Bombs Away

3

Grunting as he shifted the weight, Aaron Finch got the washing machine moving on the dolly. “Plenty of room,” Jim Summers said between puffs on a Camel. He’d earned the chance to play sidewalk superintendent-he’d just loaded the matching dryer into the back of the Blue Front truck.

“Okay,” Aaron said. He grunted again when the washer started up the ramp. He wasn’t a big man-five-nine, maybe a hundred fifty pounds. But he had the kind of whipcord strength that came from working with your hands and your back your whole life long. He’d be fifty on his next birthday. He couldn’t believe it. His hair was still black, even if it had drawn back at the temples to give him a widow’s peak. But his craggy face had the lines and wrinkles you’d expect from anyone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun and the open air. At least he wasn’t shivering now, though he wore no jacket over his Blue Front shirt. It was in the mid-seventies in the middle of January. You couldn’t beat Southern California for weather, no way, nohow.

The dolly with the washer bumped once more when it bounced down off the wooden ramp and into the bed of the truck. Aaron paused a moment to settle his glasses more firmly on his formidable nose. Without them, he couldn’t see more than a foot past its tip.

To his disgust, that had kept him out of the Army. He’d tried to volunteer right after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t take him. He was too nearsighted and too old (he’d turned forty less than a week before the attack). So he’d joined the merchant marine instead. He’d been on the Murmansk run, in the Mediterranean, and in the South Pacific. He’d done more dangerous things than a lot of soldiers, but he wasn’t eligible for any of the postwar benefits. That disgusted him, too.

He wrestled the washer into place by the dryer. It was one of the new, enclosed models. He and his wife still had a wringer machine. One of these days…He’d been married three years now. He’d got into middle age as a firm believer in why-buy-a-cow-when-milk-is-cheap. But after the war he’d come down to Glendale to stay with his brother, Marvin, for a while. He’d met Ruth there and fallen, hook, line, and sinker. They’d run off to Vegas to tie the knot. And now they rented a house in Glendale themselves. Leon was eighteen months old, and looked just like his old man.

“You gone to sleep in there?” Jim called.

“Keep your shirt on,” Aaron answered without heat. He draped a tarp over the washing machine to keep it from getting dinged and secured the cover with masking tape. He laid the dolly flat and walked down the ramp to the warehouse floor. He lit a cigarette of his own-a Chesterfield. He thought Camels were too harsh, especially when you went through a couple of packs a day the way he did.

Jim Summers got the ramp out of the way. He was a redneck from Arkansas or Alabama or somewhere like that. He had a red face to go with his neck, and an unstylish brown mustache. He was four or five inches taller than Aaron, and outweighed him by sixty or seventy pounds. But he was soft; his belly hung over the belt that held up his dungarees. In a brawl, Aaron figured he could hold his own.

Summers didn’t like Negroes, and said so at any excuse or none. He didn’t like Jews, either. He knew Herschel Weissman, the guy who ran Blue Front, was Jewish. He bellyached about it every now and then. He had no idea Aaron was. Jim Summers didn’t come equipped with a hell of a lot of ideas. Aaron Finch’s name didn’t look Jewish, even if his face did, so Summers didn’t worry about it.

Aaron chuckled as he blew out smoke. His father had turned Fink into its English equivalent when he came to America. His dad’s brothers hadn’t, so Aaron had Fink cousins. His old man had figured Finch was easier to carry. From some of the things Aaron had seen, his old man had figured pretty straight.

“Where we gotta take these fuckers?” Jim asked.

“Pasadena, I think.” Aaron reached for the clipboard with the order form. He nodded. “Pasadena-that’s right.”

“Not too far,” Summers said, and it wasn’t. Pasadena lay only a few miles east of the Glendale warehouse. They were two of the older, larger suburbs north of Los Angeles. In sly tones, Jim went on, “If we take it easy, we can stretch the delivery out so as we knock off as soon as we get back from it.”

