Fallout

8

Along with his flight crew, along with their new navigator, Boris Gribkov waited for orders. He was afraid he knew what kind of orders they would be-the kind of orders that had made Leonid Tsederbaum stick his automatic in his mouth and pull the trigger so he would never have to help carry out another set of orders like that again.

Radio Moscow (whose signal almost certainly didn’t originate from Moscow these days) screamed about American atrocities. “Even the Germans the United States claims to protect now fall victim to the imperialists’ insane blood lust!” Roman Amfiteatrov bellowed.

No one had ever heard, or heard of, Amfiteatrov before U.S. B-29s dropped three A-bombs on Moscow. By his accent, he’d done a local show in Stavropol or some other southern town till then. Yuri Levitan had been the chief radio newsreader for years-until, without warning and with no explanation, he wasn’t. He had to be dead, with luck a quick and easy death, without it…not.

Gribkov didn’t take the broadcaster’s hysterics very seriously. He knew what war was-knew much too well, in fact. You killed the enemy’s soldiers as best you could. And you smashed his cities behind the lines so his factories couldn’t make what the soldiers needed to kill your men. If you also terrified his civilians-say, with an atom bomb-so they decided giving up made a better choice than going on with the fight, that was also all to the good.

Rumors swirled over the air base outside of Prague. Czechoslovakia was still a tricky place. It was the last satellite to fall into the Soviet orbit, only a bit more than three years before. Some of the locals might not be happy about that, so the Red Army had the country locked down tight. Klement Gottwald, who ran it for the USSR, might be able to sneeze without asking permission from Stalin. But he sure couldn’t wipe the snot off his upper lip unless Stalin told him that was all right.

“Know what I heard?” Vladimir Zorin said to Boris.

“No, Volodya. I don’t know. What’s the latest shithouse news?” Gribkov asked.

The copilot chuckled self-consciously. “That’s about what it is, sure enough,” he said. “But they say the east bank of the Rhine is nothing but glass from the Swiss border all the way to the North Sea. Glass from atom bombs going off, I mean.”

“I understood you. You do know what a pile of crap that is, right?” Boris intended the question to be rhetorical. In case it wasn’t, he went on to make the point: “How many bombs would the Yanks need to do something like that? If they had that many, wouldn’t they have dropped them on us by now?”

“I suppose so, yeah,” Zorin said. Talking about the resources the enemy enjoyed was always risky.

But Boris said, “I know so. I just wish they’d turn us loose to hit back at the imperialists.” He said that partly to keep the MGB happy and partly because he did mean it-the odd double focus that suffused so much of Soviet life. It wasn’t that he was eager to kill tens of thousands and roast tens of thousands more. He wasn’t, even if it didn’t weigh on his mind so much as it had on Tsederbaum’s. But he’d been trained to fly the Tu-4, and he did want to hit back at the enemies who’d slaughtered so many Soviet fighting men.

“Some bombers have gone out of here,” Zorin said. “I just thought so before, but I know for a fact now. I’ve talked with groundcrew men who serviced them.”

“But not us,” Gribkov said.

“No, not us,” his fellow flyer agreed. “Damn that stupid motherfucking Zhid, anyhow. They don’t trust us to do what they tell us to, not any more they don’t. They think Tsederbaum’s contagious.”

“They ought to know better than that. They’ve questioned us hard enough,” Gribkov said, sincerity and prudence once more mingling in his voice. “We serve the Soviet Union. We should get the chance to do it.”

He listened to the news with special care that evening. Would Roman Amfiteatrov boast about the devastation visited on ancient cities in Western Europe? Amfiteatrov did nothing of the kind. He spent most of the broadcast talking about a Chinese attack in Korea. By the way he described it, if Mao’s soldiers were any braver, they would have torn the Americans they killed to pieces with their bare hands.

Then he sang the praises of Stakhanovite shock workers shattering production norms in places like Magnitogorsk and Irkutsk. Boris believed at least some of that. Places like those were so far from anywhere, even B-29s would have a hard time hitting them.

