Bombs Away (3 page)

Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That's good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”

“Please God,” Gustav agreed. He'd fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he'd fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army'd grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin's prison camps—unless they'd decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.

Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman's badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn't taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn't as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn't have their own little collections of medals.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa asked.

“I don't know. I'll try. What time is it, anyhow?”

The alarm clock ticking by Luisa's side of the bed had glowing hands. She rolled over to look at it. “Half past two,” she said.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
To Gustav, that was about the worst time there was. Everything in him was at low ebb—except his fear. He sighed. “The only good news is, I don't remember the last time I had those nightmares twice in one night.”

“Fine. So sleep.” Luisa's yawn said she intended to try again, too, even if getting jerked awake like that had to be as horrible for her as it was for him.

Sleep Gustav did. The alarm clock woke him at a quarter to seven. It didn't seem nearly so bad—or so loud—as the explosions inside his head. He ate black bread and jam and drank a big cup of coffee almost white with milk. Then he put on a hat and his beat-up tweed jacket and headed for work.

His breath smoked when he left the block of flats. It was cold out there—what else, at the end of the first week of January?—but not a patch on what he'd known in Russia and Poland. And he could come in from this cold whenever he wanted, and no one would shoot him if he did. It was still dark, too—darker than it had been before, in fact, because the moon was down.

Fulda had come to life even in the long winter night. The noises of carpentry rose from the
Dom.
An American air raid had damaged the cathedral six or eight months before the end of the war. The same raid had smashed the square that housed the vegetable market. One day before too long, though, and you'd look things over and have no idea that bombers had ever struck here. So many German cities got hit far harder than Fulda. A town of only 40,000 or so, it couldn't have been an important target. Bit by bit, those ravaged places were getting back on their feet, too.

They were in the zones the Americans and British and even the French held, at any rate. But something like a third of Germany had gone straight from Hitler to Stalin: a bad bargain if ever there was one. Reconstruction on the other side of the Iron Curtain moved slowly when it moved at all. The Russians were more interested in what they could pry out of their new subjects than in giving them a helping hand.

A jeep with two American soldiers in it rolled past Gustav and east toward the border with the Russian zone. The German veteran kept his head down and glanced at it only out of the corner of his eye. He'd fought the Ivans his whole time in the
Wehrmacht,
but that didn't mean he loved the Amis. If they hadn't decided Stalin made a better ally than Hitler did, the world would look different today.

Another jeep passed him a minute or two later. This one sported an American heavy machine gun on a post fixed to the floorboards. Those damn things could kill you out to a couple of kilometers. U.S. fighter planes also carried them. He'd got strafed by an American fighter the day before he surrendered. He didn't remember it fondly, but it hadn't given him wake-up-screaming nightmares.

He opened the door to the print shop. Max Bachman, who owned the place, looked up from some proofs he was reading. “Morning, Gustav.
Was ist los?
”

“Not much.” Gustav didn't talk about his nighttime horrors with anyone. He wouldn't have talked about them with Luisa if they hadn't jolted her awake, too. For all he knew, Bachman also had them. He'd been a
Frontschwein
himself. If he did, though, he didn't let on, either. But then Gustav held up a forefinger. “I take that back. Are the Americans jumpy about the border? Two jeeps went by me heading that way.”

“I haven't heard anything special, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are,” Bachman answered. “If Stalin decides to start something, all the Russian panzers in the world'll charge west through the Fulda Gap.”

Gustav grunted and lit a cigarette. With the Deutschmark a going concern, you could smoke your cigarettes again. They weren't currency any more, the way they had been in the first couple of years after the war.

The ritual of tapping the cigarette and striking a match gave him a few seconds to think. Max wasn't wrong. Gustav knew it. The Amis had to know it, too. The broad, flat valley of the river that ran by Fulda was the best panzer country along the Russian zone's western frontier. Once through it, the T-34s—and whatever new models Stalin had up his sleeve—could swarm straight toward the Rhine.

“I wonder whether they'd want us to lend a hand if the Reds do come,” Gustav said in musing tones, blowing a smoke ring up at the low ceiling. “Some of us still remember what to do.”

“Think so, eh?” Bachman said with a dry chuckle. “Well, maybe we do. And I'll tell you this—they might not have wanted to play with Adolf, but they won't mind the rest of us dying for our country…and theirs. When the Russians come, you grab everybody you can.” Gustav nodded. Again, his boss wasn't wrong.

KONSTANTIN MOROZOV SLID
a ruble across the bar. “Another,” he said in Russian.

“Da,”
the bartender said, and gave him a fresh mug of beer. The man in the apron was a German, but he understood enough Russian to get by. Damn near every Fritz in Meiningen did. With a couple of Soviet tank armies stationed near the border with the American zone, bartenders and shopkeepers and waiters and whores needed to know the occupiers' language if they were going to get money out of them.

