Bombs Away

10

Marian Staley got Linda to bed a little past eight o’clock. Linda didn’t much want to go to bed-when did she ever? — but she didn’t pitch one of the famous fits that make four-year-olds lucky to live to five, either. After a while, the wiggling and soft singing from her bedroom settled down toward quiet. After a little while longer, surprisingly deep snores floated out. Marian smiled. Linda was down for the count.

To celebrate, Marian went into the kitchen, took a can of Olympia out of the icebox (actually, it was a refrigerator, but the old name stuck), and opened it with a church key. She started to pour the beer into a glass, then shook her head and drank from the can. She didn’t have anybody to impress. Besides, this way she wouldn’t have to wash the glass.

She always remembered savoring that beer. It had been a busy day, with a lot of running around: the grocery, the bank, the laundry, a secondhand bookstore. Linda’d been…not terrible, but enough to keep Marian on her toes. She felt she’d earned the Oly.

Everything else about the day seemed the same way. She worried about Bill, over there in Korea. She worried about the war in Europe, too. But all of those concerns lay thousands of miles away. They were noises from another room, like her daughter’s snores.

She turned on the radio to catch some news. “It’s nine P.M. on Thursday, March 1, 1951,” the broadcaster said. “Mayor Bill Devin has announced that Seattle’s civil defenses are being beefed up. Air-raid warnings are scheduled to begin next week. Mayor Devin said, ‘We did this after Pearl Harbor, too. We turned out not to need it then. I don’t expect we’ll need it now, either. But, as the Boy Scouts say, it’s always better to be prepared.’ ”

Everett actually lay about twenty miles north of Seattle. Unless the suburb did the same thing as the big city, the air-raid alerts wouldn’t matter here. Just as well, Marian thought. If the sirens weren’t enough to throw Linda into a tizzy, she didn’t know what would be.

The broadcaster bragged about how many planes the Boeing plant was turning out. “Full speed ahead for the war effort!” he said. As Boeing went, so went business in Seattle and all the bedroom communities. Sometimes you wondered which was the tail and which the dog.

She listened to the radio till nine o’clock, then turned on the TV. KING-TV was the only station in Seattle-the only station in the Pacific Northwest, come to that. They’d beaten Portland to the punch. Unfortunately, the comedian prancing around on it lacked the essential quality of humor known as being funny. She gave him five minutes, made a face that would have got Linda a swat on the fanny, and turned him off again.

Maybe a murder mystery would be more interesting. It was, for ten or fifteen minutes. Then she found herself yawning and reading the same paragraph three times. Was the beer making her that sleepy? Or was it taking care of a little girl by herself while her husband fought a war on the other side of the Pacific?

Whatever it was, going to bed before ten o’clock seemed a depressing way to end the day. When she was a kid, staying up as late as she wanted seemed one of the big attractions of turning into a grownup. No bedtime! What could be better than that?

Marian yawned. Not being so goddamn tired could be better than this. She yawned again. Staying up as late as you wanted could also mean going to bed as early as you wanted. It could, and tonight it did. Linda would be up at the crack of dawn, one more habit that failed to endear little kids to their parents.

The bed was cold. She often thought that when she slid into it by herself after Bill got summoned to active duty. It seemed especially bad tonight, though. She shivered under the covers till her own body heat warmed things up a little. Then, with a sigh, she gave up and went to sleep. That was five minutes after she lay down-six, tops.

She woke in the middle of the night from a confused dream of howling dogs. The howling went on after she stopped sleeping. Sirens? she thought, more confused than ever. But Mayor Devin had said they would start next week, and that was in Seattle, not here. A couple of guns went off. Big guns. Cannons.

All the windows were closed. The shades were down to the bottom. She’d made sure of that-there’d been a Peeping Tom in the neighborhood the year before. The curtains, dark ones, were drawn. The light that filled the room was brighter than the sun even so, brighter than a thousand suns. If a flashbulb the size of a car had gone off in front of her nose, it might have felt something like that. Her left cheek felt as if someone had pressed a hot iron to it.

