Galina read off the headings that evening, giving the night’s target along the peninsula coast. Nina still felt strange to be the one listening to the headings rather than giving them. A night’s uneventful flying, seven runs. “Very low overcast coming in off the water,” Galina began as Nina made the wide returning turn on the last run.
“I see it.” Nina dived down, but the gray masses of cloud snowballed before her eyes as the wind picked up. She pressed the U-2 lower through the dense cloud . . . lower . . .
“Correct course sixty degrees west.” Galina sounded nervous. “We’re pushing out too far—”
“I need to get under this cloud.” The U-2 bounced like a ball in a chute. Three hundred meters, two hundred, and finally the plane bottomed out under the low hover of cloud. Fuck your mother, Nina thought in a sudden drench of panic. They were over the sea. Nina craned her head frantically but there was nothing in sight but lashing, roiling water, no land visible in this dense overhang. “Find me a heading. Find me land—”
“We came too far east, over the water instead of—”
“I don’t care where the water is, just get me off it!”
The clouds whirled, shaking the U-2, pressing them down. Under a hundred meters, fifty . . . Nina watched the altimeter, hypnotized. West, Galina was shouting through the interphones, set a heading west—but the winds blew dead east, pushing them back as they strained forward, controls fighting Nina’s grip. The U-2 sat almost motionless in the air, the forward kick of the engine canceled by the backward thrust of the wind, wobbling just to maintain altitude.
If we run out of fuel and fall into the sea, she thought in stark terror, we’ll sink and drown before we can fight out of our cockpits.
Pull yourself together, rusalka bitch, her father growled. But all Nina could think was that she had run thousands of kilometers west to get away from the lake, had run clear into the sky to get away from the lake, and she was still going to die by drowning.
The altimeter needle lay flat at the bottom of the dial. Eight meters, she thought, we are at eight meters’ height. Hovering just above the roiling dark water, roiling dark clouds pushing down from above, squeezed between a giant’s palms—
“We’re not going to drown,” Galina shouted through the interphones. She had, Nina realized distantly, been shouting it for quite some time. “We’re not going to drown.”
Yes, we are, Nina thought. The bigger waves were splashing up and wetting their wings; she could actually see it.
“We’re not going to drown.”
Yes, we are. Her stick arm was a stiff screech of pain all the way up to the shoulder. It would be easier to stop fighting the wind, give the rudder a good hard yank to one side and plant them propeller first in the water. Do it hard enough and they’d both be unconscious before they drowned. Nina stared at the sea, hypnotized.
“We’re not going to drown.” Galina repeated it, a monotonous rhythmic chant. “We’renotgoingtodrown.” She repeated it until the ferocious tearing of the wind relented just a little, repeated it as Nina still sat frozen. It was Galina who bore the U-2 around into the teeth of the breeze and clawed some wobbling height, still chanting “We’re not going to drown.” She was still repeating it when Nina came out of her terrified daze and took the stick, bringing them down on the first available spot on the abandoned coast. They both sagged in their cockpits as the engine spun down, and finally Galina shut up. Nina clawed free of her safety harness and turned to look at her navigator. The girl was ghastly pale, head thrown back and eyes closed; her cockpit was spattered with vomit. “We didn’t drown,” Nina told her weakly.
No thanks to you, rusalka, her father said. Nina knew she deserved the contempt. Shivers of terror were still coursing through her, but that terrible deep freeze that had held her motionless and staring at the water was gone. She wondered if Yelena had felt like that when she’d hallucinated the Messerschmitt.
You had a panic. Everyone has them. Nina had been the one to tell Yelena that.
“Thank you,” she told her new navigator now.
“Yelena Vassilovna said you hated flying over water,” Galina said surprisingly. “She said if we ever got in a bad way over seas, I should tell you we wouldn’t drown and be ready to jump on the stick.”
“She told you that?”
“I asked her everything that would help me fly for you. You’re my pilot,” Galina said as though it were obvious.
Nina felt herself smiling. “What are you afraid of, Galya?” Calling her navigator by nickname for the first time.
A long pause. “The black vans.”
Nina nodded. Normally one didn’t speak of such things, but here on the barren edge of the sea there was no poisonous listening ear to hear and report. “They came for my uncle seven years ago,” Galya went on. “His factory foreman denounced him as an agitator. He went to the Lubyanka and never came out. My aunt had to denounce him too or be taken herself. That’s what I fear, the van stopping at my door.”
“I can’t protect you from that,” Nina said. The van could come for anyone, for the smallest of reasons or no reason at all. “The van can’t come for you in the air, Galya, so what do you fear up here?”
“Those new German shells, the ones with red and green and white tracers. When they split into dozens of little projectiles in the dark, I think of flowers . . .” Galya shuddered.
“Well, if we see flowers and you freeze, I’ll get you out of it,” Nina promised. “We stall out over water again, you’ll get me out of it. In the meantime, you can fly home.”
Galina brightened. They wobbled home, and it wasn’t till they returned that they learned another U-2 had gone down in the sea, in the same low-rolling overhang of cloud.
Sixteen women died in all, over that summer and fall. Nina hoped all this territory was worth it, this unseen ground they were clawing back from the Germans. She couldn’t even see the gains they were dying for, just that it was soaked in blood.
“Who are these new girls?” Yelena asked in bewilderment when she came back from Novorossiysk in October, looking around the barracks. “They’re so young!”
“New arrivals.” Girl volunteers to the front, every one of them round-eyed at the sight of the gaunt female pilots in their bulky overalls, more and more of which were pinned with Orders of the Red Banner and Orders of the Red Star. Nina and Yelena both had one of each now, and there were whispers that the first set of HSUs were going to be passed down—the gold stars of Hero of the Soviet Union, highest decoration in the Motherland.
“My pilot sleeps with a razor under her pillow and she knows Comrade Stalin,” Nina overheard Galina bragging to one of the new recruits, who looked both terrified and impressed, and Nina would have laughed herself sick if she hadn’t been already sick with worry over Yelena.
“You look terrible,” she said frankly.
“That’s a nice thing to tell a girl.” Yelena made a face, teasing. She was skin and bone, her complexion ashy. The autumn dawn was icy, but cold was their friend; no one now lingered on the airfield when the night’s flying was done. Everyone had retreated to the dugout, warming hands at the oil-drum fire, and Nina and Yelena drifted back out to the Rusalka, lying entwined under the wing. Always the Rusalka, never Nina’s new nameless U-2. She was a nice plane, tough and reliable, but she wasn’t their plane.
“Was it bad, flying over Novorossiysk?” Nina persisted, turning over so they lay nose to nose. Because Yelena’s hands had a fine tremor they hadn’t had two months ago.
“Not so bad. I heard things got rough here—”
“Nothing difficult,” Nina said.
They smiled at each other. Both lying, Nina knew. What else do we lie to each other about? she thought, but pushed that away.
“The war will be done soon.” Yelena sounded more certain than she had in the summertime. “And then we’ll have it.”
“What?”
“Us together in Moscow. I picture it whenever I need something to keep me on course. Don’t you?” She nudged Nina. “Imagine us, sleeping at night again rather than during the day, chasing babies around the floor after breakfast . . .”
“Do I have to tell you how babies happen, Miss Moscow Goody? Because if you think anything we do is going to help on that front—” Tickling Yelena between the breasts.
Yelena laughed, swatting her hand away. “There’ll be so many orphans after the war who need mothers. Don’t you want children?” she asked as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
No, Nina thought. “I never thought about it,” she hedged.
“I know what you’re thinking—”
I doubt it.