Bombs Away

19

Gustav Hozzel used a hand-held mirror to peer through a broken window in a house on the outskirts of Schwerte. Schwerte itself lay on the eastern outskirts of Dortmund, while Dortmund was at the eastern edge of the Ruhr. The Russians were getting too damn close to the Rhine, in other words.

This bottom floor of the house was fortified, with bricks and rubbish piled up to waist height by the east-facing wall to hold off incoming bullets. Emergency militiamen had knocked out the wall between this house and the next one farther west. They could retreat to that one when they had to.

More emergency militiamen had dug a corridor from the cellar under this house to the one next door. Gustav had been one of them. His back still grumbled. He wasn’t so young as he had been the last time he played these house-to-house games. He grimaced. The fee hadn’t changed, though.

The Russians, as a matter of fact, were masters at this kind of combat and field fortification. The Wehrmacht had learned a lot from them, and paid a monstrous price in blood for the instruction.

That mirror didn’t show him any Russians or other pests. Some of the Soviet satellites’ forces were in action on this stretch of the front along with their Red Army big brothers. Hitler had used allies like that, too: Hungarians and Romanians and Slovaks. From what Gustav had seen, they were like bread crumbs in a sausage mix. You used them to stretch out the real meat.

They’d fought bravely-sometimes. But bravery wasn’t always enough. No matter how brave you were, if you had only rifles and machine guns and the enemy came at you with tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers and heavy artillery, you might slow him down a little but you wouldn’t stop him. And sometimes the puppet troops wanted nothing more than to bail out of the fight without getting killed.

Max Bachman chuckled when he said that out loud. “I don’t much want to get killed myself,” the printer replied.

“Well, neither do I,” Gustav said. “But I’m still here, same as you are. We haven’t bugged out.”

“And does that make us heroes or jerks?” Max asked. Gustav only shrugged; he had no answer. His boss went on, “I was looking at things from a different angle.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Gustav said. Max made a face at him. Hozzel added, “Tell me what your angle is, then. You know how much you want to.”

“Ah, kiss my ass,” Bachman said without heat. “I was just wondering whether we’d run into any Hungarians we knew.”

“Ha! That’s funny! It could happen, couldn’t it? They hung in there longer than almost anybody else.” Gustav didn’t bother mentioning that the Hungarians had hung in for so long because Hitler occupied their country and installed his own pet Magyar Fascists to run things there for him.

That Stalin was their other choice had no doubt kept them compliant, too. They’d had time to see how he treated other countries that yielded to him. Seeing it kept them in the Führer’s camp. So, instead of surrendering to Stalin, they’d got overrun by him. And now they were Russian cannon fodder, not the German kind.

“The guy who’ll probably know some of the Hungarians is Rolf,” Gustav said after a little thought. “He fought there till the end-till the Ivans drove us back toward Vienna.”

Max made a production of opening a ration can. “I still think chow ought to come in tinfoil tubes, not these stupid things,” he muttered. After a couple of bites, he continued, “Rolf’s a pretty good soldier-for a Waffen-SS puke.”

“There is that,” Gustav said. Rolf lived up to, or down to, the Wehrmacht’s stereotypes about Himmler’s rival service. He was recklessly brave. But he was also inclined to kill anybody on the other side who got in his way. For him, the laws of war were something out of a fag beautician’s imagination. The Wehrmacht hadn’t kept its hands clean on the Eastern Front. Nobody had, on either side. But the Waffen-SS hadn’t just fought dirty. It had reveled in fighting dirty. That made a difference.

Not quite out of the blue, Max said, “I wonder what Rolf thinks of Israel.”

“Matter of fact, I can answer that one,” Gustav said. “He told me the bomb that blew up the Suez Canal should have gone off a little farther northeast.”

“Ach!” Max pulled a face. “I never jumped up and down over Jews, but only an idiot would take the Nazi Quatsch about them seriously. An idiot or an SS man, I mean, if you can tell the one from the other.”

“Sure.” Gustav nodded. “You couldn’t tell those people they were full of crap, not unless you wanted them to bust your balls. But I didn’t go out of my way to give Jews grief.”

