Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the glowing instrument panel in front of him. B-29 engines had run hot in the last war, making every takeoff an adventure. Sitting in mothballs for half a dozen years hadn’t improved their performance one bit. When everything worked, they hauled the big plane off the ground. When it didn’t…that happened some of the time, but, in the brutal economics of war, not often enough to make the authorities quit using them.

  Bill had heard that the Soviet copies of the B-29 didn’t duplicate the American engines, but used a Russian powerplant of about the same performance. He wondered if it had the same trouble, too. He guessed it did. A B-29 copy wouldn’t have been a real copy without overheating engines.

  As they crossed the front, a little antiaircraft fire came up at them. They were up past 33,000 feet; most of it burst well below them. Front-line flak was there mostly to make enemy fighters show a little respect when they strafed trenches.

  But the sons of bitches down below would have radios or telephones or telegraph clickers. In case the radar operators farther north had decided to turn in early, somebody up there would know to wake them up and put them back to work.

  The country down there was pretty well blacked out. Electricity hadn’t been widespread in Korea before the war started. Many of the generators that supplied it had been knocked out as fighting ground up and down the peninsula. Soldiers on both sides would shoot without warning at houses showing lights they shouldn’t. No wonder the blackout was good.

  Hyman Ginsberg’s voice resounded in Bill’s earphones: “The Twin Mustangs have picked up what have to be Lavochkins heading our way,” the radioman reported.

  Hank McCutcheon heard that, too, of course. He glanced over at Bill. Bill nodded back. They were nearing Pyongyang. They had to expect a welcoming committee. Here it was, evidently. The Lavochkin La-11 was a neat little fighter, its lines not too different from a German FW-190’s. It was about as good a prop job as anybody could make, in other words. Not its fault that the rise of the jet had left it obsolete.

  Of course, the rise of the jet had left the B-29 even more obsolete. Like the La-11, it soldiered on regardless. Small jet engines helped the even larger B-36 get off the ground. The B-47 was all-jet. Neither of those planes had been manufactured by the thousands, though. Lots and lots of leftover B-29s around. Why not use them? Why not use them up?

  Flak rose toward the Superforts again. This stuff came from the heavy guns, the guns designed to throw it so high. It didn’t burst below the bombers. It burst among them. The big plane shook from near misses, as if on a potholed road.

  Out through the Plexiglas windshield panels, Bill also spotted tracers zipping back and forth across the sky. The B-29s and Twin Mustangs spat .50-caliber cartridges. The La-11s carried four 23mm cannons apiece. Their tracers, though scarcer, were more impressive.

  Fire burning from engine to engine along the left wing, a Superfort spun toward the ground. “How much longer till we can drop, dammit?” McCutcheon demanded of the bombardier. The gunners were firing at something out there.

  “Another minute, sir,” Charlie Becker answered. A fragment sliced through the plane’s aluminum skin; Bill heard the snarling clang.

  “Fuck it,” McCutcheon said. To Becker, he added, “Get rid of ’em, Charlie!”

  “They’re gone!” the bombardier said from the nose. The plane grew lighter as the bombs fell free and more aerodynamic as soon as compressed air shoved the bomb-bay doors closed. Hank McCutcheon pulled it into a tight turn to port, a turn designed to get away from Pyongyang and all the unfriendly people there as fast as he could.

  Another B-29 took a direct hit and blew up. The flash of light left Bill night-blind for several seconds. Blast buffeted his Superfort—not the way it had right after an A-bomb burst, but noticeably all the same. The big engines roared as they got out of there. The roaring wouldn’t help with an La-11 on their tail, though. The Russian fighter had something like an extra hundred miles an hour on them.

  No fat shells blew out their pressurization or smashed up an engine or tore a crewman to bloody shards. Bill began to breathe normally again. Another mission down, he thought. Sooner or later, they have to let me quit.

  They were talking with the flight controllers at the strip north of Pusan when the men there suddenly started cussing a blue streak. Bill could see explosions ahead. Somebody’s planes—North Korean? Red Chinese? Russian?—were pounding the field.

