Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Before long, she left the main road. A spiderweb of lesser ways still bound the countryside together. She went down one-lane paved roads that saw an auto or two a week, down graveled tracks, and down dirt paths that might have been shaped by flocks of sheep when the Romans still ruled Britain.

  A carrion crow scolded her from an oak still bare-branched. “Hush, you,” she told it. “Haven’t you had your fill of dead meat and then some farther east?” Instead of answering, the big-beaked black bird took wing.

  Hamlets that made Bawdeswell seem like London by comparison dotted the countryside: places with names like Stibbard and Themelthorpe and Salle. Salle was as close to Norwich as Bawdeswell was. She didn’t see any soldiers when she rode past it.

  A rabbit darted across the road. A split second later, so did a fox, red as a flame. The rabbit dove into some bushes. The fox went right after it. Daisy didn’t wait to see whether the fox came out with its jaws clamped on the rabbit.

  When she got within eight or nine miles of Norwich, she saw that the farmhouses she rode past stood empty. The bomb couldn’t have killed from so far away…could it? She hoped it was only—only!—that the soldiers and police had made everyone so close to the blast evacuate. But the breeze blew from the east, and it carried an odor—a faint odor, but unmistakable—of meat left out too long.

  A black-and-white cat trotted toward her when she stopped to look at one of the abandoned houses. It meowed and flopped down and rolled over and did everything but hold up a PLEASE TAKE ME WITH YOU! sign. It didn’t know anything about bombs or why its people had gone away. Tears stung at her eyes as she started riding again.

  She hadn’t got too much farther before she started seeing damage: broken windows, things knocked helter-skelter, scorched paint on the Norwich-facing sides of buildings, cattle and sheep dead and bloated in the fields. Then she came round a corner—and there were two soldiers getting out of an American-made jeep.

  Whether she was more startled or they were wasn’t easy to guess. One of them started to point his Sten gun at her, then decided she wasn’t dangerous and lowered it. “What are you doing here?” he growled. By his accent, he was a Geordie, from Sunderland or Newcastle or one of the smaller towns up in the northeast.

  “I’m out for a ride, of course,” she said, which was true enough but didn’t say how far she’d come.

  The other soldier had a captain’s pips on his shoulder straps. “They’re supposed to have cleared everybody out of this part of the country,” he said.

  “Nobody told me to leave,” Daisy said. That was also true, although, again, it didn’t address why.

  “Well, ma’am, I’m telling you right now,” the captain said. That ma’am put Daisy’s back up. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years older than the officer. Uncaring, he went on, “You need to get back beyond Bawdeswell. If I tell you to go there, will you?”

  “Of course.” Daisy lied through her teeth then.

  “Hrmm.” The pause for thought meant the captain knew she was lying. Damn! she thought. He turned to the soldier with the submachine gun. “Simpkins!”

  “Sir!”

  “Why don’t you throw the lady’s bicycle in the back of the jeep and take her over to Bawdeswell? I can poke about here till you get back.”

  “Yes, sir!” Simpkins replied. When an officer said Why don’t you…?, he was giving an order. He was just being polite about it. Simpkins nodded to Daisy. “Come along with me, then.”

  She did, however little she wanted to. After she got off the bicycle, the soldier lifted it into the jeep with effortless strength. Then he gestured invitingly for her to climb aboard. That was when she really noticed the passenger’s seat was on the right side. “It’s got left-hand drive,” she said in surprise.

  “Aye, it does,” the Geordie answered. “The Yanks build ’em that way, on account of they drive on t’wrong side o’ t’road.”

  “How do you like it?” Daisy asked.

  Simpkins shrugged broad shoulders. “Took a bit o’ gettin’ used to—you see things from funny angles. But it’s all right now.” As if to prove as much, he put the jeep in gear and made for the main road from Norwich to Bawdeswell.

  As he turned on to that wider—not wide, but wider—road, Daisy asked, “How close have you gone to the center of Norwich? How bad are things there?”

  “Not good, and that’s for certain.” With his accent, the last word came out sartin. Shaking his head, he went on, “Some o’ the ground right under where it blew, it’s all fused to glass, like. Not much left in the way o’ buildin’s. A few, you can see where they used to be and even some o’ what they used to be, but most of ’em’s just…gone. Kaput. You know what kaput is?”