“Me, neither.” Max’s head bobbed up and down, too.

As long as things outside seemed quiet, Gustav also opened a ration can. He shoveled pork and beans into his chowlock. It was nothing he would have eaten had he had a choice; as far as he was concerned, the Americans kept their taste buds in a concentration camp. Even a lousy ration, though, beat the hell out of going hungry.

As he ate, he remembered SS Einsatzkommandos leading scared-looking Jews out of a Russian village back in the early days, the days when victory looked sure and soldiering still seemed as if it could be a lark. He didn’t know what happened to those Jews, or to others later on. He didn’t want to know. It was none of his business.

Had Max seen things like that? He probably had. If he hadn’t, he would have been looking away as hard as he could. Not impossible, but it didn’t seem to be his style.

They’d hardly got done talking about Rolf before he poked his head up out of the cellar. “Anything going on?” he asked.

Gustav had found falling back into the military life easier than he’d expected. Rolf might never have left it. Gustav had heard that some old sweats went straight from the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS into the French Foreign Legion: one of the few outfits that didn’t worry about where its soldiers came from. They really hadn’t quit soldiering. Now they fought in meaningless little wars in places like Senegal and Indochina, places that could never matter to anybody in a million years.

“Not much,” Gustav said. Afterwards, he had a hard time making himself believe he hadn’t jinxed things. It was quiet. Then, without warning, it wasn’t any more. A series of descending shrieks in the air made him yell “Down!” even as he threw himself flat.

The heavy shells slammed into the houses in Schwerte. Pieces of the houses started falling down. Gustav scuttled like a crab-arms and legs every which way, belly on the ground-toward a heavy table. He huddled under it. So did Max. They hugged each other, as much to keep from being knocked out of that problematic safety as for friendship and reassurance.

Something slammed into the top floor like a giant’s kick. Big chunks of roof crashed down onto the table. Gustav sniffed anxiously for smoke. If the place started burning, he’d have to leave in spite of the barrage. He hoped he didn’t shit himself before then. Lying under artillery fire was the worst thing in the world, as far as he was concerned.

After fifteen minutes that seemed like fifteen years, the shelling stopped as suddenly as it had started. He and Max both knew what that meant. “Come on!” they yelled in each other’s stunned ears. Untangling themselves, they hurried to the window.

Sure as the devil, men in khaki uniforms and Russian-style helmets not too different from their own were nosing forward. Gustav chopped down one of them with a short burst from his PPSh. Max wounded another. A moment later, the machine gun down the block spat death at the Red Army soldiers. The Russians-or were they satellite troops? — pulled back and hunkered down. They wanted the German soldiers served to them on a silver platter. If the first round of shelling hadn’t minced the Germans thoroughly enough, maybe a second would.

–

Aaron Finch nodded to his niece. “Give Leon dinner in half an hour or so. He’ll probably go to bed between eight and eight-thirty. Make sure he’s dry before he does. He shouldn’t kick up too big a fuss-isn’t that right, Leon?”

“No,” Leon said. He’d been doing that a lot lately. He was younger than the books claimed all the no-saying was supposed to start. That made him advanced for his age. This once, Aaron would have liked him better normal.

“I’ll handle him,” Olivia Finch declared. She was Aaron’s younger brother’s daughter, and had just turned thirteen. Marvin lived up in the hills, in a nicer part of town than Aaron did…and one farther from the downtown L.A. bomb. Olivia poked Leon in his belly button. “You’ll be a good boy for your Cousin Olivia, won’t you?”

“No.” Leon had strong opinions and a limited vocabulary.

“It’ll work out, Uncle Aaron,” Olivia said.

“Yup.” He nodded. If he hadn’t thought so, he wouldn’t have let her babysit. He was forking over half a buck an hour for dinner and a movie with Ruth and-more important-without Leon. He raised his voice: “You ready, dear?”

His wife came into the living room. “I sure am.” Aaron would have been amazed if she weren’t. She was one of those people for whom right on time counted as late. She smiled at Olivia. “You look nice.”

