Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  “What now?” Tsederbaum asked after they put their dishes in a basin and their trays on a mountainous stack.

  “I don’t know. What now?” Gribkov answered. “We spent all that time getting ready to fly the mission. Then we went and flew it. And we didn’t just fly it—we came back from it.”

  “And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Tsederbaum continued for him.

  “And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Gribkov agreed. “So we wait around till they make up their minds.”

  “Let’s go outside,” Tsederbaum said. When they couldn’t be easily overheard, he went on, “Do you want to bomb Paris or London or Rome?”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which was never the wrong answer. But it wasn’t always enough of the right answer. After a moment, he went on, “Do I want to? Of course not. Who in his right mind could? Will I, if they give me the order? I will, because I do serve the Soviet Union. And I’ll worry about what I want some other time.”

  Leonid Tsederbaum opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever went on behind his eyes, Gribkov couldn’t read it. A couple of seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a good answer, Comrade Pilot.”

  “How about you?” Gribkov wasn’t happy about the way the navigator had put him on the spot. “What would you do if they gave us an order like that?”

  “Oh, I’d get the plane where it was supposed to go,” Tsederbaum replied. “After all, I’ve already done it once. And I’m a great coward.”

  “I don’t think so!” Whatever Gribkov had expected, that wasn’t it.

  “Oh, but I am,” Tsederbaum said. “If my choice is between a bullet in the back of the neck now and generations yet unborn spitting on my name later, they can spit all they please.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Gribkov insisted. “We’d be doing it for the proletarian cause, for the socialist cause.”

  “If you say so.”

  “We would!”

  “Even if we would, do you think anyone would be glad to remember us for melting the Eiffel Tower down to a stump about this high?” Tsederbaum drew a line across his own belly, just above his navel.

  Gribkov winced. He couldn’t help it. Even so, he said, “That didn’t stop the Americans from hammering the Kremlin. If they’re hard, we have to be hard, too.”

  “I understand that, Comrade Pilot. Just because I understand it doesn’t mean I like it,” Tsederbaum said. “And do you think for a minute that those American pilots don’t have bad dreams, too?”

  The too was what pierced Gribkov to the root. He hadn’t told anybody about his fiery dreams. He most assuredly hadn’t told Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum. Yet the Jew knew. He knew much too well.

  —

  The Yanks were back at the Owl and Unicorn! So were the RAF men who flew out of Sculthorpe with them. Daisy Baxter cared more about the Americans. April would indeed have been the cruellest month without them. Her own countrymen were a thrifty lot, keeping tabs on every ha’penny and turning loose of it only when it was forcibly extracted, as if by a dentist’s grippers.

  Americans, though…Americans spent as if there was no tomorrow. The base remained on high alert. The people who gave orders, though, discovered that the men who carried them out were human beings, and needed an escape valve to relieve the pressure of what they did. Except perhaps for a brothel, a pub was the best escape valve around.

  “You gotta make that getaway turn as quick as you can, you know?” an American said, his accent sharp and hard. He used his hands to show what he meant, continuing, “If you don’t, if the blast wave catches you when you’re halfway through it, it’ll flip you around like a leaf in a breeze.”

  “That happens to you, you’re lucky—damn lucky—if you ever pull out again, too,” another Yank said.

  Working the tap, trying to keep up with their orders for bitter, listening with no more than half an ear, Daisy needed longer than she might have to realize they were talking about the blast wave from an atomic explosion. No wonder they spent as if there was no tomorrow! For the people they visited, there wasn’t.

  A man at a slaughterhouse could knock cattle or sheep over the head day after day for years and years without ever thinking about what he was doing. Back in bygone times, executioners had hanged people the same way. But you needed imagination to be a good flyer. And if you had it, how could you help thinking about what you were doing?

  An American first lieutenant she hadn’t seen before asked her for a pint. She drew it for him. He gave her a crown. When she started to return his change, he waved it away. “All funny money anyhow,” he said.

