Bombs Away

11

Major Hank McCutcheon had to be confident as he spoke for everybody in the B-29 as it took off from the airfield north of Pusan. “Payback,” McCutcheon said solemnly, “is a bitch.”

Sitting in the right-hand seat next to the pilot, Bill Staley knew damn well that McCutcheon spoke for him. “You betcha, sir,” he said, sounding like he felt: the fiercest bookkeeper on the face of the globe.

After bringing the yoke back a little farther to pull the bomber’s nose up, McCutcheon nodded. “You’d be the one to agree with me, all right. Hear anything from your wife yet?”

Bill shook his head. “Not a word. All I know is, that bomb went off between Seattle and Everett. They’re calling it the Seattle bomb in the papers and on the news, but I got the straight skinny from a G-2 guy on Harrison’s staff. I have no idea whether Marian’s alive or dead.” He didn’t know whether Linda was, either. That hurt even worse, or maybe just as bad in a different way. A little girl had no idea what war was all about, or why people could be willing-even eager-to kill one another in the sacred name of politics.

“You’ve got to be going out of your tree,” the pilot said as he swung the plane east, toward the Sea of Japan. McCutcheon went on, “Me, I’m glad I stayed in Omaha. The West Coast is pretty, yeah, but look at all the chunks the Russians bit out of it. They can’t get to Nebraska.”

“Yet,” Bill said. “Three or four years ago, they couldn’t get to the West Coast, either. And it’s not just the coast. Salt Lake City got it, for Chrissake. Denver!”

“Yeah, and the guys who smoked Denver landed with dry tanks at that Air Force Field outside of Colorado Springs, got out of their plane, and put their hands up-and nobody knew what to do with them till they started speaking Russian,” McCutcheon said in disgust. “Fucking Tu-4 looks just like a Superfort even before you give it the same paint job. Afterwards? Brother!”

“I don’t care if they came out of the same pussy when they were born,” Bill said savagely, which made McCutcheon guffaw. Jaw set with fury, Bill continued, “The air-defense people ought to get their balls handed to them in a sack. They knew the Russians were liable to attack. How many of those bombers did they shoot down? Two or three, that’s it. Spokane made it. Las Vegas is still safe for the gamblers. Happy goddamn day!”

“That one might’ve been going after Hoover Damn, not Vegas,” McCutcheon said. “If it was, the guys who shot it down really earned their paychecks that day.”

“Okay, fine. Those guys weren’t asleep at the switch. But everybody along the Pacific sure was. We don’t have a decent port north of San Diego any more.” Bill grabbed his yoke and squeezed as if it were a civil-defense coordinator’s neck.

“Well, Vladivostok’s going to glow in the dark like a radium clock dial for nobody knows how long,” McCutcheon said. The Air Force had hit the Soviet port near the border with North Korea with several A-bombs. But only one of those bombers came home again. The Russians had known they were coming and baked them a cake.

Staley’s B-29 and its comrades droned along just above the surface of the sea, to make themselves as hard for radar to spot as they could. The Ivans had done that on the way to the West Coast. It had worked for them. Imitation might or might not be the sincerest form of flattery. Bill hoped like hell it was the most effective kind.

Some of the planes in this flight were bound for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the main Russian town on the island north of Japan whose southern half Stalin reconquered in 1945. Some were heading for Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk. Though ice closed the port for close to half the year, roads connected it with the rest of Russia. Things delayed there might not get anywhere else in a hurry, but they eventually would.

And some B-29s, like this one, would call on Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Only the sea and air joined Petropavlovsk to the outside world. It was a major Soviet naval base all the same. It had been a naval base under the Tsars, too. During the Crimean War, the English and French attacked the place, but couldn’t take it. What they would have done with it if they had taken it was beyond Bill. That that siege had happened at all was one of those worthless bits of history he happened to know.

“You’re jiving me,” McCutcheon said when he mentioned it.

“Honest injun.” Bill held up a hand as if swearing an oath.

“Wow!” The pilot whistled softly. “That must’ve been the lost fighting the lost. Like that German pest in East Africa during the First World War who stayed in the field a month after it was all over everywhere else.”

