Bombs Away

26

It was past closing time. Gently but firmly, Daisy Baxter had herded RAF and USAF men out of the Owl and Unicorn into the blacked-out streets of Fakenham. Some of them were liable to fall off their bicycles on the way back to the base at Sculthorpe. They might get knots on their noggins and scrapes on their knees. They were unlikely to smash themselves up the way they could driving drunk in motorcars.

Surveying the mess, she let out a long sigh. The more they drank, the worse the slobs they became. Empty and almost empty pints everywhere, ashtrays overflowing with butts, cigarettes stubbed out on tabletops, potato-crisp and meat-pie wrappers tossed to the floor…At least no one tonight had thrown up before he could get to the toilets. She hated that.

Daisy sighed again. She wanted to go to bed herself. It had been another long day. But she had to clean up first. That was one of the rules. You couldn’t sleep till things were tidy. If you didn’t take care of it, the elves wouldn’t, either. You just couldn’t get good elves these days.

She lit a cigarette. After she’d done it, she wondered why she’d bothered. The smoke already in the pub left the air as thick and gray and curdled as a bad London fog. Just breathing had to give her as much nicotine as the Navy Cut between her index and middle fingers. But there it was, so she finished it.

Then she got to work. First she emptied the ashtrays and wiped the tables and the long bars clean. Then she swept the garbage off the floor. After she put away the broom and the dustpan, she got the carpet sweeper out of the closet to pick up what they couldn’t. She’d deal with the squadrons of mugs after she took care of that.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Oh, bloody hell!” Daisy exclaimed. She could swear if she felt like it-who was going to hear her and be shocked? And feel like it she did. Every so often, one of the flyers, Yank or British, would decide he had to have one more pint no matter what, and bugger the laws that said he couldn’t till tomorrow. That she’d lose her license for drawing him the pint never bothered him a farthing’s worth. Why should it? It wasn’t his license.

Sometimes, if she quietly went about her business and pretended the tipsy fool outside wasn’t there, he would give up and go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t, and then she’d have to deal with him. That was almost as much fun as visiting the dentist.

The one tonight wasn’t going away, damn him. He knocked, paused, knocked some more. Another pause. Some more knocks. He was as regular and persistent as a woodpecker. He had to have a head just as hard as a woodpecker’s, too.

Daisy muttered something she’d heard once from a liquored-up, belligerent ordnance sergeant. It should have made the tables and chairs catch fire. Muttering some more, she pushed out through the blackout curtains to the door.

She didn’t open it. Through the wood and the tiny windows-useless now, with no lights on the street-she said, “It’s past closing time. I can’t serve you.” She didn’t say So sod off! but her voice was full of the suggestion.

She waited for the angry, beery insistence. She’d been down this road too many times. She was sick of it. Right this second, she was sick of everything that had to do with running a pub.

But the American voice on the other side of the door didn’t sound beery at all: “I don’t want a pint. I just want to talk to you.”

She still had to finish cleaning the floor. She had to wash and dry the glass mugs. She found herself opening the door anyhow. “Well, then, you’d better come in, hadn’t you?”

“Thanks.” Bruce McNulty stepped over the threshold. A little light leaked under the bottom of the blackout curtains: enough to make him seem to have suddenly materialized there. It was also enough to make Daisy shut the door behind him before the wandering air-raid warden walked by and started shouting at her.

When she pulled the curtains back to let him into the smoky snug, she saw that he was carrying a bouquet of roses. “What in blazes are those?” she demanded, pointing.

“They’re something to help me say I’m sorry,” McNulty answered. “I was out of line when I stomped out of here the last time I came. I was a jerk, but at least I know I was a jerk.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Daisy said. No one had brought her flowers since Tom, just before he had to go back to the Continent from leave, before he went off on the attack he didn’t come back from. It hadn’t been like him to do such a thing; he’d surprised her-startled her, really. Maybe he’d guessed something. Or maybe all the talk like that was just moonshine.