“Thanks, Aunt Ruth.” Olivia smiled back. To Aaron, Olivia looked like…his niece, wearing whatever silly clothes thirteen-year-old girls wore this year. If Olivia thought of herself as a budding femme fatale-or, if you wanted to get down to brass tacks, as thirteen going on twenty-eight-that was Marvin’s worry, not his.

Ruth, now, Ruth looked nice to him. She wore a sky-blue sweater over a white blouse, with houndstooth wool pants that did nice things to the shape of her waist and hips. Ruth was a woman; Olivia just wanted to be one.

“We’re going out, Leon,” Ruth said. “Wave bye-bye.”

“No,” Leon answered, but he did. His mouth said whatever it said. Sometimes it hardly seemed connected to the rest of him.

Out they went. Aaron held the Nash’s passenger door open so Ruth could get in. Then he went around and hopped in himself. As he started the car, he said, “One of these days, hon, I am gonna teach you to drive.”

“Okay,” Ruth replied. He’d been saying the same thing ever since they got to know each other. It hadn’t happened yet. As he backed out of the driveway, she added, “I feel funny going out and having a good time when there’s that horrible-hole-gouged out of the city just a few miles away.”

“I know what you mean.” Aaron had seen for himself what the bomb had done at much closer range than she had. “But the horrible hole will still be there if you stay home every day for the next two years and let Leon drive you meshiggeh. You’re entitled to a little fun.”

“Twist my arm.” She held it out so he could. He took his right hand off the wheel to give it a token yank. She let out a theatrical squeal for mercy. “Okay, Buster-you talked me into it.”

Aaron pulled into the parking lot at Bill’s Big Burgers. The BBB lot was crowded; quite a few people were out for a good time on a Saturday night. They didn’t let the war get them down, either, any more than they could help.

The Bill in question was a plump cartoon-y sculpture. He had amazing fiberglass hair, wore a shirt and shorts checked green and white, and clutched an enormous hamburger in his right fist and an equally enormous malt in his left. Aaron and Ruth rolled their windows all the way down and waited.

They didn’t wait long. A carhop also wearing a green-and-white-checked shirt and shorts came up with a large professional smile on her face. Her figure was much nicer than Bill’s. “Welcome to BBB,” she said, handing Aaron and Ruth menus. “I’ll be back in a minute to take your orders.”

“What are you gonna do?” Ruth asked.

“I was looking at the cheeseburger with onions-”

“Good thing we’re married.”

“Well, I think so, too. Like I said, a cheeseburger with onions, the fries, and a strawberry malt. How about you?”

“Strawberry malt and fries sound good. I think I’ll have the meat roosters to go with them.”

“Meat roosters!” Aaron snorted. Bill’s Big Burgers also peddled fried chicken. There was a picture of a strutting rooster in golf togs (why golf togs? God only knew) on the menu. Somehow or other, Leon had got that picture mixed up with fish sticks, which he loved. He’d started calling them meat roosters, he hadn’t stopped, and now his mother and father did it along with him.

When Aaron told the carhop what they wanted, he had to make himself not say meat roosters to her. She hustled back into the building to give the kitchen the order. He watched her hustle, not too obviously. She was young enough to be his daughter. And he was with his wife. So he watched without making any kind of fuss about watching.

She came back with a food-filled tray in each hand. She fixed one to Aaron’s door, the other to Ruth’s. “Enjoy your dinners,” she said, and hurried off to take care of another car.

BBB’s wasn’t fancy. When your mascot was a plump guy with silly hair, you weren’t likely to be. The place served plain chow cooked well. Aaron’s dinner was exactly that. After he’d reduced it to a few crumbs, he asked Ruth, “How’s yours?”

“Fine. If we weren’t going to the Deluxe from here, I’d save Leon the last meat rooster. Since we are-” She ate it.

The carhop came back to unhook the trays and settle the tab. Aaron tipped her a dime more than he would have if she weren’t cute. He’d heard somewhere that nice-looking people were more likely to be wealthy and happy than their plainer cousins. He was no beauty himself, but he was pretty damn happy with the gal he’d snagged. Wealthy? He shrugged, there in the old Nash. You couldn’t have everything.