She screamed and buried her face under the covers, which helped not nearly enough. Blast hit the house while she was doing that. Had the Jolly Green Giant put on hobnailed boots before kicking the place, that might have come close. It slid off the raised foundation as all the windows broke and everything that could fall down did. The bed suddenly developed a tilt. The roof beams creaked and groaned and then shrieked as they pulled apart. Chunks of plaster rained down. One, luckily not a big one, hit her in the head.

“Mommy!” High and shrill and terrified, the squeal overrode everything else. “Help, Mommy, help! It hurts!”

Marian jumped out of bed. “I’m coming, darling!” she yelled, and ran toward the bedroom door. Halfway there, she tripped over a fallen nightstand she couldn’t see in the now-returned dark and took a header.

She landed on her face-luckily, not on the burned side. When she brought her hand up to her eyebrow, it felt wet. She tried to blot the cut with the sleeve of her nightgown. She smelled gas. She also smelled smoke. She didn’t see fire anywhere, but that proved nothing. They had to get out of there right now.

“Linda?” she called.

At the same time, Linda was calling, “Mommy?” They ran into each other in the pitch-black hall. They both screamed. Then they both laughed. Marian snatched up Linda and ran for the back door. It was closer than the front door, and also downhill in the new, off-kilter world inside. As she ran, she noticed her feet hurt. Then she wondered how much broken glass she’d stepped on, and how much was still in her feet. Glass didn’t show up on X-rays.

That was the least of her worries about X-rays. How big a dose of them had the bomb just given her…and Linda? She couldn’t do anything about that. That she couldn’t do anything about it made her hate herself.

The back door stood open. She’d locked it, but atom bombs, like love, laughed at locksmiths. She stumbled out into the chilly night.

“What’s that, Mommy?” Linda pointed to the southern sky.

“It’s the horrible bomb that did this to us,” Marian answered. The mushroom cloud, still swelling, still rising, towered high into the night sky. Though fading, it glowed with a light of its own. The colors had a terrible beauty: goldenrod, peach, salmon. She also discovered that Linda had a flash burn on her neck like the one on her own cheek.

Here and there, fires were beginning to burn, some on her block. How far from the terrible cloud were they? Too far to be erased in an instant, like the people peacefully sleeping under the bomb when it went off. Too close to get off scot-free.

Neighbors were calling to one another. People were screaming, too, people who’d had pieces of furniture or big pieces of their house fall on them and people who were burning. A man ran skrieking down the street. His hair was on fire-bright yellow flames shot up at least six inches. Maybe he used too much greasy goop. Maybe he’d slept with an uncurtained window facing south. Maybe, maybe, maybe…Whatever exactly had happened, it was dreadful and funny at the same time-unless you happened to be him, in which case it was just dreadful. He shrieked and tried to beat out the flames with his fists as he dashed along the street in his pj’s.

With a sudden thrill of horror, Marian recalled that this was what her husband did to other people. He did it for a living. He incinerated them and smashed their houses and set them on fire. You took that for granted when it happened to other people, dirty Japs or Commies, thousands of miles away. Of course you did. It didn’t seem real then.

But when it happened to you…That was when you saw what atom bombs were all about. They were city-killers, nothing else but. And the Russians had killed her city. Sirens began to wail. But there wouldn’t be enough fire engines or ambulances on the whole West Coast to deal with the disaster here.

A sudden, hot rain pelted down on her and Linda. “Eww! That’s disgusting!” her daughter said. It was bound to be radioactive, too.

“Come on. We’ll get in the car and roll up the windows,” Marian said. That might help a little. Or they both might already be cooked in a fire invisible, but no less deadly-more so, in fact-because of that.

–

Leon Finch was still a little guy. He wouldn’t turn two till the end of May. He didn’t always sleep through the night. When he woke up, he usually needed to be changed. Sometimes he wanted a bottle. Sometimes he just needed cuddling till he could go back in his crib.

Except once in a while on weekends, Ruth took care of all that. Aaron went out and made a living; she stayed home with the baby. More often than not, Aaron didn’t even wake up when Leon fussed. He was tired enough to have a good excuse for staying asleep till the alarm clock bounced him out of bed.

Ruth would take Leon out to the living room and rock him in the rocking chair till he settled down. Sometimes she would turn the radio on softly and listen to music or the news. It didn’t bother Leon, and it gave her something to do without turning on the lights, which would have.

