The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  “Nina Borisovna, get back in the plane!”

  “Keep just over stall speed,” Nina overrode her, “and steady.” Then she slung a leg over the side.

  The airstream was rigid and icy as a current of water, knifing down her sides as she put one boot and then the other on the lower wing. Her body locked in the chill of the wind, and her teeth set up a chatter. Nina clung, gloved fingers clamped around the lip of the cockpit, for a moment utterly unable to move. It wasn’t fear, she was just frozen as though swallowed in ice. The wind was a malevolent bitch, wanting to scoop her off toward the ground floating past eight hundred meters below. She’d spin turning and turning through the wisps of cloud, and Yelena wouldn’t be able to do anything but watch . . .

  Move, night witch. Her father’s voice. Nina clamped her clattering teeth, then slithered her body along the lower wing between the wires. The Rusalka wobbled and for a moment Nina wondered if she was going to slide into the void, but Yelena steadied them. Inching along the wing, feeling the slipstream’s icy lingering hands run across her back, Nina swatted blindly below but couldn’t feel anything. Peeling one glove off with her teeth, she fumbled at the bomb rack, bare fingers sticking painfully to the frozen metal. Naked skin at this altitude felt like it had been set on fire, not dipped in ice. How long before her fingers stopped working altogether? Nina yanked at the unseen rack, more imagining the bomb’s release than feeling it, the wing shuddering beneath her. If they hit a mountain updraft while she was clinging here one-handed, she’d get flung off like a fishing line sailing into a lake . . .

  Something pinched her fingers and gave way. Nina saw the bomb drop silently into the dark. Pity to waste it on what was probably a barren hillside. She slid back along the wing, then levered herself upright and tipped almost headfirst into her own cockpit. The wind seemed to give a spiteful, cheated hiss when she dropped out of reach. Yelena’s voice squawked out of the interphones, and Nina clawed hers back in place.

  “We can turn around,” she told her pilot through chattering teeth, and then, “D-dammit.”

  “What?” Yelena shouted.

  “I dropped my glove.”

  “Is that all you have to say? Climb out on my wing again and I will tip you fucking off, you little Siberian lunatic!”

  “You s-swore.”

  “What?” Yelena was bringing the plane around now.

  “You swore, Miss Moscow Goody.” Nina tucked her ungloved hand under her armpit. Her teeth were clacking, but she still managed a grin. “Yelena Vassilovna, you swore!”

  “Go to hell,” Yelena said. A second later, through the interphones, a stifled laugh.

  Nina leaned back, sleep already cooing in her ear again, telling her to close her eyes. “Where are we?”

  “South of target.”

  “Right.” The sky was already lightening; it was nearly dawn. “Adjust north-northeast and we—”

  The shots came from nowhere, ripping down through the U-2’s wing with a flat brutal sound like steel punching cardboard. The dark shape zipped overhead even as Yelena yelled “Messerschmitt—” and hurled the plane down. Nina twisted in the cockpit, staring wildly past the Rusalka’s tail, mouth paper dry. They had never tangled with German fighters, only antiaircraft guns. It had disappeared into the dark, but the Messers were so fast—too fast to match a U-2, which sailed along so slowly that any fighter would stall out trying to match speed. It would have to keep making strafing runs.

  Another screaming pass, another line of fire tearing down one wing. If Nina had still been lying along that wing trying to pry a bomb off the rack, she realized, she would have been stitched the length of her spine.

  The Rusalka lurched as Yelena took her into a straight dive. Not enough cloud to hide in, Nina knew, and evasive maneuvering took fuel—at this point they’d burned too much while circling to drop the final bomb. Land and scatter, those were Bershanskaia’s orders for such occasions. Land and scatter, ladies; they won’t pursue you on the ground. Already the Rusalka was careening downward at two hundred meters.

  Shot down, Nina thought with curious clarity, we are being shot down. Better than burning in the air as the fuel line ignited—better than crashing with so many broken bones that it was nothing but a slow death hanging in your cockpit. Having to land and scatter left you a chance. “Field,” Nina heard herself shouting into the interphones. Where was the Messer? “Field, thirty degrees right—”

  Yelena saw it and brought the nose around. Shot down. The others would set Nina’s and Yelena’s breakfast dishes out at their usual places, waiting for their return. It was what the 588th always did when a U-2 failed to come back. Two days, maybe three, and only then did the plates stop being set, when no one could pretend it was still likely you’d come limping in alive . . .