“You wonder what was going through those admirals’ minds a hundred years ago. Honest to God, you do,” Bill said. “We’ve got these ships here, and there are the Russians, and if we don’t watch out they could sail around the Horn and bombard England year after next. Had to be something like that. Why didn’t they just sit tight and watch ’em?”

“Beats me,” McCutcheon replied. “Remember, the Russians did sail out of the Baltic, around Africa, and up to the Sea of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.”

“And the Japs walloped the snot out of them, too,” Bill said. “Yamamoto was at that fight. He lost a couple of fingers there, if I remember straight.”

“You know all kinds of stuff nobody in his right mind gives a crap about, don’t you?” the pilot said, not without admiration.

“Useless information is my specialty, yes, sir,” Staley answered, not without pride. “Sometimes even useful information. If you want your taxes done after you get out of the Air Force and start making some real money again, come see me if we’re anywhere in the same part of the country.”

“Do I get a discount?” McCutcheon asked.

“Sure, and you won’t even have to jew it out of me. Everybody on the crew gets the special helped-keep-me-alive discount.”

“I like that.” McCutcheon straightened in his seat and pointed ahead and to the left. “I think those are the two islands that lead up to the Kamchatka Peninsula. We’re down mighty low, but I’m gonna swing away from ’em anyhow. The Reds are bound to have radar stations on ’em. Hell, I would.” He spoke over the intercom: “I’m changing course five degrees east.”

“Noted,” answered Roger Williamson, the navigator.

The islands were lumps of dark mud in sea, which the waning crescent moon dappled nicely. North of the second, smaller, island, the peninsula was more darkness-mountainous darkness. There was a big volcano just a few miles inland from Petropavlovsk. It made a perfect target marker.

Hank McCutcheon spoke over the intercom again, this time to the radioman, who sat on Bill’s side of the plane behind a bulkhead: “Radio traffic give any sign the Russians know we’re in the neighborhood?”

“Well, you know how well I don’t speak Russian,” Hyman Ginsberg answered, “but what I’m picking up doesn’t sound excited or anything.”

“Works for me,” the pilot said. When he spoke again, it was to the navigator: “Let me know when we’re about seventy-five miles south of the target. I’ll start climbing then.”

“Seventy-five miles. Yes, sir,” Williamson answered.

When McCutcheon pulled back the yoke and the B-29 left the comforting clutter and cloak of the Pacific Ocean, Bill gulped. This was the bad time. If the Russians could scramble fighters, the aircrew wouldn’t last long enough to drop the bomb on the naval base. Their plane was painted midnight-blue all over, but radar didn’t care. The controllers could vector in the MiGs….

“Boss, they’re starting to have conniptions,” Ginsberg reported.

“Well, fuck ’em. I can see the damn volcano now, blotting out the stars. Another couple of minutes.” McCutcheon eyed his watch and the target ahead. You had to think of it as a target, not as people. And gunners around the target were starting to shoot: fireworks that confirmed where to aim. “Bombs away!” McCutcheon shouted.

“It’s gone,” Steve Bauer said from the nose. As the bomb fell free, McCutcheon heeled the B-29 away to the east and gave all four engines full emergency power.

Hell burst on earth, the way it had over Harbin. The light was dazzling, stunning. Bill stopped worrying about Russian fighters. They’d have no one down there to guide them to their target now.

–

Los Angeles writhed like a snake with a broken back. As befitted a city so sprawling and spread out, it had got hit by two bombs, one just a little south of downtown and the other to smash the ports at San Pedro and Long Beach. City Hall was gone. So was the downtown police station. Water and power in the city were both erratic.

It mattered less to Aaron Finch than he would have guessed. Like him, his wife and son were as all right as you could be if you’d wound up a little too close to an atom bomb going off. The house hadn’t fallen down on them. Only a couple of windows had blown in. Glendale, a city in its own right, had its own utilities, and they kept working…most of the time.

He was even a local celebrity. Some of the Russians who’d parachuted from their bomber were still missing. One had got stomped to death by a mob, one hanged from a lamppost, and one shot by somebody with a deer rifle before his feet even touched the ground. But Aaron was the only person who’d actually captured a Soviet flyer.