“We’ll see.” Aaron had grown up believing you always worked as hard as you could: it was the only proper thing to do. How were you going to get ahead if you didn’t work hard all the time?

He stepped on the cigarette butt, then climbed into the truck with Summers. He shook his head once or twice. How were you going to get ahead even if you did work hard all the time? He and Jim earned the same pay for doing the same job. Jim was as lazy as he could get away with. If that was fair…

Well, a lot of things in life weren’t fair. You couldn’t bump up against fifty without seeing as much. Some of Aaron’s relatives-and some of Ruth’s, too-had become Reds, or damn close anyway, on account of it. Aaron had voted Democratic since the early 1920s, and he was proud of the Teamsters’ Union card in his wallet. He left it there, though.

With the world as tense as it was, you could get into big trouble for admitting you liked the Russians. As Jim piloted the truck out of the Blue Front warehouse, Aaron asked him, “Hear any news since this morning?”

“Heard the Sacramento Solons hired Joe Gordon to manage ’em and play second base,” Summers answered. “He was goddamn good in the big leagues. I bet he’ll tear up the PCL.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Aaron was a fan, too, but he hadn’t been looking for baseball news. He tried again: “Anything about what’s going on in Korea?”

“Not much. Far as I can make out, the Chinks are still goin’ great guns, the fuckin’ bastards. We oughta blow ’em into the middle o’ next week, teach ’em they gotta be crazy to mess with white men.”

“Stalin’s a white man,” Aaron said dryly, “and he’s on their side.”

“Screw him, too,” Summers said. “He wants to take us on, he’ll be sorry.”

“No doubt about it,” Aaron agreed. “What scares me is how sorry we’ll end up being. He’s got the bomb, too, remember.”

Joe Summers offered a suggestion about where Stalin could put the bomb. Aaron thought it was too big around to fit there, even if the boss Red greased it the way Jim said he should. He let the subject drop. You did better talking politics with Jim than you did if you talked with your dog, but not a whole lot.

They drove east on Colorado Boulevard, then south on Hill Street past the California Institute of Technology. Jim Summers’ comment on that was, “Buncha Hebes with hair they forgot to comb playin’ with slide rules.” He wouldn’t have known what to do with a slide rule if it slid up and bit him in the leg. Aaron didn’t know much himself, but he’d picked up some when he got promoted to acting assistant engineer on one of the Liberty ships he’d crewed.

The house that got the washer and dryer was of white-painted stucco with a red Spanish tile roof. Aaron was smoother than Jim at hooking up the water and gas connections, so he did that. He showed the housewife both machines were in good working order. “You have any trouble, you just call us,” he told her. “The number’s on the carbon for your form there.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, and tipped each of them a dollar. Aaron didn’t like taking money for doing what he was supposed to do, but Jim pocketed his single with the air of a man who wouldn’t have minded a fin. Declining after that would have been awkward, so Aaron kept quiet. One look at the size of the house and at the furniture told him the lady wasn’t giving them anything she couldn’t afford.

They brought the big blue truck back to the warehouse a few minutes before five-thirty. Herschel Weissman nodded to them and said, “Go on home, boys. I’ll clock you out at the bottom of the hour.”

“Obliged,” Jim told him. And he’d resent being obliged, too. His mental circuits would have trouble with the notion of a Jew being generous, and that would make him angry.

“Thanks, boss,” Aaron added. When they were by themselves, they sometimes talked to each other in Yiddish. Aaron would do that with Ruth, too-but, with her as with Weissman, never when anyone who spoke only English was around. You didn’t want to show American Americans you remembered old-country ways at all.

He went out and got into his elderly gray Nash. The rented house on Irving was only a few blocks away. Aaron smiled as he lit another Chesterfield. He wondered what little Leon had been up to today.

–

Bill Staley parked his behind on a metal folding chair. The seat felt like what it was: steel painted Air Force blue-gray. The chairs must have been ordered by the carload lot, on a contract that put cheapness ahead of everything else-certainly a long way ahead of comfort.

