Bombs Away (26 page)

“Nope. That wouldn't be so real great.” If the warning offended Klein, he didn't show it. He walked along the trench till just before it kinked, popped up to check things, and promptly disappeared from sight. Somebody fired at the place where he'd been, but he wasn't there any more.

“You reckon we'll ever see the tanks they keep promising us?” Cade asked him.

“Sir, I been in the Army about as long as you been around, so I gotta say stranger things have happened.” Klein paused to think. “You ask me to name two of 'em, though, I'm gonna have some trouble.”

“That's how it looks to me, too. I was hoping you would tell me I was wrong,” Curtis said. The Reds hated and feared American armor. They hadn't had that many old Russian T-34/85s to begin with, and a lot of the ones they had had were wrecks now. Even a new T-34/85 wasn't a match for a Pershing. And the enemy wasn't likely to get new ones, or T-54s, not when Stalin needed tanks a hell of a lot closer to home.

Of course, that shoe also fit the American foot in Korea. With the Red Army trying to crash its way to the Rhine, every American, British, and French tank around was busy doing its best to hold the Ivans back. After World War II ended, the French had taken on some ex-Nazi Panthers to tide them over till they built up their own tank factories again. If any of those brutes were still running, the froggies had probably thrown them into the fight, too.

All of which left Korea half forgotten, dangling from the ends of both sides' ridiculously long supply lines. And it turned the fighting here into something out of the war before last: trenches and artillery and grenades and machine guns. The fighters that sometimes strafed the trenches were more modern than Sopwith Camels. But, with the aviation world swinging at top speed from prop jobs to jets, they were hardly less obsolete than those cloth-and-wood-and-wire biplanes.

Just to show you never could tell, a regiment's worth of Pershings clanked up to the front under cover of darkness a couple of days later. Astonishment made the cigarette in Klein's mouth twitch. “Fuck me,” the noncom said. “We went and won the Irish Sweepstakes.” Cade couldn't have put it better himself.

The attack was to be in the direction of Chongju. The way the higher-ups put it showed they didn't think it would get that far. Cade noted that without much surprise. The Americans had more and better planes and tanks and big guns than the enemy. The Red Chinese and North Koreans had committed far more soldiers to the fight. Their tactics often reminded Cade of smothering a fire by piling bodies on it till it went out, which didn't mean they wouldn't work.

As it had on the Somme thirty-five years before, artillery thundered to soften up the foe. It had gone on for days then, throwing away the advantage of surprise. Generals had learned since—not quickly, but they had. After three hours, the 105s and 155s fell silent. The tanks went forward, foot soldiers in their wake.

Enemy machine guns started barking as soon as the barrage shut down. Unless you used an A-bomb, you wouldn't kill all the troops in front of you. Even if you did, you might not get them all. And this stretch of Korea wasn't worth splitting atoms.

Nor did it need them. England had invented tanks during World War I to deal with the Kaiser's machine-gun nests. They still did the job. The Pershings' 90mm main armament smashed sandbags and knocked reinforced concrete to pieces. A few Red Chinese soldiers carried rocket-propelled grenades—what the Russians used for bazookas. They knocked out a couple of American tanks, but only a couple. The rest ground ahead.

Cade and his men loped after them. You couldn't let tanks get too far out in front of infantry. Or you had better not. If you did, brave enemies would shove Molotov cocktails into the engine compartment or chuck grenades through open hatches and make the crews unhappy.

Here and there, live Chinks fought back with rifles and submachine guns. After the pounding the forward trenches had taken, there weren't too many of them. They didn't stay alive very long, either. Cade picked up a PPSh whose former owner wouldn't need it any more. He scavenged as many magazines of pistol ammo as he could to keep it fed.

Klein eyed him. “You weren't shitting me when you said you liked those Russian jobs, were you? Uh, sir?”

“Not even a little bit,” Cade said. “They're like Model T's. They'll run forever, and they don't wear out.”

“Sir, you weren't even born yet when they quit makin' Tin Lizzies,” Klein said.

He was right. Even so, Cade answered, “There were still plenty of 'em around when I was a kid. People down the road from us had one.”

