Bombs Away

17

A train whistle blew, off to the north. Along with the other laborers who’d worked so hard rebuilding the rail line through Harbin, Vasili Yasevich stood by the track and waited for the train to roll by. Like his comrades in socialist labor, he wore a padded cap and a quilted jacket. But he was pink and fair and round-eyed, so he stood out in spite of his ordinary clothes.

“Here it comes!” Somebody pointed. All the workers craned their necks up the line.

Here it came indeed, black smoke puffing from the locomotive. The engineer leaned out the window and waved to the crowd. He looked no more Russian than Vasili.

A claque set up a cheer: “Long live Sino-Soviet solidarity!” The engineer couldn’t possibly have heard them over the din of the mechanical monster he controlled. Even if he had heard them, he wouldn’t have understood what they were saying. The cheer was for the benefit of the Chinese onlookers.

He tried to keep his breaths as shallow as he could. Maybe that wouldn’t do any good, but it couldn’t hurt. He hadn’t wanted to come into the blast zone to greet the Soviet train. When your gang boss told you to come, though, what you wanted stopped mattering.

The train was a long one. Some of those tarpaulined shapes lashed to freight cars had to belong to tanks. They would help Mao and Kim Il-sung twist the Americans’ tails down in Korea.

Those covered tank shapes looked to be the same T-34/85s that had driven the Japanese from Manchukuo with their tails between their legs in August 1945. Vasili had heard that the Russians had a new model, bigger and lower to the ground and generally meaner than their old warhorses. People who knew about such things-or made noises as if they did-complained that Stalin was giving his allies the junk he didn’t use himself any more.

Vasili had no love for the Soviet Union. With his upbringing, it was unlikely that he should. But he didn’t have anything in particular against their Chinese allies. Mao’s men made better overlords than the Japanese had.

They did unless they decided to give him to the MGB, anyhow. It hadn’t happened yet, and they’d seized control of Manchuria well before they took the rest of the Chinese mainland. Vasili dared hope they would keep leaving him alone. If they didn’t actually like him, indifference would do.

He also didn’t have anything in particular against the United States. Even if the Americans had wrecked Harbin, they were the biggest reason Manchukuo was no longer a going concern. The Chinese Nationalists and Communists could have fought Japan for the next hundred years without beating it.

More flatcars rumbled past. If those tarp-shrouded mysteries weren’t airplane fuselages, he couldn’t imagine what they would be. And if they were fuselages, the flat things strapped down by them would be wings. Could you bolt them on and start flying? He didn’t see why not. Maybe not flying saved wear and tear on the engines. Maybe it just gave the U.S. Air Force less of a chance to shoot down the Russian planes.

Then again, the U.S. Air Force might shoot up the train, or bomb it, or fire rockets at it. Vasili was glad none of the cheering Chinese around him could tell what he was thinking. He’d go to the MGB in a hurry if they could.

Another Soviet railroad man waved to the crowd from the caboose. That seemed to be what he was there for: waving to the people he passed. It was a nice, easy job-unless you happened to run into American planes.

A Chinese man next to Vasili nudged him and said, “You’re the round-eyed barbarian who sells ma huang, right?”

“That’s me,” Vasili answered with a mental sigh. If you were Chinese, anyone unlucky enough not to be was a barbarian by definition. And the man was right about which kind of barbarian he was.

“I want to buy some,” the fellow declared, as if sure Vasili had brought some to the ceremony to cater to his needs.

But Vasili had come to the the ceremony because he got a day off from work and because he was ordered to show up, not to do business. By Chinese standards, that made him a lazy man. The Chinese were ready-eager-to do business anywhere, any time. “I’ll sell you some tomorrow after work. Where do you want to meet?”

“I need it. I’ll come home with you now,” the man said.

“No.” One of the things Vasili had learned was that there were times when Chinese were the most formal, flowery people in the world. There were others when nothing but out-and-out rude got through to them. This looked to be one of those. “Tomorrow after work. Where?”

“I’ll come home with you now,” the man repeated.

“I said no, you stupid turtle. Do you think I want you in my house?”

