Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  “And finally,” the newsreader said, “on this great day Comrade Stalin, the beloved leader of the people’s vanguard of revolutionary socialism, assures Soviet workers and peasants that, despite all the troubles we have had to overcome on the road to true Communism, the world—the entire world—will see it, and sooner than most people expect. The struggle continues. The struggle will be victorious. So the dialectic assures us. Thank you, and good evening.”

  “Moo!” Three different people in the common room said the same thing at the same time. Everyone giggled, even though Radio Moscow followed the news with Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the one he wrote in response to the Hitlerites’ siege of Leningrad. Normally, you wouldn’t want to laugh while that music poured out of the speaker.

  Normally…but not this minute. Everyone in the kolkhoz lived in the shadow of things more terrible, or at any rate more instantaneously terrible, than Shostakovich had known while penning his great symphony. And when you lived in that shadow, you laughed when you could, to help hold it at bay. Any excuse would do. A newsreader mouthing silly slogans with a silly accent was as much as anyone needed.

  Once upon a time, people had believed in the silly slogans. People had died for their sake, they’d believed with such passion. They’d gone to the gulag for them.

  In the world of true Communism, there would be no gulags. Ihor chuckled again. That was pretty funny, too.

  WHY AM I HERE? Isztvan Szolovits wondered. The question was worth asking, on any number of levels. What kind of answer you got depended on how you asked it, which was true of most questions. A believing religious person (a dangerous thing to be in the Hungarian People’s Republic, but not quite illegal as long as you didn’t make a public fuss about it) would say he was here because God had placed him here as part of the divine plan. An existentialist would haughtily declare that such questions had no meaning.

  Isztvan knew less than he would have liked about existentialism. The Horthy regime had frowned on such decadent fripperies. So did the Red regime that took its place a couple of years after the war ended. But for those couple of years, Hungary had been Russian-occupied but not yet officially Communist. The new notions from Paris got in and…They were exciting, till suddenly you couldn’t mention them any more if you knew what was good for you.

  But for Isztvan right now, Why am I here? meant Why am I in a muddy trench in the middle of Germany with the Americans raining artillery down on my head? In a way, he knew the answer. His own country’s secret police would have tortured him or killed him if he hadn’t let himself be conscripted. Their Russian overlords would have tortured or killed them had they shirked.

  A big one—probably a 155—slammed into the ground ten or twenty meters in front of the trenches. Everything shook. Blast made breathing hard for a moment. A little closer and it could have killed, sometimes without leaving a mark. Fragments screeched overhead. Mud flew into the air and thumped down in the trench.

  He cowered in the dugout he’d scraped in the forward wall. He’d shored it up with wood the best way he knew how. If the best way he knew how wasn’t good enough, it would collapse on him, and that would be that. A little closer and it might have collapsed anyhow.

  In the dugout next to his, a Pole told his rosary beads and gabbled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Isztvan recognized the Latin. He’d studied some. The Pole’s pronunciation seemed strange to him, but he wasn’t about to say so. He doubted the Polish soldier would have appreciated Latin lessons from a Christ-killing clipcock.

  Any Jew who lived in Hungary heard such endearments. Any Jew who lived in Hungary while the Arrow Cross maniacs did Hitler’s bidding heard them screamed in his face. Very often, they were some of the last things he ever heard.

  The Communists didn’t call Jews names like that. Several big shots of the Hungarian People’s Republic, including Matyas Rakosi, who ruled the country, were Jews—exiles returned from Russia or survivors like Isztvan. They were not, of course, observant Jews or even indifferent Jews like Isztvan. They were ready to go after their own kind, knowing Stalin would come after them if they didn’t. They didn’t talk about Christ-killers. They talked about rootless cosmopolites instead. It sounded much more scientific. In practice? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

  Along with the heavy stuff, the Americans were throwing mortars around. Isztvan had quickly learned to hate mortars. You hardly knew the bombs were coming in till they burst, and they could fall straight down into a foxhole or trench.

