Bombs Away (4 page)

Whatever that convoy was bringing in, the people who'd sent it wanted to keep it safe till it got where it was going. Those people sure as hell knew how to get what they wanted, too.

Bill Staley suspected he knew what the trucks were carrying. He wasn't sure. He could easily have been wrong. He kept telling himself how easily he could be wrong. He hoped like anything he was.

Two days later, Brigadier General Matt Harrison, the base commander, summoned all the B-29 crews to a meeting. Some of the men—even some of the officers who sat in the pilot's and copilot's chairs—wondered out loud what was going on. Maybe they hadn't seen the convoy coming in, though even a dead man should have had trouble missing it. Maybe they just had trouble adding two and two. Bill didn't, and not just because he was a bookkeeper in the civilian world. He was pretty sure he knew why Harrison had called the meeting, no matter how he wished he didn't. Ignorance really would have been bliss.

Harrison was in his late forties. Among the ribbons on his chest was one for the Distinguished Service Cross. The only higher decoration was the Medal of Honor. He'd done something special in the last war.

He whapped the lectern he stood behind with a pointer. It wasn't quite a judge using his gavel, but it came close enough. Harrison drew all eyes to himself.

“Some of you will be wondering what came into the base the other day,” he said. “Well, I'll tell you. Our A-bombs now have pits. We can use them. If the President gives the order, we will use them.”

A few of the men—the clueless ones—exclaimed in surprise. Bill Staley only sighed and nodded; that was what he'd expected. The pit looked like an hourglass outline in steel. It had radioactives where the sand would have run from one side of the glass to the other. The bombardier manually inserted it into the bulky casing of an atomic bomb while the bomber was on its way to the target. Without it, the bomb wouldn't vaporize a city. With it in place, hell could literally come forth on earth.

“The Chinese and Russians may think they're safe on the other side of the Yalu,” Harrison went on. “They have been, but they aren't any more. Or they won't be after the President gives the word. They think they can get away with slaughtering our troops and shooting down our planes and hiding where we won't go after them. We haven't yet, but that doesn't mean we won't or we can't. When the order comes, we'll show them as much.” He looked out at the bomber crews. “If anyone has qualms of conscience, he may withdraw now. No black marks will go into his service record if he does, I promise.”

That was bullshit. Everyone knew it, promise or no. The Air Force would neither forgive nor forget a withdrawal now. Several flyers left anyhow, including a pilot and a copilot. Bill Staley sat where he was. The Red Chinese were killing too many of his countrymen. Whatever he could do to stop them, he would. He didn't care what kind of weapon he used. It wasn't as if they were fussy about such things.

By Harrison's scowl, he hadn't expected anyone to walk out. “All right,” he said. “The rest of us will go on. We are going to interdict the Chinese and the Russians at a much deeper level than they're looking for. Once that's done, we'll finish cleaning up the Korean peninsula.” He looked out at them again. “Any questions, gentlemen?”

“What happens if Stalin starts using atomic bombs, too, sir?” a major asked.

“He'll be sorry,” Harrison replied. The flyers bayed laughter. He went on, “Anything else?” No one spoke. He nodded. “We'll get ready, then.”

Boris Gribkov eased the Tu-4's yoke forward. The heavy bomber's nose came down, just a little.
Easy does it,
the pilot thought as he gave the plane a hair less throttle. You couldn't fly this thing with your dick, the way you could—the way you were supposed to—in a fighter. Well, you
could
do that, but you'd splatter the plane, and yourself, all over the countryside if you tried.

The Americans said there were bold pilots and old pilots, but no old bold pilots. Gribkov had no use for the Americans. He wouldn't have been landing his Tu-4 here at Provideniya if he'd liked them. Like them or not, what they said there was true.

And, like them or not, they built some goddamn impressive airplanes. Behind his oxygen mask, Boris' lips skinned back from his teeth in a mirthless grin. He knew exactly how impressive some American planes were. For all practical purposes, he was flying one.

