Final impact

He pulled back on the controls and fed power into the turbojets, taking them into a climb that would top out at the plane’s operational ceiling of thirteen thousand meters. Once the bombardier gave the all-clear, the device would be released, but it would deploy three parachutes almost as soon as it fell away, slowing the rate of descent and allowing them to clear the area and record the blast on the banks of equipment back in the fuselage. Gadalov had never questioned any of these precautions during their long period of training. One did not question orders in the Red Army Air Force. But he could ponder their meaning as he lay in his bunk at night, and he had concluded that all of the rumors of a doomsday weapon were probably close to the truth.

The voice of his copilot Smedlov crackled into his earphones. “Ten thousand meters.”

The little MiGs kept pace with them, climbing into the sky like silver arrows.

“Goggles,” he ordered.

Smedlov fitted his protective eyewear and took the stick while Gadalov adjusted his own. Darkness fell over the bright afternoon world.

“Gologre, have you fitted your eyeglasses?” Smedlov asked.

“Da,” came the terse reply.

The navigator-bombardier was obviously concentrating furiously.

“Come three degrees south,” Gadalov said, and Smedlov eased the Tu-16 around just a bit as they continued to claw for altitude.

The angle of ascent meant that he’d lost sight of the city. Only Gologre down in the glass bubble could still see the target. It occurred to Gadalov that he would probably never see Lodz again. Gologre would be the last man on earth to see it before it was destroyed.

“Twelve thousand meters.”

His arms ached from the strain of controlling the powerful aircraft. He had been grasping the cut-down steering wheel like some stupid peasant with his first motorized tractor, fearful that anything less than an iron grip would allow the monster to get away from him. He tried to relax but found that his heart would not stop pounding.

He forcefully pushed away any thoughts of the people he was about to kill. Originally they’d been briefed to attack an army in the field, but Moscow had changed those orders only a day ago. The intelligence officer who’d delivered the preflight briefing had told them that the fascists had withdrawn most of their troops into the city, and so it would need to be attacked directly.

Again, Gadalov did not question his orders.

But a distant voice whispered to him that he was about to kill thousands of innocent Poles, as well as their German occupiers. With a Herculean effort, he shut down the voice.

“Twelve thousand, five hundred meters.”

He could feel the bomber straining for purchase in the thin atmosphere. Leveling off, he found that he could see the city after all, but it was much closer than he imagined.

“Open the bomb bay doors,” he ordered.

Smedlov slowly wrenched back the levers, and at once they all felt the aerodynamics change as the great steel shutters groaned open down in the belly of the aircraft. It was a clear day, with the sun dropping gently toward the horizon. In peacetime it would have been quite pleasant down there in Lodz. Gadalov had an uncle who’d worked as a machinist in one of the textile mills before the Great War, and the old man still spoke fondly of the time he’d spent in Poland’s second city. Wages were high compared with Russia, and a skilled workman could earn his keep with more than a little left over to spend in the taverns, some of them hundreds of years old, along Piotrkowska Street.

The antiflash goggles allowed Gadalov to view the city even though he was more or less staring into the sun. Apart from a few fires burning here and there, it seemed unremarkable, even quiet. Large swathes of green parkland broke up the gray urban cityscape.

“Coming up on target,” Gologre announced.

He was employing the large octagonal marketplace in front of the town hall as his aiming point. Gadalov was wary as they approached, assuming that with such a concentration of German forces inside the city, there would be heavy flak. But apart from one brief line of tracer fire that came twisting up out of what looked like a factory district, there was nothing.

Probably saving ammunition for massed raids.

Gologre’s voice crackled through his headset again. “Release point in ten, nine, eight…”

Gadalov concentrated furiously on maintaining a steady course. The fighter escorts had all fled by now, as they had practiced so many times. They were alone in the sky above Lodz, their destinies linked with so many thousands of lives below them for just a few more seconds.

“…three, two, one…”

“Bomb released!”

As soon as he felt the tug of separation Gadalov hauled the giant aircraft around and opened the throttles, to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the doomed city. He waited, every muscle singing with tension, for the flash and the shock wave they’d been warned to expect.