Bombs Away

15

“Lunchtime, Mommy!” Linda said.

Marian Staley wondered how her daughter knew. Tummy Standard Time, she supposed. She didn’t have a watch. The Studebaker’s clock had quit a couple of months after she and Bill bought the car. She’d never seen an auto clock that wasn’t a piece of junk.

Linda didn’t know how to tell time anyway. That didn’t mean Tummy Standard Time wasn’t pretty good. Here and there, people were heading for the refugee camp’s mess hall. Maybe that helped give Linda a hint, too.

“Well, we can go,” Marian said. She rolled up the windows and made sure the Studebaker’s doors were locked. She didn’t have much in there, but she wanted to keep the little she did have. Someone could still break one of the windows and help himself, but that would-or at least might-make someone else notice and raise a ruckus. It hadn’t happened yet, for which Marian was duly grateful.

It wasn’t raining right this minute, but it was muddy. The stuff pulled at Marian’s shoes. She hadn’t known a day since they came here when it wasn’t muddy. She wished she could go somewhere, anywhere, else. Right at the moment, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.

Three sets of stretcher-bearers carried bodies from the hospital tent toward the graveyard. One bunch came from the National Guard. The others were refugees working for their keep or because they were bored out of their skulls. The atom bomb’s poison kept on working even six weeks after the damn thing went off. Marian touched her face. She’d healed well enough, and so had Linda.

More and more people bombed out of their homes converged on the big tent that housed the mess hall, like iron filings drawn by a magnet. Here and there, somebody would nod to her. If it was somebody she knew, like Fayvl Tabakman or one of his friends, she would nod back. If it was some man trying his luck with a woman he’d never seen before because he liked the way she looked, she pretended not to see him. She had enough troubles as things were. She needed more like she needed a hole in the head.

When she realized what she’d thought, she smiled. That sounded like something Fayvl would say-as a matter of fact, it was something he did say. The cobbler with the number on his arm had rubbed off on her in ways she hadn’t even noticed.

Tummy Standard Time must have run a little fast. The line curled around the mess-hall tent, which hadn’t opened yet. “Phooey!” Linda said. She enjoyed waiting no more than any other four-year-old.

“Phooey is right,” Marian agreed. “Phooey and pfui!” The two terms of annoyance sounded just about the same. She meant something different by each one, though. Her phooey carried the same message as Linda’s. She didn’t like waiting in line, either. That was one of the reasons she loved the camp so much.

Her pfui, now…Another reason she couldn’t stand the place was that the people stuck here didn’t bathe as often as they should. She and Linda didn’t bathe all that often themselves. It wasn’t as if the camp had enough hot water. It also wasn’t as if you could bathe without hot water in this weather unless you wanted pneumonia or frostbite.

But Marian and her daughter were nowhere near the worst offenders, as she got forcibly reminded every time they had to queue up. Some people either didn’t notice they smelled like walking garbage piles or didn’t care. Some people, in fact, seemed to glory in their BO. Animals used piss and shit to mark their territories. Some of the stinkers seemed to use their bad smell the same way.

Not so long ago, a camp like this, with thousands of people crowded together and with only the most primitive plumbing arrangements, would have had all kinds of horrible diseases tearing through it. There wasn’t much of that. Drinking water carried so much chlorine, it tasted horrible, but it didn’t make anyone sick. National Guardsmen with DDT sprayers and Red Cross armbands went through the place once a week. Hardly anyone had lice or fleas. Health workers spread a thin film of oil over every nearby puddle they could find. It was probably still too cold for mosquitoes, but nobody was taking chances. So the inmates might be unhappy, but they weren’t unhealthy.

Fayvl Tabakman and his friend Yitzkhak came by. They talked with each other in Yiddish till they saw Marian waving to them. Then they immediately switched to English. “Here-you can wait with us if you want to,” Marian said.

“Thank you, but we should go to the end of the line,” Tabakman said. Yitzkhak nodded. The cobbler went on, “No one likes somebody who jumps his place.”

“Cuts,” Yitzkhak corrected him. “They say ‘cuts in line’ in English.”

