As she went down there, jet engines screamed, seemingly right above the roof. Ordinary airplane motors were loud. Jets were ridiculous.
That was the last thought Daisy had before the world ended.
She was in the cellar, in a building with all the windows covered over by blackout curtains. The sudden glare was so savage, she wailed and clapped her hands over her eyes just the same. A few seconds later, the bricks and plaster shook and groaned, as if in an earthquake. She’d never felt an earthquake in her life, but this didn’t seem like anything else.
The Owl and Unicorn did more than shake. Things fell down and fell apart. Tinkling mixed with the rumble said the windows and the pint mugs and the mirror behind the bar were smashing themselves to hell and gone along with everything else in the place.
As soon as Daisy smelled the first whiff of smoke, she knew she had to get out of there right now. She’d bake if she stayed. She just prayed she wasn’t already too late.
Up the stairs she scrambled. That was the word, all right, because chunks of the smashed pub had fallen down them. Her bare feet took a beating. She didn’t care. A roof beam blocked the way up to the ground floor. She shoved it aside with panic-given strength. It wasn’t quite a mother lifting the front end of a motorcar off a trapped child, but it came close.
The stumbling dash across the floor tore up her feet even worse. She fell once or twice, too, when she tripped on overturned tables and chairs she couldn’t see-and on chunks of the ceiling and the first floor and the roof that had also come down. She was lucky (she supposed she was lucky) the whole thing hadn’t collapsed and trapped her down below.
A glimmer of light showed her a way out. It wasn’t the door; it was a rent in the front wall that ran from a corner of the window frame down to the ground. Afterwards, she never knew how she squeezed through it, but she did.
A brick fell down and smacked the sidewalk a few inches from her bleeding feet. She stumbled farther away from the shattered Owl and Unicorn. Would she ever be able to go back in there? Right this second, she didn’t give a damn.
High into the sky towered a mushroom cloud-not just high but higher, highest. She’d seen the one above slaughtered Norwich, of course, but that had been well off to the east, a safe thirty miles away. Nothing about this one seemed safe. She guessed that the bomb had burst right over Sculthorpe. Had it gone off a little east of the air base, nothing would have been left of Fakenham.
Not much was left of the small town as things were. By the hellish light from the cloud, she saw that at least half the buildings had fallen down. Other people were crawling out of the ruins, all of them bloody and battered-she realized she had to look bloody and battered, too. Some had useless, probably broken, arms and legs. And how much radiation had they taken?
For the time being, none of that mattered. People were screaming for help. Not everyone had got out, and the fires grew. Daisy started digging through the rubble, doing what she could.
10
Cade Curtis wasn’t used to wearing a captain’s bars on his shoulders. He knew damn well he hadn’t done anything brave or clever to earn them. He’d got them because he was an officer who’d had the dumb luck not to be under either of the A-bombs Stalin dropped on South Korea.
They needed officers, needed them desperately. Even a captain had no real business commanding a regiment, but there you were. And here Cade was, giving it his best shot. He wondered if he was the first regimental CO still too young to vote. It might have happened, on one side or the other, during the War Between the States. He would have bet it hadn’t since.
His men were holding, or anyway trying to hold, a ridge line about halfway between Chongju and vanished Pusan. The Red Chinese had poured through the gap the second Russian atom bomb tore in the American defenses. If this line didn’t hold, the town of Kaeryong behind it wouldn’t, either, and a bad situation would get worse. Shit would be out to lunch, if you wanted to get right down to it.
“Where’s that air, dammit?” Cade asked a radioman hooked into the Navy network-most surviving U.S. planes in Korea flew off carriers these days.
“Inbound this way, sir,” the sergeant with the earphones answered. “Suppose to be here in, like, five minutes.” An 81mm mortar round thudded down in front of their trench, showering them both with dirt. Cade wondered whether they had five minutes left.
The Reds didn’t have a lot of tanks. Stalin was using the ones he did have in Europe, not passing them along to Mao and Kim Il-sung. That meant machine guns counted for as much here as they had at places like Verdun and the Somme. Nothing like a well-sited machine gun for making infantry wish it had never been born.
Several Brownings were stuttering bullets at the Red Chinese dug in farther down the slope. They were less eager to throw in human-wave assaults than they had been during the days just after they swarmed over the Yalu. They still did it now and then, but not all the time any more.
Then again, they used more mortars than they had then. They also had more mortars to use. Mortars were the poor man’s artillery, and Mao’s men were nothing if not poor. Sheet metal for the tube, loose tolerances…If you were a blacksmith, you could just about go into the mortar business in your back yard.
One of the bastardly little bombs burst in a kink of the trench, fifty yards down from Cade. Somebody over there started screaming for a medic. That wasn’t good, but maybe wasn’t so bad as if he were screaming for his mother.
Here came the Corsairs. Cade whooped when he saw the long-nosed fighter-bombers with the inverted gull wings. They were as obsolete as the rest of the prop jobs left over from World War II. Where there were no jets to claw them out of the sky, though, they could still do a fine job of turning human beings into raw-or sometimes burnt-meat.
Some of them carried rockets under those kinked wings. They ripple-fired them at the Red Chinese. Others had napalm bombs instead. Flame leaped and splashed when those went in. Next to the atomic fire the Russians had rained on Korea, it was puny and cold, but you sure wouldn’t think so if you were luckless enough to have it come down on you.
Cade whooped again, and pumped his fist in the air. He knew that was an un-Christian thing to do. The Red Chinese were men, just like him. But they were also men trying their goddamnedest to kill him. Maybe he should have regretted their untimely demise, but he didn’t.
The Corsairs banked and wheeled in the air for another attack run. They all had eight .50-caliber machine guns in their wings, so they could put a lot of lead in the air when they strafed trenches. If the rockets and the napalm didn’t do for the Red Chinese, some good, old-fashioned slugs might turn the trick.
Waggling their wings in farewell, the Corsairs roared back toward the Sea of Japan. Cade cautiously stuck his head up over the parapet to see how they’d done. The napalm still blazed. Smoke rose from the rocket hits. And quite a few Chinamen in dun-colored uniforms legged it northward. They’d had more than flesh and blood could take.
Not all of them, though. A bullet cracked past Cade’s ear, close enough so he thought he felt the wind of its passage. He ducked down in a hurry. He was just glad that wasn’t a permanent reminder he hadn’t come here to play tourist.
He was a captain in charge of a regiment. His company commanders were second lieutenants, except for a couple of sergeants. One of the lieutenants asked, “You want we should move forward and push out the rest of the Chinks, sir?”
“Howie, I just want to sit tight and make sure they can’t push us out,” Cade answered. “We’ve got to hold on to Kaeryong, and they won’t be coming after us here right away, not after that pounding.”