Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Ihor lit a papiros. Yuri Levitan hadn’t said a word about what the USA was liable to do next. The Americans and the Russians were playing a game like the one snockered Ukrainian peasants sometimes enjoyed. Two men stood facing each other. One slapped the other’s cheek. Then the second guy slapped him back. They took turns till one man either couldn’t stand the pain or fell over.

  Blowing out smoke, Ihor remembered he’d played that game a few times. You had to be drunk, the drunker the better. When you were, it was funny and full of ridiculousness. If you tried it sober, it would just hurt. Not much fun in that.

  He smoked and walked, walked and smoked. The Soviet Union had just slapped the United States hard enough to stagger it. He wished the slap would have been harder. Why not some really big cities on the U.S. East Coast? Maybe the Soviet bombers couldn’t reach them. Or maybe they got shot down trying. But was this slap hard enough so the Yankee imperialists couldn’t whack you back? How could you know? All you could do was wait and find out.

  Snow still lay on the ground. The trees near the stream remained as bare-branched as if they’d never heard of leaves. Spring was on the way, but winter always hung on as long and hard as it could. Summer was the season that seemed to vanish as soon as you looked away.

  And this was the Ukraine. Up in Russia, things were worse. No wonder the Russians thought they were tougher than their cousins down here. It wasn’t just that there were more of them. They had to put up with more to get anything out of where they lived.

  He walked on. A weasel stared at him. Pretty soon, its white winter coat would turn brown. It hadn’t yet, though. The weasel darted behind a tree trunk and disappeared. Disappeared from Ihor’s view, anyhow. But the mice and voles would find out it was still around.

  He looked back at the clump of buildings that made up the heart of Kolkhoz 127. They were all cheap and shabby, punished by winter cold and summer sun, their paint faded, roof tiles coming loose and blowing off. They didn’t get fixed up as often or as well as they should have.

  But the buildings were collectively owned, along with almost everything else on the collective farm. What everybody owned together, nobody cared about individually. And so things wore out, and mostly didn’t get repaired. Ihor had never heard of a kolkhoz that worked any differently, whether in the Ukraine, in Russia, or, for that matter, in Bulgaria.

  Three women rode by on bicycles, bound for Kiev. Ihor stared after them, scowling. Had Anya decided she was going, horrible cold or no horrible cold? She’d be lucky if she didn’t come back with pneumonia. But he didn’t think she was one of the riders. For her sake, he hoped not.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, something started to squeal, far off at the edge of hearing. Not a pig kind of squeal—a machine-made kind of squeal. Rising and falling…Air-raid sirens? Ihor lit another papiros. Stalin had sown the wind. Was the whirlwind on the way?

  Screams in the air—those were jet fighters taking off and getting as high as they could as fast as they could. Could they get high enough fast enough? Everybody anywhere near Kiev would find out soon.

  Through those urgent, even desperate, screams, Ihor’s ear caught another jet roar, this one high and distant, as if the airplane making it had already got as high as it needed to get and didn’t have to worry about any interlopers late for the party.

  Off in the distance, as far away as the sirens, guns began to pound. Ihor hadn’t thought they had antiaircraft guns that could shoot as high as the plane moving from west to east was flying. For all he knew for sure, they didn’t have flak like that. Whether they could reach high enough or not, they were shooting for all they were worth. Why not? What harm would it do?

  None, probably. Whether it would do any good, though…That question got answered moments later. It did no good at all. For all the antiaircraft fire, for all the screaming MiGs, a new sun burst to life over Kiev. Even from kilometers away, the heat of that burning was fierce on Ihor’s face.

  He threw himself flat on the cold ground and tried to dig himself into it like a mole, the way he had when the Germans started throwing 105s around. But shells from a 105 were gravel on a tin roof next to that mountain of flame incinerating the ancient city.

  “God, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” He gabbled out the Old Church Slavonic prayers again and again, hardly knowing he was doing so. Had anyone heard him, he might have got in trouble for it. But if they weren’t also praying back at the kolkhoz, he would have been mightily amazed. They were praying wherever they could…wherever they weren’t dead. And he had to pray Christ had had mercy on those bicycle riders out for a shopping trip to the city—and that Anya really wasn’t one of them.