The first thing Aaron did when Ruth shook him awake was grab his glasses off the nightstand. It was still dark, but that had nothing to do with anything. He had to be able to see, and without them he damn well couldn’t.

“What is it?” he asked as soon as he had them on his nose.

“They’ve bombed Seattle,” she said, “and Portland, too.”

“Oh, Lord!” he said. He had relatives near Portland. Or maybe he had had relatives near Portland.

“I almost dropped Leon when I heard,” Ruth said. “The news from Seattle had already come in when I got him. Portland just happened, or they’ve just said it happened, anyhow.”

“What time is it?” Aaron looked at the glowing hands on the alarm clock. It was a few minutes past four. He yawned. “Well, I’m awake. Thanks for telling me. You want to put some coffee on? I’ll get by without an extra couple of hours today, that’s all.”

“Okay. I’m sorry, dear,” Ruth said.

“So am I.” Aaron turned on the lamp on his nightstand. After blinking against the sudden light, he grabbed his cigarettes and lit the first one of the morning. The first drag made him cough. After that, it felt wonderful. As he got out of bed, his wits started working. “Honey!”

“What is it, dear?” Ruth asked.

“They bombed Portland after Seattle, not at the same time?”

“That’s right. Or I think so.”

“If they had warning in Portland, why were they asleep at the switch?”

“Because nobody really believed anybody could attack the United States, I guess,” Ruth said. “We got caught by surprise at Pearl Harbor, too, and then the next day the Japs were still able to bomb the airports in the Philippines.”

“They should have court-martialed MacArthur for that.” Aaron had never been an admirer of the general’s. But Ruth’s brother, who’d been in the Army in the South Pacific and come back to the States with malaria, swore by MacArthur, not at him.

“They must have decided they needed him.” Except for marrying a man ten years older than she was, Ruth showed good sense. Aaron had quickly learned to respect her judgment.

He said, “If Portland got it about an hour after Seattle…” He paused to picture distances. “If all their planes took off together, San Francisco should get hit about two hours after Portland, and we’ll catch it an hour or an hour and a half after San Francisco.”

“Let me make you breakfast,” Ruth said. “Maybe you’ll be happier after you eat.” She fixed bacon and eggs for both of them, frying the eggs in the bacon grease. She’d kept kosher till she married him. He’d never bothered-his father prided himself on being a freethinker. Ruth hadn’t minded quitting. With toast with butter and jam, a breakfast like that gave you enough ballast to last till lunch.

They listened to the radio while they ate. From what the excited newscaster said, someone had shot down a B-29 that had no business being anywhere near Spokane when it didn’t respond on the radio. Or maybe it was a Russian bomber pretending to be a B-29. The newsman didn’t seem sure, which made it a good bet the authorities weren’t, either.

After breakfast, Aaron showered and put on his work clothes: gabardine trousers and a white shirt with Aaron embroidered in red script on his right breast and BLUE FRONT in blue capitals on the pocket. His shoes looked ordinary but had steel toecaps under the leather to keep his feet from getting mashed. He’d also used them to advantage in a bar fight or two.

When he came out of the bedroom, Ruth said, “Are you sure you should go to work today? If the bomb does come-”

He cut her off. “I can’t call in for something like that. If the bomb doesn’t fall, Weissman’ll can me so fast, it’d make your head swim. Maybe even if it does. He’s like that.”

She looked unhappy, but she nodded. They’d both gone through the Depression. If you had a job then, you clung to it the way an abalone clung to a rock. Somebody was always trying to pull you away from it.

Just before he was going to head out the door, the radio newsman said, “Flash! And I’m afraid I mean that literally. A flash of light was seen above San Francisco moments ago, and communication with the city appears to have been lost. Further details as they become available.”

“Jesus!” Jewish or not, Aaron swore like any other American.

“Don’t go,” Ruth urged him again.

“Honey, I have to,” he said. “They won’t hit the Blue Front warehouse. They’ll bomb downtown, and we’ve got the hills to shield us.”

“They’re not high enough,” she said. He shrugged. They probably weren’t. But they weren’t high enough to protect the house, either.

