Bombs Away (36 page)

Those fine German field glasses brought the Tommies moving by the dead tank almost close enough to yell at. So it seemed, anyhow. Some of the Englishmen carried rifles, others Sten guns. Neither they nor the Americans had anything like the AK-47. As more of those came into service, the enemy would regret that.

One of the Englishmen—a sergeant, by the stripes clearly visible on his sleeve—pointed in the direction of the T-54. Maybe he could still see it despite Morozov's pullback. Tanks weren't exactly inconspicuous. Or maybe he was just showing the direction from which the fatal round had come.

None of the soldiers Morozov could see carried a bazooka tube or wore a sack of rockets on his back. That made them unlikely to come tank-hunting. It wasn't a cinch—the limeys sometimes did brave, foolhardy things, like any fighting men since the beginning of time. But it did seem to be the way to bet.

He slid back down into the turret. When he reported what he'd seen, Gryzlov asked, “Want me to give them that HE round? I can see 'em pretty well through the magnifying sight.”

After a moment's thought, Konstantin shook his head. “Not unless they start coming forward. We've already made them notice us, and we don't have a lot of support around here.”

“That's what we get for being at the tip of the spear,” the gunner said.

“That
is
what we get, Pasha,” Morozov agreed. “We get it because we're good. They put us where we can fuck the imperialists the hardest.”
And where they can fuck us.
That thought followed automatically on the other. But it wasn't something you said when you were trying to encourage your crew. He went on, “We finally smashed through that shitass Arnsberg place.”

“Not much left of it now, that's for sure,” Gryzlov said. “But more and more towns and cities ahead, right? This part of Germany's even more built up and built over than the Soviet zone.”

Now Konstantin nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.” In the USSR, there'd be a city. It would have suburbs around it. Villages and farms and forests and meadows would surround the suburbs for scores if not hundreds of kilometers around. Then you'd come to another city, one that might be hardly acquainted with the place from which you'd set out.

Things here were different. Cities in Germany ran together. You could hardly tell when you got out of one and into the next. This little stretch of farm country was unusual in these parts. Land wasn't just land. With none to spare, the Fritzes made all of it
do
something, not sit there waiting for someone to get around to it.

Shturmoviks roared in from out of the east, passing over the orchard so low that their landing gear might have brushed the tops of the taller trees had it been lowered. They shot up and rocketed the English infantry near the knocked-out Centurion. Morozov stuck his head out of the turret again to watch the fun.

Only it turned out not to be all fun. The Tommies had a quick-firing flak gun that knocked down a Shturmovik. The way the planes were armored, that wasn't easy, but the antiaircraft gun did it. The Shturmovik slammed into the ground behind the English line. A pillar of greasy black smoke marked the pyre of the pilot and rear gunner.

The other planes in the formation flew on. A few minutes later, RAF Typhoons did unto the Red Army as the Shturmoviks had done to the English soldiers. Konstantin dove back inside his tank in a hurry. A couple of bullets clattered off the armor, but that only chipped paint. A hit from a rocket might have been a different story, but none struck. One blew up close enough to shake the T-54, but close didn't matter. It didn't if you were a tankman, at any rate. For the poor, damned foot solders, that was a different story, too.

When the telephone rang in the Oval Office no more than five minutes after Harry Truman got there from eating breakfast, he didn't expect it to be good news. He rose early. His breakfast was simple: scrambled eggs, sausages, toast, coffee. Good news was patient. It usually waited till someone was ready to appreciate it. Bad news came when it came, and you couldn't do a damn thing about it.

“Truman here,” the President said. “What's gone wrong now, Rose?”

“It's the Secretary of Defense, sir,” Rose Conway answered. She'd been his personal secretary since he came to the White House. She was a frump, but an efficient frump.

“Well, put him through,” Truman said.

“Yes, sir.”

A couple of clicks on the line, and then George Marshall began, “Sorry to disturb you so early—”

“Never mind that,” Truman broke in. “Just let me have it, whatever it is. That's what you were going to do, isn't it?”