  Not half a dozen centimeters in front of Ihor’s frightened eyes, a corpse-pale mushroom no taller than the last joint of his little finger pushed its way out of the Ukraine’s black earth. There above Kiev, that monstrous mushroom thrust its way untold kilometers into the Ukraine’s gray-blue sky. Lightnings crackled about it.

  Blast picked him up and flipped him over. It didn’t fling him into a tree and smash him; it wasn’t quite strong enough for that. But it did lift snow and send it skirling along. It lifted pebbles, too. One hit his boot, hard enough to hurt his foot. A little nearer and it might have pierced him like a rifle round.

  “Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” Suddenly, Ihor was praying in earnest, praying as he hadn’t prayed since he was a boy, not just spitting out words by reflex the way the least pious man would do when in danger of his life. He wasn’t thinking about his life now. There was Anya, rushing out to see the terrible cloud for herself.

  If not for that miserable head cold, she would have got on her bicycle and gone into Kiev with the other women. She wouldn’t have been there yet, but she would have been much closer than Ihor was. How much closer? He couldn’t know. Close enough for her clothes to catch fire from that blast? Close enough for her hair to catch fire? Close enough for her to catch fire?

  “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!” Ihor still had his wife, still would have her for as long as the two of them could go on putting up with each other. In the circle of villages and collective farms around Kiev, how many people would tell their children and grandchildren those stories down through the years? And how many wouldn’t be there to tell them, because they’d gone into the city after all?

  By the nature of things, you couldn’t answer such questions, not unless you were God. But you could worry at them, the way a dog worried at a bone. Worrying at questions like that was what made human beings human. Sometimes the question was more important than the answer.

  And sometimes not. What did the bomb do to me? Ihor wondered. He couldn’t answer that one, either. But the answer was already written inside him, whatever it chanced to be. He would have to keep turning the pages of his life to discover it.

  MAJOR HANK MCCUTCHEON had to be confident as he spoke for everybody in the B-29 as it took off from the airfield north of Pusan. “Payback,” McCutcheon said solemnly, “is a bitch.”

  Sitting in the right-hand seat next to the pilot, Bill Staley knew damn well that McCutcheon spoke for him. “You betcha, sir,” he said, sounding like he felt: the fiercest bookkeeper on the face of the globe.

  After bringing the yoke back a little farther to pull the bomber’s nose up, McCutcheon nodded. “You’d be the one to agree with me, all right. Hear anything from your wife yet?”

  Bill shook his head. “Not a word. All I know is, that bomb went off between Seattle and Everett. They’re calling it the Seattle bomb in the papers and on the news, but I got the straight skinny from a G-2 guy on Harrison’s staff. I have no idea whether Marian’s alive or dead.” He didn’t know whether Linda was, either. That hurt even worse, or maybe just as bad in a different way. A little girl had no idea what war was all about, or why people could be willing—even eager—to kill one another in the sacred name of politics.

  “You’ve got to be going out of your tree,” the pilot said as he swung the plane east,
toward the Sea of Japan. McCutcheon went on, “Me, I’m glad I stayed in Omaha. The West Coast is pretty, yeah, but look at all the chunks the Russians bit out of it. They can’t get to Nebraska.”

  “Yet,” Bill said. “Three or four years ago, they couldn’t get to the West Coast, either. And it’s not just the coast. Salt Lake City got it, for Chrissake. Denver!”

  “Yeah, and the guys who smoked Denver landed with dry tanks at that Air Force Field outside of Colorado Springs, got out of their plane, and put their hands up—and nobody knew what to do with them till they started speaking Russian,” McCutcheon said in disgust. “Fucking Tu-4 looks just like a Superfort even before you give it the same paint job. Afterwards? Brother!”

  “I don’t care if they came out of the same pussy when they were born,” Bill said savagely, which made McCutcheon guffaw. Jaw set with fury, Bill continued, “The air-defense people ought to get their balls handed to them in a sack. They knew the Russians were liable to attack. How many of those bombers did they shoot down? Two or three, that’s it. Spokane made it. Las Vegas is still safe for the gamblers. Happy goddamn day!”

