Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  “Well, in that case we just have to figure out something else, don’t we?” Cade hoped he sounded more cheerful than he felt. They did have a couple of bazookas, but no foot soldier relished the prospect of taking on tanks without help.

  “Right.” The radioman sure didn’t relish the prospect. He got on the horn with divisional headquarters. He did look happier when he took the earphones off his head. “They say they can give us some air, but they’ll need half an hour—maybe a whole hour.”

  “Better than nothing, I guess.” Cade stuck his head up for another look at those oncoming smudges of diesel smoke. They weren’t going to wait an hour, or even thirty minutes. He tried for a nonchalant chuckle. Whether he succeeded, he wasn’t sure. “Well, we’ll just have to keep the Indians busy till the cavalry rides over the hill, that’s all.”

  “Right,” the radioman said again. By his tone, whatever Cade had managed, nonchalant wasn’t it.

  He had no time for another rehearsal. He hurried through the trenches, saying, “They’ll have infantry with them. If we can knock those guys over or make them take cover and not come forward with the tanks, we’ve got a better chance.” That mostly meant there wouldn’t be so many enemy foot soldiers to shoot at the American bazooka teams.

  A bazooka round could kill a T-34/85 from a hundred yards, maybe from a hundred fifty. Past that, you’d probably miss. The tank could shell a bazooka team out of existence from better than half a mile if its crew knew where the men were.

  Along with the bazooka tubes, Cade had a couple of machine guns, one with a bipod that could go anywhere and the other on a heavy tripod in a sandbagged nest. “Fire one burst, then take it off the tripod, get the hell out, and use it as a light gun,” he said.

  “We have a lot more accuracy with the tripod, sir,” said the sergeant in charge of the gun. He was old enough to be Cade’s father, and spoke as if he expected Cade to take his advice.

  Not this time. “Do what I tell you, O’Higgins,” Cade said sharply. “How long do you think this position will stand up to shelling?”

  Bernie O’Higgins scowled. In spite of his name, he looked more like a dago than a mick. Thick black stubble rasped under his fingers when he rubbed his chin. “Awright, Lieutenant, you got a point,” he allowed. “We’ll play it your way.”

  Lou Klein nodded when Cade said what he’d done about the machine-gun nest. “Good job, sir,” the staff sergeant said. Then he spoiled it by adding, “I woulda talked Bernie around if he kept giving you grief.”

  No doubt he would have, too…which had nothing to do with anything. “It’s my company,” Curtis said. “I’m supposed to be in charge of it.”

  “People are supposed to do all kindsa things they can’t always handle. Sometimes they need a little help—uh, sir.” Klein paused, eyeing the young officer. “You’ve seen more and done more’n most guys your age, ain’t you?” He paused again, this time for a smoke. “Tell you what. If we’re both alive a coupla hours from now, we can talk about it some more. How’s that sound?”

  “Works for me,” Cade said.

  Mortar bombs started whistling down. The Red Army had always been in love with them. It passed on its doctrine—and a bunch of tubes—to the North Koreans and Red Chinese. The company had an 81mm mortar, too. Cade also liked it. How could you not like portable artillery? It fired back. If he got very, very lucky, a bomb would come down on a T-34/85’s turret top, where the armor was thinnest, and brew it up. That kind of luck, he didn’t have. But the mortar rounds would maim some of the enemy troops and make others take cover. They could do that from longer range than machine guns.

  As soon as O’Higgins’ gun started hammering away, the approaching tanks stopped. Their turrets swung toward the sandbagged nest. Taking out protected enemy machine guns was one reason tanks had been invented, half a lifetime ago now. After four or five hits, not much was left of the nest. Not much would have been left of the machine-gun crew, either, had they stuck around. But the gun, now on a bipod and much more portable, had already escaped.

  Another reason tanks had been invented back during the First World War was to clear paths through the bramble patches of barbed wire both sides strewed about with such abandon in front of their lines. Less wire than Cade would have liked stood between him and the enemy. He wanted the T-34/85s to come flatten it, though. That would get them closer to his position, and give the bazooka men better shots at them.

