Bombs Away

23

Vasili Yasevich smiled when he walked into the teahouse. “What do you know, Mei Ling?” he said when the pretty serving girl came over to him.

“I know you’re a nuisance,” she answered, but she was smiling, too. “What can I get you this afternoon?”

“Tea and some buckwheat noodles,” he said. The Japanese had introduced those noodles to northeastern China when they ran things here. People kept eating them even though the Japanese were long gone. They were tasty and cheap at the same time: the perfect combo.

She brought them back splashed with soy sauce and garnished with chopped scallions and leeks. Vasili handled chopsticks as if he’d used them all his life-which he had. He held the bowl up to his face and slurped away. He wasn’t always neat, but neither were the Chinese. Neat eating was for aristocrats, the last thing you wanted to look like in Mao’s People’s Republic.

Mei Ling giggled behind her hand. “What’s so funny, toots?” Vasili asked, though he already had a good idea of the answer.

Sure enough, she said, “It’s just strange, watching a round-eye eat like a regular person. I always laugh when I see that.”

“I am a regular person.” Vasili used the same northeastern dialect of Mandarin she did. Why not? Hadn’t he grown up in Harbin himself? After another slurp and a gulp, he went on, “I’m a regular person who has round eyes, that’s all. How many other round-eyes have you watched eating like this?” His right hand shoveled more noodles into his mouth.

“A few,” she said. “There aren’t as many round-eyes here as there used to be. And the ones who come over from Russia, they want knives and forks. Where am I going to get knives and forks?”

“Beats me,” Vasili said. One or two surviving Russian eateries still had some for people who wanted them. A few Russian old-timers might use them at home. Vasili knew how; his mother and father had preferred them. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d picked up a fork. He really was a regular person: a fair-skinned, big-nosed regular person with a thick beard and round blue eyes.

People in some countries didn’t all have the same general coloring and cast of features. Some looked like Vasili, some like Chinese; he supposed some were even Negroes (except for a few pictures, he’d never set eyes on one). China, though, wasn’t like that. Everybody here looked Chinese…except for Vasili and a few other relics of bygone days.

Mei Ling said, “Even though you’re a round-eyed barbarian, you talk and you act like a civilized person.”

That was what she meant. What she said was like a man from the Middle Kingdom, which was China’s name for itself. To Chinese, only Chinese could be civilized. Everybody else was a barbarian, somebody unlikely to speak the language (very unlikely to read it) and all too likely to make messes on the floor.

For hundreds of years, China had been the big wheel in the Far East. Japan, Korea, Indochina, Thailand, Burma…They all pretty much followed China’s lead in style and culture. None of them got ahead of China. And the occasional Europeans were oddities when they weren’t nuisances.

Then they turned into dangerous nuisances, nuisances who could do things the Chinese couldn’t. For one of the rare times in history, foreigners ordered Chinese around, and had the strength to make their orders stick. Russians, Englishmen, French…even the Japanese started doing it. That had to be doubly humiliating, as if a wayward son beat up a proud but weak father.

So of course the Chinese distrusted foreigners. Vasili understood it no matter how much trouble it caused him. “I hope I am like a civilized person,” he said. “I hope I am enough like a civilized person to keep you company every now and then.”

Mei Ling giggled some more. “Well, maybe,” she said, and then, tartly, “Took you long enough to get around to asking.”

“Sorry,” Vasili muttered. One of the few things he knew about Negroes was that white people often made rules against getting too friendly with them. Chinese sometimes felt the same way about whites. Knowing that had made him shy-but not too shy.

He left money on the counter and walked out whistling. He was as happy as he had been since the atom bomb fell, maybe as happy as he had been since his parents killed themselves instead of letting the Chekists take them back to the workers’ and peasants’ paradise of the USSR. They’d thought death was better than that. From the stories they’d told, Vasili could see why.

He stayed happy for about ten minutes: the time he took to walk from the teahouse to his own shanty. He rounded the last corner on his little alleyway-and stopped, and drew back. A jeep was parked there, probably one seized from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces during the civil war. He wouldn’t have thought the alley wide enough to let it squeeze through, but there you were-and there it was.

The men who’d come in it would be in the shack now, tearing it to pieces. He didn’t need to see them to know that. They’d be looking for…for opium, of course. “Yob tvoyu mat’,” Vasili whispered, aiming the obscenity at the official Wang’s wife had sent his way. He should have known the son of a bitch would want to get even. Dammit, he had known.

