Bombs Away

1

Somewhere to the South and east lay Hungnam, the North Korean port on the Sea of Japan. Second Lieutenant Cade Curtis knew that, if he managed to get there, he could hop aboard a ship and live to give the Koreans and the Red Chinese more chances to kill him as the war ground on.

He and the platoon he led stumbled along a dirt track that he thought led in the right direction. He hoped the track led in the right direction, anyhow. The clouds scudding past low overhead were gray-brown and ugly, like the wool from a filthy sheep. With snow and sleet and hail leaking down out of that uncaring sky, he got only glimpses of them, anyhow. Somewhere beyond them shone the sun. He knew that, but he would have had a devil of a time proving it by anything he could see.

Part of him wished it would warm up. Even with a knitted wool cap under his helmet, even with winter boots and long johns and an olive-drab greatcoat, his teeth chattered like castanets. He and everybody he led might freeze to death before they got close to Hungnam.

But if it did warm up-to the point, say, where it started pouring icy rain instead of the frigid witches’ brew coming down now-the dirt track would turn to a bottomless river of mud. He’d already seen the kind of mud they had here. It could suck the boots right off your feet. Moving fast in that kind of goop (sometimes, moving at all) was impossible. Tanks and halftracks bogged down. Trucks were even worse off. Men on foot had the best chance, but best didn’t mean good.

Somehow, though, what made Americans sink to midthigh often seemed to trouble the Reds much less. Kim Il-sung’s men, and Mao’s, carried their weapons and a few magazines of ammo, maybe a knife for eating and for hand-to-hand fighting, and that was about it. They were mostly scrawny little guys, too. They didn’t struggle through the mud the way so many overloaded Yankees did.

I’m no Yankee, Cade thought. He’d been born in Alabama and lived most of his life in Tennessee. Most of his life…all nineteen years. It seemed as full and as rich to him as an octogenarian’s. Why not? It was all the life he had. And if he wasn’t a Yankee to himself, he sure as the devil was to the enemy prowling somewhere too close.

He wished to God he were back in Tennessee. It was Thursday, 23 November 1950. In the States, it would be Thanksgiving. Turkey with all the trimmings. Friendship. Fireplaces. Here not far from the Yalu River, Cade had damn all to be thankful for.

A dead dogface lay by the side of the track, staring up at the sky with blind eyes. Blood had frozen on his face and on his belly. Maybe, sooner or later, someone would pick him up and bring him along. More likely, nobody would bother.

One of the GIs near the tail of the ragged column had managed to get a Camel going in spite of the horrible weather. He blew out a mixture of fog and tobacco smoke. After inhaling again, he said, “We’ll make it back okay to Watchacallit on the coast, right, Lieutenant?”

“Oh, hell, yes, Lefty,” Curtis said, hoping he sounded surer than he felt. Lefty was from Akron or Youngstown or Dayton or one of those other places in Ohio where the glow of foundries lit up the clouds from below at night. They weren’t great big cities, not next to places like Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland, but people who came out of them had that same kind of up-yours-Mac attitude.

Lefty tossed away the butt. “I ain’t had this much joy since we left the fuckin’ reservoir, y’know?”

“Not that long ago,” Cade said.

“Yeah, well, time flies when you’re havin’ fun, right?” Lefty fired up another cigarette with his Zippo. A beat slower than he might have, he held out the pack to Curtis. “You want one?”

“No, thanks. Never got the habit,” Cade said. Combat turned a lot of guys into smokers. From what they told him, you got a little buzz and a little relaxation. And cigarettes came with your K-rations. They couldn’t very well be bad for you, could they? He hadn’t found out for himself yet. One of these days, maybe, but not yet.

Off in the distance, American 105s rumbled. With luck, the heavy shells would blow some Reds straight to the devil. Big guns? Armor? Airplanes? In every category like that, UN forces-Americans, mostly-had an enormous edge on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

The enemy knew it as well as Cade did. You couldn’t very well fight this war without knowing it. So it seemed logical that the side at a disadvantage in weaponry couldn’t hope to win, and might as well throw in its hand.