He had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. General Harrison wasn’t the sort to call all his aircrews together unless he had some urgent reason to do so. Urgent reasons did keep offering themselves, dammit. The Red Chinese went right on pushing forward. They spent men in gruesome heaps for every mile they advanced. The next sign they gave that that bothered them would be the first.

An American commander who used, and used up, his troops like that would have been court-martialed. He would have won himself a newspaper nickname like “Butcher” before the brass landed on him, too. Bill figured even a Russian general in the last big war would have thought twice before he expended soldiers as if they were cartridges. The Chinese had men to burn, and burned them.

General Harrison thwacked his lectern with a pointer, the way he had to open the last big meeting. “Gentlemen, I have important news,” he said as soon as the officers and noncoms quieted. “President Truman has authorized the use of atomic bombs against the Chinese inside China. He has not directly ordered us to use them, but he has given General MacArthur permission to send out such strikes if, in his view, the situation on the ground can be improved in no other way.”

Sighs, whistles, and soft hisses floated up from the aircrews. Just like everyone else, Bill Staley knew what that meant. The only word for the present situation on the ground was fubar. The Red Chinese were in Seoul. North Korea’s flag flew above the city, or what was left of it, but the men who’d taken it didn’t belong to Kim Il-sung. They got their marching orders from Mao Tse-tung.

If they hadn’t done such horrible things to the UN forces after they swarmed across the Yalu…If they hadn’t, maybe some kind of stalemate would have developed. Stalemate wasn’t the smashing victory Douglas MacArthur had looked for, but it beat hell out of the fiasco he’d got.

Bombing on this side of the Yalu hadn’t kept the Chinese from flooding down into Korea. No ordinary weapons had. But the United States had extraordinary weapons, and it had decided that repairing things here was important enough to be worth using them.

“So…What we wait for now is the command from General MacArthur,” Matt Harrison said. “I don’t know when that will come, but I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long.”

Bill didn’t think they’d have to wait long, either. MacArthur’s military reputation had been on a roller-coaster ride the past few months. He’d looked like a genius after the Inchon landing. That had retaken Seoul and forced the North Koreans to pull back out of the south to keep from getting cut off by the forces suddenly in their rear. He’d planned on wiping Kim Il-sung’s army-and maybe Kim Il-sung’s country-off the map right after that.

But he hadn’t planned on the Chinese incursion when the forces he led neared the Yalu. He hadn’t planned on it, and he hadn’t been able to stop it. Only stragglers had escaped from the army in the north. Resupplying by air just prolonged the agony, as it had for the Germans trapped in Stalingrad. And the German cargo planes hadn’t needed to worry about jet fighters tearing into them.

So if he was going to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, he’d have to break some Chinese eggs instead. Which was fine if nobody could retaliate. Japan hadn’t been able to when fire fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao didn’t have any atomic bombs. But Stalin did.

Whether he’d use them or not…was something everybody would find out. Maybe the show of force would overawe him. Maybe he would think Mao had gone in over his head and deserved what he got. Or maybe the world would find itself in the middle of a new big war when not all the scabs from the old big war had fallen off the wounds.

Brigadier General Harrison rapped the lectern one more time. “Something else you need to know, gentlemen,” he said. “Aerial reconnaissance shows that the Russians are moving fighters and bombers onto airstrips in southeastern Siberia, and in Manchuria as well. They are getting ready for trouble, and we are the trouble they’re getting ready for.”

“Great,” muttered a man sitting behind Bill Staley. That was about what he was thinking himself. By World War II standards, the B-29 was indeed the Superfortress. But World War II was over, even if its maladies lingered on. It was 1951. The state of the art had advanced.

In 1917, the Sopwith Camel had been a world-beating fighter. Run it up against a Messerschmitt 109 and it wouldn’t last long. For that matter, a Messerschmitt’s life expectancy against an F-86 would be just as brief.