The Glendale News Press interviewed him. So did the Pasadena Star-News. The Los Angeles papers had had a large circulation in the suburbs, too. But the Times, the Mirror, the Examiner, and the Herald-Express were among the casualties of the downtown bomb.

“You know what?” Aaron told Ruth. “I’m not sorry the Times went up in smoke. It’s been a union-busting right-wing rag for as long as I’ve been alive, and I don’t miss it a bit.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Ruth exclaimed. “They blew them up! There’s nothing left of the Times Building. Even City Hall downtown is only a melted stub.” City Hall had been the one L.A. building exempt from the twelve-story height limit imposed to cut earthquake damage. It had always stood out on the skyline as a result. It still did…what was left of it.

“If anyone on earth misses the Chandlers, I’d be amazed,” Aaron said stubbornly. He raised a finger to correct himself. “Maybe some of the Nazis hiding out in Argentina and Paraguay do. Nobody else.”

“You’re horrible,” she said. He nodded, more pleased than otherwise.

Three days after the bombs fell, someone knocked on the door. When Aaron opened it, a Glendale flatfoot stood outside, his patrol car parked at the curb. “You Aaron Finch?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Aaron said. “What’s going on?”

“Somebody down at the station wants to talk to you,” the cop answered. “You don’t gotta come. I’m not arresting you or nothin’. But he wants to.”

“Who is he?” Aaron asked-reasonably, he thought.

“Somebody down at the station,” the policeman repeated. “That’s what he told me I should tell you, so that’s what I’m sayin’.”

“Somebody who wants me to buy a pig in a poke,” Aaron said. The cop didn’t deny it. Aaron thought for a moment, then shrugged. Getting in bad with the local police wasn’t something a sensible guy wanted to do. Glendale was a city, but not a great big city. If the clowns in the black-and-whites wanted to make someone’s life miserable, they could. “Okay. I’ll play along.” He called back over his shoulder to let Ruth know where he was going, then walked out into the night.

He slid into the front seat alongside the cop. The fellow sent him a quizzical look, but kept quiet. The back was where you went when they arrested you. Had the cop insisted that he sit there, he would have got out and gone back inside.

More police cars than usual cruised the streets. Glendale hadn’t got so badly damaged by the bomb that smashed downtown L.A. No doubt because it hadn’t, refugees flooded north into it. Some slept in cars, others in parks or alleys or anywhere else they could find. A lot of them had no cash. They begged. They stole. Some of the women peddled themselves. You couldn’t blame them for any of that. But you could try to slow it down, and the Glendale cops were.

Aaron also saw two rifle-toting National Guardsmen in full combat gear checking somebody’s papers. Following the lead of Fred Payne of Maine when Bangor got hit, Governor Warren had mobilized them as soon as the bombs fell. His counterparts along the West Coast had done likewise. In Utah and Colorado, the state capitals had got hit, so the Feds took care of it for the governors who weren’t there to do it for themselves.

The police station was a low-slung stucco building fronted by trees. The policeman took Aaron inside, led him past the fat sergeant at the desk (who was eating a jelly doughnut to make sure he didn’t get any skinnier), and took him into a room next to the chief’s office.

The man waiting inside wore a blue uniform, but he wasn’t a cop. He was an Air Force lieutenant colonel. Aaron nodded to himself. He’d expected either military brass or an FBI man. To himself, he’d bet on J. Edgar Hoover’s boys. Himself would have to find some money to pay off.

“Mr. Finch?” the officer asked. When Aaron nodded, the fellow went on, “I’m Del Shanahan. I’m with Air Force Intelligence.” He held out his hand.

Aaron took it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, which might or might not prove true, depending on how things worked out here. Shanahan’s grip said he didn’t spend all his time behind a desk.

“I asked you to come in here,” he said, “to talk with you about how you captured Lieutenant Yuri Svechin. He was the navigator on the Russian bomber.”

“Was he? I didn’t ask him anything about that. I just got him into my car and took him here,” Aaron said. “I’ll tell you what I know, Colonel, but I don’t know a whole heck of a lot.”

“You could talk with him, though. Isn’t that correct?” Shanahan asked.

“A little bit,” Aaron admitted.

“Do you speak Russian? I know he doesn’t speak English.”