  Unfortunately, the tank commanders weren’t so dumb. They stayed back and lambasted the American trenches with shells and with bursts from their machine guns. Cade wondered if they were Russians. The Koreans who’d crewed tanks in the earlier days of the fighting wanted to get as close as they could to whatever they were attacking. They seemed to think squashing a foe flat was the best way to dispose of him.

  A shell slammed into the dirt ten yards in front of Cade. Fragments whined overhead. He got mud in the face, harder than somebody would have thrown it at him. He spat and blinked and rubbed his eyes, trying to clean the crud out of them.

  Wounded soldiers yelled for corpsmen. Standing up on the fighting step and looking out to see what the enemy foot soldiers were up to was asking to get shot in the face. He knew the bastards were moving forward, but what could he do? Men popped up for a few seconds, fired half blindly, and ducked down again, with luck before they got hit themselves. The machine guns delivered quick bursts.

  One of the bazooka men launched a rocket at a T-34/85. It fell well short. All the same, it warned them not to get too cute. And it made them send some heavy fire toward that part of the trench. By the time they did, the guy with the sheet-metal launcher had prudently vacated.

  Cade stuck his head up to spray some bullets around with his PPSh. He was alarmed to see some Chinese soldiers—or maybe they were Koreans—close enough for him to hit. He fired a couple of short bursts. The PPSh pulled up and to the right like a son of a bitch if you just squeezed the trigger and let ’er rip. The enemy soldiers shrieked and went down. Maybe he’d hit them. Maybe he’d just scared the shit out of them. That would do.

  A distant buzz in the sky swelled to a deep-throated roar. Four Navy Corsairs zoomed low over the little battle, ripple-firing rockets and blazing away with the .50-caliber machine guns in their wings. Cade whooped and waved. Those inverted gull wings were the most gorgeous things he’d ever seen. In Europe, they’d be obsolete. They held their own here. This was a long way from MiG Alley, and a Corsair stood a good chance against anybody’s prop job.

  They made four passes in all. By the time they waggled their wings and rode off into the sunset, three tanks were on fire and the other three on the run. The foot soldiers who’d advanced with them decided they didn’t want this stretch of American line all that much, either. They fell back with the surviving T-34/85s.

  Some of the dead in front of the trenches would have ammo Cade could feed to his Russian-speaking submachine gun. He’d go out and scrounge…eventually. Now he turned to Lou Klein and said, “Made it through another one.”

  “Yeah, we did,” the veteran agreed. “Another million to go and we win the fuckin’ war.”

  “Think anybody back home’ll give a good goddamn?” Cade asked. Klein shook his head.

  —

  Air-raid sirens woke Daisy Baxter out of a sound sleep. They hadn’t sounded when the Russians bombed Norwich. If this wasn’t a drill or a mistake, the enemy was hitting somewhere closer to Fakenham now.

  “Sculthorpe!” Daisy gasped, and jumped out of bed. She hurried down to the cellar, trying not to break her neck on the dark stairs. Whether going down there would do any good if an A-bomb hit the air base, she didn’t know. She didn’t see how she could be any worse off, though.

  Antiaircraft guns began to hammer. Sculthorpe lay just a couple of miles from Fakenham. If an A-bomb did hit there, this little town would catch it hard.

  Explosions thundered. The Owl and Unicorn shuddered above Daisy’s head. She whimpered like a terrified animal.
If the pub fell down above her and blocked the stairs, would she have to stay here till she starved or suffocated?

  Explosions, she realized. Plural. With an atom bomb, there’d be only one. But watch out for that first step—it’s a dilly!

  So the Russians were dropping ordinary high explosives on Sculthorpe. They didn’t think the airfield was important enough for fancy, expensive atomic weaponry. Fakenham wasn’t in danger unless they missed badly—which, from everything she’d heard about bombing last time here and in Germany, they might well do.

  But, unless the Owl and Unicorn took a direct hit, it wouldn’t collapse like that. She breathed easier. She also hoped that whatever the Reds were dropping, it would miss the runways and Nissen huts—the Yanks called them Quonset huts—to the west.