  “Divert! Divert! Divert!” the controllers chorused. Diverting, here, meant diverting all the way to Japan. Bill glanced at the fuel gauge. They had enough in the tanks. They could go. They could, and they would—McCutcheon swung the B-29 to the east. But getting hit, here as anywhere else, was a lot less fun than hitting.

  —

  Konstantin Morozov saw the Centurion crawl out from behind the battered barn about the same time as the tank commander in the English machine spotted his T-54. But his gun pointed right at the Centurion, while the other tank had to traverse its turret ninety degrees to bear on him.

  “Armor-piercing!” Morozov screamed. “Range—five hundred! Give it to him!”

  Clang! The round slammed into the breech. Blam! “On the way!” Pavel Gryzlov shouted.

  “Another!” Morozov commanded. Even as Mogamed Safarli muscled the shell into the breech, the tank commander knew it wouldn’t matter. If the first one hit, the Centurion wouldn’t get a shot off. If it missed, the limeys would smash them before they could fire again.

  But Gryzlov knew his business. That first round caught the English tank before its main armament reached the T-54. It slammed through the thinner side armor and hit some of the ammo stowed in the fighting compartment. The Centurion brewed up. Smoke and fire burst from every hatch. Morozov couldn’t imagine how the turret stayed on after a hit like that, but it did. The British built tough machines, even if this one hadn’t been tough enough.

  The men inside would hardly have had time to realize they were dead. That was good. Better to go out fast than to cook and know you were cooking. This side of being shot by an outraged husband when he was 104, Konstantin hoped he’d die the same way.

  “Good job!” He thumped Gryzlov on the shoulder. “Fucking good job! We’ll paint a fresh ring on the cannon barrel when we get the chance.”

  “My dick was on the block, too, Comrade Sergeant,” the gunner said, which was true. The Englishmen wouldn’t have missed. Morozov was sure of that. More Americans fought in western Germany, but the limeys seemed more dangerous. They were professionals, the Yanks brave amateurs still learning their trade.

  In aid of which…“Back us up into cover, Yevgeny. Those sons of bitches may have friends up there.”

  “I’m doing it,” Yevgeny Ushakov said, and the T-54 moved back toward the little apple orchard from which it had emerged.

  “Mogamed, swap out that AP round and load us with HE instead,” Morozov said. “It’ll still hurt a tank, and confuse it—and it’ll tear up infantry.”

  “Whatever you say, Comrade Sergeant.” If Mogamed Safarli sounded like a man trying not to show he was irked, that had to be what he was. Those shells were heavy. Taking one out of the breech and slamming in another with your closed fist (to make sure you didn’t snag your thumb in the mechanism) was hard physical labor. Safarli might have loaded the HE round with a little extra oomph to drive the point home.

  Morozov sympathized…up to a point. The tank commander had started as a loader himself during the Great Patriotic War. Almost every crewman did. Loader was the slot that needed nothing but a broad back and strong arms. If you happened to have a brain, too, you’d get promoted out of it pretty quick. With the way the Hitlerites chewed up Soviet armor during the last war, there were always plenty of places to fill.

  The T-54 stood a better chance against the latest American and British tanks than the T-34/85 had against the Panther and Tiger. But Morozov had fought on a broad front before, where Soviet armor could usually find a weak spot in the Germans’ o
verextended lines and force a penetration.

  Western Germany wasn’t like that. Everything here was compact. If you outflanked some of the imperialists, you just ran into more when you tried to break through. They’d have tanks of their own nearby. Their foot soldiers would have bazookas. A bazooka wouldn’t always kill a T-54, but it had a chance. And the USAF and RAF had rocket-firing fighter-bombers—not quite the same as Shturmoviks, but plenty to pucker your asshole and send your balls crawling up into your belly.

  When peering through the periscopes set into the sides of the commander’s cupola didn’t show Konstantin what he needed to see, he put the Zeiss binoculars around his neck and stuck his head out of the cupola for a proper look around. It was the turtle’s problem. As long as he stayed inside his shell, not much could get him, but he didn’t know what was sneaking up to try. He was more vulnerable while he stuck his neck out, but he could see trouble a long way off.

