“Harbin dead ahead,” the navigator reported. He had a radar screen to guide them to the target. Hank and Bill had lights on the ground. Harbin wasn’t blacked out-the Red Chinese hadn’t looked for American visitors. Some flak climbed toward them. They were up past 30,000 feet, but even so…
“Let it go!” McCutcheon called to the bomb bay through the intercom. The B-29, suddenly five tons lighter, heeled away in a sharp escape turn to starboard. The bomb was on a parachute, to give them enough time to get away before the pressure-sensitive switch set it off.
–
When the antiaircraft guns started going off and woke him up, Vasili Yasevich thought it was the knock on the door for which he’d been waiting so long. He’d been a toddler when his father and mother fled from Russia to Harbin after the Whites lost the civil war to the Reds and their foreign backers pulled out.
For a while, Harbin had been as much Russian as Chinese. Cyrillic signs were as common as ideographs. Vasili’s father ran a pharmacy. His mother, a talented seamstress, made clothes for her exiled countrywomen. The family got along.
Then the Japanese burst out of Korea. Manchuria, loosely connected to the rest of China, became Manchukuo, a puppet of Japan’s. Life grew harder. But Japan and Russia weren’t officially at war. The Yaseviches weren’t Jews, as many of the exiles in Harbin were. They still managed to get along.
Vasili’s father taught him what he needed to know about compounding drugs. He learned fast but, like his mother, he was better with his hands than with his head. Give him a saw, an adze, a chisel, or a hammer and he couldn’t be beat. He helped his father now and then, but he made a better carpenter than a druggist, and they both knew it.
All at once, in August 1945, Japan and Russia-Manchukuo and Russia-were at war after all. The Red Army rolled into Harbin. The NKVD rolled in with it. The Soviet secret police had lists of people to execute or to send to the gulag. Instead of going with them, Vasili’s father and mother swallowed poison. They knew what to use. They were dead in less than a minute.
The NKVD didn’t bother with Vasili. He didn’t show up on their lists. Maybe they thought he was born after his folks came to Harbin. Maybe they decided making his parents kill themselves counted for enough to settle their score against the whole family.
He stayed on even after the Chinese Reds took over for their Russian tutors in 1946. He spoke Mandarin as well as he spoke Russian. He knew a couple of trades people needed. Even if he was a round-eye with a pointed nose, the Chinese in Harbin had got used to such folk.
He drifted from one job to another. The Red Army’s thunderous occupation of the city had made sure a carpenter wouldn’t lack for work. He picked up bricklaying as he helped rebuild what the Russians had knocked down.
One of these days, he supposed, Stalin’s flunkies would come back and take him away. Like any other wolves, they didn’t give up a trail. In the meantime, he did his best to keep going.
They were finally getting around to repairing the train station at Pingfan, twenty-five or thirty kilometers south of Harbin. It had been big and fancy during the war years-the Japanese had had some kind of secret project going on outside the little town. Vasili didn’t know, or want to know, the details. He just hoped he would get back to the city alive. Workers kept coming down with horrible things like cholera or the plague. A couple of them had caught smallpox, too, but he’d been vaccinated against that.
He lay on an old, musty sleeping mat in a barracks hall that couldn’t have been much flimsier if it were made of cardboard. You could see stars between the planks that made up the walls. When it rained, it was just as wet inside as out. Dung-burning braziers did little to fight the icy breezes.
And, of course, those ill-fitting planks-Vasili could have done much better if only someone had asked him to-did nothing to hold out the noise of gunfire. Vasili had snorted to see antiaircraft guns poking their snouts to the sky here. No one would want to bomb Pingfan. He didn’t think the Americans wanted to bomb Harbin, either. Had they wanted to, wouldn’t they have done it by now? The Chinese volunteers had gone into Korea months ago.
Vasili chuckled to himself, the way he always did when he thought of “volunteers.” He’d seen how the Japanese got them in Manchukuo. Volunteer or we’ll kill you worked wonders every time. His father had told stories that showed the Soviets understood the same principle.
So when the guns started going off in the middle of the night, he thought it had to be either a drill or a false alarm. “I hear planes!” another workman shouted in excited Chinese.
“You hear farts inside your stupid head,” Vasili muttered, but in Russian. He didn’t think any of the other men he was working with knew the language. Anywhere else in China, he would have been sure that was so. Near Harbin, you couldn’t be quite certain.
He couldn’t be sure the other workman was hearing brainfarts, either. Through the pounding of the guns, he might have heard engines high overhead, too. Maybe they were his imagination. He hoped they were. But he wasn’t sure, not any more.
Then he thought the sun had risen. Light-insanely bright light-filled the barracks. He closed his eyes. He jammed his face into the mat as hard as he could. None of that did any good. The light filled him and began to consume him. It was to sunlight as sunlight was to a candle.
Had it lasted longer than a moment, he felt sure he would have cooked the way a sausage did when you skewered it and thrust it into the fire. But, almost as soon as it was born, the impossible light began to fade and to go from white to yellow to orange.
“How can the sun come up in the north?” someone wailed.
“I’m blind!” someone else shouted. He must not have shielded his eyes fast enough.
Vasili hadn’t even noticed the light came from the north. He did notice that the blast of wind following the flash also came out of the north. And he noticed it was a hot wind, when the only natural gales from that direction came straight out of Siberia, if not straight off the North Pole. There hadn’t been any hot winds near Harbin for months, not from any direction.
The barracks creaked under the blast. The north wall crumpled and fell in on itself. That brought down part of the roof, too. Men shouted and squalled as planks and beams fell on them.
Nothing landed on Vasili, though a good-sized chunk of pine kicked up dust about thirty centimeters from his head. He scrambled out through the new hole in the building-the door seemed unlikely to work. Then he stared at the glowing cloud rising above what had been Harbin.
A Chinese stood beside him, also gaping at the mushroom of dust and who could say what else rising higher into the sky every second. Blood ran down the other man’s face from a cut by his eye. He didn’t seem to notice. His cheeks were also wet with tears.
“My family,” he whispered, more to himself than to Vasili. “Everyone who matters to me lives-lived-back there.”
“I’m sorry, pal,” Vasili said. He had no one who mattered to him. Not long before he came down to Pingfan, his latest girlfriend had dropped him like a live grenade. If she hadn’t, he might have stayed in the city. Then he would have been part of that boiling mushroom cloud himself.
“White men did this.” The Chinese stared at him now, not at Harbin. “Round-eyed barbarians did this.”
“Americans did it,” Vasili said quickly. If he didn’t talk fast, he could get lynched here. “I’m a Russian. If anybody can get even with the Americans, it’s Russia. The Americans hit China because China couldn’t hit back. Russia can.” He’d always hated Stalin and the mess the Georgian had made of Russia. Now, for the first time in his life, his heritage turned into something that might save him.