The Chinese man’s eyes opened so wide, they almost went round themselves. He hadn’t looked for a round-eyed barbarian to behave-and to sound-like one of his countrymen. Then he bristled, as if getting ready to fight.

Vasili reached inside a jacket pocket. He carried a straight razor in there, just because you never could tell. He didn’t threaten with it. He didn’t even show it. He had no intention of starting anything. But if the Chinese man did, Vasili aimed to finish it.

The man didn’t know what he had in his pocket. A knife? A pistol? Nothing at all-only a bluff? The Chinese decided he didn’t want to find out. He stomped off, cursing as he went.

“Good job,” another man told Vasili. “I know Wu there a little bit, I’m sorry to say. I wouldn’t trust him inside my house, either. You may be a round-eye, but you’re nobody’s fool.”

“Thanks.” Vasili wasn’t ready to take this stranger on trust, either.

“Being a round-eye, do you know how other round-eyes think?” the man asked him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Being a Chinese, do you know how other Chinese think? That’s the kind of question you’re asking.”

“Is it? I suppose it is.” The man chuckled. “A lot of the time, I do know how other Chinese would think-they’d think the way I do. Isn’t it the same with round-eyes?”

“A lot of the time, it is,” Vasili admitted. “Not always, though. Different kinds of round-eyes often don’t think alike, any more than Chinese and Koreans and Japanese do.”

“Koreans?” The stranger sounded dismissive. “Japanese?” He sounded disgusted. But then he nodded to Vasili. “All right. I see what you mean. What I wondered was, when the Americans find out the railroad line through Harbin is fixed, will they drop another one of those terrible bombs on the city?”

“Oh.” Vasili shrugged again. “I can’t begin to guess. I hope not. They’re busy over on the other side of the world. Maybe that will keep them from noticing Harbin-for a while, anyhow.”

“Ah. Yes, that makes sense.” The Chinese man nodded. Around them, the crowd that had come out to celebrate the railroad’s reopening was breaking up. Men who had the day off were probably looking for ways to enjoy it as best they could. The stranger changed the subject: “Was nasty Wu there right? You have ma huang to sell?”

“A little,” Vasili answered. “My father trained me as a druggist. He knew what an excellent medicine it was. When I have the chance, I follow in his footsteps.” Chinese honored and respected their parents more than Russians were in the habit of doing. Putting it like that was calculated to please.

And it did. “Will you sell me some?” the man asked. “I’ll meet wherever you want.”

Vasili smiled. Even if Wu hadn’t listened, this fellow had.

–

The Independence touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, a landing as smooth as a baby’s cheek. “Well, we’re here,” Harry Truman said. A cross-country flight, even on an airliner as luxurious as this one, was always wearing.

“Quite a view, wasn’t it?” asked Joseph Short, who’d taken over from Stephen Early as Truman’s press secretary. His deep-South drawl made Truman’s Missouri twang sound almost New England-y by comparison.

“It was, yes. The kind I hope I never have again,” Truman said. Sitting on the right side of the DC-6 as it descended across Los Angeles from east to west, he’d got a good look at what the Russian bomb had done to the heart of the city. After a moment, he went on, “Who was that guy who captured their flyer and turned him over to the cops?”

“His name is Finch, Mr. President. Aaron Finch.” As a good press secretary should have, Short had the facts at his fingertips. “He drives a truck and installs appliances for a local company called Blue Front.”

“Oh. Blue Front. That’s Herschel Weissman’s outfit, isn’t it?” As a good politician should have, Truman recognized a prominent contributor to his party.

Short nodded. “I believe it is, sir.”

“Okay. Maybe we can play it up. Is this Finch a veteran? That’d help.”

“No, sir. He served in the merchant marine. The military wouldn’t take him-he can’t see past his nose without Coke-bottle specs.”

“He served his country, anyhow. That’ll work,” Truman said.

As the plane taxied over to the terminal and stopped, the props spun down to stillness. Airport workers wheeled a portable stairway to the door. Truman expected it to be warm when that door opened. This was Southern California, after all! But it was still only April, and the airport lay close by the Pacific. The air that came in was chilly and moist. He set his fedora on his head before he stepped outside.