Now what am I going to do? he wondered. Here he was, a fair round-eye in a land full of golden-skinned, black-haired people. He was as conspicuous as a snowball in a coal cellar. Running away seemed unlikely to do much good.

But he couldn’t walk up to those policemen or whatever they were and go Here I am! He knew what would happen if he did: the kinds of things that would have happened to his father and mother had they got dragged back to the Soviet Union. Mao’d learned a lot from Stalin. He had native talent, too.

So, while running wasn’t a good choice, plainly it was the best one he had. They might not catch up with him for a while. If he headed north, he’d stay in country that had some idea what Russians were. Maybe he could slip across the border. Being without proper papers in Russia was deadly dangerous. His parents had made that clear. He had Chinese papers. But if all they showed was This man is wanted! that was even worse.

He headed for the abandoned blacksmith’s shop. If they were after him for selling opium, he might as well start doing it for real. They couldn’t kill him much deader for an actual crime than for an invented one. And selling the drug would get him more cash. He’d need that. They’d surely already stolen what he had in the shack.

He would have done better to have got some gold from the commissar with the craving. But Mao was so ferocious with anyone who had anything to do with opium, he hadn’t had the nerve. So here he was, on the run.

As a matter of fact, he strolled along as if he had not a care in the world. Looking scared was the dumbest thing you could do. As long as he acted the way he usually did, people here took him for granted. If he started skulking or sprinting, they’d wonder why. They would till they added two and two and got four, anyhow.

He did glance around-as casually as he could-before slipping into the old blacksmith’s shop through the hole in the side wall. Even after all these years, the place smelled faintly of horse. The odor was in the straw on the floor, and in the dirt. For all he knew, it had soaked into the planks of the walls.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he picked up the broken brick and found the apothecary’s jar still under it. On the chance that other people had also used the place to hide things, he did some more searching after he retrieved it. And he found two tarnished trade dollars-some people called them Mex dollars-that had probably been there longer than he’d been alive. He took them, too. Silver was silver.

Should I rest here for a while? he wondered. The idea of sleeping on horse-smelling dirt didn’t excite him. But neither did the idea of rushing out there and getting nabbed. He lay down. His jacket made a good enough pillow.

It was dark when he woke-the dark of a blacked-out city. He yawned, but didn’t try to sleep any more. Time to get moving. He might be able to swap town for countryside by the time the sun came up.

–

Out in the kolkhoz’s fields, horses pulled plows. The tractors sat idle for lack of fuel. Sowers with bags of seed planted wheat and barley seeds in the furrows. Ihor Shevchenko was one of them.

The work was long and tedious, but he didn’t mind. The black earth that made the Ukraine famous smelled as rich as some of the chops he’d cut from Nestor’s loin. When you got a whiff of that newly plowed ground, you thought you could eat it instead of the crops that sprang from it.

Plenty of Ukrainian peasants must have tried that when Stalin starved them into collectivizing. They’d died, so it didn’t work, even if it smelled as if it should. You had to do the rest of the work.

Ihor cast seeds here and there. He wasn’t especially careful about it. Why bother? The fields were communal. He wouldn’t get anything extra if they yielded a lot of wheat. If they yielded only a little, the kolkhoz chairman would lie to the people in charge of this area. They would lie to their superiors, and life would go on.

One of the other sowers waved an empty seed sack. A kid tore across the field with a full one. You weren’t supposed to have used up all the grain in a sack so soon. It wasn’t as if Bohdan cared, though. All he cared about was getting through the day so he could start drinking.

Petro Hapochka stood watching the workers from the edge of the field. He would have joined the sowing himself, or perhaps guided the horses up and down, if not for his missing foot. Ihor wondered if he’d give Bohdan hell for screwing around. He ought to, but Ihor doubted he would.

Ihor paused to light a Belomor cigarette. The White Sea name celebrated the canal dug from Lake Vygozero to the arm of the Arctic Ocean. One of the guys who used to live at the kolkhoz had helped dig it: he was one zek among countless others. From what he said, the idea was more to use up political prisoners than to make a useful canal. He hadn’t had any idea how many died from overwork or hunger or cold. He’d pegged out himself, just after Ihor came home from the Great Patriotic War. The guy’d lived through his stretch in the gulag, but not with his health.

Did as many die as an atom bomb kills? Ihor wondered. The bomb gave an easy, quick way to measure the atrocities of Stalin and the MGB. The only trouble was, you’d see the gulag yourself if you told that to anyone you didn’t trust with your life.

