“HOW IS IT?” Galina asked anxiously, passing Nina her tea. She really did look about twelve.
“What do you mean how is it? It’s airdrome tea; it’s ice cold and tastes like gasoline.” Nina signed off on the release the mechanic had stood on the wing to thrust under her nose.
“Can we give her a name?” Galina gave their U-2 a pat as she climbed into the navigator’s seat. “Some pilots do.”
“She’s just a U-2. Take the stick when we reach altitude, we’ll give you some practice—” and off they were, following Yelena and the Rusalka up into the clouds. “Light touch, don’t yank . . .”
They were flying missions over the peninsula all that month, coming back to barracks near Krasnodar. Not even a repurposed shed this time but dugout trenches with plank beds, lines strung up so wet underwear and stockings could dry above the mud. Nina took to sleeping on the airfield under old plane covers, arm thrown over her eyes to block the light, hoping Yelena could join her. Long days and lack of proper barracks meant fewer places they could meet alone.
“I’m being sent out on detail,” Yelena said in August, looking bleak. “Eight crews are joining the Black Sea Fleet battalions.”
Nina’s heart clutched. “When will you be back?”
“When we take Novorossiysk.” Yelena kissed her, soft and reassuring, but Nina wasn’t reassured. That was rough flying between sea and mountains, storms blowing off the water . . . she pulled Yelena to her fiercely, burying her face in that delicate collarbone. Promise you’ll come back, she thought, but no one promised that. Yelena went off to Novorossiysk; Nina stayed on flying runs over the peninsula, the Crimea, the wave-shattered coast along the Sea of Azov.
“Nina Borisovna, you will assist the training squadron in your off hours,” Bershanskaia informed her, scribbling at a stack of paperwork. The Forty-Sixth trained replacements within the regiment, pilots training their navigators, navigators training their mechanics, mechanics training their armorers. Any position could be filled within the regiment; they took pride in that. “Four mechanics have just moved up.”
Nina saluted. “Get some sleep, Comrade Major.” They were all frank-spoken with each other, regardless of rank. It shocked the officers from other regiments, but the Night Witches just shrugged.
Bershanskaia smiled, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray made of a flattened shell case. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
We’re dying off fairly fast now, Nina thought. That night, it was almost her.
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.”