  The sirens wailed for about fifteen minutes. No new bombs had fallen for some little while when the all-clear finally warbled. Daisy went up to the ground floor, opened the door, and looked around. Not much to see, not when Fakenham was blacked out. A couple of other people were also peering about.

  “That was fun, wasn’t it?” George Watkins called from across the street.

  “Now that you mention it,” Daisy said, “no.” They both laughed shaky laughs and ducked back inside.

  More sirens sounded in the distance. Daisy tensed, fearing a second wave of Russian planes. Then she realized they weren’t air-raid warnings. They were the sirens fire engines used. One thing she could be sure of: with fuel and planes and bombs and buildings, plenty at Sculthorpe would burn.

  She didn’t know what time it was. The night was clear. She found the moon. By where it stood in the sky, she guessed it was about two in the morning, give or take an hour. She could go back to sleep…if she could go back to sleep.

  She decided to try. She had nothing to lose, and it was cold down here. It wouldn’t be warm in her bedroom, either. She had a coal brazier and a hot-water bottle, very Victorian but not very effective. Steam radiators and gas heat were little more than rumors in Fakenham.

  A glance at the glowing hands of the clock on her nightstand told her it was twenty-five past two. She nodded, pleased her celestial timekeeping had come so close. Then she burrowed under the blankets. They were all wool except for the quilted comforter on top. Nothing wrong with them at all. What the feeble outside heat sources couldn’t do, they could.

  Whether they could calm her leftover fear and jitters was liable to be another story. Somewhere in the bathroom—or was it downstairs?—she had a packet of fizzing bromide powders. The stuff was supposed to calm your nerves and help you sleep. Getting out to look for it seemed more trouble than it was worth, though. She snuggled under the familiar weight of bedclothes. Either she’d sleep or she wouldn’t. If she didn’t, she’d pour down tea all day—and probably wouldn’t sleep much tomorrow night, either.

  The alarm clock’s insistent bells woke her at a quarter after six. As she silenced the clock, she realized she hadn’t killed it when the air-raid sirens wailed. As fuddled as she’d been then, that was a stroke of luck.

  She went downstairs, heated water for her morning cuppa, and fried a banger on the stove. Then she warmed up some leftover mash she had in the icebox: a fine British breakfast. She turned on the wireless to listen while she washed the dishes. If you didn’t stay ahead of the game as best you could, you’d be hip-deep in rubbish before you knew it.

  “Russian aircraft attacked several landing strips in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland last night,” said a suave BBC newsreader with an accent so perfect, you wanted to sock him in the face. “Relatively little damage was done, and only conventional bombs were dropped. Alert RAF and U.S. Air Force night fighters have claimed three enemy bombers shot down, with two more so badly damaged that they appeared unlikely to make a safe return to their distant bases.”

  He made it sound as if the Russians had carried out nothing worse than nuisance raids. It hadn’t seemed that way to Daisy. But then, when you measured attacks on air bases against leveling Norwich and Aberdeen, their importance on the grand scale of things shrank.

  She readied the pub for another day’s business. A fresh barrel of bitter went under the tap. All the ashtrays were clean and empty; all the pints and halves behind the bar gleamed. She ran the carpet sweeper to get rid of ashes and potato-crisp crumbs in the rugs. She kept telling herself she ought to buy a Hoover, but she hadn’t done it yet.

  As she worked, she wondered whether anyone but the locals would come in. If the airmen at Sculthorpe were confined to base, as they might well be, she’d lose most of a day’s trade. She shrugged. She had to get ready. If she was and they didn’t come, that would be annoying. If she wasn’t but they did, that would be disastrous.

  Come they did, as soon as the Owl and Unicorn opened for business. For them, the raid the night before seemed to have been more exciting than terrifying. “We must have irked Ivan, or he’d not have come after us like that,” an RAF flying officer opined between pulls at a pint.

  “How bad was it?” Daisy asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t good,” the officer said. “They hit a barracks and wrecked a couple of planes and smashed up the runways. We’ll have bulldozers and steamrollers the way a picnic has ants.”

  “A barracks? No, that doesn’t sound good at all,” she said.

