Fallout

24

Vasili Yasevich ambled along the road, the track, whatever you wanted to call it, that connected Smidovich and Birobidzhan. He’d never been to the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Few people from Smidovich had. Birobidzhan held thirty-five or forty thousand souls. To the locals, that made it the big city.

It wasn’t the big city to Vasili. He was supposed to come from Khabarovsk, which had been quite a bit larger till the American A-bomb cut it down to size. And he really knew Harbin, which had been larger still. Of course, by China’s anthill standards, even Harbin was only a third- or at best a second-rate town.

Having grown up among Harbin’s teeming hundreds of thousands, Vasili was amazed at how much he enjoyed getting off by himself. When he went a few kilometers down the road, he might have been the only man in the world. All he could hear were birdcalls, the wind soughing through the pine branches, and his own footsteps. No, he could hear one thing more. He could hear himself think in a way he couldn’t in a crowd.

A squirrel gnawing on a pine cone paused to chatter at him. It sat on a branch fifteen meters up a tree. He couldn’t have hurt it if he tried. It told him off just the same. Then, with a flirt of its plumy tail, it was gone.

He wagged a finger at it. “Better be careful, Tovarishch. They’ll collectivize you and your pine cones if you don’t watch out.” He could make jokes like that so long as only a squirrel heard him. If anyone in Smidovich did, he’d find out all about what they did to people.

On he went. In a jacket pocket, wrapped in newspaper, he had a sandwich of rye bread and smoked salmon and onions. The people on this side of the Amur smeared creamy cheese on their bread when they made that kind of sandwich. He didn’t. He had the Chinese view of cheese: that it was nothing but rotten milk. If the locals noticed how he fixed his food, they might think he was odd. They wouldn’t make any more of it than that.

There was the fallen tree he remembered, with the orange and yellow lichens growing on the trunk. It was the perfect place to sit and eat and smoke and let his thoughts go where they would for as long as they felt like going there. Then he’d get up, take a leak against a sapling, and saunter back to Smidovich.

He’d taken two bites out of the sandwich when a noise from deeper in the woods made him turn his head away from the dirt road. Something good-sized was moving in there. People in Smidovich talked about wolves. Vasili had never seen one, or even seen tracks in the soft ground. He suspected all the talk was only that and no more.

But he might have been wrong. He set the sandwich on the colorful tree trunk and reached for the Tokarev automatic he’d taken from Grigory Papanin. It wasn’t accurate out much farther than he could piss, but the report ought to scare away a wolf.

Or a tiger. People in Smidovich talked about them, too. Vasili had more trouble taking that seriously. Still, his father had charged the Chinese in Harbin through the nose for medicines made from ground-up and dried tiger parts. He must have got them from somewhere.

What came out of the forest, though, wasn’t a wolf or a tiger. It was a human being, though a scrawny one with cropped hair and such cheap, shabby clothes that Vasili wondered for a moment. Then he saw that the jacket and trousers had a number written on them: Б711. He realized what kind of human being it must be-a zek, straight out of the gulag.

At the same time as he saw Б711, the zek saw the sandwich he’d just started and pointed at it. “Bitte? Uh, pozhalista?” the zek said. Only when Vasili heard the voice did he realize it was a women. The ragged, quilted jacket and baggy pants hid whatever curves she owned.

“Go ahead,” he said. She had to be starving. He wouldn’t waste away for want of a smoked-salmon sandwich. He waved in invitation, in case she had trouble with his Russian-it plainly wasn’t her first language.

“Danke schon! Bolshoye spasibo!” she said, and engulfed the sandwich like a snake engulfing a rabbit. When it was gone, her bony, filthy face lit up. “Ach, wunderbar!” She pointed at her own chest. “Ich heisse Maria Bauer.”

“I’m Vasili,” he said. She had to be speaking German. He’d picked up a few Yiddish phrases in Smidovich, but only a few. He asked, “How much Russian do you speak?”

She held her thumb and forefinger not far apart. “Little bit,” she said.