“You’re right. They do.” Fayvl thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand, as if to show what an idiot he was.

“In places where there is not enough food to begin with, it may matter more than it does here, where there is usually enough,” Yitzkhak added. “But you make yourself no friends doing it anywhere.” He and Fayvl Tabakman touched forefingers to the brims of their cloth caps, then walked on.

They’d invited Marian and Linda to join them when they were ahead in line. She’d done it without thinking twice. Now she wondered if she should have thought twice. Did people talk about her because she took cuts? She was a mother with a little girl, but even so….

After she and Linda got their ration packs-Linda’s was cut down to child-size; the powers that be wouldn’t let anybody get away with overeating because of a kid-they saved places at one of the long tables for Fayvl and Yitzkhak. No one grumbled about that; people did it all the time.

Halfway through yet another military ration, Yitzkhak remarked, “I don’t like lining up for food, you know? It makes me remember the last time I had to do it.” He also had a number on his arm.

“Food now is better. More of it, too,” Fayvl Tabakman said. “What the little girl has there, that would have fed one of us for a week.”

“Ah, you’re stretching things,” Yitzkhak said. “Six days at most.” He smiled to show he was kidding. The smile never reached his eyes. Marian decided he wasn’t kidding very much.

“They aren’t trying to work us to death here, neither,” Tabakman said. “If they didn’t manage that, they just got rid of us, the way we’ll get rid of the trash from lunch.”

“How could people do that to other people?” Marian asked.

“I’m the wrong one to answer that,” the cobbler said. “The ones who should answer it are the Nazis. Only now, what’s left of the mamzrim are on the same side of us.” He screwed up his face as if at a bad smell. Marian decided against asking what mamzrim were.

“Nu, you’re not wrong, but the Russians, they’re no bargain, either,” Yitzkhak said. “Lucky me, I was in camps from both sides over there. Such luck! You wound up in one of Stalin’s, they wouldn’t kill you because you were a Jew. They wouldn’t even put you in because you were a Jew. You’d go in because they said you were a reactionary.”

“What’s that?” Linda asked.

“Anything they said it was,” Yitzkhak told her. Tabakman nodded. Yitzkhak went on, “And they didn’t kill you with poison gas or anything fancy. They just worked you till you dropped or else shot you. Maybe not so bad as the Nazis, but like I say no bargain. And they got Germans on their side, too. Feh!” As Fayvl had before him, he mimed smelling something foul.

Marian didn’t even know which questions to ask them. Had she known, she wouldn’t have had the nerve. She was just an American: someone who’d been comfortable her whole life till the bomb hit Seattle, and who only thought she and her daughter were uncomfortable now. Next to what these two men had known, this camp was a rest cure.

Fayvl Tabakman walked her and Linda back to the Studebaker near the edge of the encampment. When they got close, Marian let out a yelp: “Hey!” Some young punk with pimples and a greasy pompadour was messing with the door on the driver’s side. She yelled “Hey!” again, louder and more angrily.

The would-be thief looked up again from what he was doing. He had some kind of pry bar in his hand. Seeing only a woman, a little girl, and a small, skinny man, he let out a yell of his own-a thirteen-letter unendearment-and rushed them, waving the bar.

Marian shoved Linda behind her. Tabakman bent, picked up a rock about the size of a baseball, and let fly. He hadn’t played baseball wherever he came from, but he knew how to throw. It caught the kid right in the nose. He started to grab at himself, but fell on his face, out cold, before the motion was well begun.

“Go get a camp cop or a Guardsman,” the cobbler said calmly. “This jerk needs real trouble, or he’ll come around bothering you again.”

“Okay.” Marian stared at him. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“With grenades,” he answered, calm still. “Go on, now.” Marian went, herding Linda with her. Tabakman stayed right there, in case the thief came to. Marian didn’t think he would.

–

Konstantin Morozov’s new T-54 wasn’t new as in coming right off the factory floor. It had already seen hard action. He knew as much as soon as he slid down into the fighting compartment from the hatch atop the cupola. The inside of the tank stank of kerosene.

