WE WERE GOING TO DISOBEY ORDERS. WE HAD ALREADY disobeyed orders. This wasn’t a matter of nonstandard turnaround procedures. This was treason by Soviet law.
“Well, eaglets, it’s time for us to do our part for Operation Mars,” said Bershanskaya to the assembled aircrews. “We’ll be hitting a rail line between Rzhev and Vyazma in hopes of slowing down the fascist reinforcements.”
I hadn’t planned what to do once we touched down at the end of the night. I’d figure that out later.
“We’re loading the U-2s with an extra fifty kilos of bombs, and you’ll carry only a single sortie’s worth of fuel to compensate. We’ll spend longer on turnaround, so you’ll fit in one or two fewer runs, but the arithmetic works out. Keep your eyes on your fuel gauges, because you won’t have the buffer you expect. Otherwise, everything should be by the book. Dismissed.”
I couldn’t bite my fingers without getting a mouthful of glove, but I balled my fists as I exited the command dugout. I muttered to Iskra, “This is a problem.”
“I know,” she said, tapping the end of her pencil against her lips. “With a full tank, we could fly there and back twice over. But one sortie’s worth will barely get us one way, if we’re lucky.”
I kicked an oily snowdrift. “The universe is conspiring to keep us apart.”
“Baby cousin, you were thousands of kilometers away and now you’re close enough to throw a rock at him. The universe isn’t conspiring against you. This is just a hiccup in our plans.”
“Maybe”—I bit my lip and considered my sparse options—“we don’t need to make it all the way to our aerodrome. We just need to find somewhere safe where we can make a forced landing.”
“Where? It’s German-held territory.”
I didn’t need Iskra to tell me it was a bad plan. “I don’t know. You’re the navigator.”
It was one day short of the new moon. There were no clouds, only distant plumes of smoke along the western horizon. An endlessly long, dark winter’s night, the sort of conditions night bombers loved. I walked around Number 18 one way and then turned and walked around it the other way, running my hands lightly along the wings and across the fuselage with its unadorned coat of translucent white paint. Quietly, too quietly to be overheard by the click-snaps running here and there, I whispered, “Be good to us tonight, girl. We need your best.” And I touched the propeller and spat.
When Bershanskaya came alongside us at takeoff, I was sure she had found us out. But she only said, “Keep your mind on the mission, Koroleva,” and waved us on. I gunned the little biplane’s sewing-machine motor as if I was fleeing.
Something felt different. Or rather, it didn’t feel different. I had become intimately familiar with Number 18’s ways. The heavier bombs should have affected the little crop duster’s balance. I should have noticed the difference as I brought her nose up. But I didn’t.
And then a quiet gasp came through the speaking tube. “Valka! Check the fuel gauge!”
I looked. The needle pointed to Full. There was a scrap of paper wedged under the edge of the gauge in my cockpit. I turned on my map light to read the scribbled note.
Say hello to Pasha for me.
—Klava
My heart soared and I said a silent thank-you to Ilyushina. We had a chance after all.
Zhigli and Zhenechka were flying together ahead of us, their plane now visible, looking like a giant white dragonfly, now hidden in the darkness. Below, gunshots, explosions, brief flashes of light. Operation Mars struggled on. Then stripes of light against the black sky. The other biplane was lit up momentarily before it slid off to starboard and out of the beams. The searchlights pivoted and caught it again. It vanished again. In and out, weaving back and forth, the fearless pilot drew the lights away. Zhigli was still taking care of us and I was about to deceive her.
I idled the engine and went into a glide. A thin black stripe cut across the ravaged landscape. A railway. “Target in sight, Iskra.”
“Bombs away.” A jolt as the bombs fell away from our wings. The U-2, freed of its burden, was lighter, more maneuverable.
I called, “Now, Iskra!”
