“Everything ready for the drop, Sasha?” Boris asked the bombardier.
“Comrade Pilot, it is,” Alexander Lavrov replied.
More ships sailed the North Sea than the Baltic. What would their crews think when a bomber without lights zoomed past just above the waves? To whom would they report those thoughts?
“Getting close. Swing another couple of degrees south,” Arzhanov said. Boris did. You had to trust your people. Land loomed up ahead. They’d fly over Holland for a little while before they let the city in northern Belgium have it.
Why wasn’t flak going off like fireworks on Victory Day? Whatever the reason, here came the estuary of the Scheldt. “Let it go!” Boris told the bombardier. As soon as Lavrov pulled the lever and the bomb fell, the Tu-4 got lighter and friskier. Gribkov wheeled it out to sea, running the engines at the red line. He had to get clear before…
Hellfire seared the night behind. Blast tried to swat the bomber into the water. It didn’t…quite. Now to get back to the rodina, Boris thought. He could paint another city on the Tu-4’s flank after he did. His mouth twisted when that crossed his mind. Poor, damned Leonid!
–
“Antwerp? Antwerp!” Harry Truman didn’t so much say the name as spit it. “How in holy hell did they get Antwerp?”
George Marshall looked unhappy, too. But then, as far as Truman could tell, the Secretary of Defense never looked happy. He sure had nothing to look happy about this morning. “As best we can piece together, sir, it was a great piece of flying. The only way they could have come in lower would have been to take their bomber through the moles’ tunnels.”
“Heh,” Truman said. Every once in a while, Marshall showed that a dry wit did lurk beneath his somber exterior. He was almost as much a great stone face as Molotov or Gromyko, though Truman would never have insulted him by saying so. Dry wit or not, right this minute the President himself was more not amused than Queen Victoria had ever been.
“What really irks me is that we have no claims that anyone shot down that-that confounded Bull,” Marshall said, using the NATO reporting name for the Russian B-29 copy. “It surprised us getting in? Okay. But how could our air defenses not catch it once they knew it was there?”
“Talent,” Truman said bitterly. “Now I’ve got the Belgian Prime Minister and his Dutch opposite number screeching at me, one for each ear. Why can’t we keep them safe? Well, why can’t we, dammit?”
“Because war is like that, as you know perfectly well, sir,” Marshall answered. “Things go wrong. Or the other fellow does something very well, or does something you didn’t expect, and he hurts you. When he starts throwing atom bombs around, he can hurt you badly.”
“Can’t he, though?” Truman said. “Two in Korea, and now the one in Antwerp. What’s next? New York City?”
“I don’t believe so, Mr. President,” Marshall said. “Bulls can’t reach it from anywhere Stalin holds. If the Russians were to take Iceland away from us, that would be a different story, but there’s a worry from a thriller writer’s novel. It’s nothing to lose sleep over in the real world. They don’t have the navy to try it, let alone bring it off.”
“Thank God for small favors. He sure hasn’t doled out many big ones lately,” Truman said. “What are we going to have to do to save Korea? More atom bombs? That’s what got us into this mess to begin with.”
“We’ve punished Stalin. We haven’t really punished Mao yet,” Marshall said in musing tones. “Yes, we bombed Manchuria, but to the Chinese that was an annoyance, something that slowed their move into Korea, not anything that hit home in the country as a whole. Manchuria is the back of beyond to them, the way Wyoming is with us.”
“Peiping. Shanghai. Nanking. That would get their attention.” The President grimaced. “How many people would we kill? I don’t like blowing up cities and vaporizing civilians just to make Mao sit up and take notice, dammit.”
“If he were one of the people we vaporized, that might do more than anything else to get Red China to go back to the status quo ante bellum,” Marshall observed.
“Yes, it might. But what are the chances?” Truman said. “Do we even know where he is?”
The Secretary of Defense shook his head. “If we did, a strike might be worthwhile. Most of our intelligence on him comes through Chiang in Formosa, you understand. From what the Nationalists hear, Mao moves from one town to the next every day or two to make it harder for us to rub him out like that.”
“One more trick he picked up from Stalin.” After a moment’s thought, Harry Truman shook his head. “Mm, maybe not. You don’t need to go to Harvard to see you’re safer if you don’t give the people who don’t like you a sitting target.”
“True enough, sir,” Marshall agreed.
“I wish we could kill Mao, though,” Truman said. “If we did, I bet Stalin would be willing to go back to the status quo and start picking up pieces. But if Mao wants to keep fighting, Stalin loses face for making peace. Who’s the boss Communist then? It would be like the brawls after the Reformation, with each side saying it was more Christian than the other.”
“And of course there are no arguments at all here about how we ought to deal with this war,” Marshall said.
Yes, he was dry, all right. “Uh-huh,” Truman said tightly. “If Joe McCarthy knows what’s good for him, he’d better keep moving like Stalin and Mao. I’d do everybody a favor if I dropped an A-bomb on his big, fat, hard head.”
“That’s not the kind of thing a sitting President is supposed to say,” Marshal replied, voice prim as a schoolmarm’s.
“Tough shit,” Truman said. “It looks more and more like he’ll run next year, and it looks more and more like he’ll flush the Constitution straight down the crapper if he gets elected. Go on-tell me I’m wrong.”
“Mr. President, one of the advantages of a long career as a soldier is that I let other people worry about politics,” Marshall said.
“You’re a sandbagger today, aren’t you, Mister ex-Secretary of State?” Truman said. “And you may not worry about Tail Gunner Joe, but you can bet your bacon he worries about you. You’re a Roosevelt crony, after all. Probably a Red in disguise.”
“I hope that, if I were a Red in disguise, the United States wouldn’t be doing so well in this war.” George Marshall had his pride, sure as hell.
Maybe the USA was doing better than the USSR. Truman hoped so. But the country as it was reminded him of a battered pug on a stool pointing across the ring and going Y’oughta see the other guy. Better wasn’t the same as good. It didn’t come close to being the same.
After a moment’s silence, Marshall coughed and said, “Mr. President, do you mind if I ask you something?”
“You can always ask,” Truman said. “If I don’t feel like answering, I won’t, that’s all.”
“Fair enough, sir.” The Secretary of Defense coughed again. “Whatever you do say, it will be in confidence.”
Truman would have believed few men who made that claim. George Marshall was one of the few. That he said it made Truman pretty sure he knew what Marshall would ask. He said “Go ahead” anyway.
“Thank you, sir. Have you, ah, decided on your own political plans for next year?” Yes, that was the question Truman had expected. Marshall couldn’t have phrased it more delicately if he’d been testing clauses in his head the past week. For all Truman knew, he had. Marshall had never struck him as a man who did much off the cuff.
Most of the time, neither was Truman. Here, though…“I don’t have to make up my mind just yet, so I haven’t,” he said. “What the war situation looks like when I have to will have a lot to do with it.”
“Yes, sir. Of course I understand that,” Marshall said. “One other thing you might take into account is doing whatever makes it less likely for Senator McCarthy to reach the White House.”