Bombs Away

6

When Cade Curtis woke up in the drafty little shed, two bowls were waiting for him. One held rice, the other kimchi. Neither was big. He thought it was a miracle these people gave him anything at all. They had so little themselves. Why would they spare some for a foreigner, a stranger, passing through?

Why? Because they were Christians, and took the name and the duties that went with it seriously. That was the only answer that occurred to Cade. It was also one that shamed him. Almost all the people back in the States called themselves Christians of one flavor or another. Damn few lived up to the label, though.

Things here in Korea were different. Christians, Catholic or Protestant, were a small minority. Folks from one denomination didn’t sneer at those who belonged to another. They presented a united front against their persecutors. In Kim Il-sung’s regime, that meant against just about everybody. Things were easier in the south, but only relatively.

Cade grabbed the chopsticks laid across the bowl of rice. He wasn’t so smooth with them as the natives were, but he managed. You got better at everything with practice. He gulped the rice and the fiery pickled cabbage. He’d dropped a lot of weight since getting cut off, but he didn’t care. He was getting close to the American lines. Fried chicken and bacon and apple pie and scrambled eggs and hash browns lay around the corner. He’d plump up just fine.

The sun had gone down. Moonlight slipped between the battered planks of the shed wall and painted thin, pale zebra stripes across the dirt floor. The village, like most Korean villages after sunset, was quiet as the tomb. No electricity, no kerosene for lamps. People had candles and oil lamps, but didn’t like to use them. Whatever oil and tallow you burned, you couldn’t eat later if you got hungry enough.

A dog howled, off in the hills. Some people hereabouts had kept dogs as pets before the war. Now dogs that hung around people turned into meat. A couple of villages back, somebody’d fried a little bit of dog flesh for him, stirred together with rice. It tasted wonderful; it was the first meat he’d had in a long time. Whether he’d like it so well if he were less hungry…was a question for another day.

Farther away, still several days’ travel to the south, artillery rumbled on the edge of hearing. Getting through the lines would be the tricky part. Cade didn’t aim to worry about how he’d do it till he had to try. After getting cut off, he hadn’t really believed he would come close enough to the front in the south to need to worry about it.

He’d slept through the day, his felt hat doing duty for a pillow. Only that bare ground under him? He didn’t care, not even a little bit. He figured he could have slept on a swami’s bed of nails. Now it was nighttime, so, like a cat or a rat or a bat, he was awake.

Soft footfalls outside the shed said a couple of Koreans were awake, too. Silently, he took hold of the PPSh. He didn’t think anything here had gone wrong. If he turned out to be mistaken, though, a blaze of glory seemed preferable to letting Kim’s or Mao’s soldiers take him. Especially Mao’s. They’d be even less happy with Americans now than they had been before fire fell on Manchuria.

Low-voiced mutters in Korean outside the door. Cade wouldn’t have been able to follow even if he’d heard them clearly. He’d picked up only a handful of words from the local language.

The door opened. A man stuck his head inside. “Ave,” he whispered, and then, “Veni.”

“Sic.” Cade didn’t have a whole lot of Latin, either. But what he did have was worth its weight in gold for talking with Catholic Koreans. When Protestants helped him on his way south, he was reduced to sign language.

He scrambled to his feet. His knees and something in the small of his back crackled as he did. He had to duck to get through the doorway. He also had to lift his feet: like the Chinese, the Koreans put a plank across the bottom, maybe to help keep out chilly drafts.

One of the Koreans outside cradled a PPD, the PPSh’s older cousin. The other man had a shotgun that looked only a short step up from a blunderbuss. Well, if they got into a fight, it would be at close quarters. If they got into a fight, they would also die.

The guy with the PPD gestured toward the south. “Vade mecum,” he said.

“Sic,” Cade repeated. What else would he do but go with the Koreans?

They wore felt boots like his, possibly stolen from dead Red Chinese soldiers. Cade did wonder how much damage the atom bombs had done to the Chinese logistics system. Not enough to make the Chinks already in Korea quit fighting. Not yet, anyhow. They were like the Russians-they were expected to live off the countryside. All they really needed was ammunition.

