Bombs Away

4

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper. Bill Staley remembered being impressed with “The Hollow Men” when he first ran into it. Amazing that the fellow who wrote black verse like that and “The Waste Land” could also turn out silly poems about cats. There you were, though.

And there T. S. Eliot was, in London. As far as Bill knew, he was alive and well and still writing poetry. Good for him, the copilot thought, hurrying toward the big tent where General Harrison was in the habit of addressing his aircrews.

Eliot was alive and well for the moment, anyhow. If he was in London, how long he would stay that way might be anybody’s guess. “The Hollow Men” was a hell of a piece of poetry-no two ways about it. But Eliot hadn’t got everything in it right. By all the signs, the world was getting ready to go out with a whole bunch of bangs.

Other Air Force men were also heading for the tent. Bill didn’t like the looks on their faces. They had the air of people heading for the doctor’s office expecting to hear bad news. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his own mug bore the same apprehensive expression.

He ducked inside. There was a seat next to Major Hank McCutcheon, who piloted the B-29 where Bill had the right-hand seat. McCutcheon took a Hershey bar out of his pocket and disposed of it in two bites. “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” he said.

“We can do whatever they tell us to do,” Bill said, hoping he didn’t sound too much like a man whistling past the graveyard.

Maybe he did, because McCutcheon answered, “We can, yeah. But I hope like hell they don’t tell us to do it.”

“Christ! Who doesn’t?” Like a lot of Americans stationed in the Far East, Bill had visited the ruins of Hiroshima. If you flew in a B-29, a plane that might drop an atomic bomb, weren’t you obligated to take a look at what you did for a living? Bill thought so. Even after five years, even with the Japs rebuilding across the vast field of rubble, what the bomb had done was enough to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind. It had finally made Japan realize she was facing something she couldn’t fight back against.

Of course, what the Red Chinese were doing farther north on this peninsula was plenty to scare the crap out of anyone in his right mind, too. Damn few soldiers or leathernecks had made it back to Hungnam. The new troops flowing into Korea were trying to keep the enemy from overrunning the peninsula again, not to conquer it up to the Yalu themselves. They weren’t having all that much luck. The Reds weren’t in artillery range of the air base yet, but it wasn’t impossible that they could be one day before too long.

And atomic weapons might not knock Red China out of the war. Stalin had them, too. He could hit Europe with them, and with his own hordes of soldiers. With his knockoff of the B-29, he might reach America, too. Who had the will, the stamina, to go on after catching a few like that on the chin? There was the question, all right.

Instead of a candy bar, Bill pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. He’d just got one going when Brigadier General Harrison strode to the lectern. Harrison carried a pointer in his right hand. He walked as stiffly as if he’d shoved another one up his rear. The way his features looked didn’t argue against that, either.

He glanced down at his watch. Reflexively, Bill checked his own wrist. It was 1458; things were supposed to start at 1500. People were still coming in. Bill guessed anyone who showed up late for this particular dance would catch several different flavors of hell.

At 1500 on the dot (well, twelve seconds after, by Bill’s Elgin), Matt Harrison smacked the lectern with the pointer. “Let’s get started,” he said. “You may have guessed why I’ve called you together again. I’m afraid I have to tell you your guesses are likely to be good.”

“Aw, hell,” Hank McCutcheon whispered. Bill nodded; he couldn’t have put that better himself.

To leave no possible room for doubt in anyone’s mind, Harrison went on, “I have received orders from General MacArthur, with the approval of President Truman, to initiate the use of atomic bombs against several cities in Manchuria and other areas of northeastern China. We are going to stop Mao from flooding Korea with Red Chinese troops. We will destroy the rail lines they use and the bases and barracks within China where, up until this time, they have been immune from attack. Are there any questions?”

A pilot stuck his hand in the air. Harrison aimed the pointer at him as if it were a rifle. “Sir, what happens if the Russians start throwing A-bombs around, too?”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, all right,” Brigadier General Harrison said. “The best answer I can give you is, if they want to play the game, they can play the game. And we’ll see who stands up from the table when it’s over. Does that tell you what you want to know, Miller?”

“Yes, sir,” the flyer answered. What else could you say when your CO came out with a question like that?

Bill wondered whether Harrison would give men the chance to decline to fly in a plane loaded with atomic weapons. The general didn’t. He assumed that they’d already done whatever talking with their consciences they needed. “I will call pilots up here one by one to give you your targets and the supporting information related to completing your missions. You may open your orders as soon as you return to your seat.”