Vasili nodded. “Did you run away from the gulag?” he asked. Maria Bauer looked alarmed. He held up his hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t turn you in. Fuck the Chekists!”

That, she understood. “Fuck Chekists, da!” she said fiercely.

“How did you get away?” he asked.

She laughed. “I fuck Chekist. Five of us, we do. We go, we split up, they not maybe all catch. I here.” She paused. “Where here?”

“Near Smidovich,” Vasili said. Plainly, it meant nothing to Maria.

“What do you of me-to me-with me?” she asked. “You not give me Chekists, I you fuck, too.” With her rudimentary Russian, she couldn’t be anything but blunt.

Right this minute, he had no trouble shaking his head. She might clean up nicely, though. Feed her, let her hair grow out, and she wouldn’t be terrible. He couldn’t take her home with him any which way, not when he lived in a dormitory. All of a sudden, he started to laugh.

“Chto?” she asked, her voice full of animal wariness.

“I have a friend in town.” He spoke slowly and clearly, to make sure she could follow. “I will go see him. I think-I hope-he can take you in. I will come back tonight. I will bring food. I will take you to him if he says yes. If he says no, I will give you what I can to help you get away.”

“How I know you it?-it you?” she asked after he’d repeated himself and gestured several times.

He whistled a tune that had been popular in Harbin before the Russians drove the Japanese out of the city. “I’ll do that when I come,” he said.

Maria Bauer nodded. “Khorosho.”

Vasili went on whistling as he walked back to Smidovich. A couple of trucks passed him. He assumed Maria had had sense enough to hide from them. If she hadn’t, she was too dumb to deserve help.

He knocked on David Berman’s door, hoping the old Jew hadn’t gone anywhere. Sure enough, Berman was home. “Vasili Andreyevich!” he said, smiling in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

Looking inside the cabin, Vasili saw it was even grubbier than it had been the last time he visited. “How would you like a maid to help you straighten up this joint?” he asked.

Berman frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, I met somebody in the woods….” Vasili told the whole story. If David Berman went to the MGB, he was history. But Berman didn’t seem that kind of man. Vasili was willing to take the chance.

And the old Jew said, “Well, I got no use for Chekists or camps. Who does? But you want I should take a young girl into mine house? Into this?” His wave took in all the neglect. “And a German girl? Vey iz mir!”

“She’s not that young, David Samuelovich. She’s my age, give or take a little,” Vasili said. “Believe me, next to the camps, what you’ve got here is great. And see? You’ll be able to talk to her better than I can. You can call her your niece or your cousin or something, visiting from the real Russia.”

“She’s your age? That’s young. Believe me, that’s young,” Berman said. “But I’ll do it. If she gets caught, we all go to the gulag. For you, for her, it’s a worry. For me? I don’t care what happens to me no more.”

“I’ll bring tonight,” Vasili said. “You can keep her a secret till she grows some hair and gets some clothes that don’t have a number on them.”

He feared Maria Bauer would have fallen asleep by the time he came back up the road whistling his song. But she came out at once and walked to Smidovich with him. “A Jew?” she said when he told her David Berman’s name. “I go to a Jew?” She laughed.

“He thinks it’s funny, too,” Vasili told her, which didn’t stretch things…too far.

He knocked on Berman’s door. The old man opened it. Maria stumbled inside. Vasili went away. Either he’d just done something marvelous or he’d wrecked three lives. Well, you could only try.

–

Simon Perkins was already at work compounding medicines when Daisy Baxter came downstairs. Grinding away with a big brass mortar and pestle, he might have fallen through time from the Middle Ages. Even the faintly camphory, faintly sulfurous odor of the chemist’s shop suggested bygone days. Only his waistcoat, necktie, and gold-framed bifocals argued for 1952.

“Good morning, Mr. Perkins,” she said, as cheerfully as she could. She didn’t feel she knew him well enough to use his Christian name. She wondered if anyone in the world did.

“Good morning, Mrs. Baxter,” he answered, not stopping what he was doing.