Reporters and photographers stood on the runway. So did National Guardsmen. The military was practically running the West Coast these days. It was in decent working order and could get directions straight from Washington. That put it several steps ahead of the battered state and local governments. Putting the Humpty-Dumpty of civilian administration back together when peace came back-if peace came back-might not be so easy. Well, the country had managed it after the Civil War. It could again.

Truman shoved such worries out of his mind-one more time. Flashbulbs popped. The President waved to the members of the Fourth Estate. “Hello, boys!” he called. They were vultures, hoping he’d trip halfway down the stairs or do something else stupid so they could write a story about it.

A couple of Secret Service agents pushed past Truman, hurried down the stairs, and took stations near the base of the wheeled platform to keep the newshounds from coming too close. They no doubt felt virtuous about that. But if one of the gentlemen of the press pulled out a pistol and started shooting, he could fill the President full of holes before the Secret Service men knocked him down with their guns.

No one fired. Truman had been seventeen, almost a man but not quite, when that crazed anarchist shot William McKinley. No one had assassinated a President since then. A nut had taken a shot at FDR, but he’d only managed to kill the mayor of Chicago. And those Puerto Rican independence fanatics had hunted Truman himself, but they hadn’t made it into the White House.

Truman’s mouth twisted. Other, even worse, madness was running wild now. He wouldn’t be visiting this ravaged city if that weren’t so. How many had died here, in the two blasts? Hundreds of thousands. Put a President’s life in the scales against so many and it didn’t seem like much.

“How did those Russian bombers get through, Mr. President?” a reporter called. “Up and down the West Coast, sir, how did they get through?”

“I wish I had a good answer for you,” Truman said, a reply that came from the heart. “I wish I did, but I don’t. The best I can tell you is, they must have used the same kind of tricks we’ve used to strike at their territory. And I promise you, we’ve hit them harder than they’ve hit us.”

“That doesn’t do people here a whole lot of good,” another man said.

“I understand that. I’ve come to see the damage with my own eyes. I’ll go up to San Francisco and Portland and Seattle afterwards, too,” the President said. “I want to make sure this can never happen again.”

“The Russians are still advancing in Germany, too,” said a fellow with a loud necktie. “How can they be doing that if we’re hitting them with fire and brimstone like you claim?”

“Because there are swarms of them. It’s the same trouble we had in Korea facing the Communists from the North and the Red Chinese,” Truman snapped. “We cut our military to the bone after we whipped the Germans and the Japs. Joe Stalin didn’t. We probably put too much faith in the power of our atom bombs, and didn’t look for the Russians to build theirs as soon as they did. We can see all that now. We couldn’t then, no matter how much I wish we’d been able to. Hindsight is always 20/20.”

Behind him, Joe Short had to be pained. To a press secretary, admitting you’d made a mistake was an unpardonable sin. Truman couldn’t see it. The Führer was always right. He’d said so, repeatedly. Teachers had taught German schoolkids to believe it. Stalin was the same way-Mao, too.

Hitler hadn’t turned out so well. Stalin and Mao killed anybody who dared disagree with them. Truman had wanted to punch a reporter in the nose a time or three, but that was as far as it went. He knew damn well he wasn’t always right. The people deserved to know he knew it.

“Will we drive them back?” Mr. Yellow-and-Orange Necktie persisted. “Why can’t we smash their army with more A-bombs?”

“Because that army is on the soil of a land we’re allied to, a land we’re committed to defend,” Truman said. “We use atomic weapons as a last resort, not as a first one. We don’t want to wreck our own friends.”

Another reporter found a different kind of question for him: “Do you think anybody in the whole country will want to vote for you in 1952 after…this?” His wave took in all of shattered Los Angeles and, by extension, all of the shattered country.

