She was afraid of something else now instead.
SHE ALMOST DROWNED in her own lungs by the end of winter, when the pneumonia settled in and shook her in bone-rattling spasms. But Nina Markova survived, coughing and emaciated, filthy and ravenous, until the Germans pulled away from Poznań in January of the new year—until she could emerge blinking and staggering from her forest into the sterile white arms of the Polish Red Cross pushing through the liberated camps and stalags. There were months of thermometers and medicines, months being moved from one hospital berth to another, tossing and turning as she dreamed of a blue-eyed huntress until she knew that face better than her own. Nina was thinking of that face as she sat upright in the latest hospital cot, deliriously tracing a star on the sole of one foot with a red navigation pencil and vowing to do it over in tattoo ink, when a whip-lean Englishman with desperate eyes came running at her with a torrent of questions, and she had been able to recite the first line of the story, the myth. Not Your brother is dead because I failed him but Your brother died a hero.
Chapter 54
Ian
September 1950
Boston
Nina avoided Ian’s eyes. The woman who had stared down Comrade Stalin, Ian thought, now staring at her own interlocked hands to avoid his eyes. The Ford had wound its way out of Boston and was speeding northeast.
“I lie to you,” Nina said, ignoring Jordan and Tony in the front seat, speaking only to Ian, her Russian accent thickening. “Is my fault Seb dies.”
Ian didn’t answer. Jordan and Tony exchanged glances, said nothing either.
“I should have stayed with him. Die Jägerin, she wouldn’t catch me off guard. Or I should be faster, join him on the dock. I hesitate too long, is done.” Nina sighed, and Ian heard the layers of guilt and pain in that sigh, the long nights she’d thought about this in the years after the war.
“You did your best,” he managed to say.
“Not enough. Seb should have lived.” Nina looked at him then, unblinking. “Is what you’re thinking.”
Part of Ian did think that. The unthinking rage of a brother too swamped by loss to be fair: You knew how trusting he was, and you left him to be slaughtered. Then the rage of a betrayed lover: I slept beside you, I trusted you, I told you about the parachute, and you keep this from me?
“I fail him,” she said again, more softly. “Is what I do, when I have a team. I fail my regiment, I lose them. I fail Seb, I lose him. Is why I don’t have a team anymore. I shouldn’t have come, joined you . . .” Looking from Tony to Ian. “But I want to find the huntress. Since I have to stumble away from her by the lake, I want to find her again. It makes me selfish, so I join you. I shouldn’t have.”
That’s your one fear now, Ian thought. Not lakes. Not drowning. To fail another sestra, another teammate, another comrade.
He drew a deep breath, shoved the shock and the anger away. Reached out with one hand and hooked his trigger finger through Nina’s, looking into his wife’s blue eyes that held such desperate sorrow behind their opaque shield.
“You didn’t fail him, Nina. And you aren’t going to fail us now. Believe that. This team will not save Ruth without you. This team cannot catch die Jägerin without you. If your one fear is losing another team, her one fear is you, and we are going to use that.” Nina’s eyes flared.
“We need to get there first, and we’re at least an hour and a half behind,” Tony said grimly behind the wheel.
Ian released Nina’s finger with a fierce squeeze. “We’re going to catch up.”
The Ford stopped in a spray of gravel. Ian had never seen it before, but Tony had described it: the tiny ramshackle airfield where Nina had gone joyriding. Ian looked at a blue-and-cream biplane droning overhead, preparing to land, and felt a wave of pure terror. He shoved it down. “Jordan, can you persuade your former fiancé to do us a very large favor?”
GARRETT BYRNE LOOKED at them, dumbfounded. “You want to borrow a plane?”
“Olive,” Nina said. “I like Olive.”
“Ruth is in danger, Garrett,” Jordan said. “It’s for Ruth—”
“If she’s in danger, contact the police and—”
“Brilliant idea, Gary,” Tony snapped. “Telephone the police and report that a child is with her mother. That’ll send them running, all right. Superb.”
“I can’t let an unlicensed pilot waltz off with one of my aircraft—”
“Tony, get his other arm.” Ian came round the desk to take Garrett Byrne by the elbow. “We’re locking him in the closet.” So much for the line we won’t cross, Ian thought. He wasn’t just stepping over that line, he was vaulting across it, perfectly willing on Ruth’s behalf to bolt Garrett Byrne in with the cleaning supplies. Garrett seemed to realize it.
“Jesus—” He yanked out of Ian’s grip. “Jordan, is this true? You were right all along, your stepmother is . . .”
Jordan nodded, white faced.
“Jesus.” He gulped it this time, looking at Nina. She gazed back, eyes slitted. “Mrs. Graham, you’d better bring Olive back without a scratch, or—” But Jordan was already flinging her arms around him in a violent thank-you, Nina was calling for maps, and Garrett pulled free and went jogging off to have the Travel Air 4000 fueled.
Tony looked at Ian. “Is this really going to work? Riding to the rescue in a biplane; this is something out of a serial where damsels get tied to railway tracks.”
“It will work,” Ian said with all the conviction he could muster.
“Only way to beat a car to the cabin,” Nina said calmly, pawing through the maps. Her doubt and guilt had gone, Ian saw in relief—she had a mission to fly and the navigator in her had snapped to the fore, all business. “If I can land. Jordan, you say there is flat spot nearby, no trees? Show me—”
Soon they were all jogging for the runway, Olive standing proud in her blue-and-cream paint. Nina tugged flight goggles on. She could have been a ludicrous sight, goggles and boots and a Filene’s summer dress, but she was all cool, hard competence. “Plane can take four. Two each cockpit.”
“That’s not safe,” Garrett began.
Nina ignored him. “Is crowded but possible.” She looked over her shoulder at Ian. “Jordan with Tony in front, you fly with me.”
Ian had been afraid she would say something like that. “It would be far safer to fly with Tony, while Jordan and I follow in the car—”
“I fly four out of Taman once when U-2 behind me is chased down and the engine holed. Galya and I have to ferry the pilot and navigator. Was like flying a brick, but she stays up. Mostly.” Tony was already settling into the passenger cockpit up front, Jordan scrambling after him. Nina crooked a finger at Ian, who fought a gripping wave of the deepest panic he’d ever felt in his life.
Nina felt the same panic when she threw herself into Lake Rusalka, he thought. She could have let it take over, let herself sink, and then there would have been no one to bear witness to Seb’s murder.
Ian fought his stuttering heart down out of his throat and stepped up onto the wing. “Don’t fail me, comrade,” he said through gritted teeth, and dropped into the cockpit.