Those felt boots were quieter than ordinary footgear would have been. Cade was at least a head taller than one of his guides, but the other was about his own six-one. Some of the Koreans ran surprisingly tall. Some of them could grow surprisingly thick beards for Orientals, too. Not a one, though, came equipped with a long, pointed nose or round blue eyes.

A plane buzzed by overhead. Buzzed was the word, all right. The Chinese flew Po-2 biplanes, ancient Russian wood-and-cloth trainers pressed into service as night harassment aircraft. They fired machine guns and dropped little bombs and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone could do anything about it. Bedcheck Charlie, GIs called them. The Russians had used them the same way against the krauts, sometimes with woman pilots.

This Po-2 wasn’t much above treetop height. Cade could feel the wind of its passage as it flew by. And the pilot must have spotted his guides and him walking along in the moonlight, because he swung the little plane around for another look at them.

But how much could he really see, no matter how hard he tried? Cade and one of the Koreans were big men, but what did that prove? In moonlight, would the SOB up there be able to tell Curtis was white? Cade didn’t believe it. He held his PPSh up in his left hand to show it to the flyer and waved his right hand as if to someone he knew was a friend.

And damned if the pilot didn’t waggle his wings in a friendly greeting of his own and fly away. Once he was gone, both Koreans whooped and hollered and thumped Cade on the back. The words were just gibberish to him. He was glad he had on the parka and the quilted jacket underneath it. Chances were they saved him some bruises.

“Vir sapiens!” said the one who knew some Latin.

“Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens ego sum.” Cade thought it was funny. He knew what the scientific name for human beings was.

Since his guide didn’t, the Korean didn’t get the joke. Pointing at Cade, he said, “Vir es.” You are a man.

“Sic. Vir sum. Et homo sum.” Yes. I am a man. And I am a human being. Vir and homo both meant man, but they didn’t mean the same thing. In English, man did duty for most of the meanings of both Latin words.

Cade didn’t think he could explain any of that to the Korean in Latin. His wasn’t up to it, and neither was his guide’s. He turned out not to have to. The Korean kind of shrugged, as if to say he wasn’t even going to try to understand this inscrutable Occidental. He pointed south and started walking again. Cade and the fellow with the almost-blunderbuss followed.

A quarter of a mile outside the next village, someone called softly from the cover of some pines. Both Koreans answered. They went back and forth for a little while. The one who knew Latin pointed to the pines and said, “Vade cum.” That just meant Go with. Maybe he’d forgotten the word for him.

It did get the message across. Approaching the trees, Cade said, “Ave.”

The greeting fell on uncomprehending ears. A man with a rifle came out and spoke in Korean. Cade sighed. He spread his hands to show he didn’t get it. The local sighed, too. He gestured toward the collection of beat-up houses and outbuildings. With a nod, Cade went that way.

He got hidden in a privy. It wasn’t the first time on his way south. Nobody had used this one for a while, but it was still fragrant. He muttered, but not for long. Pretty soon, his nose noticed the stink much less. He curled up and got ready to sleep through the dangerous daylight hours.

–

“Pechenga.” Harry Truman spat out the unfamiliar name as if it were the filthiest word in the world.

“That’s right, Mr. President.” George Marshall nodded. Truman thought the Secretary of Defense was almost as much a Great Stone Face as Andrei Gromyko. Dorothy Parker had famously said that some actress ran the gamut of emotions from A to B. Truman hadn’t seen that actress perform. But by comparison to her, Marshall got stuck halfway between A and B.

“Pechenga!” Truman said it again, even more disgustedly this time. “It sounds like the noise a pinball machine makes.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Marshall sounded resigned. He was an extraordinarily able man. As Secretary of State, he’d developed the Plan that bore his name and helped keep Western Europe’s ravaged postwar economies from collapsing. Before that, he’d been a five-star general and Army Chief of Staff under FDR.

