The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  “Yeah,” said Garrett, and he dropped his head for another long kiss. He took Jordan’s hand and guided it, not under his sweater this time, but to his other hand, where she could feel the hard, cool lump of his college ring. “I wish you’d wear it,” he whispered. “You know I’m serious about you.”

  “Okay,” Jordan heard herself say. Because why not? It was the next step. She’d wear his college ring for the next few years, a placeholder for the step after that: the real ring that would come at some point during his senior year, after which the next step was a June wedding. His parents would be delighted. Her dad would be delighted. I was hoping so much that you’d want to take the shop over from me, he had said. You and Garrett both, maybe. A real future.

  “Okay,” she said again, and it felt fine.

  Chapter 20

  Ian

  May 1950

  Vienna

  On the first of May, Ian jogged down the stairs from his tiny apartment to the center office below, only to find his wife already sitting in his chair.

  He stopped, still doing up the buttons on his shirt. “I locked the door.”

  Nina made jimmying motions, lowering the paperback she was reading. Something lurid called Regency Buck. Ian looked at the open door, handle now dangling loose. She reads romance novels and breaks locks, he thought. Just what every man wants in a wife. “What are you doing here?” he asked, turning back his cuffs and going to work on the door. It had been a few weeks since she and Tony stormed out, and Ian hadn’t heard from either.

  “Tony is sorry,” Nina said. “He wants to apologize, the things he said.”

  “So why are you here and not him?”

  “He says you are Achilles in your tent and he waits till you come out. I tell him he’s a stupid mudak and I will come instead, and he says Agamemnon sends Briseis and maybe that does it. I don’t know any of these people.”

  “He’s off his bloody head. I’m not Achilles, he’s not Agamemnon, and you’re nobody’s prize getting sent anywhere.” Ian jiggled the door handle back into place. “If Homer gave Briseis a razor, Achilles would have died a good deal sooner.”

  “Who is this Homer?”

  “He didn’t write Regency Buck. Why do you read that tosh?” Ian wondered, diverted. Razors didn’t seem to go with romances.

  “I come to library my first month in Manchester—need books to learn about England, practice my reading. The librarian, she says, ‘Georgette Heyer is England.’ Is not much like the England I see, but maybe is the war?” Nina tucked Regency Buck back into her jacket. “Anyway, I come because Tony is sorry.”

  “We both said things I imagine we regretted.” Ian wasn’t surprised at the relief that loosened his chest. He and Tony had worked together for years, after all; had been friends as well as partners. Perhaps we still are. “I notice you aren’t offering any apologies,” Ian couldn’t help but observe.

  Nina merely gave a long blink. I kill her, his wife had said of Lorelei Vogt, so matter-of-factly. She meant it, she wasn’t sorry, and he’d be damned if he apologized either for throwing her out of his office because of it.

  Her eyes glinted as if she was reading his mind, and the hostility of their last encounter sparked the air for a moment. It wouldn’t take much to get it going again.

  But Nina changed the subject. “Tony and I, we went to Heidelberg for a week. We look for die Jägerin’s old university friends, student records.” A shake of the head. “Dead ends.”

  Ian had managed to put die Jägerin out of his head, mostly by working twenty-hour days. He was the only one in the office now; he had to take up Tony’s share of the load. “Do you believe me now, that pursuing her is hopeless?”

  “We go to Boston anyway,” Nina said. “Tony and me. Come with us.”

  “I meant what I said.” Ian leaned against the desk, looking down at her. “I won’t work with a vengeance squad. I won’t work beside you as you plan to kill her.”

  “Bozhe moi, don’t be dramatic.” Nina glared. “I want her caught, punished, dead, I don’t care which. Tony, he says you are good at finding them. Tony and I try alone, maybe we fail—I don’t know America, I hunt seals and deer, not Nazis. If you come, I promise now: we find her, I don’t try to kill her.”

  “How do I know I can trust you?” Ian asked quietly.