“Nah.” Aaron shook his head. With Senator McCarthy bellowing about Communists like an enraged elephant, you didn’t want to admit you spoke Russian, even if you did-but he didn’t. “I know some Yiddish, though, and I tried that on him. He turned out to speak German, so he could pretty much follow me and I could pretty much follow him.”

“He was willing to give himself up to you?”

“When he saw I wouldn’t hurt him, yeah. He was eager, in fact. Take a look at what happened to some of the other guys from that plane and I guess you can see why.”

“That was…unfortunate. We’ve sent a note to the USSR through the International Red Cross apologizing and offering compensation to the slain flyers’ families.”

“You have?” Aaron said in surprise. “How come?”

“We’ll have planes shot down over Russian territory. We don’t want their civilians to have any excuse to lynch our downed crewmen.”

“Oh.” Aaron thought that over. He didn’t need long. “Okay. I gotcha. Makes sense, I guess. Of course, when the Russians watch one of their cities go up in smoke, they’re liable not to need any other excuse. We sure didn’t, did we?”

“No. As I say, unfortunate.” Lieutenant Colonel Shanahan was in his early forties, with hair held in place by Vitalis and with a thin mustache like the ones that had been popular during the last war. Aaron had worn one then, too. He had a photo of himself with it, feeding the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square in Venice. They weren’t stylish any more. These days, Aaron’s upper lip was bare. Shanahan didn’t seem to have noticed the change. He’d probably have a thin white mustache if he lived to be ninety.

Aaron took out a pack of Chesterfields. “Do you mind?” he asked politely.

“Huh? No, not a bit.” Shanahan flicked a lighter for him and lit up himself.

“It’s funny,” Aaron said. The Air Force officer made a questioning noise. Aaron went on, “They must have killed a million of us, at least, and maimed more than that. And we’ve got to be even with them, huh?”

“More than even,” Shanahan said. “That’s off the record, if you please, but it’s no great big military secret. We can hit them harder than they can hit us.”

“Pretty much what I figured,” Aaron agreed. “But here we are, going through the motions over bomber crews. Isn’t it like blowing a thousand bucks on the world’s biggest spree and then getting all upset ’cause you can’t find a penny in your pants pocket?”

Del Shanahan sighed and blew a cloud of smoke up at the ceiling. “You do what you can, Mr. Finch. You do what the laws of war train you to do. We send those men out. If we can save them, aren’t we obligated to try our best to do so? Their families would want no less from us.”

Once more, Aaron nodded after a moment. “If you look at it that way, you’ve got a point.” He stubbed out his butt. “Need anything else from me?”

“No.” Shanahan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I just wanted to make sure you were only a chance passerby who rescued that Russian instead of, say, bashing in his head with a brick.”

“What else would I be? A spy?” Aaron asked.

“You aren’t, clearly. But we had to make sure,” the officer said. That gave Aaron something to chew on as the Glendale policeman drove him back to his house. In Stalin’s Russia, he supposed they would have kept him in jail on the principle that he might be a spy. This was better, but was it enough better?

–

“Mommy, I have to go potty!” Linda said.

Marian Staley sighed. Rain was drumming down on the roof of their Studebaker. They were living in it. That seemed better than the tents housing so many refugees from Everett. Her car was one of the few from so close to the bombing that was still in working order. Flash from the blast had set the paint on dark autos afire, but not their yellow one.

Another sigh. “Well, come on,” Marian said. “I’ll take you to the outhouse.” That was a polite word for what they had: slit trenches with board seats inside tents to hold off the rain.

“They’re stinky!” Linda said. And they were. Latrine workers sprinkled the trenches with lime chloride every day-or they were supposed to, anyway. They didn’t always. The trenches got smelly even when they came through, and worse when they didn’t. That also could have been worse, though. It could have been summertime, with flies swarming everywhere. Linda went on, “Can’t I just tinkle out here? In the rain, who’d know?”

It would have been simpler. Not without a pang, Marian shook her head all the same. “No, that’s disgusting. It lets germs get loose. Come on-we’ll both go.” Plenty of germs were bound to be loose regardless, with so many people crowded together and with hardly any way to get clean this side of standing naked under the rain.

“I wish I had my Mickey umbrella,” Linda said when they got out of the Studebaker.

