He aimed no higher than getting through another day, another month, another year. As long as nobody arrested him or shot him, he was ahead of the game. Oh-and as long as nobody dropped an atom bomb on him, either.
–
The briefing officer whacked the pull-down map with a pointer. If this had been Korea rather than Japan, Bill Staley would have guessed the light colonel was taking lessons from General Harrison. “Khabarovsk,” the briefing officer said. “Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.”
Sitting in the folding chair next to Bill’s, Hank McCutcheon whispered, “Gesundheit!”
Those were pretty good sneeze-names, all right, even by Russian standards. But Bill had to fight not to laugh out loud. You didn’t want to get in trouble at a briefing. Sometimes it happened anyway, but not right then: somehow, he managed to hold a straight face.
Whack! “Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk,” the lieutenant colonel repeated. “As you see, gentlemen, both cities lie along the Amur River, on the Russian side of the border with Red China.” The U.S. government still didn’t recognize that Mao had won the Chinese civil war. As far as it was concerned, he remained a usurper and Nationalist Chiang the legitimate President of China, even if all he held was the island of Formosa.
Then again, as far as the American government was concerned, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were independent countries, not parts of Stalin’s USSR. To Bill, the one seemed as surreal as the other. He wasn’t a striped-pants diplomat. He didn’t want to be any such silly thing, either.
He also didn’t want to copilot Major McCutcheon’s B-29. When the Department of Defense recalled him to active duty, though, what other choice did he have but to put the uniform on again? Refuse and go to jail? He’d thought that was worse. He still did-except when the Commies were shooting at him.
“Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk.” One more time! Whack! “Both cities are also important centers through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. By striking them, we will help interdict Soviet supplies flowing through Red China and down into the Korean peninsula. We will help the men on the ground by reducing the pressure the enemy can bring to bear against them.”
When the briefing officer said striking them, he meant sending them up in atomic fire. That was what this mission was all about. Neither Siberian city had yet had A-bombs visited upon it. There were reasons why they hadn’t, too. Khabarovsk lay about three hundred miles north of where Vladivostok had been. Blagoveshchensk was another three hundred miles farther west. Bill didn’t know what kind of air defenses the cities boasted. To the best of his knowledge, neither did any other Americans. The crews on this mission would find out…the hard way.
“We are expending three atomic devices on each city.” The briefing officer used the peculiarly bloodless language so beloved of militaries around the world. “We want to ensure that the interdiction process is successful. Other B-29s will carry high-explosive bombs to take out anything the large explosions happen to miss. They will also serve to divide the attention of the Russians’ defensive personnel.”
They would be decoys, was what they would be. No one-except the crews in those Superforts and their families back home-would care if the pilots in the MiGs knocked them down. The more effort the Russians put into shooting down the planes that couldn’t hurt them badly, the better the chance of getting through the B-29s with the atom bombs had.
Bill was sure he wouldn’t be on a plane loaded with ordinary bombs. Hank McCutcheon had already brought his B-29 back from repeated missions with A-bombs. To the brass, that would argue he was good at it, better than some rookie would be. And maybe the brass were right, and maybe they were full of crap. You could toss heads six times in a row, and it wouldn’t mean a thing-just a statistical hiccup.
I’m a fugitive from the law of averages, Bill thought. That wasn’t the way you ought to go into a mission. You needed confidence. Just because you needed it, though, didn’t mean you’d have it.
“Any questions?” the briefing officer asked. Nobody said a thing. The men knew what they were getting into. This was what they’d bought when they let Uncle Sam teach them to fly. The officer with the silver oak leaves on his shoulders looked out at them. “Anyone who doesn’t care to fly the mission?”
Some people in South Korea had walked out. Bill wondered if he should have. It was the fastest way he could think of to escape the Air Force. But it was also letting down his crew and his country. He’d sat tight then. He sat tight now. So did everybody else.
“Very good,” the briefing officer said briskly. “Pilots-come forward to receive your orders for the mission.”
Since Bill was but a copilot, he went on sitting right where he was. McCutcheon walked up to get the envelope with the bad news in it. Whatever the news in that envelope held, it was bound to be bad. The only question was, which kind of bad would it be?
“So who wins the Oscar?” Bill asked when McCutcheon came back. He hadn’t broken the seal yet. Maybe he wasn’t jumping up and down to find out, either.
“Funny, Billy-boy. Funny like a busted leg,” he said, as if a broken leg was the worst they had to worry about. He slid his right index finger under the edge of the flap to make it come free. The noise of the glue breaking away from the paper reminded Bill of a small animal scratching to be let out. McCutcheon pulled out the folded sheet inside and unfolded it.
Blagoveshchensk, Bill read. He bit the inside of his lower lip. They’d spend an extra couple of dangerous hours over Russia, compared to the guys who’d hit Khabarovsk. The next line told him the B-29 would be carrying an A-bomb. By now, he wondered how much it mattered. His dreams couldn’t get any worse than they already were. He’d killed his tens of thousands. What were a few more tens of thousands after that?
The rest of the sheet detailed courses and altitude. They’d stay as low as they could as long as they could, to give Soviet radar sets as much trouble as possible. In the event that you should be intercepted, you will of course utilize your best judgment to extricate yourselves from the emergency, the orders finished primly.
Bill pointed to that last sentence. “Nice of them, isn’t it?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Hank McCutcheon answered. “If we were Russians, that bit’d go Keep following your assigned course no matter what.”
“I guess it would,” Bill said, but he wondered how much difference it would make. If a MiG-15 or even an La-11 came after them, they were dead meat. They could push the throttles over the red line. They could jink and dodge as much as they pleased-and as much as an elephant could tap-dance. None of it was likely to do them any good. Why not hold course? It wouldn’t cost more than a few minutes of life.
All the B-29s took off in swift succession and roared northwest through the night toward the Siberian coast. It was as routine as anything else the crews had done before. Bill’s nerves still twanged. That extra time over land gnawed at him.
He wondered if they would have done better to fly over Manchuria and hit Blagoveshchensk from the south. When he said so, Major McCutcheon replied, “Think the Chinks don’t have radar there and down in Korea? Think they don’t have jets ready to scramble? How much you wanna bet?”
“I’m already betting my neck,” Bill said. “What else can I throw into the pot?”
They droned along not that far above what seemed endless taiga: pine forests that ran from west to east just below the frozen tundra. Khabarovsk lay somewhere south of their flight path. Just when Bill was wondering whether they’d come that far into Russia yet, flashes of blinding light in the distance told him some other Superfortresses had found their targets.