  Those fine German field glasses brought the Tommies moving by the dead tank almost close enough to yell at. So it seemed, anyhow. Some of the Englishmen carried rifles, others Sten guns. Neither they nor the Americans had anything like the AK-47. As more of those came into service, the enemy would regret that.

  One of the Englishmen—a sergeant, by the stripes clearly visible on his sleeve—pointed in the direction of the T-54. Maybe he could still see it despite Morozov’s pullback. Tanks weren’t exactly inconspicuous. Or maybe he was just showing the direction from which the fatal round had come.

  None of the soldiers Morozov could see carried a bazooka tube or wore a sack of rockets on his back. That made them unlikely to come tank-hunting. It wasn’t a cinch—the limeys sometimes did brave, foolhardy things, like any fighting men since the beginning of time. But it did seem to be the way to bet.

  He slid back down into the turret. When he reported what he’d seen, Gryzlov asked, “Want me to give them that HE round? I can see ’em pretty well through the magnifying sight.”

  After a moment’s thought, Konstantin shook his head. “Not unless they start coming forward. We’ve already made them notice us, and we don’t have a lot of support around here.”

  “That’s what we get for being at the tip of the spear,” the gunner said.

  “That is what we get, Pasha,” Morozov agreed. “We get it because we’re good. They put us where we can fuck the imperialists the hardest.” And where they can fuck us. That thought followed automatically on the other. But it wasn’t something you said when you were trying to encourage your crew. He went on, “We finally smashed through that shitass Arnsberg place.”

  “Not much left of it now, that’s for sure,” Gryzlov said. “But more and more towns and cities ahead, right? This part of Germany’s even more built up and built over than the Soviet zone.”

  Now Konstantin nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” In the USSR, there’d be a city. It would have suburbs around it. Villages and farms and forests and meadows would surround the suburbs for scores if not hundreds of kilometers around. Then you’d come to another city, one that might be hardly acquainted with the place from which you’d set out.

  Things here were different. Cities in Germany ran together. You could hardly tell when you got out of one and into the next. This little stretch of farm country was unusual in these parts. Land wasn’t just land. With none to spare, the Fritzes made all of it do something, not sit there waiting for someone to get around to it.

  Shturmoviks roared in from out of the east, passing over the orchard so low that their landing gear might have brushed the tops of the taller trees had it been lowered. They shot up and rocketed the English infantry near the knocked-out Centurion. Morozov stuck his head out of the turret again to watch the fun.

  Only it turned out not to be all fun. The Tommies had a quick-firing flak gun that knocked down a Shturmovik. The way the planes were armored, that wasn’t easy, but the antiaircraft gun did it. The Shturmovik slammed into the ground behind the English line. A pillar of greasy black smoke marked the pyre of the pilot and rear gunner.

  The other planes in the formation flew on. A few minutes later, RAF Typhoons did unto the Red Army as the Shturmoviks had done to the English soldiers. Konstantin dove back inside his tank in a hurry. A couple of bullets clattered off the armor, but that only chipped paint. A hit from a rocket might have been a different story, but none struck. One blew up close enough to shake the T-54, but close didn’t matter. It didn’t if you were a tankman, at any rate. For the poor, damned foot solders, that was a different story, too.

  —

  When the telephone rang in the Oval Office no more than five minutes after Harry Truman got there from eating breakfast, he didn’t expect it to be good news. He rose early. His breakfast was simple: scrambled eggs, sausages, toast, coffee. Good news was patient. It usually waited till someone was ready to appreciate it. Bad news came when it came, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  “Truman here,” the President said. “What’s gone wrong now, Rose?”

  “It’s the Secretary of Defense, sir,” Rose Conway answered. She’d been his personal secretary since he came to the White House. She was a frump, but an efficient frump.