“We’ll have a bumper crop this year,” Bohdan said loudly.

“Sure we will,” Ihor agreed, also loudly. You wanted people to hear you saying things like that. It showed you were loyal. If you talked that way, no one would care how much you screwed up the actual work.

The horse plodded up and down the field, plowing furrows and also manuring them. The tractor did much more in a day. Following the horse was more pleasant, as long as you didn’t step in anything.

Every so often, Ihor would glance up to the sky. That seemed more important than watching out for horseshit on the ground. Contrails scared him, especially when they came out of the west or south. Those might be American bombers paying Kiev another call. Jet-engine noises also alarmed him. Either they were bombers or fighters trying to climb high enough fast enough to go after bombers.

“Stalin will be pleased with our harvest this fall,” Bohdan declared.

“Of course he will,” Ihor said. “Great Stalin is always pleased when the peasants and workers do well under the leadership of the glorious Communist Party.”

He raised his voice, so as many of the sowers as possible could hear. Inside, he wanted to wash out his mouth with soap-or, preferably, vodka. You did what you had to do to get by. You couldn’t just keep quiet about the man and the party ruling the Soviet Union. No, if you did that, your friends and acquaintances might think you kept quiet because you had nothing good to say about Stalin and the Communists. Someone who thought something like that was bound to report you to the MGB.

And so, every so often, people spoke up in hearty tones about how wonderful things always had been, were, and always would be in the USSR. Famine in the Ukraine, famine spurred on by fanatical Communist officials? War against Germany so badly botched, the country almost went under? American atom bombs landing everywhere from Leningrad to Petropavlovsk? All those were only bumps on the road to true socialism.

You had to say they were, anyhow, as long as anyone could hear you. You didn’t dare say anything else, not unless you were in bed with your wife, in the middle of the night, all alone, with both your heads under the covers-and maybe not then, either, not if you knew what was good for you. You might have opinions about those other bits of business, but having them and voicing them were two different things.

“Great Stalin looks out for all the people of the Soviet Union,” Bohdan said. “Without his care, the country would fall to pieces.”

“He does,” said Ihor and some of the other sowers.

At the same time, others intoned, “It would.” By the way their voices rose and fell in unison, they might as well have been giving responses to the priest in church. That was another point you made only in the dark and under the covers, if you were so crazy as to make it at all.

Ihor had got far enough west with the Red Army before stopping one to see that life in Poland was richer than life in the USSR, while life in Germany was far richer than life in Poland, much less here. For the life of him, he’d never been able to figure out why the Nazis, who already had a country with so much for everybody, tried to conquer one so much poorer. It made no sense.

But then, a lot of what the Nazis did made no sense. If only they’d treated Russians and Ukrainians halfway decently, they would have got more willing workers and volunteers to fight alongside them than they knew what to do with. Instead, they turned everyone they overran into slaves-except for commissars and people like Jews and gypsies, whom they killed outright. Next to that, even Stalin started looking, well, great.

Somewhere off in the distance, in the woods or on the plain, Banderists lingered. They flew the Ukraine’s old blue-and-yellow flag, or their own red-and-black one. They still skirmished with the Red Army and the MGB. Sometimes the nationalists had fought Soviet soldiers alongside the Germans, sometimes on their own hook. When they went into the gulag these days, they won twenty-five-year terms, not the tenners that had been more common before.

Ihor wondered what they thought of great Stalin after the A-bomb fell on Kiev. He also wondered whether the bomb made people who hadn’t been Banderists decide the great Stalin wasn’t so great after all and join the rebels. He hadn’t seen any Banderist propaganda around here for a while. Would it start showing up again?

Down the field. Up the field again. Wave for a bag of seed. Wait till one of the boys brought it to you. Pause at lunchtime to eat blintzes full of cheese and gulp kvass. Kvass was slightly fermented: on the way to being beer. You’d do nothing but piss for a month if you drank enough of the stuff to get a buzz, though.

Petro Hapochka stood at the edge of the field all day long, shouting encouragement to the men working out there-and occasional obscenities at them when they faltered. He took being kolkhoz chairman seriously. You had to, if you were going to do the job at all.

If…Ihor wouldn’t have taken Petro’s post for a suitcase full of hundred-ruble bills, a motorcar, and a house all his own the size of the communal barracks. Some things came at too high a price. Trying to keep both the kolkhozniks and the Communist higher-ups happy seemed to him to be one of them.