During the USA's war against Japan, several damaged B-29s made emergency landings near Vladivostok. Till the very end, the USSR and Japan stayed neutral; Stalin had plenty on his plate fighting the Nazis. He interned the crews (after a while, he quietly gave them back to the Americans) and kept the bombers.

Russia had nothing like them, which was putting it mildly. Russian World War II heavy bombers were leftovers from the early 1930s, slow and lumbering and useless in modern combat. Stalin ordered exact copies of the B-29. He ordered them and, because his word was law in the Soviet Union, the Tupolev design bureau gave them to him in less than two years.

This machine had Russian engines. It had Russian cannons instead of American heavy machine guns. Everything else came straight from the Superfortress. Gribkov had heard that more than a few Russian engineers, used to the metric system, had driven themselves squirrely learning to work with inches and feet and pounds and ounces.

Lights marked the edge of the snowy runway outside the little town on the edge of the Bering Sea. Gribkov couldn't see the frozen sea. Provideniya sat less than a hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Winter daylight was brief at best. The sun had set long before, even if it was only late afternoon.

“Cleared to land, Plane Four,” the ground-control chief said.

“Message received. Thank you,” Gribkov answered. No one mentioned what kind of plane he was flying. Alaska lay just over the horizon. You had to figure the Americans were listening to everything they could pick up. The less they knew, the better for the Soviet Union.

He glanced over to his copilot. Vladimir Zorin nodded back. “All fine here, Comrade Captain,” he said, gesturing to his side of the complicated instrument panel.

“Good.” Boris lowered the landing gear. The hydraulics worked smoothly. On most Soviet planes, you had to do the job with a hand crank. More could go wrong with this system, but he took advantage of it just the same.

The Tu-4 was the only Soviet bomber with a nosewheel. A few new jet fighters also had them. If you'd started out keeping your nose up and using your tailwheel, the way Gribkov and every pilot trained during the Great Patriotic War had, doing things this way took some getting used to.

There. They were down—more smoothly than he'd expected. He gently tapped the brakes. The Tu-4 needed a lot of room to stop any which way. He didn't want to send it skidding by slowing down too quickly on this slick airstrip.

“Nicely done, Comrade Captain,” Zorin said.

“Spasibo,”
Boris answered. Zorin had landed the Tu-4 himself. He knew it wasn't easy. A compliment from him meant more than one from someone with no understanding of how things worked would have.

A groundcrew man bundled up like an Eskimo waved red and green lanterns to guide the bomber off the runway. Not having his nose elevated because of a tailwheel made seeing where he was going easier. The revetment to which the man led him was made from snow rather than dirt. After he killed the engine, he patted the arm of his leather flying jacket and said, “I'm glad we have this stuff. Usually, we start toasting as soon as we're on the ground, but not today.”

“No, not today,” Zorin agreed. “What do you suppose it is out there? Twenty below?”

“Something like that.” Gribkov tried to turn Celsius to Fahrenheit in his head. With so many funny measurements going into the Tu-4, funny temperatures seemed fitting, too. The only trouble was, he had no idea how to make the conversion.

Alexander Lavrov crawled back from the bombardier's station in the glassed-in nose of the plane. “Welcome to the end of the world,” he said as he, the pilot, and the copilot climbed down the ladder and their boots crunched on snow.

“This may not quite be the end of the world, Sasha,” Zorin said, “but you can sure see it from here.”

“In more ways than one,” Boris agreed. They were all silent for a moment after that. None of the B-29s that landed in the USSR had been modified to carry an A-bomb. The Americans had figured out how to do that later. Soviet engineers had had to work out the details for themselves. They'd done it, too.

The rest of the crew also left the plane. Counting the radioman, the navigator, the radar operator, and the gunners, the Tu-4 carried eleven. “Come on, folks,” called the groundcrew noncom with the lantern. “Let's get you somewhere a little warmer.” He led them toward one of the huts near the runway.

Meanwhile, other soldiers spread white cloth over the bomber to make it hard to spot from the air. Russians had always taken
maskirovka
seriously. What an enemy couldn't see, he couldn't wreck.