He’d discovered in the last war why repair crews used that stunt. If a crew got chewed to sausage meat by an armor-piercing round that did its job, you could weld a patch into place on the steel outside. And you could clean up whatever was left of the poor sorry pricks who’d got killed. But blood and bits of flesh would linger no matter how well you cleaned things out. Pretty soon, the fighting compartment would start smelling as if you’d forgotten a kilo of pork in there for a couple of weeks.

So after the repairmen did the best they could with the tank crew’s mortal remains, they would swab down the inside of the fighting compartment with a mop soaked in kerosene or gasoline. Konstantin didn’t know whether that actually killed the dead-meat stench or just overwhelmed it. Kerosene wasn’t what he would have called a pleasant odor. Next to what he could have been smelling in there, it seemed ambrosial.

When he stuck his head out again, the look on his face must have shown what was going through his mind. The corporal at the tank park who’d led him out to the T-54 donned a faintly embarrassed expression. “You’ve been through the mill a time or two, haven’t you, Comrade Sergeant?” he said. “Sorry about that, but we do want to get ’em back into action if we can.”

“Yes, yes,” Morozov said. “Show me where this pussy got it the last time, why don’t you?”

That why don’t you? made the order polite, but an order it remained. The corporal took him to the front of the tank and pointed out to him the rough patch under some new greenish-brown paint. That AP round wouldn’t just have penetrated the frontal armor. It would have slammed through the driver and the back of his seat on its way to tearing up the rest of the interior.

Thoughtfully, Morozov said, “I think I’ll hang some spare track links or something in front of that. I don’t know it’s a weak spot in the armor, but why take chances?”

“Sounds like a good idea to me.” The corporal gave him a sidelong look. “And I like the way you said that-so it wouldn’t piss me off if I happened to be a welder. I’m not, but just the same…. ”

“Life is too short when you start quarreling with the guys who’re supposed to be on your side,” Konstantin answered. “Doesn’t the enemy give us enough grief?” He set his palm on the weld.

“Did your crew get out with you?” the corporal asked.

“We all got out-we took a hit in the engine compartment. My driver was wounded before we made it to cover, though, so I have a new man there.” Morozov resolved not to say anything about the welded spot to Yevgeny Ushakov for a while. The replacement driver was barely eighteen. He’d have enough trouble telling left from right and getting into the proper gear. He didn’t need to dwell on what had happened to the man who’d sat in that seat before him.

Horrible things would have happened to all the men in the earlier crew. Morozov didn’t need to dwell on them, either. If you started wondering whether your tank was unlucky…If you did, you were liable to bring down the curse you were trying to avoid.

“Why don’t you get them, then?” the corporal said. “The beast has a full tank, and we bombed it up. You can go straight to regimental headquarters and see what they need you to do.”

“I serve the Soviet Union! Don’t go away. I’ll be back with them in a few minutes.” He trotted to the far edge of the tank park. Mechanics and welders worked on damaged T-54s and Stalins-and on a few damaged T-35/85s, leftovers from the last war pressed into service again. A cursing crew used a crane to drop a new engine into a T-54. The number on the side of the turret was different, or Konstantin would have wondered if that was his old machine.

“Well?” Pavel Gryzlov asked when Konstantin came up to the crew.

“Well, it’s a T-54,” the tank commander reported.

“That’s good,” the gunner said. “When I saw some of the old models here, I was afraid they’d try to palm one of those clapped-out cunts off on us. Fat chance we’d have in a T-34 against a Pershing or a Centurion!”

“We didn’t do so well in our T-54,” Mogamed Safarli put in between puffs on a pipe.

“We hurt them before they hit us,” Konstantin reminded the loader. “Anyway, this isn’t a brand new machine, but I think it’s sound.” Well, except for that patch on the frontal armor, anyway. “It’s got a full load of ammo and a full tank of fuel. We just have to put it back into action.”

