Bombs Away

by Harry Turtledove

  Then she realized none of that mattered. The meaning of what the major said began to sink in. “Bill’s…dead?” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.” The officer nodded somberly. “I’m very sorry. He was on an important mission, and a dangerous one. Other planes succeeded in reaching and striking the target. Unfortunately, his was intercepted before it could.”

  Important mission had to mean mission with an atom bomb, while striking the target meant doing to some Russian city what they did to Seattle. The language of war was bloodless. War itself…wasn’t. Bill’s job was to visit radioactive hell on America’s enemies. This time, they’d done unto him before he could do unto them.

  Then all rational thought melted. She let out something between a shriek and a wail that made the older clerk hop in the air and startled even the sober Air Force major. She saw that in the instant before her own world dissolved in tears.

  She wailed again, this time with words: “What are we going to do without Bill?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the major said once more. “I believe he has received a proper burial. The Russians have been respectful to our men killed on their soil, as we have with their casualties here.”

  “I don’t care about any of that!” she said furiously. “I want my husband back! I want our little girl’s daddy back!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said yet again. How many times had he stayed calm when somebody who’d lost the person who mattered most to her went to pieces in front of him? The duty couldn’t be easy. How did he stand it? Why didn’t he take a service pistol and blow his brains out? He went on, “I understand it can’t possibly make up for your loss, but his military insurance will assist you and your daughter in getting through this—”

  Blind with grief and rage, she swung at him. She wanted to tear his head off. He caught her wrist before she connected. His palm was warm and dry and very strong.

  “Ma’am, that won’t do you any good,” he said in tones suggesting he’d been swung on before. “I had nothing to do with it. I’m only the person who has to give you the news. I wish I didn’t have to come here to do it.”

  Then what do you do it for? The thought flashed through her mind, but she didn’t come out with it. What was the use? With Bill gone, what was the use of anything?

  “What will we do without him?” she said again. Would Linda even remember her father? Maybe a little—she’d been four when he went away. But only bits and pieces, nothing that really meant anything.

  That was when it hit her. She would have to tell Linda that Daddy was dead. Linda knew what the word meant. She was a smart girl. But she knew it the way a kid did. She knew a dead bug when she saw one. Did she understand that, when a person died, he stayed dead the same way? Did she understand that forever meant forever, and there were no exceptions, even for her father?

  Chances were she didn’t…yet, although maybe all the deaths at the camp had taught her. If she didn’t, she’d learn, a day, a week, a month, a year, at a time. Christ, so will I, Marian thought. Things like this happened to other people, or in movies. They didn’t happen to you.

  Except when they did.

  “The United States is grateful for your husband’s courage, ma’am,” the Air Force major said.

  “Oh, fuck the United States!” Marian didn’t remember ever using that word before. She used it now. Had she known a stronger one, she would have used that, too.

  MAJOR JEFF WALPOLE got up on the firing step to look across the barbed wire at the Red Chinese positions. He got down again in a hurry. A good thing he did, too: a bullet aimed at him cracked past a couple of seconds later. It might have missed. Did you want to find out, though?

  The battalion CO had a big grin on his face. Cade Curtis couldn’t see why. The Chinks were too goddamn close and too goddamn aggressive. But Walpole said, “Those bastards have worries of their own.”

  “How’s that, sir?” Cade was glad every day the Red Chinese didn’t try to storm the American lines. He wasn’t even slightly sure they wouldn’t break through.

  “They’ll be the ones with supply problems for a while,” Major Walpole said. “Didn’t you hear Armed Forces Radio this morning?”

  “No, sir,” Cade said. “They were throwing mortars at us this morning.”

  “That’s always fun.” Walpole had the ribbon for his own Bronze Star with a V. Cade didn’t know if he’d won it in this war or the last, but he’d be a man who knew something about mortars. He went on, “Anyway, we bombed a couple of the cities on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Blagoveshchensk and Khabarovsk.”

