Bombs Away (12 page)

“I don't know if it's enough to make England and France happy, and I don't know that Stalin won't feel obliged to retaliate against an American target, or more than one American target,” Marshall replied, plainly picking his words with care. “I also don't know that he won't order his armies forward—they're at the border and ready to move, remember.”

“I do remember.” Truman scowled. “Dammit, George, all my other choices look worse. If I do nothing—we just talked about what will happen then. And if I bomb Russia back to the Stone Age, I know the free half of Europe will get badly hurt, too. We won't get off scot-free ourselves, either. I don't believe Stalin can do unto us as we can do unto him, but I don't believe we'll stop everything he throws our way, either. If you can tell me I'm wrong and make me believe you, I'll give you a great big kiss.”

“Is that a promise or a threat, Mr. President?” Marshall asked, deadpan. Truman guffawed, more from surprise than at the quality of the crack. The Secretary of Defense owned a sense of humor after all!

“Never mind what it is,” Truman said. “The way it looks to me is, we have three choices: no response, limited response, and all-out response. If the limited response doesn't seem the best of the three, you'd better tell me right now.”

Marshall inhaled, then blew out the breath without saying anything. After inhaling again, he said, “When you put it that way, sir, I must agree with you. Whether Stalin will recognize the limited nature of the reply, though, or whether our friends will find it
too
limited…” He shrugged.

“God knows what will happen before it does. He's the only One Who can pull that off,” Truman said. “The rest of us, we have to try something and then see what happens. This isn't a good choice, but it's the best one we have now. Since we do agree on that, let's get rolling.”

“I was thinking some of the planes should fly out of England and others out of France, sir,” Marshall said. “It seems fitting.”

“It does, yes.” Truman paused a moment. “Not out of Germany?”

“What do you think, sir?”

The President answered his own question: “No, not out of Germany. Okay, get things started. You will know the orders to issue.” If anyone in the whole world knew more than George Marshall about how American armed forces around the world worked, Truman had no idea who it might be.

“I'll send them out right away.” Marshall hesitated, then said, “It might have been better to accept the loss of our forces in North Korea, then bring in enough reinforcements to stabilize the situation. The choice we're facing now wouldn't seem so…stark.”

“If I'd let the Red Chinese get away with slaughtering them all, McCarthy and Taft and the rest of the Republicans would have crucified me, and who could blame them?” Truman said. “Don't get me wrong. You have a point, and a good one. All I can tell you is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. You didn't say no then, not that I recall.”

“No, I didn't,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “Now we've got a tiger by the ears, though, and we'd better hang on tight or it will swallow us.”

“We'll need to put Alaska on highest alert,” Truman said. “If Stalin does decide to play tit for tat, that's a likely place for him to do it. Plenty of space, not many people—it's a lot like Pechenga. If we can keep the Russians from getting through, that's a feather in our cap.”

“Good point. I think we're already at the maximum there, but I will make sure,” Marshall said. “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Not off the top of my head. I'll phone you if I think of something,” the President said.

The Secretary of Defense nodded, dipped his head once more in lieu of saluting, and strode out of the White House conference room.

“Pechenga.” Truman still made the name sound like an obscenity. He scowled at the map. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Not a big enough eye or tooth to make the Europeans happy. Well, wasn't diplomacy the art of leaving everyone dissatisfied?
If it is, I win artist of the year,
Truman thought.

Leon carried a blue book up to Aaron Finch. He climbed into his father's lap in a rocking chair and said, “Read!” He was only a little more than a year and a half old. He didn't say a whole lot of words yet. He had that one, though. And he always seemed sure of what he wanted—in which he took after Aaron.

“Okay, kiddo.” Aaron tousled Leon's curly hair. Leon indignantly shook his head. He didn't like that for beans. He never had. Aaron did it anyhow. He thought those curls were funny as hell. Leon got them from Ruth. Aaron's hair was straight. His son looked like him most ways, but not there.

