4
This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. Bill Staley remembered being impressed with “The Hollow Men” when he first ran into it. Amazing that the fellow who wrote black verse like that and “The Waste Land” could also turn out silly poems about cats. There you were, though.
And there T. S. Eliot was, in London. As far as Bill knew, he was alive and well and still writing poetry. Good for him, the copilot thought, hurrying toward the big tent where General Harrison was in the habit of addressing his aircrews.
Eliot was alive and well for the moment, anyhow. If he was in London, how long he would stay that way might be anybody’s guess. “The Hollow Men” was a hell of a piece of poetry-no two ways about it. But Eliot hadn’t got everything in it right. By all the signs, the world was getting ready to go out with a whole bunch of bangs.
Other Air Force men were also heading for the tent. Bill didn’t like the looks on their faces. They had the air of people heading for the doctor’s office expecting to hear bad news. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his own mug bore the same apprehensive expression.
He ducked inside. There was a seat next to Major Hank McCutcheon, who piloted the B-29 where Bill had the right-hand seat. McCutcheon took a Hershey bar out of his pocket and disposed of it in two bites. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” he said.
“We can do whatever they tell us to do,” Bill said, hoping he didn’t sound too much like a man whistling past the graveyard.
Maybe he did, because McCutcheon answered, “We can, yeah. But I hope like hell they don’t tell us to do it.”
“Christ! Who doesn’t?” Like a lot of Americans stationed in the Far East, Bill had visited the ruins of Hiroshima. If you flew in a B-29, a plane that might drop an atomic bomb, weren’t you obligated to take a look at what you did for a living? Bill thought so. Even after five years, even with the Japs rebuilding across the vast field of rubble, what the bomb had done was enough to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind. It had finally made Japan realize she was facing something she couldn’t fight back against.
Of course, what the Red Chinese were doing farther north on this peninsula was plenty to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind, too. Damn few soldiers or leathernecks had made it back to Hungnam. The new troops flowing into Korea were trying to keep the enemy from overrunning the peninsula again, not to conquer it up to the Yalu themselves. They weren’t having all that much luck. The Reds weren’t in artillery range of the air base yet, but it wasn’t impossible that they could be one day before too long.
And atomic weapons might not knock Red China out of the war. Stalin had them, too. He could hit Europe with them, and with his own hordes of soldiers. With his knockoff of the B-29, he might reach America, too. Who had the will, the stamina, to go on after catching a few like that on the chin? There was the question, all right.
Instead of a candy bar, Bill pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He’d just got one going when Brigadier General Harrison strode to the lectern. Harrison carried a pointer in his right hand. He walked as stiffly as if he’d shoved another one up his rear. The way his features looked didn’t argue against that, either.
He glanced down at his watch. Reflexively, Bill checked his own wrist. It was 1458; things were supposed to start at 1500. People were still coming in. Bill guessed anyone who showed up late for this particular dance would catch several different flavors of hell.
At 1500 on the dot (well, twelve seconds after, by Bill’s Elgin), Matt Harrison smacked the lectern with the pointer. “Let’s get started,” he said. “You may have guessed why I’ve called you together again. I’m afraid I have to tell you your guesses are likely to be good.”
“Aw, hell,” Hank McCutcheon whispered. Bill nodded; he couldn’t have put that better himself.
To leave no possible room for doubt in anyone’s mind, Harrison went on, “I have received orders from General MacArthur, with the approval of President Truman, to initiate the use of atomic bombs against several cities in Manchuria and other areas of northeastern China. We are going to stop Mao from flooding Korea with Red Chinese troops. We will destroy the rail lines they use and the bases and barracks within China where, up until this time, they have been immune from attack. Are there any questions?”
A pilot stuck his hand in the air. Harrison aimed the pointer at him as if it were a rifle. “Sir, what happens if the Russians start throwing A-bombs around, too?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Brigadier General Harrison said. “The best answer I can give you is, if they want to play the game, they can play the game. And we’ll see who stands up from the table when it’s over. Does that tell you what you want to know, Miller?”
“Yes, sir,” the flyer answered. What else could you say when your CO came out with a question like that?
Bill wondered whether Harrison would give men the chance to decline to fly in a plane loaded with atomic weapons. The general didn’t. He assumed that they’d already done whatever talking with their consciences they needed. “I will call pilots up here one by one to give you your targets and the supporting information related to completing your missions. You may open your orders as soon as you return to your seat.”
Hank McCutcheon was the fifth man he summoned to the lectern. The major came back with the envelope in his right hand. He didn’t touch the seal till his behind was on the folding chair again; he took Harrison literally. When he did open the envelope, Bill saw a name in big black letters: HARBIN. Below the name, a note read This plane will carry the device. Others in the flight will support and decoy.
Harbin. Bill knew it was a good-sized city in Manchuria. How many tens of thousands of people would he help fry tonight? Better not to think about some things. This plane will carry the device. How could you not think about that?
He tried to turn himself into a machine. Along with the other ten men in the crew, he spent the rest of the daylight hours checking out the B-29. The engines ran hot; they always had. If one failed while you were taking off fully loaded, you had to try to put the plane down.
And if that happened, Marian and Linda would collect on his government life insurance. Pilots had done it and walked away, but the odds lay somewhere between bad and worse.
They took off after dark. The Japs hadn’t been able to shoot down day-flying B-29s. The North Koreans and their Russian and Chinese pals damn well could. Radar, better guns, more and better planes…A MiG-15’s big guns could tear a bomber to bits in nothing flat.
Twin Mustang F-82s flew escort for the bombers. The night fighters carried their own radar. They had more range and more speed than almost any other prop jobs. Put one up against a MiG, though, and it was in deep. The guys in those cockpits had to know it. They climbed in and flew anyhow.
A little flak came up at the planes as they droned north. When they got over North Korea, it grew heavier. B-29s had often bombed Red positions there.
They took a dogleg to the east to skirt MiG Alley. When they crossed the Yalu instead of turning back, the radioman came forward from his position aft of the cockpit and said, “I’m getting all kinds of hysterical traffic in Russian and Chinese. They know something new has been added.”
“Understand any?” Bill asked.
“Not a fucking word, sir,” Sergeant Hyman Ginsberg answered proudly.
Harbin lay a little more than four hundred miles north of the river: just over an hour’s flying time. The Reds had time to scramble only a few planes. Sergeant Ginsberg reported the F-82s clashing with MiG-9s: second-string Russian jets, a lot like the German Me-262 from the end of World War II. Even a second-string jet could shoot down a none-too-new bomber. Bill was glad the Twin Mustangs were on the job.