Bombs Away (10 page)

If the international organization had taken control of all the A-bombs after World War II ended, and if no country had been able to make them on its own after that…Had that happened, policemen might be able to keep unruly countries in line. But it hadn't. The USA had the bomb. So did the Russians, now. That made them both like the Mafia in Chicago in the Twenties, only more so. They could do what they aimed to do, not what anybody else told them to do.

And so…war.

“When's Daddy coming home?” Linda asked, maybe out of the blue, maybe not.

“I don't know exactly,” Marian answered. “When he can. When they let him. When the war's over.” Those were all possibly true. Another possibly true response was
Never.
Marian refused to dwell on that one now. It was for when a branch scraping on the roof woke her at three in the morning and she couldn't go back to sleep.

“I wish he would,” Linda said.

“Me, too,” her mother said. Bill had been gone for most of a year now. That felt like a long time to Marian. It had to be an eternity for Linda. She wasn't the same person now as she had been then. She'd learned the alphabet. She could sound out words on her blocks and on pages in her books. More seemed to be going on inside her every single day.

She changed. She grew. Bill, meanwhile, stayed what he'd been for her ever since he went back on duty: pictures on the wall and on the dresser in the big bedroom. He was still somebody she remembered and loved, but out of the ever more distant past.

Marian bit down on the inside of her lower lip. Sometimes Bill seemed that way to her, too. Oh, she got letters from him. She wrote to him, too. How could you pour out your heart, though, when you knew a smirking censor stood between you and the one you loved?

For that matter, how could you pour out your heart on paper any which way? Marian always felt like a fool when she tried to set down what was going on in her heart. Writing wasn't made to do things like that, not unless you were Shakespeare or somebody. So it seemed to her, anyway. She could write about how a pot roast had turned out or how a hinge on the closet door needed fixing. She could even write about funny things Linda said. Love letters? When they were together, she could tell Bill she loved him. She did tell him so, all the time.

On paper, though, it was different. The words looked stupid. They sounded stupid, too. Bill had to feel the same way. His letters were full of stories about baseball games between bomber crews and about who was on the latest USO tour. He'd write
Miss you. Love you
…and that would be that. Marian believed he did miss her and love her. She would have liked to read it in a way that made her feel it as well as see it on the page, though.

She would have liked that, but she didn't expect to get it. She'd married a flyer, not a writer. A cousin of hers had married a writer. He drank. He didn't make much money. He chased other women. And he was a cold fish in person no matter what kind of pretty words he could put down on paper.

“Do you remember the air-raid alerts Seattle and other West Coast towns went through in the early days of the Second World War?” the radio announcer asked rhetorically. “We didn't know what Japan could do, and we didn't want to take any chances. Well, civil-defense officials say those days are back again. We will be testing our defense tomorrow at ten A.M. Don't be alarmed when the sirens go off. It's not the Russians. It's only a test. No one expects that the Russians can really get here. We just want to stay on the safe side.”

Marian did remember those dark days after Pearl Harbor. She didn't want to think days like those could come again. But she knew that not wanting to think it didn't mean it couldn't happen.
Air-raid alert. Ten tomorrow morning.

“Come on! Come on! Come on!” Captain Oleg Gurevich yelled over the rumble of a company's worth of big diesel engines. “Are we ready to move? We'd fucking well better be ready to move!”

Konstantin Morozov waved from the turret of his tank to show it could roll whenever the captain ordered. Night was falling on the Red Army encampment near Meiningen. The tanks would move up to the border between the Russian zone in Germany and the American under cover of darkness. By the time the sun rose tomorrow, from the air it would look as if these tanks, and the rest at this enormous base, hadn't gone anywhere.

And, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, the tanks that had moved up to the border would be under netting and branches and dead grass that made them effectively invisible from the air. The Red Army took
maskirovka
seriously. What the enemy couldn't see, he'd have a harder time wrecking.