“I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to.” McNulty shifted from foot to foot like a nervous schoolboy. “Now I’d better get back to base, huh? I know you’ve got work to do here. You don’t need me hanging around wasting your time.”

“You’re not wasting my time,” Daisy said. “And thank you very much! I didn’t say that before, did I? They’re-they’re lovely. There was no need-I did say that.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so flustered.

“My pleasure, believe me. Anyway, I’m gone. But is it okay if I come back as long as the Russians let me?”

“Of course it is! D’you think I want to see a good customer get away?” But Daisy realized flipness wouldn’t do. When he joked about the Russians, he was trying not to think about flying through the valley of the shadow of death. She had no excuse like that. Quickly, she added, “I didn’t want you to leave to begin with. I lost my temper, that’s all. Believe me, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” he said, which didn’t come within miles of being true. Had he tried to kiss her then, she would have let him. She might have let him do more than that, too, which she hadn’t come close to doing in all the years since Tom’s tank brewed up.

He didn’t, though. He only touched the patent-leather brim of his cap in that way he had, nodded, and walked back out into the quiet night. The door closed. He was gone. Daisy stared at the place where he’d been, then at the roses in her arms. They were sweet. She could smell them through the clouds of tobacco smoke.

She took them upstairs, to the rooms where she’d never invited any of the men who drank at the Owl and Unicorn. If she left them down in the pub, everybody would wonder who’d given them to her and what she’d done to make him give them. Or rather, they wouldn’t wonder what she’d done. They’d be sure. What else could she have done?

And then they’d start talking. Somebody would start lying. And her reputation would wind up as flat as the center of Norwich.

That wouldn’t happen now, anyway. Out of sight, out of mind. A lot of the flyers might well have been out of their minds. Considering what they did to earn what their countries paid them, who could blame them?

Daisy’d seen only the outskirts of Norwich before the soldiers chased her home. She was no saint even if she didn’t sleep with pilots. She wanted revenge for the city close to home. The men flying out of Sculthorpe were the ones who gave it to her. Good for them, too!

In the meantime, she still had the mugs to deal with. She set about that, then cleaned out the toilets. Afterwards, she scrubbed her hands with the strongest soap and the hottest water she could stand. They still felt filthy afterwards. They always felt that way after the toilets, no matter how clean she got them. She knew it was in her mind. Knowing didn’t help her change.

At last, she went upstairs again. Her nose twitched-the roses perfumed her rooms. She smiled. Bruce McNulty knew how to do an apology up brown: no doubt of that. How much that meant, what she ought to do about it…She’d worry about such things some other time. She set the alarm clock, snuggled under the covers, and slept.

Whenever a motorcar came to the collective farm, Ihor Shevchenko worried. Motorcars meant the authorities. The authorities meant trouble. Ihor’s ancestors-serfs for generations uncounted-would have understood exactly how he felt. The symbols that panicked them might have been different from that black Gaz, but the panic would have been the same.

Two men got out and clumped toward the dining hall. It was early in the morning. People were still spooning up kasha, drinking glasses of tea, and smoking their first cigarettes. Like Ihor, the rest of the kolkhozniks eyed one another in apprehension when the badly tuned engine stopped so close by.

As soon as Ihor saw the men, he knew they had to belong to the MGB. The Chekists didn’t just mean trouble. They meant disaster for whomever their gaze fell upon. These fellows wore gray suits that fit their lumpy bodies none too well. One had a red tie, the other a black. Fedoras sat at a challenging angle on their bullet heads.

They eyed the kolkhozniks in the dining hall the way Ihor would have eyed a chicken he was about to take to the chopping block. “We’re here to bring two men into the service of the glorious, ever-victorious Red Army of the Soviet Union,” the one with the red tie announced. He spoke Russian, of course. To expect a Chekist, even a Chekist born in Kiev, to use Ukrainian would have been to expect the sun to rise in the west. He figured the nervous people in front of him would be able to understand…and he was right. Nodding to his partner, he said, “Read the names, Vanya.”