He lit another cigarette. He wasn't a chain smoker to the point of having two going at once, but he burned through a couple of packs a day. Leon put up with the wait as well as a toddler could: which is to say, not very well. “Read, Daddy!” he barked, like a squeaky top sergeant.

Aaron started reading about Peter Rabbit and Grandfather Frog and the Merry Little Breezes and Bowser the Hound and the rest of the edge-of-the-woods world Thornton Burgess had made. He thought the tales were tedious. They repeated themselves a lot. They'd originally run as newspaper serials, which made recapping every so often a must. Burgess hadn't bothered cleaning them up when he turned them into books.

Leon didn't care. Little kids liked hearing things over and over. Aaron wasn't always sure how much of the stories his son got. But whether Leon got everything or not, he liked sitting in his daddy's lap and listening. That was plenty to keep Aaron going.

When Lightfoot the Deer made an appearance, Aaron asked, “Do you know what antlers are, Leon?”

His son didn't say a lot, no. But Leon was nobody's dope. Far more words and ideas lodged in his brain than came out of his mouth. He stuck his thumbs above his eyes and spread his hands wide. Sure as hell, he knew what antlers were.

“That's right,” Aaron said, and, “That's good.” Aaron went on, “Deer have antlers. They're kind of like horns, except they fall off every year, so the deer have to grow new ones. Horns stay on all the time.”

Leon nodded. Maybe it was going in one ear and out the other, but maybe not, too. Yeah, the kid was smart. Some of that was good—it helped you get along. Too much was liable to turn you into a white crow. No need to worry about that for a while, though.

The water in the kitchen stopped running. Ruth walked into the living room. She was smoking a cigarette, too. She didn't puff away all the time like Aaron, but she smoked.

Leon lit up like a lightbulb. “Mommy!” he exclaimed, as if he hadn't seen her for ten years, not ten minutes.

“How many other kids who still make messes in their diapers know what antlers are?” Aaron asked proudly.

“Does he?” Ruth said.

“Show Mommy,” Aaron told Leon. “Show her what antlers are.” Damned if the kid didn't do his thumbs-to-the-forehead-with-fingers-spread gesture again.

Ruth laughed. “He does know! What a smart thing you are, Leon!”

Leon poked at the book. “Read!” So Aaron read. Pretty soon, Leon started rubbing his eyes. Aaron checked his diaper. Leon was dry. As far as Aaron was concerned, that also made the little boy pretty darn clever. Aaron started rocking a little more.

In spite of himself, Leon's eyes sagged shut. Aaron kept reading a little longer. If he quit too soon, sometimes Leon wouldn't be quite out. He'd wake up again at the sudden silence, and be cranky and hard to settle. But when Aaron stood up with his son in the crook of his arm, Leon didn't stir. Aaron carried him into the bedroom and set him in his crib. Getting the baby down was another danger spot. Leon muttered something, but he went on sleeping.

Aaron walked out to the living room. “Hi, babe!” he said. “Nobody here but us chickens.”

“Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!” Ruth said. The Armenian family two doors down raised chickens and ducks in their back yard. Ruth bought eggs from them, eggs that were better and cheaper than you could get at the grocery store.

Aaron sank down into the rocker again and lit a fresh Chesterfield. He could yawn and smoke at the same time—he kept the cigarette in one corner of his mouth while the rest opened wide. “Only trouble is, I'm worn out, too,” he said. “I'll be ready for bed in an hour or two.”

“I know what you mean,” his wife said. And he had no doubt that she did. He moved washers and driers and TVs and iceboxes all day long. She chased after Leon and kept him from smashing his head or swallowing a match or doing any of the other stupid things children did.

Ruth had an Agatha Christie on the table next to her chair. A couple of issues of
Popular Mechanics
sat on the one beside Aaron's rocker. He was a dedicated tinkerer, and used ideas from the magazine every chance he got.

But he didn't feel like reading now. Tired as he was, he didn't have the brainpower to concentrate. He turned on the TV instead. It was a big Packard Bell console: an Early American TV set, if something so modern could also be Early American. Television was even better than radio for giving you something to do when you didn't feel like thinking.