Bill wished he didn’t think that way. A lot of guys simply did what they were told and didn’t worry about anything past the mission. His mind jumped here and there, every which way, like a frog on a hot sidewalk.

He wasn’t the only one. A flyer stuck up his hand and asked, “Sir, what happens if they try and bomb this air base before we move?”

“Then they involve themselves directly in the fighting and have to take the consequences of that,” Harrison replied. Everybody knew most of the enemy MiG-15s that harassed American pilots had Russians in the cockpit. But those were unofficial Russians, as it were. You couldn’t stay unofficial when you dropped bombs on somebody’s head…could you? Harrison went on, “We do fly a day-and-night combat air patrol, and we have radar sweeping the sky. We won’t make it easy for them.”

Something occurred to Bill. He raised his hand. General Harrison aimed the tip of the pointer at him. He said, “Sir, their heavy bombers will be Bulls, right?” Bull was the NATO reporting name for the Tu-4. “If they paint some of them to look like B-29s, will our fighter jockeys up there recognize them soon enough to shoot them down?”

The base commander opened his mouth. Then he closed it without saying anything. A few seconds later, he tried again: “That’s a…better question than I wish it were. With luck, IFF will alert us that they’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. But, if they look like our planes, we may take them at face value.” His expression looked like that of a man halfway through eating a lemon. “You’ve given me something new to lose sleep over. Thanks a bunch.”

A major who wore the ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with two oak-leaf clusters came up to Bill as the gathering broke up. “Good job,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing the Russians are liable to do. They take camouflage seriously. They don’t just play games with it, the way we do half the time.”

“You sound like somebody who knows what he’s talking about, sir,” Bill said.

“Too right, I do. We flew back-and-forth missions a few times, from England to Russia and then the other way. I was on one of them, piloting a B-24. Man, you wouldn’t believe what all they’d do to make an airstrip disappear. We didn’t fly many of those, though. The Reds were nervous about ’em. Partly for what we’d see of theirs, I guess, and partly because they didn’t want their people meeting us. Russians are scared to death of foreigners.”

“I bet I would be, too, if I had Germans on my border,” Bill said.

“Yeah, they’re good neighbors, aren’t they?” The major rolled his eyes. “No wonder Stalin wanted satellites between him and the krauts. But now he’s got us on his border, and he doesn’t go for that, either.”

“And we have the bomb,” Bill said.

“We sure do. So does Stalin.” The major grimaced. “Ain’t life grand?”

–

“Time, gentlemen, please!” Daisy Baxter had run the Owl and Unicorn since her husband’s tank stopped a Panzerfaust in the closing days of World War II. Tom’s picture still hung behind the bar. In it, he looked young and eager and brave, ready to do whatever it took to get rid of the Nazis once for all. He’d never get any older now.

And I’ll never get any younger, Daisy thought discontentedly. She’d been only twenty-two when she got the telegram from the Ministry of War. Hard to believe that would be six years ago in a couple of months. Not at all hard to believe she was getting close to thirty. As tired as the pub could make her, some nights she felt close to fifty.

“Time, gentlemen!” she said again. Would a male publican have to repeat himself four or five times a week to get noticed or believed? She didn’t think so. Tom hadn’t needed to, nor had his father before him. But they were gone and she was here, so she did what she needed to do.

Grumbling, her customers drank up, paid up, and filed-sometimes lurched-out into the chilly night. Most of them wore the RAF’s slaty blue or the slightly darker uniforms of the U.S. Air Force. If not for the air base at Sculthorpe, three or four miles west of Fakenham, she didn’t think she would have been able to keep the Owl and Unicorn going. Fakenham was only a small town; there weren’t many big towns in northern Norfolk. But the men who flew planes for his Majesty and their Yankee counterparts did like to take the edge off whenever they got the chance. The way they drank, they could have kept someone a good deal less thrifty than she was comfortably in the black.