“Yes, Mr. President, I'm afraid it is.” Even after that, Marshall didn't seem to want to go on. Whatever the bad news was, it would be worse than anything Truman could imagine off the top of his head.

“Come on, George. Out with it,” he said. “Whatever you've got, it's already happened.

‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy tears wash out a Word of it. I have to know what
it
is so I can figure out what to do about it.' ”

“Omar Khayyam. Yes, sir. My English instructor at West Point said Fitzgerald made too good an English poem of
The Rubaiyat
for it to be such a good translation.” Marshall went on beating around the bush. That was so very unlike him, Truman upped the scale of the disaster again. At last, after one more sigh, the Secretary of Defense said, “Sir, the Russians have wrecked the Panama Canal.”

“Oof!” Truman said, for all the world as if he'd taken a boot in the belly. He wished he had; that would have been easier to bear. Gathering himself, he went on, “Well, you'd better tell me how, hadn't you?”

“It was a Greek freighter—Greek registry, anyhow. The
Panathenaikos.
A Liberty ship like five hundred other Liberty ships,” Marshall said. “Cargo was listed as olive oil, bay leaves, jute transshipped from East Pakistan, and something else…. Oh, I remember. The other item on the manifest was building stone—marble.”

“No one went over it with Geiger counters before it passed through the Canal?” Truman asked. “When you say the Russians wrecked things, I presume you mean they had an A-bomb on the ship?”

“Yes, that's right, Mr. President,” Marshall said unhappily. “The best guess is, they used lead sheeting to shield the bomb from the counters. If it was covered in raw jute or in among blocks of marble, the inspectors would have had to be lucky to discover it. And they weren't lucky.”

“Where along the Canal did it go off?” Truman asked. There was bad, and then there was worse.

“At the Gatún Locks, sir, by the Caribbean end,” Marshall said. Truman almost went
Oof!
again; that was as bad as it got, the greatest change in water level anywhere along the Canal. The Secretary of Defense continued, “The lock mechanism, of course, is literally up in smoke. There's a radioactive hole hundreds of yards wide and no one knows how deep, with seawater and river water steaming in it. If they can repair it at all, it's a matter of years, not months.”

“Good Lord!” Truman had been close to thirty when the Panama Canal opened. Before it did, goods bound from one coast to the other by sea had to go around South America or get unloaded, shipped overland across Central America, and reloaded on a different vessel. Now the nineteenth century was back—with a vengeance. The President tried to look on the bright side: “Our railroad and highway systems are much stronger and more solid than they were back in the day.”

“Sir, that's true…up to a point,” Marshall said. “But if anyone knows how to put an aircraft carrier on a Southern Pacific flatcar and haul it from one ocean to the other, word hasn't got to the Defense Department yet.”

Truman grunted. “Well, you're right—dammit,” he said. “Around the Horn, around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Suez Canal—” He broke off, suddenly anxious. “The Suez Canal is still all right, isn't it?”

“I haven't got any reports that it isn't.” George Marshall seemed unwilling to go any further than that, for which Truman didn't blame him.

“Call the Minister of War or the First Sea Lord or whoever in the British government is responsible for protecting Suez,” the President said. “Never mind the telegraph—
call
him. Warn him about what just happened in Panama. I'm sure he'll know: no way in hell you can keep an A-bomb going off secret. Call him and warn him anyway. If we lose the Suez Canal along with Panama, we don't just fall back fifty years. We fall back a hundred.”

“I'll do it, sir,” Marshall said. “You're right. That wouldn't just ruin trade. It would do terrible things to our military logistics. Even worse to the British, of course. So if you'll excuse me…” Marshall hung up without waiting to find out whether Truman would.

Unoffended, Truman slowly set the handset on the desk telephone back in its cradle. Then he cradled his head in his hands much the same way. The USA still had an Atlantic Fleet and a Pacific Fleet, but the Panama Canal had made swapping ships between them quick and easy.

Had made. That was the right phrase, unfortunately. Now the naval situation was back the way it had been when Teddy Roosevelt sat in this chair. What was in the Pacific would stay in the Pacific or take its own sweet time getting to the Atlantic, and vice versa.

