Another woman would have taken his hand. Ian’s wife just looked at him steadily.
He’d snagged badly about twelve meters off the ground in the branches of a massive oak, hanging breathless and tangled under his lines. He’d had a knife, but the overhead angle was so awkward the blade slipped, spinning to the ground below before he could cut a single line. His straps were too badly knotted to slip out of without cutting. But he was lucky compared to Private Luncey, who had hit every branch on the way down through the tree that eventually snagged him up short. A shattered rib had pierced his lung, or at least Ian guessed that was what had happened. It killed him slowly over the course of seven hours, shredding his lung as he hung there screaming. Ian remembered every moment of those hours: first telling him to be still, not exacerbate the injury; then trying and failing to pendulum-swing close enough to help; finally just hanging there listening as the boy’s voice ran out, from screams to the occasional monotone mutter of Gramps . . .
“By the time he died I was hallucinating,” Ian managed to say. “Dehydration and shock—it turned Donald Luncey into my brother—into Seb. I knew it wasn’t him, I knew Seb was sitting in a stalag in Poland, but it was still him, down to the last freckle. My little brother was hanging dead in the tree next to me.” Hanging there for most of a day as Ian, mouth leather dry, shivering in the cold sweat of horror, stared at his corpse. Ian had tried to focus on the ground below instead, and that twelve meters under his swaying boots seemed to double, an impossibly long fall into darkness.
“Ah,” Nina said. “Is why you have your thing, the thing about heights.”
“Foolish, really. I didn’t even fall. I was found soon after; they rigged me down safe. Quite lucky.” Lucky, but maybe not entirely sane, Ian sometimes thought. It was five years after the war was done, yet still he had the dream and in the dream it was always Seb, right from the beginning. Donald Luncey wasn’t even there; start to finish it was his brother he couldn’t save.
“Don’t brood, luchik.” Nina upended ketchup over her hamburger like she was drowning it in blood. “Brooding is no good.”
“You never brood, do you?” For all that she moved in such a cloud of anarchy, Nina was very even-keeled—rather remarkable, Ian thought, considering what she’d lived through. He wondered if flying in combat had drilled that into her, or if it had already been there—in her, and in her fellow Night Witches. “Most assume women have no place at the front lines, but after hearing about your friends in the regiment—”
“Women are good in combat,” Nina said matter-of-factly. “We don’t compete like the men do. Is all mission, no proving who is better with stupid stunts.”
“You told me you once climbed out on a plane wing at eight hundred meters, you little Cossack. If you want to talk about stunts.”
“Was necessary!” She smiled, but there was a shadow behind it. “My pilot yelled at me for that.”
“Good for her.” Ian studied Nina’s lively face, suddenly gone still. “I can see how much you miss them. Your friends.”
“Sestry,” she said softly.
He could guess the word meant sisters. “Were they all like you?” She shrugged, and he imagined hundreds of Ninas, handed planes and set loose on the Führer’s eastern front. Bloody hell. No wonder Hitler lost the war.
“No one ever did what we did before.” Nina picked up her hamburger, dripping ketchup. “We pay for it, what we do. Dreams, twitches, headaches . . .”
“I know what you mean.” Ian tapped his left ear. “It’s never been quite right after that bombing run in Spain nearly did it for me.”
“My ears too, not so good as they were. U-2 cockpit is noisy. And those years being awake all night every night—I still never sleep all night through.”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. You were a soldier.” Not like me with my pointless nightmares, Ian thought, wry.
She seemed to catch his unspoken thought. “You went to war too, luchik. You go to war, you have a lake or a parachute after. Everyone does.”
“Soldiers do. They’ve earned it. I wasn’t a soldier. Nightmares are for those who fight, not those who scribble. Maybe I was at the front, but I could leave any time I wanted. They couldn’t.”
“So?” Nina asked. “Same risk for either soldier or hunter.”
“Hunter?”
