Bombs Away (27 page)

“Fuck your mother!” Pavel Gryzlov bawled. “We're hit!”

“Fuck your own mother,” Morozov said irritably. “I never would have known without you.”

From the front of the tank, Mikhail Kasyanov reported the situation in two words: “Engine's dead.”

“Oh, fuck your mother, too,” Morozov told the driver. If that round, wherever the hell it came from, had hit the turret or bored through the hull into the fighting compartment, they wouldn't still be here banging their gums about it. With luck, they would have died before they knew they were dead. Without luck…Morozov didn't want to think about that, so he didn't.

“What do we do, Comrade Sergeant?” Mogamed Safarli asked.

Morozov marveled that even a blackass could be so goddamn dumb. “We get the hell out, that's what,” he answered. In his mind's eye, he pictured an American or English tank commander ordering his gunner to put another round into the Red Army tank with the black smoke pouring out of the engine compartment—he couldn't see that smoke, but he knew it had to be there.

Out they went. The driver had a floor hatch behind his seat. The others escaped through the one in the floor of the fighting compartment. They crawled forward as fast as they could—burning diesel fuel was dripping down from the stricken engine.

“I feel naked,” Gryzlov said.

“Tell me!” Morozov exclaimed. Under the tank wasn't so bad. But they had to get out, get away. That meant exposing themselves to bullets and shell fragments and all the other things the T-54's thick, beautifully sloped armor had held at bay…till it hadn't.

Sure as hell, as soon as Morozov came out from between the tracks, a bullet cracked past him. More rounds stirred the grass in front of the tank. Staying as low as he could, he slithered along to put the T-54's bulk between him and those unfriendly strangers out there. How the devil did any infantryman live longer than a minute and a half?

Misha Kasyanov yipped in pain. He clutched at the calf of his left leg. Red began to soak through the khaki of his coveralls. “Keep going if you can,” Morozov called to him. “We'll get you bandaged up as soon as we find cover.”

“I'll try,” was all Kasyanov said. That was as much as anyone could do. Morozov knew how lucky he was not to have stopped something himself.

Another armor-piercing round did hit the T-54 then. It brewed up. Flame and smoke shot from all the turret hatches. The turret itself didn't blow off, which was also a matter of luck. One perfect smoke ring did come into the sky from the cupola, as if the Devil had paused in the middle of smoking a cigar.

“Heh!” Pavel Gryzlov said. “They wasted ammo there. That pussy wasn't going anywhere anyhow.”

“I don't know,” Morozov responded. “If we recovered it, we might have been able to slap in a new engine.”

“I don't believe it for a minute,” the gunner said. Then, remembering to whom he was talking, he quickly added, “Uh, Comrade Sergeant.”

“Right.” Konstantin Morozov's voice was desert-dry. He pointed to the east. “I think those are our men in the holes there.” He hoped like anything those were Red Army men there. Neither he nor anybody from his crew carried anything more lethal than a Tokarev automatic. That was fine if you were shooting somebody trying to clamber aboard your tank. If you had to hit anything out past twenty meters, you might do better throwing rocks.

The tankers made for the holes. They all yelled
“Tovarishchi!”
—Comrades!—at the top of their lungs. Bullets kept cracking past and clipping the young, so-green grass—with April here, everything was sprouting like mad—but none hit any of them. And whoever was in the holes didn't slaughter them, which would have taken next to no effort.

Morozov tumbled into a foxhole beside the burnt-out ruins of a shack. A Red Army corporal with one of the new Kalashnikovs grinned at him. “Look what the cat drug in,” he said. “I didn't know they let you people out of your cages.”

“When the cage starts burning, you go,” Morozov assured him. “Listen, help me bring my driver in, will you? He's got a wounded leg.”

“I'll do that,” the infantry noncom said at once. Wounded men were serious business.

He was less leery about leaving his foxhole than Morozov had been of bailing out of the dead T-54. To him, going around in the open was all part of a day's work. Morozov couldn't very well hang back himself. They bundled Mikhail Kasyanov into their arms and got him into the hole.

“Let's see what we have here,” the corporal said, as he used his bayonet to cut Kasyanov's coveralls so he could examine the injury. “Doesn't seem too bad.” He began to bandage it with skill that told of experience.

