Or maybe there was no difference. Maybe Hank jerked awake in the middle of the night with icy rivers running down his back, too. Or maybe his bad dreams got to him some other way. Maybe he just didn’t feel like admitting that to Bill. Maybe it felt too much like showing weakness. Maybe Hank didn’t feel like admitting it even to himself.
Maybe. How could you know? You couldn’t, not when Hank didn’t want to talk about it. For all Bill could prove, the pilot really did sleep the sleep of the just every goddamn night. If you do, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din, Bill thought.
He raised his right index finger. A waiter-a colored Army private-came over and put the empty beer glasses on a tray. “You like another one, suh?” he asked.
“You bet I do,” Bill said. “Thanks.” Beer might not be the answer, but he kept hoping it would deflect the question.
“Comin’ right up,” the kid said.
Bill drank the next one a little more slowly. As he did, he looked around the inside of the officers’ club. Just by looking, he couldn’t have proved that he was in Korea rather than, say, Milwaukee or Portland.
He grimaced and shook his head. He could tell he wasn’t in Portland, all right. Portland was one of those West Coast cities that wasn’t there any more, along with Seattle and so many others. He was anything but happy about the job the Air Force had done defending the American mainland. It had screwed that up even worse than the Navy botched Pearl Harbor back in 1941.
At least Marian and Linda came through in one piece. He’d hoped they had. He’d prayed they had. He was pretty rusty at things that had to do with prayer, but he’d given it his best shot. Still, not knowing had eaten at him till Marian’s card finally got here. Probably the mail service in Seattle was as snafued as everything else in the shattered city. The card had taken more than a month to cross the Pacific in spite of its Air Mail stamp.
One piece! He had a family to go home to if he managed to live through the war. After this stretch, he promised he would never put on another uniform for the rest of his life. He’d get a bookkeeping job and be happy-ecstatic-about columns of figures in ledgers. A dark blue flannel suit, a fedora, a topcoat in the wintertime…That would be as much uniform as he needed.
If he landed a place at a big company, it might have its own softball team. He’d never been good enough to try out for the pros or anything like that, but he made a pretty fair middle infielder. He’d played baseball during the last war, softball when he went back to civilian life, and baseball again here in Korea. Even the gooks were starting to pick up the game.
If they let him play in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, he’d join the company team. If the firm that hired him was big enough to pay for uniforms, though, he figured he’d look for some rinky-dink neighborhood team instead. The ball wouldn’t be as good, but he’d feel free.
Whatever neighborhood he’d live in. By the couple of lines from Marian, he wouldn’t be in the house he’d left when Uncle Sam called him back to active duty. If that house was smashed, his wife and daughter were extra lucky to have lived. Not only would the place have done its best to fall down on them, but they would have been close enough to ground zero to pick up a nasty dose of radiation.
He grimaced once more, not caring for that thought at all. If they’d got radiation sickness, Marian hadn’t mentioned it. Even if they had, they should be better now. But who could guess what that kind of thing might do to you years down the line?
Grimacing yet again, this time in a new way, he drained the glass of beer. He’d wondered before how many Russians and Chinamen died when the Superfort dropped its bombs on them. But that wasn’t the real question, was it?
No. It wasn’t. It was tiptoeing around the real question. It was ducking the responsibility the real question held. The real question was How many people have we killed? Or, more directly, How many people have I killed? Or, more directly yet, How much blood is on my hands?
That was the real question, all right. And, with that being the real question, was it any wonder he had nightmares? How could you not have nightmares with a question like that weighing on you? The only way he could see was to have no conscience at all, like the Nazis who ran the gas chambers and crematoria at their extermination camps.
Fortunately or unfortunately-however you chose to look at it-he came equipped with that invisible but inescapable piece of his moral fiber. And, because he did, he wondered whether he might not do best by taking his service pistol and sticking it in his mouth.
The colored enlisted man appeared out of nowhere. “Want I should fetch you a fresh one, suh?”
“Why the hell not?” Bill answered. He wasn’t going to fly today. If he felt like getting snockered, he could. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t think so much about that real question.
He was doubly glad he’d got the postcard from Marian. Knowing he did have people to go home to, people who loved him, also helped armor him against the temptation to start fiddling with his.45.
–
Boris Gribkov and his Tu-4 crew took the train from Kuibishev to just east of Moscow. From there, they climbed aboard an Li-2 for the trip to an airfield not far from Leningrad. In normal times, they would have gone the whole way by train. But almost all of the European Soviet Union’s rail lines ran through Moscow. Kilometers of those lines were twisted, melted metal now. Till workers replaced them, rail transportation was going to be, in technical terms, a mess.
That was one of the reasons saving the capital from the Nazis had been so important. Yes, Moscow was the USSR’s biggest city. But it was also the country’s transport hub. With it in enemy hands, too often you really couldn’t get there from here.
Hitler hadn’t been able to seize it or damage it badly. The Luftwaffe wasn’t up to the job. The United States Air Force, by contrast, damn well was. Gribkov used his rank to ensure that he had a window seat when the military transport flew low above Moscow on its way west and north. The weather was good. Here a month after the equinox, spring was coming for real as opposed to on the calendar.
Three roughly circular holes, each a kilometer or two across, were gouged from the fabric of the city. One, close by the Moscow River, was centered on the Kremlin. Nothing was left of the famous cluster of onion domes. Whatever air defenses the authorities had emplaced around the beating heart of the Soviet world, they hadn’t been good enough-and that heart beat no more.
Instead of buildings, the blast sites held rubble. Toward the heart of each one, everything was melted flat. The farther out from right under the explosions you went, the more the wreckage started to resemble what Boris recognized as bomb damage.
Vladimir Zorin held the window seat right behind his. “Bozhemoi!” the copilot said as the plane passed over the last devastated circle.
Good Communists weren’t supposed to mention the Deity. All the same, Boris answered, “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” What else but My God! could you say when you saw something like that?
Zorin found something. “As a matter of fact,” he said in clinical tones, “it looks more as though Satan’s got loose on earth.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Boris agreed. Someone who heard that agreement and didn’t care for him might report him to the MGB. Someone might, yes, but that worried him less than it would have most of the time. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his chest could shield him from informers. And the Lubyanka, the Soviet secret-police headquarters since the days of the Russian Revolution, was one more smashed, radioactive ruin.
Leonid Tsederbaum sat next to Zorin. In a low, troubled voice, he said, “Now we know what we did to Seattle.”