Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  “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.

  As soon as Gribkov was installed in the left-hand seat, he started running through checks with Zorin and Gennady Gamarnik, the engineer. The engines powering the Tu-4 were only cousins to those the B-29 used, but they had the same problems. They ran hot, and they were barely powerful enough to get a fully laden bomber off the ground. You had to be careful with them, or you wound up dead—to say nothing of all over the landscape.

  When the engines started, the roar and vibration filled the cockpit. One by one, the Tu-4s in B-29’s clothing rumbled down the runways and climbed into the air. None of them climbed very high. They all turned southwest after takeoff: away from the questing radars near Nome and on St. Lawrence Island. Fighter-bombers were attacking those, but who could say if they’d knock them out?

  After the Tu-4s had flown that way for twenty minutes or so, they swung to the southeast, toward the United States. They scattered across the North Pacific like wandering albatrosses, separating from each other one by one. Even if the Americans should spot them and come hunting, they wouldn’t have an easy time knocking them all down. And every single bomber packed a massive punch.

  The sun sank behind Boris Gribkov. His Tu-4 flew almost half as fast as the line of night traveled. Since he was moving against the cycle, sunset came on sooner than it would have otherwise. Now it would be up to Leonid Tsederbaum, the navigator, to get them where they needed to go. He’s a smart Jew, Gribkov thought. He’ll take care of it.

  He kept his fuel mixture lean and the throttles as low as he could while staying airborne. His target wasn’t at the far end of the Tu-4’s range, the way so many were. He wasn’t necessarily on a one-way trip. Not necessarily, no, but he knew damn well that remained the way to bet.

  “Want to hear something funny?” Vladimir Zorin said.

  “I’d love to hear something funny, Volodya,” Gribkov answered. “What have you got?”

  “I was just thinking—if this really were a B-29, we could fly it.”

  “Bet your cunt, we could!” Gribkov exclaimed. The dials and labels would be in English, but he knew what they did without reading them. The measurements would also be in the English units that had driven Tupolev’s aeronautical engineers to distraction. That could prove a bigger problem, but as long as the indicators stayed out of the red it wouldn’t be anything he needed to worry about.

  Tsederbaum’s voice on the intercom sounded in his earphones: “Comrade Pilot, please bring the plane two degrees farther north. I say again, two degrees farther north.”

  “I’m doing it.” As Gribkov spoke, his hands on his yoke and his feet on the pedals made the course correction with next to no conscious thought from him. He kept his eyes glued to the altimeter, the artificial horizon, and the angle indicator. You had to trust your instruments when you flew at night. Your senses would fool you and betray you. You’d think everything was fine till you went into the drink.

  When he yawned, Zorin passed him a flat pressed-tin package of benzedrine tablets. He dry-swallowed one. “Shame I can’t wash it down with some vodka,” he said. His copilot gave back a crooked smile.

  Gribkov’s eyes opened wider. His heart pound
ed harder. His mouth got dry. He’d been sniffling a little, but his nose dried out, too. His gaze darted from one instrument to the next like a hunted animal’s. The little white pill was on the job.

  “You should take one, too,” he told Zorin. The copilot did. Benzedrine made you pay later, but that would be later. For now, Gribkov felt like a new man. And, right now, what would happen when he came down from the pep pill was the least of his worries.

  He flew on. He saw nothing through the windshield but darkness and his own reflection, faintly lit up by the lights from the instrument panel. It might have been better that way. The USSR hadn’t tried making Plexiglas—much less curved sheets of Plexiglas—till it set out to duplicate the B-29. The result wasn’t perfect. In the daytime, you got a distorted view of the world. Darkness looked the same any which way, distorted or not.

  More than three thousand kilometers from Provideniya to the target. More than two thousand miles, if you were going to think like an American. More than seven hours of flying. You just kept going. You monitored the course as best you could. Every so often, Tsederbaum gave you another small correction. You applied it.

  How many more Tu-4s were in the air, from Provdeniya and Vrangel Island and other Soviet Far East bases? Gribkov had no idea. But the number wouldn’t be small. How many of those eleven-man crews would ever see the rodina again? He feared the number wouldn’t be large.