  Cade knew Khabarovsk lay north of Vladivostok, or what remained of Vladivostok. He wasn’t so sure about the other place, or about how to pronounce it. Instead of trying, he found a different kind of question: “When you say bombed, do you mean bombed? Like with atoms?”

  “With atoms, yeah,” Major Walpole agreed. “So they won’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again in a few days, the way they would if they were fixing up ordinary bomb damage.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cade said, but he wondered if Walpole was an optimist. Mao’s men had driven new tracks through the ruins of Harbin way faster than American military intelligence guessed they could. He didn’t care about laborers, only about the labor they did. Was Stalin likely to prove more merciful? When had he ever?

  Staff Sergeant Klein ambled up the trench. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Nodding to Walpole, he said, “Sir, I hear you tell the lieutenant we dropped some more A-bombs?”

  “That’s right, Sergeant. Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” Walpole could say it.

  “Yeah, I know where those are at. That’ll slow the trains down some,” Klein said. If he knew where Blagoveshchensk was, he was one up on Cade. After a meditative puff, he went on, “Any idea where the Russians’ll clobber us for payback?”

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Major Walpole answered. “It would be nice if we could keep them from hitting us anywhere.”

  “Yes, sir. It sure would.” By the way Klein said that, he didn’t believe it would happen no matter how nice it was. He pulled out his cigarettes. “You guys want a smoke? Look at me—I’m turning into a tobacco shop for officers.”

  “I’ll take one. Thanks,” Walpole said.

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Me, too,” Cade added. A private had given him the matches he used to light up. They advertised a bar on Hotel Street in Honolulu where you could probably buy the hostesses along with the drinks they served.

  The smoke still burned as it went down the pipe and into his lungs. It didn’t make him think he’d lose his last can of C-rats any more, though. And he did get the little jolt of relaxed alertness that made people start using cigarettes to begin with.

  “See what you did?” he said to Lou Klein. “You turned me into a junkie.”

  Major Walpole laughed. “You mean you weren’t before? I didn’t think there was anybody over here who didn’t smoke like a steel-mill chimney. Christ, even the North Koreans puff away every chance they get, and those sorry bastards don’t have food half the time, let alone tobacco.”

  “I’ve never seen ’em short of small-arms ammo, though,” Cade said.

  “Uh-huh. The cartridges get through. I think they make their own in Pyongyang, too,” Walpole said.

  “Cartridges aren’t hard. Anybody with some brass bar stock and a lathe can crank ’em out,” Klein said. “The Red Chinese ain’t makin’ tanks, but they sure as hell turn out copies of Russian submachine guns and the rounds to shoot from ’em.”

  Cade looked down at his own PPSh. “By the maker’s stamps, this one’s from Russia,” he said. “But I’ve seen those Chinese copies, too. They work just as well as Stalin’s specials.”

  “Pretty soon, they will make their own tanks,” Walpole said. “Then they’ll make their own planes, and Katie bar the door after that.”

  “Unless we bomb the fuckers back to the Stone Age before they get that far,” Klein said.<
br />
  “If we’re going to hang on to our half of Korea, we may need to,” Walpole said. “We can screw the Russians’ logistics, same way they did with us. But we can’t screw up Mao’s logistics, or not very much. Red China’s right across the goddamn river, for Chrissake. We can make ’em work harder to haul the shit over here, but it’s not like we can stop ’em.”

  Cade had had that same unhappy thought. “Mao’s got I don’t know how many hundred million people,” he said. “However many we kill, how much difference will it make?”

  “Gotta get ourselves more bombs. Bigger bombs. Sooner or later, we’ll make the Chinks sit up and take notice.” Lou Klein sounded like a man with all the angles figured.

  He made a hell of a staff sergeant. He could have run the company better than Cade. They both knew it. So, no doubt, did Major Walpole. If Walpole and all the battalion officers suddenly bought a plot, Klein could probably handle that many men, too.

