Bombs Away (11 page)

“Is that anything like an army?” Gustav's voice was dry.

“Of course not. We're Germans. We don't deserve an army. Besides, it has a different name.” Bachman was as cynical as he was.

Gustav remembered his nightmares, something he usually tried not to do while he was awake. “Haven't we paid our dues?” he said. “I fought the Ivans as much as I ever wanted to, thanks. If the Amis are so hot to have a go, let them take their crack at it this time. They didn't want to when we could have done it together before, so to hell with them.” He made as if to spit on the floor, but didn't.

His boss clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Only one thing wrong with that.”

“What?” Gustav Hozzel didn't see anything wrong with it.

“If the Americans fight the Russians here and they lose, they won't have commissars telling them what to do and spying on them from now till the end of time. We will, worse luck,” Bachman said.

“Oh.” In spite of himself, Gustav grimaced. “Well, when you're right, you're right, dammit.”

Plenty of people had fled from the Russian zone to freer lands farther west. The tales they told would curl anyone's hair. More than a few of them lived in Fulda now. And, among those refugees, chances were that some played a double game. Cursing Stalin's name at the top of your lungs didn't necessarily mean you weren't also whispering things in the MGB's ear.

But those horror stories rang true to Gustav. Counterattacks that briefly won back some ground showed what the Russians did when they took over German soil. They didn't play the game by the rules; as far as they were concerned, the game had no rules. Of course, the
Wehrmacht
and the SS hadn't had clean hands when they were going forward, either. On the Eastern Front, no one's hands were clean.

Noise outside the print shop distracted him from his gloomy memories, but not from his gloom. That noise was of big, snorting engines and of caterpillar tracks grinding on asphalt and cobblestones. American panzers and self-propelled guns had smoother lines than the slab-sided vehicles the
Wehrmacht
used, but they sounded pretty much the same.

“Are you going to sign up for this emergency militia, Max?” Gustav loaded the name with a certain sour relish.

“Probably. My guess is it's already too late, though. With the bombs dropping, they won't have time to get us shaken out into units and give us uniforms and weapons. Too bad. I wouldn't mind getting myself an M-1. That's a pretty good rifle.”

“My old Mauser carbine would do fine,” Gustav said. “Getting ammo for it might be tricky, though.” The standard German caliber had been 7.92mm. Some of that was bound to be floating around, but Gustav didn't know where to lay his hands on it. He hadn't worried about it from the time he surrendered till this new trouble blew up.

The Americans used what they called .30-caliber rounds, which were 7.62mm to the rest of the world. They did a perfectly respectable job of killing people, and they were easy to get hold of.

Max said, “Shall we do some work?”

“Why not?” Gustav answered. “That way, Saint Peter can see we were busy until the bomb blew us to smoke.”

His boss smiled a twisted smile. Gustav had seen that expression before, on the faces of
Landsers
trying to show they weren't scared when a swarm of drunken Russians were howling and screaming and getting ready to roll over their trenches. The Ivans often acted as if they didn't care whether they lived or died. Considering the kind of country they had to live in, who could blame them?

Even getting through the day wasn't easy. Max kept the radio running, which he didn't do most of the time. A newsman said that Stalin said he had as much right to blow up those European cities as Truman did to blow up Chinese cities. He might even have been right, not that that did the people in those cities any good. The dead had to number in the hundreds of thousands.

“The guy on the news is going on like that's a big number,” Gustav said after music replaced word of the latest disasters. “For Stalin, it's nothing but pocket change.”

“Maybe the asshole didn't fight on the
Ostfront,
” Max answered. “Or maybe he wants people to think he didn't.”

The first thing Luisa asked Gustav when they both got home was, “Will it start for real?”

He sent that hooded look toward the east again. Then he sighed. “Probably,” he said. “Well, we had five or six good years, anyhow. What's for supper?”

She took a pot out of the oven. It had simmered in there all day, since she went off to her own job. Savory steam rose when she took off the lid. Turnips, cabbage, a cheap cut of pork to add some body and some flavor, dill, caraway seeds…

Gustav opened a couple of bottles of Black Hen from the local brewery. The malty beer would go well with what his wife had made. They clinked glasses after he poured. Everything tasted especially good to him. He was about halfway through the meal when he realized what that meant. He was savoring flavors more than usual because part of him believed this might be the last time he ever got the chance to do it.

Not too much later, he took Luisa to bed. She squeaked, but only a little. Again, it seemed extra good to Gustav. He hadn't been able to do this before a Russian attack in the last war. Now he could, so he made the most of it.

WHEN CADE CURTIS
woke up in the drafty little shed, two bowls were waiting for him. One held rice, the other kimchi. Neither was big. He thought it was a miracle these people gave him anything at all. They had so little themselves. Why would they spare some for a foreigner, a stranger, passing through?