“I’ll do it,” the one with the black tie-Vanya-said. He fumbled in an inside pocket that held the paper with those names. The fumbling showed he had a shoulder holster, though the bulge under his left arm, and under his boss’, had already warned of that. He unfolded the paper. “First name is Gavrysh, Bogdan Stepanovich.” In his mouth, too, Ukrainian h’s turned to Russian g’s.

Bohdan stared in horror. He always made noises that marked him as a patriotic man. He’d fought against the Nazis, and must have thought the government would keep leaving him alone this time around.

“Come on,” said the MGB man with the red tie-the one who wasn’t Vanya. “Do you serve the Soviet Union or don’t you?”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Bohdan choked out. Any other answer would have sent him to the gulags instead of the Red Army, or maybe into the Red Army after a beating that should have earned him a medical exemption.

His wife put her head down and covered her face with her hands. Elizaveta was shocked, and well she might be. Ihor guessed it wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before she decided she was at least as well off without him. Ihor didn’t know Bohdan was as big a gasbag in private as in public, but it sure seemed likely to him.

Miserably, the kolkhoznik got up and walked over to the two MGB men. The one with the red tie nodded to Vanya. “The other whore, and then we’ll be on our way.” He sounded as if getting out of here was his fondest wish. He also sounded like a zek, dropping mat’ into his talk without noticing he was doing it.

“The other one. Right.” Vanya peered down at the paper again. “Shevchenko, Igor Semyonovich.”

Anya shrieked, then clapped both hands to her mouth. Ihor felt as if someone had slapped him in the face with a meter-long salmon. “You can’t do that!” he said automatically.

Tovarishch Red Tie glowered at him. With the Chekist’s ugly, badly shaved mug, it was a good glower. “No, huh?” he growled. His voice wasn’t deep enough for a truly scary growl, but he did his best with what he had. “You want to find out what we can do and what we can’t, prick?”

“But…But…But…” Ihor unstuck himself. He got to his feet, stepped away from the table-and from his wife-and pulled up his trouser leg to show his scars. “One of your people was here not too long ago. He looked at the leg, and he said the wound was too bad for the Army to take me back.”

“Well, I’m here now, and I’m telling you something fucking else,” the MGB man said. “Get over here with What’s-his-face if you know what’s good for you. You want to get cute, we’ll teach you more about cute than you ever wanted to find out.”

They would, too. And they’d enjoy themselves while they were doing it. Nobody here would lift a finger to save him. If the collective farm rebelled, the Chekists would take a couple of T-34s out of storage-maybe not even the new ones, but the originals with the two-man turret and the smaller gun-and level the place to the ground. They’d shoot the men right away. They’d have their fun with the women, then shoot them, too. All the kolkhozniks knew as much. Ihor could see the sick certainty in their eyes. He was sure they could also see it in his.

He limped over to the Chekists. “Cut the playacting, cuntface,” the one with the red tie said. “Won’t do you no good.”

“It isn’t playacting. It’s how I walk. But…” Ihor drew himself to stiff attention. It wasn’t as if he’d forgotten how. “I serve the Soviet Union!” As well as I can, he added, but only to himself.

“Let’s go,” Red Tie said. Go they did. Ihor looked back over his shoulder once, but only once. Seeing Anya wailing like that made him feel worse, not better.

He and Bohdan got into the Gaz’s back seat. Vanya slammed the door closed behind them. That was when Ihor discovered the rear doors had no latches on the inside. He also discovered that a grill of steel mesh separated the passengers in the back seat from the ones up front.

Vanya drove. Tovarishch Red Tie-Ihor still didn’t know his name-sat on the passenger side and took it easy. “We drop off these dingleberries, then head out to the next worthless fucking dump,” he said.

