Well, very soon now, he’d show them.
D-DAY + 33. 5 JUNE 1944. 1708 HOURS.
Six fighters remained close to the Tupolev, guarding it like sheepdogs. Their comrades had moved ahead to clear the skies above Lodz of any German aircraft, but none had been found. The city’s garrison was cut off, bypassed by the Red Army and hunkered down for a long siege. Gadalov knew that a number of divisions from the Far East had been detailed to bottle up the Germans inside, but he tried not to think about them. He’d been assured that the Soviet forces were far enough back from the city to survive the blast and its aftereffects. But he wasn’t so sure. The precautions they were taking just in delivering the bomb spoke of something quite extraordinary.
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.
Gologre watched as the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city fell away from the dark womb of the Tupolev Tu-16.
After five seconds three enormous parachutes deployed and slowed its decent to a more measured pace. Lieutenant Gologre had used the latest bombsight to line up on the Lodz town hall, but a light breeze carried the egg-shaped, four-and-a-half-thousand-kilogram load slightly northward. He had been briefed on the effects of the device and knew only too well what he was about to unleash.
The device, modeled on the original Fat Man, was almost cartoonish in appearance, with a swollen body and oversized stabilizing fins. It was so very obviously a bomb that nobody would be foolish enough to stand staring at it as it descended, swinging gently beneath the triple canopy. A small web-cam in the nose sent pictures of the ground back to a mil-grade EMP-hardened flexipad on the Tupolev. Later, bomb damage analysts would be able to replay images of German troops and a handful of Polish civilians fleeing the gardens as the bomb dropped ever so slowly into their midst.
Code-named “Gori,” it was an implosion device. In the center of the bulbous casing sat six and a half kilograms of delta-phase plutonium alloy. Some of this had come from the reactors on the British vessel Vanguard, but most had been bred in the Kamchatka Sharashka. Shaped into a nine-centimeter sphere with a small cavity at its center, the pit-as it was called-was actually composed of two hemispheric halves, separated by a thin golden gasket to prevent premature penetration by shock wave jets that might trigger the bomb’s neutron initiator too early. While Beria’s researchers had not been able to find blueprints for a bomb in the Vanguard’s archives, there was still a wealth of detail about the construction of early atomic weaponry, the sort of thing that the Soviet Union would have had to ferret out with a massive espionage program before the Emergence.
Nearly half of Gori’s weight came from its trigger, a high-explosive casing that resembled a giant soccer ball nearly half a meter thick. The hexagonal pieces formed a lens around the plutonium that transformed a convex, expanding shock wave into a concave, converging one.