Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

Ruth’s family sprang from a village right on the border between Byelorussia and the Ukraine. No one on this side of the Atlantic had heard a word from the ones who didn’t emigrate, not after Hitler invaded the USSR. Those people had to be dead now.

He didn’t want to think about things like that, especially not when he was holding a letter from Harry Truman. Evidently, Ruth didn’t want to think about things like that, either, because she pointed at the letter and said, “You ought to frame it and hang it in the living room. The envelope, too.”

“Maybe I will,” he answered. He was handy with tools; he could make the frame and cut the glass himself. It would be cheap. That notion led to another, one which made him chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” his wife asked.

“I was just thinking about Roxane and Howard again. They’ll be thrilled when they come over and see it, won’t they?”

“They probably will. They aren’t that bad, Aaron. They want America to be better, that’s all.”

“Huh.” Aaron had heard Marvin say the same thing. Saying it, though, didn’t necessarily make it so. But Aaron didn’t push it to a quarrel. Fighting with your wife struck him as a losing proposition. To Marvin, it was something more like sport, though Aaron didn’t believe for a minute that poor Sarah felt the same way. Instead of going on about Roxane and Howard Bauman, Aaron asked, “What smells good?”

“Short ribs,” Ruth answered. “They should be ready any minute. I’ve got ’em stewing with potatoes and carrots and onions and mushrooms.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Aaron said. One of the reasons it sounded wonderful was that it meant some short ribs had made it to the store. They’d eaten a lot of spaghetti with tomato sauce and macaroni and cheese lately. You didn’t need refrigerated railroad cars to ship that kind of stuff into town. For meat, you did.

He splashed Tabasco sauce on his short ribs. Ruth eyed him, but didn’t say anything about it. He splashed Tabasco or horseradish on everything this side of oranges and lemon-meringue pie. He poured hot sauce onto eggs. When he drank beer from a glass and not from the bottle or can, he sprinkled salt into it. Leon loved that because of the way it made the bubbles rise so spectacularly. Like Tabasco, the salt added flavor. He hadn’t had his taste buds shot off in the war, but all those packs of cigarettes had scorched them into submission.

After supper, Ruth washed and he dried. As she used steel wool on the aluminum pot the ribs had stewed in, she remarked, “I wonder how you got that letter.”

“Beats me,” Aaron said. “It’s pretty nice, though, isn’t it?”

“I mean,” Ruth went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “it was in the local news and everything, but how did it get all the way back to Washington?”

“Well, Truman did come out here to inspect the damage, and-” Aaron broke off. He snapped his fingers as an answer glowed like a shooting star inside his head.

“What?” his wife asked.

“I bet Herschel fixed it,” Aaron said. “He gives the Democrats money all the time. I know he’s met Truman. And his business has been rotten since the bombs fell. So maybe he thought this would make me feel good even if it didn’t put any money in my pocket.”

“If he did, he was right,” Ruth said.

“Yeah. I know.” Aaron smiled cynically. “Roxane would say he was just tricking me so I’d go on working for Blue Front without that extra money. She’d be right, too, I guess. But whether she is or whether she ain’t, I’m still gonna frame that letter!”

“Down below five hundred meters, Comrade Pilot,” Vladimir Zorin said from the Tu-4’s right-hand seat.

“Thanks. I know. Bozhemoi, but I hate night landings!” Boris Gribkov was keeping an eye on the altimeter, too. At the same time, he was peering out through the bomber’s crappy Plexiglas windshield, looking for the landing lights that would let him put the big plane down.

They wouldn’t be much-he knew that. He’d be landing on a stretch of Autobahn northeast of Munich. The Bavarian city lay in Red Army hands. He was still nervous, not only about the makeshift runway but also about the chance of American marauders. Deliberately, he made himself forget about those. If they jumped him now, he was dead. It was that simple. So he didn’t need to worry about them.

From the bombardier’s position, which had the best view in the plane, Alexander Lavrov called, “I see them, Comrade Pilot! Almost dead ahead-a cunt-hair’s worth to starboard.”

“Good job, Sasha! I see ’em, too-now.” The lights were provided by a bunch of soldiers shining flashlights up into the air. It wouldn’t have worked on a cloudy night, but it did here. Even as things were, the lights seemed mighty faint to Boris. Well, it wasn’t as if they wanted their presence so far forward advertised-just the opposite, in fact.

“I’m going to land it,” he told Zorin, and then turned the intercom to the all-hands setting. “Crew, strap in and prepare for landing!”

He’d already lowered the flaps to slow the hulking airplane. While he changed course ever so slightly, he watched the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and-as always-the engine temperatures. As he did on takeoffs, he opened the engine cowlings that let heat escape but spoiled the bomber’s aerodynamics.

Bump! He was down, more smoothly than he’d expected. He hit the brakes hard, steering as straight as he could. The Tu-4 needed more than two and a half kilometers of runway to take off fully laden, but a good bit less than that to land with tanks close to dry.

When he came to a stop, a man with a flashlight guided him forward and then off the edge of the paved highway to a waiting revetment with steel mesh on the ground to keep the plane from sinking in. “You did that just right,” Zorin said admiringly.

“ Spasibo, Volodya,” Boris answered. “If they’re smart, they’ll have fixed several, depending on where we landed and how far we had to taxi.” He chuckled dryly. “I wouldn’t want to have to back her up.”

“Well,” the copilot said, “no.”

They got out as soon as the props stopped spinning. Groundcrew men were already draping the Tu-4 with camouflage netting. They’d be here only a day or two. No one wanted to give the Americans any excuse to visit.

“Welcome! Welcome!” That well-educated, self-satisfied voice had to belong to a senior officer. Sure enough, the man who owned it went on, “I’m Colonel Madinov. I run this madhouse. We’re going to give the decadent imperialists a kick in the balls they’ll never forget.”

“We serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Colonel,” Gribkov said. He couldn’t see Leonid Tsederbaum’s eyes on him; the navigator stood several meters to the rear. He felt them all the same.

“Well, come on. We’ll get you fed and we’ll get you settled for now,” Madinov said. “When the sun comes up, we’ll review what you’re going to do to Paris.”

Tsederbaum coughed softly, as if one of the little bushes growing by the side of the Autobahn bothered him. Gribkov wasn’t happy, either. He didn’t want to tear the heart out of a world-famous city. But that hadn’t stopped the Americans who hit Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev. It also wouldn’t stop him. And he didn’t believe it would stop his navigator.

After shchi and sausages, the Tu-4 crew met Colonel Madinov in what had been a Catholic church. Blackout curtains shielded windows and doorway. Kerosene lamps gave enough light to use. With Madinov was a very pink young man in Soviet flying togs. “This is Klement Gottwald,” Madinov said. “He speaks Russian with an accent and English almost without one. He’s trained up on the B-29’s radio. He’ll take your man’s seat there on the attack run.”