Why? Because they were Christians, and took the name and the duties that went with it seriously. That was the only answer that occurred to Cade. It was also one that shamed him. Almost all the people back in the States called themselves Christians of one flavor or another. Damn few lived up to the label, though.

Things here in Korea were different. Christians, Catholic or Protestant, were a small minority. Folks from one denomination didn't sneer at those who belonged to another. They presented a united front against their persecutors. In Kim Il-sung's regime, that meant against just about everybody. Things were easier in the south, but only relatively.

Cade grabbed the chopsticks laid across the bowl of rice. He wasn't so smooth with them as the natives were, but he managed. You got better at everything with practice. He gulped the rice and the fiery pickled cabbage. He'd dropped a lot of weight since getting cut off, but he didn't care. He was getting close to the American lines. Fried chicken and bacon and apple pie and scrambled eggs and hash browns lay around the corner. He'd plump up just fine.

The sun had gone down. Moonlight slipped between the battered planks of the shed wall and painted thin, pale zebra stripes across the dirt floor. The village, like most Korean villages after sunset, was quiet as the tomb. No electricity, no kerosene for lamps. People had candles and oil lamps, but didn't like to use them. Whatever oil and tallow you burned, you couldn't eat later if you got hungry enough.

A dog howled, off in the hills. Some people hereabouts had kept dogs as pets before the war. Now dogs that hung around people turned into meat. A couple of villages back, somebody'd fried a little bit of dog flesh for him, stirred together with rice. It tasted wonderful; it was the first meat he'd had in a long time. Whether he'd like it so well if he were less hungry…was a question for another day.

Farther away, still several days' travel to the south, artillery rumbled on the edge of hearing. Getting through the lines would be the tricky part. Cade didn't aim to worry about how he'd do it till he had to try. After getting cut off, he hadn't really believed he would come close enough to the front in the south to need to worry about it.

He'd slept through the day, his felt hat doing duty for a pillow. Only that bare ground under him? He didn't care, not even a little bit. He figured he could have slept on a swami's bed of nails. Now it was nighttime, so, like a cat or a rat or a bat, he was awake.

Soft footfalls outside the shed said a couple of Koreans were awake, too. Silently, he took hold of the PPSh. He didn't
think
anything here had gone wrong. If he turned out to be mistaken, though, a blaze of glory seemed preferable to letting Kim's or Mao's soldiers take him. Especially Mao's. They'd be even less happy with Americans now than they had been before fire fell on Manchuria.

Low-voiced mutters in Korean outside the door. Cade wouldn't have been able to follow even if he'd heard them clearly. He'd picked up only a handful of words from the local language.

The door opened. A man stuck his head inside.
“Ave,”
he whispered, and then,
“Veni
.
”

“Sic.”
Cade didn't have a whole lot of Latin, either. But what he did have was worth its weight in gold for talking with Catholic Koreans. When Protestants helped him on his way south, he was reduced to sign language.

He scrambled to his feet. His knees and something in the small of his back crackled as he did. He had to duck to get through the doorway. He also had to lift his feet: like the Chinese, the Koreans put a plank across the bottom, maybe to help keep out chilly drafts.

One of the Koreans outside cradled a PPD, the PPSh's older cousin. The other man had a shotgun that looked only a short step up from a blunderbuss. Well, if they got into a fight, it would be at close quarters. If they got into a fight, they would also die.

The guy with the PPD gestured toward the south.
“Vade mecum,”
he said.

“Sic,”
Cade repeated. What else would he do
but
go with the Koreans?

They wore felt boots like his, possibly stolen from dead Red Chinese soldiers. Cade did wonder how much damage the atom bombs had done to the Chinese logistics system. Not enough to make the Chinks already in Korea quit fighting. Not yet, anyhow. They were like the Russians—they were expected to live off the countryside. All they really needed was ammunition.

Those felt boots were quieter than ordinary footgear would have been. Cade was at least a head taller than one of his guides, but the other was about his own six-one. Some of the Koreans ran surprisingly tall. Some of them could grow surprisingly thick beards for Orientals, too. Not a one, though, came equipped with a long, pointed nose or round blue eyes.

A plane buzzed by overhead.
Buzzed
was the word, all right. The Chinese flew Po-2 biplanes, ancient Russian wood-and-cloth trainers pressed into service as night harassment aircraft. They fired machine guns and dropped little bombs and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone could do anything about it.
Bedcheck Charlie,
GIs called them. The Russians had used them the same way against the krauts, sometimes with woman pilots.

This Po-2 wasn't much above treetop height. Cade could feel the wind of its passage as it flew by. And the pilot must have spotted his guides and him walking along in the moonlight, because he swung the little plane around for another look at them.

But how much could he really see, no matter how hard he tried? Cade and one of the Koreans were big men, but what did that prove? In moonlight, would the SOB up there be able to tell Curtis was white? Cade didn't believe it. He held his PPSh up in his left hand to show it to the flyer and waved his right hand as if to someone he knew was a friend.