“I wish we had any kind of umbrella at all,” Marian said. The ones back at their house had burned. Almost everything back there had burned. If she hadn’t stashed a spare car key in a flower pot, they wouldn’t have been able to drive away.

Would we be that much worse off? she wondered as they squelched through the mud toward the outhouse. They were both wearing tattered secondhand clothes-handouts, and what the National Guardsmen and State Police who ran this camp had had in their storerooms. None of it fit well. It was warmer than nothing, and that was about what you could say for it. The blankets they wrapped themselves in at night were wool, and somehow managed to be scratchy and thin at the same time.

They got in and out as fast as they could, and looked at the other women and girls in there as little as they could. There were no stalls. What you did, you did for others to see. That was harder on women than on men, though Marian refused to believe even men relished taking a crap in front of spectators.

There were other things men didn’t have to worry about. She really dreaded getting her period in a place like this. Not having privacy when you needed it most…

Linda’s little hand in hers, she hurried back to the car. They were both alive. They still had a chance for things to turn around and get better. From what the harried, desperately overworked docs said, they had a good chance of staying alive for a while, too. Some of Marian’s hair kept coming out when she combed it. So did some of her daughter’s. Their flash burns were healing cleanly. When she put on enough powder, she could hardly see hers.

They hadn’t gone bald, the way people with bad radiation sickness did. They weren’t puking up their guts all the time, or passing blood, or roasted like a medium-rare leg of lamb. They would have to worry more about cancer down the line. Next to vanishing in a flash of light, next to getting your whole hide seared and your eyeballs melted, next to being too weak and too sick to eat, they were lucky.

Some luck, Marian thought as she let Linda in ahead of her. They had one ratty towel in there. She dried off Linda first, then used the wet towel to get some of the water off herself, too. She sneezed. They could catch pneumonia. Then they’d end up in a hospital till penicillin cleared it up. If penicillin cleared it up.

Marian had to keep both front windows open a half inch or so, or the inside of the Studebaker got impossibly stuffy. But that let in half-inch slices of rain-one more thing to keep the towel busy. Boy, this is fun, ran through her mind. Yeah, sure.

Just when she was ready to believe things couldn’t possibly get any worse, two National Guardsmen came by carrying a corpse. The weary men in olive drab didn’t even bother with a stretcher. One had the head end, the other the feet. Cloth shrouded the body, but not well. At least the workers wore camouflaged ponchos, and helmets to keep the water out of their eyes.

“There goes another dead one, Mommy!” Linda adapted to things like this faster and more easily than Marian could.

Well, she saw enough of them. People here died all the time, of radiation sickness and burns and bodies broken by the bomb-and of heart attacks and strokes, and of knife wounds and gunshots when they brawled. More bodies went into the new graveyard by the camp every day. Whenever they filled a new layer in the mass graves, they shoveled dirt over the corpses. They used lime chloride on them, too. As with the latrines, it helped some but not enough.

At seven in the morning, at half past noon, and at six at night, bells rang throughout the camp. That was meal call. Getting food, maybe running into people you knew: the highlights of the day. Keeping the car windows open a smidgen did make sure they heard the bells.

Most of what they got was C-rations and K-rations-canned and packaged stuff-out of the National Guard armories. Like the rest of the camp, it kept you alive without leaving you overjoyed to stay that way. The K-rats sometimes included a starvation allowance of cigarettes: not even enough to keep you from getting the jitters if you’d smoked regularly before the bomb fell. There was a lively trade between people who needed tobacco more than anything else on earth and those who didn’t care about cigarettes and were out for whatever else they could get.

When Marian got her ration pack and a real sandwich for Linda (“Dog meat” was her daughter’s take on the bologna), someone waved to her from one of the crowded tables in the mess hall. She peered that way, smiled, and waved back. “Mr. Tabakman!” she said. “It’s good to see you!” It would have been good to see anyone she knew, but she didn’t say that.

“You can eat with my friends and me if you want,” the cobbler said. “We’ll make room for you and Linda.”

More than anything else, his remembering her daughter’s name decided her. “Come on, dear,” she said, shepherding Linda forward.