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m not worrying about it right now,” Truman answered. They’d proposed the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting a President’s tenure to two terms of his own and half of a predecessor’s minus one day, in 1947. They’d got enough states to ratify it just weeks earlier. But it didn’t apply to the President in whose administration it was ratified. If he could get people to keep reelecting him till 1976, it would be legal.

For now, though, he tended to agree with the snoopy reporter. He’d have a hard time getting elected dogcatcher next year, let alone President. That didn’t necessarily prove anything. A lot could change in a year and a half. The USA might have won the war by then.

Or the Russians might have dropped one on the White House, the way the United States had dropped one on the Kremlin. The American effort hadn’t got rid of Stalin, which was too bad. Maybe the Russians won’t get me, either, Truman thought. If they did, the USA would have an easier time going on than Russia would without Uncle Joe. If the United States could get along without Roosevelt, it could definitely get along without Truman.

He held up both hands. “Boys, I didn’t come to chew the fat on the runway,” he said. “I came to see what Los Angeles looks like now, and how we can get it back on its feet as soon as possible.” He’d also come to eat rubber chicken at a banquet that would swell Democratic coffers, but he didn’t mention that.

He’d hoped for a convertible so he could see better, but they put him into a sedan. The fan was uncommonly noisy. That turned out to be because it wasn’t just a fan. “This car has an air-conditioning and filtering system, sir,” explained the Air Force colonel who played tour guide for him. “Some of the dust in the air is still radioactive in the damaged regions. We don’t know how much long-term harm it can do, and we don’t want to experiment on the President.”

“No, eh?” Truman said. “Well, thanks for that much.”

In the air-conditioned car, he got close to ground zero. Nothing much stirred there. The area had been comprehensively flattened. But a crow hopped around on the glassy ground before flying off in search of a place that offered better eating. The bird didn’t worry about radioactivity.

The bird also didn’t have to decide whether and when to launch new strikes against the Soviet Union. All it worried about were cats and hawks. It didn’t know how lucky it was.

–

Cade Curtis watched the distant plumes of black exhaust heading his way. Sure as hell, more T-34/85s had made it into Korea. Tanks with diesel engines had all kinds of advantages over ones powered by gas. They went farther on the same amount of fuel. They were easier to maintain. If hit by an AP round, they were far less likely to explode into flame.

But they didn’t run clean. You could see them coming if they moved by day. You could, and Cade did. He went down the trench to the radioman. “Let division know we’ve got half a dozen tanks coming toward us,” he said. “An air strike would be nice, or some artillery if they can’t do that.”

“Yes, sir,” the kid with the heavy backpack said. Some kid-he was likely a year or two older than Curtis. He hesitated, then asked, “What if they can’t do it?”

“Well, in that case we just have to figure out something else, don’t we?” Cade hoped he sounded more cheerful than he felt. They did have a couple of bazookas, but no foot soldier relished the prospect of taking on tanks without help.

“Right.” The radioman sure didn’t relish the prospect. He got on the horn with divisional headquarters. He did look happier when he took the earphones off his head. “They say they can give us some air, but they’ll need half an hour-maybe a whole hour.”

“Better than nothing, I guess.” Cade stuck his head up for another look at those oncoming smudges of diesel smoke. They weren’t going to wait an hour, or even thirty minutes. He tried for a nonchalant chuckle. Whether he succeeded, he wasn’t sure. “Well, we’ll just have to keep the Indians busy till the cavalry rides over the hill, that’s all.”

“Right,” the radioman said again. By his tone, whatever Cade had managed, nonchalant wasn’t it.

He had no time for another rehearsal. He hurried through the trenches, saying, “They’ll have infantry with them. If we can knock those guys over or make them take cover and not come forward with the tanks, we’ve got a better chance.” That mostly meant there wouldn’t be so many enemy foot soldiers to shoot at the American bazooka teams.

A bazooka round could kill a T-34/85 from a hundred yards, maybe from a hundred fifty. Past that, you’d probably miss. The tank could shell a bazooka team out of existence from better than half a mile if its crew knew where the men were.

Along with the bazooka tubes, Cade had a couple of machine guns, one with a bipod that could go anywhere and the other on a heavy tripod in a sandbagged nest. “Fire one burst, then take it off the tripod, get the hell out, and use it as a light gun,” he said.