  They could, and this one did. It burst right behind the Pole in the dugout next to Isztvan’s. The boom shook him. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the mud a few centimeters in front of his nose. Another one, smaller, drew a bleeding line across the back of his hand. And one more, smaller still, clinked off his helmet. Like most people who’d seen both, he liked the German model better than its Soviet counterpart. But the Red Army lid did what it was made to do. Nobody’s helmet would stop a bullet. Fragments? Yes.

  He was so stunned—and so deafened by the near miss—he needed a couple of seconds to hear someone screaming, and a couple of seconds more to realize it was the Pole who’d sheltered in the dugout next to his. Though other bombs were still falling all around, Szolovits scrambled out of his shelter to do what he could for the foreigner who was here in a war no more his than the Hungarian soldier’s.

  “Oh,” Isztvan said, and then, “Oh, God.” He’d already seen some things he’d be trying to forget for the rest of his life. This was worse than all of them put together.

  He didn’t want to look. He wanted retroactively not to have looked. It was that bad. It was…he didn’t know what it was. He’d never dreamt even iron and explosives fired with bad intent could do—that—to a man.

  Worst of all, despite mutilating the Pole as ingeniously as any torturer might have, the mortar bomb hadn’t killed him. He wailed and moaned and shrieked and clutched at himself, trying to put himself back together. He wouldn’t be in one piece again till the Christian Judgment Day at the earliest.

  When the Pole wasn’t screaming, he was shouting and crying out in a language Isztvan didn’t speak. Some of that was prayer in Latin mixed with Polish. Some was—Isztvan didn’t know what it was. But if he’d been torn apart like that, he would have been howling for his mother.

  If he’d been torn apart like that, he would have wanted something else, too. He would have given it to a tormented dog smashed by a tram. You could do it to a dog, though. With a man, you ought to make sure it was all right first.

  Isztvan pulled the bayonet off his belt and held it in front of the Pole’s wild blue eyes. “Willst du?” he asked. Do you want me to? German was the only language the two of them might share.

  He didn’t know the poor bastard spoke German. Even if the Pole did, he might be too far gone to follow now.

  When his gashed mouth opened, more blood dribbled from the corner. But he choked out three clear words: “Ja. Bitte. Danke.” He tried to make the sign of the cross, but his right hand wasn’t attached any more.

  “Ego te absolvo, filii,” Isztvan said. He wasn’t a priest, or even a Christian. He hoped the words would do the Pole a little good anyhow. In all the time since the beginning of the world, few men had been in unction this extreme. Not watching what he did, Isztvan cut the fellow’s throat.

  The screaming stopped. Szolovits drew a deep breath. He plunged the bayonet into the dirt again and again to get the blood off it. It was a tool with all kinds of uses, though rarely as a spearpoint on the end of a rifle, its nominal purpose. He’d never thought he’d use it for that, though.

  An unexpected hand on his shoulder made him jerk and start to use it as a fighting knife. No Americans in the trenches, though. It was Sergeant Gergely. “He shut up,” Gergely said. “You shut him up?”

  “Uh-huh.” Isztvan nodded miserably.

  “Way to go,” the noncom said. “Take care of it for me, too, if I get all ripped up like that.”

  “Onc
e was bad enough, and he was a stranger,” Szolovits said.

  “You’d do it for a stranger but not for somebody you know? Lofasz a seggedbe!” The Magyar curse meant A horse’s cock up your ass! Hungarians had come into Europe off the steppe, and their language still showed it a thousand years later.

  “Are you volunteering, Sergeant?” Isztvan asked. As soon as he spoke, he realized the joke might be too strong. But he was still feeling the horror of what he’d just done, and wanted to exorcise it any way he could. He’d also begun to suspect—though he wasn’t sure yet—a human being might lurk somewhere under Gergely’s thick, highly polished steel armor.

  And the veteran noncom didn’t get angry. He let out a harsh chuckle. “Not right now, thanks,” he said. “If that day comes, you’ll know. I’ll be screaming the way that poor damned Pole was. Am I right? Did you try to shrive him before you put him out of his misery?”