  “That one might’ve been going after Hoover Damn, not Vegas,” McCutcheon said. “If it was, the guys who shot it down really earned their paychecks that day.”

  “Okay, fine. Those guys weren’t asleep at the switch. But everybody along the Pacific sure was. We don’t have a decent port north of San Diego any more.” Bill grabbed his yoke and squeezed as if it were a civil-defense coordinator’s neck.

  “Well, Vladivostok’s going to glow in the dark like a radium clock dial for nobody knows how long,” McCutcheon said. The Air Force had hit the Soviet port near the border with North Korea with several A-bombs. But only one of those bombers came home again. The Russians had known they were coming and baked them a cake.

  Staley’s B-29 and its comrades droned along just above the surface of the sea, to make themselves as hard for radar to spot as they could. The Ivans had done that on the way to the West Coast. It had worked for them. Imitation might or might not be the sincerest form of flattery. Bill hoped like hell it was the most effective kind.

  Some of the planes in this flight were bound for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the main Russian town on the island north of Japan whose southern half Stalin reconquered in 1945. Some were heading for Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk. Though ice closed the port for close to half the year, roads connected it with the rest of Russia. Things delayed there might not get anywhere else in a hurry, but they eventually would.

  And some B-29s, like this one, would call on Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Only the sea and air joined Petropavlovsk to the outside world. It was a major Soviet naval base all the same. It had been a naval base under the Tsars, too. During the Crimean War, the English and French attacked the place, but couldn’t take it. What they would have done with it if they had taken it was beyond Bill. That that siege had happened at all was one of those worthless bits of history he happened to know.

  “You’re jiving me,” McCutcheon said when he mentioned it.

  “Honest injun.” Bill held up a hand as if swearing an oath.

  “Wow!” The pilot whistled softly. “That must’ve been the lost fighting the lost. Like that German pest in East Africa during the First World War who stayed in the field a month after it was all over everywhere else.”

  “You wonder what was going through those admirals’ minds a hundred years ago. Honest to God, you do,” Bill said. “We’ve got these ships here, and there are the Russians, and if we don’t watch out they could sail around the Horn and bombard England year after next. Had to be something like that. Why didn’t they just sit tight and watch ’em?”

  “Beats me,” McCutcheon replied. “Remember, the Russians did sail out of the Baltic, around Africa, and up to the Sea of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.”

  “And the Japs walloped the snot out of them, too,” Bill said. “Yamamoto was at that fight. He lost a couple of fingers there, if I remember straight.”

  “You know all kinds of stuff nobody in his right mind gives a crap about, don’t you?” the pilot said, not without admiration.

  “Useless information is my specialty, yes, sir,” Staley answered, not without pride. “Sometimes even useful information. If you want your taxes done after you get out of the Air Force and start making some real money again, come see me if we’re anywhere in the same part of the country.”

  “Do I get a discount?” McCutcheon asked.

  “Sure, and you won’t even have to jew it out of me. Everybody on the crew gets the special helped-keep-me-alive discount.”

  “I like that.” McCutcheon straightened in his seat and pointed ahead and to the left. “I think those are the two islands that lead up to the Kamchatka Peninsula. We’re down mighty low, but I’m gonna swing away from ’em anyhow. The Reds are bound to have radar stations on ’em. Hell, I would.” He spoke over the intercom: “I’m changing course five degrees east.”

  “Noted,” answered Roger Williamson, the navigator.

  The islands were lumps of dark mud in sea, which the waning crescent moon dappled nicely. North of the second, smaller, island, the peninsula was more darkness—mountainous darkness. There was a big volcano just a few miles inland from Petropavlovsk. It made a perfect target marker.

  Hank McCutcheon spoke over the intercom again, this time to the radioman, who sat on Bill’s side of the plane behind a bulkhead: “Radio traffic give any sign the Russians know we’re in the neighborhood?”

  “Well, you know how well I don’t speak Russian,” Hyman Ginsberg answered, “but what I’m picking up doesn’t sound excited or anything.”