“We have a lot more accuracy with the tripod, sir,” said the sergeant in charge of the gun. He was old enough to be Cade’s father, and spoke as if he expected Cade to take his advice.

Not this time. “Do what I tell you, O’Higgins,” Cade said sharply. “How long do you think this position will stand up to shelling?”

Bernie O’Higgins scowled. In spite of his name, he looked more like a dago than a mick. Thick black stubble rasped under his fingers when he rubbed his chin. “Awright, Lieutenant, you got a point,” he allowed. “We’ll play it your way.”

Lou Klein nodded when Cade said what he’d done about the machine-gun nest. “Good job, sir,” the staff sergeant said. Then he spoiled it by adding, “I woulda talked Bernie around if he kept giving you grief.”

No doubt he would have, too…which had nothing to do with anything. “It’s my company,” Curtis said. “I’m supposed to be in charge of it.”

“People are supposed to do all kindsa things they can’t always handle. Sometimes they need a little help-uh, sir.” Klein paused, eyeing the young officer. “You’ve seen more and done more’n most guys your age, ain’t you?” He paused again, this time for a smoke. “Tell you what. If we’re both alive a coupla hours from now, we can talk about it some more. How’s that sound?”

“Works for me,” Cade said.

Mortar bombs started whistling down. The Red Army had always been in love with them. It passed on its doctrine-and a bunch of tubes-to the North Koreans and Red Chinese. The company had an 81mm mortar, too. Cade also liked it. How could you not like portable artillery? It fired back. If he got very, very lucky, a bomb would come down on a T-34/85’s turret top, where the armor was thinnest, and brew it up. That kind of luck, he didn’t have. But the mortar rounds would maim some of the enemy troops and make others take cover. They could do that from longer range than machine guns.

As soon as O’Higgins’ gun started hammering away, the approaching tanks stopped. Their turrets swung toward the sandbagged nest. Taking out protected enemy machine guns was one reason tanks had been invented, half a lifetime ago now. After four or five hits, not much was left of the nest. Not much would have been left of the machine-gun crew, either, had they stuck around. But the gun, now on a bipod and much more portable, had already escaped.

Another reason tanks had been invented back during the First World War was to clear paths through the bramble patches of barbed wire both sides strewed about with such abandon in front of their lines. Less wire than Cade would have liked stood between him and the enemy. He wanted the T-34/85s to come flatten it, though. That would get them closer to his position, and give the bazooka men better shots at them.

Unfortunately, the tank commanders weren’t so dumb. They stayed back and lambasted the American trenches with shells and with bursts from their machine guns. Cade wondered if they were Russians. The Koreans who’d crewed tanks in the earlier days of the fighting wanted to get as close as they could to whatever they were attacking. They seemed to think squashing a foe flat was the best way to dispose of him.

A shell slammed into the dirt ten yards in front of Cade. Fragments whined overhead. He got mud in the face, harder than somebody would have thrown it at him. He spat and blinked and rubbed his eyes, trying to clean the crud out of them.

Wounded soldiers yelled for corpsmen. Standing up on the fighting step and looking out to see what the enemy foot soldiers were up to was asking to get shot in the face. He knew the bastards were moving forward, but what could he do? Men popped up for a few seconds, fired half blindly, and ducked down again, with luck before they got hit themselves. The machine guns delivered quick bursts.

One of the bazooka men launched a rocket at a T-34/85. It fell well short. All the same, it warned them not to get too cute. And it made them send some heavy fire toward that part of the trench. By the time they did, the guy with the sheet-metal launcher had prudently vacated.

Cade stuck his head up to spray some bullets around with his PPSh. He was alarmed to see some Chinese soldiers-or maybe they were Koreans-close enough for him to hit. He fired a couple of short bursts. The PPSh pulled up and to the right like a son of a bitch if you just squeezed the trigger and let ’er rip. The enemy soldiers shrieked and went down. Maybe he’d hit them. Maybe he’d just scared the shit out of them. That would do.

