Harry Turtledove - Bombs Away

A middle-aged man came in. He was too heavily decked out in winter gear to let Boris read his rank, but the pilot wasn’t surprised when he said, “Welcome, men. I am Colonel Doyarenko. This is my base.” He had the accent to go with his Ukrainian name.

“Thank you, Comrade Colonel. This is…quite a place, isn’t it?” Gribkov did his best to stay polite.

“It’s the Soviet Union’s asshole, is what it is,” Doyarenko answered, which was only too true. He went on, “But it’s also about as close to the United States as this country comes. I don’t mean Alaska-I mean the real United States. We can strike part of it with some hope of coming back to the rodina again. From most of our air bases, attack missions are strictly one-way.”

Gribkov licked his lips. “I hope it doesn’t come to that, sir.” He wondered how many crews sent on such a one-way mission actually would drop their bomb at the end of it. He didn’t ask the base commandant his opinion. Ask a question like that and the MGB would start asking questions of you. They wouldn’t care whether you felt like answering, either.

Colonel Doyarenko shrugged. “I hope it doesn’t, too. Only somebody who’s never seen a war is stupid enough to want one. But I serve the Soviet Union. If the imperialists strike at our Chinese allies, we have to show them they can’t intimidate us. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Boris said. You might not want a war, but once you were in one you were all in. If Hitler had taught the Russian people anything, he’d taught them that.

–

I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made . Cade Curtis was absolutely, one hundred percent certain A. E. Housman had never been on the run from the Red Chinese in wintertime North Korea. Housman, if he remembered straight, had had a comfortable career teaching classics in English universities and writing poetry on the side. No other eleven words, though, could have better summed up how Cade felt now.

He was filthy. He was scrawny. He’d grown a scraggly, rusty beard. He was cold. He wasn’t so cold as he might have been, though. He wore a Chinese quilted jacket under his GI parka. He had some excellent felt boots that fit over his American winter footgear. He’d tied more quilting around his trousers. The enemy soldiers who’d furnished those supplies would never need them again.

He’d taken all the food they had, too. He only wished they’d had more. He’d stolen whatever he could find in wrecked villages. But he wasn’t the first scavenger who’d gone through them. No place in North Korea had much worth stealing left in it.

He kept working his way south as best he could, moving by night and hiding during the day. For all he could prove, he was the only American left alive and free north of the thirty-eighth parallel. He probably wasn’t. Other stubborn, resourceful souls had to be doing the same thing he was, singly and in small groups. But he hadn’t seen another white man since the Chinese overran his platoon as they were overrunning the whole overconfident American force up by the Yalu.

He chuckled harshly as he waited in a hillside cave for darkness to fall. No matter how bad things were, you could always imagine them worse. The next white man he saw might speak Russian, not English.

A squad of Chinese soldiers with Soviet submachine guns tramped through the valley below. They weren’t hunting him, not in particular. They were just patrolling. With so much snow on the ground, he couldn’t help leaving tracks. But those felt boots did more than keep his tootsies from freezing. They made his footprints look the same as the Chinks’. The waffle-sole pattern on his American shoes would have betrayed him in nothing flat.

He had a Soviet submachine gun himself. It was as least as good a weapon as his M-1 carbine, no matter how much uglier it might be. Again, the Chinese who’d lost it wasn’t worrying about it any more. Cade could use it without worrying that the unfamiliar report would give him away.

But the submachine gun was for emergencies only. He also had a long bayonet he’d taken from a dead Tommy’s Lee-Enfield. It had had blood on it then. He’d blooded it several times since he got it. It made no noise at all. If you were careful, neither did the people you stuck with it.

Cade yawned. He wondered how far south he’d have to get before he found UN troops. If the Chinese and North Koreans had driven their foes back to the Pusan perimeter again and collapsed it this time…Well, in that case he was completely screwed, so he saw no point in worrying about it. Instead, he rolled over and fell asleep.

He remembered what a tough time he’d had on maneuvers in basic when he had to curl up on the ground in a sleeping bag. He didn’t have that kind of trouble now. He didn’t have a sleeping bag, either. Just him and the ground, as if he were a stray dog. He was stray, all right, strayer than dogs ever got. And he fell asleep instantly. He didn’t bother turning around three times first.

When he woke, it was so dark he had to look hard to find the mouth of the cave. Stars blazed down from a black, black sky. Something way off to the east was blazing, too. A house? A barn? A tank? He had no way of knowing. He hoped an American air raid had blown a bunch of Red Chinese to hell, but hope was all he could do. The fire didn’t matter enough to make him go find what it was about.

His watch’s luminous dial told him it was half past ten. The Army timepiece was Zippo-tough. He’d banged it around like nobody’s business, but it kept ticking. The moon was getting close to last quarter. It would rise soon. When it did, he’d start moving.

Not many people would be out and about in the dead of night. You had to be crazy to travel then, crazy or desperate. He figured he qualified on both counts.

He scooped up snow and ate a few mouthfuls. Each one turned to a small swallow of cold water. He would have killed for coffee, or even the tea he was more likely to find here.

Maybe he wouldn’t have to. If he was where he thought he was, and if he remembered his maps right-two good-sized ifs-there ought to be a village not too far south of here. If it hadn’t been too badly picked over, he might find some tea.

He moved slowly, warily, sliding from one moonshadow to the next. Anyone who glimpsed him might have imagined he was an owl gliding from perch to perch. A low rumble made him dive for cover. As it got louder, he realized it had nothing to do with him. It came from the air, not the ground. It was a formation of B-29s, flying north by night to drop some hell on the enemy’s heads.

“Luck, guys,” he whispered. The sounds of English startled him. He hadn’t said anything at all for a few days. Making noise, especially a kind of noise the locals didn’t make, had to be the quickest way to get yourself killed.

He found the village about three in the morning. He really was where he thought he was-or this was a different village. Different or not, it was good-sized: on the way to being a town. It wouldn’t make townhood now. It must have changed hands three or four times. The buildings were chewed-up ruins. The carcass of a Pershing tank sat in the village square. Open hatches were more likely to mean the Koreans or Chinese had cleaned out the tank than that the crew had pulled off a getaway.

Guessing the houses near the square would have been looted first and hardest, Cade went to the ones on the southern outskirts. Damned if he didn’t find some tea. He’d chew it if he couldn’t brew it the ordinary way. Hidden under the floor of the house next to the one with the tea in it, he also found a sack of rice cakes, a sack of sun-dried plums, and a jug of kimchi.

He started to leave that behind. The fiery pickled cabbage had such a stink, the enemy wouldn’t need a bloodhound to track him if he ate it. But, he decided, so what? What would he smell like? A Korean. They gobbled the shit every chance they got. Most Americans turned up their noses at it. Cade didn’t turn up his nose at anything even vaguely foodlike, not any more. He’d eaten slugs and snails. He might have let a cockroach go, but he also might not.