Closing time meant her customers had to go. It didn’t mean her day was done-nowhere near. She had to clean off the bar and the tables. She had to empty the ashtrays. Why was it that so many people who drank hard smoked hard, too? She’d never got the habit herself. She thought it was nasty, in fact. Nasty or not, with so many puffing away in there, she might have been smoking a packet a day. And nothing was more disgusting than the stink of stale tobacco ashes.

Once she got rid of those and the rest of the rubbish, she washed and dried the pint mugs and the smaller glasses that held stronger brew. The Americans said a British pint was bigger than one of theirs-not that they complained about the difference when they were pouring down her best bitter. But it bothered her. Shouldn’t a measure with the same name on both sides of the Atlantic also be the same size?

She was low on potato crisps. She’d have to get more before she opened tomorrow. Potatoes, thank heaven, weren’t rationed. Too many things still were, all these years after the war ended. England might have been one of the winners, but she’d beggared herself in the process. France was better off these days, and France had packed it in straightaway. From things Daisy heard, even the western part of Germany was better off. That seemed bitterly unfair.

Not that she could do anything about it, regardless of whether the damned Germans ate caviar for breakfast and beefsteak for supper every day. By the way the airmen talked, the bloody Germans were liable to get theirs pretty soon.

By the way the airmen talked, the whole world was liable to get its pretty soon. And even a place like Fakenham, far from any big city, could get its along with the rest of the world. The Nazis hadn’t bothered it; the only industry in town worth mentioning was printing.

But Fakenham lay much too close to Sculthorpe. Some of the planes that flew out of the base there were B-29s: bombers that could carry a deadly payload all the way to Russia. Daisy had no idea whether the Russians knew that. If they did, though, they would want to find ways to keep it from happening. She was no general, but she could see that.

Daisy yawned. What she couldn’t see right this minute was straight. She’d either fall asleep here, next to the gleaming glassware, or she’d go upstairs to the flat over the pub and do it somewhere a little more comfortable. Upstairs won, though the weary trudge felt a lot longer than it really was.

The sun had risen when she sat bolt upright in bed, but it was much too early. “Bloody hell!” she said, even if no one was there to hear her swear. “I forgot to clean the stinking toilets!”

They would be stinking, too. Beer made men piss more and aim less. She didn’t think anybody’d puked the night before-no one had complained about it. The job would be bad enough anyhow. She could see why she’d forgotten about it. It was nothing anybody would want to remember.

Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t have to do it, even before she brewed her first cuppa and grilled a bloater for breakfast. Those were part of today’s business. The toilets still belonged to yesterday’s, so they came first.

Sighing, she went downstairs and into that dark, smelly little room to do what wanted doing. The toilets were an afterthought in the pub, put in when indoor plumbing came to Fakenham some time late in Queen Victoria’s reign. It would have been Tom’s granddad or great-granddad who added them, and he cost himself no more space than he could help. When things were busy, as they had been last night, that made crowding and messes worse.

Afterwards, Daisy wished she could scrub her hands with steel wool. Washing them like Lady Macbeth was the next best thing. She did that every night after cleaning the toilets. Because she did, her hands were red and rough all the time in spite of the creams and lotions she rubbed in.

No matter how tired she got, she was still on the chipper side of thirty. She sometimes dreamt that, in spite of rough, red hands, an American pilot would sweep her off her feet and take her back across the Atlantic to Wyoming or Arkansas or Nevada or one of those other states with a romantic-sounding name. She was sure she’d be happier in some town there than she was in out-on-its-feet Fakenham.

The flyers chatted her up. They would have loved to take her to bed for the fun of it. Going to bed with a man was fun; she remembered that only too well. You stayed warm afterwards much better than you did with a flannel nightgown and a pile of blankets and a hot-water bottle on your feet.

But if you went to bed with men for the fun of it, word got around. And they said women gossiped! Plenty of flyers would want to sleep with that kind of woman. Not a one of them, though, would want to take her back to the United States when his tour here finished.