Did he bear down a bit on the title that showed she was, or at least had been, a married woman? She didn’t want him to be difficult. Yes, he was generous, to give shelter to someone who’d lived through the disaster that crushed Fakenham. But couldn’t he leave it there?

Evidently he couldn’t, because he went on, “You got in late last night-or I should say, this morning.”

“I’m ever so sorry if I bothered you coming up the stairs,” Daisy said, pretending not to hear any larger meanings in his remark. “I tried to be as quiet as I could.”

“I wasn’t awake very long,” he said grudgingly. “But what can you and your Yank be doing that keeps you out till half past two?”

He sounded as if he honestly had no idea. Daisy didn’t know whether that made her want to laugh or to cry or to do both at once. What are we doing? We’re screwing like bunnies was the first thing that leaped into her mind. However tempting it was, though, it would only make things worse.

“We have a good time,” she said. “We enjoy each other’s company.” And the North Sea was damp, and the flash when an atom bomb went off was bright. Words were useless for some things. If you hadn’t experienced them, they couldn’t mean anything to you. She did try to sound as innocent as she could. For that, words were worth something.

“I daresay,” Simon Perkins replied. Perhaps she sounded less innocent than she hoped.

“It’s really between Bruce and me, don’t you think?” she said. Before he could tell her whether he did think that-she would have bet against it-she added, “I’m going out for some breakfast. I’ll see you later.”

Out she went. She could feel his eyes boring into the small of her back like awls. She was glad to close the door behind her. She wondered whether she ought to look for another room. She didn’t want to. Even with as little in the way of worldly goods as she had, moving was a bloody nuisance. But if Mr. Perkins was going to get his nose out of joint whenever she and Bruce spent time together, she might not have a choice.

She bought scrambled eggs and chips and her morning cuppa at a place around the corner from the chemist’s shop. She had a hot plate in her room; she could brew tea there. She could even cook if she had no other choice, but a little experimenting had shown that anything beyond tea or heating tinned soup was more trouble than it was worth.

The town hall had gone up in the 1880s. It was brick and granite, built with smug Victorian confidence that it would still be an important place two hundred years from when it went up. Back then, the British Empire had been the unchallenged, the unchallengeable, mistress of the world. Here it was, only a lifetime later, and the Empire was a tattered ruin of its grander self. The home country, still in the grip of crippling austerity after the last war, had been hit again, harder, by this new one.

People nowadays laughed at how smug and certain their grandparents had been. No one now was certain about anything-and how could you be, when the town where you lived might get seared out of existence in the next moment? But that sureness that their achievements would last forever made Daisy envy her ancestors…and also made her want to weep at the foundering of all their hopes.

Inside the hall, signs with arrows directed people to where they needed to go. By now, she knew which window to visit without resorting to them. The window had a newly printed sign held in place above it by sticky tape: FAKENHAM SURVIVOR BENEFITS. This was where the government gave what it could spare to the townsfolk the Russians hadn’t managed to murder with their atom bomb.

The clerk looked up from a form he’d been filling in. “Ah, Mrs. Baxter,” he said. “How are you this morning?” His smile and something in his voice told her he liked the way she looked.

She smiled back, not quite with the same warmth. He was polite, which made his regard more a compliment than an annoyance. She wanted to keep it that way. “I’m fine, Mr. Jarvis, thanks,” she said. “And you?”

“I’m very well, very well indeed,” he replied. “You’ve come for the weekly allotment?”

“That’s right.” She wondered why else she or anyone else would come to this tan-painted, poorly lit corridor. Unless you had to be here, you’d stay as far away as you could.

“Here you are.” He handed her an envelope. She looked inside to make sure the money the state said she was entitled to was in there. When she saw it was, she signed the line on the allotment roster that also held her typewritten name. She turned to go, but Mr. Jarvis said, “Wait a moment, please.”

“Yes?” Now she didn’t sound one bit warm. Was he going to prove a bother after all?