Truman wondered whether Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. No, on second thought, Truman didn’t wonder any such thing. He knew damn well Marshall compared him to Roosevelt. The man would have been even less human than he was if he didn’t. What Truman really wondered was what Marshall thought, comparing him to his illustrious predecessor.

He didn’t ask. He would never ask. He would go on the rack and let a torturer tear out his fingernails before he asked. But he wondered. He would have been less human than he was if he didn’t.

“Pechenga.” Now Marshall said it. His index finger pinned it down on a large-scale map of Europe, as if he were an entomologist mounting a butterfly on a collecting board. “Formerly Petsamo in Finland, till the Russians took it away when they knocked the Finns out of the war. A little more than fifty miles west of Murmansk. About as far northwest as you can go and stay in the USSR.”

“And where the goddamn Russians took off from when their bombers blasted Britain and France,” Truman ground out.

“And Germany,” Marshall reminded him.

“And Germany,” Truman agreed sourly. “But the Prime Minister is screaming in my ear, and so is the President of the Fourth Republic. The Germans aren’t part of the NATO treaty. I have an easier time ignoring them than I do with the English and French.”

“The treaty does say that an attack against one signatory is the same as an attack against all signatories.” Marshall knew what it said. It had been negotiated while he was Secretary of State, even if the dickering wasn’t done till Dean Acheson took over for him at the start of Truman’s full term, the one he’d won himself.

“I know. I know. I know,” Truman said. “And if I didn’t know, they’re reminding me-at the top of their lungs. And so I am going to have to do something to Russia. If I don’t, the treaty is dead in the water, and I can have the joy of watching all the countries in Western Europe line up to hop into bed with Joe Stalin.”

The slightest twitch of one eyebrow on George Marshall’s craggy face said Franklin D. Roosevelt wouldn’t have talked about countries hopping into bed with other countries. FDR would have found some properly diplomatic way to say the same thing. Well, good for FDR. Truman called them as he saw them, and worried about diplomacy later.

After pulling his features back to expressionlessness, Marshall said, “I’m afraid that’s much too likely, sir. With the Communists already so strong in France and Italy-”

“I know,” Truman said one more time. “And so I was thinking of striking this Pechenga place. It’s where the Russian bombers came from, so it naturally draws our notice. We can drop a bomb there if we want to, blow up the air base, look heroic to our allies, and not endanger even Murmansk, let alone any of the really big Russian cities.”

“I don’t know if it’s enough to make England and France happy, and I don’t know that Stalin won’t feel obliged to retaliate against an American target, or more than one American target,” Marshall replied, plainly picking his words with care. “I also don’t know that he won’t order his armies forward-they’re at the border and ready to move, remember.”

“I do remember.” Truman scowled. “Dammit, George, all my other choices look worse. If I do nothing-we just talked about what will happen then. And if I bomb Russia back to the Stone Age, I know the free half of Europe will get badly hurt, too. We won’t get off scot-free ourselves, either. I don’t believe Stalin can do unto us as we can do unto him, but I don’t believe we’ll stop everything he throws our way, either. If you can tell me I’m wrong and make me believe you, I’ll give you a great big kiss.”

“Is that a promise or a threat, Mr. President?” Marshall asked, deadpan. Truman guffawed, more from surprise than at the quality of the crack. The Secretary of Defense owned a sense of humor after all!

“Never mind what it is,” Truman said. “The way it looks to me is, we have three choices: no response, limited response, and all-out response. If the limited response doesn’t seem the best of the three, you’d better tell me right now.”

Marshall inhaled, then blew out the breath without saying anything. After inhaling again, he said, “When you put it that way, sir, I must agree with you. Whether Stalin will recognize the limited nature of the reply, though, or whether our friends will find it too limited…” He shrugged.

“God knows what will happen before it does. He’s the only One Who can pull that off,” Truman said. “The rest of us, we have to try something and then see what happens. This isn’t a good choice, but it’s the best one we have now. Since we do agree on that, let’s get rolling.”