“That’s about the size of it,” Vanya agreed. “Shitty goddamn job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

“Hey, we serve the Soviet Union, too,” the other Chekist said. “How are we gonna whip the imperialists without soldiers, huh? Gotta find ’em somewhere. These cunts ain’t much, but they’re better’n nothin’.”

They drove down to Vasilkov, south of Kiev. It had been a small, sleepy town. Now it was bustling: it had taken over many of the functions Kiev had performed till it was visited by hell on earth. The place put Ihor in mind of a four-year-old in a two-year-old’s clothes-it was too big for its britches.

The Gaz stopped in front of a Red Army recruiting station. “We’ll take you inside,” Red Tie told Ihor and Bohdan. “Don’t want anything getting fucked up, the way it could if we just leave you on the sidewalk.” Don’t want you bugging out-Ihor had no trouble reading between the lines.

A sergeant with a patch where his left eye should have been and scars all over that side of his face waved to the MGB men as if they were old friends. They probably were. “Well, what kind of ravens’ meat have you got for me this time?” he called.

“Ravens’ meat? These are veterans! Good, solid men.” Red Tie sounded insulted.

“They’re veterans, are they?” The sergeant’s glower put the Chekist’s to shame, but he had unfair advantages in frightfulness. “You pussies fought the Hitlerites?”

“Yes, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor and Bohdan said together.

“Then we don’t even have to waste time with the oath. You swore it the last time, and it still holds.” The cyclops sergeant jabbed a thumb at a doorway behind him. “Go through there. They’ll do your paperwork and kit you out. This time tomorrow, you’ll be on a train heading west. Something to look forward to, hey?”

Ihor looked forward only to going home to Anya. All he wanted to do was stay alive. Now if only the state cared a kopek for what he wanted!

When Aaron Finch came to the door, Ruth opened it with the oddest expression on her face. After he kissed her, he asked, “Okay, what’s Leon gone and done?” That was the likeliest thing he could think of to make her wear such a bemused look.

“Leon didn’t do anything,” Ruth said. As if to contradict her, Aaron got attacked by a toddling tornado in a cowboy outfit. Leon hadn’t seen him all day. When you’d just turned two, that was a decent chunk of your lifespan.

Once the tickling and rough-housing and other greetings were out of the way, Aaron asked, “Nu? What is going on then?” He was positive something had to be.

By way of reply, his wife took an envelope out of a cut-glass bowl on a little table near the door and handed it to him. “This is for you,” she said.

“Oh,” he said: a little breath of a word. His was not the sort of household that got a letter from the White House, a letter whose envelope was embossed with the Presidential seal, every day. He eyed it in mock alarm. “They must be drafting me.”

Ruth poked him in the ribs. He wriggled to make her happy, even though he wasn’t ticklish. “Open it, you-you bulvan, you,” she said.

“Bulvan!” Leon said happily. He collected new words the way FDR had collected stamps. He had no idea that one was Yiddish, not English. He didn’t know the difference, or care. He didn’t know it meant ox or jerk. He just liked the sound of it.

Open it Aaron did: carefully, so he could keep the envelope for a souvenir along with whatever it held. The stationery had the Presidential emblem at the top of the sheet, too.

“Read!” Ruth said, as if she were Leon demanding a story.

Aaron read: “ ‘Dear Mr. Finch: It is with great pleasure that I congratulate you for the brave action you took in capturing the Soviet aviator who had bailed out of his bomber after attacking Los Angeles. What you did showed courage, quick wits, and patriotism. Americans can and should take you for an example. Your country owes you a debt of gratitude.’ ”

It wasn’t one of those printed letters made to look as if they were typewritten, with a machine signature likewise impersonating the real McCoy. He could feel the way the typewriter’s strokes indented the paper in the back. The President’s signature, sloppy and smeary, was also the genuine article. The typed-by/author line at the bottom left read rc/HST.

Ruth stared at the letter. “Wow!” she said. “That’s something! Well, so are you.” She kissed him.