But what had happened to the Tu-4s that set out from here? Had they carried ordinary bombs instead of the ones with atoms in them? Or had they flown west with the intent to avenge but gone down before they were able to?

He knew how possible that was. The B-29 had been a world-beating heavy bomber at the end of the Great Patriotic War. The ones that made emergency landings in Siberia so impressed the USSR, Stalin ordered Tupolev to make an exact copy within two years…or else. And Tupolev did-he’d already had one taste of the gulag, and didn’t fancy another-and thus the Tu-4 was born.

The Tu-4 was every bit as marvelous as the B-29 had been and still was. The problem was, that soon proved not marvelous enough. Neither bomber had been designed to escape radar-guided, sometimes radar-carrying, night fighters or radar-guided antiaircraft guns. Neither bomber had the speed or the ceiling to get away from jets, and neither had a prayer of shooting them down.

Both were, if you wanted to get right down to it, obsolete. Both kept flying anyhow. They were the best tools their countries had for delivering atom bombs across thousands of kilometers of sea and land. If best didn’t always mean good enough, well, in that case you went out and sent some more. Sooner or later, some would get through.

When sooner looked more like turning into never than later, Gribkov gathered his courage in both hands and called on Brigadier Yulian Olminsky, the air-base commandant. The visit took all the courage he had. He knew his own side could shoot him down far more easily than an American F-80 or F-86. The USSR didn’t need radar to track him. The rodina already had him in its sights.

While he wanted to talk to Olminsky, the brigadier didn’t want to talk to him. Boris cooled his heels for an afternoon while Olminsky dealt with a swarm of other people. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t give up. He went back early the next morning. This was how the game was played.

He sat there smoking, not looking bored, not twiddling his thumbs, for another hour and a half. At last, Olminsky stuck his head out of his office and rolled his eyes. “All right, Gribkov, I suppose I can give you five minutes.”

“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Boris bounced to his feet.

He stood in front of the table that did duty for the brigadier’s desk. He was not invited to sit. Olminsky wasn’t round-faced, blunt-featured, and double-chinned like so many Soviet general officers. He looked more like a Scandinavian literature professor. He was tall and thin and craggy, and wore wire-framed spectacles.

Looks, of course, had nothing to do with anything. “Go ahead and spill it.”

“Comrade General, I am a good pilot. I proudly wear the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.” Boris tapped the ribbon and star on his tunic. He’d won the medal for bombing Seattle. (So had Tsederbaum. He tried not to think about that.) “All I want to do is go on serving the Soviet Union as I was trained. Please, sir, let my crew and me fly against her enemies.”

Olminsky steepled his fingers. They were long and skinny, too. “If it were up to me, I would do that. For the moment, I can’t. You are not judged reliable enough to be trusted with the country’s ultimate weapons.”

“By whom, sir? Point me at the son of a bitch and I’ll punch him in the snoot!”

He got a small smile from the brigadier, but only a small one. “I’m afraid that isn’t practical for you, considering the arm-of-service color of the men involved.”

Olminsky meant the MGB; he couldn’t very well mean anything else. “What am I supposed to do, then, sir?” Gribkov asked.

“Just wait. You’re in what the Catholics call limbo. It may not be heaven, but it isn’t hell, either.” Yulian Olminsky paused. “Sooner or later, one door or the other will open. Believe me, if it’s hell, you’ll wish you were back in limbo. Now go away.” Not even bothering to salute, Boris went away.

–

Ihor Shevchenko had his Kalashnikov. He had as many banana-shaped magazines full of the special cartridges it fired as he could carry. All things considered, he wished he were still toting his old PPD.

He’d picked up another wound. He was getting a collection of them from the wars he’d been through. This one was of the extraordinarily stupid kind. He’d sat down on a pile of freshly dug dirt that had come out of the side of a trench when Red Army men widened it. Unbeknownst to all of them-and especially to Ihor-a broken bottle lurked in that dirt, business end up.

