Sure as the devil, men in khaki uniforms and Russian-style helmets not too different from their own were nosing forward. Gustav chopped down one of them with a short burst from his PPSh. Max wounded another. A moment later, the machine gun down the block spat death at the Red Army soldiers. The Russians—or were they satellite troops?—pulled back and hunkered down. They wanted the German soldiers served to them on a silver platter. If the first round of shelling hadn’t minced the Germans thoroughly enough, maybe a second would.
—
Aaron Finch nodded to his niece. “Give Leon dinner in half an hour or so. He’ll probably go to bed between eight and eight-thirty. Make sure he’s dry before he does. He shouldn’t kick up too big a fuss—isn’t that right, Leon?”
“No,” Leon said. He’d been doing that a lot lately. He was younger than the books claimed all the no-saying was supposed to start. That made him advanced for his age. This once, Aaron would have liked him better normal.
“I’ll handle him,” Olivia Finch declared. She was Aaron’s younger brother’s daughter, and had just turned thirteen. Marvin lived up in the hills, in a nicer part of town than Aaron did…and one farther from the downtown L.A. bomb. Olivia poked Leon in his belly button. “You’ll be a good boy for your Cousin Olivia, won’t you?”
“No.” Leon had strong opinions and a limited vocabulary.
“It’ll work out, Uncle Aaron,” Olivia said.
“Yup.” He nodded. If he hadn’t thought so, he wouldn’t have let her babysit. He was forking over half a buck an hour for dinner and a movie with Ruth and—more important—without Leon. He raised his voice: “You ready, dear?”
His wife came into the living room. “I sure am.” Aaron would have been amazed if she weren’t. She was one of those people for whom right on time counted as late. She smiled at Olivia. “You look nice.”
“Thanks, Aunt Ruth.” Olivia smiled back. To Aaron, Olivia looked like…his niece, wearing whatever silly clothes thirteen-year-old girls wore this year. If Olivia thought of herself as a budding femme fatale—or, if you wanted to get down to brass tacks, as thirteen going on twenty-eight—that was Marvin’s worry, not his.
Ruth, now, Ruth looked nice to him. She wore a sky-blue sweater over a white blouse, with houndstooth wool pants that did nice things to the shape of her waist and hips. Ruth was a woman; Olivia just wanted to be one.
“We’re going out, Leon,” Ruth said. “Wave bye-bye.”
“No,” Leon answered, but he did. His mouth said whatever it said. Sometimes it hardly seemed connected to the rest of him.
Out they went. Aaron held the Nash’s passenger door open so Ruth could get in. Then he went around and hopped in himself. As he started the car, he said, “One of these days, hon, I am gonna teach you to drive.”
“Okay,” Ruth replied. He’d been saying the same thing ever since they got to know each other. It hadn’t happened yet. As he backed out of the driveway, she added, “I feel funny going out and having a good time when there’s that horrible—hole—gouged out of the city just a few miles away.”
“I know what you mean.” Aaron had seen for himself what the bomb had done at much closer range than she had. “But the horrible hole will still be there if you stay home every day for the next two years and let Leon drive you meshiggeh. You’re entitled to a little fun.”
“Twist my arm.” She held it out so he could. He took his right hand off the wheel to give it a token yank. She let out a theatrical squeal for mercy. “Okay, Buster—you talked me into it.”
Aaron pulled into the parking lot at Bill’s Big Burgers. The BBB lot was crowded; quite a few people were out for a good time on a Saturday night. They didn’t let the war get them down, either, any more than they could help.
The Bill in question was a plump cartoon-y sculpture. He had amazing fiberglass hair, wore a shirt and shorts checked green and white, and clutched an enormous hamburger in his right fist and an equally enormous malt in his left. Aaron and Ruth rolled their windows all the way down and waited.
They didn’t wait long. A carhop also wearing a green-and-white-checked shirt and shorts came up with a large professional smile on her face. Her figure was much nicer than Bill’s. “Welcome to BBB,” she said, handing Aaron and Ruth menus. “I’ll be back in a minute to take your orders.”
“What are you gonna do?” Ruth asked.