  “Comrade Pilot, time to gain altitude for the attack run,” Tsederbaum said.

  “Thank you, Comrade Navigator.” Gribkov pulled back on the yoke. The Tu-4’s nose rose. This was where things got tricky. He had literally stayed under the Americans’ radar on the way across the Pacific. But he had to rise to deliver the bomb. They’d spot him. His IFF would have outdated codes. If they were on their toes, they could scramble fighters. If the maskirovka didn’t fool them, they could shoot him down.

  But there was the western coast of the USA, dead ahead. It was supposed to be blacked out, but it wasn’t. With the radar in the plane, that wouldn’t have mattered much, but a proper blackout would have made things harder. As they were, he could guide himself as if by a road map.

  “Are we ready, Comrade Bombardier?” he asked as they flew 9,000 meters over sleeping Seattle.

  “We are, Comrade Pilot,” Lavrov said. “I bomb at your order.”

  “Bomb!” Gribkov said. The Tu-4 got five tonnes lighter as the egg of death fell free. He banked toward the ocean and mashed the throttles to the red line.

  MARIAN STALEY GOT LINDA to bed a little past eight o’clock. Linda didn’t much want to go to bed—when did she ever?—but she didn’t pitch one of the famous fits that make four-year-olds lucky to live to five, either. After a while, the wiggling and soft singing from her bedroom settled down toward quiet. After a little while longer, surprisingly deep snores floated out. Marian smiled. Linda was down for the count.

  To celebrate, Marian went into the kitchen, took a can of Olympia out of the icebox (actually, it was a refrigerator, but the old name stuck), and opened it with a church key. She started to pour the beer into a glass, then shook her head and drank from the can. She didn’t have anybody to impress. Besides, this way she wouldn’t have to wash the glass.

  She always remembered savoring that beer. It had been a busy day, with a lot of running around: the grocery, the bank, the laundry, a secondhand bookstore. Linda’d been…not terrible, but enough to keep Marian on her toes. She felt she’d earned the Oly.

  Everything else about the day seemed the same way. She worried about Bill, over there in Korea. She worried about the war in Europe, too. But all of those concerns lay thousands of miles away. They were noises from another room, like her daughter’s snores.

  She turned on the radio to catch some news. “It’s nine P.M. on Thursday, March 1, 1951,” the broadcaster said. “Mayor Bill Devin has announced that Seattle’s civil defenses are being beefed up. Air-raid warnings are scheduled to begin next week. Mayor Devin said, ‘We did this after Pearl Harbor, too. We turned out not to need it then. I don’t expect we’ll need it now, either. But, as the Boy Scouts say, it’s always better to be prepared.’ ”

  Everett actually lay about twenty miles north of Seattle. Unless the suburb did the same thing as the big city, the air-raid alerts wouldn’t matter here. Just as well, Marian thought. If the sirens weren’t enough to throw Linda into a tizzy, she didn’t know what would be.

  The broadcaster bragged about how many planes the Boeing plant was turning out. “Full speed ahead for the war effort!” he said. As Boeing went, so went business in Seattle and all the bedroom communities. Sometimes you wondered which was the tail and which the dog.

  She listened to the radio till nine o’clock, then turned on the TV. KING-TV was the only station in Seattle—the only station in the Pacific Northwest, come to that. They’d beaten Portland to the punch. Unfortunately, the comedian prancing around on it lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny. She gave him five minutes, made a face that would have got Linda a swat on the fanny, and turned him off again.

  Maybe a murder mystery would be more interesting. It was, for ten or fifteen minutes. Then she found herself yawning and reading the same paragraph three times. Was the beer making her that sleepy? Or was it taking care of a little girl by herself while her husband fought a war on the other side of the Pacific?

  Whatever it was, going to bed before ten o’clock seemed a depressing way to end the day. When she was a kid, staying up as late as she wanted seemed one of the big attractions of turning into a grownup. No bedtime! What could be better than that?