Parking meters in downtown Glendale didn’t gobble coins from six at night to six in the morning. The City Council was talking about changing that, but hadn’t done it yet, no doubt fearing outraged-and cheap-citizens would throw the rascals out if they got greedy. Aaron figured he’d vote that way, but so far everything was just talk.

A whiskery panhandler stood in front of the Deluxe with an upside-down Hollywood Stars cap in his hand. Aaron gave him two bits and waved aside his whimpered thanks. Ruth rolled her eyes. She had to figure he’d spend it on bourbon. Maybe she was right, but Aaron had got a closer look at smashed Los Angeles than she had. The guy might be an ordinary Joe just down on his luck.

Not a first-run house, the theater was showing The African Queen. They’d already seen it once (Aaron had read it, too-he liked C. S. Forester), but it was worth watching again. He also wanted to see the newsreel. You got more concentrated pictures of what was going on in the world there than you did on TV.

What was going on in the world was the world going to hell in a handbasket-an atomic handbasket. A big crater in the middle of a tropical jungle was the wreckage of the Panama Canal. An equally big crater in the middle of a sandy desert was the wreckage of the Suez Canal. A smashed Russian tank in northern Italy said the Red Army still hadn’t muscled its way into Milan. A stream of refugees on a southbound road and the shot-up ruins of a train said the Italians still feared they might. A general pinned a medal on an Air Force pilot who’d downed his fifth MiG and become an ace.

After a stupid science-fiction serial, the movie came on. With A-bombs and jet planes and TV, the world was living a science-fiction life these days. Even so, that serial was dumb. Not The African Queen. You could say a lot of different things about it. Dumb, it wasn’t.

Aaron found himself eyeing Katharine Hepburn in a new way. After a moment, he worked out why. Jim Summers hadn’t been so squirrely as he’d thought. That gal down in Torrance, the one to whom they’d taken the refrigerator, did look a little like her. Not a lot, but enough to notice.

When they got back to the house, Ruth asked Olivia, “How’d it go?”

“It was okay,” she said. “He didn’t want to eat his string beans, but I sprinkled magic dust on ’em, and after that he did.”

“Magic dust?” Aaron said.

His niece waggled her fingers above an imaginary bowl. “Sure. Magic dust,” she said. “Makes everything yummy.”

“I bet it does.” Aaron decided to give her an extra quarter for finding a way to get Leon to do what she wanted. Little as the kid was, that could be tricky. He did what he wanted, and to hell with the rest of the world. “Come on, then. I’ll drive you back to your dad’s house.”

–

Boris Gribkov watched as the technician bolted the new IFF unit into its place in the radioman’s equipment behind the bulkhead on the right side of the Tu-4’s cockpit. The man began connecting wires to hook it up to the rest of the radio gear.

“This will really work?” Gribkov asked.

“Comrade Pilot, it ought to,” the tech answered over his shoulder as he worked. “We took this IFF set from a B-29 we shot down in Poland only a couple of days ago. We’ve fixed it up as best we know how. It should convince the enemy that your machine is a B-29 itself.”

“But our original IFF unit wasn’t copied from the B-29’s,” Gribkov said. “They told me that when I started training on the Tu-4. They took the unit from a different American bomber, a newer one.”

“Don’t worry. The Americans have updated the ones in their B-29s now, too,” the technician said. “And we’ve made this kind of swap before. I’ve done it myself, when I got my hands on a good unit.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said-a phrase with a multitude of meanings. Here, it translated as something like You prick, you’d better be right, because I’m stuck with it either way.

“We all do,” the technician agreed. “Do you know where they’ll send you once you’ve got your new toy here?”

“Nyet.” The pilot shook his head. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t have told the tech. The man might be honestly curious. Or he might report to the MGB. Boris didn’t want the Chekists landing on him for violating security. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his chest wouldn’t save him. Nothing saved you from that. They’d call him a stupid hero while they knocked his teeth down his throat.

That afternoon, once the tech was happy with the way the new IFF box worked, the base commandant summoned Gribkov and his copilot, bombardier, navigator, and radioman to his office. That was a tiny cubby, maybe the size of a submarine skipper’s, in the farmhouse; the strip outside Leningrad was as cramped as if it housed fighter planes only thirty kilometers behind the lines.