  “Well, thanks very much.” She wondered if he knew how much he was overpaying. A lot of Americans, used to decimal coinage, had trouble with Britain’s more arcane system. If he did know, he didn’t care.

  “Mud in your eye.” He raised the pint in salute, then started to take a long pull. But he stopped in surprise before it was well begun. He stared at the deep-amber liquid in the mug with sudden, astonished admiration and blurted, “This is good beer!”

  “Glad you like it.” Daisy hid a smile. She’d seen that reaction before from Americans downing their first pint of best bitter.

  This Yank had more enthusiasm than most. “I mean to tell you, Miss, this is good beer,” he said again. “The stuff you get in bottles in America, it tastes like they strain it through the kidneys of a horse—a sick horse, too. Draft beer’s a little better, but only a little. This here, though, this is great.” By the way he finished the pint, he meant every word of that.

  “We aim to please.” Now Daisy did smile. She couldn’t help it, not with such an enthusiastic customer.

  “Sweetheart, you hit the bull’s-eye.” She’d gone from Miss to Sweetheart in a couple of sentences. Well, beer and enthusiasm could do that. Having mentioned a bull’s-eye, the American waved toward the dartboard down at the end of the snug. Pete Huntington, a local man, was matched with an American sergeant. The Yank had some idea of what he was about. That put him ahead of most of his countrymen, who thought of darts as nothing more than a silly lark. But Pete was taking him to the cleaners just the same. No one would have told the sergeant his foe won tournaments all over East Anglia. The U.S. Air Force man standing in front of Daisy said, “Let me have another glass of this…what do you call it?”

  He didn’t even know that. He was a new fish, all right. “Best bitter,” Daisy said patiently.

  “You got that right!” He grinned and nodded. “It is the best—you better believe it!” He slid another fat silver coin at Daisy. “Big old coin,” he remarked, eyeing it. “Bigger than a cartwheel.”

  “Cartwheel?” Whatever that Americanism meant, Daisy hadn’t run into it before, at least not where it had to do with money.

  “Silver dollar,” the Yank explained. “They haven’t made ’em since the Depression—they just make halves, and use dollar bills instead.”

  “Notes, we say.”

  “Do you? How about that? Anyway, though, I’m from California, and there’s still lots of silver dollars around out West.”

  She took one more stab at not gypping him: “Let me give you your change, please.”

  He shook his head. “Nah, don’t bother. Way things look, I’m not likely to live long enough to care what I’ve got in my pockets when I go down.”

  What has he got in his pocketses? Memories of some children’s book flickered in Daisy’s mind. Where did that line come from? As the Yank had, she also shook her head. The title wouldn’t come back to her. Letting it go, she said, “Well, your next couple are on the house, then.”

  He touched the patent-leather brim of his officer’s cap. “Much obliged, dear, but you don’t have to do that.”

  “I’m not doing it because I have to. I’m doing it because I want to,” Daisy said, in lieu of something like You’ve already bought them anyhow, you silly twit. He wouldn’t have paid any attention to that unless it made him mad.

  �
�Well, that’s mighty nice of you.” He touched his cap again, coming closer to a real salute this time. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Daisy Baxter. I run the Owl and Unicorn.”

  “Mighty pleased to meet you, Daisy. My name’s Bruce—Bruce McNulty.” He eyed her. “You run this joint? For real?”

  “That’s right.” She nodded. “Why?”

  “I just figured they hired you to tend bar on account of you’re so pretty—they figured you’d draw guys the way sugar draws ants.”

  She chuckled. She’d heard more lines than she could remember; that was better than most. As was her habit, she replied as if he hadn’t been strewing compliments around: “No, the pub’s mine. It’s been mine since a little before the war—the last war, I should say—ended. My husband was fighting in Germany, and he didn’t come home.”

  “Oh. I’m mighty sorry to hear it. I was there myself—I was flying a B-25 then. Just dumb luck I came back in one piece. The krauts, they sure did their best to see that I didn’t.”

  She would have guessed him for a year or two younger than she was. Probably not, though, not if he’d fought in World War II. “What do you fly now?” she asked him.