But all he did was hand her another envelope. “This came in for you yesterday. As you’ll know, the post to Fakenham has been, ah, rather badly disrupted since the, ah, unfortunate incident.”

“The A-bomb, you mean,” she said. Government officials thought they could hide the mushroom cloud behind a thicker cloud of meaningless words.

“Well, yes.” Mr. Jarvis didn’t care to admit it but couldn’t very well deny it.

“Thank you very much,” she said, giving him credit for admitting it and more because he wasn’t in fact trying to urge himself on her.

Sure enough, the envelope had gone to the Owl and Unicorn’s address in ruined Fakenham. It was from her insurance company. Bloody took them long enough, she thought as she opened it.

It has come to our attention that the property at the above-mentioned address may have been adversely affected by the unfortunate events of 11 September 1951, she read. A soft snort escaped her. The insurers talked as if they wanted to be bureaucrats. She waded through a couple of paragraphs of turgid drivel before she got to the meat. As acts of war and acts of God are specifically disallowed under the provisions of Clause 6.2.3.a.3 of your policy, we regret to inform you that we have no financial obligation in the matter of damages suffered on or about the above-mentioned date in regard to the unfortunate events thereof.

A scribbled signature followed. She read it again. No financial obligation. Yes, it still said the same thing. No, she hadn’t read it wrong. They weren’t going to pay. She only wished she were less surprised. Insurance companies were there for themselves first and you only later, if at all. They were very good at taking in premiums. Sending money the other way? That, they weren’t so happy about.

She knew what Bruce would say if she showed him the letter. He’d note the London address and offer to make a special bombing run for her. He couldn’t do it, but the offer would be nice. Unless the government did more for her and her townsfolk than it had so far, the offer would be all she got.

What the company said might be legal, but it hardly seemed fair. She’d just had her pub in the wrong place at the wrong time. Was that enough to ruin her for life? The insurance outfit thought so.

With sudden startling clarity, she realized letters like hers were how the Bolsheviks got started. When the ones above you didn’t give a damn about what happened to you, what did you do? You got rid of them. Good God! I’ve just turned Red myself, Daisy thought-proudly.

–

Harry Truman had eaten rubber chicken at more political dinners than he could remember, let alone count. Sometimes it was good rubber chicken. The fried drumsticks he’d had in Kentucky on his 1948 reelection campaign he did still remember, and fondly. The stuff he’d downed in Reno on that same campaign he also recalled, but not so happily. He’d had the trots for most of a week after that banquet.

What was on his plate here in Buffalo tonight wouldn’t go down in either of those columns. He could eat it. It wasn’t interesting. If it had been a baseball player, it would have been a backup infielder with a decent glove who hit .250 but had no power. Serviceable. Not memorable.

A local politico named Steven Pankow stood up to introduce him. Pankow aspired to be mayor of Buffalo after the next election. He might well make it. He had the self-confidence, the glibness, and the money he’d acquired from a successful career selling cars.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my great privilege to present to you the President of the United States, Mr. Harry S Truman,” he said from the lectern. He also had a slight Polish accent, which in this part of the country was in itself a political asset of sorts.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Pankow,” Truman said as he walked to the lectern. Then he said it again into the mike. He got a warm hand from the crowd of dignitaries and other prosperous upstate Democrats. Applause never went stale. He went on, “Thank you all for coming to the museum today to take a look at the dinosaur.”

That won him a laugh, maybe a bigger one than the joke deserved. But many a truth was spoken in jest. He’d volunteered for his own political extinction, but he would have been pushed if he hadn’t jumped.

“The cast always changes, but the show goes on,” he said. “It has to. We need to elect as many Democrats as we can in November, from the top of the ticket all the way down, to make sure the so-and-sos on the other side do as little damage as possible. The way things look, the Republicans seem to be running on the slogan ‘Throw the rascals in!’?”

He got another laugh for what looked like another jesting truth. The real problem, or what looked like the real problem to Truman and the rest of the pols in the room, was that the Republicans were all too likely to throw their rascals in and the ones who were Democrats out.