But the Reds came at it from a different angle. The only way for them to put out a fire was by piling bodies on it? Okay, they’d do that. Casualties didn’t worry them, any more than casualties had worried Stalin when he took on the Nazis. We need to spend a division to get rid of an American regiment? Fine. Spend it, and make sure the next division’s ready to go behind the lines.

North Korean and Red Chinese losses were four, five, six times as many as those of the UN troops they faced. Their generals, and the commissars who told those generals what to do, didn’t give a damn. Men were as disposable to them as bullets or boots.

The really scary thing was, they could win that way. The Reds made brave soldiers-often braver than the South Koreans whose fat the United States had pulled off the fire. They swarmed forward against machine guns, against tanks, against damn near anything. From all Cade could gather, worse things would happen to them if they hung back than whatever American shells and bullets dished out.

He and his men trudged through a little village. An old man and a girl of perhaps eight sent them impassive stares. The village looked to have been fought over two or three times in the recent past: likely, once in the American push up to the Yalu and once or twice in the retreat after Chinese troops swarmed over the river and drove the UN forces back.

Cade shook his head. He wished his beard were thicker. It might keep his face warmer, the way it seemed to with some of the older guys. Lice? He’d worry about lice some other time. Or, with DDT ready to kill off the little bastards with one squirt from the spray gun, he might not worry about them at all.

He’d just thought that maybe he’d try a cigarette after all when the Reds hit them from behind. One second, everything was quiet. The next, swarms of men in quilted khaki jackets and caps with earflaps were screaming their heads off and shooting what sounded like a million Russian-model submachine guns. The damn things were good out to only a couple of hundred yards, but inside that range they’d chop you into hamburger.

His own.30-caliber carbine was a piece of junk by comparison. It was an officer’s weapon, one that fired a smaller, weaker cartridge than the good old M-1. Like an M-1, it was only semiautomatic; it didn’t go full auto. At short range, even M-1s were in deep against submachine guns. The cheap, nasty little things threw lead around as if it were going out of style.

But the platoon had a light machine gun. If the Chinks didn’t know it, they were about to get a surprise they wouldn’t like. “Johnson! Masters! Set up in this hooch here”-Curtis pointed to a not too battered hut at the south end of the village-“and give those cocksuckers what-for!”

As soon as the LMG started banging away, the Red Chinese screamed on a different note. Cade and the other American soldiers kept plinking away at anything they saw or imagined they saw. The enemy went on pushing, probing. Without the machine gun, the Americans would have died quickly-or slowly, depending.

Cade sent most of his men down the track. If they didn’t, or couldn’t, get to Hungnam, they were screwed any which way. They’d have to head south through a countryside that was a lot more hostile than anyone could have imagined before things went sour.

To the soldiers at the LMG, Curtis said, “Hang on here as long as you have to.”

“How long is that, Lieutenant?” Masters asked.

“Well-as long as you have to,” Cade answered. Till you make them kill you, he meant, and they knew it. He’d never had to give an order like that before. He hoped to Christ he never would again. With his rear guard set, he went after his retreating men. Behind him, the machine gun barked death at the Chinese.

–

Not quite so smoothly as Harry Truman might have liked, the Independence touched down at Hickam Field west of Honolulu and taxied to a stop. The DC-6’s four big props windmilled down to motionlessness. Truman had traded in FDR’s executive airplane, the Sacred Cow, for this more modern one in 1947. He’d named it for his own home town. The bald eagle on the nose warned the world of America’s strength.

Warm, moist, sweet-smelling air came in when they opened the door. Truman grumbled under his breath just the same. In spite of that fierce-beaked eagle, America wasn’t looking any too strong right this minute. The Red Chinese had cut off something like three divisions’ worth of troops between the Chosin Reservoir and Hungnam. In spite of air raids and naval gunfire and godawful casualties of their own, the Reds were chewing them up and spitting out the bloody bones.