Hank McCutcheon was the fifth man he summoned to the lectern. The major came back with the envelope in his right hand. He didn’t touch the seal till his behind was on the folding chair again; he took Harrison literally. When he did open the envelope, Bill saw a name in big black letters: HARBIN. Below the name, a note read This plane will carry the device. Others in the flight will support and decoy.

Harbin. Bill knew it was a good-sized city in Manchuria. How many tens of thousands of people would he help fry tonight? Better not to think about some things. This plane will carry the device. How could you not think about that?

He tried to turn himself into a machine. Along with the other ten men in the crew, he spent the rest of the daylight hours checking out the B-29. The engines ran hot; they always had. If one failed while you were taking off fully loaded, you had to try to put the plane down.

And if that happened, Marian and Linda would collect on his government life insurance. Pilots had done it and walked away, but the odds lay somewhere between bad and worse.

They took off after dark. The Japs hadn’t been able to shoot down day-flying B-29s. The North Koreans and their Russian and Chinese pals damn well could. Radar, better guns, more and better planes…A MiG-15’s big guns could tear a bomber to bits in nothing flat.

Twin Mustang F-82s flew escort for the bombers. The night fighters carried their own radar. They had more range and more speed than almost any other prop jobs. Put one up against a MiG, though, and it was in deep. The guys in those cockpits had to know it. They climbed in and flew anyhow.

A little flak came up at the planes as they droned north. When they got over North Korea, it grew heavier. B-29s had often bombed Red positions there.

They took a dogleg to the east to skirt MiG Alley. When they crossed the Yalu instead of turning back, the radioman came forward from his position aft of the cockpit and said, “I’m getting all kinds of hysterical traffic in Russian and Chinese. They know something new has been added.”

“Understand any?” Bill asked.

“Not a fucking word, sir,” Sergeant Hyman Ginsberg answered proudly.

Harbin lay a little more than four hundred miles north of the river: just over an hour’s flying time. The Reds had time to scramble only a few planes. Sergeant Ginsberg reported the F-82s clashing with MiG-9s: second-string Russian jets, a lot like the German Me-262 from the end of World War II. Even a second-string jet could shoot down a none-too-new bomber. Bill was glad the Twin Mustangs were on the job.

“Harbin dead ahead,” the navigator reported. He had a radar screen to guide them to the target. Hank and Bill had lights on the ground. Harbin wasn’t blacked out-the Red Chinese hadn’t looked for American visitors. Some flak climbed toward them. They were up past 30,000 feet, but even so…

“Let it go!” McCutcheon called to the bomb bay through the intercom. The B-29, suddenly five tons lighter, heeled away in a sharp escape turn to starboard. The bomb was on a parachute, to give them enough time to get away before the pressure-sensitive switch set it off.

–

When the antiaircraft guns started going off and woke him up, Vasili Yasevich thought it was the knock on the door for which he’d been waiting so long. He’d been a toddler when his father and mother fled from Russia to Harbin after the Whites lost the civil war to the Reds and their foreign backers pulled out.

For a while, Harbin had been as much Russian as Chinese. Cyrillic signs were as common as ideographs. Vasili’s father ran a pharmacy. His mother, a talented seamstress, made clothes for her exiled countrywomen. The family got along.

Then the Japanese burst out of Korea. Manchuria, loosely connected to the rest of China, became Manchukuo, a puppet of Japan’s. Life grew harder. But Japan and Russia weren’t officially at war. The Yaseviches weren’t Jews, as many of the exiles in Harbin were. They still managed to get along.

Vasili’s father taught him what he needed to know about compounding drugs. He learned fast but, like his mother, he was better with his hands than with his head. Give him a saw, an adze, a chisel, or a hammer and he couldn’t be beat. He helped his father now and then, but he made a better carpenter than a druggist, and they both knew it.

All at once, in August 1945, Japan and Russia-Manchukuo and Russia-were at war after all. The Red Army rolled into Harbin. The NKVD rolled in with it. The Soviet secret police had lists of people to execute or to send to the gulag. Instead of going with them, Vasili’s father and mother swallowed poison. They knew what to use. They were dead in less than a minute.

The NKVD didn’t bother with Vasili. He didn’t show up on their lists. Maybe they thought he was born after his folks came to Harbin. Maybe they decided making his parents kill themselves counted for enough to settle their score against the whole family.

He stayed on even after the Chinese Reds took over for their Russian tutors in 1946. He spoke Mandarin as well as he spoke Russian. He knew a couple of trades people needed. Even if he was a round-eye with a pointed nose, the Chinese in Harbin had got used to such folk.