“I was looking at the cheeseburger with onions—”
“Good thing we’re married.”
“Well, I think so, too. Like I said, a cheeseburger with onions, the fries, and a strawberry malt. How about you?”
“Strawberry malt and fries sound good. I think I’ll have the meat roosters to go with them.”
“Meat roosters!” Aaron snorted. Bill’s Big Burgers also peddled fried chicken. There was a picture of a strutting rooster in golf togs (why golf togs? God only knew) on the menu. Somehow or other, Leon had got that picture mixed up with fish sticks, which he loved. He’d started calling them meat roosters, he hadn’t stopped, and now his mother and father did it along with him.
When Aaron told the carhop what they wanted, he had to make himself not say meat roosters to her. She hustled back into the building to give the kitchen the order. He watched her hustle, not too obviously. She was young enough to be his daughter. And he was with his wife. So he watched without making any kind of fuss about watching.
She came back with a food-filled tray in each hand. She fixed one to Aaron’s door, the other to Ruth’s. “Enjoy your dinners,” she said, and hurried off to take care of another car.
BBB’s wasn’t fancy. When your mascot was a plump guy with silly hair, you weren’t likely to be. The place served plain chow cooked well. Aaron’s dinner was exactly that. After he’d reduced it to a few crumbs, he asked Ruth, “How’s yours?”
“Fine. If we weren’t going to the Deluxe from here, I’d save Leon the last meat rooster. Since we are—” She ate it.
The carhop came back to unhook the trays and settle the tab. Aaron tipped her a dime more than he would have if she weren’t cute. He’d heard somewhere that nice-looking people were more likely to be wealthy and happy than their plainer cousins. He was no beauty himself, but he was pretty damn happy with the gal he’d snagged. Wealthy? He shrugged, there in the old Nash. You couldn’t have everything.
Parking meters in downtown Glendale didn’t gobble coins from six at night to six in the morning. The City Council was talking about changing that, but hadn’t done it yet, no doubt fearing outraged—and cheap—citizens would throw the rascals out if they got greedy. Aaron figured he’d vote that way, but so far everything was just talk.
A whiskery panhandler stood in front of the Deluxe with an upside-down Hollywood Stars cap in his hand. Aaron gave him two bits and waved aside his whimpered thanks. Ruth rolled her eyes. She had to figure he’d spend it on bourbon. Maybe she was right, but Aaron had got a closer look at smashed Los Angeles than she had. The guy might be an ordinary Joe just down on his luck.
Not a first-run house, the theater was showing The African Queen. They’d already seen it once (Aaron had read it, too—he liked C. S. Forester), but it was worth watching again. He also wanted to see the newsreel. You got more concentrated pictures of what was going on in the world there than you did on TV.
What was going on in the world was the world going to hell in a handbasket—an atomic handbasket. A big crater in the middle of a tropical jungle was the wreckage of the Panama Canal. An equally big crater in the middle of a sandy desert was the wreckage of the Suez Canal. A smashed Russian tank in northern Italy said the Red Army still hadn’t muscled its way into Milan. A stream of refugees on a southbound road and the shot-up ruins of a train said the Italians still feared they might. A general pinned a medal on an Air Force pilot who’d downed his fifth MiG and become an ace.
After a stupid science-fiction serial, the movie came on. With A-bombs and jet planes and TV, the world was living a science-fiction life these days. Ev
en so, that serial was dumb. Not The African Queen. You could say a lot of different things about it. Dumb, it wasn’t.
Aaron found himself eyeing Katharine Hepburn in a new way. After a moment, he worked out why. Jim Summers hadn’t been so squirrely as he’d thought. That gal down in Torrance, the one to whom they’d taken the refrigerator, did look a little like her. Not a lot, but enough to notice.
When they got back to the house, Ruth asked Olivia, “How’d it go?”
“It was okay,” she said. “He didn’t want to eat his string beans, but I sprinkled magic dust on ’em, and after that he did.”
“Magic dust?” Aaron said.
His niece waggled her fingers above an imaginary bowl. “Sure. Magic dust,” she said. “Makes everything yummy.”
