“I serve the Soviet Union, sir!” Gribkov said.
“Good. Excellent, in fact. That is what I wanted to hear,” Yulian Olminsky said, and Boris wondered what he’d just bigmouthed his way into. The senior officer wasted no time letting him know: “There has been a reactionary uprising in the Slovak region of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”
“Has there?” Gribkov said tonelessly. Czechoslovakia had been the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for only about three years. It was the last satellite to fall into orbit around the USSR. There were probably still some people left who didn’t care for their country’s new orientation.
Sure enough, Olminsky said, “Elements believed to be affiliated with Father Tiso’s Slovak Fascist regime have seized Bratislava. A disloyal military clique is cooperating with them. If they succeed in detaching Slovakia from its affiliation to the cause of class struggle and world revolution, it will damage Red Army logistics and worldwide socialist solidarity.”
“I see,” Gribkov said. Father Tiso had run Slovakia as a Nazi puppet state after the Germans grabbed Bohemia and Moravia in the aftermath of the Munich sellout. Even before committing to Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, Czechoslovakia executed him and a good many of his henchmen and tagged more of them with corrective-labor or jail terms.
As if plucking that thought from his ear, the brigadier said, “The regime here in Prague must have been too soft, or we wouldn’t have to put up with this pestilential nonsense now. They should have done a better job of eliminating that faction. Now we have to pay the price for it.”
“What does this have to do with me, sir?” Boris asked.
Olminsky’s frown said he was slower on the uptake than the senior man had hoped. “We can’t let the fucking Slovaks get away with this horseshit,” he answered. “Do you want the Hungarians and the Poles to start playing games, too? That would screw us in the mouth for real. And so we are going to wipe Bratislava off the face of the earth.”
“With an A-bomb?” Gribkov’s heart sank. Leonid Tsederbaum might have known what he was doing, all right.
But, reluctantly, Olminsky shook his head. “We have none to spare for the Slovaks, I’m sorry to say. So instead we will send many Tu-4s against the reactionaries with conventional bombs. Bratislava will still be destroyed.”
“Yes, sir.” Gribkov knew better than to show how relieved he was. The ten tonnes of bombs his plane carried might still kill hundreds of people. All the Tu-4s the USSR could afford to despatch would drop a couple of hundred tonnes of bombs and might kill thousands. One A-bomb was worth fifteen or twenty thousand tonnes of high explosives, and would surely kill tens of thousands.
This was war. It wasn’t quite wholesale slaughter. Boris wouldn’t want to add Bratislava to the nose art of murdered cities that the bomber in his mind carried.
Something else occurred to the pilot. “Excuse me, Comrade Brigadier, but will these revolting reactionaries-”
“That’s just what they are, damn them,” Olminsky broke in.
“Yes, sir,” Gribkov said patiently. “Do they have any air defenses? Flak? Fighters? What are we getting into?” He didn’t remind Yulian Olminsky that the Tu-4 was easy meat even for the leftover Soviet fighters the Czechoslovakian Air Force flew. Olminsky had to know it already. Or if he didn’t, he didn’t deserve the stars on his shoulder boards.
“There may be some flak under their control,” he answered now, sounding as if he didn’t like to admit it. “As far as we know, socially friendly forces are still in charge of the warplanes in Czechoslovakia. No one’s attacked the airstrip here, you’ll notice. Any more questions?” The way his eyebrows drew down and came together warned Boris had better not have any.
“No, sir!” he said, and saluted crisply. “I serve the Soviet Union!”
“Khorosho,” Olminsky said. “Now beat it. You’ll fly tonight.”
Gribkov tried not to let his face show what he was thinking as he walked back to brief his crew. That was a good idea for any Soviet citizen at any time, and all the more so when trying to digest news like this. He supposed the satellites were going to try to get out of the war their tutor had dragged them into. Germany’s less than eager allies had done their best to escape when things stopped going Hitler’s way.
As he told the men what the next mission would be, he watched their expressions freeze up the way his had when Olminsky told him. Dropping bombs on the enemy was one thing. Dropping them where a lot of people were your friends was another…wasn’t it?
Vladimir Zorin went through a cigarette in a few quick, harsh, deep puffs. “Well, this is something different, isn’t it?” he said. Not many questions could pack more possible meanings into them.
“Oh, maybe a little,” Gribkov answered: another handful of words with more than a handful of meanings.
The copilot ground the butt under his boot and lit a new smoke. “Shame Leonid isn’t here,” he said. “He could read the angles better than anybody else I ever knew.” Boris feared that Zorin was right. And what did that say about what the former navigator had done?
“We’ll deal with the rebels’ treason the way it deserves,” Yefim Arzhanov declared. The quick navigator, unlike the dead one, didn’t seem afflicted by doubts. Did that make him a lucky man or a fool? How much difference was there, when you got down to it?
They took off a little before midnight. Boris’ grip on the yoke eased off when he was sure the Tu-4 would stay airborne. Full of high-octane avgas and TNT, the bomber was itself a bomb that, if not quite of atomic proportions, would take out a big chunk of the landscape if one-or two-of the overstrained engines failed trying to lift it off the ground.
The plane circled up to bombing altitude while still over the Czech half of Czechoslovakia. Then it flew southeast. Gribkov wasn’t used to going in that direction on the way to a mission. It was the kind of route he might have to fly if unrest ever broke out inside the rodina. He didn’t even want to think about such a thing, much less do it.
As Olminsky had promised, no fighters rose up inside Czechoslovakia to assail the Tu-4 and its companions. Radar made finding Bratislava in the darkness far easier than it would have been during the last war. Then, on a long-range flight (which this, of course, wasn’t), you were lucky if your bombs came down within ten kilometers of their intended target. Destruction was more efficient now.
So was flak. The Slovak rebels did have guns down there on the ground. For all Boris knew, they were 88s the Nazis had given to Tiso’s men. Whatever they were, they had excellent direction. Shells started bursting below the incoming bombers, and then among them. A Tu-4 spun out of the sky, fire all up and down the wings.
“Drop the bombs!” Gribkov called to Alexander Lavrov as near misses buffeted the plane.
Away they went. Not thirty seconds later, a direct hit knocked out both starboard engines and killed the bomber’s pressurization. Gribkov had an oxygen mask on, or he would have slid straight into unconsciousness and death.
“Get out!” he screamed over the intercom. “Get out while you can!”
The hatch was by the main engineer’s station. The engineer and radio operator were already gone before Boris got back there. He jumped into the blackness. When he yanked the rip cord, his parachute opened. Shivering, he slid down, down, down toward whatever waited on the ground.
–
Ihor Shevchenko’s sergeant sent him a suspicious stare. Anatoly Prishvin had been doing that ever since Ihor wound up in his section. “I’ve got my eye on you, Ukrainian,” he said for the third time that day.
Rolling tobacco in a torn chunk of newspaper and lighting it seemed a better idea than answering. Ihor had heard cracks like that during the Great Patriotic War, too. Most of the time, ignoring them was the smartest thing you could do.