  “Poshol nakhui, govno.” Nina seized Ian by the collar and yanked him down to eye level, her blue eyes all but spitting knives. “Am not just a savage from the taiga,” she hissed. “I am Lieutenant N. B. Markova of the Red Air Force. I make a promise and I keep it. Blyadt,” she spat for good measure, shoving him back so hard he staggered. “Fuck you.”

  She reads romance novels, she breaks locks, and she’s a lieutenant in the Red Air Force, Ian thought. Just what every man wants in a wife! He felt the strangest urge to laugh, not because he thought she was lying, but because . . . “Bloody hell, Nina. When are you going to stop turning my world on its ear?”

  She planted hands on hips, glaring. “You come with us, I promise I do things like you want. Carrot, stick, no razor.” How boring, her eyes said.

  Ian didn’t bother quoting the odds against their succeeding. Nina clearly didn’t care what the odds of extraditing Lorelei Vogt were, and neither did Tony. “I know how much this chase pulls at you,” he said instead. “It does me too. Tony said Lorelei Vogt was my white whale, and he’s not wrong. But in Moby-Dick, everyone who hunts the white whale dies.”

  “I’m hard to kill. So are you—Tony tells me about the places you go in the war. Come to Boston.”

  “I have other cases. They are just as important as—”

  “Ian,” his wife said, his name in her voice bringing him up short. “You want the huntress. For Seb and for the children, you want her. I want her for Seb and for the children and for me. Is not just vengeance, is also justice. Can be both. Is not wrong if it’s both.”

  She put out her hand, and the burning chill of recklessness raced across Ian’s nerves again. Throw everything down because the bombs were coming closer and who knew what the odds were? Throw it all on the line. You bring this out in me, he thought, looking at his wife. The reckless side that had made him go to war with a typewriter instead of a gun, that risked everything for the right story, the right column. The right hunt.

  This hunt goes on whether you join it or not, the voice of reason said. The one that refused to beat suspects, or be party to vigilante justice. One way or another, she’ll follow die Jägerin. If you don’t go with her, who knows how the chase could end? Nina certainly wasn’t going to be held by any promise of clean dealing if he wasn’t there.

  He couldn’t tell what this hungry swoop in his stomach was, if he was talking himself onto the right path or onto the wrong one. But with a coppery hunger, it was whispering, Call me Ishmael.

  “Boston.” Nina’s small hand was still extended. “In? Or out?”

  Part II

  Chapter 21

  Nina

  September 1942

  North Caucasus front

  Night had fallen, and with it, the chase.

  Ahead of Nina, Yelena was sprinting. Arms pumping, legs flashing, head lowered as she poured every last drop of strength into getting ahead of the crowd behind. One boot hit the Rusalka’s lower wing, and Nina’s pilot vaulted straight up to the side of the cockpit, fist punching up toward the sliver of moon. “Too slow, rabbits! Rusalka claims first place on the runway!”

  She was utter magnificence, crouched atop their plane on boot toes and fingertips like a cat. Nina’s heart squeezed, even as a chorus of groans rose up from the other pilots running to their own U-2s in Yelena’s wake. “God rot you, Yelena Vassilovna,” Dusia Nosal gasped, reaching her own plane. “Long-legged cow—”

  “I love you too, Dushenka,” Yelena cooed, blowing a kiss as she dropped into the Rusalka’s cockpit, and Nina grinned, jogging behind with the navigators. First pilot to her plane every night earned the right of first takeoff, and Yelena had the l
ongest legs in the regiment. Unless someone tripped her off the line (Dusia wasn’t above sticking a boot out), the Rusalka had first takeoff five nights out of seven.

  By the time Nina threw herself down into the rear cockpit, Yelena was already belted in and running checks. “Start up!” the call came from the ground.

  “Starting up!”

  “Swing prop!”

  The propeller swung, caught, bit. The noisy little radial engine started up, sneezing smoke. The Rusalka rumbled out even as Nina was checking her compass and map. They’d only been in the mountainous region a few weeks, but this was a world different from the summer nights they’d flown at the southern front. Here in the Caucasus the winds could come screaming out between the steep mountain peaks and fling a U-2 into a cliff face in a heartbeat. And if the winds didn’t get you, the heavy, gluelike mists might. Two U-2s had collided in one of those lethal mists last week. Only one survivor.