Lieutenant Colonel Osip Milyukov would have seemed at home at an airstrip like that. He was on the happy side of forty, though his medals said he’d had a busy time in the Great Patriotic War. “Well,” he said brightly, “so you’re all set up to give the imperialists a surprise, are you?”

“Yes, sir, unless they change their IFF codes before we take off,” Boris answered. “In that case, the joke’s on us.”

“They usually do that on the first of the month, so it shouldn’t cause you any problems.” Milyukov clucked in a peculiar form of military disapproval. “They ought to pick a day out of a hat, not do it on the same one every time. We’d have to work harder if they did. But if they want to make things simple for us, I don’t mind.”

“Simple is good,” Leonid Tsederbaum said.

Milyukov nodded. Boris could almost see the slot-machine wheels spin behind his eyes. They went Navigator…Jew…wise guy…but smart wise guy, so put up with him. Boris had made those same calculations about Tsederbaum himself.

“Simple is excellent,” Milyukov said. “So that’s why you’re going to bomb Bordeaux. The Americans are shipping things in there like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll put a stop to that, all right.”

“Long flight,” Gribkov said, and then laughed at himself. He’d flown from Provideniya to Seattle, and from Seattle a long way back across the Pacific. By comparison, any purely European mission was only a schoolboy jaunt.

Osip Milyukov got his pipe going. It was the same model as Stalin used. Boris wondered whether the other officer had chosen that style because Stalin used it. One more question he wouldn’t ask. After sending up some smoke signals, Milyukov unfolded a map and used a capped pen for a pointer. “This is the route you’ll fly,” he said when he’d traced it twice.

“Sir, that isn’t simple,” Tsederbaum said. Boris Gribkov was thinking the same thing. By the looks on their faces, so were his crewmates. Being a smart wise guy-and the navigator-Tsederbaum could, and had, come out with it.

“I will have all the bearings and distances for you before you take off,” Milyukov said. “And, while it may not be simple, you can see how it combines with the captured IFF box to improve the element of surprise.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Tsederbaum said.

A tractor brought a fat bomb to the Tu-4. The special armorers in charge of atomic weapons winched the bomb off its trailer and up into the big plane’s bomb bay. Like the one that had attacked Seattle, this bomber was painted in U.S. Air Force colors. If you were going to duplicate all the mechanisms on your enemy’s expensive machine, why not confuse him some more by duplicating its markings?

Takeoff in a Tu-4 duplicated the anxiety B-29 pilots knew. Would you coax the huge, ungainly monster into the air? Boris breathed easier once the bomber climbed past two thousand meters. If you got going, you’d usually keep going-as long as you didn’t run into enemy fighters.

He droned south and a little west. He flew right over Minsk, hoping MiG-15s wouldn’t take him for a real B-29 and shoot him down. One A-bomb had already hit the Byelorussian capital. The crater reminded him of a canker sore on the world’s gum.

The sun set just before the bomber left the USSR and entered Romanian airspace. Romania had joined the Soviet Union in the fight against capitalist imperialism, but, aside from contributing a few second-line divisions, hadn’t done much.

Over a town called Craiova in the southwestern part of the country, Tsederbaum said, “Change course to 270, Comrade Pilot. I say again, change course to 270.”

“I am changing course to 270,” Gribkov replied, and swung the Tu-4 due west. He was up above 11,000 meters now, as high as it would fly. In a little while, they passed out of Romania and into Yugoslavia. Tito’s Yugoslavia was socialist, but deviationist. He’d broken with Stalin, and he’d stayed neutral in the war. If his defenses detected the Tu-4, and if he had fighters that could get high enough, he might try to attack it.

No challenges came from the ground. No antiaircraft fire climbed into the darkness. No Yugoslav fighter planes made runs at the Tu-4. Gribkov guessed Tito’s men had no idea it was there. He kept flying.

Yugoslavia gave way to the Adriatic between Zadar and Split. “Switch the IFF set to its American configuration,” Gribkov told Andrei Aksakov.