None of which was likely to make any enormous difference in how this war came out. Stalin had done it anyhow. “That miserable fucking bastard!” Truman snarled. When the Germans retreated through Russia as they began to lose the last war, they destroyed everything they could to keep the Red Army from getting any use from it. Scorched earth, they called the policy.

Destruction for the sake of destruction, the Allies named it. War-crimes tribunals convicted several German field marshals and generals because they'd ordered such devastation. He wasn't sure, but he thought some of them still sat behind bars.

That was the kind of thing Stalin was doing. What else was wrecking the Panama Canal but damaging America economically in a way that didn't have much directly to do with the war? Truman would have loved to see the mustachioed four-flusher in the dock at Nuremberg to answer for his crimes. Unlike the German generals, he couldn't claim he was only following orders. He didn't follow orders. He gave them.

Truman swore under his breath. Then he came out with the question that had been in his thoughts more and more lately: “Even if we win, what the hell do we do about Russia?” Hitler had planned to occupy it on a line that stretched from Arkhangelsk down past Moscow and all the way to the Caspian Sea. Chances were he wouldn't have had enough men to make that occupation stick even if he'd won all his battles. And, with the majority of the vast USSR still unoccupied and still in arms against him, all he would have bought himself was endless grief.

Suppose the United States eventually made Russia say uncle. Suppose it stripped away the Soviet satellites and turned them into free countries again. Suppose it kept a close eye on the Reds for years to come. Then what?

The unhappy example of the Treaty of Versailles leaped to mind. Only it was worse than that. Russia would still be enormous. It would still have swarms of people and tremendous industrial power. Some of those people would still know how to make atom bombs. It would still be a deadly danger to the rest of the world, in other words.

Stalin and his henchmen had to be looking at the United States the same way. The USA and Canada put together posed the same problem for the USSR as Russia did for America. Truman only wished that were more consolation.

Then the telephone rang once more. He picked it up. “Truman.”

“It's the Secretary of Defense again, sir,” Rose Conway told him.

“Thank you.”

“Mr. President…” George Marshall sounded even gloomier than he had before. Truman hadn't dreamt such a thing possible. He could come up with only one reason why it might be. Before he could ask, Marshall went on, “I'm sorry, sir, but my call came too late. The British were on the point of ringing us—that's how the First Sea Lord put it—to tell us to watch out for the Panama Canal, because they'd just lost Suez.”

“Oh,” Truman said: a sound of pain disguised as a word. “Well, this is a hell of a morning, isn't it?”

Rain drummed down. The ground got muddy in a hurry. So did the soldiers on both sides fighting in Germany. Isztvan Szolovits wore his shelter half as a rain cape, the way you were supposed to. He got muddy anyhow, and wet, and uncomfortable. Maybe he was a little drier than he would have been without the shelter half, but he wasn't dry enough to be happy about it.

He was happy that the rain had slowed down the fighting. Those dirty-gray clouds hung only a couple of hundred meters above the ground. Fighters couldn't tear along shooting up anything they saw when a pilot was liable to fly into a tall tree or a church steeple before he had the chance to dodge. It was wet enough for wheeled vehicles to make heavy going of it when they left the road. Tanks could still manage, and so could foot soldiers, but the rain also cut down how far anybody could see to shoot.

Pickets and snipers on both sides of the front still banged away, just to remind everybody the war hadn't gone on holiday. But if you were back a little way and you used some care and common sense, you could almost relax.

Isztvan sat with a smashed tree trunk between him and the fighting ahead. He leaned forward to get some extra protection from the brim of his helmet and kept his hands cupped as he lit a cigarette. Even so, he needed a couple of tries. Considering how wet it was, he didn't think he'd done badly.

Other Magyars sprawled here and there amidst the wreckage of war. Some also smoked. Some ate. Some slept. Szolovits thought he might try that after the cigarette. He'd quickly learned you were more likely to be sleepy—tired to death, not to put too fine a point on it—at war than you were to be hungry.