When he sat down, it bit him right in the ass. Naturally, he sprang up swearing and clapping his hands to the wounded part. Just as naturally, the rest of the soldiers in the squad laughed themselves silly. That was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

Even Ihor thought it was funny-till he saw that his left hand wasn’t just red but dripping with blood. “Fuck me!” he said. “That got me bad!” He showed off the gory evidence.

Some of his mates turned sympathetic. Others kept giggling. “I bet it gave you a brain concussion,” one would-be wit said.

Lieutenant Smushkevich came around a kink in the trench. “What’s going on, guys?” he asked.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but I got hurt.” Ihor showed off his red hand and his bloody trousers while explaining how he’d got them.

“That’s dumb, all right, but you’re sure as hell bleeding there,” the company commander said. “Drop your pants so I can see what you did to yourself.” Feeling more foolish than ever, Ihor obeyed. Smushkevich whistled softly. “Bozhemoi! You did tear yourself up.” He turned to a nearby soldier. “Karsavin!”

“Sir!” Dmitri Karsavin said.

“Slap your wound bandage on his butt and take him back to an aid station,” the lieutenant said. “He’ll need stitches for sure, and probably a tetanus shot and whatever pills they give you to keep a wound from going bad.”

“I’ll do it, Comrade Lieutenant,” Karsavin said. After he put on the bandage, Ihor pulled up his pants again. He was glad to have someone help him back behind the line. Moving started to hurt like a bastard.

The aid station had that butcher-shop smell that made your stomach want to turn over. A harried-looking doctor gave Karsavin a receipt for Ihor. Then he took a look at the wound. “What happened? Shell fragment?”

“Glass fragment. I parked my ass on a busted bottle.”

“Well, you fucked yourself up pretty good. Let’s get the stitches into you first off.” He had some novocaine, so that wasn’t too bad. Then he went off to get the tetanus antitoxin. When he came back, he was fuming. “We’re out, dammit. You’ve got to have a dose. Sit on something filthy like that and you’re lockjaw waiting to happen. That’s a filthy way to go.”

“What will you do with me, Comrade Physician?”

“Send you back to the second-level aid station. They’ll have it, and with luck some sulfa or penicillin so you don’t fester.” He yelled for an orderly: “Hey, Borya!” When the man appeared, the doctor went on, “Stick this clown in the jeep and take him to the field hospital in Horstel. Here, give them this so they know what to do with him.”

“I’ll take care of it, sir.” The orderly stuck the note in his pocket. He eyed Ihor. “Can you walk?”

“As far as the jeep, yeah.” Ihor did. It was a captured American one, with a red star painted over what had been a white one on the hood. He sat with a right-hand list. Horstel was another town that had seen hard fighting. Red Cross flags were draped on the roof of the building that did hospital duty. Maybe they’d keep fighter-bombers away, maybe not. It was worth a try.

The people there took charge of Ihor as if he were a truck with a blown head gasket. He got the tetanus shot and a handful of pills that would have choked a mule. Under a doctor’s stern and watchful gaze, he swallowed them.

When they put him in a cot, he lay on his stomach. He figured his right side might also work; his back and left side wouldn’t. As the novocaine wore off, the wound and the stitches hurt more and more. They gave him aspirin, which did nothing much. He didn’t have the gall to ask for morphine, though. Some of the men in there with him had their bellies torn open. Others were missing arms or legs. They needed the strong drug worse than he did.

He got better food, and more food, in the ward than he had at the front. They wanted wounded men to recover as fast as they could, and fed them so they would. He hadn’t eaten so well back on the collective farm, either. No wonder he fell asleep right after supper.