  The lights along the field flickered on, marking a makeshift runway. So close to the front line, Nina could hear the crackle of not-so-distant ground fire and tracer fire, yet as soon as they lifted off there would only be the midnight-blue horizon stretching ahead, the endless blanket of stars. No clouds tonight, just a sliver of moon—a perfect night for flying. Not for sleeping, Nina thought with a wolverine flash of teeth as the Rusalka began to pick up speed under Yelena’s hands. Their target was troop bunkers, every one packed full of German soldiers freshly arrived at the front. “Let’s give the new boys a warm welcome, ladies,” Major Bershanskaia had said in briefing that afternoon. Nina had looked around to see every sestra wearing the same feral grin. No one sleeps tonight.

  The U-2’s undercarriage lifted off the crushed grass, and the Rusalka soared. Nina’s heart soared with it—no matter how many dozens of times she’d done this, it was always the same liquid-sweet catch at her throat. She took a moment to savor the icy rush of the air, and then it was back to business. Yelena was waiting.

  “East a hair . . . aim for the southwest pass . . .” The Rusalka twitched to each of Nina’s directions as she scanned the surrounding mountains. Some navigators relied on flares, pitching them over the side and setting course by the falling red glow, but Nina scorned flares. Map and compass, moon and stars were enough for her.

  The first bombing run always passed in a flash. It was thirty minutes’ flying before reaching the target, but it seemed like only seconds passed before they were descending through a wisp of cloud like silver veiling. “One minute,” Yelena called, leveling out, and Nina went marble still. It was teeth-chatteringly cold up so high, autumn winds biting cruel and sere in the open cockpit, but whenever they lined up for a run, Nina flushed as warm as though she stood before a roaring fire.

  The Rusalka hit an updraft, steadied. Then the world fell away into stillness as Yelena cut the engine.

  That was the moment Nina loved best, when the U-2’s nose dropped and she began her weightless glide downward. Like a rusalka plunging down into the glassy dark of her lake, Nina thought, webbed fingers catching the currents of the water as Nina’s gloved fingers caught the currents of the air . . . Silent, invisible, undetectable, until far, far too late. Those yawning German soldiers below had no idea what slid toward them out of the night. You’re on our ground now, you stupid little boys, Nina thought. You have your Führer and your Fatherland, but we have the Motherland and she has us.

  “Six hundred meters,” Yelena called. Nina poised her hand. A buzzing drone filled the wind as Yelena kicked the engine back to life; they were low enough Nina could see lights below, dark shapes of dugouts, German trucks. The instant they began to rise, Nina flicked the release. Their payload of bombs dropped into the black velvet night, Yelena already veering away from the searchlight that stabbed the sky seconds after the bloom of explosions below. The light hunted for them like a blind white finger, but Yelena had already jinked out of reach, finding the new altitude. Not three minutes behind them the next U-2 would be lining up, Dusia Nosal with her hatred-tautened face relaxing as she dropped her load in turn. And the next, and the next, and by the time every U-2 in the regiment had finished its first run, Nina and Yelena would be back on their second.

  “First away,” Yelena called through the interphones, satisfaction in every word.

  “Well done, rabbit.”

  The Rusalka had barely touched down on the flattened grass before the first wave of ground crew came swarming out to service her. Girls in overalls jogged over with cans of fuel, armorers staggered under the weight of thirty-two-kilo bombs, mechanics crawled over propeller and engine by flashlight. Yelena twisted in her cockpit, reaching a hand back to Nina. “No ground fire,” she said. “But they’ll be wide awake next time.”