  “One of the Superforts down the road,” he said, which surprised her not at all. “Guys who were in the B-25 and B-26 kind of have a head start on the big bird, since they all come with nose wheels. A little harder when you’re used to tilting up because you were in a B-17 or some other plane with a tailwheel.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, which was true enough.

  Bruce McNulty wagged his hand, as if to say it didn’t matter one way or the other. “Enough about me,” he said, so earnestly that she could tell the best bitter was doing some of the talking. “What I want to know is how come a pretty gal like you never found another fella.”

  Daisy would have retired rich long since if she’d had a quid for every lecherous flyboy who asked her that. For another fella, they always meant me. Now she shrugged. “At first, I wasn’t at all interested, which I’m sure you’ll understand. Since the worst of the grief passed away, I haven’t met anyone who suited me.”

  She waited for this McNulty to volunteer his services. That was what they did. Except he didn’t. He just said, “Well, I hope you do one of these days.” Such restraint so amazed her, she drew him another pint on the house. Why not? She was still far ahead of the game.

  —

  Gustav Hozzel didn’t know exactly where he was. Somewhere between Frankenberg and Arnsberg—he knew that much. Along with the Amis—and with Max Bachman, who also remained lucky—he was still retreating to the north and west. And the Red Army was still coming on. Not much seemed to have changed from the last war, in other words.

  He was filthy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d shaved, either. His beard had streaks of gray on the chin that hadn’t been there the last time he went to war. But he wasn’t lousy, which he surely would have been then. A couple of weeks earlier, an American aid man had sprayed him with DDT. He had no idea what went into DDT. Whatever it was, it did to lice and fleas and ticks and other little pests what Zyklon-B had done to Jews.

  Russian mortar bombs whispered in and blew up with sudden, startling bangs. After one of those bangs, someone started shrieking for his mother—in English, so he was an American. You felt bad when somebody screamed liked that. No human being who wasn’t desperately hurt could make such horrible noises. Gustav would have felt a trifle worse had the wounded man been a fellow German.

  Then he blinked and whipped his head around. That noise like a giant tearing heavy canvas was a blast from the past in the most literal sense of the words. That couldn’t be anything but a German MG42—no other machine gun in the world had such a high rate of fire. Whoever was shooting it had found enough 7.92mm cartridges to satisfy its appetite for ammo.

  Some of the Russians knew what it was. They cried out in alarm. They’d hated and feared the MG42 from the moment the Germans started using it. It spat death at rates unmatched. Because of that and because of the noise it made, they called it Hitler’s saw. The Amis and the Tommies hadn’t loved it, either.

  Most Russian private soldiers, like their American counterparts in this fight, would be too young to have heard it before. The old sweats, the corporals and sergeants and officers from captain’s rank on up, would have to warn the kids what they were facing.

  I bet the Amis are glad it’s not shooting at them this time, Gustav thought. He crawled toward the snarling gun. That noise brought back happy memories to him, memories of Russian soldiers falling over and Russian soldiers running away.

  He wanted to find the crew that had brought such an excellent weapon out of retirement. If they needed him to help serve the gun, he would gladly do that. He could handle it. By the end of the war, each German squad had centered on an MG42 (or, occasionally, an older, more finicky, MG34). The riflemen were there more to protect the machine gun than for the sake of their puny firepower. Everybody learned to handle the piece in case the regular guys got hurt.

  Gustav looked for a detachment of emergency militiamen, figuring only Germans could properly appreciate the wonders of the MG42. But the men serving the machine gun—and doing it with the same unflustered competence Landsers would have shown in the western Ukraine in 1944—were Yankees, jabbering away in English.

  Gustav hadn’t worried about English during the Second World War. He’d picked up tiny bits in the years since. Because Fulda lay so close to the border with the Russian zone, it had swarmed with American soldiers. The Amis had run the town till they finally let it elect its own Burgomeister. Gustav and Max had printed for them, in English as well as German. So he had those bits. Max, now, Max could really use it.