For that matter, Morozov could have asked for his refill in German. He'd never be fluent, but he could manage. Unless he had to, though, he preferred not to. He'd been a tankman since 1944. He'd joined the Red Army just before Operation Bagration, the great attack that drove the Nazis out of the Soviet Union. He'd seen what they'd done to the
rodina,
the motherland. And he'd paid them back, with as much interest as he could add, in the grinding drive west that ended in Berlin the following spring. German still felt dirty in his mouth.

He'd been a private starting out, of course, a seventeen-year-old kid slamming shells into the breech of a T-34/85's cannon. New fish always started as loaders; the job didn't take much in the way of brains. If you showed you had something on the ball—and if you lived, naturally—you could go on to bigger and better things.

He'd had four (or was it five?) tanks killed out from under him. A puckered scar on his left calf showed where a German machine-gun bullet bit him when he was bailing out from one of them. Burn scars mostly hidden by the right sleeve of his khaki tunic reminded him he hadn't got out of another soon enough. That had hurt like a mad bastard—and burning human flesh smelled too much like a pork roast forgotten in a hot oven.

But he was still here. That put him ahead of the game right there. So many of the men who'd fought alongside him were dead, some in graves, some not. And the Nazis had murdered civilians for fun, or so it seemed. He'd heard officers arguing about whether the Great Patriotic War cost the USSR twenty or thirty million deaths. Both numbers were too enormous to mean much to him. Twenty or thirty deaths? A tragedy. Multiply by a million? A statistic, nothing more.

He eyed the bartender. The fellow was about thirty-five. He had a scar of his own, on his forehead. Chances were he hadn't picked it up playing tiddlywinks. “What did you do during the war?” Morozov asked him in Russian.

“I'm sorry. I don't understand,” the Fritz answered. And maybe that was true, and maybe it was horseshit. Maybe he just didn't want to admit to whatever it was.

Well, too damn bad if he didn't. Konstantin asked the same question in German. If he didn't like the answer he got, he'd knock the bastard into the middle of next week. It was possible for a Red Army senior sergeant to get in trouble for roughing up a German. It was possible, yeah, but it sure wasn't easy.

But the bartender said, “Oh! During the
war
!”—so maybe that was what he hadn't got. “I fought in the Low Countries and France. Then I went to North Africa. I got this there.” Konstantin thought he was going to touch that scar, but he did more. He popped his right eye out of its socket. It lay in the palm of his hand—it was glass.

“It's a good match for the one you kept.” Morozov meant that. He hadn't noticed it was artificial. It had to be German work. Russian glass eyes looked like, well, glass eyes. The tankman gestured. “Put it back. You aren't so pretty without it.”

“Sie haben Recht,”
the German agreed gravely. Back went the eye. He blinked a couple of times to settle it in place. Now that Konstantin knew, he could tell the eye was false. But he never would have thought so had the Fritz not shown him.

He downed the beer. He'd drunk enough to feel it, not enough to get tipsy. After the daily combat ration of a hundred grams of vodka, beer seemed like water going down the hatch. It did taste nice, though; he had to give it that. Good vodka didn't taste like anything much. Bad vodka reminded him of an accident with a chemistry set.

Drinking beer, you had to work to get smashed. It was easy with vodka. The whole point to drinking vodka was getting smashed. Maybe the point to drinking beer was drinking without getting smashed. If so, it was a point too subtle for Konstantin to fathom.

He drained the mug, tipped the barkeep, and went back to the toilets. They were cleaner than they would have been in a Russian dive, but not a lot cleaner. The ammonia reek of stale piss stung his nose.

After leaving the tavern, he walked back to the tent city outside of town. It was cold. Some snow lay on the ground. He'd known plenty worse, though. The Red Army didn't worry about the weather. Whatever it happened to be, you did what your commanders told you.

Now, instead of loading in a T-34, he commanded a T-54. He wished the Red Army'd had these during the last war. They would have made the Hitlerites roll over onto their backs and show their bellies in jig time. Thick armor, that elegant turtle-shell dome of a turret, a 100mm gun that would have smashed up every Tiger or Panther ever made…

Someone waved to him. He came to attention—it was Captain Oleg Gurevich, the company commander. “What do you need, Comrade Captain?” he asked.

“Is your tank ready for action, Sergeant?” Gurevich demanded.

“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Morozov said, which was never the wrong answer. “The tank is ready to roll as soon as we climb aboard.” That wasn't quite true, but it came close enough. They wouldn't move forward right this minute. Konstantin didn't think they would, anyhow. “But what's gone wrong now?”

“It's the stinking Americans,” Gurevich said. He was even younger than Konstantin. He'd come into the Red Army after the war ended. He didn't remember, or care to remember, that the Americans had been allies against Hitler. Konstantin did, though he didn't say so—admitting such things wasn't just dangerous, it was suicidal. The officer went on, “It's looking more and more as though they think they'll have to use atomic weapons to stop the advance of the victorious Chinese People's Liberation Army. In his wisdom, Comrade Stalin has decided that the Soviet Union will not sit idly by while the imperialists assail a fraternal socialist state.”