A distant buzz in the sky swelled to a deep-throated roar. Four Navy Corsairs zoomed low over the little battle, ripple-firing rockets and blazing away with the.50-caliber machine guns in their wings. Cade whooped and waved. Those inverted gull wings were the most gorgeous things he’d ever seen. In Europe, they’d be obsolete. They held their own here. This was a long way from MiG Alley, and a Corsair stood a good chance against anybody’s prop job.

They made four passes in all. By the time they waggled their wings and rode off into the sunset, three tanks were on fire and the other three on the run. The foot soldiers who’d advanced with them decided they didn’t want this stretch of American line all that much, either. They fell back with the surviving T-34/85s.

Some of the dead in front of the trenches would have ammo Cade could feed to his Russian-speaking submachine gun. He’d go out and scrounge…eventually. Now he turned to Lou Klein and said, “Made it through another one.”

“Yeah, we did,” the veteran agreed. “Another million to go and we win the fuckin’ war.”

“Think anybody back home’ll give a good goddamn?” Cade asked. Klein shook his head.

–

Air-raid sirens woke Daisy Baxter out of a sound sleep. They hadn’t sounded when the Russians bombed Norwich. If this wasn’t a drill or a mistake, the enemy was hitting somewhere closer to Fakenham now.

“Sculthorpe!” Daisy gasped, and jumped out of bed. She hurried down to the cellar, trying not to break her neck on the dark stairs. Whether going down there would do any good if an A-bomb hit the air base, she didn’t know. She didn’t see how she could be any worse off, though.

Antiaircraft guns began to hammer. Sculthorpe lay just a couple of miles from Fakenham. If an A-bomb did hit there, this little town would catch it hard.

Explosions thundered. The Owl and Unicorn shuddered above Daisy’s head. She whimpered like a terrified animal. If the pub fell down above her and blocked the stairs, would she have to stay here till she starved or suffocated?

Explosions, she realized. Plural. With an atom bomb, there’d be only one. But watch out for that first step-it’s a dilly!

So the Russians were dropping ordinary high explosives on Sculthorpe. They didn’t think the airfield was important enough for fancy, expensive atomic weaponry. Fakenham wasn’t in danger unless they missed badly-which, from everything she’d heard about bombing last time here and in Germany, they might well do.

But, unless the Owl and Unicorn took a direct hit, it wouldn’t collapse like that. She breathed easier. She also hoped that whatever the Reds were dropping, it would miss the runways and Nissen huts-the Yanks called them Quonset huts-to the west.

The sirens wailed for about fifteen minutes. No new bombs had fallen for some little while when the all-clear finally warbled. Daisy went up to the ground floor, opened the door, and looked around. Not much to see, not when Fakenham was blacked out. A couple of other people were also peering about.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” George Watkins called from across the street.

“Now that you mention it,” Daisy said, “no.” They both laughed shaky laughs and ducked back inside.

More sirens sounded in the distance. Daisy tensed, fearing a second wave of Russian planes. Then she realized they weren’t air-raid warnings. They were the sirens fire engines used. One thing she could be sure of: with fuel and planes and bombs and buildings, plenty at Sculthorpe would burn.

She didn’t know what time it was. The night was clear. She found the moon. By where it stood in the sky, she guessed it was about two in the morning, give or take an hour. She could go back to sleep…if she could go back to sleep.

She decided to try. She had nothing to lose, and it was cold down here. It wouldn’t be warm in her bedroom, either. She had a coal brazier and a hot-water bottle, very Victorian but not very effective. Steam radiators and gas heat were little more than rumors in Fakenham.

A glance at the glowing hands of the clock on her nightstand told her it was twenty-five past two. She nodded, pleased her celestial timekeeping had come so close. Then she burrowed under the blankets. They were all wool except for the quilted comforter on top. Nothing wrong with them at all. What the feeble outside heat sources couldn’t do, they could.

