Bombs Away (42 page)

If, on the other hand, a B-29 was buzzing ten or eleven kilometers up in the air and dropped an A-bomb here, all this was nothing but a joke. Gribkov didn't think the Americans would send a B-29 into Soviet airspace in broad daylight. He wouldn't have wanted to fly a daylight mission against, say, England. But you did what they told you to do, not what you wanted to do.

And the fear remained. The fear, if anything, got worse. He'd dropped A-bombs. He'd seen the horrible gouges they tore in Soviet cities. So he knew what they did. If one did that here, he could only hope everything ended before he even knew the end had begun.

Jet engines screamed as fighters scrambled at some nearby airstrip. Looking up, Gribkov watched the MiG-15s climb almost vertically. That kind of flight was so different from the Tu-4's, it was almost as if he were watching a flying saucer perform. In the Tu-4, you counted yourself lucky to get off the ground at all, however slowly you did it.

The MiGs could reach a B-29's ceiling. They might even reach it fast enough to keep the Americans from doing whatever they wanted to do.
They might,
Boris thought. It wasn't a prayer. It wasn't that far from one, either.

Those jet banshee wails dopplered out as the MiG-15s rose against high-altitude invaders. No sooner had they begun to fade, though, than Gribkov also heard piston-engine growls.

He frowned. Before he could say anything, Leonid Tsederbaum exclaimed, “Those aren't ours!”

And they weren't. They were half a dozen American Mustangs. The plane had been developed as a long-range escort fighter. It had protected U.S. bombers all the way from England to Berlin. Mount a small bomb under each wing and it turned into a long-range fighter-bomber.

The Mustangs roared by low overhead. They dropped their bombs. They shot up the field. They zoomed away. They were gone.

“Bozehmoi!”
Vladimir Zorin sounded shaken to the core. “I thought I was back in Lithuania in 1944, with Focke-Wulfs strafing my strip.”

“If the MiGs can spot the Americans, they'll dive on them,” Tsederbaum said. “Mustangs are fast, but not that fast.”

“I wonder how many missions those Mustang pilots flew during the last war,” Boris said. By the way they carried out this one, they had plenty of experience. Soviet fighter pilots with that kind of expertise were up at the front, not defending an airfield far behind it.

Boris stood up. The Americans had left holes in some of the runways. The Tu-4s wouldn't be taking off from here till people fixed them. Around the farmhouse that housed base personnel, everybody was running every which way. Well, everybody who could run. The Mustangs hadn't left the farmhouse unscathed.

“You know something?” Zorin said. “We were lucky to be where we were when the Americans came. If we'd been over there, we might not've made it to the trenches.”

“It's all luck,” Tsederbaum said. “Good luck, bad luck—what else is there?”

“The dialectic,” Boris Gribkov said. “There's always the dialectic.”

“Well, yes, Comrade Pilot.” Tsederbaum smiled so charmingly, for a moment Boris thought he was watching a movie actor. “You're right. Absolutely. There's always the dialectic.”

Is he agreeing with me? Or is he mocking me, calling me an uncultured fool of a peasant?
Gribkov wondered. He wasn't sure. Leonid Tsederbaum left no room for anything so bourgeois as certainty. Then the pilot thought,
Don't you have more important things to worry about?
Deciding he did, he figured the navigator could wait.

The Canal Zone was American territory. Harry Truman couldn't imagine giving it back to Panama. The greasers down here could no more run or protect the Panama Canal than they could fly.

As the President stepped out of the
Independence
and into Panama's steamy tropical heat, he scowled. It wasn't as if the United States had done such a heads-up job of protecting the Canal. One bang, in fact, and there was no Panama Canal to protect any more.

“Welcome, Mr. President,” Arnulfo Arias said. The President of Panama was a stout man of about fifty. He spoke English almost as well as Truman did; he'd studied medicine at Harvard.

“Thank you very much, Mr. President.” Truman held out his hand. Arias took it. Holding the clasp, they turned toward the photographers and plastered political smiles on their faces. Flashbulbs popped. When the shutterbugs were happy, the two leaders let go of each other. As they did, Truman spoke in a low voice: “I'm sorry as hell about this.”

