poland at the end of 1944. He'd hung on to them ever since. They were so much better than the junk his own country made, it wasn't even funny.

A few enemy foot soldiers had dug foxholes half a kilometer farther west, not far from a burnt-out farmhouse. They were Americans, or maybe the Nazi retreads who fought alongside the imperialists. Had he been sure they were Fritzes, he would have sent a few shells at them, more to scare them out of a year's growth than in serious hope of killing them. Fighting Americans was a professional responsibility. Even in this new war, fighting Germans was a savage pleasure.

He let himself slide back down into the turret. “What's going on, Comrade Sergeant?” Pavel Gryzlov asked.

“Not much, not right this second,” Morozov told the gunner. He asked the loader, “How are we doing for ammo, Mogamed?”

“Could be better, Comrade Sergeant,” Mogamed Safarli answered. “We're down to maybe eight rounds of AP, half a dozen HE, and a couple of those canister shells.”

“Fuck me! That's not enough!” Morozov said. You could go through eight rounds of armor-piercing in five frantic minutes. The T-54 had already done it more than once. “What are we supposed to do if we run dry? Hit the goddamn Pershings with our dicks?”

“You'd need a hell of a hard-on to get it in,” Gryzlov said. All three men in the turret laughed goatishly.

But Konstantin didn't keep laughing for long. “That really isn't enough, Mogamed—nowhere near. Why didn't you say something sooner?”

“Comrade Sergeant, please excuse me, but I told you we were running low yesterday afternoon. We haven't bombed up since. In fact, we used some high-explosive shells knocking that tavern flat.”

Morozov thought back. “Well, up my cunt,” he remarked without rancor. “You did say that. Went clean out of this chamber pot that's supposed to be my head.” He didn't mind getting on his crew when they screwed up. You kept them sharp that way. But they hated you if you came down on them when they hadn't done anything wrong.

He'd had a couple of superiors like that. Neither one of them lived through the Great Patriotic War. It could have been a coincidence. It could also have been that nobody went out of his way to lend a hand when the hardasses landed themselves in trouble.

He got on the radio with regimental HQ and said, “Things are pretty quiet in front of me. Any chance I can pull back long enough to fill up my racks?”

“How are you fixed for shells?” asked the uniformed clerk in the colonel's tent. Konstantin repeated what Mogamed Safarli had told him. The clerk said, “You'd better hang on where you are. We've got some tanks drier than you, and we aren't feeding them any shells, either.”

“
Bozhemoi!
Why not? What'll we fight with if the Yankees counterattack? Rocks?” Morozov didn't want to talk about his dick with someone he didn't know well. If the clerk was a prissy little shit, as so many clerks were, he could get his tit in a wringer for throwing
mat
around. People like that were allergic to the filthy Russian slang.

“I can't give you what I don't have.” By the way the man said it, he'd used the same words with those other tank commanders before he talked to Morozov. “It isn't reaching the front in the quantities we've requisitioned.”

“Why the hell not? If we don't have ammo, we'll lose the war!” Konstantin yipped.

“Haven't you been paying attention to Radio Moscow?” the clerk said coldly. “The imperialists dropped more atom bombs on our supply routes last night. We have to be careful expending ammunition and fuel till the situation stabilizes. Out.” He broke the circuit.

“Bugger me with a pine cone!” Morozov said in disgust, yanking the earphones off his head. “They can't give us any more, not right now. They're low on diesel, too, or they say they are, the stingy turds.” He called to the driver through the speaking tube: “Hey, Misha!”

“What do you need, Comrade Sergeant?” Mikhail Kasyanov asked.

“How are we fixed for fuel?”

“Half full—a hair under. How come?”

“Because only the Devil's auntie knows when we'll get any more,” Konstantin replied. When a Russian started talking about Satan's near relations, things had gone wrong somewhere. Well, things
had
gone wrong somewhere, and the Devil was loose on earth. For all Morozov knew, his near relations were loose with him. The tank commander went on, “They've dropped more atom bombs—that's what's happened. They want to fuck over our logistics, is what they want, and they know how to do it.”

“That's no good,” Kasyanov said. “What happens if we get the order to advance, and we run out of gas before we've gone ten kilometers?”

“What do you think happens?” Morozov answered irritably. “Either the Americans shoot us because we're out of shells, too, or the MGB shoots us because we didn't send the tank forward without fuel.”

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. As usual, that was just exactly too late. Everybody who wasn't a snitch hated the MGB. Even some polecats who were snitches hated the MGB while they informed on their friends and neighbors and spouses and parents. Hating the MGB was simply a fact of life in the Soviet Union.

But
saying
things that suggested you hated the MGB…When you did that, you gambled with your freedom. You gambled with your life. Konstantin had given the other three men in the tank a grip on him. It wouldn't matter that his T-54 was at the spearpoint of the Soviet advance. If one of them let a Chekist know what he'd said, they'd yank him out and send him to the gulag or shoot him, depending on how annoyed and how busy they happened to be.

They might also do the same to the crewmen who hadn't reported him. Disloyalty was one of the worst crimes a Soviet citizen could commit. What was not reporting disloyal speech but a disloyal act? Nothing else at all, not the way the security apparatchiks eyed things.

To keep from worrying about it, he poked his head out of the tank again. A couple of Soviet infantrymen had come up alongside it. One of them carried the new rifle, the AK-47. It was wonderful, like giving a soldier his own private machine gun.

“Careful, friends,” Morozov called to the men in grimy khaki. “The Americans are on the far side of the rise, maybe half a kilometer from here. Don't show yourselves when you move up.”

“Yes, Granny dear,” the man with the Kalashnikov said. His pal snickered. They figured a tank commander didn't know the first thing about fighting on foot. For all Morozov knew, they were right. He shrugged. At least he'd tried.

Boris Gribkov smiled as he walked from the barracks to the airstrip. “Isn't that something?” he said, his breath smoking as he spoke. “Makes me wish I spoke English, damned if it doesn't.”

His Tu-4, like all the heavy bombers at Provideniya, had turned into a B-29.
Maskirovka
was a many-splendored thing. The paint job had always been the biggest visual difference between the original and its reverse-engineered half brother. The other Soviet features—the engines, the cannons that replaced .50-caliber machine guns in the turrets—didn't stand out to the eye.

Now the red Soviet stars and numbers were gone. White U.S. stars inside blue replaced them. So did American numbers and group markings. If you saw Gribkov's plane or any of the others here, you would swear it came out of a Boeing factory, not one from half the world away.

Vladimir Zorin came out with a nasty chuckle. “We may not speak English, but the imperialists will understand what we tell them,” the copilot said.

“You're right about that, even if they don't understand us,” Gribkov said. His big hope for accomplishing his mission was that any American fighter pilot who happened to spot the Tu-4 would take it for a B-29 and pay no attention to it.

No guarantees, of course. No guarantees about anything that had to do with what they were about to try. All the aircrew knew that. Everybody understood it. No one had shied away or refused to fly, even though Colonel Doyarenko swore there would be no reprisals against anybody who wanted out.

Gribkov didn't believe him. He didn't believe any of the other flyers did, either. Maybe they wouldn't give you a bullet in the nape of the neck. Maybe. But you would get an enormous black mark on your record. You would never see another promotion or another assignment you actually wanted. And what would happen to your family? They had all kinds of ways to make you sorry if you stepped out of line, and to make the people you loved even sorrier.

Two ladders led up into the bomber. Gribkov, Zorin, and Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, climbed up into the one that led to the cockpit. The radioman, the navigator, the flight engineers, the radar operator, the fire-control scanners, and the poor, lonely tail gunner boarded through the bomb bay.