He drifted from one job to another. The Red Army’s thunderous occupation of the city had made sure a carpenter wouldn’t lack for work. He picked up bricklaying as he helped rebuild what the Russians had knocked down.

One of these days, he supposed, Stalin’s flunkies would come back and take him away. Like any other wolves, they didn’t give up a trail. In the meantime, he did his best to keep going.

They were finally getting around to repairing the train station at Pingfan, twenty-five or thirty kilometers south of Harbin. It had been big and fancy during the war years-the Japanese had had some kind of secret project going on outside the little town. Vasili didn’t know, or want to know, the details. He just hoped he would get back to the city alive. Workers kept coming down with horrible things like cholera or the plague. A couple of them had caught smallpox, too, but he’d been vaccinated against that.

He lay on an old, musty sleeping mat in a barracks hall that couldn’t have been much flimsier if it were made of cardboard. You could see stars between the planks that made up the walls. When it rained, it was just as wet inside as out. Dung-burning braziers did little to fight the icy breezes.

And, of course, those ill-fitting planks-Vasili could have done much better if only someone had asked him to-did nothing to hold out the noise of gunfire. Vasili had snorted to see antiaircraft guns poking their snouts to the sky here. No one would want to bomb Pingfan. He didn’t think the Americans wanted to bomb Harbin, either. Had they wanted to, wouldn’t they have done it by now? The Chinese volunteers had gone into Korea months ago.

Vasili chuckled to himself, the way he always did when he thought of “volunteers.” He’d seen how the Japanese got them in Manchukuo. Volunteer or we’ll kill you worked wonders every time. His father had told stories that showed the Soviets understood the same principle.

So when the guns started going off in the middle of the night, he thought it had to be either a drill or a false alarm. “I hear planes!” another workman shouted in excited Chinese.

“You hear farts inside your stupid head,” Vasili muttered, but in Russian. He didn’t think any of the other men he was working with knew the language. Anywhere else in China, he would have been sure that was so. Near Harbin, you couldn’t be quite certain.

He couldn’t be sure the other workman was hearing brainfarts, either. Through the pounding of the guns, he might have heard engines high overhead, too. Maybe they were his imagination. He hoped they were. But he wasn’t sure, not any more.

Then he thought the sun had risen. Light-insanely bright light-filled the barracks. He closed his eyes. He jammed his face into the mat as hard as he could. None of that did any good. The light filled him and began to consume him. It was to sunlight as sunlight was to a candle.

Had it lasted longer than a moment, he felt sure he would have cooked the way a sausage did when you skewered it and thrust it into the fire. But, almost as soon as it was born, the impossible light began to fade and to go from white to yellow to orange.

“How can the sun come up in the north?” someone wailed.

“I’m blind!” someone else shouted. He must not have shielded his eyes fast enough.

Vasili hadn’t even noticed the light came from the north. He did notice that the blast of wind following the flash also came out of the north. And he noticed it was a hot wind, when the only natural gales from that direction came straight out of Siberia, if not straight off the North Pole. There hadn’t been any hot winds near Harbin for months, not from any direction.

The barracks creaked under the blast. The north wall crumpled and fell in on itself. That brought down part of the roof, too. Men shouted and squalled as planks and beams fell on them.

Nothing landed on Vasili, though a good-sized chunk of pine kicked up dust about thirty centimeters from his head. He scrambled out through the new hole in the building-the door seemed unlikely to work. Then he stared at the glowing cloud rising above what had been Harbin.

A Chinese stood beside him, also gaping at the mushroom of dust and who could say what else rising higher into the sky every second. Blood ran down the other man’s face from a cut by his eye. He didn’t seem to notice. His cheeks were also wet with tears.

“My family,” he whispered, more to himself than to Vasili. “Everyone who matters to me lives-lived-back there.”

“I’m sorry, pal,” Vasili said. He had no one who mattered to him. Not long before he came down to Pingfan, his latest girlfriend had dropped him like a live grenade. If she hadn’t, he might have stayed in the city. Then he would have been part of that boiling mushroom cloud himself.

“White men did this.” The Chinese stared at him now, not at Harbin. “Round-eyed barbarians did this.”

“Americans did it,” Vasili said quickly. If he didn’t talk fast, he could get lynched here. “I’m a Russian. If anybody can get even with the Americans, it’s Russia. The Americans hit China because China couldn’t hit back. Russia can.” He’d always hated Stalin and the mess the Georgian had made of Russia. Now, for the first time in his life, his heritage turned into something that might save him.

