Harry Turtledove - Fallout

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.

Sometimes Harry Truman could sleep on the Independence despite noise and turbulence. When you were flying nonstop from one coast to the other or crossing the Atlantic, you had to be able to do that. For a trip from Buffalo home to Washington, the President didn’t feel like making the effort. He’d sleep after he got to the White House.

Or so he thought. The Presidential airliner was about fifteen minutes-say, fifty miles-from landing when an aide came back from the direction of the cockpit. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Major Pesky says there’s some kind of flap about the airspace over Washington,” the man said. “We’ve been asked to divert to Richmond.”

“I don’t think Richmond is even slightly diverting,” Harry Truman said. The aide winced, which was what puns were for. Truman continued, “Some kind of flap, you say? Does the pilot know what’s going on?”

“Sir, I told you as much as he told me,” the man said.

“Well, go back up and find out why they’ve got their knickers in a twist,” Truman said. “I don’t want to head for Richmond unless we’ve got to.”

The aide had just started up the aisle again when sudden harsh glare burned away the night and blazed in through every window on the DC-6, swamping the airliner’s lighting system. Truman sat frozen in his seat. He knew-knew too well-what that flash had to mean. Somehow or other, the Russians had got through.

That was his first thought. His second one made him bury his face in his hands. Bess and Margaret hadn’t come to Buffalo with him. His wife and daughter were waiting back at the White House.

Or they had been. He couldn’t let himself contemplate his own troubles, though. The country had just taken an uppercut to the chin. Truman stood. He pushed past his aide and stuck his head into the cockpit. “Major Pesky, don’t take me to Richmond. If you can’t land in Washington, go to Baltimore. That’s close enough so I can get to Washington in a hurry-by helicopter, if I have to.”