“Let’s do that, then! We serve the Soviet Union!” Yevgeny Ushakov’s voice cracked with excitement. For the veterans, I serve the Soviet Union! was a catchphrase with no more meaning than Yes, sir! or I’ll take care of it. Ushakov, still wet behind the ears, said it as if he meant it.

Well, he’d find out. Or maybe he was playing a role, and what seemed like excitement and enthusiasm and patriotism was in fact acting ability. You never could tell to whom people really reported.

“Come on over, then,” Morozov said. “Climb in and fire it up. We’ll find out what the regiment wants us to do, and hop back on the merry-go-around again. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“Da, Comrade Sergeant!” By the way Ushakov said it, he did think it sounded like fun. Gryzlov and Morozov eyed each other for a moment. Yes, the kid would find out. He’d never had to flee a burning tank. He’d never watched a crewmate suffer and bleed. He’d never watched enemy soldiers machine-gunned from the turret, or seen an enemy tank afire and known it could as easily have been his own.

Safarli’s nostrils twitched when he got into the tank. “Smells like the lamps at my grandfather’s house,” he said.

Pavel Gryzlov glanced at Morozov again. The loader must not have known why the fighting compartment smelled that way. As plainly, Gryzlov did. “Well, there are worse odors,” he said. He didn’t name any of them. In this business, you didn’t keep your innocence long. If Safarli and Ushakov had some left, more power to them.

“Start it up,” Morozov called to the driver.

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Ushakov replied, as Konstantin had guessed he would. The engine belched to life. It ran more raggedly than the one in Morozov’s old machine, but it did run. The new driver shifted well enough. Morozov guided him toward regimental HQ. As they rumbled along, Konstantin watched Gryzlov fiddle with the sights on the main armament and the coaxial machine gun. He couldn’t do as much as he doubtless wanted to without some leisure, but he was doing whatever he could.

As it happened, Captain Gurevich was back at regimental headquarters, seeing to something or other, when the T-54 chugged in. Morozov waved to him from the cupola. He didn’t ride buttoned up unless he had to. “You’ve got a runner again, do you, Sergeant?” Gurevich called.

“Sure do, Comrade Captain,” Konstantin answered. “Where do I go with it?”

“We’re still trying to break into Arnsberg, four or five kilometers up the road there,” the company commander said. “They’ll be glad to see another 100mm gun. Why don’t you give them a hand?”

Morozov sketched a salute. “I’ll do it, Comrade Captain,” he said, and ducked inside to deliver the word to the men who couldn’t have heard it. The tank headed for Arnsberg. Morozov’s belly knotted. Another chance to serve the rodina. And another chance to get horribly killed.

–

Bill Staley cherished the postcard as he’d never cherished any piece of writing before. The house is a wreck, but Linda and I are OK, it said. At the refugee camp, sleeping in the car. Will get out when we have somewhere to go. Much love, Marian. Not a long message, but more precious than rubies to him.

The night after he got the card, he slept well for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long. He found himself too much reminded of O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Bad dreams he had. They woke him, again and again, in one kind of a cold sweat or another. Sometimes his wife and little girl went up in radioactive fire. Sometimes he did himself-till he woke with thundering heart. Sometimes all the Chinese and Russians he’d helped incinerate rose from the graves they mostly didn’t have, hungry for revenge.

How many people had died from the bombs his B-29 dropped? He couldn’t begin to guess. When he was awake, he didn’t try. Indeed, he did his best not to think of what he did on his missions. When he couldn’t help calling it to mind, he told himself he did it strictly in the line of duty-and shoved it out of his thoughts as fast as he could.

All of which worked fairly well…while he was awake. But the more he shoved things aside by day, the more they came out at night. He’d woken up screaming only once. The cold sweats bothered no one but himself. That didn’t make them-and the nightmares that spawned them-any less horrible to him.

Once, over frosty-cold Falstaffs at the officers’ club, he asked Hank McCutcheon, “Sir, do you ever, um, dream about any of the things we’ve done?”

“Dream?” The pilot paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “Oh, maybe once or twice. Nothing too much. Nothing too bad. How about you?”