  “It wasn’t,” the RAF man said. “Actually, the bomb didn’t hit square. It blew in one wall, and then the roof fell down. One bloke—a Yank; this was an American barracks—has to be the luckiest sod ever hatched. He was near the far wall. The blast blew him out of his cot and through the window next to it…and all he has to show is a cut on one cheek. You wouldn’t care to play cards against a chap who can do that.”

  “I don’t know. He may have used it all up there,” Daisy said. “If he were a cat, that would be eight lives out of nine, wouldn’t it? Eight and a half, maybe.”

  “Hadn’t looked at it like that. You may be right.” The flying officer flashed what he no doubt thought of as his best lady-killing smile. “You’re as smart as you are pretty, dear.”

  “Oh, foosh!” Daisy said. That and the look on her face made the flyer deflate like a punctured inner tube. Later, she thought she might have let him down more easily. But sometimes such a stale line made her not care what she came out with.

  Bruce McNulty strode in that afternoon. He had a bandage taped to his left cheek. For a moment, Daisy thought nothing of it. Several RAF men and Americans had shown up with one minor injury or another—or with one and another. But then she made a guess: “Are you the bloke who went through the window during the raid?”

  “Oh, you heard about that, did you?” He made as if to chuckle, but his face clouded over instead. “Yeah, I made it. Some buddies of mine didn’t. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be here myself—know what I mean?”

  “I suppose I do.” She drew him a pint. “Here. This is on me. I’m glad you’re here.” He tried to argue. She wouldn’t let him.

  BILL STALEY WATCHED the ordnance men bombing up his B-29. The bombs had yellow rings painted on their noses. They were ordinary high explosives. The Superfortress didn’t always visit radioactive hell upon its targets. Sometimes ordinary hell was thought to be enough.

  Hank McCutcheon stood beside him. The pilot reached for his breast pocket, as if to take out the pack of cigarettes in there. An ordnance sergeant wagged a finger at him. Major McCutcheon dropped his hand. “Yeah, I’m too close to all this good stuff to smoke,” he said sheepishly. “But I still want to.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Bill said. “Pyongyang’s a milk run, right? A piece of cake. Nothing to it.”

  “Nothing to it,” McCutcheon echoed, his voice doleful.

  The North Korean capital wasn’t far. They could get there and back in a couple of hours. Whether they could get back at all, though, was very much an open question. Stalin had lavished on Kim Il-sung air defenses stouter than any city had enjoyed during the Second World War. Radar to spot approaching bombers,
radar to direct the fire from the antiaircraft guns, radar-carrying night fighters to hunt through the black skies and attack with heavy cannon of their own…Yes, the B-29s carried window to make the enemy radar operators’ lives more difficult. Yes, the radar-carrying F-82 Twin Mustangs escorted them and tried to keep off the North Korean La-11s.

  Tried was the word, though. It wasn’t the way it had been going against the Japs, some of whose fighters couldn’t even climb up to the B-29s. Japan was on the ropes before the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki knocked it through them. With their big Red brothers helping out, the North Koreans remained much tougher customers.

  “I should’ve driven a milk truck instead of one of these babies. That’d be a milk run for sure.” McCutcheon sounded like a man kidding on the square.

  “Hey, I’m a bookkeeper,” Bill said, “or I would be if Uncle Sam let me.” He imagined a gloomy office full of dusty ledgers, none of which added up the way it should. Next to what the plane would be facing tonight, he wouldn’t have minded spending several weeks—or years—in a place like that.

  They took off around 2300. This wasn’t anything like a lone-wolf mission, the way some of the atomic strikes had been. A swarm of Superfortresses would visit Pyongyang. With luck, something from one of them would blow Kim Il-sung to kingdom come. Just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean it couldn’t. Without Kim telling them what to do, the North Koreans might just throw in their cards and give up the war. Quite a few Americans—some with stars on their shoulders—thought it could happen.

  Bill wished he could believe it, but he didn’t. With Kim Il-sung gone, he figured the North Koreans would find some other hard-nosed bastard to order them around. And, even if they didn’t, the Red Chinese seemed here to stay. Short of turning all of North Korea into radioactive glass—an approach which, if you’d been fighting here for a while, definitely had its points—this war wouldn’t dry up and blow away any time soon.