He aimed no higher than getting through another day, another month, another year. As long as nobody arrested him or shot him, he was ahead of the game. Oh-and as long as nobody dropped an atom bomb on him, either.

–

The briefing officer whacked the pull-down map with a pointer. If this had been Korea rather than Japan, Bill Staley would have guessed the light colonel was taking lessons from General Harrison. “Khabarovsk,” the briefing officer said. “Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.”

Sitting in the folding chair next to Bill’s, Hank McCutcheon whispered, “Gesundheit!”

Those were pretty good sneeze-names, all right, even by Russian standards. But Bill had to fight not to laugh out loud. You didn’t want to get in trouble at a briefing. Sometimes it happened anyway, but not right then: somehow, he managed to hold a straight face.

Whack! “Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk,” the lieutenant colonel repeated. “As you see, gentlemen, both cities lie along the Amur River, on the Russian side of the border with Red China.” The U.S. government still didn’t recognize that Mao had won the Chinese civil war. As far as it was concerned, he remained a usurper and Nationalist Chiang the legitimate President of China, even if all he held was the island of Formosa.

Then again, as far as the American government was concerned, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were independent countries, not parts of Stalin’s USSR. To Bill, the one seemed as surreal as the other. He wasn’t a striped-pants diplomat. He didn’t want to be any such silly thing, either.

He also didn’t want to copilot Major McCutcheon’s B-29. When the Department of Defense recalled him to active duty, though, what other choice did he have but to put the uniform on again? Refuse and go to jail? He’d thought that was worse. He still did-except when the Commies were shooting at him.

“Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” One more time! Whack! “Both cities are also important centers through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. By striking them, we will help interdict Soviet supplies flowing through Red China and down into the Korean peninsula. We will help the men on the ground by reducing the pressure the enemy can bring to bear against them.”

When the briefing officer said striking them, he meant sending them up in atomic fire. That was what this mission was all about. Neither Siberian city had yet had A-bombs visited upon it. There were reasons why they hadn’t, too. Khabarovsk lay about three hundred miles north of where Vladivostok had been. Blagoveshchensk was another three hundred miles farther west. Bill didn’t know what kind of air defenses the cities boasted. To the best of his knowledge, neither did any other Americans. The crews on this mission would find out…the hard way.

“We are expending three atomic devices on each city.” The briefing officer used the peculiarly bloodless language so beloved of militaries around the world. “We want to ensure that the interdiction process is successful. Other B-29s will carry high-explosive bombs to take out anything the large explosions happen to miss. They will also serve to divide the attention of the Russians’ defensive personnel.”

They would be decoys, was what they would be. No one-except the crews in those Superforts and their families back home-would care if the pilots in the MiGs knocked them down. The more effort the Russians put into shooting down the planes that couldn’t hurt them badly, the better the chance of getting through the B-29s with the atom bombs had.

Bill was sure he wouldn’t be on a plane loaded with ordinary bombs. Hank McCutcheon had already brought his B-29 back from repeated missions with A-bombs. To the brass, that would argue he was good at it, better than some rookie would be. And maybe the brass were right, and maybe they were full of crap. You could toss heads six times in a row, and it wouldn’t mean a thing-just a statistical hiccup.

I’m a fugitive from the law of averages, Bill thought. That wasn’t the way you ought to go into a mission. You needed confidence. Just because you needed it, though, didn’t mean you’d have it.

“Any questions?” the briefing officer asked. Nobody said a thing. The men knew what they were getting into. This was what they’d bought when they let Uncle Sam teach them to fly. The officer with the silver oak leaves on his shoulders looked out at them. “Anyone who doesn’t care to fly the mission?”

Some people in South Korea had walked out. Bill wondered if he should have. It was the fastest way he could think of to escape the Air Force. But it was also letting down his crew and his country. He’d sat tight then. He sat tight now. So did everybody else.

“Very good,” the briefing officer said briskly. “Pilots-come forward to receive your orders for the mission.”

Since Bill was but a copilot, he went on sitting right where he was. McCutcheon walked up to get the envelope with the bad news in it. Whatever the news in that envelope held, it was bound to be bad. The only question was, which kind of bad would it be?

“So who wins the Oscar?” Bill asked when McCutcheon came back. He hadn’t broken the seal yet. Maybe he wasn’t jumping up and down to find out, either.