“I was thinking some of the planes should fly out of England and others out of France, sir,” Marshall said. “It seems fitting.”

“It does, yes.” Truman paused a moment. “Not out of Germany?”

“What do you think, sir?”

The President answered his own question: “No, not out of Germany. Okay, get things started. You will know the orders to issue.” If anyone in the whole world knew more than George Marshall about how American armed forces around the world worked, Truman had no idea who it might be.

“I’ll send them out right away.” Marshall hesitated, then said, “It might have been better to accept the loss of our forces in North Korea, then bring in enough reinforcements to stabilize the situation. The choice we’re facing now wouldn’t seem so…stark.”

“If I’d let the Red Chinese get away with slaughtering them all, McCarthy and Taft and the rest of the Republicans would have crucified me, and who could blame them?” Truman said. “Don’t get me wrong. You have a point, and a good one. All I can tell you is, it seemed like a good idea at the time. You didn’t say no then, not that I recall.”

“No, I didn’t,” the Secretary of Defense agreed. “Now we’ve got a tiger by the ears, though, and we’d better hang on tight or it will swallow us.”

“We’ll need to put Alaska on highest alert,” Truman said. “If Stalin does decide to play tit for tat, that’s a likely place for him to do it. Plenty of space, not many people-it’s a lot like Pechenga. If we can keep the Russians from getting through, that’s a feather in our cap.”

“Good point. I think we’re already at the maximum there, but I will make sure,” Marshall said. “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Not off the top of my head. I’ll phone you if I think of something,” the President said.

The Secretary of Defense nodded, dipped his head once more in lieu of saluting, and strode out of the White House conference room.

“Pechenga.” Truman still made the name sound like an obscenity. He scowled at the map. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Not a big enough eye or tooth to make the Europeans happy. Well, wasn’t diplomacy the art of leaving everyone dissatisfied? If it is, I win artist of the year, Truman thought.

–

Leon carried a blue book up to Aaron Finch. He climbed into his father’s lap in a rocking chair and said, “Read!” He was only a little more than a year and a half old. He didn’t say a whole lot of words yet. He had that one, though. And he always seemed sure of what he wanted-in which he took after Aaron.

“Okay, kiddo.” Aaron tousled Leon’s curly hair. Leon indignantly shook his head. He didn’t like that for beans. He never had. Aaron did it anyhow. He thought those curls were funny as hell. Leon got them from Ruth. Aaron’s hair was straight. His son looked like him most ways, but not there.

He lit another cigarette. He wasn’t a chain smoker to the point of having two going at once, but he burned through a couple of packs a day. Leon put up with the wait as well as a toddler could: which is to say, not very well. “Read, Daddy!” he barked, like a squeaky top sergeant.

Aaron started reading about Peter Rabbit and Grandfather Frog and the Merry Little Breezes and Bowser the Hound and the rest of the edge-of-the-woods world Thornton Burgess had made. He thought the tales were tedious. They repeated themselves a lot. They’d originally run as newspaper serials, which made recapping every so often a must. Burgess hadn’t bothered cleaning them up when he turned them into books.

Leon didn’t care. Little kids liked hearing things over and over. Aaron wasn’t always sure how much of the stories his son got. But whether Leon got everything or not, he liked sitting in his daddy’s lap and listening. That was plenty to keep Aaron going.

When Lightfoot the Deer made an appearance, Aaron asked, “Do you know what antlers are, Leon?”

His son didn’t say a lot, no. But Leon was nobody’s dope. Far more words and ideas lodged in his brain than came out of his mouth. He stuck his thumbs above his eyes and spread his hands wide. Sure as hell, he knew what antlers were.

“That’s right,” Aaron said, and, “That’s good.” Aaron went on, “Deer have antlers. They’re kind of like horns, except they fall off every year, so the deer have to grow new ones. Horns stay on all the time.”

Leon nodded. Maybe it was going in one ear and out the other, but maybe not, too. Yeah, the kid was smart. Some of that was good-it helped you get along. Too much was liable to turn you into a white crow. No need to worry about that for a while, though.