Some time after midnight, the building shook as if in an earthquake. Horrid white light speared the wounded men’s eyes. They were well behind the line. All the same, Ihor feared the building would fall down on him. “God, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” he yipped. No one told him praying was antisocialist. Almost everyone in there who could talk at all prayed like a dying man-which most of them, like Ihor, had to think they were. The ward orderly called on the Trinity and the saints as readily as any of the injured men.

“Those atom things’ll cook us even back here!” cried a man who had a bloody bandage over the stump of his right arm. Ihor wanted to call him a stupid fool. He couldn’t very well, though, not when he was afraid the mutilated man might be right.

Only a moment later did he stop to think about the unit he’d left behind at the front. How many of them were still alive? Any at all?

In the last war, he would have been devastated, ravaged, had he been the sole survivor of his company. He supposed he still should be. And he still was, but only in an attenuated way. He hadn’t wanted to go back to war to begin with. The whole regiment was hastily thrown together. None of the other guys wanted to fight, either. It was only that all their other choices looked worse.

Two doctors came into the ward as soon as morning twilight gave them enough light to see by. They divided the patients in half. The more badly wounded ones, they loaded into ambulances and jeeps and sent east.

“What about the rest of us?” Ihor asked an orderly.

“You guys’ll be back on your pins in a few days,” the man answered. “Either you’ll be fighting again or the Americans’ll roll forward and take you prisoner and get you off our hands. And we’ll have Lord only knows how many more wounded coming in from the west.”

He was right, of course. The atom bomb killed whatever lay directly under it. If you were a little farther away, it melted you or burned you or blinded you or simply knocked heavy things or sharp things down onto you without immediately doing you in. Or the radiation made your hair fall out and left you bleeding from every orifice you had, and from your eyeballs and the beds of your nails. Or…

Ihor saw more in the way of horror till they turned him loose three days later than he had in all his service before that time. When they told him to get out of there so they could deal with more of the desperately wounded, he said, “I haven’t got a weapon.”

“Well, pick one up off the ground,” a doctor answered impatiently. “It’s not like there won’t be plenty to go around.”

Yes, they’d told raw troops almost the same thing in the early days of the Great Patriotic War. Ihor couldn’t very well doubt that the sawbones here was right. And, sure enough, that was how he got his AK-47 and plenty of ammo to fire from it. Whoever had owned the assault rifle didn’t need it any more.

The way he got it was why he wished he still carried the PPD instead. He joined what was more a band than a section. No American infantry pushed forward right where they were. They’d stayed alive. For the moment, that was plenty.

–

Near the barbed wire that separated the men’s and women’s sides of the camp stood a wooden arrangement something like a small gallows. From the gibbet hung not a man but a 105mm shell casing with a hole drilled in the side so a rope could go through. When a guard whacked it with a hammer, the horrible clatter did duty for a wakeup call.

It was 0530. Since summer still ruled, the sun had been up for a while, and Luisa Hozzel’s barracks had got light. That didn’t matter; she would have slept till noon had she got the chance. But a slap in the face and a boot in the backside had quickly taught her she had to pay attention to those crow’s-caw clanks. No matter how exhausted she was, they meant get moving.

She slid out of her bunk and put on her boots. She used them for a pillow and slept in the rest of her clothes. Then she staggered out onto the dirt courtyard in front of the barracks and took her place in one of the rows of ten. Guards-men with machine pistols-screamed curses at any female zek who didn’t move fast enough to suit them.

Luisa was picking up Russian faster than she’d dreamt she could. She had to. Nobody with any authority would condescend to speak German while giving orders, not after that dreadful first day. You’re here, was the guards’ attitude. You’ve got to figure out what we want. She’d learned zeks were prisoners-like her.

Some of the Russian women seemed as dejected and stunned as the newly arrived Germans. They were the politicals. Falling foul of Stalin’s henchmen here was as dangerous as irking the Nazis had been in Hitler’s time. The rest of the women prisoners were what the guards called “socially friendly elements.” They were ordinary criminals, in other words. They called themselves blatnye, which meant something like thieves or bitches.