During the last war, the Germans had been pretty good at camouflage. But pretty good, against Russians, amounted to pretty bad. From what Morozov had seen of the way the Americans did business, they just didn't give a damn about concealment. They thought of war as a boxing match. You got into the ring with the other guy and you slugged away till he fell over or you did.

Of course, when you started slugging with atom bombs, you had reason to believe the other guy would be the one who fell. Morozov's belly knotted. He didn't want to die like that. But he didn't see what he could do about it. He might live through another war. If he tried to desert, the MGB absolutely, positively
would
give him a 9mm bullet in the back of the head.

“Let's go!” Captain Gurevich shouted, and waved toward the west. “
Urra!
for the Red Army!
Urra!
for the Soviet Union!”

Coughing, Sergeant Morozov ducked down into his turret and slammed the cupola hatch shut. The diesel stink was just as thick in here as it had been outside. What kind of
maskirovka
could you use to hide the smell and the smoke? He imagined fresh-air generators sucking up exhaust and spitting out clean, fragrant, transparent gases. Being only a tank commander, though, he couldn't imagine how to make those generators.

“Put it in gear, Misha!” he called to the driver through the speaking tube. “We're going forward.” The T-54 had an intercom system connecting the three men in the turret and the driver farther forward. The tank had the intercom, but Konstantin didn't trust it. Electrical systems could fail when you needed them most, but what could go wrong with a brass tube?

“Going forward, Comrade Sergeant,” Mikhail Kasyanov answered. Like the gunner and the loader, he was too young to have fought in the Great Patriotic War. Morozov was the only one here who knew what battle was like. He had the bad feeling the others would find out pretty damn quick, though.

The growl from the engine compartment got louder as the T-54 began to move. How much noise did all these tanks make as they advanced? What kind of
maskirovka
could you use to muffle it or drown it out? As with the black, stinking exhaust, Konstantin could see something would be useful, but didn't know enough to work out what it might be.

He peered out through the periscopes set into the cupola. Not much to see: a tank ahead, another behind. He swore under his breath. He'd be breathing those stinking fumes till they got where they were going.

His station was on the right side of the turret. The gunner's seat was a little lower, to the left of the cannon's breech. The loader's was farther back and farther down still. It was crowded in there, especially with the T-54's low, rounded turret, made to deflect shells coming from any direction. The ideal tankman for one of these beasts should have been no more than 170 centimeters tall. Konstantin was a little too big, and had to be extra careful when he moved around. So did Pavel Gryzlov, the gunner. Mogamed Safarli, the loader, was about the right size.

There'd been only a commander and a loader in the original T-34's turret. The commander aimed and fired the cannon along with everything else he had to take care of. The Nazis, who'd separated commander and gunner from the start, could shoot rings around those T-34s, even if the tanks themselves outdid anything Germany made.

When the Red Army upgunned the T-34 from 76 to 85 millimeters, the engineers stole a page from the Hitlerites' book. The new, bigger turret held three men. It also had a cupola for the commander to use. All Soviet tanks from then on kept that same system.

One difference between the T-54 and its ancestors was that Misha had no company up front. The T-34 carried a bow machine gun as well as one coaxial with the main armament. T-54s got along with just the coaxial machine gun. You could fill that many more tanks with four-man crews than if they took five.

After a while, Konstantin opened the hatch atop the cupola and stood up to look around. You could see so much more if you did that than if you stuck with the periscopes. Of course, you also made a far juicier target. Sometimes you had to do it, though, even in combat, if you were going to get the most out of your tank.

Now all he got was a smelly breeze in the face. The noise was far louder than it had been with the tank buttoned up. They wouldn't just hear it on the far side of the border. They'd hear it on the far side of the Rhine.

He worried about that, which was the only thing he could do about it. What were the Americans up to, there on the other side of the plowed ground and barbed wire and tank traps that marked the frontier between the two main conquerors of the Third
Reich
? How ready were they?

