“Thank you. That should work,” Truman said. “In the meantime, I’ll get off the plane at the airport and get on the telephone and see what I can do to let the country and the world know I’m still in business.”
Major Pesky nodded. “Sounds like a good idea.”
The President wasn’t so sure. If Washington and New York were down for the count, he wouldn’t have an easy time getting word out. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the hubs of all the radio and television networks…Gone now, probably.
He gulped coffee for an hour and a half. Then Pesky smoothly landed the Independence. Reporters snapped photos of Truman as he got off. A boss’ phone in the terminal did very little for him or the country. He couldn’t make the connections he needed, and the local operators didn’t know enough to be helpful. Frustrated, he retreated to the airliner and drank more coffee.
As soon as the sky grew light, the DC-6 flew north. It wasn’t far from Richmond to Washington. Ninety years before, Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis had both fretted about that. Now…Now Truman watched smoke from fires still not quenched rise high into the air. Was what he breathed getting more and more radioactive as he neared the capital? He could wonder, but he didn’t know-or care.
He’d seen photos of what A-bombs did to cities. He’d visited the West Coast in the wake of the Russian attacks there. Now he saw it again, with that smoke still swirling up and up and making him cough as the Independence’s ventilators sucked it into the fuselage. The Washington Monument was a melted, toppled stub. Not much was left of the Pentagon-part of one side of the five. The Capitol’s shattered dome lay on the Mall, in front of what remained of the ravaged, burnt-out building. Of the White House he could make out nothing at all.
And he flew three miles above the disaster. Burned and charred and blinded and radiated people in terrible anguish, tens of thousands of them, were too small to make out at such a distance. So were the dead: more tens of thousands. But they were there. Truman knew they were. Some of them were his. All of them were somebody’s.
“Stalin will pay, all right,” he whispered. “Oh, how he’ll pay!”
–
Commander Alexei Vavilov raised a glass in salute. “Congratulations!” he told Boris Gribkov. “To the glory and vengeance you and your crew have given the Soviet Union! To victory over the imperialists!” He tossed back his shot of vodka.
Gribkov’s copilot stood up and hoisted his glass. “To Commander Vavilov and the splendid S-71!” Anton Presnyakov said.
He drank. So did all the flyers. So did Vavilov and the other officers serving on the Red Fleet submarine. On and under the sea as in the air, the USSR learned from its foes. Just as the Tu-4 was a virtually identical copy of the American B-29, so the submarines that came out of Red Fleet Project 613 borrowed heavily from German Type XXI U-boats.
The Yankees, at least, had also got good use from their heavy bombers. The Hitlerites developed the Type XXI too late for their fancy new subs to take more than one or two combat cruises. But the design made all previous boats obsolete. It had tremendous batteries, a snorkel to power the diesels and charge those batteries while most of the submarine stayed hidden beneath the water, and such perfect streamlining that it was faster submerged than on the surface.
As German U-boats had before them, attack submarines like the S-71 harried the lifeline between America and Europe. Unlike the Kriegsmarine, the Red Fleet didn’t delude itself into thinking it could starve England into surrender. But it could sink enemy ships full of food and weapons and men, and it could make life difficult for the ones that did manage to cross.
And its submarines could rescue bomber crews if not bombers, and take them back to the rodina to fly more missions in new planes. That was what the S-71 was doing, along with Gribkov didn’t know how many other boats. Some of them would head back to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk with no airmen aboard. Not all the bombers that struck at America would have reached their oceanic meeting points. Not all of them would have reached their targets, either.
War was like that, however much people wished it weren’t. Things went wrong. The bastards on the other side proved more clever than you thought they would. You lost friends…or they lost you.
Briefly, Boris thought of Leonid Tsederbaum again. Now he had Washington on his conscience along with Paris and the rest of the places he’d smashed. The old navigator hadn’t been able to stand it. The fighting went on without him.
As if to prove as much, Commander Vavilov’s executive officer rose to make another toast. Lieutenant Yuri Krasnov lifted his glass and said, “To Comrade Filevich, whose navigation put you down right where it should have!”
The men gathered under the conning tower-the only place in the boat with room for them all-drank together. Svyatoslav Filevich offered his own toast: “To the brave submariners who take all this crowding not just to save us but to carry the fight to the foe!”
Everyone in the Tu-4’s crew drank. So did the submarine’s officers, but they seemed amused. “If you think this boat is crowded,” Vavilov said, “you should have seen the ones we used during the Great Patriotic War. We were as bad as the Germans. The junior ratings slept on top of the fish in the forward torpedo room till we used a few and gave them more room to swing their hammocks.”
“Maybe it was worse then, Commander,” Gribkov said. “I mean no disrespect when I tell you it’s still pretty bad.”
The boat was divided into three pressure compartments. Going from one to the next meant slithering through a round hatchway not much wider than a man’s torso. That might have been the smallest breach practicable in a bulkhead, but it was far from convenient. Corridors were so narrow, two men going in opposite directions had trouble squeezing past each other. Every so often, metal things with corners and edges stuck out into them. The top of the pressure tube made a low ceiling. The pipes running along it had valves and fittings that could knock an unwary man in a hurry for a loop.
Boris and the rest of the flyers kept quiet about one more aspect of how crowded the S-71 was. The boat stank. It smelled of dirty sailors and dirtier socks, of food going off and of heads that had backed up, all mixed in with the heavy reek of diesel fuel. The men wore shabby clothes and let their beards grow while they were at sea. Shaving soap was a luxury judged needless. By the fug, so was any other kind of soap.
As a man familiar with commanding and maintaining one kind of complicated mechanism, Gribkov used his time as a passenger aboard the S-71 as a chance to watch another skilled professional in charge of a different, perhaps even more complex, piece of machinery.
On the Tu-4, what the pilot and navigator could see was still an important part of completing a mission. Except when making an attack run with periscope raised, Alexei Vavilov depended almost completely on his sensors. Men with earphones constantly monitored the passive sonar, listening for any warning that U.S. Navy or Royal Navy vessels were near enough to be dangerous.
“I don’t expect to surface till we’re up in the Arctic Ocean,” Vavilov told him. “We’d be asking for it if we did. The snorkel will keep the diesels going and the batteries happy. If we show ourselves on the surface, even at night, the enemy’s radar will spot us and he’ll send out planes after us.”
“More and more gadgets,” Gribkov said. “It’s the same in the air. Pretty soon the gadgets will do all the fighting, and the crews will just come along for the ride.”