They bossed the politicals around. They were used to this kind of life, where the women who’d thought of themselves as good Communists till the MGB grabbed them kept trying to believe it was all a ghastly mistake. The bitches bossed the foreigners around, too. Some of them were bull dykes, and as predatory as any man. Luisa didn’t mind being bossed-they knew the ropes and she didn’t. The other…She counted herself lucky no one had put a serious move on her yet.

When all the zeks were in place, the guards went up and down, making sure each row held ten women and counting the rows. That kind of arithmetic, even a camp guard could do. The Reds might not believe in God, but the count was sacred. Till the morning count came out right, nobody got breakfast. Till the evening count was right, no one ate supper or went into the barracks. At this season, that wasn’t too bad. In winter, standing there in, say, half a meter of snow…

At last, after literally counting on their fingers to make sure they had everything straight, the guards decided no one had somehow escaped the camp for the dubious shelter of the pine forest that ran on for untold hundreds or thousands of kilometers in every direction. The top sergeant pointed toward the dining hall and yelled something that meant either Go! or Eat!-Luisa hadn’t worked out which yet.

She went and she ate. Rations had been small and rotten-often literally-at the end of the war. They hadn’t got better for a long time afterwards. Then, when they did, the Russians overran Fulda, and times turned tough all over again. Nothing, though, nothing had prepared her for what she got in the gulag.

She hadn’t been to Dachau or Buchenwald, let alone Treblinka or Auschwitz. Maybe people there had got this kind of horrible slop. If they had, all the atrocity stories the Allies told were true. She didn’t know how you were supposed to live. All she could do was try.

The stew the cook ladled into her bowl was so watery, it barely deserved the name. Bits of chopped cabbage and turnip or potato or parsnip or some other root gave most of what bulk it had. It was also vaguely briny; at some point or another, a salted herring or sardine must have swum past the cauldron it came out of.

Her parents, who’d lived through the Turnip Winter and the sawdust-stretched war bread of the Kaiser’s time, would have turned up their noses at the black, badly baked brick she got with her stew. It was full of husks, and what grain there was was rye and oats.

In Fulda, she’d drunk coffee white with milk at breakfast. The wartime ersatz had been bad, but it beat the devil out of the weak tea the Russians grudgingly gave the zeks. They didn’t even waste sugar on prisoners. The stuff’s sole virtue was, it was hot.

No matter how bad the food was, she wolfed it. Partly, that was because she was hungry all the time. And they gave you only fifteen minutes to eat. Whatever you couldn’t down in that time, you lost.

After breakfast…latrine call. Luisa had used some odorous outhouses in Germany, but nothing like these slit trenches. Everyone took care of her business-piss, shit, period, whatever-in front of everyone else. The setup was designed to humiliate. You tried not to breathe. You tried not to look. But Hercules, even if he’d cleaned out the Augean Stables, would have thrown up his hands and run away if he saw-and got a whiff of-this.

Then the women separated into work gangs and went out into those endless woods to fell trees. The Soviet Union proudly proclaimed equality between the sexes. It lived up to its claims by making the work norm for a gang of women the same as that for a gang of men. Guards cursed at zeks to keep them working. If that didn’t work, they clouted them with the butts of their machine pistols.

Luisa and Trudl Bachman inexpertly used a two-person saw almost as tall as they were. This was what you got for having husbands who’d gone off to fight the Russians. Neither of them had any idea whether their man was alive or dead. They were both paying the price either way.

Back and forth, back and forth. Beavers as inept as they were would never have toppled enough trees to build a dam. Luisa’s shoulders had the toothache. Sharper pain came from her hands. The blisters on her palms popped and bled, over and over. Some of the women who’d been here for years had calluses that let them stub out smokes without feeling a thing. Those were ugly, but Luisa craved them just the same.

Up in a pine tree no one was attacking, a jay called. Luisa could see it if she looked up. But it didn’t sound like the jays back in Germany. It spoke a different dialect, the way a woman from Munich and one from up near the Dutch border would have.

