Harry Turtledove - Fallout

As German U-boats had before them, attack submarines like the S-71 harried the lifeline between America and Europe. Unlike the Kriegsmarine, the Red Fleet didn’t delude itself into thinking it could starve England into surrender. But it could sink enemy ships full of food and weapons and men, and it could make life difficult for the ones that did manage to cross.

And its submarines could rescue bomber crews if not bombers, and take them back to the rodina to fly more missions in new planes. That was what the S-71 was doing, along with Gribkov didn’t know how many other boats. Some of them would head back to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk with no airmen aboard. Not all the bombers that struck at America would have reached their oceanic meeting points. Not all of them would have reached their targets, either.

War was like that, however much people wished it weren’t. Things went wrong. The bastards on the other side proved more clever than you thought they would. You lost friends…or they lost you.

Briefly, Boris thought of Leonid Tsederbaum again. Now he had Washington on his conscience along with Paris and the rest of the places he’d smashed. The old navigator hadn’t been able to stand it. The fighting went on without him.

As if to prove as much, Commander Vavilov’s executive officer rose to make another toast. Lieutenant Yuri Krasnov lifted his glass and said, “To Comrade Filevich, whose navigation put you down right where it should have!”

The men gathered under the conning tower-the only place in the boat with room for them all-drank together. Svyatoslav Filevich offered his own toast: “To the brave submariners who take all this crowding not just to save us but to carry the fight to the foe!”

Everyone in the Tu-4’s crew drank. So did the submarine’s officers, but they seemed amused. “If you think this boat is crowded,” Vavilov said, “you should have seen the ones we used during the Great Patriotic War. We were as bad as the Germans. The junior ratings slept on top of the fish in the forward torpedo room till we used a few and gave them more room to swing their hammocks.”

“Maybe it was worse then, Commander,” Gribkov said. “I mean no disrespect when I tell you it’s still pretty bad.”

The boat was divided into three pressure compartments. Going from one to the next meant slithering through a round hatchway not much wider than a man’s torso. That might have been the smallest breach practicable in a bulkhead, but it was far from convenient. Corridors were so narrow, two men going in opposite directions had trouble squeezing past each other. Every so often, metal things with corners and edges stuck out into them. The top of the pressure tube made a low ceiling. The pipes running along it had valves and fittings that could knock an unwary man in a hurry for a loop.

Boris and the rest of the flyers kept quiet about one more aspect of how crowded the S-71 was. The boat stank. It smelled of dirty sailors and dirtier socks, of food going off and of heads that had backed up, all mixed in with the heavy reek of diesel fuel. The men wore shabby clothes and let their beards grow while they were at sea. Shaving soap was a luxury judged needless. By the fug, so was any other kind of soap.

As a man familiar with commanding and maintaining one kind of complicated mechanism, Gribkov used his time as a passenger aboard the S-71 as a chance to watch another skilled professional in charge of a different, perhaps even more complex, piece of machinery.

On the Tu-4, what the pilot and navigator could see was still an important part of completing a mission. Except when making an attack run with periscope raised, Alexei Vavilov depended almost completely on his sensors. Men with earphones constantly monitored the passive sonar, listening for any warning that U.S. Navy or Royal Navy vessels were near enough to be dangerous.

“I don’t expect to surface till we’re up in the Arctic Ocean,” Vavilov told him. “We’d be asking for it if we did. The snorkel will keep the diesels going and the batteries happy. If we show ourselves on the surface, even at night, the enemy’s radar will spot us and he’ll send out planes after us.”

“More and more gadgets,” Gribkov said. “It’s the same in the air. Pretty soon the gadgets will do all the fighting, and the crews will just come along for the ride.”

“Or there won’t be any crews,” Vavilov replied. “Think of a big rocket, one like a V-2’s big brother. It’ll fly thousands of kilometers, not hundreds. It’ll be powerful enough to do that with an A-bomb on the head of its dick. And it’ll land within a hundred meters of where somebody aims it. As soon as they build it, you’ll be out of work.”

Boris hadn’t thought of the future of war in those terms till now. As soon as he did, he realized the submarine skipper was bound to be right. “Your job won’t last much longer than mine,” he said.

“You never can tell,” Vavilov said. “Mount those rockets on a submarine, and it’d pop up and launch them before the enemy realized it was in the neighborhood.”

“You could do that, couldn’t you?” Now the bomber pilot saw what might be the future of war spread out for him, almost as if in a religious vision. He shuddered. That future held even more deaths than he’d already dealt out.

The current state of the art faced them the next day. Alexei Vavilov had explained that the S-71, like its Type XXI ancestors, ran much quieter than earlier models. Enemy ships detected the boat anyhow, and attacked. Vavilov dove deep and sneaked away. Depth charges burst in the sea above the boat, close enough to be alarming but not to put it in serious peril.

“How’s this stack up against antiaircraft guns?” the skipper asked Boris in a low voice-silence was literally a matter of life and death.

“As far as I’m concerned, you can keep them both,” he whispered back.

Vavilov nodded. “About what I figured. This, this isn’t too bad. They don’t really know where we are, and the charges foul up their sonar something fierce. Slow and steady, and we’ll get away. Once we slide through the gap between Britain and Iceland, we’re just about home free.”

“I used that gap flying south to strike Washington,” Boris said.

“I’m not surprised. It’s there to be used,” Vavilov said. “We’ll get you back, and they can pin some more medals on you.”

“Who cares about medals? I just want to live through the war.”

“Well, so do I. Who doesn’t?” Vavilov said. “But when you serve the Soviet Union, you get what the rodina needs, not what you want.” It was Boris Gribkov’s turn to nod. He’d already worked that out for himself.

–

Whenever Aaron Finch wasn’t at work or asleep-and he slept as little as he could get away with, or rather less than that-he sat staring at the television set in his living room. TV in and around Los Angeles had gone cattywumpus when the A-bomb leveled downtown: it took out most of the local studios.

TV here was back in business now, and relayed from the East Coast to the West more horrific images of what atomic war did to great cities. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building both wrecked and toppled, Old Ironsides burnt to the waterline in Boston harbor, the glassy wasteland that had been the White House…

Seeing the damage to what had been national monuments was bad. Seeing and hearing about the damage to what had been people was worse. It had a horrid fascination to it, though. Aaron found he couldn’t look away.

The television reporters understood that only too well. A man with a jacket and tie would go up to a scorched or bandaged woman who’d somehow been pulled alive from a ravaged Manhattan apartment house and stick a microphone in her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Torres,” he’d go, or it might be Mrs. Lombardi or Mrs. Callahan or Mrs. Rabinowicz, “but could you tell me what happened to you and what you’re feeling now?”