People were calling it the worst American defeat since the Battling Bastards of Bataan went under in the dark, early days of World War II. It was a hell of a way to go into Christmas, only a week away now. And it was why Truman had come to Hawaii to confer with Douglas MacArthur. In October, MacArthur had flown to Wake Island to assure Truman Red China wouldn’t interfere in the Korean War. Which would have been nice if only it had turned out to be true.

And MacArthur had also been the architect of defeat in the Philippines. Yes, he’d had help, but he’d held command there. Truman hadn’t been able to stand him since well before that. MacArthur had led the troops who broke up the Bonus Army’s Hooverville in Washington when the Depression was at its worst. Didn’t a man have to be what they called a good German to go and do something like that?

Truman didn’t care for looking up at MacArthur, either. Not looking up to, because he didn’t. But looking up at. Truman was an ordinary, stocky five-nine. MacArthur stood at least six even. He seemed taller than that because of his lean build, his ramrod posture, and his high-crowned general’s cap. It wasn’t quite so raked as the ones the Nazi marshals had worn, but it came close.

Looking out a window in the airliner, Truman watched a Cadillac approach the Independence. “Your car is here, sir,” an aide said.

“I never would have guessed,” the President answered. The aide looked wounded. Somebody-George Kaufman? — had said satire was what closed on Saturday night. Well, sarcasm was what got a politician thrown out on his ear. Truman walked to the doorway, saying, “Sorry, Fred. I’ve come a long way, and I’m tired. The weather will be nicer outside. Maybe I will, too.”

By the look on Fred’s face, he didn’t believe it. Since Truman didn’t, either, he couldn’t get on his flunky. The weather was nicer. Washington didn’t have horrible winters. Honolulu didn’t have winter at all. It was in the upper seventies. It never got much hotter. It never got much colder. If this wasn’t paradise on earth, what would be?

The limousine took the President to Fort Kamehameha, just south and west of Hickam Field. The fort had guarded the channel that lead in to Pearl Harbor. It was obsolete now, of course; the Japs had proved as much at the end of 1941. Being obsolete didn’t mean it had got torn down. The military didn’t work that way. No, it had gone from fort to office complex.

A spruce young first lieutenant led Truman to the meeting room where MacArthur waited. The five-star general stood and saluted. “Mr. President,” he rasped. The air smelled of pipe tobacco.

“At ease,” Truman told him. He knew the military ropes. He’d been an artillery captain himself in the First World War. Knowing the ropes didn’t mean he felt any great affection for them. “Let’s do this without ceremony, as much as we can.”

“However you please, sir,” MacArthur said.

They did have a big map of Korea, Japan, and Manchuria taped to the conference table. That would help. Truman stabbed a finger at the terrain between the reservoir and the port, the terrain where the American troops were in the meat grinder. “What the devil went wrong here?”

“We got caught by surprise, sir,” Douglas MacArthur said. “No one expected the Chinese to swarm into North Korea in such numbers.”

“There were intelligence warnings,” Truman said. And there had been. MacArthur just chose not to believe them, and made Truman not believe them, either. The general was finishing up his own triumphal campaign. He’d defended the Pusan perimeter, at the southern end of the Korean peninsula. He’d landed at Inchon and got behind the North Koreans. He’d rolled them up from south to north, and he’d been on the verge of rolling them up for good…till the Chinese decided they didn’t want the USA or an American puppet on their border. MacArthur’d guessed they would sit still for it. Not for the first time, he’d found himself mistaken.

“Intelligence warns of everything under the sun,” he said now, with a not so faint sneer. “Most of what it comes up with is moonshine, not worth worrying about.”

“This wasn’t,” Truman said brusquely. MacArthur’s craggy features congealed into a scowl. The President went on, “The question now is, what can we do about it?”

“Under the current rules of engagement, sir, we can’t do anything about it till too late,” MacArthur said. “As long as American bombers aren’t allowed to strike on the other side of the Yalu, the Chinese will be able to assemble as they please and bring fresh troops into the fight in North Korea without our disrupting their preparations in any way.”