  But, because he could do his part of the military job so well, he thought he could do even more. He reminded Cade of the poets and craftsmen in Socrates’ Apology. They too knew their own business inside and out-, but thought they also knew everything else because they did.

  And a fat lot of good explaining all that had done the ancient Greek. Socrates had paid the price then. The whole world was paying it now.

  No sooner had that cheerful notion crossed Cade’s mind than the Red Chinese started lobbing some more mortar bombs at the American trenches. Mortar rounds—and the nasty little tubes that fired them—were even easier to make than ordinary firearms and ammo. The tolerances were looser, and the tubes didn’t have to be very strong. Homemade artillery, perfect for a country full of blacksmiths like Mao’s so-called People’s Republic of China.

  Curtis threw himself flat. Lou Klein was diving for the mud as soon as he was. Jerry Walpole, who didn’t get to the front as much as the two men of lower rank, stayed on his pins half a second longer. It cost him. When he went down, it was with a howl of pain. He clutched at his left thigh. Red started soaking his trouser leg and oozing out between his fingers.

  “Corpsman!” Sergeant Klein yelled. “The major’s down! We need a corpsman, God damn it to fucking hell!”

  Cade lay closer to Major Walpole. The first thing he did was grab the morphine syrette out of the pouch on Walpole’s belt and stick him with it. The next thing was to pull his own bayonet from the sheath on his belt and use it to cut away the wounded man’s pants so he could see the wound.

  It was a nasty, ragged gash. It was bleeding, but not gushing blood. Cade guessed the fragment hadn’t torn the femoral artery—that could kill you in a couple of minutes. He wished for pins to close the cut. Since wishing didn’t produce them, he did the next best thing: he dusted the wound with sulfa, slapped on a bandage, and taped it down as tight as he could.

  “You’ll be okay, sir,” he said, hoping he was right. While he was busy like that, the mortar bombs still coming in seemed more an annoyance than a danger.

  Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands that wouldn’t do them any good carried the wounded major away. They also ignored the mortar fire. Cade wondered whether the battalion had any healthy officers senior to him. If it didn’t, he’d just inherited it. Well, if Lou Klein might swing a battalion, so could he—again, he hoped.

  —

  It was getting close to the top of the hour. Harry Truman turned on the radio on his desk to WMAL to catch the NBC news. It would tell him a little of what was going on in the country and the world. And the way it told the stories would let him judge how big a son of a bitch the people who ran NBC thought he was.

  He didn’t care, or not enough to let what they thought of him change anything he did. For better or worse, he was his own man. He might make mistakes—he had made mistakes—but they were his, nobody else’s. The buck did stop here. It had to.

  Bong! Bong! Bong! The NBC chimes sounded. “In Washington today,” the announcer said, “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin again lashed out at the Truman administration. Here is a recording of some of his remarks.”

  A momentary pause, and then Joe McCarthy’s raspy voice poured out over the airwaves: “How much trouble have the Democrats landed us in because they’re soft on Communism? All the Reds we uncovered in the State Department must have told Stalin we were weak. They must have pointed out where our defenses had holes. Otherwise, how could the Reds have hit us so hard? Treason and blindness to treason lurk in too many high places.”

  “That was Senator McCarthy,” the newsman said. “He—”

  “—has his head wedged,” Truman finished for him, and turned off the radio with an angry twist of the wrist. McCarthy had started his Red-baiting witch hunt even before the Korean War broke out. He’d got shriller since the fighting started, and shriller yet after the A-bombs began to fall.

  At first, Truman had figured McCarthy was a stalking horse for Robert Taft and the other Republicans who still wanted to be isolationists. Tail Gunner Joe said the things politer pols like Senator Taft only thought. And he didn’t just say them—he bellowed them at the top of his lungs.

  He’d succeeded in convincing Truman he was nobody’s stalking horse. He was for nobody except Joe McCarthy. Did he aim to run for President in 1952? He’d be awfully young. Bob Taft had been waiting his turn for a long time. Or Eisenhower might get the nod, the way U. S. Grant had in 1868.