When she looked up once too often, a guard yelled, “Bistro!” He wasn’t looking for a French restaurant with a zinc bar. That was how you said Hurry up! in Russian.

After a while-it only seemed forever-the pine crashed to the ground. The jay flew off, screeching in fear. Luisa and Trudl traded the saw for two hatchets. They used them to trim the branches from the trunk. Bending to do that made Luisa ache in different ways in different places.

They put in twelve hours like that before the guards paraded them back to the camp. Luisa shambled along like a dead thing. They lined up for the evening count. As usual, the screws needed to try more than once before they were happy. Supper was breakfast over again.

Tomorrow would be the same as today. She had no idea how long they meant to keep her here. Till she was dead? Till Stalin was dead? Till the A-bombs made sure everybody was dead?

For now, she was too weary to care. After evening latrine call, she clambered into her bunk, took off her boots, and laid them under her head. When you got tired enough, any pillow felt great. She was tired enough and then some. She closed her eyes. She vanished.

–

Cade Curtis wore a clean uniform. His cheeks were freshly shaved. His hair was GI short, and smelled pleasantly of Vitalis. Except for the PPSh he carried, he might have been ready to appear in a Stateside review. It was nighttime, and blacked-out nighttime at that, so no one could get a good look at him, but he knew.

He clucked sadly as he slid into the jeep. “After you’ve spent a while in Pusan, you don’t want to go back to the front,” he said.

The corporal behind the wheel chuckled. “Sir, if I had a buck for every guy who told me that, I’d be rich like Rockefeller. A quarter, even.”

“I believe you,” Cade said. Pusan was almost as American as apple pie. When you got leave, you could go there to clean up. Cade had. You could eat American food that didn’t come out of ration cans. Cade had. You could get crocked out of your skull. Cade had. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but nobody’d asked him about that, so he hadn’t had to tell any lies.

And you could indulge in other pleasures. Korean women had quickly discovered that American men had more money than they knew what to do with. You didn’t have to look very hard or very far to find joyhouses. Cade had. Buying his fun faintly embarrassed him. Buying it was better than going without, though. He’d been careful to use his pro kit right away every time.

The corporal started the jeep and put it in gear. Away it rolled, reliable as jeeps always were. It didn’t roll very fast, though. Driving through darkness without headlights was suicidal if you hurried.

Driving through darkness in Korea with headlights was also suicidal. “Here’s hoping Bedcheck Charlie takes the night off,” Cade said.

“Amen to that!” the driver agreed. The Red Chinese and North Koreans flew night-harassment missions in ancient Russian wood-and-cloth-and-wire biplane trainers. They were slow and underpowered even by World War I standards. But they carried a machine gun and little bombs a pilot could lob from the cockpit as if all the years after 1915 had been canceled. They were damn nuisances, and they could kill you just as dead as more modern toys.

White-painted posts by the side of the road gave faint clues about where you were about to go off it. Nearer the front, North Korean infiltrators knocked them down or lied with them to lead traffic off the road and sometimes into an ambush. This close to the big American base on the southern coast, though, they were probably reliable.

Of course, the highway itself was in bad shape. The flimsy paving hadn’t been made to support all the tanks and trucks and halftracks that used it. It also hadn’t been made to get shelled. The potholes were of the tooth-rattling, kidney-crunching variety.

“Boy, this is a fun ride,” Cade said after a jounce made him bite his tongue. “How much do I have to pay to get off?”

“Sir, you got to take that up with Uncle Sam, not with me,” the corporal said. They both laughed, for all the world as if it were funny.

They’d come ten or fifteen miles northwest when the formidable antiaircraft batteries around Pusan all started banging away at once. Cade peered back over his shoulder at the red and orange and yellow tracers scribing lines across the southern sky and the shells bursting in air.

“Looks like the Fourth of July there,” he said.

