Among the Red Stars

by Gwen C. Katz

  Iskra said, “They won’t torture him. He’s a soldier, not a spy. If the fascists run across him, they’ll only take him as a POW.”

  “As a POW,” I echoed. “To Vyazma. Do you know what’s in Vyazma?”

  Iskra silently prodded the fire with a gun-cleaning rod. She knew.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Court-martialed as a traitor and sent to our camps or captured and sent to the fascist camps. What’s the difference?”

  “Valka. No.” Iskra looked up. Flickering yellow firelight illuminated the curve of her cheek. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

  “It’s true.”

  Iskra wetted her lips. “There have been injustices on both sides. I know that better than anyone. But that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as justice. I don’t want to hear for a second that we don’t have the moral high ground. What you do still matters. It may not win the war, it may not bring about the utopia we keep waiting for, but it matters.”

  “It might matter if there was anything I could do! I would go through fire and water for Pasha. If I only had . . .” My voice faded into a whisper as I realized I still had everything I needed. “An airplane and a long winter night.”

  “Valka, what are you—” began Iskra, but then a smile crept across her face.

  I jumped to my feet and began pacing. “After the first bombing run is our chance. We can drop our bombs, then send up a red distress flare as if we couldn’t get the engine to reengage. They’ll think we made an emergency landing. No one will expect to see us for the rest of the night. In the meantime, we keep low and quiet and go on our way.”

  I headed out of the dugout. I was a few steps onto the freshly shoveled airfield before I realized Iskra was following me.

  “Iskra,” I said. “This is something I need to do. Not you. You don’t need to come.”

  “Are you planning to drop me off on the way? Bershanskaya will notice if you take off without a navigator.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. But I couldn’t ask Iskra to put herself in danger, not even for Pasha’s sake. “This will end badly.”

  “Probably.” Iskra didn’t move.

  “And worse for you. Disobeying orders to rescue a traitor . . . we’ll be court-martialed! You know what they’ll do to you.”

  “Shh!” Iskra threw a pointed glance to her left, where Captain Ilyushina was examining a plane’s rudder. Ilyushina looked up at the sound of my raised voice, but only shook her head and returned to work. We moved behind the mound of the dugout, out of sight.

  Iskra put her hands on my shoulders and fixed her clear eyes on me. “We’re part of a system that’s done terrible things. And I’ve helped. I share the responsibility for what happened to my parents. I said everything the NKVD wanted me to say. I share the responsibility for Malakhov’s partisans. This once I have a chance to fix an injustice instead of causing one. I’m coming with you.”

  I knew Iskra well enough to tell when there was no point in arguing.

  THIRTY-THREE

  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 fa
ced 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.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  WE TOUCHED DOWN SOFTLY IN A DRIFT OF CLEAN SNOW. Our illumination flare burned on the ground, melting snow where it had fallen, its miniature silk parachute crumpled nearby. It created a pool of blue-white light beyond which all was black. We could have landed on a fascist parade ground for all I knew.

  We sat there in our cockpits for a few moments as if frozen, waiting for shouts, gunshots. None came. The winter night was still and quiet. The sound of our breathing seemed very loud. Could this really be the middle of a battlefield?

  Iskra broke the silence. “I think it’s all clear.”

  I nodded and unbuckled my harness, letting the straps slide off my shoulders. “Stay here. Shoot anything who isn’t me or Pasha. If you get into trouble . . .” Another part of my half-cocked plan I hadn’t considered. “If there’s trouble, get out of here immediately. Don’t wait for me.”

  “I won’t leave without you,” said Iskra.

  “I’m the commanding officer of this aircraft and those are my orders. If the fascists get their hands on Number 18, it’s over for all of us.”

  Iskra nodded, her mouth tight. As I slipped out of the cockpit and onto the wing, her hand caught my shoulder. “Valka?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come back.”

  I pressed my loyal cousin’s hand to my cheek and stepped onto enemy territory.

  I had flown over fascist-occupied territory many times, but I had never before set foot on it. Unable to dart back into the sky at the first sign of danger, I felt helpless, like a fly with its wings plucked off.

  The first thing I did was to grab the flare by its unlit end and shove it into the ground. It proved surprisingly hard to extinguish. The melted snow only made it hiss and spit sparks. But finally I ground it far enough into the dirt to put it out. Darkness and safety enveloped me.

  Raising my goggles, I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my hands against them to make them adjust faster. When I reopened them, I could make out the faint outlines of my surroundings. A night-bomber pilot quickly learned to make sense of the finest gradations of black and gray. Trees. Bushes. A snow-covered piece of artillery, defunct long before Operation Mars. Number 18. Iskra crouched silent and vigilant in the cockpit, her hands resting on her machine gun.