The water in the kitchen stopped running. Ruth walked into the living room. She was smoking a cigarette, too. She didn’t puff away all the time like Aaron, but she smoked.

Leon lit up like a lightbulb. “Mommy!” he exclaimed, as if he hadn’t seen her for ten years, not ten minutes.

“How many other kids who still make messes in their diapers know what antlers are?” Aaron asked proudly.

“Does he?” Ruth said.

“Show Mommy,” Aaron told Leon. “Show her what antlers are.” Damned if the kid didn’t do his thumbs-to-the-forehead-with-fingers-spread gesture again.

Ruth laughed. “He does know! What a smart thing you are, Leon!”

Leon poked at the book. “Read!” So Aaron read. Pretty soon, Leon started rubbing his eyes. Aaron checked his diaper. Leon was dry. As far as Aaron was concerned, that also made the little boy pretty darn clever. Aaron started rocking a little more.

In spite of himself, Leon’s eyes sagged shut. Aaron kept reading a little longer. If he quit too soon, sometimes Leon wouldn’t be quite out. He’d wake up again at the sudden silence, and be cranky and hard to settle. But when Aaron stood up with his son in the crook of his arm, Leon didn’t stir. Aaron carried him into the bedroom and set him in his crib. Getting the baby down was another danger spot. Leon muttered something, but he went on sleeping.

Aaron walked out to the living room. “Hi, babe!” he said. “Nobody here but us chickens.”

“Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!” Ruth said. The Armenian family two doors down raised chickens and ducks in their back yard. Ruth bought eggs from them, eggs that were better and cheaper than you could get at the grocery store.

Aaron sank down into the rocker again and lit a fresh Chesterfield. He could yawn and smoke at the same time-he kept the cigarette in one corner of his mouth while the rest opened wide. “Only trouble is, I’m worn out, too,” he said. “I’ll be ready for bed in an hour or two.”

“I know what you mean,” his wife said. And he had no doubt that she did. He moved washers and driers and TVs and iceboxes all day long. She chased after Leon and kept him from smashing his head or swallowing a match or doing any of the other stupid things children did.

Ruth had an Agatha Christie on the table next to her chair. A couple of issues of Popular Mechanics sat on the one beside Aaron’s rocker. He was a dedicated tinkerer, and used ideas from the magazine every chance he got.

But he didn’t feel like reading now. Tired as he was, he didn’t have the brainpower to concentrate. He turned on the TV instead. It was a big Packard Bell console: an Early American TV set, if something so modern could also be Early American. Television was even better than radio for giving you something to do when you didn’t feel like thinking.

The tubes took a minute or so to warm up and show him a picture. He turned the channel-changing dial to see what all was on. Los Angeles had seven stations, as many as anywhere in the country and far more than most places. He found a fight on Channel Five and went back to the chair to watch.

He did so with a critical eye. He hadn’t been a bad man with his fists in his own younger days. In bar brawls, some people dove under the table, while others grabbed a beer bottle and waited to see what happened next. He’d always been a bottle grabber himself.

One of these palookas-middleweights-hit harder. The other was a better boxer. Neither, on his best day, would make Sugar Ray Robinson break a sweat. The boxer was plainly ahead on points halfway through the ninth round. Then the other guy, even though his face looked like steak tartare, landed a left hook square on the button. The boxer slumped to the canvas as if his legs had turned to Jell-O. The bow-tied referee counted him out. He didn’t come close to standing again. In the neutral corner, the slugger raised his gloves in beat-up triumph. He looked about ready to fall over, too.

Commercials followed. Because the fight hadn’t gone the distance, there were a lot of them. The station had to fill time till the news came on at the top of the hour. Aaron did reach for a Popular Mechanics then. He found TV commercials even more annoying than the ones on the radio.