He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t tell Roxane about it. She’ll think I’m selling out the workers again.”

“She’s not that bad,” Ruth said.

“Like heck she’s not,” Aaron replied. “But if you hadn’t gone to Marvin’s with her that one afternoon, we never would’ve run into each other. I’ll cut her some slack on account of that.”

“I guess we wouldn’t,” Ruth said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“There ought to be stories where some little thing happens differently and everything that comes afterwards gets changed from the way it really was,” Aaron said thoughtfully. “They might be fun, make you think a little while you’re reading. You know, like if the South won the Civil War.”

“Or if the Nazis won World War II.” Ruth showed she got what he was talking about.

He shook his head anyway. “Nobody’s ever gonna want to read about that, not in a million years. What else could a story like that be about except them killing everybody they didn’t like-everybody who wasn’t German, I mean?”

His father and mother had come to America from a little Romanian town. After the war, his older brother up in Oregon (who had lived through the bomb that fell on Portland) had got a couple of letters from a relative on their mother’s side. He’d sent money once. Then the Iron Curtain thudded down, and letters stopped getting through.

Ruth’s family sprang from a village right on the border between Byelorussia and the Ukraine. No one on this side of the Atlantic had heard a word from the ones who didn’t emigrate, not after Hitler invaded the USSR. Those people had to be dead now.

He didn’t want to think about things like that, especially not when he was holding a letter from Harry Truman. Evidently, Ruth didn’t want to think about things like that, either, because she pointed at the letter and said, “You ought to frame it and hang it in the living room. The envelope, too.”

“Maybe I will,” he answered. He was handy with tools; he could make the frame and cut the glass himself. It would be cheap. That notion led to another, one which made him chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” his wife asked.

“I was just thinking about Roxane and Howard again. They’ll be thrilled when they come over and see it, won’t they?”

“They probably will. They aren’t that bad, Aaron. They want America to be better, that’s all.”

“Huh.” Aaron had heard Marvin say the same thing. Saying it, though, didn’t necessarily make it so. But Aaron didn’t push it to a quarrel. Fighting with your wife struck him as a losing proposition. To Marvin, it was something more like sport, though Aaron didn’t believe for a minute that poor Sarah felt the same way. Instead of going on about Roxane and Howard Bauman, Aaron asked, “What smells good?”

“Short ribs,” Ruth answered. “They should be ready any minute. I’ve got ’em stewing with potatoes and carrots and onions and mushrooms.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Aaron said. One of the reasons it sounded wonderful was that it meant some short ribs had made it to the store. They’d eaten a lot of spaghetti with tomato sauce and macaroni and cheese lately. You didn’t need refrigerated railroad cars to ship that kind of stuff into town. For meat, you did.

He splashed Tabasco sauce on his short ribs. Ruth eyed him, but didn’t say anything about it. He splashed Tabasco or horseradish on everything this side of oranges and lemon-meringue pie. He poured hot sauce onto eggs. When he drank beer from a glass and not from the bottle or can, he sprinkled salt into it. Leon loved that because of the way it made the bubbles rise so spectacularly. Like Tabasco, the salt added flavor. He hadn’t had his taste buds shot off in the war, but all those packs of cigarettes had scorched them into submission.

After supper, Ruth washed and he dried. As she used steel wool on the aluminum pot the ribs had stewed in, she remarked, “I wonder how you got that letter.”

“Beats me,” Aaron said. “It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?”

“I mean,” Ruth went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “it was in the local news and everything, but how did it get all the way back to Washington?”

“Well, Truman did come out here to inspect the damage, and-” Aaron broke off. He snapped his fingers as an answer glowed like a shooting star inside his head.

“What?” his wife asked.

“I bet Herschel fixed it,” Aaron said. “He gives the Democrats money all the time. I know he’s met Truman. And his business has been rotten since the bombs fell. So maybe he thought this would make me feel good even if it didn’t put any money in my pocket.”