“Yes. So are we.” Arias shrugged. “Well, we can talk more about that after you've seen the disaster for yourself.”

It was as much a disaster for Panama as it was for the USA. If anything, it was a worse disaster for Panama than for the United States. Panama had no reason to exist except for the Panama Canal. Without the Canal, there would have been no Panama. Up till the turn of the century, it had been a province of Colombia—not always a perfectly contented province, but also not one with secession on its mind.

Then the Colombian government refused the excavation terms the American government offered. With amazing speed, the free nation of Panama sprang from Teddy Roosevelt's forehead the way Minerva sprang from Jupiter's. The United States recognized it almost before it declared its own independence. Colombia's choice was accepting the inevitable or going to war with the USA.

Thus the Panama Canal was born. And now, not quite half a century later, the Panama Canal had died. If any young Colombian lieutenants then were old Colombian generals now, they had to be snickering behind their hands.

A Cadillac convertible drove out onto the runway. “I will take you to the Presidential Palace,” Arias said. “After the luncheon there, we will go the the Canal Zone so you can examine the damage for yourself.”

Truman didn't want to go to the Presidential Palace. He didn't want to have lunch with a bunch of Panamanian big shots. That was all a waste of time. He wanted to get up there and see what the damned Russians had done. But, like it or not, he had to be diplomatic. “Sounds fine, Mr. President,” he lied. “I'm at your service.”

Secret Service men who'd flown down with Truman and Panamanian soldiers climbed into other cars. They made a small motorcade that wound through the streets of Panama City. A few people stood on the sidewalks waving American and Panamanian flags. If Arias' henchmen hadn't got them out there, Truman would have been amazed. That was one of the oldest ward-heeler's tricks in the world.

And one of the oldest assassin's tricks in the world was to attack from a high place. The guards wouldn't stop a rifleman or someone with a grenade if he popped out of a third-story window in one of the old Spanish-style buildings. Truman knew it but didn't let it worry him.

The Presidential Palace lay northeast of Independence Square, and took up a whole block. They'd declared independence in the cathedral in the square. The USA was in the background when they did it, but not very far in the background.

Big white egrets swaggered across the marble-floored palace lobby. Smiling, President Arias said, “The nickname for the building is
Palacio de las Garzas
—the Palace of the Herons.”

Smiling back, President Truman replied, “None of those at the White House. We have lobbyists instead, lobbyists and other vultures.”

Like Arias himself, the dignitaries he'd invited to eat with Truman were educated men fluent in English. Some of them showed a better understanding of both sides' strategy in the war than most of the Congressmen Truman had conferred with. The lunch was excellent: lobster chunks simmered in spiced coconut milk and served with rice and beans. Rum flowed freely.

Not too much later than he'd planned, Truman got back into the Cadillac with Arias for the trip to the blasted lock. The Canal's geography was confusing; till you studied a map, you weren't likely to realize that the Caribbean opening lay west of the one on the Pacific.

A good highway ran from Panama City to Colón. It had gone on to Gatún, but Gatún was no more. Neither was Lake Gatún, some of which had boiled to steam and more of which poured out into the Caribbean after the bomb hidden in the
Panathenaikos
went off. Every drop that poured through the crater became radioactive as it went. Eventually, the Caribbean would dilute the poison till it didn't matter any more, but how eventually eventually was, Truman didn't know. Every alleged expert he talked to gave him a different answer.

Making sure the Japs didn't wreck the Panama Canal had been one of America's worries during World War II. Making sure the Russians didn't was a high priority this time around. High priority or not, the Russians had done it.

“My fault,” he told Arnulfo Arias. “We were supposed to defend against this kind of savagery. We were supposed to, but we dropped the ball. I'm sorry, sir. I don't know what else to tell you.”

“I have heard that you are a man who says what is in his heart,” the President of Panama replied. “Now I find for myself that it is so.”