  “Works for me,” the pilot said. When he spoke again, it was to the navigator: “Let me know when we’re about seventy-five miles south of the target. I’ll start climbing then.”

  “Seventy-five miles. Yes, sir,” Williamson answered.

  When McCutcheon pulled back the yoke and the B-29 left the comforting clutter and cloak of the Pacific Ocean, Bill gulped. This was the bad time. If the Russians could scramble fighters, the aircrew wouldn’t last long enough to drop the bomb on the naval base. Their plane was painted midnight-blue all over, but radar didn’t care. The controllers could vector in the MiGs….

  “Boss, they’re starting to have conniptions,” Ginsberg reported.

  “Well, fuck ’em. I can see the damn volcano now, blotting out the stars. Another couple of minutes.” McCutcheon eyed his watch and the target ahead. You had to think of it as a target, not as people. And gunners around the target were starting to shoot: fireworks that confirmed where to aim. “Bombs away!” McCutcheon shouted.

  “It’s gone,” Steve Bauer said from the nose. As the bomb fell free, McCutcheon heeled the B-29 away to the east and gave all four engines full emergency power.

  Hell burst on earth, the way it had over Harbin. The light was dazzling, stunning. Bill stopped worrying about Russian fighters. They’d have no one down there to guide them to their target now.

  —

  Los Angeles writhed like a snake with a broken back. As befitted a city so sprawling and spread out, it had got hit by two bombs, one just a little south of downtown and the other to smash the ports at San Pedro and Long Beach. City Hall was gone. So was the downtown police station. Water and power in the city were both erratic.

  It mattered less to Aaron Finch than he would have guessed. Like him, his wife and son were as all right as you could be if you’d wound up a little too close to an atom bomb going off. The house hadn’t fallen down on them. Only a couple of windows had blown in. Glendale, a city in its own right, had its own utilities, and they kept working…most of the time.

  He was even a local celebrity. Some of the Russians who’d parachuted from their bomber were still missing. One had got stomped to death by a mob, one hanged from a lamppost, and one shot by somebody with a deer rifle before his feet even touched the ground. But Aaron was the only person who’d actually captured a S
oviet flyer.

  The Glendale News Press interviewed him. So did the Pasadena Star-News. The Los Angeles papers had had a large circulation in the suburbs, too. But the Times, the Mirror, the Examiner, and the Herald-Express were among the casualties of the downtown bomb.

  “You know what?” Aaron told Ruth. “I’m not sorry the Times went up in smoke. It’s been a union-busting right-wing rag for as long as I’ve been alive, and I don’t miss it a bit.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!” Ruth exclaimed. “They blew them up! There’s nothing left of the Times Building. Even City Hall downtown is only a melted stub.” City Hall had been the one L.A. building exempt from the twelve-story height limit imposed to cut earthquake damage. It had always stood out on the skyline as a result. It still did…what was left of it.

  “If anyone on earth misses the Chandlers, I’d be amazed,” Aaron said stubbornly. He raised a finger to correct himself. “Maybe some of the Nazis hiding out in Argentina and Paraguay do. Nobody else.”

  “You’re horrible,” she said. He nodded, more pleased than otherwise.

  Three days after the bombs fell, someone knocked on the door. When Aaron opened it, a Glendale flatfoot stood outside, his patrol car parked at the curb. “You Aaron Finch?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Aaron said. “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody down at the station wants to talk to you,” the cop answered. “You don’t gotta come. I’m not arresting you or nothin’. But he wants to.”

  “Who is he?” Aaron asked—reasonably, he thought.

  “Somebody down at the station,” the policeman repeated. “That’s what he told me I should tell you, so that’s what I’m sayin’.”

  “Somebody who wants me to buy a pig in a poke,” Aaron said. The cop didn’t deny it. Aaron thought for a moment, then shrugged. Getting in bad with the local police wasn’t something a sensible guy wanted to do. Glendale was a city, but not a great big city. If the clowns in the black-and-whites wanted to make someone’s life miserable, they could. “Okay. I’ll play along.” He called back over his shoulder to let Ruth know where he was going, then walked out into the night.