“It does, yeah.” The driver nodded. “I can see a skosh in my rear-view mirror. You don’t mind, I ain’t gonna turn around like you done.” Like a lot of men in the Far East, the corporal used the Japanese for a little bit without even noticing it wasn’t English.

And then Cade stopped caring about Japanese slang or any other kind, for a new sun blazed in the sky above Pusan. He crossed himself and whispered a Hail Mary before he even thought about it. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, the corporal moved his lips in prayer, too.

Then the two-striper asked, “Sir, are we too far away for that fucker to, like, fry us?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Cade answered slowly. “I think we are, but I sure wouldn’t swear to it or anything.”

“Okay. Good.” The corporal nodded. Behind them, the glow of riven atoms slowly faded. Cade stared, transfixed at the hellish beauty of the rising, swelling mushroom cloud. The corporal went on, “What do you want me to do now, sir? Go on taking you north or turn around so we can lend a hand to them poor sorry bastards back there?”

No one could possibly fault Cade for telling the driver to go on toward the front. That was what he was supposed to be doing. But his orders didn’t take the A-bomb into account, and it struck him as more urgent than one more first lieutenant in the trenches. “I won’t command you to turn around,” he said after the briefest of pauses. “But if you’re willing to do that, I’ll thank you for it.”

“Gotcha, sir. That’s jake by me.” The corporal made a neat Y-turn on the narrow road. They’d just started heading south again when wind from the atomic blast briefly buffeted the jeep. The driver let out a harsh chuckle. “We’re a coupla goddamn fools, is what we are, y’know?”

“Now that you mention it, that did cross my mind, yes,” Cade said, which made the corporal laugh again.

They hadn’t gone very far south before there was another flash in the sky behind them, which meant that A-bomb blew to the northwest. It was much farther away than the one that had just incinerated Pusan. Somberly, the driver said, “The guys you was goin’ back to, Lieutenant, they’re liable not to be there no more.”

“I know.” Those were Cade’s men, up there in the trenches near Chongju. Or they had been. Now they were part of a new mushroom cloud. If I hadn’t got leave and gone drinking and making a pig of myself and getting my ashes hauled, I’d be dead with them, Cade thought. Guilt pierced him for no better reason than that he was still breathing and they weren’t. The top part of his mind understood how ridiculous the feeling was, which didn’t make it go away.

The other thing was, the Americans had just had a big hole bitten out of their line. Would the Red Chinese and the North Koreans swarm through it? He was all too sure they would. How much would they care if their soldiers got a little radioactive, or more than a little? That question answered itself as soon as it occurred to him.

There was light ahead, not just from the dissipating mushroom cloud above Pusan but also from the countless ordinary fires the bomb had set. “Fuck it,” the driver said. “I’m gonna turn on my headlights. We got bigger things to worry about than Bedcheck Charlie an’ gooks with Tommy guns.”

“Fine by me.” Cade wanted to see what he could, too. How often did you find yourself on the edge of an atomic explosion?

Once, he soon decided, was at least three times too often. The farther in they got, the worse things looked. Tents burned. Prefab buildings went over as if they’d been assembled from playing cards. They caught fire, too. Fighter planes that hadn’t got off the ground blazed. So did the trucks that had fueled them.

Next to one of those trucks writhed a burning man. If you splashed kerosene on a cockroach and tossed in a match, the effect would have been similar but smaller. “Christ!” the corporal said. “Is he too far away for you to shoot him with that thing?”

Cade glanced down at the PPSh in his lap. “Afraid so. I sure would if I could, though.”

“Oh, hell, yes. But Jesus God, sir, what are we gonna do? What can we do? What can anybody do? This goddamn thing is too big for people to do any good with.”

Although Cade thought he was right, they did get stopped and put to work before they’d gone much farther. They made up two links in the human chain of a bucket brigade that was trying without much luck to keep a barracks from going up in flames. Cade wondered how radioactive he was getting. Then another bucket came by. Passing it along was easier than thinking.