“How much good will bombing north of the river do, though?” Truman asked, holding on to his temper. North of the Yalu sat enormous, hostile Red China. Bomb Red China, and who knew what kind of excuse you were handing Joe Stalin? “Won’t they hit our B-29s hard? The Superforts were world-beaters in 1945, but they haven’t done so well against North Korean air defenses. The Chinese should be better yet on that score, don’t you think?”

“If we use ordinary munitions, we will slow them down to some degree but we won’t stop them. You’re absolutely right about that, sir.” MacArthur sounded amazed the President could be right about anything. That might have been Truman’s imagination, but he didn’t think so. His Far East commander went on, “But if we drop a few atomic bombs on cities in Manchuria, not only do we destroy their men and rail lines, we also send the message that we are sick and tired of playing around.”

“The trouble with that is, if we drop A-bombs on Stalin’s friends, what’s to keep him from dropping them on ours?” Truman returned.

“My considered opinion, your Excellency, is that he wouldn’t have the nerve,” Douglas MacArthur said. “He doesn’t have that many bombs. He can’t-he just dropped his first last year. And he must see we can hurt him far worse than he can hurt us.”

“Once the pipeline gets moving, they come pretty fast, though. And he has a hell of a lot of men and tanks in Eastern Europe, too,” the President said. “They could head west on very short notice.”

MacArthur shrugged. “We can destroy swarms of them before they get into West Germany. And how sad do you think the French and British will be if we have to use a few bombs on West German territory?”

Harry Truman’s chuckle was dry as a martini in the desert. “I’m sure they would wring their hands in dismay.” He scratched the side of his jaw, considering. “If we’d been able to get our forces out through Hungnam, I wouldn’t think of this for a minute. The atom is a dangerous genie to let out of the lamp-deadly dangerous. But now the Chinese are bragging that they really can do what Kim Il-sung had in mind-they want to drive us into the sea and turn all of Korea into a satellite.”

“Yes, sir. That’s exactly what they want to do,” MacArthur agreed. “We’d betray our loyal allies in the south if we let them get away with it, too. The enemy has the advantage in numbers-China always will. He has the advantage in logistics, too. He’s right across the river from the fighting, and we’re six thousand miles away. If we insist on fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs, what can we possibly do but lose?”

“You’ve got something there.” Now it was Truman’s turn to sound surprised. He hadn’t expected arrogant MacArthur to make such good sense. In other words, he hadn’t looked for the general’s thoughts to march with his own so well. He’d already ordered the bomb used once, and ended a war with it. How could ordering it into action again be anything but easier?

–

“Come on, Linda!” Marian Staley called. “Whatever you do, don’t dawdle! We’ve got to go to the cobbler’s and then to the supermarket.”

“I’m coming, Mommy,” the four-year-old answered from her bedroom. “I’m just putting my coat on now.”

“Okay,” Marian said, knowing it might not be. Four-year-olds could dress themselves, sure, but not always reliably. And Linda didn’t have all the buttons on her coat through the buttonholes they were supposed to occupy. Marian didn’t fuss about it; she just fixed things. Then she asked, “Have you gone potty?”

Linda’s blond curls bobbed up and down as she nodded. Her eyes were hazel like Bill’s, not gray. Otherwise, she looked like her mother. “Just a little while ago,” she said.

Young children’s sense of time being what it was, that might mean anything or nothing. For that matter, it might be a fib. “Well, go one more time,” Marian said. “We’ll be away from home for a while.”

A put-upon secretary might have aimed the look Linda sent her at an obnoxious boss. But Marian’s flesh and blood went off to the bathroom, flushed, and came back. Marian didn’t think Linda had enough deceit yet to flush when she hadn’t done anything. If she was wrong, she’d find out about it.

“It’s raining!” Linda started to open her own little Mickey Mouse umbrella.

“Don’t do that indoors! It’s bad luck!” Marian said. “Wait till we get out on the front porch.”