“Aii!”
Kasyanov said, and then, “Up yours, you whore! It isn't your motherfucking leg!”

“That's a fact,” the corporal agreed placidly. He examined his handiwork. “Not bleeding
too
much now. You'll be on the shelf a while, for sure. If the war's still going when you get better, though, I bet they let you serve again.”

“Happy fucking day,” Kasyanov said. “You have a morphine shot? It hurts like they shot the head of my dick off.”

“Ouch!” The corporal cupped his hands in front of his crotch. Morozov wanted to do the same thing. The foot soldier took a syringe from a pouch on his belt and stuck the tank crewman. He said, “This ought to do the trick. I took it off a dead American. Those whores carry all kinds of goodies. They must all be millionaires over there.”

Someone who wanted to land him in trouble could do it if he kept talking like that. The Soviet Union declared over and over, at the top of its ideological lungs, that the American proletariat, like the proletariat in other capitalist countries, was oppressed by the bourgeoisie and especially by the magnates, the plutocrats. What would an American soldier be but a member of the proletariat, dragooned into service by his vicious overlords?

And yet…During the last war, Morozov had seen for himself that even Poland was richer than the workers' and peasants' paradise, and that people lived better there. He'd seen that Germany was
much
richer than the USSR, though he hadn't seen any parts of Germany that weren't knocked flat before he got to them.

During this war, he'd seen that the Western-occupied parts of Germany were richer and were rebuilding faster than the section the USSR controlled. The corporal must have seen some of those things, too. Unlike Morozov, he didn't know enough to keep his big mouth shut.

So the tank commander without a tank just asked, “Where's the closest aid station?”

“Back that way, not quite a kilometer,” the corporal said, jerking his thumb to the east. “You want your other two guys to take him? Once they get away from the front, he can probably drape his arms over their shoulders and go on his good leg.”

“How's that sound, Misha?” Morozov asked.

“Fine by me.” Kasyanov spoke as if he hadn't a care in the world. Morphine was good stuff, as Morozov had also seen before. The wounded driver let his comrades take him to the sawbones. Morozov went back with them, wondering what the Red Army would do with him next.

BACK IN THE
black days of October 1941, the Soviet Union had chosen Kuibishev, on the Volga just west of the Urals, as the capital in case the Nazis took Moscow. There'd been a panic and a skedaddle out of Moscow that October, when it looked as if the Hitlerites would do exactly that. These days, people talked about the skedaddle in whispers when they talked about it at all.

Boris Gribkov understood why they whispered, and why they didn't like to speak at all. That was called a working sense of self-preservation. Underlying the reticence was the question of whether anyone would have paid attention to Stalin had he tried to give orders from a provincial town dusty in the summer and frozen in the winter. The Soviet Union was lucky: it hadn't had to find out.

But Kuibishev was now what it had been intended to be then: the alternative capital of the USSR. Jackbooted SS men didn't goose-step through Moscow's streets. Atomic fire, though, had burnt too many of those streets out of existence. Too many commissars and generals were burnt out of existence, too.

So the authorities hadn't brought Boris and his bomber crew to Moscow to congratulate them on dealing a similar blow to Seattle. No, they'd pinned Hero of the Soviet Union medals on them here in Kuibishev. They'd photographed them for
Pravda
and
Izvestia
and
Red Star.
And, after that, they hadn't seemed sure what to do with them next.

“You know what really bothers me?” Leonid Tsederbaum said quietly as he and Gribkov walked from their barracks to the mess hall at the Red Air Force base where they were being kept.
Confined,
Gribkov judged—and hoped—was too strong a word.

“No. What really bothers you, Leonid Abramovich?” the pilot asked. It wasn't as if he didn't also have a list of things that really bothered
him.
Tsederbaum was a clever
Zhid.
He might be bothered by some things that hadn't even occurred to Gribkov.

“What really bothers me,” he said, pausing to light a
papiros
and blow a stream of smoke up toward the watery sky, “is that, as far as I can tell, we're the
only
Tu-4 crew that bombed America they're making propaganda about.”

“Oh.” Gribkov felt vaguely disappointed. “That crossed my mind, too.” He nodded to himself, admiring the understatement. “Even so, though, considering what we all did, you have to say the
rodina
got a good return on its investment.”