Something went out of the other man’s eyes. “Yes. You’re right,” he said, and Vasili breathed again. “We will be avenged. Or else we will give Russia what America gave us.” China couldn’t do that. If Russia didn’t back her up, though, she was liable to try. That would be unfortunate-for both countries.

–

Harry Truman strode into the White House press room. Behind his round-lensed glasses, his eyes narrowed against the TV lights’ glare. Those hadn’t been there when he took over for FDR. You didn’t need a girl to slap pancake makeup on you and cluck at how badly you’d shaved before you went on the radio, either.

Like it or not, though-and Truman didn’t, not very much-television was the coming thing, and plainly here to stay. If they could, people wanted to see your face when you told them something. He’d be speaking on the radio, too: there was a regular thicket of microphones hooked up to his lectern, each one crowned with a different combination of alphabet soup.

“Here you go, Mr. President.” Stephen Early, the press secretary, led Truman to that mike-festooned lectern. Early had done the job for Roosevelt, and had come out of retirement to do it again after Charlie Ross dropped dead the previous December. Truman missed Charlie the way he missed a just-pulled tooth. They’d gone back a long way together; Ross was another Independence man. But no one could say Early didn’t know the ropes.

The cameramen nodded to Truman one by one as he took his place. No reporters sat in the chairs in front of the lectern. He would be issuing a statement this morning, not taking questions. The questions would come later, but later could wait.

Almost in exact unison, red lights came on under the front lenses of all three television cameras. That meant they were sending his picture across the country, and to parts of Canada and Mexico as well.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Truman said, glancing down at his text. “Last night, the night of January twenty-third local time, to protect United Nations forces battling the unprovoked Red Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula, U.S. Air Force planes used atomic weapons against several Chinese marshaling points in Manchuria.”

He didn’t say how many places had been attacked. The Chinks had hacked one of the bomb-carrying B-29s out of the sky before it could deliver its cargo. Truman hoped that atomic bomb was an unusable wreck now, but he didn’t know for sure. He also didn’t call the targets cities. Marshaling points sounded much more military.

“I took this step with great reluctance, but I did take it,” Truman went on. “The bombs were delivered at my order, and under my responsibility as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States of America. I regret the urgent military necessity that forced me to this extraordinary step. I regret it, but I did not, I could not, shrink from it. As I have told you before, the buck stops here.”

Some people would have set things up so that, if using the atomic bombs turned out not to be such a hot idea, a good chunk of the blame would stick to General MacArthur. Truman was as sure as made no difference that Roosevelt would have played it that way. He admired his predecessor’s subtle political skills without wanting to imitate them. He’d got the job done his own way for almost six years now. He wasn’t as smooth or slick as FDR, but he coped.

“We have not attacked the territory of the Soviet Union,” he said. “We have not, and we will not, provided that it refrain from any provocative response in the wake of our necessary action pertaining to Korea. We were allies against the greatest menace to freedom the world has ever seen. We do not need to fight each other now. With the weapons in our arsenals, that would be the worst tragedy in recorded history.”

He wasn’t just talking to the American people. Shortwave radio would carry his words around the world at the speed of light. Joseph Stalin would see them or hear them as soon as they could be translated. Stalin wasn’t the cuddly Uncle Joe we’d made him out to be during the war years. He was as ruthless as Hitler, if less rash. If he had any sense, he would know better than to mess with the USA.

If. Truman knew he wasn’t the only one going after Stalin’s ear now. Mao Tse-tung would be screaming into it right this minute. Mao would have been screaming into it ever since he got word that big chunks of Manchuria had just gone up in smoke. Well, too goddamn bad for Mao, Truman thought.

Aloud, he finished the statement: “We do not seek a wider war. All we want to do is restore to Korea its liberty, which came into danger when the North invaded the South without warning. We have a mandate from the United Nations to do exactly that. We serve the cause of freedom and peace, and want nothing more anywhere else in the world. Thank you, and God bless the United States of America.”

As he stepped away from the lectern, the lights under the camera’s noses went out. “That was a good speech, Mr. President,” the press secretary said. “An excellent speech.”

“Thanks, Stephen,” Truman answered. He couldn’t imagine calling the plump, dignified, gray-mustached Stephen Early Steve. Charles Ross had been Charlie for more years than he could remember. Truman couldn’t help adding, “I hope it does what I want it to do.”

“Well, that’s partly in Stalin’s court now, isn’t it?” Early said.

