Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Maskirovka. It was all maskirovka. He drank more tea.

  —

  Tibor Nagy hadn’t hated Americans. He hadn’t hated Germans, either. He’d been a kid when they fought in Hungary. They were ragged and weary and knew they were losing, but when they had any food to spare they shared it. He’d seen Russians as the enemy—till he found that their soldiers didn’t act much different from anybody else. People were people, he’d decided. Not profound, maybe, but it suited him.

  By the time he got drafted, Hungary had been transformed into the Hungarian People’s Republic. He wasn’t thrilled about that, but what could you do? If you complained, you could find out all about the MGB and its Hungarian counterparts—that was what. Better to nod when anybody praised Joseph Stalin (whose name was always spelled Sztalin in Magyar, to make it sound right), and to try to get on with the rest of your life.

  After he got drafted, political officers talked his ear off, and the ears of all the other conscripts. They shouted that the Germans had been Fascists, which they had. They shouted that Hungary’s Arrow Cross regime had been Fascists, which they had. They insisted that Admiral Horthy had been a Fascist. Nobody was dumb enough to stand up and tell them they were full of it.

  Americans, as far as the political indoctrinators were concerned, weren’t quite Fascists. But they were imperialists and reactionaries and class enemies. They were capitalist oppressors of the proletariat, too. So were the English.

  Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. Again, telling the political officers it was all a pack of rubbish was a long walk off a short pier. You nodded. You gave back the slogans. You tried to go along. You figured being a soldier couldn’t last forever, no matter how much it seemed to while you did it.

  Then the war broke out. The Russians didn’t trust the Hungarians—or think they were strong enough—to break through the enemy defenses. But, no matter how many Russians there were, there weren’t enough to do all the fighting they needed to do and to hold down the land they’d overrun.

  They figured the Hungarians were good enough for that. And so Tibor and his company found themselves occupying Schweinfurt while the Russians tried to break through at Fulda, farther north and west.

  They made ball-bearings in Schweinfurt. Because they did, the Americans had bombed the hell out of the town in the big war. No doubt Stalin had cheered them on when they did, too. Now the Red Army’s planes and tanks had flattened a lot of what the Germans worked so hard to rebuild during the war and after it.

  “No fraternizing with the locals!” Sergeant Gergely shouted, again and again. “You can’t trust them. Anything you say to them is liable to go straight to the enemy’s ears. Or some of the bastards who learned their trade with the Nazis may try and blow your head off.”

  Bastards like you? Tibor wondered, but that was one more thing you didn’t say.

  They’d already had trouble with sniping. Some of the Germans wore almost-uniforms and armbands that proclaimed them part of the emergency militia. Orders were not to kill those guys out of hand, but to capture them if possible and hand them over to the Red Army. What the Russians would end up doing with them or to them…was anybody’s guess.

  Other Germans just had rifles or pistols or grenades and a sense of determination. Somebody would toss a grenade at a truck or shoot from a third-floor window or from behind a burnt-out auto. The Magyars took casualties, and couldn’t always catch the sons of bitches who caused them.

  Hungarian authorities dealt with that problem the same way the Germans had in two world wars before them. They seized and shot large numbers of hostages. Tibor hated firing-squad duty. You couldn’t shoot to miss, though. You’d land in worse trouble if you did.

  To his surprise, Isztvan Szolovits hated it even worse than he did. “They’re Germans,” Tibor said to him after an execution. “Don’t you want to get even with them for what they did to your people?”

  “I don’t want to kill people up against a post,” the Jew answered. “The SS did shit like that. And I don’t know that the people we’re shooting did anything to anybody during the war. If I have to fight, I want to fight, where the other guys have guns, too. Killing blindfolded people with their hands tied isn’t war. It’s murder.”

  “You might as well be a fighter pilot, huh?” Tibor said.

  “That would be funny, except it isn’t funny,” Szolovits said.