  Truman wasn’t thrilled about the idea of either of those men in the White House. Taft did want to pretend nothing existed beyond the borders of the United States. That was hard in the middle of World War III, but he might try anyhow. And Eisenhower struck the President as an amiable but lightweight executive, someone who might run an auto company but not a country.

  Next to Joe McCarthy, though, they both looked like the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. They were reasonably honest. You might not fancy their principles, but they had some. McCarthy…The way it looked to Truman, McCarthy didn’t just want to be President. He wanted to be Führer, and he didn’t care whose toes he trampled on his way to the job.

  Lie? Smear? Cheat? Invent? He used all those stunts, and wrapped himself in the American flag while he did it. That was part of what made him so dangerous: if you attacked him, you seemed to attack the country as well.

  I have to decide whether I’ll run, Truman thought once more. If it looked as if he would lose and drag the Democrats down with him, then he’d do best to bow out. With this war, he wondered whether he would have a chance against anybody the Republicans put up.

  But if he didn’t run, who would? The Democrats hadn’t had a disputed nomination since 1932. He shrugged. If he decided he wouldn’t run, he also wouldn’t need to worry about that any more. No one would care what he thought thirty seconds after he announced he was through. He would turn into the lamest of lame ducks.

  Stalin and Mao had no worries like that. They’d give orders till somebody carried them out feet-first. Truman had done his best to arrange that for Uncle Joe, but it hadn’t quite worked out. A damn shame, really. How the Reds would have worked out who succeeded their longtime dictator would have been…interesting.

  Muttering under his breath, he fired up the radio again. He did need to hear what was going on. The sound came on almost at once; the tubes were still warm. “Defense Secretary Marshall has declined to comment on Senator McCarthy’s latest accusations,” the newsman said. “McCarthy continues to charge that the war is not being fought hard enough, and that, while Marshall was Secretary of State, he permitted many Communists to join the State Department.”

  There had been some Reds in the State Department. A few of them had given Moscow a hand. More were people who’d been Communists in the 1930s, when, if you were young and you hated the Nazis, that was where you were liable to end up. Just about all of them had got over it.

  There were also some Reds at Los Alamos and other places that worked on A-bombs. Without their help, Stalin might not have had any of his own yet. Th
at was a crying shame, no two ways about it. Things there had also tightened up, though. Or Truman sure hoped they had.

  He telephoned George Marshall. When the Secretary of Defense came on the line, Truman said, “Isn’t it wonderful to be loved?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. President?” Marshall said.

  “Well, let me put it this way instead—when an SOB like Joe McCarthy comes after you with a meat-axe, you must be doing something right.”

  “Oh. Him.” The patrician distaste in Marshall’s voice could have belonged to a Roman senator eyeing a barbarian chieftain sightseeing in the imperial city during Hadrian’s reign.

  “Yeah, him,” Truman said. “He’s a snake, and a poisonous one at that.”

  “People like him are part of the price we pay for living in a free country.” Marshall paused. “I keep telling myself so. Some days, I have more trouble believing it than others.”

  “I know what you mean, and this is one of those days,” Truman said. “This is one of the days when I remember how many people in the Weimar Republic said the same thing about that beer-hall babbler in Munich. His stupid party would never amount to a hill of beans, not in a million years.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s also crossed my mind, sir,” Marshall said. “The Nazis didn’t amount to much, not until the Depression gave them a boost. I can hope McCarthy won’t, either.”

  “So can I. So do I.” But Truman wasn’t happy with his own answer. Marshall was right: the Depression had let Hitler take off. A national disaster had a way of discrediting the people who were in charge when it happened.

  Well, what was World War III if it wasn’t a national disaster? So far, only Maine and the western part of the United States had had bombs fall on them. But Truman knew so far meant just that and no further. The Russians weren’t done. He’d just hit them again. Now they would try to hit back. American defenses would do their best to stop whatever Stalin came up with. And maybe their best would prove good enough, and maybe it wouldn’t.