  The Messer swept overhead like a dark kite, firing another burst. Yelena dropped the U-2 from two hundred meters to a hundred to fifty, the fastest, roughest landing Nina had ever seen her pull off. Another heartbeat and wheels bounced on frozen winter earth.

  “OUT,” Nina bellowed, kicking free of her safety harness for the second time this flight. Yelena was already clawing free of her cockpit, cheeks burning crimson; their boots hit the earth at the same time. Some kind of rough field, shadowed scrub all around. The day was coming cruelly fast, pale light flinging their shadows in front of them. A flat chopping sound rose and the Messerschmitt came back around, painted swastikas flashing like spiders.

  They reversed and bolted for the scrub, Nina never feeling more like a rabbit sprinting for cover. Lines of bullets crossed the field, and Nina wasn’t even aware she’d flung herself flat—she just found herself on the ground, arms clamped around her head as puffs of soil jumped around her. She had no idea if she’d been hit or not. She felt nothing but the roar in her blood.

  The plane passed overhead. Nina’s ears rang. She dragged herself up, heart flipping in sudden panic as she saw Yelena’s long form stretched on the ground ahead of her, but then Yelena’s head turned. “Ninochka—” she gasped, and they were both up, stumbling for the scrub. They crawled in, and when the sound of the Messer’s engines droned overhead again they froze, clamped together, Nina’s face buried in Yelena’s shoulder, Yelena’s in hers.

  The Messer made another pass over the field.

  “Wait,” Nina breathed.

  They muffled the cold cloud of their breath in star-covered scarves. Another droning pass, another stipple of bullets.

  “If the Germans capture us,” Yelena whispered, “promise you’ll kill me.”

  “They’re not going to capture us.”

  “If they do—”

  “Stop!”

  A third pass.

  “You know what they do to women pilots. They’ll rape us and murder us.” Yelena’s whisper rattled faster like hailstones on a roof. “And we’ll be branded traitors for allowing ourselves to be taken—”

  “We aren’t traitors. We followed orders—”

  “No one sees it that way if you’re caught.” Yelena’s breath hitched. “I left my pistol in the cockpit.”

  “Sshh!”

  “If they catch us, cut my throat with that razor, Ninochka. Promise.”

  Yelena’s face, white as frost now with terror, the most precious thing in the world. “I love you,” Nina whispered. She cupped her bare hand and her gloved hand around Yelena’s cheeks. “I love you, and I will kill you before letting the Fritzes get you, if that is what you want.” Anything you want. I love you enough for anything, even that.

  Yelena squeezed her eyes shut, gulping. Nina pulled her closer. The drone of the Messerschmitt’s engine retreated.

  They waited.

  “Your heart’s beating steady as a drum,” Yelena whispered. “You aren’t even afraid, are you?”

  “No. Because we’re safe. No one ever catches a rusalka, much less a pair. We slip through their hands like water.”

  Yelena buried her face in Nina’s fur overalls. Nina stroked her hair, l
ooking at the sky overhead. Icy stars winking out with the coming day. So cold. She closed her eyes and saw the turquoise water of the Old Man rising up to meet her, and then her eyes flew open with a jerk.

  “You started to doze,” Yelena whispered. “Waiting to see if you would be strafed to death by a Messerschmitt, you actually dozed off.”

  “It’s been a long night.” Nina stretched her hearing out as far as she could listen. No buzz of engines, no thump of bullets. “Can we risk it?”

  “We’ll have to. It’s almost day.”

  “They could be lying in wait—”

  “We’d have heard them land.”

  They made their way out of the brush. So strange to be on the ground, snow crunching underfoot, strange hills and jagged trees unfamiliar against the horizon. Up in a plane you forgot what it looked like down in the middle of things. Life was either a cockpit or a set of interchangeable airdromes and runways.

  Yelena let out a long breath. “If the Rusalka’s wrecked, we’ll have to walk back.”

  “Then we walk back, like Larisa Radchikova and her pilot last month.” They’d bailed out in the neutral zone and made it back walking through the active line, both of them sliced head to toe by shrapnel.