Hiss. Pop. A brilliant red light flashing across the sky momentarily illuminated every contour of the landscape, buildings and craters and the cover-stitch path of the railroad. The flare faded. I let our aircraft glide away to the west, away from our comrades, into the darkness.
Zhigli must have lost sight of us not long after Iskra fired the flare, but I waited until we were within spitting distance of the ground and well hidden by a patch of trees before I reengaged the engine. It started up obediently at its regular rhythm.
I said, “Zhigli will wonder why we didn’t try to glide to Soviet territory. It wasn’t far.”
“Maybe we had rudder damage.”
“They’ll worry. The other girls. I wish I could have told them.”
“I’m glad of your newfound empathy, but we would only have faced the inevitable court-martial even sooner. Now let’s gain some altitude before someone on the ground picks us off with a machine gun.”
We ascended into the sky. Away from the bombing site, from the front lines, from the planes of our friends, all was quiet. There were no gunshots, no explosions, no sound of artillery, not even voices, for we had stopped talking, save for Iskra’s occasional whispered directions. The only sound was the rhythmic ticking of Number 18’s engine.
It was a beautiful night. The thinnest thread of brilliant silver lined the bottom edge of a moon that was otherwise nothing but a blank spot amid a million stars. The brindled white stripe of the Milky Way slashed across the sky. Below, to the north or south, we passed scattered patterns of orange lights in nets or grids. We avoided those, instead finding a path through the dark patches in between. In one of those dark spots, Pasha was hiding.
We’d be arrested for sure when we got back. Shot, most likely. If Bershanskaya had authorized the flight, things might have worked out. Pasha’s runaway squad could have been explained away amid the chaos surrounding the offensive. My runaway plane could not.
Part of me was angry at Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. The whole mess was her fault. But I knew better. Zoya hadn’t ordered anyone to do anything. All she had done was die well. No one had come to Zoya’s rescue when she was in need, but Pasha’s squad had thrown their lives away searching for her after she was dead. Propaganda was worth more to us than actual lives. I wondered what Zoya would have thought of that.
I realized I had no idea what Zoya would think. All I knew about her came from some villagers by way of a reporter, or from her comrade in arms by way of Pasha. Had she really been like they said, proud and defiant? Or was that only the shell she retreated into during her last hours, while inwardly she was curled up, crying and begging for it all to stop?
It didn’t make any real difference to me and Pasha. Nor to the authorities who wanted her pictures. Whatever Zoya the pictures showed would become just another facet of the legend they built around her.
The stillness was shattered by the sound of another engine, not a rickety five-cylinder but a roaring V12. Only one type of aircraft had an engine like that. I yelled, “A night fighter!”
“Stay calm, Valka,” came my cousin’s steady voice. “It’s pitch dark. It can’t have spotted us.”
The engine built up into a scream, then lowered to a Doppler-effect growl as the fighter swept past us. I said, “It’s spotted us! Where is it?”
We looked wildly around. Then Iskra called out, “There—above us! Four o’clock!”
Over my right shoulder I spotted a cross-shaped silhouette. I made a sharp turn. A staccato rattle rang out from Iskra’s machine gun. The fighter shot past. Milk-white starlight faintly highlighted its canopy and the tops of its wings. I pulled into another sharp turn and dived, in hopes of losing the enemy plane in the night before it came back around.
Iskra asked, “Why didn’t he fire on us?”
“I outmaneuvered him,” I replied, leveling out a few hundred meters lower.
“Nonsense. He had a clear shot. We should be dead.”
The hum of the fighter’s engine was building again. “We’ll be dead soon enough if I can’t shake him.”
Sudden excitement filled Iskra’s voice. “A lone fighter in the middle of the night. No strategic objectives for kilometers around, who knows how far to the nearest airfield. Valka—he’s lost!”
“Good. If he’s bad at navigating, it’ll be easier to lose him.”
“No, don’t you see? He thinks we’re on a bombing run. He’s following our engine noise, hoping we’ll lead him to the German lines so that he can get his bearings and find his way back!”