“We’ve held the White House and Congress for the past twenty years,” Truman went on. “Oh, the Republicans took Congress a few years ago, but they made such a do-nothing mess of it, the people made them give it back two years later.”

They blistered their palms clapping for that. Had the President been in the audience instead of giving the speech, he would have clapped, too. He’d won the tag Give ’Em Hell Harry not least by tearing into the Republican-led Congress when he was running for his own term in 1948. That had gone a long way toward giving him the election.

“They say we can’t win this upcoming Presidential race. They sure do say a lot of stupid things, don’t they?” Truman grinned out at the crowd. “I say they’re full of hooey. I’d say they were full of something else, something from the barnyard, but we have ladies present. I do want to remind you of a picture somebody took of me four years ago. I was holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune with a big old headline-DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. So tell me, folks, did Dewey defeat Truman?”

“No!” everybody shouted.

“That’s right. Dewey didn’t defeat Truman. If he had, you wouldn’t be here today putting up with my hot air,” Truman said. “And whoever gets our nomination this time around can win the same way I did. All he has to do is work hard, never give up, and remember he’s running for the little man, not for the fat cats. Fat cats always vote Republican. They’ve got other things wrong with ’em, too.”

They whooped and hollered. They liked him fine when he was laying into the GOP. When he had to talk about the war and the punishment America had taken and how things in Europe and Korea were going…No, he wasn’t so popular then. If he had been, he would have run again. So he steered clear of anything that had to do with foreign affairs as far as he could-which wasn’t far.

“We’ve got us a fine field of candidates,” he said. “The way it looks to me is, we’ve got a better field than they’ll run in the Kentucky Derby next week. This is the state Averell Harriman comes from, of course. He’s a fine man. Since he spent time in Moscow as a diplomat during the last war, he knows the Russians as well as any American is likely to. If I haven’t found peace by the time I leave office, I know he’ll make a good one.”

No, he couldn’t ignore the wider world, however much he wanted to. He won more applause, tentative at first but then growing. Everyone wanted a good peace. Finding terms both sides could accept was the hard part.

“Now, I wouldn’t mind if Mr. Harriman were to be the nominee, but I also wouldn’t mind if any of the other leading candidates got the nod.” Truman liked Harriman at least as well as any of the others, and better than most. But he wasn’t about to endorse him publicly. As near as he could tell, his endorsement would be the kiss of death for whoever was unlucky enough to get it.

“The most important thing is, whichever candidate wins the nomination, we all have to get behind him and work for him as hard as we can. No Dixiecrats this time around, please. No so-called Progressives. We’re all Democrats together, consarn it, and we’ve got to stick together as Donkeys against whichever jackass the Elephants run against us. Thanks very much, folks!”

He got a laugh and applause this time. It looked more and more as if the junior Senator from Wisconsin would bear the Republicans’ standard. Without the war, Truman would have bet on Eisenhower. But a general’s luster tarnished when men were fighting and dying all over again. Senator Taft kept trying to pretend Senator McCarthy didn’t exist. It wasn’t working.

Well, this bash cost twenty-five bucks a plate. Some good, solid cash would flow into the Democratic coffers from it. You needed ward-heelers to campaign for your candidates, not just the national ticket but the local men like Steven Pankow as well. You needed flyers and pamphlets and billboards. You needed more money for radio spots. And, in this modern world, you needed more money still for TV ads. Politics had never been cheap. These days, getting somebody elected was ridiculously expensive.

As the gathering started to break up, Truman pressed the flesh and chatted with his supporters. That was also part of the game. If they could imagine they knew you, they’d work harder on the campaign.

“Nice introduction,” the President said when he clasped Pankow’s hand. “You kept it short, and that’s the most important thing.”

“My pleasure, sir,” Pankow replied. “Keep walloping the snot out of those damn Russians-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. And never trust ’em further than you can throw ’em. They’ll cheat if they get half a chance. A quarter of a chance, even.”