“I bet it does.” Aaron decided to give her an extra quarter for finding a way to get Leon to do what she wanted. Little as the kid was, that could be tricky. He did what he wanted, and to hell with the rest of the world. “Come on, then. I’ll drive you back to your dad’s house.”
—
Boris Gribkov watched as the technician bolted the new IFF unit into its place in the radioman’s equipment behind the bulkhead on the right side of the Tu-4’s cockpit. The man began connecting wires to hook it up to the rest of the radio gear.
“This will really work?” Gribkov asked.
“Comrade Pilot, it ought to,” the tech answered over his shoulder as he worked. “We took this IFF set from a B-29 we shot down in Poland only a couple of days ago. We’ve fixed it up as best we know how. It should convince the enemy that your machine is a B-29 itself.”
“But our original IFF unit wasn’t copied from the B-29’s,” Gribkov said. “They told me that when I started training on the Tu-4. They took the unit from a different American bomber, a newer one.”
“Don’t worry. The Americans have updated the ones in their B-29s now, too,” the technician said. “And we’ve made this kind of swap before. I’ve done it myself, when I got my hands on a good unit.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said—a phrase with a multitude of meanings. Here, it translated as something like You prick, you’d better be right, because I’m stuck with it either way.
“We all do,” the technician agreed. “Do you know where they’ll send you once you’ve got your new toy here?”
“Nyet.” The pilot shook his head. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t have told the tech. The man might be honestly curious. Or he might report to the MGB. Boris didn’t want the Chekists landing on him for violating security. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his chest wouldn’t save him. Nothing saved you from that. They’d call him a stupid hero while they knocked his teeth down his throat.
That afternoon, once the tech was happy with the way the new IFF box worked, the base commandant summoned Gribkov and his copilot, bombardier, navigator, and radioman to his office. That was a tiny cubby, maybe the size of a submarine skipper’s, in the farmhouse; the strip outside Leningrad was as cramped as if it housed fighter planes only thirty kilometers behind the lines.
Lieutenant Colonel Osip Milyukov would have seemed at home at an airstrip like that. He was on the happy side of forty, though his medals said he’d had a busy time in the Great Patriotic War. “Well,” he said brightly, “so you’re all set up to give the imperialists a surprise, are you?”
“Yes, sir, unless they change their IFF codes before we take off,” Boris answered. “In that case, the joke’s on us.”
“They usually do that on the first of the month, so it shouldn’t cause you any problems.” Milyukov clucked in a peculiar form of military disapproval. “They ought to pick a day out of a hat, not do it on the same one every time. We’d have to work harder if they did. But if they want to make things simple for us, I don’t mind.”
“Simple is good,” Leonid Tsederbaum said.
Milyukov nodded. Boris could almost see the slot-machine wheels spin behind his eyes. They went Navigator…Jew…wise guy…but smart wise guy, so put up with him. Boris had made those same calculations about Tsederbaum himself.
“Simple is excellent,” Milyukov said. “So that’s why you’re going to bomb Bordeaux. The Americans are shipping things in there like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll put a stop to that, all right.”
“Long flight,” Gribkov said, and then laughed at himself. He’d flown from Provideniya to Seattle, and from Seattle a long way back across the Pacific. By comparison, any purely European mission was only a schoolboy jaunt.
Osip Milyukov got his pipe going. It was the same model as Stalin used. Boris wondered whether the other officer had chosen that style because Stalin used it. One more question he wouldn’t ask. After sending up some smoke signals, Milyukov unfolded a map and used a capped pen for a pointer. “This is the route you’ll fly,” he said when he’d traced it twice.
“Sir, that isn’t simple,” Tsederbaum said. Boris Gribkov was thinking the same thing. By the looks on their faces, so were his crewmates. Being a smart wise guy—and the navigator—Tsederbaum could, and had, come out with it.
“I will have all the bearings and distances for you before you take off,” Milyukov said. “And, while it may not be simple, you can see how it combines with the captured IFF box to improve the element of surprise.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Tsederbaum said.
A tractor brought a fat bomb to the Tu-4. The special armorers in charge of atomic weapons winched the bomb off its trailer and up into the big plane’s bomb bay. Like the one that had attacked Seattle, this bomber was painted in U.S. Air Force colors. If you were going to duplicate all the mechanisms on your enemy’s expensive machine, why not confuse him some more by duplicating its markings?