“This is Stan Chambers, reporting on Wednesday, February the seventh,” the young reporter behind the desk said when the news started. “Our growing conflict with Russia has taken a dangerous new step. You will recall that, three days ago, American bombers vaporized Pechenga, the northern air base from which Red planes smashed the cities of our European allies. Within the past half hour, we have received word that Elmendorf Air Force Base, outside of Anchorage, Alaska, has vanished in what is being described as a quote tremendous explosion unquote. Radio Moscow, in an English-language broadcast, calls this quote justified retaliation unquote. There is no comment yet from the President or the Defense Department.”

“Jesus!” Aaron said. After a moment, he added, “Gevalt!”

“Vey iz mir!” Ruth agreed. They’d both picked up Yiddish from their immigrant parents. They found themselves using it more these days than they had for a while, to keep Leon from knowing what they were talking about.

As Stan Chambers went on with the news, Aaron thought about the prize fight he’d just watched. If America and Russia kept slugging each other like this, would either one still be standing at the final bell?

–

Boris Gribkov wished he could get drunk. That was what Red Air Force pilots commonly did when they weren’t flying and were stuck at a base someplace in the middle of nowhere. Provideniya wasn’t just the middle of nowhere. If nowhere ever needed an enema, Provideniya was where they’d plug it in.

Provideniya was so far from somewhere, from anywhere, it didn’t even have a brothel. Whores gave pilots something to do when they weren’t pouring down vodka, anyhow.

But alcohol-any alcohol, even beer-was off-limits for flight crews for the duration of the emergency. Tu-4s carried atomic bombs. They had to be ready to fly at a moment’s notice. Outrage by outrage, the fight the Americans had called the Cold War was heating up.

The base commandant made sure he got the point across. After summoning all his aircrews, Colonel Doyarenko said, “No booze. Fuck your mothers, you cocksuckers, do you hear me? No booze! None. Not a fucking drop. You know what will happen if you screw it up? You’ll go to Kolyma, that’s what. You think you’re far north now, assholes? There, you won’t see the sun for six weeks at a time. You’ll mine coal and dig for gold when it’s fifty below. You’ll find frogs and salamanders frozen in the ice for a thousand years and you’ll eat ’em raw, on account of they’ll taste like caviar next to what the camps usually feed zeks. No…goddamn…booze!”

Somebody didn’t listen. Put a bunch of people together and there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the message. One aircrew quite suddenly vanished from Provideniya. Boris didn’t know the MGB had hauled them off to the wrong side of the Arctic Circle. He didn’t know they were slamming picks into the permafrost and hoping for frozen salamanders.

No, he didn’t know any of those things. All he knew was, they were gone. An Li-2-which was almost as close a copy of the American DC-3 as the Tu-4 was of the B-29 (though the transport, unlike the bomber, was licensed)-flew in a new crew for the plane that found itself without one. Life went on.

Oh, he knew one other thing. No matter how bored he got here at Provideniya, he wouldn’t drink. Kolyma was a name Russian mothers whispered to scare kids who wouldn’t behave. It was the worst place in the world. A snootful of vodka wasn’t worth the risk of going there.

He read books. He played cards. He played chess. He watched the Northern Lights. When he got five minutes by himself, he jacked off. And he waited for the order to fly his Tu-4 against the Americans. He didn’t think he would come back. If they sent him against the U.S. proper, he didn’t see how he could come back. Well, if you were going to go out with a bang…

None of the planes from Provideniya had flown against the U.S. Air Force base in Alaska. That perplexed him enough to talk to the commandant: “Comrade Colonel, what are we doing here? Are we decoys, lined up like wooden ducks on a pond so the imperialists can waste weapons on us?”

“Don’t believe it, not even for a minute,” Doyarenko answered. “When the time comes, we will hit them, and we’ll hurt them when we do it, too.”

Unless they wipe us off the map first. But Gribkov didn’t say it. You didn’t want to borrow too much trouble. He did ask, “Well, sir, since we were closest to this Elmendorf place, why didn’t we fly against it?”