“If he did, he was right,” Ruth said.

“Yeah. I know.” Aaron smiled cynically. “Roxane would say he was just tricking me so I’d go on working for Blue Front without that extra money. She’d be right, too, I guess. But whether she is or whether she ain’t, I’m still gonna frame that letter!”

“Down below five hundred meters, Comrade Pilot,” Vladimir Zorin said from the Tu-4’s right-hand seat.

“Thanks. I know. Bozhemoi, but I hate night landings!” Boris Gribkov was keeping an eye on the altimeter, too. At the same time, he was peering out through the bomber’s crappy Plexiglas windshield, looking for the landing lights that would let him put the big plane down.

They wouldn’t be much-he knew that. He’d be landing on a stretch of Autobahn northeast of Munich. The Bavarian city lay in Red Army hands. He was still nervous, not only about the makeshift runway but also about the chance of American marauders. Deliberately, he made himself forget about those. If they jumped him now, he was dead. It was that simple. So he didn’t need to worry about them.

From the bombardier’s position, which had the best view in the plane, Alexander Lavrov called, “I see them, Comrade Pilot! Almost dead ahead-a cunt-hair’s worth to starboard.”

“Good job, Sasha! I see ’em, too-now.” The lights were provided by a bunch of soldiers shining flashlights up into the air. It wouldn’t have worked on a cloudy night, but it did here. Even as things were, the lights seemed mighty faint to Boris. Well, it wasn’t as if they wanted their presence so far forward advertised-just the opposite, in fact.

“I’m going to land it,” he told Zorin, and then turned the intercom to the all-hands setting. “Crew, strap in and prepare for landing!”

He’d already lowered the flaps to slow the hulking airplane. While he changed course ever so slightly, he watched the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and-as always-the engine temperatures. As he did on takeoffs, he opened the engine cowlings that let heat escape but spoiled the bomber’s aerodynamics.

Bump! He was down, more smoothly than he’d expected. He hit the brakes hard, steering as straight as he could. The Tu-4 needed more than two and a half kilometers of runway to take off fully laden, but a good bit less than that to land with tanks close to dry.

When he came to a stop, a man with a flashlight guided him forward and then off the edge of the paved highway to a waiting revetment with steel mesh on the ground to keep the plane from sinking in. “You did that just right,” Zorin said admiringly.

“Spasibo, Volodya,” Boris answered. “If they’re smart, they’ll have fixed several, depending on where we landed and how far we had to taxi.” He chuckled dryly. “I wouldn’t want to have to back her up.”

“Well,” the copilot said, “no.”

They got out as soon as the props stopped spinning. Groundcrew men were already draping the Tu-4 with camouflage netting. They’d be here only a day or two. No one wanted to give the Americans any excuse to visit.

“Welcome! Welcome!” That well-educated, self-satisfied voice had to belong to a senior officer. Sure enough, the man who owned it went on, “I’m Colonel Madinov. I run this madhouse. We’re going to give the decadent imperialists a kick in the balls they’ll never forget.”

“We serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Colonel,” Gribkov said. He couldn’t see Leonid Tsederbaum’s eyes on him; the navigator stood several meters to the rear. He felt them all the same.

“Well, come on. We’ll get you fed and we’ll get you settled for now,” Madinov said. “When the sun comes up, we’ll review what you’re going to do to Paris.”

Tsederbaum coughed softly, as if one of the little bushes growing by the side of the Autobahn bothered him. Gribkov wasn’t happy, either. He didn’t want to tear the heart out of a world-famous city. But that hadn’t stopped the Americans who hit Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev. It also wouldn’t stop him. And he didn’t believe it would stop his navigator.

After shchi and sausages, the Tu-4 crew met Colonel Madinov in what had been a Catholic church. Blackout curtains shielded windows and doorway. Kerosene lamps gave enough light to use. With Madinov was a very pink young man in Soviet flying togs. “This is Klement Gottwald,” Madinov said. “He speaks Russian with an accent and English almost without one. He’s trained up on the B-29’s radio. He’ll take your man’s seat there on the attack run.”