Fayvl Tabakman’s friends were a couple of other middle-aged Jews. He introduced them as Yitzkhak and Moishe. They both spoke English with accents thicker than his. Plainly, they would have been more at home in Yiddish, or perhaps Polish or Russian. But, like him, they stuck to America’s language while talking to lifelong Americans. Any other speech was for when they were amongst themselves.

They were no dopes, even if they did have heavy accents. They talked about how the war in western Germany was going and about how Stalin thought as if they belonged on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I saw Stalin once, in Minsk,” Moishe said. “I was lucky-Stalin didn’t see me.”

Accent or not, he made Linda laugh. “That’s funny!” she said, and was amused enough (or hungry enough) to take two more bites from her sorry sandwich.

He looked at her over the tops of his bifocals. “Funny now, sure. I can sit here and tell the story. Not so funny then. Stalin is a very scary man. Even in a crowd of people, I was nervous.” Marian got the idea that to him the atomic bomb was only the latest catastrophe he’d lived through, and that he didn’t expect it to be the last-or the worst.

Marian got down her own canned-beef ration. Two of the Jews were eating Spam instead. Since they didn’t say anything, she didn’t, either. Moishe gave her the hard candies from his pack for Linda. She passed back the cigarettes from hers. She didn’t smoke enough to miss them much, and his yellow-stained index and middle fingers said he did.

Fayvl walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker. “Thank you,” she said. She’d never had trouble, but she knew she might.

He touched the brim of his old-fashioned cloth cap. “It’s a nothing,” he said. “Once upon a time-” Breaking off, he turned and walked away fast. Marian wondered just what he was remembering. Whatever it was, she could tell how much it hurt.

–

In all his flying time, Boris Gribkov had never been airsick. Less than a day aboard the Stalin had him puking up the sausage and sauerkraut he’d eaten an hour before. The destroyer’s skipper, a commander named Anatoly Edzhubov, was sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Boris Pavlovich,” he said. “The North Pacific in the wintertime can be a nasty roller coaster. Here, drink this to get the taste out of your mouth.” He held out a tumbler of clear liquid.

Gribkov drank, expecting it to be water. It was vodka: fine, smooth vodka, but strong as a plow horse. He got it down without choking. Had Edzhubov wanted to make him splutter, or did the skipper really think he was helping? “Thank you, Anatoly Ivanovich,” Boris said when he could speak again. “That hits the spot-with a grenade.”

“There you go! Good for what ails you, see?” Edzhubov beamed. He had a round, ruddy, peasanty face with several gold teeth he showed in a perpetual smile. He didn’t seem the sort who would have tried to make Boris feel worse on purpose, but you never could tell.

The destroyer and the rest of the little rescue flotilla were steaming west now, into the teeth of the swells. Boris dosed his seasickness with more vodka. It helped him sleep, if nothing else. The bunk in the officers’ quarters included a belt to keep him from suddenly waking up on the steel deck. He wasn’t too drunk to use it.

They changed course two mornings after rescuing the Tu-4’s crew. “I’m sorry, Comrade, but we’ll be at sea a little longer than I expected,” Edzhubov said.

“What’s gone wrong?” Boris asked. The skipper still seemed cheerful, but his eyes had a faraway look.

“Well, we were bound for Petropavlovsk,” Edzhubov answered. “There’s…not much point to that any more, I’m afraid.”

“Not much point?” Boris realized what that had to mean as soon as the question was out of his mouth. “Oh! The Americans?”

“Yes, the Americans,” the naval officer agreed. “They gave the place a dose of the same medicine your crew served to Seattle. They got Petropavlovsk and Magadan and Vladivostok. They hit Provideniya, too.”

Provideniya wasn’t a port, except for a few months at the height of summer. In this season, the ice ran kilometers out from the land. But the Yankees wouldn’t be hitting it because it was a naval base. Colonel Doyarenko had been a good man. He was still a good man if he remained alive, but Gribkov feared he didn’t.

Trying not to think about Colonel Doyarenko and what might have happened to him, the bomber pilot asked, “Where will we go, then?”

“I have orders to put in at Korf-or rather, to get as close to Korf as we can,” Edzhubov replied. “It isn’t a big city, which is probably why the Americans didn’t bother to bomb it.”