Once they left the house, she opened her own plain navy-blue bumbershoot-much plainer than her daughter’s, but able to cover both of them if it had to, and it probably would. It wasn’t raining too hard. Everett, Washington, north of Seattle, had the same kind of weather as the bigger city. You could and did get rain any time of year at all, in other words, but it seldom snowed even during winter.

By what Bill’s letters said, Korea wasn’t like that. It was hot and dusty in the summertime, and impersonated Siberia now. He was copilot on a B-29. From things she read between the lines in his letters and from little snippets on the news, the Reds gave the big bombers a hard time. She just wanted him to finish his hitch and come home safe.

The sun-yellow Studebaker sat in the driveway. “C’mon, sweetie,” Marian told Linda. They went to the car together. Marian opened the driver’s-side door and held her umbrella while Linda shut hers and slithered across the seat to the passenger side. She sat up straight there. Even though her feet barely got past the front edge of the seat, she looked very grown-up.

Marian got in, too. She laid her purse on the seat between them, set the choke, and started the car. It was a postwar model, with the windshield a single sheet of glass, not two divided and held in place by a strip of chromed metal. She liked that. She liked the automatic transmission, too. She could drive a stick-who couldn’t? — but she didn’t believe in working any harder than you had to.

Keeping her eye on the rear-view mirror to watch for kids on bikes or silly dogs or grownups who weren’t paying attention, she backed out into the street. The cobbler’s was only a few blocks away.

The shop window had a shoe and a cobbler’s small hammer painted on it, and a legend: FAYVL TABAKMAN-COBBLER. REPAIRS amp; RESOLING. Under the shoe was another legend in smaller letters from an alphabet Marian couldn’t read. She supposed it said the same thing in Yiddish, but it might have been Russian or Armenian or Greek for all she could prove.

Inside, the shop smelled of the cheap cigars Tabakman smoked. One was in his mouth. He was about fifty, skinny, with a graying mustache. He wore a cloth cap and short sleeves. A number was tattooed on his arm. He knew more about horror than most people who lived in America.

What he knew, though, he didn’t peddle. He just touched the brim of his old-fashioned cap and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Staley. Hello, little girl.” He had an accent, but not a thick one. If he’d learned English since the war, he’d done a bang-up job.

“My name is Linda!” Linda said.

“Hello, Linda,” Tabakman said gravely. “I had a little girl about your age.”

“You had one?” Linda caught the past tense. “What happened? Did you lose her?”

“Yes. I lost her.” Behind gold-rimmed glasses, the cobbler’s eyes were a million miles and a million years away. With an effort, he came back to the here-and-now. “Both pairs you left are ready to take home, Mrs. Staley. If you want to see them…”

“I’m sure they’re great,” Marian said. He showed them to her anyway. He did fine, neat work; you could hardly see where the half-sole ended and the older leather picked up. Both pairs together came to seventy-five cents. She gave him a dollar and waved away the change.

“You are very kind,” he murmured, touching his cap again. “Have a happy New Year, both of you.”

Marian only shrugged. She knew the tip wouldn’t blot out the memories Linda had stirred up. It was what she could do, though, so she did it.

The wide aisles and abundant food at the supermarket made her smile. Riding in the welded-wire shopping cart made Linda smile. The prices…The prices made Marian wish she were on a military base. But Bill had been a bookkeeper for Boeing till the new war sucked him back into uniform. They’d bought the house with the idea that they’d keep it for a long time. Trying to do that on military pay wasn’t easy, but Marian had made it work so far.

She bought ground chuck instead of ground round, margarine instead of butter, and pot roast instead of steak. If it came to beef hearts and chicken giblets and lots of macaroni and cheese, then it did, that was all. She’d eaten that kind of stuff as a little girl during the Depression. She could do it again if she had to. So far, she hadn’t had to.

She splurged a little-a whole nickel-on a Hershey bar for Linda. After a moment fighting temptation, she lost and spent another nickel on one for herself, too. When she spread her bread with something that tasted like motor oil, she could look back on the chocolate and smile.

