“I suppose I do.” She drew him a pint. “Here. This is on me. I’m glad you’re here.” He tried to argue. She wouldn’t let him.
18
Bill Staley watched the ordnance men bombing up his B-29. The bombs had yellow rings painted on their noses. They were ordinary high explosives. The Superfortress didn’t always visit radioactive hell upon its targets. Sometimes ordinary hell was thought to be enough.
Hank McCutcheon stood beside him. The pilot reached for his breast pocket, as if to take out the pack of cigarettes in there. An ordnance sergeant wagged a finger at him. Major McCutcheon dropped his hand. “Yeah, I’m too close to all this good stuff to smoke,” he said sheepishly. “But I still want to.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Bill said. “Pyongyang’s a milk run, right? A piece of cake. Nothing to it.”
“Nothing to it,” McCutcheon echoed, his voice doleful.
The North Korean capital wasn’t far. They could get there and back in a couple of hours. Whether they could get back at all, though, was very much an open question. Stalin had lavished on Kim Il-sung air defenses stouter than any city had enjoyed during the Second World War. Radar to spot approaching bombers, radar to direct the fire from the antiaircraft guns, radar-carrying night fighters to hunt through the black skies and attack with heavy cannon of their own…Yes, the B-29s carried window to make the enemy radar operators’ lives more difficult. Yes, the radar-carrying F-82 Twin Mustangs escorted them and tried to keep off the North Korean La-11s.
Tried was the word, though. It wasn’t the way it had been going against the Japs, some of whose fighters couldn’t even climb up to the B-29s. Japan was on the ropes before the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki knocked it through them. With their big Red brothers helping out, the North Koreans remained much tougher customers.
“I should’ve driven a milk truck instead of one of these babies. That’d be a milk run for sure.” McCutcheon sounded like a man kidding on the square.
“Hey, I’m a bookkeeper,” Bill said, “or I would be if Uncle Sam let me.” He imagined a gloomy office full of dusty ledgers, none of which added up the way it should. Next to what the plane would be facing tonight, he wouldn’t have minded spending several weeks-or years-in a place like that.
They took off around 2300. This wasn’t anything like a lone-wolf mission, the way some of the atomic strikes had been. A swarm of Superfortresses would visit Pyongyang. With luck, something from one of them would blow Kim Il-sung to kingdom come. Just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean it couldn’t. Without Kim telling them what to do, the North Koreans might just throw in their cards and give up the war. Quite a few Americans-some with stars on their shoulders-thought it could happen.
Bill wished he could believe it, but he didn’t. With Kim Il-sung gone, he figured the North Koreans would find some other hard-nosed bastard to order them around. And, even if they didn’t, the Red Chinese seemed here to stay. Short of turning all of North Korea into radioactive glass-an approach which, if you’d been fighting here for a while, definitely had its points-this war wouldn’t dry up and blow away any time soon.
Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the glowing instrument panel in front of him. B-29 engines had run hot in the last war, making every takeoff an adventure. Sitting in mothballs for half a dozen years hadn’t improved their performance one bit. When everything worked, they hauled the big plane off the ground. When it didn’t…that happened some of the time, but, in the brutal economics of war, not often enough to make the authorities quit using them.
Bill had heard that the Soviet copies of the B-29 didn’t duplicate the American engines, but used a Russian powerplant of about the same performance. He wondered if it had the same trouble, too. He guessed it did. A B-29 copy wouldn’t have been a real copy without overheating engines.
As they crossed the front, a little antiaircraft fire came up at them. They were up past 33,000 feet; most of it burst well below them. Front-line flak was there mostly to make enemy fighters show a little respect when they strafed trenches.
But the sons of bitches down below would have radios or telephones or telegraph clickers. In case the radar operators farther north had decided to turn in early, somebody up there would know to wake them up and put them back to work.
The country down there was pretty well blacked out. Electricity hadn’t been widespread in Korea before the war started. Many of the generators that supplied it had been knocked out as fighting ground up and down the peninsula. Soldiers on both sides would shoot without warning at houses showing lights they shouldn’t. No wonder the blackout was good.
Hyman Ginsberg’s voice resounded in Bill’s earphones: “The Twin Mustangs have picked up what have to be Lavochkins heading our way,” the radioman reported.
Hank McCutcheon heard that, too, of course. He glanced over at Bill. Bill nodded back. They were nearing Pyongyang. They had to expect a welcoming committee. Here it was, evidently. The Lavochkin La-11 was a neat little fighter, its lines not too different from a German FW-190’s. It was about as good a prop job as anybody could make, in other words. Not its fault that the rise of the jet had left it obsolete.
Of course, the rise of the jet had left the B-29 even more obsolete. Like the La-11, it soldiered on regardless. Small jet engines helped the even larger B-36 get off the ground. The B-47 was all-jet. Neither of those planes had been manufactured by the thousands, though. Lots and lots of leftover B-29s around. Why not use them? Why not use them up?
Flak rose toward the Superforts again. This stuff came from the heavy guns, the guns designed to throw it so high. It didn’t burst below the bombers. It burst among them. The big plane shook from near misses, as if on a potholed road.
Out through the Plexiglas windshield panels, Bill also spotted tracers zipping back and forth across the sky. The B-29s and Twin Mustangs spat.50-caliber cartridges. The La-11s carried four 23mm cannons apiece. Their tracers, though scarcer, were more impressive.
Fire burning from engine to engine along the left wing, a Superfort spun toward the ground. “How much longer till we can drop, dammit?” McCutcheon demanded of the bombardier. The gunners were firing at something out there.
“Another minute, sir,” Charlie Becker answered. A fragment sliced through the plane’s aluminum skin; Bill heard the snarling clang.
“Fuck it,” McCutcheon said. To Becker, he added, “Get rid of ’em, Charlie!”
“They’re gone!” the bombardier said from the nose. The plane grew lighter as the bombs fell free and more aerodynamic as soon as compressed air shoved the bomb-bay doors closed. Hank McCutcheon pulled it into a tight turn to port, a turn designed to get away from Pyongyang and all the unfriendly people there as fast as he could.
Another B-29 took a direct hit and blew up. The flash of light left Bill night-blind for several seconds. Blast buffeted his Superfort-not the way it had right after an A-bomb burst, but noticeably all the same. The big engines roared as they got out of there. The roaring wouldn’t help with an La-11 on their tail, though. The Russian fighter had something like an extra hundred miles an hour on them.
No fat shells blew out their pressurization or smashed up an engine or tore a crewman to bloody shards. Bill began to breathe normally again. Another mission down, he thought. Sooner or later, they have to let me quit.
They were talking with the flight controllers at the strip north of Pusan when the men there suddenly started cussing a blue streak. Bill could see explosions ahead. Somebody’s planes-North Korean? Red Chinese? Russian? — were pounding the field.
“Divert! Divert! Divert!” the controllers chorused. Diverting, here, meant diverting all the way to Japan. Bill glanced at the fuel gauge. They had enough in the tanks. They could go. They could, and they would-McCutcheon swung the B-29 to the east. But getting hit, here as anywhere else, was a lot less fun than hitting.