“And you find that it doesn't do you one whole hell of a lot of good, hey?” Truman said. “I promise you this, Mr. President: after we've won the war, we
will
put the Panama Canal back together again. It's too important to leave it like—this.”

“To the whole world, and to Panama,” Arias said.

“Yes, and to Panama,” Truman agreed. Without the Canal, Panama might as well go back to being part of Colombia. The only drawback to that was, Colombia probably wouldn't want it.

President Arias had other things on his mind. “How long will the war go on before the United States wins it, Mr. President? How much of the world will be left in one piece by the time it ends?”

Those were both good questions. They were much better questions than Truman wished they were, in fact. “I'm not the only one who has something to say about that, you know, your Excellency,” he said. “Stalin does, too. If the Russians pull out of western Germany and Italy and if the Red Chinese pull out of South Korea, we have nothing left to fight about.”

“Yes, sir.” Arias studied him with wide, sad eyes. “And what do you think the chances of that are?”

“Pretty poor,” Truman said. “If he wanted to do that, he would've done it by now, and made Mao do it, too. But there is a way to get a man who doesn't want to do something to do it anyhow. If you keep hitting him, after a while he'll do what you tell him to do to get you to stop. That's how we finally made the Nazis and the Japs give up. Sooner or later, we'll make Stalin quit, too.”

“Sooner or later, yes.” Arias waved at the crater that marked the ruination of one of the greatest engineering feats mankind had ever brought off. “But in the meantime, Mr. President, Stalin keeps hitting back. He is still trying to make you quit.”

“Well, it won't work,” Truman snapped. “Korea won't go all Red, and if Joe Stalin doesn't like that, he can stick it in his pipe and smoke it. Western Europe won't be all Red, either.”

“He's hurt you—not just here, but in your own country,” Arias said.

“We've hurt him worse. We'll go on doing it as long as we have to,” Truman answered. He fanned himself with his Panama hat. It was muggier than even a Missouri man who'd done time in Washington was used to. As an old haberdasher, he knew perfectly well that Panama hats came from Ecuador. He wore one anyhow; names counted, too. He went on, “In the last war, Admiral Halsey said the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell. Japan surrendered before we had to arrange that. If the Soviet Union doesn't, Satan will get himself a lot of new Russian customers.”

Arnulfo Arias smiled. The expression slipped as he realized Truman meant it.

Wilf Davies walked into the Owl and Unicorn and said, “I'll take a pint of your best bitter, Daisy, if you'd be so kind.”

“Well, I might have enough left to spare you one,” she said, and winked at the mechanic with the hook where his left hand should have been.

“Here now, you watch that!” Wilf exclaimed as she worked the tap. “Anybody sees you and tells my missus, she'll think you're tryin' to lure me away from her.”

The pub had just opened. They were the only ones in the snug. Wilf often stopped in for an early pint. Nobody but the two of them could have seen the wink. Daisy said, “Who knows? I could do worse.”

“Don't go puttin' ideas in my head, dear,” he said as he set money on the bar. They weren't likely to be practical ideas, not when he was happily married and old enough to be her father. Maybe he got them anyhow.

The worst of it was, she'd only been half kidding. Some of the RAF and USAF men who came into the Owl and Unicorn reckoned themselves God's gift to womankind. They acted as if she ought to fall into their arms right there in the snug—never mind wasting time going upstairs to bed.

You couldn't even tell those blighters anything that would dent their splendid opinion of themselves. The nicer ones would call you stuck-up if you did. The others would call you things that started with frigid bitch and went downhill from there.

Davies took a pull at the pint and smacked his lips. “That's good,” he said. “That's mighty good.” He drank again. “I've got a question for you, dear.”

“What kind of question?” Daisy felt a certain small alarm. Was he going to get difficult, after so long being not just a customer but a friend?

But what he asked was, “Do you know how long a metal part stays radioactive and how dangerous that is?”

She stared at him. “Why in God's name d'you think I'd know something like that?”

“Well…” He looked sheepish, and stared down at his half-empty mug. “You've got those Yank officers comin' in here all the time. I wondered if maybe one of 'em talked about it, or somethin'.” Embarrassment thickened his accent.