“Comrade Pilot, I am switching the set to its American configuration,” the radioman replied.

Now, as far as any electronic snoopers could tell, they were an American B-29 going about its business. Gribkov flew across the Adriatic, across Italy, and came to the Ligurian Sea near Pisa. He stayed over the water, passing south of Marseille, and entered France near Perpignan. Had he gone too far south and come into Spain instead, Franco’s Fascists might have tried to meet him with leftover Messerschmitt-109s, though they probably couldn’t have reached his height.

“There’s the Garonne!” Tsederbaum sounded surprised and exultant at the same time. “Now all we have to do is follow it northwest to Bordeaux.”

Alexander Lavrov let the bomb fall free at Boris’ command. No one had wondered about them from Leningrad all the way here. Gribkov swung the Tu-4 into its escape turn. The parachute delayed the fall of the bomb. When hellfire burst out behind them, blast buffeted the Tu-4 but did it no harm.

“Now we see if we get back to the rodina,” Zorin said with a wry chuckle. “They may not have known we were here before, but I bet they do now.”

“They may,” Boris told the copilot, “but will their IFF?” He was betting his life-all their lives-it wouldn’t.

–

Cade Curtis had always admired George Orwell. Animal Farm told people what Stalin was like years before they wanted to hear it. Orwell’s new one, 1984, had come out just ahead of the day Cade traded in civvies for Army olive-drab. He read it in a night, and came away with his mind reeling at the totalitarian world and at the scrunched-down language that totalitarian world required. As far as he was concerned, 1984 was a doubleplusgood book.

And then there was Homage to Catalonia. Orwell hadn’t just talked about fighting Fascism. He’d gone and done it, and got himself shot in the doing. While he was in Republican Spain, he’d also noted and written about Marxist doctrinal splits and how they hampered the war against Franco. (These days, having outlasted his Fascist pals, Franco was an American ally. Politics could be a mighty peculiar business.)

One of the other things Orwell had seen while in the trenches was that the Spanish Civil War was the first loudspeaker war. Phalangists and Republicans threw loud, amplified lies across no-man’s-land at each other. Anyone on either side who believed the other’s propaganda would no doubt regret it in short order. Both made the effort, though.

At the start of the Second World War, the Phony War between the Western Allies and Germany (the Sitzkrieg, the Germans had called it) was mostly a loudspeaker war, too. Again, both sides also used them later.

And loudspeakers were very much in play here in Korea. The Red Chinese used them whenever the fighting bogged down, which was often. Sometimes what came out of them was pretty thick stuff: people going on about how wonderful Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao were, all in an accent straight out of a Chinese laundry back home. That kind of crap was easy to ignore.

As time went by, though, they got smoother. More people who really spoke English started giving spiels for them. If somebody who sounded like you said you were fighting for the wrong cause and that things on Mao’s side of the line were wonderful, you could be tempted to listen to him. You’d be a prime jerk if you did, but what army didn’t have some prime jerks in it?

Uneasily, Cade wondered how many American prisoners the Reds had taken south of the Chosin Reservoir. Not everybody they overran there would have died. When you were surrounded and cut off, you might throw down your M-1 and raise your hands and hope for the best.

And then, once you were a POW, what if they said they’d feed you better if you did some talking for them? What if they said they wouldn’t feed you at all if you didn’t? What if they worked on you the way O’Brien worked on Winston Smith in 1984? Would some prisoners start to love Big Brother? The garbage that sometimes came from the loudspeakers argued they would.

The Americans used loudspeakers themselves. What they shouted across the barbed wire sounded to Cade like cats in a sack when you kicked it. He didn’t find Chinese a beautiful language.

Every so often, though, one of the Reds would sneak across no-man’s-land and give himself up. It didn’t happen every day, but it happened often enough for Cade to notice. When his battalion CO came to the forward trenches to see how things were going, Cade asked, “Sir, what are we yelling at the Chinks? It seems to do something, anyway.”

Major Jeff Walpole grinned a sly grin. “Ah, you haven’t heard that story, huh?”

“No, sir,” Cade answered. “What is it?”