“I’m sorry, Anatoly Ivanovich. Please forgive a dumb landlubber, but I have no idea where Korf is.” Tu-4s didn’t fly into or out of the place-Boris knew that much.

“It’s on the east side of the neck of the Kamchatka Peninsula,” the skipper answered. “You get there by sea, by sled in the wintertime, and these days by air, too. They catch salmon in the river, and there are mines for platinum and brown coal close by.”

“All right.” A town out here would have natives living in it, natives and zeks who’d served their sentences but were held near the gulags by the terms of their internal exile. Gribkov grinned a sly grin. “I bet they brew a lot of samogon, too.”

“Well, what else is there to do in a place like that?” Edzhubov said. “Not as if a lot of real vodka gets there.”

Boris nodded. Russian moonshine flourished wherever there were Russians but not enough official booze. Some of it was as good as anything the state distilleries turned out. Some was poison, literally. It was cheaper than the official product, because you didn’t have to pay the tax that went into the government’s pocket. That was the other thing that made it so widespread.

They sailed through a storm. If Gribkov had thought the North Pacific was bad before, now he admitted he hadn’t known the first thing about it. Any dog as sick as he was, they would have shot. His fellow airmen suffered with him. Misery sympathized with company even if it didn’t love it.

Most of the sailors took it all in stride. A couple of them also puked their guts out, but only a couple. You could get used to anything. You could, or you could die trying. Boris rather felt like it.

Little by little, more news trickled in to the Stalin. Radio Moscow went off the air suddenly and without warning. When it came back, several hours later, it had a weaker signal and unfamiliar broadcasters. That alone would have made Gribkov guess something horrible had happened to the station and to the city that housed it.

He supposed it made sense that the Americans would strike the heart of the rodina as well as the Soviet Far East. Except for Vladivostok, the Russian cities in this part of the world were small towns compared to the ones along the Pacific Coast of the United States. And supplies for the war in Europe traveled from and traveled through the cities in the USSR’s heartland.

But how much of the world would be left in one piece if they kept blowing up city after city? That was a question Boris couldn’t begin to answer. It was also a question he couldn’t ask anyone else. If he did, the MGB would soon be asking questions of him.

Stalin came on the radio not long before the destroyer that bore his name reached Korf. “The reactionary imperialists have murdered good Soviet citizens by the million,” he said, his Georgian accent flavoring the way he spoke as it always did. “They have done their best to murder me, but their best is not good enough. The struggle for socialism, for Communism, will continue to its final, inevitable triumph against the Americans as it did against the Hitlerites. Forward, progressives of the world, to victory!”

It wasn’t a great speech. Stalin seldom made great speeches. But it did show he was alive. Gribkov was amazed how good that made him feel. He’d been a baby when the Revolution came. He didn’t remember anyone else at the Soviet Union’s helm. He couldn’t imagine how the immense country would go on without its leader.

Boats took the bomber crewmen from the Stalin to the edge of the pack ice. Dog sleds took them across the ice to Korf itself. The hamlet-it might have held a thousand people, or it might not-sat on a sand spit. People clumped over the snow on skis and snowshoes.

They gave the men from the Tu-4 as much of a heroes’ welcome as they could. The toasts they drank, they drank with samogon, but it was good samogon. The roast they served was enormous, tasty, and, best of all, on dry land. However tasty it was, it didn’t seem familiar. “What kind of meat is this?” Gribkov asked.

“Bear,” answered a flat-faced local. “I shot it myself.” The pilot had got hungry enough aboard the Stalin that the news hardly slowed him down.

Korf had a rudimentary airstrip. Rudimentary airplanes buzzed down to take away the Tu-4’s men. Boris eyed the Po-2s in delight. “I learned to fly on one of those!” he exclaimed.

“Me, too,” Vladimir Zorin said. “I can’t imagine a Soviet pilot who didn’t.”

These particular wood-and-canvas biplanes sported skis for landing gear. Snow didn’t faze the Kukuruznik, either. As if he were still a student, Gribkov climbed into the front seat.

The pilot revved the little radial engine. The plane taxied along till it sedately rose into the sky. Icy wind in his face, Gribkov grinned like Christmas. This was what flying was supposed to be!