One of the signs Gurevich was still wet behind the ears was that he could bring out propaganda slogans as if they were part of his ordinary language. He hadn't seen enough of the real world to know that slogans were like the old newspaper you wrapped around
makhorka
to roll yourself a cigarette. They held things together, but they weren't why you smoked. The tobacco was.

“If the Americans use atomic bombs, we will, too?” Morozov asked, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn't know much about them. But from everything he'd heard, the best way to live through one was not to be there when it went off.

“We will take whatever steps the wise Comrade Stalin decides we have to take,” Captain Gurevich replied, so he didn't know, either. Chances were no one did, except the longtime leader of the Soviet Union.

Something else occurred to Morozov: “If our tanks head west and go over the border, will the Americans drop one of these bombs on us? Or more than one?”
One will be all it takes,
he thought unhappily.

“We will not go forward alone if we get the order to liberate the American zone,” Gurevich said. “The Red Air Force will move with us, and will give us the air support we need.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Konstantin said once more. That was more polite than
You've got to be out of your goddamn mind, sir,
even if, here, it meant the same thing. By the way Captain Gurevich turned red, he understood the words behind the words. That could be good. Maybe he wasn't a total dope after all.

An Air Force base was like a little bit of the Midwest plopped down in whatever foreign country happened to hold it. First Lieutenant Bill Staley had been born and raised in Nebraska before moving to Washington state. He knew the Midwest when he ran into it, even if he ran into it in South Korea near the port of Pusan.

Scrambled eggs. Fried eggs. Bacon. Coffee with cream and sugar. Hash browns. Toast with butter and jam. Ham sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Fried chicken. Steak. Baked potatoes. Canned string beans. Canned peas. Apple pie. Canned fruit salad.

Movies. Touch football in the snow. If there was barbed wire around the perimeter, if guards with grease guns kept North Korean infiltrators from getting too close, you didn't have to think about that. You also didn't have to remember that your Aunt Susie would have hanged herself for shame at the miserable mattresses on the cots in the barracks.

The one un-Midwestern thing about the base that you couldn't ignore was the B-29s. Without them, after all, the base wouldn't have been there to begin with.

They were also too damn big to ignore, sitting there like a herd of four-engined dinosaurs at the end of the snow-dappled runway. The trouble was, they were like dinosaurs in more than just size. In a world of quick, nimble biting mammals, the hulking brutes got more obsolete by the day.

They'd flattened Japan. They'd had the Japs on their knees even before the A-bombs that cooked Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Second World War. But what the generals who gave orders in Korea hadn't understood was that Japan was already staggering even before the B-29s zoomed in to finish the job.

Day bombing raids against air defenses that hadn't been smashed? Against guns and planes and radar tougher and more modern than any the Japs had had? Those didn't work so well. The American commanders took longer than they should have to figure that out. A lot of four-engined dinosaurs and a lot of good aircrews got lost teaching them the lesson.

Bill thanked heaven he hadn't gone down in flames or had to hit the silk over North Korea. Night missions gave the Superforts the chance to come back and try again. Even with fighter escorts, though, they were no piece of cake. He assumed Russian pilots flew the enemy's night fighters. The North Koreans were brave, but they didn't have the sophisticated training that kind of mission took.

When the Russians got in trouble, they scooted back across the Yalu into Red China. American planes weren't allowed to follow them. The Russian pilots had a sanctuary on the other side of the river. Chinese troops? Same story.

No wonder they were kicking our tails in North Korea. Letting them have free rein till they crossed the Yalu made no military sense. None. Zero. Zip. You didn't have to be General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to see that. It was as clear as clear could be to First Lieutenant Bill Staley, and to any American private on the ground up there—any the Chinks hadn't killed or captured, anyhow.

So far, Harry Truman had said it made political sense. The President hadn't wanted to get the United States into a big Asian war. Bill Staley could see that, too. The logistics of a war like that would have to get a lot better to reach merely terrible.

But not getting into a big Asian land war didn't mean losing the smaller Asian land war the USA was already in. Or it had damn well better not, anyway. The horrible things the Chinese had done to the American ground forces up near the Yalu—and to the British and other UN troops that fought at their side—made losing the war and the peninsula seem much too possible.

By all the signs, losing the smaller war wasn't going to happen, not if Truman had anything to say about it. Just that morning, a convoy from Pusan had entered the air base. Columns of trucks bringing in food and fuel and ordnance came in all the time. Bill hardly even noticed them.

This one was…different. Trucks full of chicken pieces or crates of .50-caliber ammo, tanker trucks full of avgas, were usually escorted by nothing more than halftracks or jeeps. This convoy was only three or four trucks long. It had halftracks riding shotgun fore and aft, sure, and clearing a path through the snow. And it had four top-of-the-line Pershing tanks in front of the trucks and four more behind.