“A little more than that,” Bill said, which was true in the same sense that water was moist or a jet of molten metal was warm.

“Ah.” For all they showed, Major McCutcheon’s eyes might have been made from green and white glass. “Still able to handle your job okay when you aren’t sleeping?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Bill answered quickly. That was true, too. True or not, though, it wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.

Regardless of whether he wanted to talk about other things, Hank McCutcheon plainly didn’t. “That’s good, Billy-boy,” McCutcheon said. “That’s what you need. Can’t let the hobgoblins and fantods get you down, right?”

“Sure,” Bill said tonelessly, and emptied his own beer. He’d been drinking more than usual lately, in the hope that it would dull or blot out the nightmares. It hadn’t, but he hadn’t cut back again, either.

“There you go. You’re a good man, Bill. Nothing to worry about, not in the long run, hey?” Without waiting for an answer, McCutcheon stood up, patted Staley on the shoulder, and walked out of the club: back straight, stride long, the image of a professional military man on the move.

Fuck. Bill silently mouthed the word. He wasn’t a professional military man himself, and didn’t want to be. Maybe that made the difference.

Or maybe there was no difference. Maybe Hank jerked awake in the middle of the night with icy rivers running down his back, too. Or maybe his bad dreams got to him some other way. Maybe he just didn’t feel like admitting that to Bill. Maybe it felt too much like showing weakness. Maybe Hank didn’t feel like admitting it even to himself.

Maybe. How could you know? You couldn’t, not when Hank didn’t want to talk about it. For all Bill could prove, the pilot really did sleep the sleep of the just every goddamn night. If you do, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din, Bill thought.

He raised his right index finger. A waiter-a colored Army private-came over and put the empty beer glasses on a tray. “You like another one, suh?” he asked.

“You bet I do,” Bill said. “Thanks.” Beer might not be the answer, but he kept hoping it would deflect the question.

“Comin’ right up,” the kid said.

Bill drank the next one a little more slowly. As he did, he looked around the inside of the officers’ club. Just by looking, he couldn’t have proved that he was in Korea rather than, say, Milwaukee or Portland.

He grimaced and shook his head. He could tell he wasn’t in Portland, all right. Portland was one of those West Coast cities that wasn’t there any more, along with Seattle and so many others. He was anything but happy about the job the Air Force had done defending the American mainland. It had screwed that up even worse than the Navy botched Pearl Harbor back in 1941.

At least Marian and Linda came through in one piece. He’d hoped they had. He’d prayed they had. He was pretty rusty at things that had to do with prayer, but he’d given it his best shot. Still, not knowing had eaten at him till Marian’s card finally got here. Probably the mail service in Seattle was as snafued as everything else in the shattered city. The card had taken more than a month to cross the Pacific in spite of its Air Mail stamp.

One piece! He had a family to go home to if he managed to live through the war. After this stretch, he promised he would never put on another uniform for the rest of his life. He’d get a bookkeeping job and be happy-ecstatic-about columns of figures in ledgers. A dark blue flannel suit, a fedora, a topcoat in the wintertime…That would be as much uniform as he needed.

If he landed a place at a big company, it might have its own softball team. He’d never been good enough to try out for the pros or anything like that, but he made a pretty fair middle infielder. He’d played baseball during the last war, softball when he went back to civilian life, and baseball again here in Korea. Even the gooks were starting to pick up the game.

If they let him play in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, he’d join the company team. If the firm that hired him was big enough to pay for uniforms, though, he figured he’d look for some rinky-dink neighborhood team instead. The ball wouldn’t be as good, but he’d feel free.

Whatever neighborhood he’d live in. By the couple of lines from Marian, he wouldn’t be in the house he’d left when Uncle Sam called him back to active duty. If that house was smashed, his wife and daughter were extra lucky to have lived. Not only would the place have done its best to fall down on them, but they would have been close enough to ground zero to pick up a nasty dose of radiation.

He grimaced once more, not caring for that thought at all. If they’d got radiation sickness, Marian hadn’t mentioned it. Even if they had, they should be better now. But who could guess what that kind of thing might do to you years down the line?