When he got to the warehouse just before sunup, Herschel Weissman was standing out front. “Good to see you. I wasn’t sure I would,” the boss said. He spoke in Yiddish, in a Nobody here but us chickens way.

“I’m here-for as long as I’m here,” Aaron answered in the same language.

They went inside. Not everybody had shown up, or would. Weissman grumbled, but not too hard. Aaron realized he wouldn’t have got fired for staying home after all. Well, he’d feel like a jerk for leaving now.

And it was too late anyway. Sirens started going off. A minute later, he heard jet engines screaming overhead. Jet engines meant warplanes, nothing else. If there was a bomber, maybe they’d shoot it down before it could unload. Or maybe it was a drill, or a false alarm, or even a bad dream.

But it wasn’t. The sunflash made Aaron and Mr. Weissman and everyone else in the place shout and scream. Seconds later, blast rattled the building. It didn’t fall on the people inside-the bomb must have gone off a little too far away. All the lights inside went out.

Aaron was already running for the open door. “See you later,” he called over his shoulder. Washing machines weren’t the biggest thing on his mind right now. He jumped into his Nash and started home. He hadn’t even looked at the mushroom cloud rising above downtown Los Angeles. He had more urgent things on his mind.

He was only a couple of blocks from his house when a parachute-wearing airman landed in the street in front of him. He swore under his breath-all the goddamn traffic lights were out, and now this? What else would slow him down? Then he saw the red stars on the man’s flight suit.

He jumped out of the car and ran toward the Russian, who was struggling to free himself from his harness. Aaron grabbed a pocket knife, the only weapon he had except for his shoes. “You’re my prisoner!” he yelled. The man spread his gloved hands and gave forth with palatal gibberish. On a what-the-hell hunch, Aaron repeated himself in Yiddish.

“Ach, prisoner,” the Russian replied in what had to be German-close enough to Yiddish to be comprehensible. “Yes, I am prisoner. I surrender.” He raised his hands.

“Come on back to the car with me. I’ll take you…somewhere.” Aaron wondered where. He’d never captured a prisoner in the merchant marine. Then inspiration struck. He put the car in gear and headed for the Glendale police station. It wasn’t far. They could stick the Russian in a cell so nobody lynched him till after he was questioned.

Afterwards? How many people had the bastard just killed? What would the Japs have done to the crew that bombed Hiroshima? That was what Aaron wanted to do to this guy. He kept driving. He was more civilized than he’d thought.

–

It was daylight over the North Pacific. Boris Gribkov felt as if he’d been flying forever. The little white pills kept his eyes wide open anyhow. He wouldn’t start paying for them till after he got down. If he got down.

All he could see was water. All he’d been able to see for a long time was water. The USSR was the biggest country in the world. You could drop it into the Pacific and it would go splash and disappear. He hadn’t imagined an ocean could be so vast. Till now, he’d done his flying over land. This was a different business-about as different as it got.

“How are we doing, Leonid Abramovich?” he called back to the navigator.

“Comrade Pilot, change course three degrees to the north. I say again, three degrees to the north,” Tsederbaum answered. He and Gribkov were trying to bring the Tu-4 to a precise dot of latitude and longitude, a dot marked only by waves.

“I am changing course three degrees to the north,” Gribkov said as he applied the correction. “We’re what-fifteen minutes away?”

“More like twenty or twenty-five. We’ve been fighting some nasty headwinds on the way west,” Tsederbaum said. Gribkov must have made an unhappy noise, because the navigator asked him, “How are we fixed for fuel, sir?”

“We’re low.” Boris didn’t need to look at the gauge to answer that. Flying from Provideniya to Seattle took more than half the Tu-4’s range. All the land between Seattle and Provideniya belonged to the USA or Canada. If only the Tsars hadn’t sold Alaska to the Americans! A long lifetime too late to regret that now.

And so Red Fleet vessels were supposed to be waiting at that designated dot of latitude and longitude. If the Tu-4 got there, if it ditched as it was supposed to, if the sailors were on their toes…If all those things went right, the bomber crew might possibly survive. It gave them something to hope for, anyhow.