  He waited for the crew to notice him, and to make sure he wasn’t a Russian but wore pretty much the same uniform they did. Then he pointed at the MG42 and asked, “Where find?”

  As soon as they figured out he was one of the gun’s original users, they burst out laughing. One of them spoke better German than Gustav did English. “We found it in a warehouse,” he said, his speech painfully correct, like a clever schoolboy’s. “We found some friends who knew where cases of cartridges were kept. It uses a great many cartridges.”

  “You’ve sure as hell got that right,” Gustav said. Then he said it again, more slowly. The Ami didn’t understand what he heard very well. He must have studied German in school and forgotten it till he came over here.

  “It’s a wonderful gun, though,” another American said, in English. He added “Wunderbar!” in case Gustav hadn’t got it.

  But Gustav nodded—he had. “Do you change the barrel often?” he asked the fellow who had a little Deutsch. Because the MG42 put so many rounds through the barrel so fast, it heated up in a hurry. The Wehrmacht had issued an asbestos mitt to handle the hot metal. With it, you could take off the old barrel and swap in a new, cool one in seconds.

  The Americans didn’t have an asbestos mitt. Stowing those along with the machine gun would have stretched even German efficiency. But they did have a folded-up wool blanket that now showed scorch marks. The Ami showed it to Gustav to let him know they weren’t burning out the barrels. He nodded again. People said Americans were good at improvising.

  Russians, on the other hand…Russians were good at muddling through, at keeping at it when anyone sane would have given up. “Urra! Urra!” the infantrymen shouted, a sound to make the hair of anyone who’d heard it before want to stand on end. They were nerving themselves for a charge.

  “Urra! Urra!” Here they came, a great khaki flood of them.

  For a bad fraction of a second, Gustav thought he was back in the other war, trying to hold a position in Poland or, later, in eastern Germany. Then the flashback, the nightmare, merged with reality, and reality was just as bad. Armed with the Russian PPSh, he had to sit tight as the Ivans rushed forward. Some of them still wore billowing greatcoats; i
t might be spring, but it wasn’t warm. His submachine gun was just a peashooter—it couldn’t reach them yet.

  Some of them tripped in holes in the ground or over hastily laid barbed wire. A few stepped on land mines. One must have set off a big charge, because he and two of his neighbors vanished into scarlet mist. But the rest of the Red Army men closed ranks, linked arms, and came on. They were as impervious to doubt or damage as they had been on the Ostfront a few years before. Vodka and fear of their own secret police both had to play a part in that.

  Rrrriiiippp! Rrrriiiippp! The MG42 cut loose. The Amis fired short bursts to keep from overheating the barrel as best they could. They traversed it so the stream of bullets knocked down Russians across a broad stretch of the line. Riflemen and Yankees with grease guns—which fired heavier cartridges than the PPSh—also took a toll. That khaki wave was liable to roll over these defenses anyhow.

  An American took another belt of ammo out of a wooden crate and fed it into the MG42’s insatiable maw. The old crate had an eagle with a swastika in its claws burned onto its side. That emblem was illegal in the new Germany the Allies had made and then broken. It was mighty welcome to Gustav just the same.

  Bullets snapped past the machine gunners. Some of the Ivans were shooting as they ran. It wasn’t aimed fire, or anything like it. With enough bullets flying, that didn’t matter. Gustav started shooting back from behind a large chunk of broken brickwork. The Ivans were close enough for him to have a decent chance of hitting them with the PPSh—not a good sign.

  Then another machine gun opened up. Its bass stutter put even the MG42’s growl to shame. During the last war, Gustav hadn’t had to face the Americans’ .50-caliber machine gun. He counted himself goddamn lucky he wasn’t facing it now. Those big, heavy slugs didn’t just drop the Russians they hit in their tracks. They threw the poor, sorry bastards every which way, like crumpled wastepaper.

  Flesh and blood, even vodka-numbed flesh and blood, had their limits. Between them, the MG42 and that heavy monster not only reached but exceeded those limits. Instead of rushing forward, the Russians still on their feet turned and ran away. They wouldn’t break through on this stretch of the line.