Grimacing yet again, this time in a new way, he drained the glass of beer. He’d wondered before how many Russians and Chinamen died when the Superfort dropped its bombs on them. But that wasn’t the real question, was it?

No. It wasn’t. It was tiptoeing around the real question. It was ducking the responsibility the real question held. The real question was How many people have we killed? Or, more directly, How many people have I killed? Or, more directly yet, How much blood is on my hands?

That was the real question, all right. And, with that being the real question, was it any wonder he had nightmares? How could you not have nightmares with a question like that weighing on you? The only way he could see was to have no conscience at all, like the Nazis who ran the gas chambers and crematoria at their extermination camps.

Fortunately or unfortunately-however you chose to look at it-he came equipped with that invisible but inescapable piece of his moral fiber. And, because he did, he wondered whether he might not do best by taking his service pistol and sticking it in his mouth.

The colored enlisted man appeared out of nowhere. “Want I should fetch you a fresh one, suh?”

“Why the hell not?” Bill answered. He wasn’t going to fly today. If he felt like getting snockered, he could. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t think so much about that real question.

He was doubly glad he’d got the postcard from Marian. Knowing he did have people to go home to, people who loved him, also helped armor him against the temptation to start fiddling with his.45.

–

Boris Gribkov and his Tu-4 crew took the train from Kuibishev to just east of Moscow. From there, they climbed aboard an Li-2 for the trip to an airfield not far from Leningrad. In normal times, they would have gone the whole way by train. But almost all of the European Soviet Union’s rail lines ran through Moscow. Kilometers of those lines were twisted, melted metal now. Till workers replaced them, rail transportation was going to be, in technical terms, a mess.

That was one of the reasons saving the capital from the Nazis had been so important. Yes, Moscow was the USSR’s biggest city. But it was also the country’s transport hub. With it in enemy hands, too often you really couldn’t get there from here.

Hitler hadn’t been able to seize it or damage it badly. The Luftwaffe wasn’t up to the job. The United States Air Force, by contrast, damn well was. Gribkov used his rank to ensure that he had a window seat when the military transport flew low above Moscow on its way west and north. The weather was good. Here a month after the equinox, spring was coming for real as opposed to on the calendar.

Three roughly circular holes, each a kilometer or two across, were gouged from the fabric of the city. One, close by the Moscow River, was centered on the Kremlin. Nothing was left of the famous cluster of onion domes. Whatever air defenses the authorities had emplaced around the beating heart of the Soviet world, they hadn’t been good enough-and that heart beat no more.

Instead of buildings, the blast sites held rubble. Toward the heart of each one, everything was melted flat. The farther out from right under the explosions you went, the more the wreckage started to resemble what Boris recognized as bomb damage.

Vladimir Zorin held the window seat right behind his. “Bozhemoi!” the copilot said as the plane passed over the last devastated circle.

Good Communists weren’t supposed to mention the Deity. All the same, Boris answered, “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” What else but My God! could you say when you saw something like that?

Zorin found something. “As a matter of fact,” he said in clinical tones, “it looks more as though Satan’s got loose on earth.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Boris agreed. Someone who heard that agreement and didn’t care for him might report him to the MGB. Someone might, yes, but that worried him less than it would have most of the time. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his chest could shield him from informers. And the Lubyanka, the Soviet secret-police headquarters since the days of the Russian Revolution, was one more smashed, radioactive ruin.

Leonid Tsederbaum sat next to Zorin. In a low, troubled voice, he said, “Now we know what we did to Seattle.”

“Well, Leonid Abramovich, if the Americans do it to us, we don’t have much choice but to do it to them, do we?” Gribkov said.

“Of course not, Comrade Pilot, not when you put it that way,” Tsederbaum replied. “But if they keep hitting us and we keep hitting back, will anyone or anything be left by the time we get through?”

That was a better question than Boris wished it were. After a moment, he said, “We don’t have to worry about such things. Our superiors tell us what to do, and we do it.”