Whether they could calm her leftover fear and jitters was liable to be another story. Somewhere in the bathroom-or was it downstairs? — she had a packet of fizzing bromide powders. The stuff was supposed to calm your nerves and help you sleep. Getting out to look for it seemed more trouble than it was worth, though. She snuggled under the familiar weight of bedclothes. Either she’d sleep or she wouldn’t. If she didn’t, she’d pour down tea all day-and probably wouldn’t sleep much tomorrow night, either.

The alarm clock’s insistent bells woke her at a quarter after six. As she silenced the clock, she realized she hadn’t killed it when the air-raid sirens wailed. As fuddled as she’d been then, that was a stroke of luck.

She went downstairs, heated water for her morning cuppa, and fried a banger on the stove. Then she warmed up some leftover mash she had in the icebox: a fine British breakfast. She turned on the wireless to listen while she washed the dishes. If you didn’t stay ahead of the game as best you could, you’d be hip-deep in rubbish before you knew it.

“Russian aircraft attacked several landing strips in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland last night,” said a suave BBC newsreader with an accent so perfect, you wanted to sock him in the face. “Relatively little damage was done, and only conventional bombs were dropped. Alert RAF and U.S. Air Force night fighters have claimed three enemy bombers shot down, with two more so badly damaged that they appeared unlikely to make a safe return to their distant bases.”

He made it sound as if the Russians had carried out nothing worse than nuisance raids. It hadn’t seemed that way to Daisy. But then, when you measured attacks on air bases against leveling Norwich and Aberdeen, their importance on the grand scale of things shrank.

She readied the pub for another day’s business. A fresh barrel of bitter went under the tap. All the ashtrays were clean and empty; all the pints and halves behind the bar gleamed. She ran the carpet sweeper to get rid of ashes and potato-crisp crumbs in the rugs. She kept telling herself she ought to buy a Hoover, but she hadn’t done it yet.

As she worked, she wondered whether anyone but the locals would come in. If the airmen at Sculthorpe were confined to base, as they might well be, she’d lose most of a day’s trade. She shrugged. She had to get ready. If she was and they didn’t come, that would be annoying. If she wasn’t but they did, that would be disastrous.

Come they did, as soon as the Owl and Unicorn opened for business. For them, the raid the night before seemed to have been more exciting than terrifying. “We must have irked Ivan, or he’d not have come after us like that,” an RAF flying officer opined between pulls at a pint.

“How bad was it?” Daisy asked.

“Well, it wasn’t good,” the officer said. “They hit a barracks and wrecked a couple of planes and smashed up the runways. We’ll have bulldozers and steamrollers the way a picnic has ants.”

“A barracks? No, that doesn’t sound good at all,” she said.

“It wasn’t,” the RAF man said. “Actually, the bomb didn’t hit square. It blew in one wall, and then the roof fell down. One bloke-a Yank; this was an American barracks-has to be the luckiest sod ever hatched. He was near the far wall. The blast blew him out of his cot and through the window next to it…and all he has to show is a cut on one cheek. You wouldn’t care to play cards against a chap who can do that.”

“I don’t know. He may have used it all up there,” Daisy said. “If he were a cat, that would be eight lives out of nine, wouldn’t it? Eight and a half, maybe.”

“Hadn’t looked at it like that. You may be right.” The flying officer flashed what he no doubt thought of as his best lady-killing smile. “You’re as smart as you are pretty, dear.”

“Oh, foosh!” Daisy said. That and the look on her face made the flyer deflate like a punctured inner tube. Later, she thought she might have let him down more easily. But sometimes such a stale line made her not care what she came out with.

Bruce McNulty strode in that afternoon. He had a bandage taped to his left cheek. For a moment, Daisy thought nothing of it. Several RAF men and Americans had shown up with one minor injury or another-or with one and another. But then she made a guess: “Are you the bloke who went through the window during the raid?”

“Oh, you heard about that, did you?” He made as if to chuckle, but his face clouded over instead. “Yeah, I made it. Some buddies of mine didn’t. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be here myself-know what I mean?”

“I suppose I do.” She drew him a pint. “Here. This is on me. I’m glad you’re here.” He tried to argue. She wouldn’t let him.