When they got home, she took Linda inside first with a stern, “Now you stay here till I finish bringing in the groceries, okay?”

“Yes, Mommy,” Linda said. If she messed that one up, her Teddy bear spent the night on a high shelf and she had to sleep without it. That had happened only a couple of weeks earlier, so the tragic memory was still fresh.

Marian hated carrying shopping bags in the rain. The miserable things turned to library paste and fell apart as soon as water touched them. Chasing escaped cans down the driveway wasn’t her idea of fun.

She got everything into the house. Linda didn’t feel the urge to play explorer-maybe the rain outside held her back. Whatever the reason, Marian put the groceries away and then let out the sigh of relief she always saved for when she’d done the things she had to do.

A cup of Lipton’s would be nice now, she thought. She could watch whatever happened to be on the one channel the new TV in the front room got. As long as she let it grab hold of her eyes, she wouldn’t worry-so much-about how Bill was doing over there on the far side of the Pacific.

Before she could even start boiling water, Linda carried in a copy of Tootle and said, “Read to me.”

Bill always called those the magic words. Whatever he was doing, he’d stop and read when she asked. He went through books like popcorn himself, and wanted a kid who’d do the same thing. Marian wasn’t quite so dedicated, but she was pretty good-not least because she didn’t want Linda squealing on her when Bill got home.

“Let me fix some tea first, okay?” she said. “Then I will.”

“Okay!” Linda said.

–

The Ivans were giving the Wehrmacht hell on the Eastern Front again. Gustav Hozzel cowered in his trench. He knew too well that that wouldn’t save his sorry ass. Three different T-34/85s were bearing down on the weakly held German lines in eastern Poland. An antipanzer round had just hit one of them-and glanced off the monster’s cleverly sloped armor.

Lances of fires in the air. Screams as the Katyushas rained down on the German earthworks. Sweet suffering Jesus, there’d be nothing left of the company after those fuckers blew.

Screams…

Gustav Hozzel’s eyes opened wide, wider, widest. All he saw was blackness. He was sure he was dead…till he spied a thin strip of moonlight that slid between two misaligned slats on the Venetian blinds covering the bedroom window.

Luisa set a soft hand on his shuddering shoulder. “You did it again, Liebchen,” his wife said sadly.

“I…I guess I did.” Gustav’s voice was hoarse. When you screamed yourself awake, and your wife with you, no wonder you tried to talk through a raw throat afterwards. Little by little, his heart slowed from its panicked thundering. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

“Was it the same dream?” Luisa asked.

“It’s always the same dream. The panzers, the rockets…” Gustav shuddered. That dream, and the death it held, seemed more real, more true, than his waking life. He’d never told that to his wife. It would only have scared her-and who could blame her for being scared? He took what comfort he could from saying, “It doesn’t come as often as it used to. I haven’t had it for a couple of months now.”

Luisa nodded; Gustav felt the motion rather than seeing it. “That’s good,” she said. “Please God, in a while years will go by between one time and the next.”

“Please God,” Gustav agreed. He’d fought the Russians from late 1942 to the end of the war. When the collapse finally came, he’d fled west out of Bohemia and managed to surrender to the Amis. If the Red Army’d grabbed him, he would still be in one of Stalin’s prison camps-unless they’d decided a bullet in the back of the neck was easier than dealing with him.

Here he was in Fulda, safe in the American zone even if it did lie close to the part of Germany Russia still held. Except when he shrieked himself awake in the middle of the night, he was an ordinary printer with an ordinary clerk for a wife. Yes, he had a wound badge and a marksman’s badge and the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class and the medal for the Iron Cross First Class in a drawer under his socks. But he hadn’t taken them out and looked at them more than twice in the past five years. And it wasn’t as if most other German men in their late twenties and early thirties didn’t have their own little collections of medals.

“Do you think you can go back to sleep this time?” Luisa asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll try. What time is it, anyhow?”

The alarm clock ticking by Luisa’s side of the bed had glowing hands. She rolled over to look at it. “Half past two,” she said.