Takeoff in a Tu-4 duplicated the anxiety B-29 pilots knew. Would you coax the huge, ungainly monster into the air? Boris breathed easier once the bomber climbed past two thousand meters. If you got going, you’d usually keep going—as long as you didn’t run into enemy fighters.
He droned south and a little west. He flew right over Minsk, hoping MiG-15s wouldn’t take him for a real B-29 and shoot him down. One A-bomb had already hit the Byelorussian capital. The crater reminded him of a canker sore on the world’s gum.
The sun set just before the bomber left the USSR and entered Romanian airspace. Romania had joined the Soviet Union in the fight against capitalist imperialism, but, aside from contributing a few second-line divisions, hadn’t done much.
Over a town called Craiova in the southwestern part of the country, Tsederbaum said, “Change course to 270, Comrade Pilot. I say again, change course to 270.”
“I am changing course to 270,” Gribkov replied, and swung the Tu-4 due west. He was up above 11,000 meters now, as high as it would fly. In a little while, they passed out of Romania and into Yugoslavia. Tito’s Yugoslavia was socialist, but deviationist. He’d broken with Stalin, and he’d stayed neutral in the war. If his defenses detected the Tu-4, and if he had fighters that could get high enough, he might try to attack it.
No challenges came from the ground. No antiaircraft fire climbed into the darkness. No Yugoslav fighter planes made runs at the Tu-4. Gribkov guessed Tito’s men had no idea it was there. He kept flying.
Yugoslavia gave way to the Adriatic between Zadar and Split. “Switch the IFF set to its American configuration,” Gribkov told Andrei Aksakov.
“Comrade Pilot, I am switching the set to its American configuration,” the radioman replied.
Now, as far as any electronic snoopers could tell, they were an American B-29 going about its business. Gribkov flew across the Adriatic, across Italy, and came to the Ligurian Sea near Pisa. He stayed over the water, passing south of Marseille, and entered France near Perpignan. Had he gone too far south and come into Spain instead, Franco’s Fascists might have tried to meet him with leftover Messerschmitt-109s, though they probably couldn’t have reached his height.
“There’s the Garonne!” Tsederbaum sounded surprised and e
xultant at the same time. “Now all we have to do is follow it northwest to Bordeaux.”
Alexander Lavrov let the bomb fall free at Boris’ command. No one had wondered about them from Leningrad all the way here. Gribkov swung the Tu-4 into its escape turn. The parachute delayed the fall of the bomb. When hellfire burst out behind them, blast buffeted the Tu-4 but did it no harm.
“Now we see if we get back to the rodina,” Zorin said with a wry chuckle. “They may not have known we were here before, but I bet they do now.”
“They may,” Boris told the copilot, “but will their IFF?” He was betting his life—all their lives—it wouldn’t.
—
Cade Curtis had always admired George Orwell. Animal Farm told people what Stalin was like years before they wanted to hear it. Orwell’s new one, 1984, had come out just ahead of the day Cade traded in civvies for Army olive-drab. He read it in a night, and came away with his mind reeling at the totalitarian world and at the scrunched-down language that totalitarian world required. As far as he was concerned, 1984 was a doubleplusgood book.
And then there was Homage to Catalonia. Orwell hadn’t just talked about fighting Fascism. He’d gone and done it, and got himself shot in the doing. While he was in Republican Spain, he’d also noted and written about Marxist doctrinal splits and how they hampered the war against Franco. (These days, having outlasted his Fascist pals, Franco was an American ally. Politics could be a mighty peculiar business.)
One of the other things Orwell had seen while in the trenches was that the Spanish Civil War was the first loudspeaker war. Phalangists and Republicans threw loud, amplified lies across no-man’s-land at each other. Anyone on either side who believed the other’s propaganda would no doubt regret it in short order. Both made the effort, though.
At the start of the Second World War, the Phony War between the Western Allies and Germany (the Sitzkrieg, the Germans had called it) was mostly a loudspeaker war, too. Again, both sides also used them later.
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