“Me, I got my face slapped in my old man's Model T,” Klein said. “If she'd come across instead, I might've married her and never joined the Army. Just goes to show, don't it?” He didn't say what it showed. Chances were he didn't know, either. They slogged on through the ruined Korean countryside.

It was what would have been a lazy Sunday morning in Glendale. Aaron Finch hadn't seen a lot of lazy Sunday mornings in his life. He'd known a few after he married Ruth. He might have known more with her, but then Leon came along. Babies didn't believe in lazy mornings, not even after they turned into toddlers.

And the bombs that had smashed Los Angeles made Aaron only too sure that nobody around here would know any lazy Sunday mornings for a long time to come. The people the bomb hadn't killed were too busy scrambling to kick off their shoes, pour some more coffee, and relax with the paper (assuming the paper they were used to relaxing with had survived, which the big ones hadn't). Aaron found himself no less busy at the game of survival than anyone else.

“You ready, Leon?” he asked his little son.

Leon was fidgeting, which made it hard for Ruth to finish tying his shoes. He fidgeted a lot. He had more energy than he knew what to do with. But he nodded, which made the baby curls bounce up and down on top of his head. And he said, “Ready, Daddy!”

Aaron and Ruth looked at each other. They knew Leon knew what
ready
meant. But he hadn't said it himself till just now. Kids came out with new stuff every day. From everything Aaron could see, coming out with new stuff all the time was a big part of what being a kid was about.

“Well, come on, then.” Aaron stubbed out his cigarette. “Let's go see what the Kasparians want for eggs. And you can pay your respects to the ducks.”

“Ducks! Quack!” Leon jumped up and down in excitement. He wasn't a whole lot taller than a duck or a chicken, but he did act oddly solemn around the mallards. If he wasn't paying his respects to them, Aaron didn't know what else to call it.

They walked down the street together, Leon's little hand in Aaron's big one. No cars went past them. It was still early, but even so…. Gas was scarce in and around Los Angeles, and cost upwards of half a buck a gallon when you could get it. That was one reason Aaron was down to part-time at Blue Front. Another was that nobody was hauling appliances into L.A. Even if people had brought them in, nobody was buying them. Herschel Weissman cursed the way his business was going in Yiddish and in accented English.

No cars drove the street, but a beat-up station wagon and a newish De Soto that didn't belong in the neighborhood were parked on the far side. The windows on both were steamed up, which meant somebody, or a family's worth of somebodies, slept inside. Aaron locked his doors all the time now, which he hadn't bothered doing before the bombs fell. He kept a heavy iron fireplace poker and a carving knife where he could grab them fast if he had to, too. He hadn't needed them, but he was ready if he did.

Leon suddenly yanked his hand out of his father's. “Flarn!” he said. “Flarn!” He plucked a yellow dandelion on the next-door neighbor's lawn.
Flarn
was what he said when he meant
flower.
He knew what he meant, and so did Aaron and Ruth, but not everything that came out of his mouth was what strangers would recognize as English. His parents didn't always recognize it right away, either. He'd gone
Drin-drin!
for a couple of weeks before Ruth figured out it was the noise he made for a ringing telephone.

The Kasparians had a hand-lettered sign on their front lawn: POULTRY & EGGS FOR SALE HERE. Clucks and quacks floated up from the back. Leon picked another flarn. One of these days, he'd probably tear up somebody's prize tulips and catch hell for it, but so far he'd stuck to dandelions.

Aaron knocked on the front door. When it opened, a woman of about his own age looked back at him. She had a nose more “Jewish” than his and eyebrows that met above it. He found that off-putting, but somebody'd told him it was a beauty mark for Armenians.
To each his own,
he thought with profound unoriginality.

Her smile was nice. “Hello, Aaron,” she said, and then, “Hello, Leon.”

“Flarns!” Leon showed off the dandelions.

“Morning, Elizabeth,” Aaron said.

“You need eggs today?” Elizabeth Kasparian had a faint guttural accent. She'd come to the States after surviving the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I.

“And a chicken, if you've got one to sell,” Aaron answered.

“We do, yes.” She nodded. “Go around the back, and Krikor will let you pick one out for yourself. Do you want him to do the honors for you?” She meant killing and gutting the bird.

