“I’m going to land it,” he told Zorin, and then turned the intercom to the all-hands setting. “Crew, strap in and prepare for landing!”
He’d already lowered the flaps to slow the hulking airplane. While he changed course ever so slightly, he watched the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and-as always-the engine temperatures. As he did on takeoffs, he opened the engine cowlings that let heat escape but spoiled the bomber’s aerodynamics.
Bump! He was down, more smoothly than he’d expected. He hit the brakes hard, steering as straight as he could. The Tu-4 needed more than two and a half kilometers of runway to take off fully laden, but a good bit less than that to land with tanks close to dry.
When he came to a stop, a man with a flashlight guided him forward and then off the edge of the paved highway to a waiting revetment with steel mesh on the ground to keep the plane from sinking in. “You did that just right,” Zorin said admiringly.
“Spasibo, Volodya,” Boris answered. “If they’re smart, they’ll have fixed several, depending on where we landed and how far we had to taxi.” He chuckled dryly. “I wouldn’t want to have to back her up.”
“Well,” the copilot said, “no.”
They got out as soon as the props stopped spinning. Groundcrew men were already draping the Tu-4 with camouflage netting. They’d be here only a day or two. No one wanted to give the Americans any excuse to visit.
“Welcome! Welcome!” That well-educated, self-satisfied voice had to belong to a senior officer. Sure enough, the man who owned it went on, “I’m Colonel Madinov. I run this madhouse. We’re going to give the decadent imperialists a kick in the balls they’ll never forget.”
“We serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Colonel,” Gribkov said. He couldn’t see Leonid Tsederbaum’s eyes on him; the navigator stood several meters to the rear. He felt them all the same.
“Well, come on. We’ll get you fed and we’ll get you settled for now,” Madinov said. “When the sun comes up, we’ll review what you’re going to do to Paris.”
Tsederbaum coughed softly, as if one of the little bushes growing by the side of the Autobahn bothered him. Gribkov wasn’t happy, either. He didn’t want to tear the heart out of a world-famous city. But that hadn’t stopped the Americans who hit Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev. It also wouldn’t stop him. And he didn’t believe it would stop his navigator.
After shchi and sausages, the Tu-4 crew met Colonel Madinov in what had been a Catholic church. Blackout curtains shielded windows and doorway. Kerosene lamps gave enough light to use. With Madinov was a very pink young man in Soviet flying togs. “This is Klement Gottwald,” Madinov said. “He speaks Russian with an accent and English almost without one. He’s trained up on the B-29’s radio. He’ll take your man’s seat there on the attack run.”
Leonid Tsederbaum said something in German-or maybe it was Yiddish. Gottwald looked surprised, then smiled. In that accented Russian the colonel had mentioned, he said, “I serve the Soviet Union! I do, and I was born a Sudeten German. That’s funny, if you like.” Since the Germans in the Sudetenland had given Hitler his excuse to swallow Czechoslovakia, it was at least curious to find one of them helping the USSR along.
Andrei Aksakov, the regular radioman, spoke excellent Russian but no English-Boris wasn’t sure about German. If he was disappointed to get bumped from this mission, he didn’t show it.
“Comrade Colonel, we’ll also need new American IFF codes, if you have them,” Vladimir Zorin said. He didn’t add This will be suicidal without them, but he might as well have.
Madinov nodded. “A technician is entering them into your set right now.”
“From what they told us before we flew here, sir, this will be a low-level mission,” Gribkov said. “We won’t have the long parachute delay till the bomb goes off. How do we escape before the blast knocks us down?”
“It will still have a parachute, of course,” Madinov said, and Boris nodded back. The colonel went on, “There will be a thirty-second wait once it touches down. That will buy you several kilometers.”
Boris thought about it. Could anyone in Paris disarm the bomb in half a minute, even if he started trying right away? It seemed unlikely. “Fair enough, Comrade Colonel,” the pilot said.
“I don’t like this myself, but we have to do it,” Madinov said. “Paris is as big a transportation hub for France as Moscow is for us. Smashing it will keep the Americans from resupplying their forces farther east.”
“Yes, sir,” Boris said. The colonel was taking a chance to tell the bomber crew he didn’t care for his orders. His courage deserved respect.
Madinov pointed to a couple of bottles of vodka that sat on the altar instead of sacramental wine. “We’ll drink to the success you’ll have tomorrow.” Drink they did. Everyone had a good knock; nobody got enough to get smashed.
Boris and his crewmen devoted the next day to checking the Tu-4 from nose to tail, making as sure as they could that it was ready to do its part. “We’ll paint another city on the nose.” Leonid Tsederbaum sounded almost gay at the prospect.
That he was, Boris didn’t believe for a minute. “Right,” he said tightly. He didn’t like this, either. But what could you do?
Part of the plan involved jamming enemy radio and radar, starting well before the bomber (and how many others with it, from different stretches of highway?) took off. That might help. It might not. The Soviet techs had been doing it on and off for a week, to confuse the Americans and French.
After dark, armorers loaded the A-bomb into the Tu-4. They were not quite seven hundred kilometers from Paris: between an hour and an hour and a half, plus the same time back. A short mission, as these things went. Usually, they had to sweat out getting shot down for most of a day.
A track made from more steel mesh led them back to the Autobahn, from which they’d take off. The bomb was heavy, but the fuel load was pretty light. They got airborne more easily than they had, say, on the way to Bordeaux.
As soon as they crossed the front, the IFF claimed they were a B-29 on the way home. Gottwald spoke in whistling English once, then switched to Russian to use the intercom: “So much static, we could hardly understand each other. That’s good. It helps.”
Tsederbaum also spoke over the intercom: “Hitler wanted Paris burning, too. He didn’t get his wish. We will.”
I don’t like the way he said that, Boris thought. Who would like getting compared to the Nazi Führer?
After the one challenge, no Yank or Frenchman wondered about the Tu-4 or what it was doing. The short flight went as smoothly as a training run. Guided by radar, Lavrov dropped the bomb near the Arc de Triomphe.
As soon as it was gone, Boris pushed the throttles to the red line. Even so, the flash almost blinded him and the blast wave nearly swatted him from the sky. A mushroom cloud, full of fire and lightning, mounted to the stratosphere. Behind the bomber, Paris burned.