And so she smiled behind the bar as she worked the tap. She made pleasant conversation. She swatted hands away when she carried pints to tables. If she had to, she spilled things on people too stupid to get the message any other way.

She slept by herself, in a flannel nightgown, under a pile of blankets, with a hot-water bottle on her feet. If, one night or another when she wasn’t too exhausted, her hand sometimes slipped under the nightgown and took care of certain needs, she was the only one who knew that. By now, she’d got over feeling guilty about it, or even very embarrassed. It was just something she did. Under the clothes, people were animals. She slept better on nights when she scratched that particular itch.

She did tonight, even though she was tired. But bombers flying low overhead woke her before sunup all the same. When those engines thundered just above the housetops, a body would have had trouble staying dead, much less asleep.

“Daft buggers,” Daisy muttered through a yawn. They weren’t supposed to land or take off right above Fakenham. The American colonel in charge of the planes at Sculthorpe made noises about how he wanted his men to be good neighbors.

Good neighbors didn’t shake people out of bed at whatever heathen hour this was. Of course, good neighbors also didn’t fly thousands of miles across the North Sea and Europe to deliver incandescent hell on people they judged to be not such good neighbors. And those not-such-good neighbors didn’t pay return visits. Daisy hoped like blazes they didn’t, anyhow. She yawned again and tried to go back to sleep.

–

Ihor Shevchenko’s valenki made the snow crunch as he walked across the field. A hooded crow hopping along looking for mice or whatever else it could get cocked its head to one side and studied him, trying to figure out whether he was dangerous. He was a good twenty meters away and not heading straight toward it, so it decided he wasn’t.

Which only proved the crow was dumb. When he was a kid, he would have killed it and proudly carried it home for his mother to cook. He’d eaten crow often enough during the famine years, and been glad every time. He’d eaten anything he could get in those days, and thanked the God in Whom he wasn’t supposed to believe any more at every swallow.

Stalin had wanted to purge the Ukraine of prosperous peasants, and to collectivize the rest. As usual, Stalin had got what he wanted. If a few million people starved to give it to him, he lost not a minute of sleep over that.

No wonder so many Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt when they invaded. Ihor had been fifteen then. He hadn’t celebrated when Hitler’s men drove out Stalin’s; he’d already learned wariness. But he hadn’t been sorry, either.

Not at first. It didn’t take long to see, though, that the Nazis made an even worse set of masters than the commissars. Ihor at fifteen had watched. Ihor at sixteen had slipped away to join one of the partisan bands operating west of Kiev.

There were bands, and then there were bands. Not all the men in the Ukraine thought Hitler was a worse bargain than Stalin. Some wanted to break away from Russia come hell or high water, and tried to use the Germans as their tools, never seeing that the Germans were actually using them. Some saw and didn’t care. They could rob and plunder, settle scores and murder Jews, and they were happy enough doing that.

Even now, going on six years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, a few bands who’d followed nationalist Stepan Bandera still skulked across the countryside. Ihor kept his eye out for more than crows. He hadn’t seen any Banderists for a while, but you still heard stories.

These days, they had to know there would be no free Ukraine. As soon as the front started moving west again, that had become clear. But they had also known the secret police would kill them, so there wasn’t much point to giving up.

When the front came through here at the end of 1943, Ihor stopped being a partisan and joined-or was dragooned into-the Red Army. He ended the war a sergeant, laid up with a leg wound outside of Breslau. They’d done a good job fixing him up. He hardly limped at all.

He counted himself lucky that they’d let him come back to his kolkhoz after they mustered him out of the army. Plenty of men paid the price for seeing Europe west of Russia by going into the gulag instead. Maybe he had an innocent face. Maybe the Chekists had already filled their daily quota by the time they got to him. Who the hell knew?

He could have been messing with a tractor engine or putting up barbed-wire fencing or doing any number of other socially useful things. Nobody would use a tractor for six weeks or two months. Fences could wait. Everything on the kolkhoz except his and Anya’s little garden plot could wait. He didn’t see any benefit from most of the work, so he did as little as he could get away with. It wasn’t as if he were the only one.