A lot of the Tu-4s taking off from the bases in the Soviet Far East would use all their fuel, or almost all, reaching their targets. Their crews couldn’t even hope for waiting ships. They would have to drop their bombs and either make an emergency landing at whatever airfields they could find or bail out and hope the Yankees who caught them didn’t string them up or burn them alive.

He’d done what he was ordered to do. The bomb lit up the night when it blew. Two separate shock waves buffeted the Tu-4. He’d expected only one. Maybe the second came from a ground reflection. He didn’t know. It hadn’t knocked the plane from the sky. Nothing else mattered.

Time crawled by. After twenty-five minutes-and after the fuel for the first engine fell into the red zone-Gribkov said, “Well, Leonid Abramovich?”

“Another…two minutes on this heading, Comrade Pilot,” the navigator replied. “Then start flying the search spiral. We’ll find them-or we won’t.” Better than most, Tsederbaum understood their chance wasn’t a good one. A dot-an invisible dot-on an unimaginably enormous ocean? A dot where his navigation had to match that of the pickup ships?

After two minutes, Gribkov did begin the spiral. He also began flying lower. Two engines were in the red zone for fuel now. He needed power for ditching. They could bob in their rafts for a while if they went in smoothly. Maybe the Red Fleet would find them. Maybe the Americans would, and take them captive. Maybe no one would, and they’d all wish they’d crashed and got it over with in a hurry.

He peered through the Plexiglas, hoping to see ships below. In the right-hand seat, Vladimir Zorin was doing the same thing. Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, had the best view of anyone in the crew.

“Fuck your mother!” Lavrov shouted suddenly. “Fuck my mother! There they are-about two o’clock, not even far away!”

“Bozhemoi!” Boris whispered. Now that the bombardier had spotted them, he could see them, too. He put the intercom on the all-hands circuit. “We have spotted the rescue vessels. We are preparing to land on the sea. Get ready to use the water-landing procedures we have learned.”

One of the interned B-29s had a manual that covered the drill for ditching the big plane. Translators had carefully turned it into Russian. No one in the Red Air Force had actually practiced the drill, not so far as Boris Gribkov knew. He knew damn well he’d never practiced it himself, though he’d read the translated manual. Well, there was a first time for everything.

They shrugged out of their parachute harnesses. Lavrov left the bombardier’s station and took his place by the flight engineer. You wanted to come in as slowly as you could-ideally, under sixty meters per second-and land on top of a swell with the nose slightly up. Gribkov lowered the flaps to cut his speed as much as he could. At first, even the Americans hadn’t been sure that was a good idea. They finally decided it was, though, and he wasn’t about to argue with them.

“Brace yourselves!” he called one last time as the green-gray water rushed up to meet the plane. “We’re going in!”

There were two slaps, as there’d been two blast waves. The first, when the tail touched the water, was light. The other, when the fuselage and wings went in, almost threw Gribkov against the yoke in spite of his safety harness. He hoped everyone was well strapped in.

“Come on, Volodya,” he called to Zorin. “We’ll get the rafts out.” The Tu-4 rode higher than he’d expected. That was one advantage of dry fuel tanks, anyhow. He grabbed the raft near the pilot’s seat. The copilot was doing the same thing on the other side. They inflated the rubber rafts with CO₂ cartridges.

Boris opened his escape hatch. He pushed the raft out ahead of him, and didn’t inflate his own life jacket till he’d got outside-the hatch was tight. A light line connected the raft to the plane. It would break if the bomber quickly sank, so as not to pull the raft down, too.

Other men were coming out of the hatches farther back along the fuselage. Damned if Vitya Trubetskoi wasn’t splashing forward from the left tailplane toward the left wing. Rear gunner was the loneliest spot on the plane. You were all by yourself for the whole flight-unless the enemy gave you company, of course. And Boris had put the plane down tail first. He’d feared he’d drowned poor Vitya. But there the corporal was. He was made of stern stuff. He waved as he paddled forward, held up by the life vest. Boris had no idea whether he could swim without it.

He scrambled into his own raft. The first man he pulled up was Leonid Tsederbaum. The navigator kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Comrade Pilot.”

