When McCutcheon pulled back the yoke and the B-29 left the comforting clutter and cloak of the Pacific Ocean, Bill gulped. This was the bad time. If the Russians could scramble fighters, the aircrew wouldn’t last long enough to drop the bomb on the naval base. Their plane was painted midnight-blue all over, but radar didn’t care. The controllers could vector in the MiGs….
“Boss, they’re starting to have conniptions,” Ginsberg reported.
“Well, fuck ’em. I can see the damn volcano now, blotting out the stars. Another couple of minutes.” McCutcheon eyed his watch and the target ahead. You had to think of it as a target, not as people. And gunners around the target were starting to shoot: fireworks that confirmed where to aim. “Bombs away!” McCutcheon shouted.
“It’s gone,” Steve Bauer said from the nose. As the bomb fell free, McCutcheon heeled the B-29 away to the east and gave all four engines full emergency power.
Hell burst on earth, the way it had over Harbin. The light was dazzling, stunning. Bill stopped worrying about Russian fighters. They’d have no one down there to guide them to their target now.
–
Los Angeles writhed like a snake with a broken back. As befitted a city so sprawling and spread out, it had got hit by two bombs, one just a little south of downtown and the other to smash the ports at San Pedro and Long Beach. City Hall was gone. So was the downtown police station. Water and power in the city were both erratic.
It mattered less to Aaron Finch than he would have guessed. Like him, his wife and son were as all right as you could be if you’d wound up a little too close to an atom bomb going off. The house hadn’t fallen down on them. Only a couple of windows had blown in. Glendale, a city in its own right, had its own utilities, and they kept working…most of the time.
He was even a local celebrity. Some of the Russians who’d parachuted from their bomber were still missing. One had got stomped to death by a mob, one hanged from a lamppost, and one shot by somebody with a deer rifle before his feet even touched the ground. But Aaron was the only person who’d actually captured a Soviet flyer.
The Glendale News Press interviewed him. So did the Pasadena Star-News. The Los Angeles papers had had a large circulation in the suburbs, too. But the Times, the Mirror, the Examiner, and the Herald-Express were among the casualties of the downtown bomb.
“You know what?” Aaron told Ruth. “I’m not sorry the Times went up in smoke. It’s been a union-busting right-wing rag for as long as I’ve been alive, and I don’t miss it a bit.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Ruth exclaimed. “They blew them up! There’s nothing left of the Times Building. Even City Hall downtown is only a melted stub.” City Hall had been the one L.A. building exempt from the twelve-story height limit imposed to cut earthquake damage. It had always stood out on the skyline as a result. It still did…what was left of it.
“If anyone on earth misses the Chandlers, I’d be amazed,” Aaron said stubbornly. He raised a finger to correct himself. “Maybe some of the Nazis hiding out in Argentina and Paraguay do. Nobody else.”
“You’re horrible,” she said. He nodded, more pleased than otherwise.
Three days after the bombs fell, someone knocked on the door. When Aaron opened it, a Glendale flatfoot stood outside, his patrol car parked at the curb. “You Aaron Finch?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “What’s going on?”
“Somebody down at the station wants to talk to you,” the cop answered. “You don’t gotta come. I’m not arresting you or nothin’. But he wants to.”
“Who is he?” Aaron asked-reasonably, he thought.
“Somebody down at the station,” the policeman repeated. “That’s what he told me I should tell you, so that’s what I’m sayin’.”
“Somebody who wants me to buy a pig in a poke,” Aaron said. The cop didn’t deny it. Aaron thought for a moment, then shrugged. Getting in bad with the local police wasn’t something a sensible guy wanted to do. Glendale was a city, but not a great big city. If the clowns in the black-and-whites wanted to make someone’s life miserable, they could. “Okay. I’ll play along.” He called back over his shoulder to let Ruth know where he was going, then walked out into the night.
He slid into the front seat alongside the cop. The fellow sent him a quizzical look, but kept quiet. The back was where you went when they arrested you. Had the cop insisted that he sit there, he would have got out and gone back inside.
More police cars than usual cruised the streets. Glendale hadn’t got so badly damaged by the bomb that smashed downtown L.A. No doubt because it hadn’t, refugees flooded north into it. Some slept in cars, others in parks or alleys or anywhere else they could find. A lot of them had no cash. They begged. They stole. Some of the women peddled themselves. You couldn’t blame them for any of that. But you could try to slow it down, and the Glendale cops were.
Aaron also saw two rifle-toting National Guardsmen in full combat gear checking somebody’s papers. Following the lead of Fred Payne of Maine when Bangor got hit, Governor Warren had mobilized them as soon as the bombs fell. His counterparts along the West Coast had done likewise. In Utah and Colorado, the state capitals had got hit, so the Feds took care of it for the governors who weren’t there to do it for themselves.
The police station was a low-slung stucco building fronted by trees. The policeman took Aaron inside, led him past the fat sergeant at the desk (who was eating a jelly doughnut to make sure he didn’t get any skinnier), and took him into a room next to the chief’s office.
The man waiting inside wore a blue uniform, but he wasn’t a cop. He was an Air Force lieutenant colonel. Aaron nodded to himself. He’d expected either military brass or an FBI man. To himself, he’d bet on J. Edgar Hoover’s boys. Himself would have to find some money to pay off.
“Mr. Finch?” the officer asked. When Aaron nodded, the fellow went on, “I’m Del Shanahan. I’m with Air Force Intelligence.” He held out his hand.
Aaron took it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, which might or might not prove true, depending on how things worked out here. Shanahan’s grip said he didn’t spend all his time behind a desk.
“I asked you to come in here,” he said, “to talk with you about how you captured Lieutenant Yuri Svechin. He was the navigator on the Russian bomber.”
“Was he? I didn’t ask him anything about that. I just got him into my car and took him here,” Aaron said. “I’ll tell you what I know, Colonel, but I don’t know a whole heck of a lot.”
“You could talk with him, though. Isn’t that correct?” Shanahan asked.
“A little bit,” Aaron admitted.
“Do you speak Russian? I know he doesn’t speak English.”
“Nah.” Aaron shook his head. With Senator McCarthy bellowing about Communists like an enraged elephant, you didn’t want to admit you spoke Russian, even if you did-but he didn’t. “I know some Yiddish, though, and I tried that on him. He turned out to speak German, so he could pretty much follow me and I could pretty much follow him.”
“He was willing to give himself up to you?”
“When he saw I wouldn’t hurt him, yeah. He was eager, in fact. Take a look at what happened to some of the other guys from that plane and I guess you can see why.”
“That was…unfortunate. We’ve sent a note to the USSR through the International Red Cross apologizing and offering compensation to the slain flyers’ families.”
“You have?” Aaron said in surprise. “How come?”
“We’ll have planes shot down over Russian territory. We don’t want their civilians to have any excuse to lynch our downed crewmen.”
“Oh.” Aaron thought that over. He didn’t need long. “Okay. I gotcha. Makes sense, I guess. Of course, when the Russians watch one of their cities go up in smoke, they’re liable not to need any other excuse. We sure didn’t, did we?”