“Yes,” the President said, not altogether happily. “Now we find out just how good a friend of his Mao Tse-tung is. If Stalin drops bombs on France and England, the NATO treaty says that’s the same thing as dropping bombs on us. I don’t believe Russia and Red China have the same kind of formal alliance-”

“And Stalin can ignore it if he wants to,” the press secretary put in.

“He sure can,” Truman agreed. “He has more practice breaking treaties than Babe Ruth did with home-run records. But if he decides he won’t break this one…Well, we’ll do what we have to do, that’s all.”

“He respects you, sir,” Stephen Early said. “He respects the power of the United States.”

“Your old boss talked softer to the Russians than I do.” If Truman sounded proud of not being soft, well, he was.

“It was wartime,” Early replied. “He always worried that, if he got too sticky, Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. That would have fouled up the war effort beyond all recognition.”

“Would the Russians really have done that?” Truman hadn’t paid much attention to the ins and outs of diplomacy till he got tapped for the Vice Presidency and saw Roosevelt wasn’t likely to live out his term.

“We heard that Molotov and Ribbentrop did talk after Stalingrad,” Early said. “But Hitler wanted to keep a good-sized chunk of Russia, and Stalin insisted on the status quo ante bellum. So the war went on another two years.”

“Hitler would have done better to take whatever he could get then, the way it turned out.” Truman paused to light a cigarette. With a reminiscent chuckle, he went on, “After one of our little wrangles, Molotov told me he’d never had anyone talk to him that way in his whole life.”

“He’s a difficult man,” the veteran press secretary said. “The few times I had anything to do with him, I saw that plainly.”

“Somebody should have knocked the applesauce out of him when he was younger. He wouldn’t be such a blasted nuisance now if somebody had,” Truman said.

“Probably not. But if he wasn’t, Stalin would have found some other son of a bitch to fill that slot instead of him,” Early said.

Truman laughed. “Boy, have you got that right! If you work for Stalin and you aren’t a son of a bitch, you don’t last. Even if you are a son of a bitch, a lot of the time you don’t last. I’m not saying Molotov isn’t good at what he does. But, Lord, he’s a hard-nosed so-and-so. At the UN, Gromyko is the same way.”

“Mister Nyet? Grim Grom?” Early trotted out the Soviet ambassador’s nicknames. “Well, you’ve given him something new to be grim about.”

“Good,” Truman said. “I’d sooner worry the other guy than let him worry me-every day of the week and twice on Sundays.”

–

Wilf Davies stuck his head into the Owl and Unicorn and stared in surprise at how empty it was. “Where’d all your Yanks go, Daisy?” he asked.

“Confined to base,” she answered morosely from behind the bar. “They’re on alert, and my trade’s in hospital because of it.”

Wilf stepped all the way in. His left hand was a hook; he’d lost the one he was born with on the Somme in 1916. Daisy Baxter had known him like that her whole life. She wouldn’t have had any idea what to make of him had he had two ordinary hands. She might not even have recognized him.

“I’ll buy me a pint of best bitter,” he said.

Daisy made as if to faint. “Catch me! Now I can holiday on the bloomin’ Riviera!”

“Well, if you don’t want my money, you don’t have to take it.” Wilf set a shilling and a smaller silver sixpence on the bar. The pint was one and three. When Daisy tried to give him his threepence change, he shook his head and slid the tiny coin back at her with the tip of the hook. A finger couldn’t have done it more neatly.

“You’re a gent, Wilf,” she said.

He snorted. “You need your head candled, to see if you’ve got any working parts in there. My missus knows better, she does. Daft old bugger, she calls me. Eh, it’s not as though she ain’t daft herself, mind. Would she have put up with me all these years if she weren’t?”

“Not likely,” Daisy answered. They smiled at each other. Wilf’s father had been the town blacksmith and farrier. Wilf still worked out of the same shop. He styled himself a blacksmith, though. People brought autos and lorries and tractors to Fakenham from as far away as Swaffham and Wells-next-to-the-sea, sometimes even from Norwich, to have him set them right.

He raised the pint in his good right hand. By the smile on his face, he started to give some kind of silly toast. But the smile slipped. What came out of his mouth was a simple, “Here’s to peace.”

Daisy drew herself half a pint. She lifted her little mug. “I have to drink that with you,” she said.

After a long pull at his bitter, Wilf said, “It’s a rum old world, ain’t it?”

“Too right, it is!” Daisy said.

“Last war not half a dozen years behind us, and here we’re staring another in the face,” he said. “So the Yanks are on alert, are they?”