He stumped along. After a while, he lit a papiros. His breath didn’t smoke much more when he exhaled than it had before. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular: just away from the other kolkhozniks for a while. Except for his wife, he wouldn’t shed a tear if they all went and hanged themselves. Well, it wasn’t as if they’d miss him if he lay down in the snow out here and died.

He drew on the papiros again. One thing he’d seen in Europe was that most countries’ machine-made cigarettes were like roll-your-owns: they were all tobacco. Russians mostly preferred a short stretch at the end of a long, useless paper holder. For the life of him, Ihor couldn’t see why.

A distant rumble made his head come up. He might have heard it sooner if he hadn’t had the earflaps of his army cap pulled down. When he did notice it, his gut twisted in fear too well remembered. “Fuck me in the mouth if those aren’t tank engines,” he said, even if no one was anywhere near close enough to hear him.

Those were diesels: Soviet tank engines. The Fritzes’ panzers burned gasoline, and sounded different. None of those still in business, but yes, the fear remained. You could still find coal-scuttle helmets around here, and Gott mit Uns belt buckles, and cartridges and shell cases. You could find shells that hadn’t gone off, too, buried in the ground but working their way up frost by frost. And if you messed with them, you could still blow your stupid head off.

The rumble got louder. Ihor spotted the black exhaust plumes in the distance. Plenty of Red Army tank crews had died because the Germans could do the same thing. The Germans had made better soldiers than his own countrymen. Ihor knew that. But when you took on somebody with three times your manpower and far more resources, better didn’t mean good enough.

Here came the tanks. Some were dark green; others had whitewash slapped on over their paint. All were dusted with snow. They kicked up white clouds as they rattled west. About half were T-34/85s: the workhorses of the last war. The rest were T-54s, with a curved turtleback turret and a bigger, more powerful gun. They all looked as if they were going somewhere important, and wasting no time doing it.

Looks, of course, could be deceiving. The commander in the lead tank rode head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could see more. Good commanders did that even in battle. It was one reason you went through a lot of good tank commanders.

This fellow spied Ihor. His tank swerved toward the kolkhoznik. The rest of the big, growling machines followed. Ihor could have done without the honor, not that he had a choice.

“Hey, you!” the tank commander shouted as his machine slowed to a stop. “Yeah, you! Who else would I be talking to?”

Ihor thought about playing dumb. If he answered in broad Ukrainian, he might convince the tank commander he knew no Russian. But the bastard might decide that made him a Banderist and have the gunner give him a machine-gun burst. The risk wasn’t worth it. “Waddaya want?” Ihor would never speak good Russian, but his stint in the Red Army had sure beaten bad Russian into him.

“Where’s the nearest railhead?” the soldier asked. “Fuck my mother if the map I’ve got is worth shit.”

If he’d said Fuck your mother, Ihor would have sent him in the wrong direction. As things were, he pointed west and said, “That way-four or five kilometers.”

“Thanks,” the tanker told him. “I didn’t want to break radio silence to ask the brass. They wouldn’t like that, know what I mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ihor said in a way that showed he’d done his bit. Because he’d done the commander a good turn, he asked, “Why are you guys on the move, anyhow?”

“Whole Kiev Military District is on the move,” the man answered, not without pride. “The imperialists are stirring up trouble against the peace-loving socialist nations. We’ve got to be ready to show them they can’t get away with that crap, right?”

“Uh, right,” Ihor said. No other reply seemed possible.

“So-” With a wave, the tank commander got his monster moving. The rest followed. Ihor coughed. The stinking diesel exhaust was fouler than the cheapest, nastiest makhorka you could smoke.

The whole Kiev Military District? That was a couple of Guards Tank Armies, some of the best troops the Soviet Union owned. Ihor’s shiver had nothing to do with the snow on the ground.