Free Bombs Away by Harry Turtledove Page A

seat.”
    Hank McCutcheon was the fifth man he summoned to the lectern. The major came back with the envelope in his right hand. He didn’t touch the seal till his behind was on the folding chair again; he took Harrison literally. When he did open the envelope, Bill saw a name in big black letters: HARBIN . Below the name, a note read
This plane will carry the device. Others in the flight will support and decoy.
    Harbin. Bill knew it was a good-sized city in Manchuria. How many tens of thousands of people would he help fry tonight? Better not to think about some things.
This plane will carry the device.
How could you not think about that?
    He tried to turn himself into a machine. Along with the other ten men in the crew, he spent the rest of the daylight hours checking out the B-29. The engines ran hot; they always had. If one failed while you were taking off fully loaded, you had to try to put the plane down.
    And if that happened, Marian and Linda would collect on his government life insurance. Pilots had done it and walked away, but the odds lay somewhere between bad and worse.
    They took off after dark. The Japs hadn’t been able to shoot down day-flying B-29s. The North Koreans and their Russian and Chinese pals damn well could. Radar, better guns, more and better planes…A MiG-15’s big guns could tear a bomber to bits in nothing flat.
    Twin Mustang F-82s flew escort for the bombers. The night fighters carried their own radar. They had more range and more speed than almost any other prop jobs. Put one up against a MiG, though, and it was in deep. The guys in those cockpits had to know it. They climbed in and flew anyhow.
    A little flak came up at the planes as they droned north. When they got over North Korea, it grew heavier. B-29s had often bombed Red positions there.
    They took a dogleg to the east to skirt MiG Alley. When they crossed the Yalu instead of turning back, the radioman came forward from his position aft of the cockpit and said, “I’m getting all kinds of hysterical traffic in Russian and Chinese. They know something new has been added.”
    “Understand any?” Bill asked.
    “Not a fucking word, sir,” Sergeant Hyman Ginsberg answered proudly.
    Harbin lay a little more than four hundred miles north of the river: just over an hour’s flying time. The Reds had time to scramble only a few planes. Sergeant Ginsberg reported the F-82s clashing with MiG-9s: second-string Russian jets, a lot like the German Me-262 from the end of World War II. Even a second-string jet could shoot down a none-too-new bomber. Bill was glad the Twin Mustangs were on the job.
    “Harbin dead ahead,” the navigator reported. He had a radar screen to guide them to the target. Hank and Bill had lights on the ground. Harbin wasn’t blacked out—the Red Chinese hadn’t looked for American visitors. Some flak climbed toward them. They were up past 30,000 feet, but even so…
    “Let it go!” McCutcheon called to the bomb bay through the intercom. The B-29, suddenly five tons lighter, heeled away in a sharp escape turn to starboard. The bomb was on a parachute, to give them enough time to get away before the pressure-sensitive switch set it off.
    —
    When the antiaircraft guns started going off and woke him up, Vasili Yasevich thought it was the knock on the door for which he’d been waiting so long. He’d been a toddler when his father and mother fled from Russia to Harbin after the Whites lost the civil war to the Reds and their foreign backers pulled out.
    For a while, Harbin had been as much Russian as Chinese. Cyrillic signs were as common as ideographs. Vasili’s father ran a pharmacy. His mother, a talented seamstress, made clothes for her exiled countrywomen. The family got along.
    Then the Japanese burst out of Korea. Manchuria, loosely connected to the rest of China, became Manchukuo, a puppet of Japan’s. Life grew harder. But Japan and Russia weren’t officially at war. The Yaseviches weren’t Jews, as