  Nina shrugged. “We’ve been holed before.” There had been fierce nights on the southern front when the Rusalka had been so peppered by bullets that her linen-covered wings looked like a cheese after the mice got at it, yet she was always ready to fly by the following twilight. “Bullets won’t bring down a U-2 unless they hit both of us. Even then, this bird could probably land herself.” Nina squeezed Yelena’s fingertips, a stand-in for the kiss they couldn’t exchange in public, and swung out of the cockpit to the ground. A pair of armorers hunched over a bomb, one girl holding a flashlight for the other who squatted with gloves clamped between her teeth as she attached the fuse with fingers gone blue-marbled with cold, and Nina veered around them to go make her report inside. Major Bershanskaia always heard the first round of reports herself. “Good, Comrade Lieutenant Markova. Carry on.” Nina saluted, gulped some tea that tasted of engine grease, and hurried back with a cup for Yelena.

  “Drink up,” she ordered, stepping onto the wing over the armorer lugging a bomb along on her knees toward the rack. Yelena drained the cup in one gulp, scribbling her signature on the release form a petite mechanic was thrusting under her nose, and in minutes they were circling for takeoff again. Behind them, the mechanics and armorers were already clustered around Dusia’s U-2 like worker bees round a hive queen as Dusia slumped back in her cockpit and her navigator went trotting inside to make her report and bring her pilot some tea . . .

  “Let’s break our record tonight,” Nina said as the mechanic gave the prop a swing. “Ten runs?”

  “Ten,” Yelena agreed as the engine’s drone rose, and Nina could hear the elation in her voice. By the sixth, seventh, eighth run her voice would be blurry with exhaustion, but for the first few runs everyone was still bright-eyed. Once again the Rusalka leaped up into the diamond-sewn night, heading for the front line.

  Will anyone die tonight? Nina wondered. The 588th had already suffered losses. Three just last week in that midair collision . . . But it was no use thinking of tracer fire ripping up through the cockpit, or the spiraling terror of a crash. There was a job to do. The first week of flying back in June, Nina and Yelena had managed four bombing runs per night. Now with the nights getting longer, Nina reckoned ten would be possible. And when the endless white nights of deep winter arrived, the nights when dark fell greedily on the day and gobbled it up like Baba Yaga eating unwary children, who knew what they might accomplish?

  “How long has it been?” Yelena wondered on their sixth touchdown, gnawing on the cold biscuit Nina had grabbed inside. “Since we first started on the southern front?”

  Nina had to think. The nights blurred together, the days even more. “Three months.”

  Yelena gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “Feels longer.”

  Those early weeks had felt like being flung into the deepest part of the Old Man with rocks tied to their feet. They took off for the evening’s first run with the fascist line so close that Nina wondered if the airfield would be in German hands by the time they landed. Bombing the rolling columns of German tanks as they advanced, the pilots flew over fields of grain ripe to be harvested and saw flames leap along the golden rows instead of scythes as billows of wheat were converted into billows of fire rather than be left to feed a single German soldier
. Black clouds roiled into the sky, and the regiment’s U-2s touched down with smoke-blackened wings and red-eyed pilots to the news that the Fritzes had seized another town, another river, another city, one after another gone under the swastika. Hearing Major Bershanskaia’s grim voice reading aloud from Order No. 227, direct from Moscow: “‘It is time to finish retreating. Not one step back.’”

  Not one step back? Nina thought, weighed down by exhaustion as heavy as a lead blanket. Try that for yourself, Comrade Stalin. See how much you feel like advancing through those fields of burning grain. Or through those piercing searchlights surrounding the antiaircraft guns, that feeling of being pinned and exposed like a butterfly tacked to a board. The first time they had been caught in a searchlight the Rusalka had sheared sideways, falling into a stall, and for a dizzying moment Nina had not known where the horizon was, only that she was blind and shells were exploding all around them. When her internal compass righted itself, she found herself screaming, Flip, Yelena, we’re inverted, FLIP—and blindly Yelena rolled them right side up and they were out of the searchlights and lurching toward home. Nina hadn’t been able to get out of the cockpit when they landed. Her legs simply refused to work. She sat there until they worked again, not really knowing what else to do, and then dropped out of the cockpit like a sack of turnips to stagger out, vomit matter-of-factly beside the runway, then make her report.