  “Well, put him through,” Truman said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  A couple of clicks on the line, and then George Marshall began, “Sorry to disturb you so early—”

  “Never mind that,” Truman broke in. “Just let me have it, whatever it is. That’s what you were going to do, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, I’m afraid it is.” Even after that, Marshall didn’t seem to want to go on. Whatever the bad news was, it would be worse than anything Truman could imagine off the top of his head.

  “Come on, George. Out with it,” he said. “Whatever you’ve got, it’s already happened.

  ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy tears wash out a Word of it. I have to know what it is so I can figure out what to do about it.’ ”

  “Omar Khayyam. Yes, sir. My English instructor at West Point said Fitzgerald made too good an English poem of The Rubaiyat for it to be such a good translation.” Marshall went on beating around the bush. That was so very unlike him, Truman upped the scale of the disaster again. At last, after one more sigh, the Secretary of Defense said, “Sir, the Russians have wrecked the Panama Canal.”

  “Oof!” Truman said, for all the world as if he’d taken a boot in the belly. He wished he had; that would have been easier to bear. Gathering himself, he went on, “Well, you’d better tell me how, hadn’t you?”

  “It was a Greek freighter—Greek registry, anyhow. The Panathenaikos. A Liberty ship like five hundred other Liberty ships,” Marshall said. “Cargo was listed as olive oil, bay leaves, jute transshipped from East Pakistan, and something else…. Oh, I remember. The other item on the manifest was building stone—marble.”

  “No one went over it with Geiger counters before it passed through the Canal?” Truman asked. “When you say the Russians wrecked things, I presume you mean they had an A-bomb on the ship?”

  “Yes, that’s right, Mr. President,” Marshall said unhappily. “The best guess is, they used lead sheeting to shield the bomb from the counters. If it was covered in raw jute or in among blocks of marble, the inspectors would have had to be lucky to discover it. And they weren’t lucky.”

  “Where along the Canal did it go off?” Truman asked. There was bad, and then there was worse.

  “At the Gatún Locks, sir, by the Caribbean end,” Marshall said. Truman almost went Oof! again; that was as bad as it got, the greatest change in water level anywhere along the Canal. The Secretary of Defense continued, “The lock mechanism, of course, is literally up in smoke. There’s a radioactive hole hundreds of yards wide and no one knows how deep, with seawater and river water steaming in it. If they can repair it at all, it’s a matter of years, not months.”

  “Good Lord!
” Truman had been close to thirty when the Panama Canal opened. Before it did, goods bound from one coast to the other by sea had to go around South America or get unloaded, shipped overland across Central America, and reloaded on a different vessel. Now the nineteenth century was back—with a vengeance. The President tried to look on the bright side: “Our railroad and highway systems are much stronger and more solid than they were back in the day.”

  “Sir, that’s true…up to a point,” Marshall said. “But if anyone knows how to put an aircraft carrier on a Southern Pacific flatcar and haul it from one ocean to the other, word hasn’t got to the Defense Department yet.”

  Truman grunted. “Well, you’re right—dammit,” he said. “Around the Horn, around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Suez Canal—” He broke off, suddenly anxious. “The Suez Canal is still all right, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t got any reports that it isn’t.” George Marshall seemed unwilling to go any further than that, for which Truman didn’t blame him.

  “Call the Minister of War or the First Sea Lord or whoever in the British government is responsible for protecting Suez,” the President said. “Never mind the telegraph—call him. Warn him about what just happened in Panama. I’m sure he’ll know: no way in hell you can keep an A-bomb going off secret. Call him and warn him anyway. If we lose the Suez Canal along with Panama, we don’t just fall back fifty years. We fall back a hundred.”

  “I’ll do it, sir,” Marshall said. “You’re right. That wouldn’t just ruin trade. It would do terrible things to our military logistics. Even worse to the British, of course. So if you’ll excuse me…” Marshall hung up without waiting to find out whether Truman would.

  Unoffended, Truman slowly set the handset on the desk telephone back in its cradle. Then he cradled his head in his hands much the same way. The USA still had an Atlantic Fleet and a Pacific Fleet, but the Panama Canal had made swapping ships between them quick and easy.