Leonid Tsederbaum said something in German-or maybe it was Yiddish. Gottwald looked surprised, then smiled. In that accented Russian the colonel had mentioned, he said, “I serve the Soviet Union! I do, and I was born a Sudeten German. That’s funny, if you like.” Since the Germans in the Sudetenland had given Hitler his excuse to swallow Czechoslovakia, it was at least curious to find one of them helping the USSR along.

Andrei Aksakov, the regular radioman, spoke excellent Russian but no English-Boris wasn’t sure about German. If he was disappointed to get bumped from this mission, he didn’t show it.

“Comrade Colonel, we’ll also need new American IFF codes, if you have them,” Vladimir Zorin said. He didn’t add This will be suicidal without them, but he might as well have.

Madinov nodded. “A technician is entering them into your set right now.”

“From what they told us before we flew here, sir, this will be a low-level mission,” Gribkov said. “We won’t have the long parachute delay till the bomb goes off. How do we escape before the blast knocks us down?”

“It will still have a parachute, of course,” Madinov said, and Boris nodded back. The colonel went on, “There will be a thirty-second wait once it touches down. That will buy you several kilometers.”

Boris thought about it. Could anyone in Paris disarm the bomb in half a minute, even if he started trying right away? It seemed unlikely. “Fair enough, Comrade Colonel,” the pilot said.

“I don’t like this myself, but we have to do it,” Madinov said. “Paris is as big a transportation hub for France as Moscow is for us. Smashing it will keep the Americans from resupplying their forces farther east.”

“Yes, sir,” Boris said. The colonel was taking a chance to tell the bomber crew he didn’t care for his orders. His courage deserved respect.

Madinov pointed to a couple of bottles of vodka that sat on the altar instead of sacramental wine. “We’ll drink to the success you’ll have tomorrow.” Drink they did. Everyone had a good knock; nobody got enough to get smashed.

Boris and his crewmen devoted the next day to checking the Tu-4 from nose to tail, making as sure as they could that it was ready to do its part. “We’ll paint another city on the nose.” Leonid Tsederbaum sounded almost gay at the prospect.

That he was, Boris didn’t believe for a minute. “Right,” he said tightly. He didn’t like this, either. But what could you do?

Part of the plan involved jamming enemy radio and radar, starting well before the bomber (and how many others with it, from different stretches of highway?) took off. That might help. It might not. The Soviet techs had been doing it on and off for a week, to confuse the Americans and French.

After dark, armorers loaded the A-bomb into the Tu-4. They were not quite seven hundred kilometers from Paris: between an hour and an hour and a half, plus the same time back. A short mission, as these things went. Usually, they had to sweat out getting shot down for most of a day.

A track made from more steel mesh led them back to the Autobahn, from which they’d take off. The bomb was heavy, but the fuel load was pretty light. They got airborne more easily than they had, say, on the way to Bordeaux.

As soon as they crossed the front, the IFF claimed they were a B-29 on the way home. Gottwald spoke in whistling English once, then switched to Russian to use the intercom: “So much static, we could hardly understand each other. That’s good. It helps.”

Tsederbaum also spoke over the intercom: “Hitler wanted Paris burning, too. He didn’t get his wish. We will.”

I don’t like the way he said that, Boris thought. Who would like getting compared to the Nazi Führer?

After the one challenge, no Yank or Frenchman wondered about the Tu-4 or what it was doing. The short flight went as smoothly as a training run. Guided by radar, Lavrov dropped the bomb near the Arc de Triomphe.

As soon as it was gone, Boris pushed the throttles to the red line. Even so, the flash almost blinded him and the blast wave nearly swatted him from the sky. A mushroom cloud, full of fire and lightning, mounted to the stratosphere. Behind the bomber, Paris burned.