By the nature of things, you couldn’t answer such questions, not unless you were God. But you could worry at them, the way a dog worried at a bone. Worrying at questions like that was what made human beings human. Sometimes the question was more important than the answer.
And sometimes not. What did the bomb do to me? Ihor wondered. He couldn’t answer that one, either. But the answer was already written inside him, whatever it chanced to be. He would have to keep turning the pages of his life to discover it.
11
Major Hank McCutcheon had to be confident as he spoke for everybody in the B-29 as it took off from the airfield north of Pusan. “Payback,” McCutcheon said solemnly, “is a bitch.”
Sitting in the right-hand seat next to the pilot, Bill Staley knew damn well that McCutcheon spoke for him. “You betcha, sir,” he said, sounding like he felt: the fiercest bookkeeper on the face of the globe.
After bringing the yoke back a little farther to pull the bomber’s nose up, McCutcheon nodded. “You’d be the one to agree with me, all right. Hear anything from your wife yet?”
Bill shook his head. “Not a word. All I know is, that bomb went off between Seattle and Everett. They’re calling it the Seattle bomb in the papers and on the news, but I got the straight skinny from a G-2 guy on Harrison’s staff. I have no idea whether Marian’s alive or dead.” He didn’t know whether Linda was, either. That hurt even worse, or maybe just as bad in a different way. A little girl had no idea what war was all about, or why people could be willing-even eager-to kill one another in the sacred name of politics.
“You’ve got to be going out of your tree,” the pilot said as he swung the plane east, toward the Sea of Japan. McCutcheon went on, “Me, I’m glad I stayed in Omaha. The West Coast is pretty, yeah, but look at all the chunks the Russians bit out of it. They can’t get to Nebraska.”
“Yet,” Bill said. “Three or four years ago, they couldn’t get to the West Coast, either. And it’s not just the coast. Salt Lake City got it, for Chrissake. Denver!”
“Yeah, and the guys who smoked Denver landed with dry tanks at that Air Force Field outside of Colorado Springs, got out of their plane, and put their hands up-and nobody knew what to do with them till they started speaking Russian,” McCutcheon said in disgust. “Fucking Tu-4 looks just like a Superfort even before you give it the same paint job. Afterwards? Brother!”
“I don’t care if they came out of the same pussy when they were born,” Bill said savagely, which made McCutcheon guffaw. Jaw set with fury, Bill continued, “The air-defense people ought to get their balls handed to them in a sack. They knew the Russians were liable to attack. How many of those bombers did they shoot down? Two or three, that’s it. Spokane made it. Las Vegas is still safe for the gamblers. Happy goddamn day!”
“That one might’ve been going after Hoover Damn, not Vegas,” McCutcheon said. “If it was, the guys who shot it down really earned their paychecks that day.”
“Okay, fine. Those guys weren’t asleep at the switch. But everybody along the Pacific sure was. We don’t have a decent port north of San Diego any more.” Bill grabbed his yoke and squeezed as if it were a civil-defense coordinator’s neck.
“Well, Vladivostok’s going to glow in the dark like a radium clock dial for nobody knows how long,” McCutcheon said. The Air Force had hit the Soviet port near the border with North Korea with several A-bombs. But only one of those bombers came home again. The Russians had known they were coming and baked them a cake.
Staley’s B-29 and its comrades droned along just above the surface of the sea, to make themselves as hard for radar to spot as they could. The Ivans had done that on the way to the West Coast. It had worked for them. Imitation might or might not be the sincerest form of flattery. Bill hoped like hell it was the most effective kind.
Some of the planes in this flight were bound for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the main Russian town on the island north of Japan whose southern half Stalin reconquered in 1945. Some were heading for Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk. Though ice closed the port for close to half the year, roads connected it with the rest of Russia. Things delayed there might not get anywhere else in a hurry, but they eventually would.
And some B-29s, like this one, would call on Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Only the sea and air joined Petropavlovsk to the outside world. It was a major Soviet naval base all the same. It had been a naval base under the Tsars, too. During the Crimean War, the English and French attacked the place, but couldn’t take it. What they would have done with it if they had taken it was beyond Bill. That that siege had happened at all was one of those worthless bits of history he happened to know.
“You’re jiving me,” McCutcheon said when he mentioned it.
“Honest injun.” Bill held up a hand as if swearing an oath.
“Wow!” The pilot whistled softly. “That must’ve been the lost fighting the lost. Like that German pest in East Africa during the First World War who stayed in the field a month after it was all over everywhere else.”
“You wonder what was going through those admirals’ minds a hundred years ago. Honest to God, you do,” Bill said. “We’ve got these ships here, and there are the Russians, and if we don’t watch out they could sail around the Horn and bombard England year after next. Had to be something like that. Why didn’t they just sit tight and watch ’em?”
“Beats me,” McCutcheon replied. “Remember, the Russians did sail out of the Baltic, around Africa, and up to the Sea of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War.”
“And the Japs walloped the snot out of them, too,” Bill said. “Yamamoto was at that fight. He lost a couple of fingers there, if I remember straight.”
“You know all kinds of stuff nobody in his right mind gives a crap about, don’t you?” the pilot said, not without admiration.
“Useless information is my specialty, yes, sir,” Staley answered, not without pride. “Sometimes even useful information. If you want your taxes done after you get out of the Air Force and start making some real money again, come see me if we’re anywhere in the same part of the country.”
“Do I get a discount?” McCutcheon asked.
“Sure, and you won’t even have to jew it out of me. Everybody on the crew gets the special helped-keep-me-alive discount.”
“I like that.” McCutcheon straightened in his seat and pointed ahead and to the left. “I think those are the two islands that lead up to the Kamchatka Peninsula. We’re down mighty low, but I’m gonna swing away from ’em anyhow. The Reds are bound to have radar stations on ’em. Hell, I would.” He spoke over the intercom: “I’m changing course five degrees east.”
“Noted,” answered Roger Williamson, the navigator.
The islands were lumps of dark mud in sea, which the waning crescent moon dappled nicely. North of the second, smaller, island, the peninsula was more darkness-mountainous darkness. There was a big volcano just a few miles inland from Petropavlovsk. It made a perfect target marker.
Hank McCutcheon spoke over the intercom again, this time to the radioman, who sat on Bill’s side of the plane behind a bulkhead: “Radio traffic give any sign the Russians know we’re in the neighborhood?”
“Well, you know how well I don’t speak Russian,” Hyman Ginsberg answered, “but what I’m picking up doesn’t sound excited or anything.”
“Works for me,” the pilot said. When he spoke again, it was to the navigator: “Let me know when we’re about seventy-five miles south of the target. I’ll start climbing then.”
“Seventy-five miles. Yes, sir,” Williamson answered.