  Nina and Yelena held their breath as they came back to the Rusalka, canted drunkenly in the middle of the field. The wings were so holed they looked like a screen. Yelena went to inspect the engine, while Nina hopped up to look into the cockpits.

  “Well, we still have an engine.” Yelena’s voice floated up as she poked her head among the wires. “And a propeller . . . most of it.”

  Nina surveyed the mass of splinters where the instrument panels used to be. “We have controls. Not much else, but we each have a stick.”

  “All a U-2 really needs is a stick, an engine, and a pilot.” Yelena reclaimed her pistol, standing back. “I’d rather trust the Rusalka to get us home than try to walk it.” They had no way of knowing if this was German territory or not; they could walk into their own troops or into a nest of Fritzes.

  Nina joined her in staring at the propeller. A third of the blade was missing on one side. “Knock a third off the opposing blade to equalize it?” Nina said at last. “It’s already bullet riddled; we could break the end off without tools.”

  Yelena looked a little white, but nodded.

  Nina tugged her down to eye level. “Yelenushka. Are you all right?”

  Her pilot managed another nod. Nina wasn’t sure she believed her, but nodded back. They worked as fast as they could, bashing at the propeller blade until they could get it evened up with the shortened one; Nina gave the prop a swing to get it going as Yelena coaxed the engine to life, and fifteen minutes later they were airborne, rising sluggishly after a takeoff twice as long as their nimble little plane normally needed. “We need height,” Nina called as they wobbled along. She felt naked, flying in daylight. At least it was deep winter, when dawn looked more like deep blue twilight. Yelena brought the Rusalka up, the engine groaning as though mortally wounded. It’s just a flesh wound, Nina told her plane. A few days in repairs, and you’ll be good as new.

  “I meant what I said.” Yelena’s voice sounded tinny, and Nina didn’t think it was the interphones. “If we ever get shot down, I’d rather you kill me than be taken captive.”

  “No one’s getting shot down. We’re almost home.” Twenty minutes at most.

  “He could still be back there. The Messerschmitt.”

  “He’s not back there.”

  “He might have lain in wait till we got back in the air—”

  “He’s not there!”

  No reply. Nina could see Yelena’s shoulders moving as she breathed in unsteady gulps. The Rusalka wobbled along, jolting Nina back and forth in her cockpit like a nut jumping in a frying pan. A frying pan full of hot oil, she thought, and then thought at least the nut would be warm. She could still feel sleep hissing in her ear, that terrible urge to close her eyes and drift. Go away, you dense night-slut, Nina told sleep. We’re a hair from going down in a ball of flame.

  The dense fog of night was thinning. “Airdrome should be below,” Nina called. “Correct fifteen degrees east—” The night’s flying would long be over, but the girls would still be there, eyes on the sky. They always waited when a plane was late.

  A flare blossomed, red and welcome: Here is the runway. Nina let out a long shaky breath in relief, and that was when Yelena shouted and threw the U-2 sideways.

  The Rusalka shrieked as though she’d been gored. She shook so violently Nina thought the wings were going to shear off. “Yelena—”

  “He’s lining us up—” Yelena’s voice came through the interphones, rising higher and higher. “I see him ahead—”

  “It’s just landing flares.” Nina clawed free of her safety harness, the third time in the last hour. “No one’s firing.”

  “He’s firing on us—” The Rusalka gave a sickening shudder, nose dropping. “We’re hit—”

  “We are not hit. You’re hallucinating.” It had happened to other pilots; overstrain conjuring danger from nowhere, landing flares becoming enemy fire. Lunging forward over the broken remnants of windscreen, Nina grabbed for Yelena’s hair where it escaped her flying cap. She yanked Yelena off the controls, bringing her head slamming back against her seat. “Stop!” Nina roared, grabbing with the other hand for her own stick. Her ungloved fingers were so numb she couldn’t feel it. She gave a blind yank, and the engine sputtered. The Rusalka flattened out from her lurching spiral, fighting Nina with everything it had. She didn’t dare let Yelena go; if her pilot clawed the stick back and sent them into one more spin, this poor wounded bird would stall out. Nina muscled the nose down, still standing in an awkward crouch half in and half out of her cockpit, one hand anchoring her pilot and one gripping the stick for dear life. Her entire shoulder screamed with the effort of bracing the descent. The Rusalka dived toward the ground, bounced hard enough to rattle every tooth in Nina’s head, then flung her forward over the shattered windscreen. A white-hot sliver of agony bolted through her forearm, but Nina didn’t care, they were on the ground, rolling safe across frozen earth, and Yelena was all right. She was crying out—I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—and she wouldn’t be saying that if she were still hallucinating in panic.