  “Oh, yes,” Daisy answered. “My husband was a tankman. He picked that up from Jerry prisoners.”

  “Was?” Simpkins heard the past tense.

  “Was,” Daisy repeated. “Not long before the war ended, his tank got hit, and that—was the end of that, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m sorry,” the soldier said. “A cousin o’ mine, he didn’t come home, neither. I wasn’t old enough to take the King’s shilling, or it could’ve been me. If your luck’s out, it’s out, that’s all.”

  “Too right, it is,” Daisy said bleakly. They didn’t say much more till he stopped the jeep in Bawdeswell. He gave her the bicycle. She got on and started back to Fakenham. It was well past noon by then. B-29s rumbled by low overhead, eastbound out of Sculthorpe. Daisy wondered where they’d be by the time darkness fell.

  —

  Harry Truman studied the situation map thumbtacked to a bulletin board in a White House conference room. Red pins in western Germany, in Austria, and in northeastern Italy made the map look as if it had come down with a bad case of the measles. The more he looked, the worse things seemed.

  “This is terrible!” he exclaimed. “Terrible!”

  “I’m afraid you’re right, sir.” George Marshall nodded gravely.

  “They keep coming forward,” Truman said. “We knock out the first wave of tanks and drunken infantrymen. They send in another one, just as strong and just as ferocious. We knock that out, too. Then they send in the third wave, and it rolls over whatever we have left after we took out the first two.”

  “It’s standard operating procedure for the Russians, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Germans found out all about it. One of their generals said, ‘A German soldier is worth two or three Russians—but there’s always a fourth one.’ ”

  “There sure as hell is.” Truman scowled at the map. “What are we going to do? The way it looks to me is, we don’t have enough men to stop them, not even with England and France doing their best to help.”

  “It looks the same way to me,” Marshall said.

  “We can’t let them gobble up our piece of Germany. They won’t stop there, either. They’ll take the Low Countries, too. And they may take France. What have we got then? Europe Red all the way to the Atlantic. That isn’t a disaster, George. That’s a catastrophe!”

  “There are things we can do about it,” Marshall reminded him.

  “Atom bombs. It comes down to more goddamn atom bombs.” Truman did some more scowling. “You were right—I made a mistake when I authorized using them in Manchuria. And the whole world is paying because I did.”

  He might have found a way to blame the decision on Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur had agreed with it, certainly. He’d thought it would help his troops in North Korea. It probably had. The Red Chinese were having trouble bringing men and supplies into Korea. Aerial reconnaissance and intercepted radio transmissions proved as much.

  But MacArthur and Truman had both miscalculated—guessed wrong, if you wanted to get right down to it—about how Stalin would react. And, in the end, the responsibility lay with the President. It always did. If you took the responsibility, you also had to shoulder the blame. The buck really did stop here.

  “No point dwelling on what mi
ght have been. We’ve got to deal with the world as it is,” Marshall said. “And the world as it is has too many Russians in it, and they’re too far west.”

  “I just got a cable from Adenauer in Bonn,” Truman said. “From Adenauer in a bomb shelter in Bonn, which he took pains to point out.” The President made a sour face. Konrad Adenauer was a confirmed anti-Nazi, which had made him a good man to lead the new, hopeful Federal Republic of Germany. But he was also stiff-necked and sanctimonious.

  “And what did he say from his bomb shelter in Bonn?” Marshall rolled his eyes. When he was Secretary of Defense, he’d also had to deal with the German politico. His expression argued that he hadn’t enjoyed it.

  “He begs me—that’s his word, not mine—not to use atom bombs on the territory of the Federal Republic,” Truman answered. “He says the damage they would cause outweighs any military advantage they’d give. He says his people would have a hard time staying friends with a country that did that to them.”

  “If we don’t do it, in another week or two there’s liable to be no Federal Republic to worry about,” Marshall said.

  “I understand that,” Truman said, with another harassed glance toward the map. “The trouble is, I’m sure Adenauer understands it, too. He may have the tightest asshole in Western Europe, but he’s no dope.”

  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!”