“If they catch us, cut my throat with that razor, Ninochka. Promise.”
Yelena’s face, white as frost now with terror, the most precious thing in the world. “I love you,” Nina whispered. She cupped her bare hand and her gloved hand around Yelena’s cheeks. “I love you, and I will kill you before letting the Fritzes get you, if that is what you want.” Anything you want. I love you enough for anything, even that.
Yelena squeezed her eyes shut, gulping. Nina pulled her closer. The drone of the Messerschmitt’s engine retreated.
They waited.
“Your heart’s beating steady as a drum,” Yelena whispered. “You aren’t even afraid, are you?”
“No. Because we’re safe. No one ever catches a rusalka, much less a pair. We slip through their hands like water.”
Yelena buried her face in Nina’s fur overalls. Nina stroked her hair, looking at the sky overhead. Icy stars winking out with the coming day. So cold. She closed her eyes and saw the turquoise water of the Old Man rising up to meet her, and then her eyes flew open with a jerk.
“You started to doze,” Yelena whispered. “Waiting to see if you would be strafed to death by a Messerschmitt, you actually dozed off.”
“It’s been a long night.” Nina stretched her hearing out as far as she could listen. No buzz of engines, no thump of bullets. “Can we risk it?”
“We’ll have to. It’s almost day.”
“They could be lying in wait—”
“We’d have heard them land.”
They made their way out of the brush. So strange to be on the ground, snow crunching underfoot, strange hills and jagged trees unfamiliar against the horizon. Up in a plane you forgot what it looked like down in the middle of things. Life was either a cockpit or a set of interchangeable airdromes and runways.
Yelena let out a long breath. “If the Rusalka’s wrecked, we’ll have to walk back.”
“Then we walk back, like Larisa Radchikova and her pilot last month.” They’d bailed out in the neutral zone and made it back walking through the active line, both of them sliced head to toe by shrapnel.
Nina and Yelena held their breath as they came back to the Rusalka, canted drunkenly in the middle of the field. The wings were so holed they looked like a screen. Yelena went to inspect the engine, while Nina hopped up to look into the cockpits.
“Well, we still have an engine.” Yelena’s voice floated up as she poked her head among the wires. “And a propeller . . . most of it.”
Nina surveyed the mass of splinters where the instrument panels used to be. “We have controls. Not much else, but we each have a stick.”
“All a U-2 really needs is a stick, an engine, and a pilot.” Yelena reclaimed her pistol, standing back. “I’d rather trust the Rusalka to get us home than try to walk it.” They had no way of knowing if this was German territory or not; they could walk into their own troops or into a nest of Fritzes.
Nina joined her in staring at the propeller. A third of the blade was missing on one side. “Knock a third off the opposing blade to equalize it?” Nina said at last. “It’s already bullet riddled; we could break the end off without tools.”
Yelena looked a little white, but nodded.
Nina tugged her down to eye level. “Yelenushka. Are you all right?”
Her pilot managed another nod. Nina wasn’t sure she believed her, but nodded back. They worked as fast as they could, bashing at the propeller blade until they could get it evened up with the shortened one; Nina gave the prop a swing to get it going as Yelena coaxed the engine to life, and fifteen minutes later they were airborne, rising sluggishly after a takeoff twice as long as their nimble little plane normally needed. “We need height,” Nina called as they wobbled along. She felt naked, flying in daylight. At least it was deep winter, when dawn looked more like deep blue twilight. Yelena brought the Rusalka up, the engine groaning as though mortally wounded. It’s just a flesh wound, Nina told her plane. A few days in repairs, and you’ll be good as new.
“I meant what I said.” Yelena’s voice sounded tinny, and Nina didn’t think it was the interphones. “If we ever get shot down, I’d rather you kill me than be taken captive.”
“No one’s getting shot down. We’re almost home.” Twenty minutes at most.
“He could still be back there. The Messerschmitt.”
“He’s not back there.”
“He might have lain in wait till we got back in the air—”
“He’s not there!”