  His syntax might be twisted, but Tibor knew what he meant. American fighters—jets and prop jobs—often flew low over Schweinfurt on their way to shoot up Red Army units on the move inside the Russian zone of Germany. If they saw a truck column or a few tanks or even some soldiers bunched together, they would open up with their machine guns or fire some of the rockets they carried under their wings.

  You couldn’t shoot them down, not if you were a rifleman on the ground. You could fire a few rounds at them, but they went by too fast for you to lead them the way you needed to. The slam of your piece against your shoulder might make you feel better, but you had to understand you were only wasting ammunition.

  What happened when a rocket hit a truck, on the other hand…Tibor dragged a burning man out of the wreckage. The soldier’s clothes weren’t on fire. He was. Tibor rolled on top of him, careless that his own uniform and flesh were getting singed. Then two men rushed up with a big pail of water and dumped it over both of them.

  They took the badly burned soldier away. Tibor got some ointment to smear on his scorches. He also got, for the first time ever, Sergeant Gergely’s genuine respect. “Good job, kid,” the veteran said. “Not everybody’d lay his balls on the line for his buddy.”

  “He’s not my buddy,” Tibor said; his own burns were starting to sting in spite of the ointment. “I don’t even know who he is. And I didn’t think about taking chances. I just ran over and grabbed him. If I’d taken the time to think, I bet I would’ve stood there with my thumb up my ass.”

  “That’s how it works most of the time,” Gergely told him. “But how you did it doesn’t matter. What matters is, you did it. Next time we’ve got a slot for a lance-corporal, now I know who to fill it with.”

  Tibor cared about becoming a lance-corporal no more than he cared about being elected Pope. But Sergeant Gergely’s good opinion of him meant something—meant quite a bit, in fact. It hadn’t while the army was on a peacetime footing. Then he’d wanted to stay out of trouble and to keep the sergeant out of his hair. Past that, Gergely could have gone and hanged himself for all Tibor cared. Tibor might have hoisted one if he had, to tell the truth.

  War was different, though. War was different all kinds of ways. You found out why they drilled so many things into you in peacetime training. It wasn’t only to kill time or to wear you out. When the bullets and rockets and shells started flying, you needed to obey orders without wasting an instant. You needed to know how to dig a foxhole and how to keep your rifle clean. And you needed to know when to hit the dirt a split second before you had any conscious reason to.

  Even second-line soldiering, which was all the Red Army demanded from its none too eager Hungarian, Polish, and Czechoslovakian allies, taught you those things in a hurry. And, though Tibor wouldn’t have been in Schweinfurt if not for the Russians, they weren’t trying to kill him here.

  The Americans were. He might not have hated them before he started trying to hold down the city. When they did things like blowing up that truck, though, whatever kindness he’d felt toward them melted away as if it were snow in a hot oven.

  A hot oven…The sight of burning flesh was horrible. The smell was even worse. His stomach wanted to turn over. He sternly told it it would do no such thing. To his relief, it decided to listen to him.

  American bombers came over that night. They pounded Schweinfurt as if it were the Second World War all over again. “Why don’t they hit the Russians?” Szolovits complained from his foxhole near Tibor’s. “We didn’t do anything to them.”

  “We’re here,” Sergeant Gergely said flatly, and
that did seem to be as much answer as anyone needed.

  —

  We’re here, Cade Curtis thought. The Korean with him punched him softly on the shoulder to wish him luck, the way an American might have. The man whispered something in his own language, touched him again, and slipped away to the north in the darkness, back toward his own village.

  He’s gone about as far as he can go. Cade’s mind played with the song from Oklahoma! He hadn’t gone as far as he had to go himself. The lines the Red Chinese and North Koreans held lay just ahead, between him and the American trenches he needed to reach.

  Here and there, he could see faint red glows among the Communist positions. Some of those, the ones that brightened and faded, would be cigarettes. Others were more constant. If you put kerosene or fat in the bottom of a can and added a wick, you had a lamp or even a puny stove. The soldiers wouldn’t need to be so careful about hiding the lights from behind as they were from ahead.