“Funny, Billy-boy. Funny like a busted leg,” he said, as if a broken leg was the worst they had to worry about. He slid his right index finger under the edge of the flap to make it come free. The noise of the glue breaking away from the paper reminded Bill of a small animal scratching to be let out. McCutcheon pulled out the folded sheet inside and unfolded it.

Blagoveshchensk, Bill read. He bit the inside of his lower lip. They’d spend an extra couple of dangerous hours over Russia, compared to the guys who’d hit Khabarovsk. The next line told him the B-29 would be carrying an A-bomb. By now, he wondered how much it mattered. His dreams couldn’t get any worse than they already were. He’d killed his tens of thousands. What were a few more tens of thousands after that?

The rest of the sheet detailed courses and altitude. They’d stay as low as they could as long as they could, to give Soviet radar sets as much trouble as possible. In the event that you should be intercepted, you will of course utilize your best judgment to extricate yourselves from the emergency, the orders finished primly.

Bill pointed to that last sentence. “Nice of them, isn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact, it is,” Hank McCutcheon answered. “If we were Russians, that bit’d go Keep following your assigned course no matter what.”

“I guess it would,” Bill said, but he wondered how much difference it would make. If a MiG-15 or even an La-11 came after them, they were dead meat. They could push the throttles over the red line. They could jink and dodge as much as they pleased-and as much as an elephant could tap-dance. None of it was likely to do them any good. Why not hold course? It wouldn’t cost more than a few minutes of life.

All the B-29s took off in swift succession and roared northwest through the night toward the Siberian coast. It was as routine as anything else the crews had done before. Bill’s nerves still twanged. That extra time over land gnawed at him.

He wondered if they would have done better to fly over Manchuria and hit Blagoveshchensk from the south. When he said so, Major McCutcheon replied, “Think the Chinks don’t have radar there and down in Korea? Think they don’t have jets ready to scramble? How much you wanna bet?”

“I’m already betting my neck,” Bill said. “What else can I throw into the pot?”

They droned along not that far above what seemed endless taiga: pine forests that ran from west to east just below the frozen tundra. Khabarovsk lay somewhere south of their flight path. Just when Bill was wondering whether they’d come that far into Russia yet, flashes of blinding light in the distance told him some other Superfortresses had found their targets.

“One down, one to go,” McCutcheon said.

“If they didn’t know we were around before, they probably have a hint now,” Bill said.

“Think so, do you?” the pilot answered.

Twenty minutes later, Bill wondered if he’d jinxed them. The radar operator started yelling about bogies. The B-29’s defensive guns hammered. And shells from a night fighter’s cannon ripped into the bomber. One of them tore off the left side of McCutcheon’s face. The plane was suddenly Bill’s, only it wouldn’t answer the controls. There was fire-fire everywhere.

“Bail out!” he yelled. He couldn’t himself, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Not only were there flames between him and his escape hatch, but his parachute was already burning. So was he. The B-29 tumbled down toward the black, snow-dappled pines.

–

Marian had just dropped Linda off at the camp kindergarten. She didn’t know why school had taken so long to get started in this miserable place. No, actually she could make a pretty good guess: too many other things for the authorities to worry about. But they’d finally noticed the swarms of kids too often running around in screaming packs.

So they said Let there be school, and there was school. And the parents looked on it, and they saw that it was good, and there was much rejoicing-among them, anyhow. And if their little darlings had a different opinion, too goddamn bad. Linda was out of Marian’s hair for several hours a day. Somebody else could ride herd on her for a while.

Having left her own flesh and blood at the kindergarten tent, Marian walked away, wondering what she would do with time to herself and to herself alone. She hadn’t had any since the bomb wrecked the house and left her and Linda with a Studebaker as a place to sleep. She kept looking behind her for the daughter who wasn’t there.

The camp loudspeakers crackled to life. They did that every so often. Like everybody else, Marian paid them no more attention than she had to. She walked along for half a dozen steps before she realized they were blaring, “Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately! Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately!”

Again like everybody else, she had as little to do with the camp administrative center as she could. You went there if you were in trouble or if you wanted to get someone else in trouble. She’d testified against Daniel Philip Jaspers after he tried to break into her car. She hadn’t gone back since.

It was easy enough to find. In front of it flew a big American flag on a tall flagpole. Nobody seemed to know how the flagpole had appeared when so many more important things still hadn’t. Most camp inmates thought it was stupid, not patriotic. Marian found herself among them.

Typewriters were clacking away when she walked inside. That was the only place in the refugee camp where she would have heard them. People came here with what they had on their backs, no more. Not even the craziest would-be author had a typewriter on his back.