That hut wasn't much warmer than the wintry air outside. It was out of the wind, though; that wind seemed to blow, and probably did blow, straight down from the North Pole. A couple of kerosene lamps gave what light there was. Boris wondered whether Provideniya had electricity at all.

But a samovar bubbled in a corner of the room. Once he got outside of some hot sugared tea, the pilot felt better about the world. Some jam-filled blini sat on a table by the samovar. They weren't terrific blini, but they were better than the iron rations the crew had downed on the way east. Gribkov assumed there had to be vodka somewhere on the base; there was vodka somewhere all over the Soviet Union. There wasn't any in that hut.

A middle-aged man came in. He was too heavily decked out in winter gear to let Boris read his rank, but the pilot wasn't surprised when he said, “Welcome, men. I am Colonel Doyarenko. This is my base.” He had the accent to go with his Ukrainian name.

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel. This is…quite a place, isn't it?” Gribkov did his best to stay polite.

“It's the Soviet Union's asshole, is what it is,” Doyarenko answered, which was only too true. He went on, “But it's also about as close to the United States as this country comes. I don't mean Alaska—I mean the
real
United States. We can strike part of it with some hope of coming back to the
rodina
again. From most of our air bases, attack missions are strictly one-way.”

Gribkov licked his lips. “I hope it doesn't come to that, sir.” He wondered how many crews sent on such a one-way mission actually would drop their bomb at the end of it. He didn't ask the base commandant his opinion. Ask a question like that and the MGB would start asking questions of you. They wouldn't care whether you felt like answering, either.

Colonel Doyarenko shrugged. “I hope it doesn't, too. Only somebody who's never seen a war is stupid enough to want one. But I serve the Soviet Union. If the imperialists strike at our Chinese allies, we have to show them they can't intimidate us. Isn't that right?”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Boris said. You might not want a war, but once you were in one you were all in. If Hitler had taught the Russian people anything, he'd taught them that.

I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made
. Cade Curtis was absolutely, one hundred percent certain A. E. Housman had never been on the run from the Red Chinese in wintertime North Korea. Housman, if he remembered straight, had had a comfortable career teaching classics in English universities and writing poetry on the side. No other eleven words, though, could have better summed up how Cade felt now.

He was filthy. He was scrawny. He'd grown a scraggly, rusty beard. He was cold. He wasn't so cold as he might have been, though. He wore a Chinese quilted jacket under his GI parka. He had some excellent felt boots that fit over his American winter footgear. He'd tied more quilting around his trousers. The enemy soldiers who'd furnished those supplies would never need them again.

He'd taken all the food they had, too. He only wished they'd had more. He'd stolen whatever he could find in wrecked villages. But he wasn't the first scavenger who'd gone through them. No place in North Korea had much worth stealing left in it.

He kept working his way south as best he could, moving by night and hiding during the day. For all he could prove, he was the only American left alive and free north of the thirty-eighth parallel. He probably wasn't. Other stubborn, resourceful souls had to be doing the same thing he was, singly and in small groups. But he hadn't seen another white man since the Chinese overran his platoon as they were overrunning the whole overconfident American force up by the Yalu.

He chuckled harshly as he waited in a hillside cave for darkness to fall. No matter how bad things were, you could always imagine them worse. The next white man he saw might speak Russian, not English.

A squad of Chinese soldiers with Soviet submachine guns tramped through the valley below. They weren't hunting him, not in particular. They were just patrolling. With so much snow on the ground, he couldn't help leaving tracks. But those felt boots did more than keep his tootsies from freezing. They made his footprints look the same as the Chinks'. The waffle-sole pattern on his American shoes would have betrayed him in nothing flat.

He had a Soviet submachine gun himself. It was as least as good a weapon as his M-1 carbine, no matter how much uglier it might be. Again, the Chinese who'd lost it wasn't worrying about it any more. Cade could use it without worrying that the unfamiliar report would give him away.

But the submachine gun was for emergencies only. He also had a long bayonet he'd taken from a dead Tommy's Lee-Enfield. It had had blood on it then. He'd blooded it several times since he got it. It made no noise at all. If you were careful, neither did the people you stuck with it.