Vladimir Zorin came out with a nasty chuckle. “We may not speak English, but the imperialists will understand what we tell them,” the copilot said.
“You’re right about that, even if they don’t understand us,” Gribkov said. His big hope for accomplishing his mission was that any American fighter pilot who happened to spot the Tu-4 would take it for a B-29 and pay no attention to it.
No guarantees, of course. No guarantees about anything that had to do with what they were about to try. All the aircrew knew that. Everybody understood it. No one had shied away or refused to fly, even though Colonel Doyarenko swore there would be no reprisals against anybody who wanted out.
Gribkov didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe any of the other flyers did, either. Maybe they wouldn’t give you a bullet in the nape of the neck. Maybe. But you would get an enormous black mark on your record. You would never see another promotion or another assignment you actually wanted. And what would happen to your family? They had all kinds of ways to make you sorry if you stepped out of line, and to make the people you loved even sorrier.
Two ladders led up into the bomber. Gribkov, Zorin, and Alexander Lavrov, the bombardier, climbed up into the one that led to the cockpit. The radioman, the navigator, the flight engineers, the radar operator, the fire-control scanners, and the poor, lonely tail gunner boarded through the bomb bay.
As soon as Gribkov was installed in the left-hand seat, he started running through checks with Zorin and Gennady Gamarnik, the engineer. The engines powering the Tu-4 were only cousins to those the B-29 used, but they had the same problems. They ran hot, and they were barely powerful enough to get a fully laden bomber off the ground. You had to be careful with them, or you wound up dead-to say nothing of all over the landscape.
When the engines started, the roar and vibration filled the cockpit. One by one, the Tu-4s in B-29’s clothing rumbled down the runways and climbed into the air. None of them climbed very high. They all turned southwest after takeoff: away from the questing radars near Nome and on St. Lawrence Island. Fighter-bombers were attacking those, but who could say if they’d knock them out?
After the Tu-4s had flown that way for twenty minutes or so, they swung to the southeast, toward the United States. They scattered across the North Pacific like wandering albatrosses, separating from each other one by one. Even if the Americans should spot them and come hunting, they wouldn’t have an easy time knocking them all down. And every single bomber packed a massive punch.
The sun sank behind Boris Gribkov. His Tu-4 flew almost half as fast as the line of night traveled. Since he was moving against the cycle, sunset came on sooner than it would have otherwise. Now it would be up to Leonid Tsederbaum, the navigator, to get them where they needed to go. He’s a smart Jew, Gribkov thought. He’ll take care of it.
He kept his fuel mixture lean and the throttles as low as he could while staying airborne. His target wasn’t at the far end of the Tu-4’s range, the way so many were. He wasn’t necessarily on a one-way trip. Not necessarily, no, but he knew damn well that remained the way to bet.
“Want to hear something funny?” Vladimir Zorin said.
“I’d love to hear something funny, Volodya,” Gribkov answered. “What have you got?”
“I was just thinking-if this really were a B-29, we could fly it.”
“Bet your cunt, we could!” Gribkov exclaimed. The dials and labels would be in English, but he knew what they did without reading them. The measurements would also be in the English units that had driven Tupolev’s aeronautical engineers to distraction. That could prove a bigger problem, but as long as the indicators stayed out of the red it wouldn’t be anything he needed to worry about.
Tsederbaum’s voice on the intercom sounded in his earphones: “Comrade Pilot, please bring the plane two degrees farther north. I say again, two degrees farther north.”
“I’m doing it.” As Gribkov spoke, his hands on his yoke and his feet on the pedals made the course correction with next to no conscious thought from him. He kept his eyes glued to the altimeter, the artificial horizon, and the angle indicator. You had to trust your instruments when you flew at night. Your senses would fool you and betray you. You’d think everything was fine till you went into the drink.
When he yawned, Zorin passed him a flat pressed-tin package of benzedrine tablets. He dry-swallowed one. “Shame I can’t wash it down with some vodka,” he said. His copilot gave back a crooked smile.
Gribkov’s eyes opened wider. His heart pounded harder. His mouth got dry. He’d been sniffling a little, but his nose dried out, too. His gaze darted from one instrument to the next like a hunted animal’s. The little white pill was on the job.
“You should take one, too,” he told Zorin. The copilot did. Benzedrine made you pay later, but that would be later. For now, Gribkov felt like a new man. And, right now, what would happen when he came down from the pep pill was the least of his worries.
He flew on. He saw nothing through the windshield but darkness and his own reflection, faintly lit up by the lights from the instrument panel. It might have been better that way. The USSR hadn’t tried making Plexiglas-much less curved sheets of Plexiglas-till it set out to duplicate the B-29. The result wasn’t perfect. In the daytime, you got a distorted view of the world. Darkness looked the same any which way, distorted or not.
More than three thousand kilometers from Provideniya to the target. More than two thousand miles, if you were going to think like an American. More than seven hours of flying. You just kept going. You monitored the course as best you could. Every so often, Tsederbaum gave you another small correction. You applied it.
How many more Tu-4s were in the air, from Provdeniya and Vrangel Island and other Soviet Far East bases? Gribkov had no idea. But the number wouldn’t be small. How many of those eleven-man crews would ever see the rodina again? He feared the number wouldn’t be large.
“Comrade Pilot, time to gain altitude for the attack run,” Tsederbaum said.
“Thank you, Comrade Navigator.” Gribkov pulled back on the yoke. The Tu-4’s nose rose. This was where things got tricky. He had literally stayed under the Americans’ radar on the way across the Pacific. But he had to rise to deliver the bomb. They’d spot him. His IFF would have outdated codes. If they were on their toes, they could scramble fighters. If the maskirovka didn’t fool them, they could shoot him down.
But there was the western coast of the USA, dead ahead. It was supposed to be blacked out, but it wasn’t. With the radar in the plane, that wouldn’t have mattered much, but a proper blackout would have made things harder. As they were, he could guide himself as if by a road map.
“Are we ready, Comrade Bombardier?” he asked as they flew 9,000 meters over sleeping Seattle.
“We are, Comrade Pilot,” Lavrov said. “I bomb at your order.”
“Bomb!” Gribkov said. The Tu-4 got five tonnes lighter as the egg of death fell free. He banked toward the ocean and mashed the throttles to the red line.
10
Marian Staley got Linda to bed a little past eight o’clock. Linda didn’t much want to go to bed-when did she ever? — but she didn’t pitch one of the famous fits that make four-year-olds lucky to live to five, either. After a while, the wiggling and soft singing from her bedroom settled down toward quiet. After a little while longer, surprisingly deep snores floated out. Marian smiled. Linda was down for the count.
To celebrate, Marian went into the kitchen, took a can of Olympia out of the icebox (actually, it was a refrigerator, but the old name stuck), and opened it with a church key. She started to pour the beer into a glass, then shook her head and drank from the can. She didn’t have anybody to impress. Besides, this way she wouldn’t have to wash the glass.