  “I didn’t think it would do any harm.” Isztvan sounded more sheepish, more embarrassed, than he’d thought he would.

  “My guess is, you did him as much good as a priest would’ve,” the sergeant said. A good Marxist-Leninist was almost bound to say that. But you didn’t have to follow the Communist line to feel that way. Anyone who’d been through a couple of wars and listened to too many people die in ugly ways might come to think it was true. More and more, Isztvan was coming to think it was himself.

  —

  Boris Gribkov eyed the Tu-4 under camouflage netting at the field outside of Leningrad. “You know, we’re lucky no real Americans have looked us over in either one of our planes,” he remarked.

  “Why?” Vladimir Zorin asked. “They look as much like B-29s as real B-29s do.”

  “But a lot of the real B-29s have naked girls on the nose, to remind the crews what they’re fighting for. Not all of them, but a lot,” Gribkov said. “I bet our maskirovka guys would have enjoyed their work more if they’d given us one of those.”

  “I would’ve enjoyed it more, too,” the copilot said with a grin. “But I can’t see the guys who give the orders telling them to slap one on.”

  “Mm, no,” Boris said. The commissars who gave such orders were stiff-necked, strait-laced…. They were prudes, was what they were. They didn’t have much fun, and they didn’t believe anyone else should, either.

  Leonid Tsederbaum said, “Our fighter pilots would sometimes paint a swastika on the nose for every Nazi plane they shot down.”

  “That’s true,” Boris said. “And some bomber crews would paint a bomb there for each mission they flew.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tsederbaum nodded. “So I was thinking—maybe we could paint two cities on the nose of our beast here.”

  He owned a formidable deadpan. He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that the pilot started to nod before he really heard what Tsederbaum said. Then he made a horrible face and exclaimed, “Fuck your mother!”

  “I love you, too, sir.” Tsederbaum blew him a kiss.

  Two cities. The Jew had asked him if he wanted to bomb London or Paris or Rome. He hadn’t had to rip the heart out of a metropolis from which a great empire had been ruled for centuries. That was luck, if you liked. He had smaller places on his conscience. Seattle and Bordeaux didn’t matter nearly so much to the people who didn’t live in them. If you did happen to live in a city where an A-bomb went off, you wouldn’t be happy afterwards. The best, the only, defense was to be somewhere else when that happened.

  And if you were on the other end of the bomb, the only defense was not thinking about what you did in service to your country and to the world proletariat in arms. Gribkov remembered that the Stalin hadn’t been able to land the crew at Petropavlovsk. He remembered the craters scarring the cityscapes of Moscow and Leningrad. He was defending his country.

  The Americans who’d bombed Soviet cities were defending their country, too. A few of the Hitlerites who’d got hanged or shot for running death camps had killed more people than those Americans and their Soviet counterparts. A few, but not many.

  That wasn’t such a good thought to have. Gribkov wished he hadn’t had it. Well, that was why they made vodka. One of the things vodka did was blot out thoughts you didn’t feel like having. They’d eventually come back, but with Russians and the way they drank eventually could take a while.

  There were also other ways to blot out those ugly thoughts. Hearing the base air-raid siren could do the trick, for instance. Pilot, copilot, and navigator looked at one another. Then they all started to run.

  Maybe from force of habit, the construction crew that ran up this field had dug trenches by the quarters and others alongside the runways. Gribkov, Zorin, and Tsederbaum dashed for a runwayside trench. Tsederbaum was taller and skinnier than his Russian crewmates. He might have broken the Olympic record for the hundred meters. In any race, though, they would have won silver and bronze.

  Tsederbaum leaped down into the trench. Gribkov and Zorin followed. They all crouched in the mud, careless of their uniforms. The trenches were there to protect base personnel from bomb fragments and from strafing fighters’ machine guns. They’d done that well enough during the Great Patriotic War. They could again—if they were dealing with bomb fragments and bullets.

  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.