No reply. Nina could see Yelena’s shoulders moving as she breathed in unsteady gulps. The Rusalka wobbled along, jolting Nina back and forth in her cockpit like a nut jumping in a frying pan. A frying pan full of hot oil, she thought, and then thought at least the nut would be warm. She could still feel sleep hissing in her ear, that terrible urge to close her eyes and drift. Go away, you dense night-slut, Nina told sleep. We’re a hair from going down in a ball of flame.
The dense fog of night was thinning. “Airdrome should be below,” Nina called. “Correct fifteen degrees east—” The night’s flying would long be over, but the girls would still be there, eyes on the sky. They always waited when a plane was late.
A flare blossomed, red and welcome: Here is the runway. Nina let out a long shaky breath in relief, and that was when Yelena shouted and threw the U-2 sideways.
The Rusalka shrieked as though she’d been gored. She shook so violently Nina thought the wings were going to shear off. “Yelena—”
“He’s lining us up—” Yelena’s voice came through the interphones, rising higher and higher. “I see him ahead—”
“It’s just landing flares.” Nina clawed free of her safety harness, the third time in the last hour. “No one’s firing.”
“He’s firing on us—” The Rusalka gave a sickening shudder, nose dropping. “We’re hit—”
“We are not hit. You’re hallucinating.” It had happened to other pilots; overstrain conjuring danger from nowhere, landing flares becoming enemy fire. Lunging forward over the broken remnants of windscreen, Nina grabbed for Yelena’s hair where it escaped her flying cap. She yanked Yelena off the controls, bringing her head slamming back against her seat. “Stop!” Nina roared, grabbing with the other hand for her own stick. Her ungloved fingers were so numb she couldn’t feel it. She gave a blind yank, and the engine sputtered. The Rusalka flattened out from her lurching spiral, fighting Nina with everything it had. She didn’t dare let Yelena go; if her pilot clawed the stick back and sent them into one more spin, this poor wounded bird would stall out. Nina muscled the nose down, still standing in an awkward crouch half in and half out of her cockpit, one hand anchoring her pilot and one gripping the stick for dear life. Her entire shoulder screamed with the effort of bracing the descent. The Rusalka dived toward the ground, bounced hard enough to rattle every tooth in Nina’s head, then flung her forward over the shattered windscreen. A white-hot sliver of agony bolted through her forearm, but Nina didn’t care, they were on the ground, rolling safe across frozen earth, and Yelena was all right. She was crying out—I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—and she wouldn’t be saying that if she were still hallucinating in panic.
Nina sagged back in her seat, pain stabbing her arm, drenched in sweat, shivering all over because the sweat droplets were already freezing on her damp skin. She couldn’t feel her right hand, and it wouldn’t come loose from the stick, but that didn’t matter. They were on the ground. Muzzily, Nina patted the U-2’s shattered instrument panel. “Good girl.” The world tilted.
In the thirty seconds it took for the flood of waiting pilots to reach the Rusalka, Nina was unconscious.
“WHO ARE THEY giving you to navigate?”
“Zoya Buzina,” Yelena answered. “Her pilot’s down with a bullet through the knee. Ground fire.”
“Zoya Buzina?” Nina glowered up from her bed. “The redhead from Kiev with the buckteeth?”
“Don’t sulk, she’s good!”
“Not as good as me.” Jealousy pricked Nina, seeing Yelena head off to fly with someone else while she lay in bed. Two weeks grounded, just because a shard of windscreen went through her forearm! “If she doesn’t bring you back without a scratch, I’ll knock her buckteeth down her throat.”
That got a laugh from Yelena. The dormitory was empty besides the two of them—Nina fuming on her cot, arm in a sling, Yelena perched at the other end in her fur overalls. The others had trooped out for the evening’s briefing. “Keep the hole in your arm warm,” Dusia had said, ruffling Nina’s hair. “Matches the hole in your head, you crazy rabbit.” They all made jokes, but over sympathetic eyes. They all understood how much it hurt to be forbidden the air.
Yelena took a deep breath, and Nina braced herself. “I nearly killed us both—”