  Not much shooting was going on. For one thing, it was 0130. Men on both sides would be at the low ebb of energy and alertness. For another, the Korean War had turned into a backwater fight. It had dominated the world’s attention all through its first six months. But then the atom bombs started falling. The big brawl broke out in Europe. And with that donnybrook in full swing—which was about as much as Cade knew about it—the Americans, if not the Chinese, wouldn’t worry so much about things here.

  If Cade was ever going to do this, he had to go forward. He walked straight down the muddy dirt track that led to the front here. He’d given the U.S. Army parka to his Korean buddies. He’d hacked off his beard. In quilted jacket and fur hat, with a Russian submachine gun in his hands, he looked like somebody who belonged here till you got close enough to see his nose. He hoped like hell nobody would.

  If the Reds caught him, they could shoot him for wearing their clothes. Of course, if they caught him, they could shoot him for the fun of it. They probably would, too.

  He didn’t worry about it. Whatever happened would happen, that was all. He’d been on the run ever since things went sour south of the Chosin Reservoir. He wondered how many other dogfaces had managed to get away. Not a lot. He was sure of that.

  When he started getting close to those red glows, he stepped off the path and began to crawl. Some snow still lay on the ground. He wondered whether Korea was ever free of it. He knew which way he’d bet.

  Here and there, snores rose from foxholes. Cade was glad to hear them; they kept him from making what would be his last dumb mistake. A couple of men talked quietly in singsong Chinese. Now he could tell the difference between that language and Korean from only a handful of syllables. He sure hadn’t been able to when the fighting here started. He still didn’t speak more than a few words of either tongue. Even that little was more than he’d looked for.

  The front here wasn’t multiple rows of trenches on both sides, the way it had been in France during World War I. Cade gathered it was like that on some stretches of the line. His guide had brought him here because things were looser in these parts.

  Somebody called out something. A challenge? Whatever it was, Cade froze—not hard to do in this weather. The Red Chinese soldier called out again. This time, Cade heard, or thought he heard, a questioning note in the man’s voice.

  Nobody fired off a flare to light up the landscape. Nobody started spraying bullets around as if from a garden hose. After fifteen motionless minutes, Cade slithered forward once more. His thumb hit a pebble. It clicked when it caromed off a bigger rock. He froze again.

  Then, to his vast relief, a dog started barking not far away. The beast probably stayed near the soldiers to eat whatever they threw away. It took its chances, though. It would have been safer with the Americans. With these guys, it could end up simmering over one of those makeshift stoves.

  But if they went after the dog, they wouldn’t stumble over him…unless they found him by accident while they were hunting it. Bite your tongue, he thought. He did. It hurt. He was still alive, then. He wanted to stay that way.

  On he crawled. His hand hit a metal post. Both sides used them to anchor their belts of barbed wire. He had a wire cutter. He got to work with it. The strands parted with twangs he would have thought you could hear in Guam, if not in Honolulu. No flares hissed out over no-man’s-land, though. No machine guns started chattering, either.

  A barb on the wire skewered his finger. He howled and swore—inside his own mind. The stuff was bound to be filthy and rusty. His last tetanus shot, just before he went into action, had left him miserable and feverish for a couple of days. Now he was damn glad that bored Army doc had stuck him.

  Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Freeze. What was that? Oh—they were going after the dog. Crawl. Snip. Crawl.

  Suddenly, no more wire to snip. He’d made it through the Reds’ belt. If he kept going, he’d find the American entanglements pretty soon. How jumpy were the GIs on the far side? Would they open up with everything they had when they heard him coming?

  He dreaded that more than anything else. He’d made it all this way, dodged the enemy’s hunters down most of the peninsula. Now, at last, he could see rescue, see safety. How cruel would the irony be if his own side ventilated him, thinking him a Red?

  He discovered the American wire with his forehead. The blood trickling down his cheek was warm. He hoped the gash wouldn’t leave a nasty scar. Your face usually healed up pretty well, but usually wasn’t always.