“Thank you, Comrade Navigator. You guided us to where we were supposed to be.”

Everybody got out. His raft held six men; Zorin’s, five. He wouldn’t have bet on that when he ditched. The Tu-4 was no seaplane, made to land on water. All you could do was put it down and hope, the more so with an unpracticed crew. But they’d made it work. He cut the umbilical line.

Here came the boats from the rescue vessels. One ship in the flotilla was a destroyer, the Stalin. The others were smaller: patrol ships and a couple that looked like fishing boats. The sailors waved and cheered.

“You did it!” shouted the bosun in the lead boat. “You stuck a big one right up the Americans’ cunts!”

“We serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov answered. It wasn’t as if he never used mat, but it didn’t seem right for an officer who’d managed to survive a mission where survival wasn’t really expected.

“Pull these heroes in!” the bosun told his sailors. They did. Behind the abandoned raft, the Tu-4 settled lower and lower in the water. Before they’d got back to the patrol ship that had sent out the boat, the bomber sank forever. Gribkov saluted it. Like him, it had done everything asked of it and more.

–

“I thought you were going into Kiev today,” Ihor Shevchenko told his wife. “It’s Sunday, after all.”

Instead of answering, Anya sneezed. It was one of those horrible, wet sneezes that show somebody has a genuinely awful cold. She blew her nose-a mournful honk-into a handkerchief. Ihor got a glimpse of her snot. It was yellow, almost green, the kind you would expect to see dribbling from a three-year-old’s snoot.

“Never mind,” Ihor said. “I see why you’re staying here.”

Anya made a feeble, get-away-from-me pushing gesture. “Go to the common room. Go outside. Go somewhere,” she said. “If you stay around me, you’ll catch this. Believe me, you don’t want it.” As if for emphasis, she sneezed again.

“Bless you,” he said, and then, “I’m going, I’m going.” Sometimes arguing with your wife was a losing proposition. That had to be doubly true when she wasn’t fit company any which way.

Ihor did go outside. If he didn’t want Anya’s company, he didn’t want anybody’s. Besides, if he went to the common room, he’d start drinking. The kolkhozniks were celebrating the news of the blows the Red Air Force had struck against the West Coast of the United States-and against Newfoundland and a city called Bangor, Maine. Yuri Levitan bragged about the devastation the Soviet bombers had left behind.

Ihor lit a papiros. Yuri Levitan hadn’t said a word about what the USA was liable to do next. The Americans and the Russians were playing a game like the one snockered Ukrainian peasants sometimes enjoyed. Two men stood facing each other. One slapped the other’s cheek. Then the second guy slapped him back. They took turns till one man either couldn’t stand the pain or fell over.

Blowing out smoke, Ihor remembered he’d played that game a few times. You had to be drunk, the drunker the better. When you were, it was funny and full of ridiculousness. If you tried it sober, it would just hurt. Not much fun in that.

He smoked and walked, walked and smoked. The Soviet Union had just slapped the United States hard enough to stagger it. He wished the slap would have been harder. Why not some really big cities on the U.S. East Coast? Maybe the Soviet bombers couldn’t reach them. Or maybe they got shot down trying. But was this slap hard enough so the Yankee imperialists couldn’t whack you back? How could you know? All you could do was wait and find out.

Snow still lay on the ground. The trees near the stream remained as bare-branched as if they’d never heard of leaves. Spring was on the way, but winter always hung on as long and hard as it could. Summer was the season that seemed to vanish as soon as you looked away.

And this was the Ukraine. Up in Russia, things were worse. No wonder the Russians thought they were tougher than their cousins down here. It wasn’t just that there were more of them. They had to put up with more to get anything out of where they lived.

He walked on. A weasel stared at him. Pretty soon, its white winter coat would turn brown. It hadn’t yet, though. The weasel darted behind a tree trunk and disappeared. Disappeared from Ihor’s view, anyhow. But the mice and voles would find out it was still around.

He looked back at the clump of buildings that made up the heart of Kolkhoz 127. They were all cheap and shabby, punished by winter cold and summer sun, their paint faded, roof tiles coming loose and blowing off. They didn’t get fixed up as often or as well as they should have.