“Because we’re also closest to the American radars at Nome and on St. Lawrence Island,” Colonel Doyarenko answered. “They would have spotted us taking off, and the enemy would have been alert and ready for us. When the gloves come all the way off, if they do, we’ll have fighter-bombers pound those radar stations to blind the enemy. Then we can do what we need to do.”

“Ah, I see,” Gribkov said. “Where did the planes that hit Alaska come from, then?”

Doyarenko sent him a hooded look. That wasn’t anything he needed to know, even if he might want to. Then the colonel shrugged. “Well, what difference does it make? It’s not as if the Americans don’t already know we also have planes up on Vrangel Island.”

“Ah,” Boris Gribkov repeated. The island lay north of the Siberian mainland, between the parts of the Arctic Ocean the maps called the East Siberian Sea and the Chukchi Sea. There wasn’t even a gulag on it, which said something, though Boris wasn’t sure what. He hadn’t known the USSR flew bombers off of it, but he wasn’t astonished to learn as much. It was within range of Alaska, certainly, yet even more isolated and able to hold secrets than Provideniya.

The colonel went on, “I’ve heard the Tu-4s that hit the American air base flew over the ocean, no higher than a cat’s testicle above the waves. If you’re going to beat radar, that’s how you do it.”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said, which meant he’d do it that way if and when the bell tolled for him.

But Doyarenko hadn’t finished. “I’ve also heard-unofficially-that our Tu-4s were painted in U.S. Air Force colors.” He steepled his fingertips. “They do look quite a bit like the American B-29s.”

Gribkov couldn’t help snorting, but he managed not to guffaw. The Tu-4 was as close to a copy of the B-29 as Soviet factories could make. There was a story that, because the interior paint jobs on two of the interned B-29s that formed the Soviet plane’s pattern differed, Tupolev asked Beria to ask Stalin which scheme to use. The aircraft designer didn’t dare choose on his own. The way Stalin chuckled when he heard the question told Beria the answer.

That was what Boris had heard, anyhow. Was the story true? He had no idea. He’d never met either Stalin or Beria, and didn’t want to. But that the story could be told as if true spoke volumes abut how closely the Tu-4 resembled its American inspiration.

Something else occurred to Gribkov. “Isn’t it against the laws of war to fly a plane under false colors, sir?” he asked.

“Officially, yes,” Colonel Doyarenko answered, which told Boris everything he needed to know. Doyarenko went on, “But what’s the worst thing the imperialists can do to a plane like that? Shoot it down and kill everybody on it. And what’s the worst thing they can do to a plane plastered with red stars and with For Stalin! painted on the fuselage? Shoot it down and kill everybody in it, da?”

“Da,” Gribkov agreed. “Comrade Colonel, what if a Tu-4 plastered with red stars and with For Stalin! painted on the fuselage turns out to be a B-29 in disguise, though?”

Doyarenko opened his mouth. Then he closed it without saying anything. When he did speak, it was in musing tones: “If we can think of it, the Americans can, too. I’ll talk with Colonel Fursenko, the air-defense commander. The MiGs will have to be extra alert.”

“Yes, sir,” Boris said, his own voice not altogether free from resignation or worry. Extra-alert MiG pilots were liable to shoot down Tu-4s to make sure they didn’t let a B-29 sneak through. That might even serve the cause of the rodina. Whether it served the motherland or not, though, it wouldn’t do a Tu-4’s eleven-man crew any good.

No B-29s struck Provideniya. It was well below freezing, with snow flurries every other day or so. That didn’t keep groundcrew men from getting rid of the Soviet markings on the Tu-4s hiding at the airstrip here and turning them into bombers that looked even more like B-29s than they had already.

When Gribkov asked a sergeant about it, the man replied, “Sir, your eyes must be playing tricks on you. This isn’t happening at all.” He laid a paint-stained finger by the side of his nose and winked.

“No, eh?” Boris said.

“No, sir.” By the way the sergeant sounded, butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.

“All right.” Gribkov wondered if it was. But Colonel Doyarenko had to be right about one thing. Either way, the worst the Americans could do was kill him.