“Hunters,” Nina said. “You. And me—well, I was soldier and hunter, but important part is hunter. Very different from soldier.”
“I don’t quite follow.”
“Soldiers fight wars. It gives them nightmare—a lake, a parachute. It makes them want to stop, go home.” The hamburger was gone; she sat spooning up ketchup by itself, like soup. “Hunters in war face same risks, same fight, so they get a lake or a parachute too. But we don’t have the thing soldiers do, other people do—the thing that says stop. We have a nightmare, we hate it, but if war ends, soldiers go home while we need a new hunt.”
Ian looked at her. “That does not make sense.”
“Does.” Calmly. “Soldiers get made. Hunters get born. You either need to track danger, or you don’t.”
“I don’t need to track danger, Nina. Not all Englishmen go pounding over fields blasting shotguns.”
Nina sighed, impatient. “Those boys you wrote about, GIs, airmen—what did they want?”
“They talked about home, like all soldiers. Films, backyard barbecues, going out for girls—”
“Then the war ends and they go back to that, yes?”
“The lucky ones.” The unlucky ones ended up like Private Luncey. Like Seb.
“But some don’t. Like Tony; he doesn’t go home to get married, find work. He stays, finds a hunt. You don’t go home either. Your war ends, you start tracking Hitlerites.” Nina licked ketchup off her thumb. “The girls I fly with, they’re mostly like your GIs. They dream of peace, babies, all the borscht they can eat. Their war ends, they get peace, they’re happy. But me?” A grimace. “During the war, I have my bad nights, I dream the lake, but it never makes me want borscht and babies. My war finishes, you get me to England, I end up at the airfield in Manchester. Loops on old biplanes, no target, going crazy. Until I get the message about die J?gerin. Is good then; because I have target again.” Nina pointed at Ian, then at Kolb’s door. “You—in war you hunt stories, in peace you hunt men like him.” Pointing at herself, then at Kolb’s door. “Me—in war I hunt Nazis to bomb, in peace I hunt Nazis to make pay.”
Ian shook his head. “If you and I are hunters, if we have the urge to chase down prey and we give in to it, that makes us no better than die J?gerin. And if that is the truth, then I will go home and put a bullet in my own brain.”
“Nyet.” Nina was very certain. “Die J?gerin, she’s different kind of hunter. A killer who hunts things because she likes it. Maybe she has excuses—is orders from her Reich, is because her mudak of a lover tells her to—but is just excuses. She kills because she likes it, and she hunts what she thinks are easy targets—children, people on the run, those who can’t fight her. Would you do that?”
“Bloody hell, Nina, no!”
“I don’t either. We don’t hunt the helpless, luchik. We hunt the killers. Is like villagers going after a wolf gone mad. Only when the wolf is dead, villagers go home and we find the next mad wolf. Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just—” She mimed an explosion. “Is too much for them; they come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop, not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. Is a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die.”
It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever heard her say. Ian sat back, looking her over. “I had no idea my wife was a philosopher.”
“Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”
“Hunters chasing a huntress . . .” Ian rotated his cup of now-cold coffee. “This is your first chase, Nina—normally, our targets aren’t terribly impressive. They may have done terrible things, but in the flesh they are pathetic men full of excuses, not unlike Kolb in there. Die J?gerin isn’t. She had the nerve to hide in plain sight in Altaussee, even while it was being combed for Nazis. She managed to come to America on a new identity. She covered her tracks.”
“And now she is target,” Nina said.
“She’s a very clever target,” Ian stated bluntly. “It will not be easy to catch her.”
“Hunters tracking a huntress?” Nina reached across the table, hooking what would be her trigger finger through his trigger finger. “I like our odds.”
It was the first time she’d ever touched him outside a bedroom—normally Nina was prickly as a thornbush when it came to giving or receiving any sign of affection. Ian smiled. Fingers still linked, he fell into silence, watching Herr Kolb’s unmoving doors. The moon was higher up the sky; they’d been sitting a long time in this diner.