But the buildings were collectively owned, along with almost everything else on the collective farm. What everybody owned together, nobody cared about individually. And so things wore out, and mostly didn’t get repaired. Ihor had never heard of a kolkhoz that worked any differently, whether in the Ukraine, in Russia, or, for that matter, in Bulgaria.

Three women rode by on bicycles, bound for Kiev. Ihor stared after them, scowling. Had Anya decided she was going, horrible cold or no horrible cold? She’d be lucky if she didn’t come back with pneumonia. But he didn’t think she was one of the riders. For her sake, he hoped not.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, something started to squeal, far off at the edge of hearing. Not a pig kind of squeal-a machine-made kind of squeal. Rising and falling…Air-raid sirens? Ihor lit another papiros. Stalin had sown the wind. Was the whirlwind on the way?

Screams in the air-those were jet fighters taking off and getting as high as they could as fast as they could. Could they get high enough fast enough? Everybody anywhere near Kiev would find out soon.

Through those urgent, even desperate, screams, Ihor’s ear caught another jet roar, this one high and distant, as if the airplane making it had already got as high as it needed to get and didn’t have to worry about any interlopers late for the party.

Off in the distance, as far away as the sirens, guns began to pound. Ihor hadn’t thought they had antiaircraft guns that could shoot as high as the plane moving from west to east was flying. For all he knew for sure, they didn’t have flak like that. Whether they could reach high enough or not, they were shooting for all they were worth. Why not? What harm would it do?

None, probably. Whether it would do any good, though…That question got answered moments later. It did no good at all. For all the antiaircraft fire, for all the screaming MiGs, a new sun burst to life over Kiev. Even from kilometers away, the heat of that burning was fierce on Ihor’s face.

He threw himself flat on the cold ground and tried to dig himself into it like a mole, the way he had when the Germans started throwing 105s around. But shells from a 105 were gravel on a tin roof next to that mountain of flame incinerating the ancient city.

“God, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” He gabbled out the Old Church Slavonic prayers again and again, hardly knowing he was doing so. Had anyone heard him, he might have got in trouble for it. But if they weren’t also praying back at the kolkhoz, he would have been mightily amazed. They were praying wherever they could…wherever they weren’t dead. And he had to pray Christ had had mercy on those bicycle riders out for a shopping trip to the city-and that Anya really wasn’t one of them.

Not half a dozen centimeters in front of Ihor’s frightened eyes, a corpse-pale mushroom no taller than the last joint of his little finger pushed its way out of the Ukraine’s black earth. There above Kiev, that monstrous mushroom thrust its way untold kilometers into the Ukraine’s gray-blue sky. Lightnings crackled about it.

Blast picked him up and flipped him over. It didn’t fling him into a tree and smash him; it wasn’t quite strong enough for that. But it did lift snow and send it skirling along. It lifted pebbles, too. One hit his boot, hard enough to hurt his foot. A little nearer and it might have pierced him like a rifle round.

“Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Jesus!” Suddenly, Ihor was praying in earnest, praying as he hadn’t prayed since he was a boy, not just spitting out words by reflex the way the least pious man would do when in danger of his life. He wasn’t thinking about his life now. There was Anya, rushing out to see the terrible cloud for herself.

If not for that miserable head cold, she would have got on her bicycle and gone into Kiev with the other women. She wouldn’t have been there yet, but she would have been much closer than Ihor was. How much closer? He couldn’t know. Close enough for her clothes to catch fire from that blast? Close enough for her hair to catch fire? Close enough for her to catch fire?

“Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Lord!” Ihor still had his wife, still would have her for as long as the two of them could go on putting up with each other. In the circle of villages and collective farms around Kiev, how many people would tell their children and grandchildren those stories down through the years? And how many wouldn’t be there to tell them, because they’d gone into the city after all?

By the nature of things, you couldn’t answer such questions, not unless you were God. But you could worry at them, the way a dog worried at a bone. Worrying at questions like that was what made human beings human. Sometimes the question was more important than the answer.

And sometimes not. What did the bomb do to me? Ihor wondered. He couldn’t answer that one, either. But the answer was already written inside him, whatever it chanced to be. He would have to keep turning the pages of his life to discover it.