  Marian yawned. Not being so goddamn tired could be better than this. She yawned again. Staying up as late as you wanted could also mean going to bed as early as you wanted. It could, and tonight it did. Linda would be up at the crack of dawn, one more habit that failed to endear little kids to their parents.

  The bed was cold. She often thought that when she slid into it by herself after Bill got summoned to active duty. It seemed especially bad tonight, though. She shivered under the covers till her own body heat warmed things up a little. Then, with a sigh, she gave up and went to sleep. That was five minutes after she lay down—six, tops.

  She woke in the middle of the night from a confused dream of howling dogs. The howling went on after she stopped sleeping. Sirens? she thought, more confused than ever. But Mayor Devin had said they would start next week, and that was in Seattle, not here. A couple of guns went off. Big guns. Cannons.

  All the windows were closed. The shades were down to the bottom. She’d made sure of that—there’d been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood the year before. The curtains, dark ones, were drawn. The light that filled the room was brighter than the sun even so, brighter than a thousand suns. If a flashbulb the size of a car had gone off in front of her nose, it might have felt something like that. Her left cheek felt as if someone had pressed a hot iron to it.

  She screamed and buried her face under the covers, which helped not nearly enough. Blast hit the house while she was doing that. Had the Jolly Green Giant put on hobnailed boots before kicking the place, that might have come close. It slid off the raised foundation as all the windows broke and everything that could fall down did. The bed suddenly developed a tilt. The roof beams creaked and groaned and then shrieked as they pulled apart. Chunks of plaster rained down. One, luckily not a big one, hit her in the head.

  “Mommy!” High and shrill and terrified, the squeal overrode everything else. “Help, Mommy, help! It hurts!”

  Marian jumped out of bed. “I’m coming, darling!” she yelled, and ran toward the bedroom door. Halfway there, she tripped over a fallen nightstand she couldn’t see in the now-returned dark and took a header.

  She landed on her face—luckily, not on the burned side. When she brought her hand up to her eyebrow, it felt wet. She tried to blot the cut with the sleeve of her nightgown. She smelled gas. She also smelled smoke. She didn’t see fire anywhere, but that proved nothing
. They had to get out of there right now.

  “Linda?” she called.

  At the same time, Linda was calling, “Mommy?” They ran into each other in the pitch-black hall. They both screamed. Then they both laughed. Marian snatched up Linda and ran for the back door. It was closer than the front door, and also downhill in the new, off-kilter world inside. As she ran, she noticed her feet hurt. Then she wondered how much broken glass she’d stepped on, and how much was still in her feet. Glass didn’t show up on X-rays.

  That was the least of her worries about X-rays. How big a dose of them had the bomb just given her…and Linda? She couldn’t do anything about that. That she couldn’t do anything about it made her hate herself.

  The back door stood open. She’d locked it, but atom bombs, like love, laughed at locksmiths. She stumbled out into the chilly night.

  “What’s that, Mommy?” Linda pointed to the southern sky.

  “It’s the horrible bomb that did this to us,” Marian answered. The mushroom cloud, still swelling, still rising, towered high into the night sky. Though fading, it glowed with a light of its own. The colors had a terrible beauty: goldenrod, peach, salmon. She also discovered that Linda had a flash burn on her neck like the one on her own cheek.

  Here and there, fires were beginning to burn, some on her block. How far from the terrible cloud were they? Too far to be erased in an instant, like the people peacefully sleeping under the bomb when it went off. Too close to get off scot-free.

  Neighbors were calling to one another. People were screaming, too, people who’d had pieces of furniture or big pieces of their house fall on them and people who were burning. A man ran skrieking down the street. His hair was on fire—bright yellow flames shot up at least six inches. Maybe he used too much greasy goop. Maybe he’d slept with an uncurtained window facing south. Maybe, maybe, maybe…Whatever exactly had happened, it was dreadful and funny at the same time—unless you happened to be him, in which case it was just dreadful. He shrieked and tried to beat out the flames with his fists as he dashed along the street in his pj’s.