The tubes took a minute or so to warm up and show him a picture. He turned the channel-changing dial to see what all was on. Los Angeles had seven stations, as many as anywhere in the country and far more than most places. He found a fight on Channel Five and went back to the chair to watch.

He did so with a critical eye. He hadn't been a bad man with his fists in his own younger days. In bar brawls, some people dove under the table, while others grabbed a beer bottle and waited to see what happened next. He'd always been a bottle grabber himself.

One of these palookas—middleweights—hit harder. The other was a better boxer. Neither, on his best day, would make Sugar Ray Robinson break a sweat. The boxer was plainly ahead on points halfway through the ninth round. Then the other guy, even though his face looked like steak tartare, landed a left hook square on the button. The boxer slumped to the canvas as if his legs had turned to Jell-O. The bow-tied referee counted him out. He didn't come close to standing again. In the neutral corner, the slugger raised his gloves in beat-up triumph. He looked about ready to fall over, too.

Commercials followed. Because the fight hadn't gone the distance, there were a lot of them. The station had to fill time till the news came on at the top of the hour. Aaron did reach for a
Popular Mechanics
then. He found TV commercials even more annoying than the ones on the radio.

“This is Stan Chambers, reporting on Wednesday, February the seventh,” the young reporter behind the desk said when the news started. “Our growing conflict with Russia has taken a dangerous new step. You will recall that, three days ago, American bombers vaporized Pechenga, the northern air base from which Red planes smashed the cities of our European allies. Within the past half hour, we have received word that Elmendorf Air Force Base, outside of Anchorage, Alaska, has vanished in what is being described as a quote tremendous explosion unquote. Radio Moscow, in an English-language broadcast, calls this quote justified retaliation unquote. There is no comment yet from the President or the Defense Department.”

“Jesus!” Aaron said. After a moment, he added,
“Gevalt!”

“Vey iz mir!”
Ruth agreed. They'd both picked up Yiddish from their immigrant parents. They found themselves using it more these days than they had for a while, to keep Leon from knowing what they were talking about.

As Stan Chambers went on with the news, Aaron thought about the prize fight he'd just watched. If America and Russia kept slugging each other like this, would either one still be standing at the final bell?

Boris Gribkov wished he could get drunk. That was what Red Air Force pilots commonly did when they weren't flying and were stuck at a base someplace in the middle of nowhere. Provideniya wasn't just the middle of nowhere. If nowhere ever needed an enema, Provideniya was where they'd plug it in.

Provideniya was so far from somewhere, from anywhere, it didn't even have a brothel. Whores gave pilots something to do when they weren't pouring down vodka, anyhow.

But alcohol—any alcohol, even beer—was off-limits for flight crews for the duration of the emergency. Tu-4s carried atomic bombs. They had to be ready to fly at a moment's notice. Outrage by outrage, the fight the Americans had called the Cold War was heating up.

The base commandant made sure he got the point across. After summoning all his aircrews, Colonel Doyarenko said, “No booze. Fuck your mothers, you cocksuckers, do you hear me?
No booze!
None. Not a fucking drop. You know what will happen if you screw it up? You'll go to Kolyma, that's what. You think you're far north now, assholes? There, you won't see the sun for six weeks at a time. You'll mine coal and dig for gold when it's fifty below. You'll find frogs and salamanders frozen in the ice for a thousand years and you'll eat 'em raw, on account of they'll taste like caviar next to what the camps usually feed
zeks.
No…goddamn…booze!”

Somebody didn't listen. Put a bunch of people together and there's always somebody who doesn't get the message. One aircrew quite suddenly vanished from Provideniya. Boris didn't
know
the MGB had hauled them off to the wrong side of the Arctic Circle. He didn't
know
they were slamming picks into the permafrost and hoping for frozen salamanders.

No, he didn't
know
any of those things. All he
knew
was, they were gone. An Li-2—which was almost as close a copy of the American DC-3 as the Tu-4 was of the B-29 (though the transport, unlike the bomber, was licensed)—flew in a new crew for the plane that found itself without one. Life went on.