“I have noticed that, yes,” Truman said. A man who spoke with a faint Polish accent might well be one of the few people on earth who trusted Russians even less than Truman did. His reasons would be personal and historical, not political, but that only made them more sincere.

A limousine with a police escort took Truman to the airport. Red lights flashed, clearing traffic from the road. It was after midnight; there wasn’t much traffic to clear. Spotlights guided the limo to the waiting Independence. As soon as the President climbed the wheeled stairway and boarded the DC-6, its engines thundered to life and the big props began to spin.

The plane rolled down the runway. It smoothly climbed into the air. Truman leaned back in his seat with a weary sigh. Washington soon, Washington and the war.

–

Boris Gribkov peered out through the Tu-4’s Plexiglas windscreen. All he saw was ocean. Waves in the North Atlantic rolled on endlessly from the northwest toward the southeast. He circled between Norway and Iceland, low enough and far enough away from land that radar sets on Jan Mayen and the Faeroes wouldn’t spot him. Patrol planes…Patrol planes were a chance he simply had to take.

Although the sun had set, it was a long way from dark. He was up near the Arctic Circle, farther north than Leningrad and its famed white nights. That was another chance he had to take. He wouldn’t have had to worry about it during the winter. It was May, though. Things happened when they happened, not when it was most convenient for them to happen.

He spoke to the radar operator over the intercom: “Anything?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question, or even the tenth.

“No, Comrade Pilot. I’m sorry,” Arkady Oppokov replied. The first few times, he hadn’t apologized.

Muttering to himself, Gribkov spoke to the navigator instead: “We are where we’re supposed to be?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question, either.

“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” Svyatoslav Filevich replied.

“You’re sure?” Boris knew he wouldn’t have asked that question of Leonid Tsederbaum. He’d had confidence in the Jew. He might not have asked it of Yefim Arzhanov, either. But they weren’t here. Filevich was.

“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” he repeated. It also wasn’t the first time Gribkov had asked him that.

Boris fumed. That was all he could do. No, he could also eye his fuel gauge and worry. If his crew didn’t find a milch cow pretty soon, he’d have to abort and fly back to Murmansk. That would effectively end his career. They wouldn’t blame his crewmen. They wouldn’t blame the milch cow’s pilot. They’d blame him, for not flying the mission he was ordered to fly. He had the responsibility, and blame was the other side of that coin.

He was about to query Oppokov yet again when the radar operator suddenly exclaimed, “I have a target, Comrade Pilot! Bearing 270, speed 300 kilometers an hour, range fifteen kilometers, altitude…a long piss above the sea. That’s got to be why I’ve had so much trouble picking it up.”

“Here’s hoping.” Gribkov swung the Tu-4 west. He wasn’t much more than a long piss above the sea himself. His last couple of practice runs at in-flight refueling had been low-level missions. He knew how to do it. He’d done it. It still made him nervous every time.

He also hoped the plane Oppokov’s set had found wasn’t another thirsty calf. That would be a colossal balls-up. He didn’t know what he’d do then. Head back to Murmansk, he supposed, and try to take his medicine like a man.

But the pilot of the Tu-4 ahead waggled his wings when he spotted Gribkov. The tail gunner flashed a green lamp. Anton Presnyakov answered with a red one. Here, milch cow and calf had to connect without radio contact. The Soviet Union didn’t control this stretch of ocean, which was putting things mildly. The enemy was bound to monitor every frequency.

Up Boris came, taking station astern of the milch cow. Its pilot deployed the filler cable. Lev Vaksman used his own to catch that one and guide it to the wingtip recess where it needed to go.

“We are taking on fuel, Comrade Pilot!” the engineer said. He didn’t sound amazed the way he had the first time, but he still seemed excited.

“My gauge also shows it,” Gribkov replied. “Wait till we’re good and full before you turn loose of it.”

“Yes, sir!” There was an order Vaksman agreed with.

Uncoupling went as smoothly as the rest of the process. Boris waved to the milch cow’s pilot as he pulled away. He didn’t know whether the other man could see him, but he made the effort.