Tank against tank, man against man, Konstantin was ready to fight them. He wasn't eager—few people who have seen once what war is like are eager to see it again. And anyone who has seen it once knows that anything that can happen can happen to him. Anything, no matter how horrible. So no, Morozov wasn't eager. Willing, yes.

He thought the Red Army could overrun the rest of Germany and stand on the Rhine in a matter of days. It could…unless the Americans started dropping those atomic bombs. Not all the steel in the T-54's hull and turret would save him from one of those.

Something pale ghosted by the tank on silent wings, close enough to make Konstantin jump. Then he realized it was only a barn owl. He wondered why it would fly so near the noise and the smells of a tank column on the move. Then he wondered how many mice and rats and rabbits the tanks were scaring out of their nests. Maybe the owl knew what it was doing after all.

Foot soldiers waved the tanks of Captain Gurevich's company into position just out of sight of the frontier. More foot soldiers draped them with netting covered with grass and with white cloth to create from above the impression of snowy ground. Things probably wouldn't look the same as they had before the tanks got here, but they wouldn't look so very different, either.

Konstantin got out of his T-54 after it went under the camouflage. He carefully checked the ground on which the machine sat. It was hard and firm—indeed, frozen here and there. The tank wouldn't sink in very far. The crew could sleep under it. They'd be almost as safe as if they'd stayed inside, and much more comfortable.

“It's cold out here,” Mogamed Safarli whined.

“You've got your greatcoat and a blanket. What else do you want?” Morozov said. To a Russian, the kind of cold you got in Germany, even at the start of February, wasn't worth getting excited about. But Safarli was a blackass from Azerbaijan or one of those other places that didn't know what winter was all about.

They ate. They smoked. They drank a little vodka. They talked in low voices. Then they wrapped themselves up and slept. The Red Army taught everybody—even blackasses—to get through a really cold night with nothing but a greatcoat. It wasn't all that cold tonight. And they had blankets along with their coats. Nothing to it.

Nothing to it tonight. Tomorrow…Tomorrow was liable to be a different story.

Max Bachman nodded when Gustav Hozzel walked into the print shop. “Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” Gustav said. He glanced toward the east. Any German who'd served on the Russian front had developed that kind of anxious, wary glance. When you looked east like that, you wondered what would be coming your way in the next few minutes or the next few days. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be anything you wanted.

His boss grunted. He'd served on the Eastern Front, too. Most German men their age had. Some lucky guys had just fought in Italy or France. A few even luckier ones had sat out the war on garrison duty in places like Norway or Crete. But the Russians had been the big show—too big a show, as things turned out.

“Remember how you asked whether the Amis would want a hand against Stalin if things heated up?” Bachman asked.

“Ja.”
Gustav lit a cigarette. Yes, he still felt rich every time he did it, as if he were smoking hundred-dollar bills like a fat cat in a cartoon. Silly, but there you were. After blowing a ragged smoke ring, he went on, “They won't get much hotter than they did in Augsburg.”

“Or Bremen, or the other places the Russians fried,” Bachman agreed. But Augsburg was the closest one, less than two hundred kilometers away. Some people in Fulda who were out in the middle of the night claimed to have seen a flash on the southern horizon when the city that had stood there since the days of its namesake, the Roman Emperor Augustus, abruptly ceased to be. Were they lying? How big did an explosion have to be for you to see it from so far away? Big—that was the only answer Gustav could come up with.

“So what about the Americans?” Gustav asked. If the Russians felt like it, they could drop one of those bombs on Fulda, too. What would hold them back? Needing to go through here was the only thing he could think of. They might not be able to do that if the place glowed in the dark.

“Well, you know how we print things for the town and for the
Burgomeister,
” Bachman said. Gustav nodded. Willi Stoiber was a fat blowhard, which made him ideal to run the city. How he'd got through the denazification trials, Gustav couldn't guess, but he had. Max Bachman continued, “So he likes to run his mouth. The Americans are talking about setting up what they want to call a national emergency militia.”