  Crawl. Snip. Crawl. Snip. He moved as quietly as he could. He heard low voices ahead of him. They were speaking English. Not Chinese, not Korean, not even mangled Latin. English!

  He cut one more strand and crawled forward again. He didn’t come up against any more wire. He was through! Nothing at all stood between him and his own countrymen—except their fear when they finally heard him coming. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That had been FDR, back when Cade was a baby. He’d been way too little to remember it himself, but it was the kind of thing you heard all the time.

  “Hey!” he called. Why not? The Reds were several hundred yards behind him. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!” Sweet Jesus! English felt strange in his own mouth, it had been so long since he’d used it.

  Sudden silence slammed down ahead, silence mixed with scrambling noises. No, they’d had no idea he was out here. If he’d been a Chinese raiding party, a lot of these guys would be talking to their undertaker.

  Somebody chambered a round. The sharp snick! was much too audible. Then somebody else did. “Don’t shoot!” Cade repeated, more urgently than before. “Honest to God, I’m an American.”

  Through the silence, someone called, “Okay, asshole, who played in the Series last year?”

  They’d asked the same kind of question to trip up English-speaking Japs in the last war. Cade thanked heaven he was a fan. “Yanks and Phillies,” he answered. “Yankees swept.”

  After a pause, that same voice said, “Okay. Come on. We won’t plug you till you get here, anyway.”

  Cade came. He remembered to leave his Russian submachine gun behind. It wouldn’t create the impression he wanted. He tumbled into a foxhole. A GI lit him up with a flicked Zippo. The flame was dazzling.

  “Fuck me,” the dogface said. “He is an American—I think. Scrawny SOB, whatever he is.” The casual scorn was the most wonderful thing Cade had ever heard.

  A BUS RAN from Fakenham to Norwich. It was about twenty-seven miles from the small town to the city. The bus always stopped in Bawdeswell, halfway between. Every once in a while, it would stop without intending to. All the buses on the route dated from the 1930s, and they’d all seen hard service since the day they were built. No wonder they broke down from time to time. The wonder was that they didn’t do it more.

  To Daisy Baxter, Norwich had always been the city. It was the one she could easily get to. It was her window on a wider, brighter, more cosmopolitan life than the one she lived in her hamlet near the sea.

  Or rather, it ha
d been. These days, Norwich was a synonym for hell on earth, in the most literal sense of the words. No one knew how many had died there, not to the closest ten thousand. No one knew how many were hurt: burned by fire from the skies, poisoned by radiation, or simply crushed or mangled as they would have been in an ordinary explosion. The word the BBC most often used about the devastation was unimaginable.

  Daisy didn’t want to imagine it. She wanted to see for herself what the Russians had visited on Norwich. She wanted to see what the enormous American bombers at Sculthorpe might visit on Russia. It was morbid curiosity. She understood that.

  She also understood seeing any more than they showed in the newspaper pictures wouldn’t be easy. Never mind that she’d lose business, because she was sure getting there and back would take all day. She was willing to sacrifice the day’s trade. An atom bomb didn’t go off in your neighborhood every day—and a bloody good thing it didn’t, too.

  But she feared she might not be able to see what she wanted to see any which way. The Army and Scotland Yard had thrown a cordon around Norwich. That was partly to help them deal with the devastation in the sealed-off area. And it was partly to keep away would-be sightseers like Daisy.

  Since the bomb fell, the bus ran only half as often. No wonder: now the route ended at Bawdeswell. Far fewer people cared about going there than had wanted or needed to go to Norwich. Bawdeswell had nothing you couldn’t find in any other hamlet. And, no doubt, the road from Bawdeswell to Norwich would be blocked.

  But there was more than one way to kill a cat. Instead of climbing on the bus, Daisy got on her bicycle and pedaled out of Fakenham early in the morning. It was chilly but not freezing, and drizzling but not really raining. If she waited for better weather, she might still be waiting months from now. Some of the grass was greening up. Spring still lay three weeks ahead, but you could tell it was coming.