The fighter made another pass. Still it did not fire. I said, “I’ll idle the engine and glide, then.”
I was reaching to disengage the engine when Iskra’s voice in my ear interrupted me. “The Volga. There’s a trestle bridge not far from here.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I demanded.
“He’s lost. It’s dark. He doesn’t know where the obstacles are. We do!”
And suddenly I understood. I stopped maneuvering and climbed until the sparse features on the ground became indistinct smudges to even the sharpest eyes. The German fighter continued to circle us, now near, now far, still never firing. Iskra let off a few rounds whenever it came into range, not out of hope of hitting it so much as to keep the enemy pilot informed of our location and, hopefully, enraged. In the meantime she would be focusing on her compass and airspeed indicator and spinning the wheel on her Vetrochet, correlating our location with our invisible destination.
The frozen Volga curved ahead of us, a smooth, winding white stripe on a white background. In the distance, I could make out the lights of Rzhev. Iskra told me, “Perfect. The bridge is only a kilometer farther—”
She was cut off by a deafening barrage of cannon fire. The fighter dived past us. I screamed, “Iskra! Why is he shooting at us?”
“I miscalculated. He’s spotted the city. He can use it to get his bearings. He doesn’t need to follow us anymore, so he’s shooting us down.”
Great. Just great. I couldn’t outfly him and I couldn’t lose him. I only had one trick left, and it was a dangerous one. “Hang on!”
As the mounting roar warned that the enemy plane was approaching again, I opened the throttle as far as it would go and simultaneously shoved the control stick forward. The acceleration shoved me against my seat. Icy wind lashed my face and howled in my ears. Above it, I could hear the drone of the fighter. Cannon fire ripped the air just beyond the top wing. “Come on,” I thought. We were already in his sights. He was close to shooting us down, so close to getting that iron cross. If only I could tempt him into following us into the dive.
The altimeter spun wildly, a thousand meters, six hundred, three hundred. Below, the Volga grew wider at an alarming rate. Flanked by nothing but blackness, I couldn’t judge its distance. It might have been a broad river far away or a narrow stream right in front of us.
“Pull up!” Iskra screamed.
I waited one more terrifying second and then pulled up Number 18’s nose with a neck-wrenching jerk. For a moment I thought we would crash into the river. I steeled myself for the crack of the tail skid hitting ice, but it never came. We leveled out. Before us, a stark black shape bisected the river. Now we were climbing, steeper and steeper, then inverting.
I thought doing a loop would feel like hanging upside down off a climbing frame. It did not. The blood didn’t rush to my head. Instead, the world rotated around me. Below me spread a sparkling blanket of stars. Above, an orange flower blossomed on a steel vine. The sound of rending metal echoed through the air. By the sullen light of the explosion, the landscape became a landscape again. The broad, frozen Volga. The snowy banks dotted with stands of reeds. The crisscross struts of the truss bridge. And, foundering in a hole in the ice where it had fallen after colliding with the bridge, the crushed corpse of a blunt-winged Messerschmitt.
For an instant I was gripped by the uncanny impression that the broken plane would fall out of the river and into the sky. I felt queasy. Blackness crept into the sides of my vision. Then I finished the loop and the world righted itself. I skimmed the snow-covered ice parallel to the bridge, passing so close to the sinking fighter that I could make out every detail: a bright yellow nose ripped open and streaming hot oil, three shattered propeller blades spinning to a halt, a brown-gloved hand against the cockpit glass, vainly trying to shove open the warped canopy. The plane disappeared into the water.
“That,” said I grimly, “is why you never follow a smaller aircraft into a dive.”
My cousin’s hand grabbed my shoulder. “Valka! You did a loop!”
I laughed. “I did! So it’s possible after all. Wait until Lilya hears about this!”
I hit the throttle and steered Number 18 away from Rzhev and deeper into the salient. No fighter was going to keep me away from Pasha.