After supper, they dug themselves in under the T-54, the way they did in dry weather on hard ground. The front lay a few kilometers farther west. Konstantin figured they’d move up again tomorrow. If the company hadn’t found the field kitchen and the dump, they might have gone up again before it got dark tonight.
Red Army guns banged away at the enemy troops in front of them. Not much artillery fire came back. Even with the tank’s thirty-six tonnes of steel to shield him, Morozov wasn’t a bit sorry about that. Every once in a while, a heavy, long-range gun-it had to be at least a 240-would throw a shell back this way. Those big bursts sounded like the end of the world, but none of them came very close.
The familiar smells of metal and diesel exhaust and hot lubricating oil and tobacco filling his nostrils, Morozov fell asleep as readily as he would have in a barracks. Other, earthier, odors would probably fill his nostrils later; cabbage soup gave everybody gas. That didn’t worry him, though. It was nothing that hadn’t happened before.
He wasn’t so used to the screams of jet fighters’ engines. Those pried his eyelids apart, somewhere in the middle of the night. He would have gone straight back to sleep anyway, only he noticed what sounded like every antiaircraft gun in the world going off. Were the Americans coming over? He didn’t let it bother him. Unless a bomb hit right on top of his tank, he was safe. If one did, he’d be dead too fast to get bothered about anything.
Or so he thought, till the black cave under the T-54 suddenly filled with blinding, overwhelming, impossible light. Even more impossible, the massive tank heaved up on one side before crashing down again. For a mad moment, Konstantin feared it would get blown over like a wooden toy car in a high wind. Then he feared it would squash him coming down.
He did exactly the same thing as the other three men under the tank: he screamed and started gabbling prayers. His, like Kalyakin’s, were in Old Church Slavonic. Eigims called on God in Latin, Sarkisyan in throaty Armenian. Jesus’ name sounded very much alike in all three languages.
The blast that almost tipped the tank had been hot. How close was the A-bomb? That question translated into another one faster than Morozov would have wished. Am I already dead? he wondered.
If he was, if the radiation would roast him like a pork butt in the oven, he couldn’t do anything about it. If he wasn’t, he had to do everything he could to live. “Everybody into the tank!” he ordered. “Quick as we can. We’ll close all the hatches and turn on the filtered blower.”
The system hadn’t been designed with radioactivity in mind. It was like a gas mask for the T-54. If the enemy started using poison gas on the battlefield, the tank could close down and keep going. It might protect the crew from fallout, too. Konstantin couldn’t see how it would leave them any worse off, no matter what.
Warm rain spattered them as they scrambled into the T-54. A nearby tank was on fire. Maybe its paint had caught. What was left of a nearby wooden shed was burning, too. How many men are burning? flashed through Konstantin’s mind. How many are all burnt up?
He slammed the cupola hatch behind him and dogged it tight. The other hatches clanged shut. Vladislav Kalyakin fired up the reliable V-54 engine. Then he hit the blower. The fan started sucking air-with luck, air cleansed of radioactivity-through the filters and into the fighting compartment.
As soon as Morozov got his helmet hooked up to the radio circuit, he heard Captain Lapshin shouting in his earphones: “All tanks, report in! All tanks, report in!”
“Morozov here. Over,” Konstantin said, remembering to hit the SEND button.
“Good to hear from you, Kosta,” the company commander said. “We have orders-I just now got them-to pull back for medical care and decontamination.”
“I serve the Soviet Union, Comrade Captain!” Morozov said. Things were as lousy as he’d feared, then. If the brass thought they were likely to last even a little while, it would have sent them forward against the Americans. If they had to go back so the quacks could mess with them, they were really and truly fucked. He spoke to the driver: “You hear that, Genya?”
“Da, Comrade Sergeant,” Kalyakin said. “How bad is it?”
“Well, it isn’t good.” Konstantin didn’t know much about radiation sickness. Except that there was such a thing, he knew next to nothing, in fact. Now he knew next to nothing. He had the bad feeling he’d find out more than he’d ever wanted to learn.
–
The makeup girl clucked reproachfully. “Please turn your head more to the right, Mr. President!” she said: an order phrased as a request. A captain bossing a corporal couldn’t have done it any better.
“Yes, ma’am,” Harry Truman said. Making him look as good as he was ever likely to was her job. He let her get on with it. She smacked him with a powder puff, then, frowning in concentration, did some fine work with a skinny little brush.
None of the touches was unpleasant-if anything, the reverse. Truman hated the whole process anyway. For one thing, he felt like a counterfeit sawbuck. And, for another, the process left his face smelling like makeup. He couldn’t get away from the odor by moving away from it; it moved with him. And it drove him crazy. The first thing he did whenever he escaped the TV cameras was hop in the shower to wash it off.
When the girl drew back to survey her work, Truman asked her, “Will the bathing suit be green or orange this time, dear?”
She giggled. “You’re a card, Mr. President!”
“I don’t know about that, but people have been telling me for a long time I ought to be dealt with,” Truman said, not without pride. When the makeup girl got it-she needed a couple of seconds-she made a horrible face. The President grinned.
An assistant director or director’s assistant or whatever they called him said, “You’re on in two minutes, sir!”
Getting ready for a speech or a press conference was always frantic. Truman gave a thumbs-up to show he’d heard. The makeup girl smacked him with the powder puff one more time. She studied her handiwork and nodded to show she was satisfied.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Truman told her. He took his bifocals off the makeup table and set them on his nose. He didn’t like the way his sight had lengthened after he turned fifty, but what could you do if you wanted to go on reading? You could wear glasses, that was what.
He looked through the mild, upper portion as he walked into the press room. A young forest of mikes sprouted from the front of his lectern. Radio and television were carrying this speech. Reporters waited for him to finish reading it so they could grill him afterwards.
The second hand on the wall clock was sweeping up toward eleven on the dot. The red lights under the TV camera lenses glowed, so they were filming or broadcasting or whatever the right word was. Truman took his place behind the lectern and glanced down at the papers. Yes, they said what they were supposed to say. If they hadn’t, he could have given the gist without them. The gist was, the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and he’d just thrown some more gasoline on the fire.
“My fellow Americans, I come to you today with a heavy heart,” he said. “To keep the Red Army from overrunning all of Western Europe and bringing it under Stalin’s tyranny, we have had to use more atomic bombs in the fight. To destroy as many front-line Russian troops as we could, we dropped them on the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Not it has become necessary that we. Truman said we have had to. He’d watched nonsense and bureaucratic drivel start to swallow the English language. He knew he’d never be a speaker in FDR’s or Churchill’s class-hell, nobody was in Churchill’s class-but by God he said what he meant without beating around the bush.