Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away

“The Chinese and Russians may think they’re safe on the other side of the Yalu,” Harrison went on. “They have been, but they aren’t any more. Or they won’t be after the President gives the word. They think they can get away with slaughtering our troops and shooting down our planes and hiding where we won’t go after them. We haven’t yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t or we can’t. When the order comes, we’ll show them as much.” He looked out at the bomber crews. “If anyone has qualms of conscience, he may withdraw now. No black marks will go into his service record if he does, I promise.”

That was bullshit. Everyone knew it, promise or no. The Air Force would neither forgive nor forget a withdrawal now. Several flyers left anyhow, including a pilot and a copilot. Bill Staley sat where he was. The Red Chinese were killing too many of his countrymen. Whatever he could do to stop them, he would. He didn’t care what kind of weapon he used. It wasn’t as if they were fussy about such things.

By Harrison’s scowl, he hadn’t expected anyone to walk out. “All right,” he said. “The rest of us will go on. We are going to interdict the Chinese and the Russians at a much deeper level than they’re looking for. Once that’s done, we’ll finish cleaning up the Korean peninsula.” He looked out at them again. “Any questions, gentlemen?”

“What happens if Stalin starts using atomic bombs, too, sir?” a major asked.

“He’ll be sorry,” Harrison replied. The flyers bayed laughter. He went on, “Anything else?” No one spoke. He nodded. “We’ll get ready, then.”

–

Boris Gribkov eased the Tu-4’s yoke forward. The heavy bomber’s nose came down, just a little. Easy does it, the pilot thought as he gave the plane a hair less throttle. You couldn’t fly this thing with your dick, the way you could-the way you were supposed to-in a fighter. Well, you could do that, but you’d splatter the plane, and yourself, all over the countryside if you tried.

The Americans said there were bold pilots and old pilots, but no old bold pilots. Gribkov had no use for the Americans. He wouldn’t have been landing his Tu-4 here at Provideniya if he’d liked them. Like them or not, what they said there was true.

And, like them or not, they built some goddamn impressive airplanes. Behind his oxygen mask, Boris’ lips skinned back from his teeth in a mirthless grin. He knew exactly how impressive some American planes were. For all practical purposes, he was flying one.

During the USA’s war against Japan, several damaged B-29s made emergency landings near Vladivostok. Till the very end, the USSR and Japan stayed neutral; Stalin had plenty on his plate fighting the Nazis. He interned the crews (after a while, he quietly gave them back to the Americans) and kept the bombers.

Russia had nothing like them, which was putting it mildly. Russian World War II heavy bombers were leftovers from the early 1930s, slow and lumbering and useless in modern combat. Stalin ordered exact copies of the B-29. He ordered them and, because his word was law in the Soviet Union, the Tupolev design bureau gave them to him in less than two years.

This machine had Russian engines. It had Russian cannons instead of American heavy machine guns. Everything else came straight from the Superfortress. Gribkov had heard that more than a few Russian engineers, used to the metric system, had driven themselves squirrely learning to work with inches and feet and pounds and ounces.

Lights marked the edge of the snowy runway outside the little town on the edge of the Bering Sea. Gribkov couldn’t see the frozen sea. Provideniya sat less than a hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Winter daylight was brief at best. The sun had set long before, even if it was only late afternoon.

“Cleared to land, Plane Four,” the ground-control chief said.

“Message received. Thank you,” Gribkov answered. No one mentioned what kind of plane he was flying. Alaska lay just over the horizon. You had to figure the Americans were listening to everything they could pick up. The less they knew, the better for the Soviet Union.

He glanced over to his copilot. Vladimir Zorin nodded back. “All fine here, Comrade Captain,” he said, gesturing to his side of the complicated instrument panel.

“Good.” Boris lowered the landing gear. The hydraulics worked smoothly. On most Soviet planes, you had to do the job with a hand crank. More could go wrong with this system, but he took advantage of it just the same.

The Tu-4 was the only Soviet bomber with a nosewheel. A few new jet fighters also had them. If you’d started out keeping your nose up and using your tailwheel, the way Gribkov and every pilot trained during the Great Patriotic War had, doing things this way took some getting used to.

There. They were down-more smoothly than he’d expected. He gently tapped the brakes. The Tu-4 needed a lot of room to stop any which way. He didn’t want to send it skidding by slowing down too quickly on this slick airstrip.

“Nicely done, Comrade Captain,” Zorin said.

“Spasibo,” Boris answered. Zorin had landed the Tu-4 himself. He knew it wasn’t easy. A compliment from him meant more than one from someone with no understanding of how things worked would have.

A groundcrew man bundled up like an Eskimo waved red and green lanterns to guide the bomber off the runway. Not having his nose elevated because of a tailwheel made seeing where he was going easier. The revetment to which the man led him was made from snow rather than dirt. After he killed the engine, he patted the arm of his leather flying jacket and said, “I’m glad we have this stuff. Usually, we start toasting as soon as we’re on the ground, but not today.”

“No, not today,” Zorin agreed. “What do you suppose it is out there? Twenty below?”

“Something like that.” Gribkov tried to turn Celsius to Fahrenheit in his head. With so many funny measurements going into the Tu-4, funny temperatures seemed fitting, too. The only trouble was, he had no idea how to make the conversion.

Alexander Lavrov crawled back from the bombardier’s station in the glassed-in nose of the plane. “Welcome to the end of the world,” he said as he, the pilot, and the copilot climbed down the ladder and their boots crunched on snow.

“This may not quite be the end of the world, Sasha,” Zorin said, “but you can sure see it from here.”

“In more ways than one,” Boris agreed. They were all silent for a moment after that. None of the B-29s that landed in the USSR had been modified to carry an A-bomb. The Americans had figured out how to do that later. Soviet engineers had had to work out the details for themselves. They’d done it, too.

The rest of the crew also left the plane. Counting the radioman, the navigator, the radar operator, and the gunners, the Tu-4 carried eleven. “Come on, folks,” called the groundcrew noncom with the lantern. “Let’s get you somewhere a little warmer.” He led them toward one of the huts near the runway.

Meanwhile, other soldiers spread white cloth over the bomber to make it hard to spot from the air. Russians had always taken maskirovka seriously. What an enemy couldn’t see, he couldn’t wreck.

That hut wasn’t much warmer than the wintry air outside. It was out of the wind, though; that wind seemed to blow, and probably did blow, straight down from the North Pole. A couple of kerosene lamps gave what light there was. Boris wondered whether Provideniya had electricity at all.

But a samovar bubbled in a corner of the room. Once he got outside of some hot sugared tea, the pilot felt better about the world. Some jam-filled blini sat on a table by the samovar. They weren’t terrific blini, but they were better than the iron rations the crew had downed on the way east. Gribkov assumed there had to be vodka somewhere on the base; there was vodka somewhere all over the Soviet Union. There wasn’t any in that hut.