Harry Turtledove - Fallout

Without looking back at him, the pilot answered, “Sir, I’d rather not. They may hit Baltimore, too, while they’re less likely to go after a smaller city like Richmond. Since I don’t know how bad the casualties are in Washington, I’m obliged to keep you as safe as possible. I may do best just to circle as long as I can.”

He made more sense than Truman wished he did. Was Alben Barkley still alive? How much of the Cabinet was left? What about Congress? Only this political junket had kept Truman from being in Washington. He might have lived through the blast. He probably would have, in the bomb shelter in the White House basement, had he got any warning. Had Bess got any? Had Margaret? Had anyone?

“What are you hearing on the radio?” Truman asked.

“They’re scrambling fighters, sir,” answered Captain McMullin, the copilot. “The Pentagon is directing-” He broke off. “Mr. President, I’m getting reports of a blinding flash in New York City. It-” He stopped again, and swore loudly and fluently. “Boston, too, damn them.”

“Christ!” Harry Truman said. Marshall had assured him the Russians couldn’t reach the East Coast. Even the august and brilliant Secretary of Defense didn’t know everything there was to know. Truman hoped Marshall had survived the attack. He’d help pick up the pieces better than anyone else was likely to.

If there are any pieces left to pick up. Truman had had that thought before. What brought it on this time was another flash ahead. They were closer to Washington for this one. It seemed fiercer and brighter than the first. Something buffeted the Independence, as if a big dog were shaking a mouse.

Pesky and McMullin both cursed. They fought the DC-6 back under control. “Pentagon just fell off the air, Mr. President,” McMullin said. “Everything’s going to hell, sounds like.”

The Tempest tolled in Truman’s mind like a funeral bell:

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.

What had Will known? How had he known it? Washington’s proud towers were capped by clouds, all right-mushroom clouds.

Pesky’s thoughts ran on more pragmatic lines: “Sir, I am going to stay airborne as long as I can. I have fuel for another couple of hours. That should give us some kind of chance to sort out what’s going on.”

“Do that, then,” Truman said heavily. “If you get…any word of how things are at the White House, please pass it on to me.”

“Of course, sir,” pilot and copilot said together. McMullin sent a sympathetic glance over his shoulder.

“We’ll make the Russians pay for this,” Pesky said.

“Oh, yes.” Truman nodded. But Stalin had been making America pay for what B-29s did to the Soviet Union. Where did it end? Did it, could it, end anywhere except with both sides too battered and devastated to throw any more haymakers, as if two weary pugs in the ring knocked each other out at the same time?

Slowly, reports filtered in as the DC-6 droned through the sky. A Superfortress that had to be a Bull in a lying paint job was said to have gone down outside of Philadelphia. No one had shot it down. It was flying so low, it clipped something tall and crashed in flames. If it was carrying an A-bomb, which seemed a good bet, the infernal device hadn’t gone off. Philadelphia lived.

Truman stayed by the cockpit, hoping to hear something about his wife and daughter. He didn’t. News came in from the outskirts of both Washington blast areas, stories of fires and burns and wreckage. Plainly, the White House wasn’t on the outskirts of either. Truman ground his teeth. His dentist would have clucked. He cared nothing for what his dentist thought.

“If you land in Richmond when we run low on gas, Major, can I get a helicopter or a light plane to take me over Washington after sunup so I can see what’s happened to it?” he asked the pilot.

“Sir, I don’t think you’d be helping the country right now by going up in anything with only one engine,” Pesky said. “That goes double for those newfangled flying eggbeaters, but it holds for Piper Cubs and the like, too. If you want, though, we can refuel there and I’ll take you over myself.”

“Thank you. That should work,” Truman said. “In the meantime, I’ll get off the plane at the airport and get on the telephone and see what I can do to let the country and the world know I’m still in business.”

Major Pesky nodded. “Sounds like a good idea.”

The President wasn’t so sure. If Washington and New York were down for the count, he wouldn’t have an easy time getting word out. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the hubs of all the radio and television networks…Gone now, probably.

He gulped coffee for an hour and a half. Then Pesky smoothly landed the Independence. Reporters snapped photos of Truman as he got off. A boss’ phone in the terminal did very little for him or the country. He couldn’t make the connections he needed, and the local operators didn’t know enough to be helpful. Frustrated, he retreated to the airliner and drank more coffee.

As soon as the sky grew light, the DC-6 flew north. It wasn’t far from Richmond to Washington. Ninety years before, Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis had both fretted about that. Now…Now Truman watched smoke from fires still not quenched rise high into the air. Was what he breathed getting more and more radioactive as he neared the capital? He could wonder, but he didn’t know-or care.

He’d seen photos of what A-bombs did to cities. He’d visited the West Coast in the wake of the Russian attacks there. Now he saw it again, with that smoke still swirling up and up and making him cough as the Independence ’s ventilators sucked it into the fuselage. The Washington Monument was a melted, toppled stub. Not much was left of the Pentagon-part of one side of the five. The Capitol’s shattered dome lay on the Mall, in front of what remained of the ravaged, burnt-out building. Of the White House he could make out nothing at all.

And he flew three miles above the disaster. Burned and charred and blinded and radiated people in terrible anguish, tens of thousands of them, were too small to make out at such a distance. So were the dead: more tens of thousands. But they were there. Truman knew they were. Some of them were his. All of them were somebody’s.

“Stalin will pay, all right,” he whispered. “Oh, how he’ll pay!”

–

Commander Alexei Vavilov raised a glass in salute. “Congratulations!” he told Boris Gribkov. “To the glory and vengeance you and your crew have given the Soviet Union! To victory over the imperialists!” He tossed back his shot of vodka.

Gribkov’s copilot stood up and hoisted his glass. “To Commander Vavilov and the splendid S-71 !” Anton Presnyakov said.

He drank. So did all the flyers. So did Vavilov and the other officers serving on the Red Fleet submarine. On and under the sea as in the air, the USSR learned from its foes. Just as the Tu-4 was a virtually identical copy of the American B-29, so the submarines that came out of Red Fleet Project 613 borrowed heavily from German Type XXI U-boats.

The Yankees, at least, had also got good use from their heavy bombers. The Hitlerites developed the Type XXI too late for their fancy new subs to take more than one or two combat cruises. But the design made all previous boats obsolete. It had tremendous batteries, a snorkel to power the diesels and charge those batteries while most of the submarine stayed hidden beneath the water, and such perfect streamlining that it was faster submerged than on the surface.