Once she did go inside, the functionaries needed a couple of minutes to notice she was there. At last, a clerk looked up from whatever he was doing and said, “Yes? What do you need?” By the way he said it, it couldn’t be as important as his job.

“I’m Marian Staley.”

“Yes? And so?” He didn’t listen to the loudspeakers, either.

“Marian Staley,” she said again, more sharply this time. “The stupid speakers told me to come here. I want to know why.”

“I’m sorry, I have no idea,” the clerk said.

But another, older, man said, “Please come with me, Mrs. Staley. It is Mrs. Staley, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Will you kindly tell me what’s going on?”

“Please come with me,” the older clerk repeated. Fuming, Marian followed him around a makeshift wall of olive-drab sheet-metal file cabinets taller than a man. The administrative center was a big tent. Sitting on a folding chair behind the cabinets was an Air Force major. He jumped to his feet as soon as he saw the clerk and Marian.

“Ma’am, your husband is First Lieutenant William Gerald Staley?” he asked her, his voice altogether empty of expression.

“That’s right,” Marian said automatically.

“Ma’am, I am sorrier than I know to have to inform you that the B-29 in which your husband was flying was seen to go down in flames over the territory of the Soviet Union. It is not believed that anyone could have survived the crash.” Now the major did sound sad and sympathetic. He’d had to confirm who she was before he could start acting like a human being.

Her first dazed thought was A B-29 carries eleven. Were ten other officers telling ten other brand new widows or shocked mothers they’d just lost someone they loved? Or was she honored with a visit from an officer because Bill was an officer himself? Did enlisted men’s kinfolk get only a wire?

Then she realized none of that mattered. The meaning of what the major said began to sink in. “Bill’s…dead?” she whispered.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.” The officer nodded somberly. “I’m very sorry. He was on an important mission, and a dangerous one. Other planes succeeded in reaching and striking the target. Unfortunately, his was intercepted before it could.”

Important mission had to mean mission with an atom bomb, while striking the target meant doing to some Russian city what they did to Seattle. The language of war was bloodless. War itself…wasn’t. Bill’s job was to visit radioactive hell on America’s enemies. This time, they’d done unto him before he could do unto them.

Then all rational thought melted. She let out something between a shriek and a wail that made the older clerk hop in the air and startled even the sober Air Force major. She saw that in the instant before her own world dissolved in tears.

She wailed again, this time with words: “What are we going to do without Bill?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the major said once more. “I believe he has received a proper burial. The Russians have been respectful to our men killed on their soil, as we have with their casualties here.”

“I don’t care about any of that!” she said furiously. “I want my husband back! I want our little girl’s daddy back!”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said yet again. How many times had he stayed calm when somebody who’d lost the person who mattered most to her went to pieces in front of him? The duty couldn’t be easy. How did he stand it? Why didn’t he take a service pistol and blow his brains out? He went on, “I understand it can’t possibly make up for your loss, but his military insurance will assist you and your daughter in getting through this-”

Blind with grief and rage, she swung at him. She wanted to tear his head off. He caught her wrist before she connected. His palm was warm and dry and very strong.

“Ma’am, that won’t do you any good,” he said in tones suggesting he’d been swung on before. “I had nothing to do with it. I’m only the person who has to give you the news. I wish I didn’t have to come here to do it.”

Then what do you do it for? The thought flashed through her mind, but she didn’t come out with it. What was the use? With Bill gone, what was the use of anything?

“What will we do without him?” she said again. Would Linda even remember her father? Maybe a little-she’d been four when he went away. But only bits and pieces, nothing that really meant anything.

That was when it hit her. She would have to tell Linda that Daddy was dead. Linda knew what the word meant. She was a smart girl. But she knew it the way a kid did. She knew a dead bug when she saw one. Did she understand that, when a person died, he stayed dead the same way? Did she understand that forever meant forever, and there were no exceptions, even for her father?

Chances were she didn’t…yet, although maybe all the deaths at the camp had taught her. If she didn’t, she’d learn, a day, a week, a month, a year, at a time. Christ, so will I, Marian thought. Things like this happened to other people, or in movies. They didn’t happen to you.

Except when they did.

“The United States is grateful for your husband’s courage, ma’am,” the Air Force major said.

“Oh, fuck the United States!” Marian didn’t remember ever using that word before. She used it now. Had she known a stronger one, she would have used that, too.