“They are, and the RAF, too,” Daisy answered sadly. “So you can see why the snug’s not full to the brim.”

Wilf drank some more of his pint. “They fly the big bombers out of there,” he remarked. “If I was the Russians, that’s one of the places I’d want to knock flat, bugger me blind if it ain’t.”

“Bite your tongue!” Daisy told him. “If they do that, how much’d be left of Fakenham?”

“Probably not a lot, I reckon,” he said. “We were lucky the last go-round-not enough here to put the Luftwaffe’s wind up. But a bomb with them atom things inside…” He shook his head. “I don’t know much about that business, or want to. I’m thinking, though, the only question is whether there’d be enough left of us to bury.”

“You say the cheeriest things!” Daisy’d got to the bottom of her half-pint. She filled it again.

Wilf’s pint was empty, too. He slid it across the bar for his own refill. As Daisy worked the tap, he fished in his pocket for silver. He gave her another one and six, and again returned the change. “Sorry, ducks,” he said. “I’d like it better if I was talking moonshine, too. I wish I was. But that’s how it looks to me.”

Far overhead, a thin banshee whine resounded. That was a jet fighter high, high in the sky. In the last war, England and Russia had fought side by side. As soon as Hitler attacked Stalin, Churchill had declared that any foe of Hitler’s was a friend of his. That lasted till Hitler was beaten. No, a few months longer-till atomic fire blossomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the plane up there was watching out for enemies who’d been friends not so long before.

“They won’t come by day,” Wilf Davies predicted. “We’d spot ’em and shoot ’em down. No, they’ll sneak across the sea at night, the way the Jerries did after they saw they couldn’t knock us flat.”

“That’s how the Americans did it when they bombed China,” Daisy said. “That’s what the radio says, any road.”

“That’s how you’ve got to go about it nowadays. Even in the last war, didn’t the Yanks pay a beastly price for bombing Germany by day?” Wilf said. “And it’s worse now. The jets are so much faster than bombers, and that radar or whatever they call it lets you see in the nighttime almost like it’s noon.”

“You make me want to sleep down in the cellar tonight,” Daisy said. “Not that that’d do me half a farthing’s worth of good if the bomb came down on Fakenham, would it?”

“You could do worse,” Wilf said. “By all I hear, only way to live through one of them bombs is not to be there when it goes off. But if it blows a ways away, the cellar’s best chance you’ve got. Put some blankets on a bench and hope you see tomorrow morning. Pray, if you think it does any good. Me, I gave up on that rot a while ago.” He held out the hook. Catching a packet like that could easily put you off prayer for life.

Daisy wondered whether Tom had prayed, there inside his tank. If he had, it hadn’t done him any good. And if she prayed and a bomb came down on the little town here, that wouldn’t do her any good, either. She’d given up praying, anyhow, when her husband didn’t come back from the Continent. She hadn’t had much faith in prayer before the black day, and none was left now.

The flash of light and, four or five minutes later, the roar like the end of the world didn’t come from Sculthorpe. The runways and Nissen huts lay almost due west of Fakenham. The blast in the middle of the night was south and east of the hamlet.

Still in her nightgown, Daisy ran downstairs and out into the chilly darkness. She knew what a mushroom cloud looked like. Anyone who picked up magazines or watched newsreels at the cinema would. She’d never dreamt she would see one blazing in the night sky-a very black night in more ways than one, this February first-of East Anglia.

“Holy Mary Mother of God!” a neighbor choked out. “That’s Norwich, all gone to destruction!”

Sure enough, the direction was right. The bomb wouldn’t have come down anywhere else in this part of the country. Norwich was the only real city East Anglia boasted. If you needed a hospital, or treatment fancier than the local quack knew how to give, Norwich was where you went. If you needed to buy an auto, you went to Norwich. If you wanted a dress in last year’s style, Norwich was the place to get it. Local shops could be three or four years behind what they were wearing in London right now.

Norwich was…gone to destruction. Daisy’s Catholic neighbor had got that one spot on. What the countryside would do without the city, Daisy had no idea. She also had no idea whether other bombs were going off farther away than her senses reached, or whether the Russians would come back tomorrow or the next day to visit fire and destruction on Sculthorpe.

Another neighbor said, “This just turned into the exact middle of nowhere.”

Plenty of people already thought Fakenham was nowhere. They moved to Norwich or to London to have a better chance of making something of themselves. The ones who’d gone to Norwich made…part of that glowing, swelling cloud. Daisy burst into tears.