  Nina sagged back in her seat, pain stabbing her arm, drenched in sweat, shivering all over because the sweat droplets were already freezing on her damp skin. She couldn’t feel her right hand, and it wouldn’t come loose from the stick, but that didn’t matter. They were on the ground. Muzzily, Nina patted the U-2’s shattered instrument panel. “Good girl.” The world tilted.

  In the thirty seconds it took for the flood of waiting pilots to reach the Rusalka, Nina was unconscious.

  “WHO ARE THEY giving you to navigate?”

  “Zoya Buzina,” Yelena answered. “Her pilot’s down with a bullet through the knee. Ground fire.”

  “Zoya Buzina?” Nina glowered up from her bed. “The redhead from Kiev with the buckteeth?”

  “Don’t sulk, she’s good!”

  “Not as good as me.” Jealousy pricked Nina, seeing Yelena head off to fly with someone else while she lay in bed. Two weeks grounded, just because a shard of windscreen went through her forearm! “If she doesn’t bring you back without a scratch, I’ll knock her buckteeth down her throat.”

  That got a laugh from Yelena. The dormitory was empty besides the two of them—Nina fuming on her cot, arm in a sling, Yelena perched at the other end in her fur overalls. The others had trooped out for the evening’s briefing. “Keep the hole in your arm warm,” Dusia had said, ruffling Nina’s hair. “Matches the hole in your head, you crazy rabbit.” They all made jokes, but over sympathetic eyes. They all understood how much it hurt to be forbidden the air.

  Yelena took a deep breath, and Nina braced herself. “I nearly killed us both—”

  Nina leaned forward and kissed her, warm lips lingering in a cold room. “Stop that, Yelena Vassilo
vna.”

  “For an instant I thought the landing flares were lights from a Messer. I knew they weren’t but it looked so real for a moment. I couldn’t stop—” A shudder went through her. “If I’d thrown us into one more spin—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Because you banged my head off the seat.” Yelena tried to smile, but her eyes were more shadowed than ever in her narrow face. When did you get so thin? Nina wondered, a lurch in her stomach.

  “You had a panic, Yelenushka. A hallucination. Everyone has them.” Even the best pilots, the best navigators. It was just a question of whether a moment’s panic was fatal or not.

  Yesterday, for them, it was not. As far as Nina was concerned, that was an end to it.

  “You didn’t tell Bershanskaia,” Yelena said. “If she’d known, she might have grounded me too.”

  “You need to get back in the air.” Nina knew her pilot down to her fingertips, every last doubt and worry. “You stay on the ground even one night, you’ll brood. Get in the air, fly ten good runs with no mishaps, and you’ll be right as rain. Now go join the others, before Bershanskaia notices.”

  Another kiss butterfly light across Nina’s lips, and Yelena was gone. Nina thumped back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. She closed her eyes, but all she saw was Yelena in a borrowed U-2, taking off into the night sky without her.

  Are you sure she’s all right to fly? the thought whispered.

  NINA STRUGGLED OUT of her cot at dawn, making her way to the airfield past a notice for a Komsomol meeting (Mutual Help in Combat Is the Komsomol Member’s Law!). The U-2s had returned; they were already being covered over with camouflage drapes. Nina grabbed the nearest of the ground crew. “Where’s Yelena Vetsina?”

  The girl turned, red-eyed, her lips trembling. Nina suddenly realized that the entire field was hushed, ground crew working with hunched shoulders. From somewhere, she heard the choked sound of someone weeping. The quarter moon above was disappearing into a beautiful dawn, but the world had telescoped into something nightmarish.

  Nina heard her own voice and couldn’t tell if it was a roar or a whisper. “What happened?”