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!” To Gustav, that was about the worst time there was. Everything in him was at low ebb-except his fear. He sighed. “The only good news is, I don’t remember the last time I had those nightmares twice in one night.”

“Fine. So sleep.” Luisa’s yawn said she intended to try again, too, even if getting jerked awake like that had to be as horrible for her as it was for him.

Sleep Gustav did. The alarm clock woke him at a quarter to seven. It didn’t seem nearly so bad-or so loud-as the explosions inside his head. He ate black bread and jam and drank a big cup of coffee almost white with milk. Then he put on a hat and his beat-up tweed jacket and headed for work.

His breath smoked when he left the block of flats. It was cold out there-what else, at the end of the first week of January? — but not a patch on what he’d known in Russia and Poland. And he could come in from this cold whenever he wanted, and no one would shoot him if he did. It was still dark, too-darker than it had been before, in fact, because the moon was down.

Fulda had come to life even in the long winter night. The noises of carpentry rose from the Dom. An American air raid had damaged the cathedral six or eight months before the end of the war. The same raid had smashed the square that housed the vegetable market. One day before too long, though, and you’d look things over and have no idea that bombers had ever struck here. So many German cities got hit far harder than Fulda. A town of only 40,000 or so, it couldn’t have been an important target. Bit by bit, those ravaged places were getting back on their feet, too.

They were in the zones the Americans and British and even the French held, at any rate. But something like a third of Germany had gone straight from Hitler to Stalin: a bad bargain if ever there was one. Reconstruction on the other side of the Iron Curtain moved slowly when it moved at all. The Russians were more interested in what they could pry out of their new subjects than in giving them a helping hand.

A jeep with two American soldiers in it rolled past Gustav and east toward the border with the Russian zone. The German veteran kept his head down and glanced at it only out of the corner of his eye. He’d fought the Ivans his whole time in the Wehrmacht, but that didn’t mean he loved the Amis. If they hadn’t decided Stalin made a better ally than Hitler did, the world would look different today.

Another jeep passed him a minute or two later. This one sported an American heavy machine gun on a post fixed to the floorboards. Those damn things could kill you out to a couple of kilometers. U.S. fighter planes also carried them. He’d got strafed by an American fighter the day before he surrendered. He didn’t remember it fondly, but it hadn’t given him wake-up-screaming nightmares.

He opened the door to the print shop. Max Bachman, who owned the place, looked up from some proofs he was reading. “Morning, Gustav. Was ist los?”

“Not much.” Gustav didn’t talk about his nighttime horrors with anyone. He wouldn’t have talked about them with Luisa if they hadn’t jolted her awake, too. For all he knew, Bachman also had them. He’d been a Frontschwein himself. If he did, though, he didn’t let on, either. But then Gustav held up a forefinger. “I take that back. Are the Americans jumpy about the border? Two jeeps went by me heading that way.”

“I haven’t heard anything special, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are,” Bachman answered. “If Stalin decides to start something, all the Russian panzers in the world’ll charge west through the Fulda Gap.”

Gustav grunted and lit a cigarette. With the Deutschmark a going concern, you could smoke your cigarettes again. They weren’t currency any more, the way they had been in the first couple of years after the war.

The ritual of tapping the cigarette and striking a match gave him a few seconds to think. Max wasn’t wrong. Gustav knew it. The Amis had to know it, too. The broad, flat valley of the river that ran by Fulda was the best panzer country along the Russian zone’s western frontier. Once through it, the T-34s-and whatever new models Stalin had up his sleeve-could swarm straight toward the Rhine.

“I wonder whether they’d want us to lend a hand if the Reds do come,” Gustav said in musing tones, blowing a smoke ring up at the low ceiling. “Some of us still remember what to do.”

“Think so, eh?” Bachman said with a dry chuckle. “Well, maybe we do. And I’ll tell you this-they might not have wanted to play with Adolf, but they won’t mind the rest of us dying for our country…and theirs. When the Russians come, you grab everybody you can.” Gustav nodded. Again, his boss wasn’t wrong.