And damned if the pilot didn't waggle his wings in a friendly greeting of his own and fly away. Once he was gone, both Koreans whooped and hollered and thumped Cade on the back. The words were just gibberish to him. He was glad he had on the parka and the quilted jacket underneath it. Chances were they saved him some bruises.

“Vir sapiens!”
said the one who knew some Latin.

“Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens ego sum.”
Cade thought it was funny. He knew what the scientific name for human beings was.

Since his guide didn't, the Korean didn't get the joke. Pointing at Cade, he said,
“Vir es.” You are a man.

“Sic. Vir sum. Et homo sum.” Yes. I am a man. And I am a human being. Vir
and
homo
both meant
man,
but they didn't mean the same thing. In English,
man
did duty for most of the meanings of both Latin words.

Cade didn't think he could explain any of that to the Korean in Latin. His wasn't up to it, and neither was his guide's. He turned out not to have to. The Korean kind of shrugged, as if to say he wasn't even going to try to understand this inscrutable Occidental. He pointed south and started walking again. Cade and the fellow with the almost-blunderbuss followed.

A quarter of a mile outside the next village, someone called softly from the cover of some pines. Both Koreans answered. They went back and forth for a little while. The one who knew Latin pointed to the pines and said,
“Vade cum.”
That just meant
Go with.
Maybe he'd forgotten the word for
him.

It did get the message across. Approaching the trees, Cade said,
“Ave.”

The greeting fell on uncomprehending ears. A man with a rifle came out and spoke in Korean. Cade sighed. He spread his hands to show he didn't get it. The local sighed, too. He gestured toward the collection of beat-up houses and outbuildings. With a nod, Cade went that way.

He got hidden in a privy. It wasn't the first time on his way south. Nobody had used this one for a while, but it was still fragrant. He muttered, but not for long. Pretty soon, his nose noticed the stink much less. He curled up and got ready to sleep through the dangerous daylight hours.

“Pechenga.” Harry Truman spat out the unfamiliar name as if it were the filthiest word in the world.

“That's right, Mr. President.” George Marshall nodded. Truman thought the Secretary of Defense was almost as much a Great Stone Face as Andrei Gromyko. Dorothy Parker had famously said that some actress ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Truman hadn't seen that actress perform. But by comparison to her, Marshall got stuck halfway between A and B.

“Pechenga!” Truman said it again, even more disgustedly this time. “It sounds like the noise a pinball machine makes.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Marshall sounded resigned. He was an extraordinarily able man. As Secretary of State, he'd developed the Plan that bore his name and helped keep Western Europe's ravaged postwar economies from collapsing. Before that, he'd been a five-star general and Army Chief of Staff under FDR.

Truman wondered whether Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. No, on second thought, Truman didn't wonder any such thing. He knew damn well Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. The man would have been even less human than he was if he didn't. What Truman really wondered was what Marshall thought, comparing him to his illustrious predecessor.

He didn't ask. He would never ask. He would go on the rack and let a torturer tear out his fingernails before he asked. But he wondered.
He
would have been less human than he was if he didn't.

“Pechenga.” Now Marshall said it. His index finger pinned it down on a large-scale map of Europe, as if he were an entomologist mounting a butterfly on a collecting board. “Formerly Petsamo in Finland, till the Russians took it away when they knocked the Finns out of the war. A little more than fifty miles west of Murmansk. About as far northwest as you can go and stay in the USSR.”

“And where the goddamn Russians took off from when their bombers blasted Britain and France,” Truman ground out.

“And Germany,” Marshall reminded him.

“And Germany,” Truman agreed sourly. “But the Prime Minister is screaming in my ear, and so is the President of the Fourth Republic. The Germans aren't part of the NATO treaty. I have an easier time ignoring them than I do with the English and French.”

“The treaty does say that an attack against one signatory is the same as an attack against all signatories.” Marshall knew what it said. It had been negotiated while he was Secretary of State, even if the dickering wasn't done till Dean Acheson took over for him at the start of Truman's full term, the one he'd won himself.

“I know. I know. I know,” Truman said. “And if I didn't know, they're reminding me—at the top of their lungs. And so I am going to have to do something to Russia. If I don't, the treaty is dead in the water, and I can have the joy of watching all the countries in Western Europe line up to hop into bed with Joe Stalin.”

The slightest twitch of one eyebrow on George Marshall's craggy face said Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn't have talked about countries hopping into bed with other countries. FDR would have found some properly diplomatic way to say the same thing. Well, good for FDR. Truman called them as he saw them, and worried about diplomacy later.

After pulling his features back to expressionlessness, Marshall said, “I'm afraid that's much too likely, sir. With the Communists already so strong in France and Italy—”

“I know,” Truman said one more time. “And so I was thinking of striking this Pechenga place. It's where the Russian bombers came from, so it naturally draws our notice. We can drop a bomb there if we want to, blow up the air base, look heroic to our allies, and not endanger even Murmansk, let alone any of the really big Russian cities.”