After a stupid science-fiction serial, the movie came on. With A-bombs and jet planes and TV, the world was living a science-fiction life these days. Even so, that serial was dumb. Not The African Queen. You could say a lot of different things about it. Dumb, it wasn’t.
Aaron found himself eyeing Katharine Hepburn in a new way. After a moment, he worked out why. Jim Summers hadn’t been so squirrely as he’d thought. That gal down in Torrance, the one to whom they’d taken the refrigerator, did look a little like her. Not a lot, but enough to notice.
When they got back to the house, Ruth asked Olivia, “How’d it go?”
“It was okay,” she said. “He didn’t want to eat his string beans, but I sprinkled magic dust on ’em, and after that he did.”
“Magic dust?” Aaron said.
His niece waggled her fingers above an imaginary bowl. “Sure. Magic dust,” she said. “Makes everything yummy.”
“I bet it does.” Aaron decided to give her an extra quarter for finding a way to get Leon to do what she wanted. Little as the kid was, that could be tricky. He did what he wanted, and to hell with the rest of the world. “Come on, then. I’ll drive you back to your dad’s house.”
–
Boris Gribkov watched as the technician bolted the new IFF unit into its place in the radioman’s equipment behind the bulkhead on the right side of the Tu-4’s cockpit. The man began connecting wires to hook it up to the rest of the radio gear.
“This will really work?” Gribkov asked.
“Comrade Pilot, it ought to,” the tech answered over his shoulder as he worked. “We took this IFF set from a B-29 we shot down in Poland only a couple of days ago. We’ve fixed it up as best we know how. It should convince the enemy that your machine is a B-29 itself.”
“But our original IFF unit wasn’t copied from the B-29’s,” Gribkov said. “They told me that when I started training on the Tu-4. They took the unit from a different American bomber, a newer one.”
“Don’t worry. The Americans have updated the ones in their B-29s now, too,” the technician said. “And we’ve made this kind of swap before. I’ve done it myself, when I got my hands on a good unit.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Gribkov said-a phrase with a multitude of meanings. Here, it translated as something like You prick, you’d better be right, because I’m stuck with it either way.
“We all do,” the technician agreed. “Do you know where they’ll send you once you’ve got your new toy here?”
“Nyet.” The pilot shook his head. Even if he had known, he wouldn’t have told the tech. The man might be honestly curious. Or he might report to the MGB. Boris didn’t want the Chekists landing on him for violating security. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal on his chest wouldn’t save him. Nothing saved you from that. They’d call him a stupid hero while they knocked his teeth down his throat.
That afternoon, once the tech was happy with the way the new IFF box worked, the base commandant summoned Gribkov and his copilot, bombardier, navigator, and radioman to his office. That was a tiny cubby, maybe the size of a submarine skipper’s, in the farmhouse; the strip outside Leningrad was as cramped as if it housed fighter planes only thirty kilometers behind the lines.
Lieutenant Colonel Osip Milyukov would have seemed at home at an airstrip like that. He was on the happy side of forty, though his medals said he’d had a busy time in the Great Patriotic War. “Well,” he said brightly, “so you’re all set up to give the imperialists a surprise, are you?”
“Yes, sir, unless they change their IFF codes before we take off,” Boris answered. “In that case, the joke’s on us.”
“They usually do that on the first of the month, so it shouldn’t cause you any problems.” Milyukov clucked in a peculiar form of military disapproval. “They ought to pick a day out of a hat, not do it on the same one every time. We’d have to work harder if they did. But if they want to make things simple for us, I don’t mind.”
“Simple is good,” Leonid Tsederbaum said.
Milyukov nodded. Boris could almost see the slot-machine wheels spin behind his eyes. They went Navigator…Jew…wise guy…but smart wise guy, so put up with him. Boris had made those same calculations about Tsederbaum himself.
“Simple is excellent,” Milyukov said. “So that’s why you’re going to bomb Bordeaux. The Americans are shipping things in there like you wouldn’t believe. You’ll put a stop to that, all right.”
“Long flight,” Gribkov said, and then laughed at himself. He’d flown from Provideniya to Seattle, and from Seattle a long way back across the Pacific. By comparison, any purely European mission was only a schoolboy jaunt.
Osip Milyukov got his pipe going. It was the same model as Stalin used. Boris wondered whether the other officer had chosen that style because Stalin used it. One more question he wouldn’t ask. After sending up some smoke signals, Milyukov unfolded a map and used a capped pen for a pointer. “This is the route you’ll fly,” he said when he’d traced it twice.
“Sir, that isn’t simple,” Tsederbaum said. Boris Gribkov was thinking the same thing. By the looks on their faces, so were his crewmates. Being a smart wise guy-and the navigator-Tsederbaum could, and had, come out with it.
“I will have all the bearings and distances for you before you take off,” Milyukov said. “And, while it may not be simple, you can see how it combines with the captured IFF box to improve the element of surprise.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Tsederbaum said.
A tractor brought a fat bomb to the Tu-4. The special armorers in charge of atomic weapons winched the bomb off its trailer and up into the big plane’s bomb bay. Like the one that had attacked Seattle, this bomber was painted in U.S. Air Force colors. If you were going to duplicate all the mechanisms on your enemy’s expensive machine, why not confuse him some more by duplicating its markings?
Takeoff in a Tu-4 duplicated the anxiety B-29 pilots knew. Would you coax the huge, ungainly monster into the air? Boris breathed easier once the bomber climbed past two thousand meters. If you got going, you’d usually keep going-as long as you didn’t run into enemy fighters.
He droned south and a little west. He flew right over Minsk, hoping MiG-15s wouldn’t take him for a real B-29 and shoot him down. One A-bomb had already hit the Byelorussian capital. The crater reminded him of a canker sore on the world’s gum.
The sun set just before the bomber left the USSR and entered Romanian airspace. Romania had joined the Soviet Union in the fight against capitalist imperialism, but, aside from contributing a few second-line divisions, hadn’t done much.
Over a town called Craiova in the southwestern part of the country, Tsederbaum said, “Change course to 270, Comrade Pilot. I say again, change course to 270.”
“I am changing course to 270,” Gribkov replied, and swung the Tu-4 due west. He was up above 11,000 meters now, as high as it would fly. In a little while, they passed out of Romania and into Yugoslavia. Tito’s Yugoslavia was socialist, but deviationist. He’d broken with Stalin, and he’d stayed neutral in the war. If his defenses detected the Tu-4, and if he had fighters that could get high enough, he might try to attack it.
No challenges came from the ground. No antiaircraft fire climbed into the darkness. No Yugoslav fighter planes made runs at the Tu-4. Gribkov guessed Tito’s men had no idea it was there. He kept flying.
Yugoslavia gave way to the Adriatic between Zadar and Split. “Switch the IFF set to its American configuration,” Gribkov told Andrei Aksakov.