“Of course, Comrade Pilot,” the Jew said. Four innocuous words, and he sounded as if he was calling Gribkov a liar.

On droned the Li-2. The United States designed excellent airplanes. The Soviet Union made excellent copies of them. The United States had designed the first atom bombs. The ones the USSR made worked just as well, as Gribkov had seen. Whether their design also copied American originals, he didn’t know, but he wouldn’t have been surprised.

The plane passed over Leningrad on the way to the new base. Patchy clouds there didn’t let Gribkov see as much of the USSR’s second city (Kiev would have thought of it as the third; it thought of itself as the first) as he would have liked, but he did see that its cityscape also had chunks bitten out.

So did his comrades. “The Americans called here, too,” Vladimir Zorin said glumly.

“Did you think that they hadn’t?” Tsederbaum asked.

“No. But I wished they wouldn’t,” Zorin said. “This was a hero city above all hero cities in the last war. The Nazis laid siege to it for three years, but couldn’t take it. Now the Americans killed who knows how many people in the blink of an eye.”

However many the atom bombs had killed, it was probably fewer than had died during the siege. Those people mostly hadn’t died in the blink of an eye, though. Most of them had starved to death, especially in the first winter. The bread ration in Leningrad got down to something like a hundred grams a day, and even that tiny bit was stretched with sawdust or sometimes dirt. People whispered of cannibals-well-fed, rosy-cheeked cannibals-roaming the streets in search of corpses or living men and women they could make into corpses…and meat.

But that wasn’t what bothered Boris Gribkov. “We knew their bombers were coming!” he said. “We knew, dammit. We should have done a better job of stopping them. The way it looks, we couldn’t even slow them down.”

“They couldn’t stop us, either, Comrade Pilot,” Tsederbaum reminded him. “If they’d been able to, we wouldn’t be sitting here now talking about how bad our own air defenses were.”

He was right. Gribkov hadn’t looked at it that way. Now that he had to, he said, “Yes…and no. We were hitting their coast, so they wouldn’t have had much warning-”

“Maybe not for Seattle,” the navigator broke in. “But they should have been waiting for us at every city south of that. They should have been-only they weren’t.”

“They were dickheads,” Boris said. “Just because they were dickheads, should we have been dickheads, too? We had radar! We had jet fighters! To hit places like Moscow and Kiev, the Americans had to fly over our territory for hundreds of kilometers. They got through.”

“They lost planes.” Tsederbaum sounded uncomfortable.

“So did we. Not enough, either way, to keep the cities safe,” Boris said. No one said anything in response to that. His crewmates had to be remembering, as he was, the holes burnt into the hearts of the great Russian cities, and all the people who’d lived in those places and lived no more.

The Li-2 flew under the clouds toward the camouflaged airstrip. Gribkov had spoken of jet fighters. Now two of them streaked past the transport’s windows. He knew a moment of alarm. Leningrad had always been Russia’s window on the West. It might not be impossibly far for American fighters with drop tanks to reach.

But no. Those were MiG-15s, familiar as the back of his own hand. Their tails and fuselages and swept wings were blazoned with the rodina’s red star. Their jet engines weren’t copies of an American design. They were copies of a British design, and far better than the copies of Nazi jet engines the Soviet Union had used before.

Bump! The Li-2 touched down on the dirt runway and taxied to a stop. One of the gunners opened the door on the right side of the passenger compartment. Cool, moist air came in. So did the noise of the props, which were still spinning. The blast of air from them almost knocked Gribkov off his feet when he jumped out. As soon as the whole bomber crew had left the Li-2, the pilot taxied toward the men who waited with maskirovka off to the side of the airstrip.

What looked like a big farmhouse was the only building in sight. Boris and his crewmates walked over to it. When he opened the door, a Red Air Force major greeted them all. Inside, the place looked like an air base. A radioman with earphones and a mike tended to his set. A sergeant flicked beads on an abacus as he did paperwork. A battered samovar sat over a low flame on a table in a corner. Tobacco smoke fogged the air.

“Well, we’re home,” Leonid Tsederbaum said. Gribkov felt the same way.