“I did not want to do this. The West German people are our allies in the fight against Communist oppression,” he went on. “But with almost all West German territory under Russian occupation, and with the Low Countries and France threatened with invasion, I saw no other choice.
“We have also struck at Soviet troop concentrations deeper inside West Germany, and in Austria. And we have hit the Russian satellite nations in Eastern Europe. We will not let Russian soldiers cross their territory unpunished, and we will not let the petty tyrants who run them help Joseph Stalin snuff out freedom all across Europe.
“If Stalin wants peace, he can have it. I will not fight him as long as he is not fighting me. Let him pull his troops back behind the borders they held before the war started, let the North Koreans and Red Chinese move back north of the thirty-eighth parallel in Korea, and there will be no more reason to fight as far as I’m concerned. They’ve hurt us, and we’ve hurt them. The scales balance, near enough.
“But I warn the Russian leader: if he doubts our resolve, he’s making a bigger mistake than the one he made by trusting Hitler. His puppets started the fight in Korea. He started the fight in Europe. We will finish them. On that, he has my solemn word.”
He looked up again to show he’d finished his prepared remarks. The reporters all started yelling his name and waving. He pointed at one of them. “If we’ve used more A-bombs in Europe, Mr. President, how do we keep the Russians from doing the same thing?” the man asked.
“Chet, we will do the best we can with planes and radar and antiaircraft guns,” Truman answered. “We will give their bombers the hottest time we know how to give them.”
“Some of them will get through, though, won’t they?” Chet persisted. “If enough do, won’t the European countries grab at whatever kind of peace Stalin will give them?”
“They haven’t shown any signs of that so far,” said Truman, who had no idea what he and the United States would do if they did. He went on, “As a matter of fact, the French Committee of National Salvation seems more eager to get on with the war than the Fourth Republic did.” There! He’d said something good about Charles de Gaulle! Who would have believed it? He pointed to another reporter. “Yes, Eric?”
“Mr. President, this set of bombs didn’t hit Soviet territory?” Eric held his pipe in his left hand while he talked; smoke curled up from the bowl toward the press-room ceiling.
“That’s right.” Truman nodded.
“What will we do if they strike at us again, sir?”
Suffer. Bleed. Burn, the President thought. But, blunt-spoken as he was, he couldn’t say that to a reporter. Sighing, he answered, “If that happens-and may God forbid it-I promise that we’ll hurt the Russians much worse than they can hurt us.”
Hitler’d made the same promise after English bombs started falling on Germany in reply to the ones the Luftwaffe’d dropped on London. The difference was, the Fuhrer hadn’t been able to make good on his promise. Truman knew damn well he could.
He aimed his left index finger at another reporter. “Walter?”
“Mr. President, what I want to know-what I think every American wants to know-is, will anything be left of the country and of the world by the time this war ends?”
“I think there will. I hope-I pray-there will. But I’m not the only one who has something to say about that. You also have to ask Joe Stalin. I’m sorry, Walter, but that’s the way it is.” He chose another gentleman of the Fourth Estate. “Yes, Howard?”
“Sir, how do you stand being one of the two men responsible for so much death and devastation?”
The question struck closer to home than Truman had expected. Slowly, he said, “I don’t believe anyone who was in the White House would have been able to do anything much different from what I’ve done. What consolation I have, I take from that.” This time, he didn’t suggest that Howard ask Joe Stalin. Stalin, the President figured, simply didn’t give a damn.
8
Along with his flight crew, along with their new navigator, Boris Gribkov waited for orders. He was afraid he knew what kind of orders they would be-the kind of orders that had made Leonid Tsederbaum stick his automatic in his mouth and pull the trigger so he would never have to help carry out another set of orders like that again.
Radio Moscow (whose signal almost certainly didn’t originate from Moscow these days) screamed about American atrocities. “Even the Germans the United States claims to protect now fall victim to the imperialists’ insane blood lust!” Roman Amfiteatrov bellowed.
No one had ever heard, or heard of, Amfiteatrov before U.S. B-29s dropped three A-bombs on Moscow. By his accent, he’d done a local show in Stavropol or some other southern town till then. Yuri Levitan had been the chief radio newsreader for years-until, without warning and with no explanation, he wasn’t. He had to be dead, with luck a quick and easy death, without it…not.
Gribkov didn’t take the broadcaster’s hysterics very seriously. He knew what war was-knew much too well, in fact. You killed the enemy’s soldiers as best you could. And you smashed his cities behind the lines so his factories couldn’t make what the soldiers needed to kill your men. If you also terrified his civilians-say, with an atom bomb-so they decided giving up made a better choice than going on with the fight, that was also all to the good.
Rumors swirled over the air base outside of Prague. Czechoslovakia was still a tricky place. It was the last satellite to fall into the Soviet orbit, only a bit more than three years before. Some of the locals might not be happy about that, so the Red Army had the country locked down tight. Klement Gottwald, who ran it for the USSR, might be able to sneeze without asking permission from Stalin. But he sure couldn’t wipe the snot off his upper lip unless Stalin told him that was all right.
“Know what I heard?” Vladimir Zorin said to Boris.
“No, Volodya. I don’t know. What’s the latest shithouse news?” Gribkov asked.
The copilot chuckled self-consciously. “That’s about what it is, sure enough,” he said. “But they say the east bank of the Rhine is nothing but glass from the Swiss border all the way to the North Sea. Glass from atom bombs going off, I mean.”
“I understood you. You do know what a pile of crap that is, right?” Boris intended the question to be rhetorical. In case it wasn’t, he went on to make the point: “How many bombs would the Yanks need to do something like that? If they had that many, wouldn’t they have dropped them on us by now?”
“I suppose so, yeah,” Zorin said. Talking about the resources the enemy enjoyed was always risky.
But Boris said, “I know so. I just wish they’d turn us loose to hit back at the imperialists.” He said that partly to keep the MGB happy and partly because he did mean it-the odd double focus that suffused so much of Soviet life. It wasn’t that he was eager to kill tens of thousands and roast tens of thousands more. He wasn’t, even if it didn’t weigh on his mind so much as it had on Tsederbaum’s. But he’d been trained to fly the Tu-4, and he did want to hit back at the enemies who’d slaughtered so many Soviet fighting men.
“Some bombers have gone out of here,” Zorin said. “I just thought so before, but I know for a fact now. I’ve talked with groundcrew men who serviced them.”
“But not us,” Gribkov said.
“No, not us,” his fellow flyer agreed. “Damn that stupid motherfucking Zhid, anyhow. They don’t trust us to do what they tell us to, not any more they don’t. They think Tsederbaum’s contagious.”
“They ought to know better than that. They’ve questioned us hard enough,” Gribkov said, sincerity and prudence once more mingling in his voice. “We serve the Soviet Union. We should get the chance to do it.”
He listened to the news with special care that evening. Would Roman Amfiteatrov boast about the devastation visited on ancient cities in Western Europe? Amfiteatrov did nothing of the kind. He spent most of the broadcast talking about a Chinese attack in Korea. By the way he described it, if Mao’s soldiers were any braver, they would have torn the Americans they killed to pieces with their bare hands.