“How capitalist!” Tsederbaum exclaimed. Boris eyed him. In the USSR, a man could disappear without ditching in the Pacific or having the Americans shoot him down. A Hero of the Soviet Union could become a nobody in nothing flat. But the navigator didn't look like someone getting ready to report him to the MGB. He just looked like somebody cracking wise. Of course, what somebody looked like didn't mean a thing.

“Have you heard anything about our next assignment?” Gribkov asked. Being a clever
Zhid,
Tsederbaum was liable to have connections in all kinds of interesting places.

Just because he was liable to didn't mean he did. He shook his head. “Not a word. Since you're the pilot, I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Sorry,” Gribkov said. “I serve the Soviet Union, but they haven't told me how they want me to serve it next.”

He wondered how much Soviet Union would be left to serve by the time the war ended. The Red Army was still advancing in Germany, at least if you believed Radio Moscow. Here, Gribkov did. He knew the signs a newsreader used when he was hedging—or, for that matter, when he was just lying. He hadn't noticed any of those in the reports.

Even if the advance stopped, even if the Americans and their Western European lackeys somehow turned the tide and fought their way through Russia's allies in Eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, they wouldn't be able to conquer and occupy it. Boris was sure of that. If Hitler hadn't been able to, nobody could.

Which might not have anything to do with anything. He knew what the bomb his Tu-4 had dropped did to Seattle. How many of those bombs had fallen on the Soviet Union? How many holes did you need to blow in the fabric of a country before it was more holes than fabric? Boris Gribkov didn't know, but he did know the experiment was going on right this minute, both here and in America.

He and Tsederbaum walked up three wooden steps to the mess hall. His nose twitched as soon as he opened the door. A cook with a ladle stood next to an enormous cauldron of borscht. Another stood next to an equally enormous cauldron of shchi. Beet soup or cabbage soup? That had been the Russian question for as long as there'd been Russians. The cauldron of kasha—buckwheat groats—was smaller but still formidable. There was also black bread and peppery sausage coiled like rope.

Gribkov loaded up his tray. So did Tsederbaum. They both took twenty or twenty-five centimeters' worth of sausage. The stuff was bound to have pork in it. Gribkov couldn't imagine a Soviet military kitchen worrying about kosher food. To Russian military cooks, the meals they turned out were like gasoline: fuel for the body, nothing more.

He didn't say anything about it to Leonid Tsederbaum. The Jew had to know what kind of meat went into the sausage—and the shchi, and the borscht—as well as he did. If Tsederbaum didn't care, that was the navigator's business.

Glasses of tea from a samovar completed the meal. Gribkov and Tsederbaum spooned in sugar, then sat down on one of the long benches and ate. It wasn't the kind of meal anyone would go looking for in a restaurant. All the same, Gribkov knew he was getting more food and better food than most civilians did.

“What now?” Tsederbaum asked after they put their dishes in a basin and their trays on a mountainous stack.

“I don't know. What now?” Gribkov answered. “We spent all that time getting ready to fly the mission. Then we went and flew it. And we didn't just fly it—we came back from it.”

“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Tsederbaum continued for him.

“And now they have no idea what to do with us,” Gribkov agreed. “So we wait around till they make up their minds.”

“Let's go outside,” Tsederbaum said. When they couldn't be easily overheard, he went on, “Do you want to bomb Paris or London or Rome?”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which was never the wrong answer. But it wasn't always enough of the right answer. After a moment, he went on, “Do I
want
to? Of course not. Who in his right mind could? Will I, if they give me the order? I will, because I do serve the Soviet Union. And I'll worry about what I want some other time.”

Leonid Tsederbaum opened his mouth, then closed it again. Whatever went on behind his eyes, Gribkov couldn't read it. A couple of seconds later, he tried again: “That's a good answer, Comrade Pilot.”

“How about you?” Gribkov wasn't happy about the way the navigator had put him on the spot. “What would you do if they gave us an order like that?”

“Oh, I'd get the plane where it was supposed to go,” Tsederbaum replied. “After all, I've already done it once. And I'm a great coward.”

“I don't think so!” Whatever Gribkov had expected, that wasn't it.