“What we yell on the loudspeakers is something a psy-ops colonel named Linebarger cooked up. He speaks perfect Chinese-he’s an American China big shot’s kid. I mean somebody with clout. Sun Yat-sen was Linebarger’s godfather, for cryin’ out loud.”

“Wow! Really?” Cade said.

“I wasn’t there to see it myself. I haven’t met Linebarger. From what I gather, he’s not an easy guy to meet. But that’s what I hear. And anyway, what we’re telling them is, they can come in to our lines yelling Chinese words like love and virtue and humanity. And when they yell ’em in the right order, it sounds like I surrender in English. Lets ’em give up without losing face, you know?”

“Wow,” Cade said again. “That’s one sneaky guy. I thought I heard something like I surrender in all the Chinese jibber-jabber, but who can tell? I mean, it’s Chinese, sir.”

“Yeah, it’s Greek to me, too.” Walpole grinned. Cade winced. The older man continued, “We drop leaflets on ’em with the same message. It works. From what they tell me, it works better than most of the rest of our propaganda.”

“If it works, we ought to stick with it,” Cade said.

“Feels the same way to me.” Like Curtis, Walpole wouldn’t look out at the Red Chinese positions from any of the loopholes set up so American soldiers could do exactly that. Nine times out of ten, maybe ninety-nine out of a hundred, you’d get away with it. The odd time, a sniper would be waiting and put one through the eye you used to do the looking. The battalion commander found his own observation points. “Quiet for the time being,” he remarked.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Curtis replied. “They tried that armored assault on us, and the Corsairs came in and smashed it up. They were like kids with new toys-they’d got some tanks through! Then we went and broke the new toys, so they’ve been sulking ever since.”

“People who outrank me weren’t very happy when those tanks showed up,” Walpole said. “I mean to tell you, son-they were not happy. We dropped an atom bomb on Harbin, remember, and on the rail line through Harbin. And now the line’s a going concern again. Nobody figured the Chinks could drive it through there anywhere near so fast.”

Nobody had figured the Red Chinese would swarm over the Yalu the way they had, either. Nobody had figured they would be able to do such horrible things to the Americans and other UN troops south of the Chosin Reservoir. If they hadn’t cut them off from Hungnam and started grinding them to bits, maybe Truman wouldn’t have decided to use atom bombs in Manchuria. Underestimating Red China came with expensive consequences.

The major, though, wouldn’t care about the political and strategic views of a shavetail first looey too young to vote or buy himself a drink. So all Cade said was, “Lord help the poor suckers who rebuilt that railroad. I bet every one of ’em glows in the dark.”

“I bet you’re right,” Walpole said. “Considering how the Reds throw soldiers at us the way rich guys throw money at chorus girls-and considering how they lose ’em as fast as the rich guys burn through their cash-is it any wonder if they spend railroad workers the same way?”

“No wonder at all, sir,” Cade said.

Once more, he didn’t feel like arguing with his superior. It wasn’t even that he thought Jeff Walpole was wrong. But the Red Chinese didn’t have planes and abundant artillery and bunches of tanks. They had bunches of men with rifles and submachine guns. The Americans could spend ordnance to kill them. They had to spend men to kill Americans, and did what they had to do. That their commanders did it as cold-bloodedly as if they were snakes lent itself to Walpole’s point, but to fight the war at all they would have had to do it whether they cared to or not.

Off in the distance, a rifle banged-once, twice. That was a Mosin-Nagant, probably in a Chinaman’s hands, maybe fired by one of Kim Il-sung’s finest. A Browning machine gun stammered death back at it. One more bang from the rifle. Another quick, professional burst from the Browning.

Cade hefted his own Soviet submachine gun. If things heated up, he was ready. But they didn’t. One of the clowns on the other side had got excited about nothing, and that was as far as it went.

Walpole pointed to the PPSh. “Like that piece better than the carbine they gave you, huh?”

“You bet, sir,” Cade said, in lieu of You bet your ass, sir.

But all Walpole said was, “You’re nobody’s fool, kid. The carbine’s a piece of junk, but you can do yourself some good with one of those babies.” They beamed at each other. For an old guy, Cade thought, the major was all right.