“Nice introduction,” the President said when he clasped Pankow’s hand. “You kept it short, and that’s the most important thing.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Pankow replied. “Keep walloping the snot out of those damn Russians-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. And never trust ’em further than you can throw ’em. They’ll cheat if they get half a chance. A quarter of a chance, even.”
“I have noticed that, yes,” Truman said. A man who spoke with a faint Polish accent might well be one of the few people on earth who trusted Russians even less than Truman did. His reasons would be personal and historical, not political, but that only made them more sincere.
A limousine with a police escort took Truman to the airport. Red lights flashed, clearing traffic from the road. It was after midnight; there wasn’t much traffic to clear. Spotlights guided the limo to the waiting Independence. As soon as the President climbed the wheeled stairway and boarded the DC-6, its engines thundered to life and the big props began to spin.
The plane rolled down the runway. It smoothly climbed into the air. Truman leaned back in his seat with a weary sigh. Washington soon, Washington and the war.
–
Boris Gribkov peered out through the Tu-4’s Plexiglas windscreen. All he saw was ocean. Waves in the North Atlantic rolled on endlessly from the northwest toward the southeast. He circled between Norway and Iceland, low enough and far enough away from land that radar sets on Jan Mayen and the Faeroes wouldn’t spot him. Patrol planes…Patrol planes were a chance he simply had to take.
Although the sun had set, it was a long way from dark. He was up near the Arctic Circle, farther north than Leningrad and its famed white nights. That was another chance he had to take. He wouldn’t have had to worry about it during the winter. It was May, though. Things happened when they happened, not when it was most convenient for them to happen.
He spoke to the radar operator over the intercom: “Anything?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked the question, or even the tenth.
“No, Comrade Pilot. I’m sorry,” Arkady Oppokov replied. The first few times, he hadn’t apologized.
Muttering to himself, Gribkov spoke to the navigator instead: “We are where we’re supposed to be?” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question, either.
“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” Svyatoslav Filevich replied.
“You’re sure?” Boris knew he wouldn’t have asked that question of Leonid Tsederbaum. He’d had confidence in the Jew. He might not have asked it of Yefim Arzhanov, either. But they weren’t here. Filevich was.
“Yes, Comrade Pilot,” he repeated. It also wasn’t the first time Gribkov had asked him that.
Boris fumed. That was all he could do. No, he could also eye his fuel gauge and worry. If his crew didn’t find a milch cow pretty soon, he’d have to abort and fly back to Murmansk. That would effectively end his career. They wouldn’t blame his crewmen. They wouldn’t blame the milch cow’s pilot. They’d blame him, for not flying the mission he was ordered to fly. He had the responsibility, and blame was the other side of that coin.
He was about to query Oppokov yet again when the radar operator suddenly exclaimed, “I have a target, Comrade Pilot! Bearing 270, speed 300 kilometers an hour, range fifteen kilometers, altitude…a long piss above the sea. That’s got to be why I’ve had so much trouble picking it up.”
“Here’s hoping.” Gribkov swung the Tu-4 west. He wasn’t much more than a long piss above the sea himself. His last couple of practice runs at in-flight refueling had been low-level missions. He knew how to do it. He’d done it. It still made him nervous every time.
He also hoped the plane Oppokov’s set had found wasn’t another thirsty calf. That would be a colossal balls-up. He didn’t know what he’d do then. Head back to Murmansk, he supposed, and try to take his medicine like a man.
But the pilot of the Tu-4 ahead waggled his wings when he spotted Gribkov. The tail gunner flashed a green lamp. Anton Presnyakov answered with a red one. Here, milch cow and calf had to connect without radio contact. The Soviet Union didn’t control this stretch of ocean, which was putting things mildly. The enemy was bound to monitor every frequency.
Up Boris came, taking station astern of the milch cow. Its pilot deployed the filler cable. Lev Vaksman used his own to catch that one and guide it to the wingtip recess where it needed to go.
“We are taking on fuel, Comrade Pilot!” the engineer said. He didn’t sound amazed the way he had the first time, but he still seemed excited.
“My gauge also shows it,” Gribkov replied. “Wait till we’re good and full before you turn loose of it.”
“Yes, sir!” There was an order Vaksman agreed with.
Uncoupling went as smoothly as the rest of the process. Boris waved to the milch cow’s pilot as he pulled away. He didn’t know whether the other man could see him, but he made the effort.
That milch cow kept circling. Boris didn’t know how many calves it could feed. What he didn’t know, no interrogator could tear out of him. On the kinds of missions he flew, capture was only too possible.
“What’s our course now, Svyatoslav?” he asked the navigator.
“Comrade Pilot, I suggest 225. That will send us out into the wider ocean about equidistant between the Faeroes and Iceland,” Filevich replied. “We want to stay as far from land as we can.”
“Think so, do you?” Boris said dryly. “Good enough. Course 225 it will be.” He swung the Tu-4 to the southwest.
Every kilometer brought deeper darkness as the sun sank farther below the horizon. That was all to the good. The Americans and English could read a map. They knew where the ocean gaps were. Aerial patrols and radar-carrying picket ships watched them. But if the Tu-4 stayed low, an enemy plane’s radar looking down from above had trouble telling its echo from that of the Atlantic. Picket ships couldn’t spot it from very far away. Its IFF insisted it was an American plane itself.
On and on. On and on. No attacks. No challenges. They’d made it through one danger zone. The next one, the bad one, was still hours away. After a while, Presnyakov said, “It’s a big ocean, isn’t it?”
“Not next to the Pacific,” Boris answered. He’d made that flight. He’d come back from it, too. Maybe he could do it again. That would be something to brag about! (Though poor Tsederbaum would tell him otherwise.)
On and on. He swallowed a benzedrine pill, then another one. They would have their way with him later, if there was a later. For now, they kept him awake and made him alert. On and on. He saw no freighters heading for England. With luck, no freighters saw him, either.
“We are approaching the East Coast of the United States,” Filevich reported some time later. He sounded awed. “We should make landfall over Atlantic City, New Jersey.”
Before long, Gribkov saw lights ahead. The Yankees didn’t bother with a blackout in this part of the country. Radar made navigation easier, but lights helped. The Tu-4’s IFF went right on claiming it was just another B-29 on its lawful occasions. Why a B-29 would be roaring along without lights at an altitude that made skyscrapers dangerous and heading straight for the capital of the USA was a question the IFF couldn’t answer.
They crossed the Delaware Bay, then zoomed low over Dover, Delaware. Another stretch of water-the Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis, Maryland, was a small town.
Faizulla Ikramov, the radioman, knew some English. “They seem to be wondering about us, Comrade Pilot,” he reported. “They don’t know what we are, though. We’re so low and so hard to pick up, they aren’t sure we’re anything.”
“Good,” Boris said. Washington was only a few minutes away. “We put it between the White House and the Capitol, if we can,” he reminded navigator and bombardier. “They’ve tried to kill the great Stalin. Now we go after Truman.”