Nina swallowed, pushed one foot forward and then the other. A wordless rustle rose through the throng, and for a moment all the Night Witches pressed closer. Silent fingers touched Nina’s shoulder, her back, her hair as she moved through her sisters. Someone gave her hand a brief, fierce squeeze—she didn’t know who.
“Tell Galya to keep a lighter hand on the stick,” Nina said not too distinctly and set off across the airfield for her plane, first walking, then running. From the corner of her eye she saw Yelena for the last time, face contorted, bent almost double in red-haired Zoya’s comforting arms, then the regiment lapped around her, hiding her from view before the wrong eyes could take notice of her grief, pulling her along in the mass of boots and overalls jogging for the line of U-2s. Nina’s heart kicked, but she didn’t look back. She was never going to look back, look east, look in the direction of the Old Man. To look back was to drown. To look forward was to fly.
She found herself stepping up onto the wing of the Rusalka. She hadn’t consciously decided to take her old plane, but she should leave her own U-2 for her navigator—Galya was going to need every advantage a familiar plane could give her, now that she’d become pilot. Yelena wouldn’t be fazed by an unfamiliar new plane, Yelena could fly anything . . . no protest rose behind her, so Nina dropped down into the Rusalka’s cockpit. It smelled like Yelena’s soft hair, and Nina bit her lip until she tasted blood. She brought the engine to life, and agony subsided a little in that familiar thrum.
All around her, the other U-2s were awakening. No outsider would be able to say tomorrow that the regiment had deviated from routine: often they sang on the airfield, always they ran to their planes, and now the preflight checks proceeded exactly as usual. If someone asked questions later about tears and sad faces, Nina had no doubt Bershanskaia would bring forth a plausible story about the regiment being downcast because of recent losses outside Ostro??ka. The Night Witches would keep the secret.
Ground crew ran to light the runway, just a flicker to mark the point of liftoff. Nina remembered Yelena groaning last month, Soon they’ll be expecting us to land by the light of Bershanskaia’s cigarette!
Enough, Nina thought as the Rusalka was waved forward. Enough.
Stick forward. Speed gathering under the wheels. Nina took the air, feeling her arms disappear into the wings, her blood into the fuel line. Behind her the Night Witches followed, an arrow-straight line into the rising moon. Nina knew Yelena would be flying second right behind her.
Six hundred and sixteenth flight. The last flight.
Last time rising away from the airfield. Last time leveling off at altitude, skimming through silvery wisps of cloud. Last time descending toward the target. Last time cutting the engine, sinking down in a silent death glide. Nina took a deep breath, held it. Keyed the engines back up in a roar, felt the nose rise, and as the blinding white fingers of the searchlights stabbed the sky, triggered her bombs off the rack. She flung her U-2 on its wingtip and sailed on past the target, luring the ground fire and the lights to follow her and leave the ground dark in her wake, perfectly set for Yelena to ghost through with her own load of death. Nina felt the familiar blindness of the lights pinning her against the vault of the sky, heard the chain of explosions below, and saw shells blooming into red and green and white bursts.
Nina released her long breath, sinking down and down and down so the pilots behind her could truthfully witness that their lead pilot had failed to pull up and vanished on the descent. Twisting, she could see Yelena slip out of the lights, turning back. Nina leveled the Rusalka and kept flying low and straight into the blackness. What lies west? a little girl had wondered on the frozen shore of a vast lake. What lies all the way west?
Like it or not, Nina was now going to find out.
As she climbed back above the clouds and dim moonlight filled the cockpit again, she saw the dried rose wedged into the instrument panel. The rose she’d plucked from one of Marina Raskova’s funeral wreaths and brought back for Yelena, carefully dried out and tucked beside the altimeter. My Moscow rose.
The first choked sob burst out of Nina. She tore the rose away and pulverized it, raising her hand and letting the rigid wind stream carry away the shredded petals. She wept alone in her cockpit on her six hundred and sixteenth flight, soaring west, never looking back.
BY DAWN, wolf packs of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs would be roaming this airspace. Until then, Nina had the advantage. I am still a Night Witch. As long as the dark lasted, she could hide from the whole world.
How long would it take to cross Poland? Beyond was Germany, the belly of the beast—would it be safer to turn south, aim for Czechoslovakia? Wherever she touched down, how was she going to find safety speaking no language but Russian, with no money to her name? She flew through a war-torn world filled with blood and barbed wire, and as soon as the fuel gave out and she had to put foot on the ground, she was quite probably dead. That conviction had shone in the tear-filled eyes of her fellow pilots: here was trouble even their crazy little Siberian couldn’t fly free of.
On and on she flew in the murk of cloud, hunched over her controls. West and west and west. Below somewhere would be Warsaw in its dying spasms—then Warsaw was behind her, or she assumed it was. A malicious headwind kicked up, and the Rusalka labored. Nina eyed the fuel gauge. The altitude and the speed were already eating through her tank. The wind grew rougher, and her heart fell. A U-2 could cover more than six hundred kilometers on a full tank in good flying conditions, but in this spiteful headwind Nina wouldn’t make four hundred.
“Fuck your mother,” she muttered, but rage wouldn’t get her farther west; nothing would but fuel, and she was nearly out. The night was far from over and the needle on the gauge scraping near empty when Nina brought the Rusalka down out of the clouds. No lights below of cities or towns, not even any scattered farmhouses. Nothing but a dark swath of forest, stretching as far as Nina’s night-trained eyes could see. She brought her plane down until she was sailing along the treetops, looking for a clearing. A U-2 could land on a dinner plate, the saying went, but you still needed a dinner plate. She supposed remotely that if she couldn’t find one, she’d crash among the pines and die spiked by branches or burning in her cockpit.
The engine quit. The fuel gauge stood at empty. The U-2 began to drop.
Nina glided down silently in her last bombing run, only this time there were no bombs to drop, no engine roar propelling her back up into the clouds. Just down and down and down between the treetops.
There—a clearing. Part of Nina was disappointed. The siren croon of oblivion hadn’t entirely gone away; in the back of her mind it kept up its seductive whisper. But she couldn’t take the coward’s way out when a runway stretched in front of her. She lined up the Rusalka and brought her down in a perfect three-point landing, branches cracking as her wings brushed past walls of trees. Flying wires snapped. Something else broke with a judder like a spine cracking. Then at last they were still, and Nina sat in the cockpit with her breath coming in short gasps. She heard the rustle of leaves, smelled leaf rot and bark. Her nose had grown accustomed to harsher smells, gasoline and engine grease, but one breath of this tree-laced night and she was back in the vast woods around the Old Man, trailing after her father as he taught her to track through the taiga.
Nina climbed stiffly out of her cockpit and jumped to the ground. A little moonlight filtered down, enough to show that a blade of her propeller was gone. “That’s it, then,” she said aloud. Her half-formed hope of stealing some cans of gasoline from somewhere and fueling up the Rusalka again spun away. Without a machine shop there was no fixing a halved propeller. Nina had spent most of her waking hours in the sky since she was nineteen and had first slid into a cockpit, but now she’d have to content herself with this rickety human shape and its inadequate feet: the Rusalka would never fly again.