“Thanks, but I'll take care of it myself and save a quarter. We kept poultry in Oregon when I was a kid, and I used to do it then. Chopped wood, too.” Aaron didn't tell her that he'd also chopped off the last joint of his younger brother Marvin's right little finger. He hadn't meant to, which didn't make Marvin—or their father—any happier.

“However you please,” Mrs. Kasparian said. “Some people don't care to do the killing themselves. They would rather not think about that—only the eating.”

“They've never raised livestock, then,” Aaron said. Mrs. Kasparian nodded again. If you ran a farm or even kept a few chickens for eggs and meat, you couldn't get sentimental about your critters. Of course, most city folks knew animals only as pets. Aaron steered Leon toward the gate by the side of the Kasparians' house. “C'mon, kiddo-shmiddo.”

Leon bounded ahead. Aaron wouldn't let him watch when the chicken met the hatchet. He was too little for that. But he sure did think live chickens, and especially ducks, were fascinating as all get-out.

Krikor Kasparian had a graying mane of wavy hair and a mustache bushier than Joe Stalin's. He was shorter than Aaron, but wider through the shoulders. He puffed on a stogie foul enough to fall under the Geneva Convention rules against poison gas.

“Hallo, Aaron,” he said, his accent thicker than his wife's. “Eggs this morning?”

“A dozen, yes, and a chicken. That one, I think.” Aaron pointed at a plump bird pecking corn and bugs from the dirt. Leon ran past the rooster toward the muddy little pond the ducks used. He stared at them, wide-eyed. He didn't bother them or anything—he just stared. He really did seem to be paying his respects. He got muddy doing it, which wouldn't thrill Ruth, but he was a little kid. Little kids drew mud the way magnets drew nails.

“Feed has got more expensive since the bomb fell,” Krikor said gravely. “And we have more demand, because the supermarkets that get birds from far away cannot do it so easily. So it will cost you half a dollar more than last time.”

I've got you over a barrel,
was what he meant. He was one of the price gougers big shots in Sacramento and Washington went on about. But he was also a neighbor, and he could have tried to extract more than he had. Aaron paid him without haggling. Life was too short. As long as you had the money, life was too short. For the moment, he did.

“Hey, Leon!” he called. “Come on! We're going home!”

Pretty soon, from what Ruth said, Leon would start saying no whether he meant it or not. He hadn't done it yet, though. He started back toward Aaron, but stopped to go eye-to-eye with the rooster. Maybe he enjoyed doing that with something that was shorter than he was. The rooster's golden eyes bored into his brown ones. Leon reached out—Aaron was convinced he was experimenting, not being mean—to touch the bird's red comb.

“Careful, kid,” Aaron said. He knew, as Leon didn't, that a rooster was boss of the henyard and had no use for intruders—especially not for intruders who weren't much bigger than it was.

He spoke up just too late. The rooster hauled off and kicked Leon in the shin. Since Leon was wearing short pants, it hurt even more than it would have otherwise. He let out a squeal that literally ruffled the rooster's feathers, then dashed back to his daddy. Aaron picked him up to inspect the damage.

“I am very sorry about that,” Mr. Kasparian said.

“Doesn't seem to be much harm done,” Aaron said. Leon had a red mark on his leg and might get a bruise, but the rooster hadn't broken the skin. “You have to watch out for things like that,” Aaron told him.

Leon had no idea what he was talking about. He'd keep finding out the hard way how the world worked for quite a while yet. But, as long as Aaron had hold of him, things couldn't be
too
bad.

After a minute or two, Aaron set him down. He paid Krikor Kasparian, took the eggs and the chicken, got hold of Leon's hand, and went home. He'd have a new story to tell Ruth.

They said you never saw the one that got you. As far as Sergeant Konstantin Morozov was concerned, they said all kinds of silly crap. This once, though, they happened to be right.

Morozov was frantically traversing the T-54's turret so the tank's big gun would bear on an English Centurion—he thought it was a Centurion, anyhow, since it looked more angular than the American Pershings. Next thing he knew, something slammed into the T-54 hard enough to smash his face into the periscope eyepiece. Blood ran down his cheek.