“Oh, but I am,” Tsederbaum said. “If my choice is between a bullet in the back of the neck now and generations yet unborn spitting on my name later, they can spit all they please.”

“It isn't like that,” Gribkov insisted. “We'd be doing it for the proletarian cause, for the socialist cause.”

“If you say so.”

“We would!”

“Even if we would, do you think anyone would be glad to remember us for melting the Eiffel Tower down to a stump about this high?” Tsederbaum drew a line across his own belly, just above his navel.

Gribkov winced. He couldn't help it. Even so, he said, “That didn't stop the Americans from hammering the Kremlin. If they're hard, we have to be hard, too.”

“I understand that, Comrade Pilot. Just because I understand it doesn't mean I like it,” Tsederbaum said. “And do you think for a minute that those American pilots don't have bad dreams, too?”

The
too
was what pierced Gribkov to the root. He hadn't told anybody about his fiery dreams. He most assuredly hadn't told Leonid Abramovich Tsederbaum. Yet the Jew knew. He knew much too well.

The Yanks were back at the Owl and Unicorn! So were the RAF men who flew out of Sculthorpe with them. Daisy Baxter cared more about the Americans. April would indeed have been the cruellest month without them. Her own countrymen were a thrifty lot, keeping tabs on every ha'penny and turning loose of it only when it was forcibly extracted, as if by a dentist's grippers.

Americans, though…Americans spent as if there was no tomorrow. The base remained on high alert. The people who gave orders, though, discovered that the men who carried them out were human beings, and needed an escape valve to relieve the pressure of what they did. Except perhaps for a brothel, a pub was the best escape valve around.

“You gotta make that getaway turn as quick as you can, you know?” an American said, his accent sharp and hard. He used his hands to show what he meant, continuing, “If you don't, if the blast wave catches you when you're halfway through it, it'll flip you around like a leaf in a breeze.”

“That happens to you, you're lucky—
damn
lucky—if you ever pull out again, too,” another Yank said.

Working the tap, trying to keep up with their orders for bitter, listening with no more than half an ear, Daisy needed longer than she might have to realize they were talking about the blast wave from an atomic explosion. No wonder they spent as if there was no tomorrow! For the people they visited, there wasn't.

A man at a slaughterhouse could knock cattle or sheep over the head day after day for years and years without ever thinking about what he was doing. Back in bygone times, executioners had hanged people the same way. But you needed imagination to be a good flyer. And if you had it, how could you help thinking about what you were doing?

An American first lieutenant she hadn't seen before asked her for a pint. She drew it for him. He gave her a crown. When she started to return his change, he waved it away. “All funny money anyhow,” he said.

“Well, thanks very much.” She wondered if he knew how much he was overpaying. A lot of Americans, used to decimal coinage, had trouble with Britain's more arcane system. If he did know, he didn't care.

“Mud in your eye.” He raised the pint in salute, then started to take a long pull. But he stopped in surprise before it was well begun. He stared at the deep-amber liquid in the mug with sudden, astonished admiration and blurted, “This is
good
beer!”

“Glad you like it.” Daisy hid a smile. She'd seen that reaction before from Americans downing their first pint of best bitter.

This Yank had more enthusiasm than most. “I mean to tell you, Miss, this is
good
beer,” he said again. “The stuff you get in bottles in America, it tastes like they strain it through the kidneys of a horse—a sick horse, too. Draft beer's a little better, but only a little. This here, though, this is great.” By the way he finished the pint, he meant every word of that.

“We aim to please.” Now Daisy did smile. She couldn't help it, not with such an enthusiastic customer.

“Sweetheart, you hit the bull's-eye.” She'd gone from
Miss
to
Sweetheart
in a couple of sentences. Well, beer and enthusiasm could do that. Having mentioned a bull's-eye, the American waved toward the dartboard down at the end of the snug. Pete Huntington, a local man, was matched with an American sergeant. The Yank had some idea of what he was about. That put him ahead of most of his countrymen, who thought of darts as nothing more than a silly lark. But Pete was taking him to the cleaners just the same. No one would have told the sergeant his foe won tournaments all over East Anglia. The U.S. Air Force man standing in front of Daisy said, “Let me have another glass of this…what do you call it?”