That milch cow kept circling. Boris didn’t know how many calves it could feed. What he didn’t know, no interrogator could tear out of him. On the kinds of missions he flew, capture was only too possible.

“What’s our course now, Svyatoslav?” he asked the navigator.

“Comrade Pilot, I suggest 225. That will send us out into the wider ocean about equidistant between the Faeroes and Iceland,” Filevich replied. “We want to stay as far from land as we can.”

“Think so, do you?” Boris said dryly. “Good enough. Course 225 it will be.” He swung the Tu-4 to the southwest.

Every kilometer brought deeper darkness as the sun sank farther below the horizon. That was all to the good. The Americans and English could read a map. They knew where the ocean gaps were. Aerial patrols and radar-carrying picket ships watched them. But if the Tu-4 stayed low, an enemy plane’s radar looking down from above had trouble telling its echo from that of the Atlantic. Picket ships couldn’t spot it from very far away. Its IFF insisted it was an American plane itself.

On and on. On and on. No attacks. No challenges. They’d made it through one danger zone. The next one, the bad one, was still hours away. After a while, Presnyakov said, “It’s a big ocean, isn’t it?”

“Not next to the Pacific,” Boris answered. He’d made that flight. He’d come back from it, too. Maybe he could do it again. That would be something to brag about! (Though poor Tsederbaum would tell him otherwise.)

On and on. He swallowed a benzedrine pill, then another one. They would have their way with him later, if there was a later. For now, they kept him awake and made him alert. On and on. He saw no freighters heading for England. With luck, no freighters saw him, either.

“We are approaching the East Coast of the United States,” Filevich reported some time later. He sounded awed. “We should make landfall over Atlantic City, New Jersey.”

Before long, Gribkov saw lights ahead. The Yankees didn’t bother with a blackout in this part of the country. Radar made navigation easier, but lights helped. The Tu-4’s IFF went right on claiming it was just another B-29 on its lawful occasions. Why a B-29 would be roaring along without lights at an altitude that made skyscrapers dangerous and heading straight for the capital of the USA was a question the IFF couldn’t answer.

They crossed the Delaware Bay, then zoomed low over Dover, Delaware. Another stretch of water-the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis, Maryland, was a small town.

Faizulla Ikramov, the radioman, knew some English. “They seem to be wondering about us, Comrade Pilot,” he reported. “They don’t know what we are, though. We’re so low and so hard to pick up, they aren’t sure we’re anything.”

“Good,” Boris said. Washington was only a few minutes away. “We put it between the White House and the Capitol, if we can,” he reminded navigator and bombardier. “They’ve tried to kill the great Stalin. Now we go after Truman.”

The little river called the Anacostia guided them. At Filevich’s word, Gribkov turned west before it joined the Potomac. As soon as the bomb fell free, he swung north and jammed the throttles past the red line. There’d be enough delay to let the Tu-4 get clear…if everything went well.

Unlike his crewmen, he’d been through atomic explosions before. He rode out the hideous flash and the shock waves, then went east, back toward the Atlantic, again. “They’re going crazy, Comrade Pilot!” Ikramov told him. “Crazy!”

“Good,” Boris said once more. “If they don’t come to their senses till we’re out over the water, we may even get away with this.” A submarine from the Red Fleet was supposed to be waiting at a precise point of latitude and longitude. If it was, if he could ditch this Tu-4 as he had the other after bombing Seattle, he and his crewmates might see the rodina again.

Seven and a half minutes after they bombed Washington, another great flash of light came from behind them. “Bozhemoi!” Anton Presnyakov exclaimed. “What was that?”

“Another dose of the same medicine,” Gribkov answered. “Can’t be anything else. The imperialists gave Moscow three. Washington deserves at least two.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” the copilot agreed. “I didn’t know another plane was on the way, though.” He laughed a shaky laugh. “Security!”

“That’s right. Security.” Boris hadn’t known, either. The other blast might have knocked down his Tu-4-or he might have taken out the other one. But neither mischance happened. Both planes carried out their missions. Now they had to live through them.