The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  Her voice floated down along with the sound of rustling. “Da, tovarische.”

  Frau Vogt appeared to be crying, overcome by brandy and memory. Tony was offering handkerchiefs . . .

  Nina’s booted legs appeared suddenly from the hatch. “Catch me.”

  Ian caught her sturdy little form as she wriggled down from the ceiling, held her up as she bolted the hatch behind her. His grip slipped and he nearly dropped her. “Clumsy,” she snorted, landing cat light.

  “You’re not exactly a featherweight, comrade.” He could see something under Nina’s jacket, but there was no time to inquire what. Ian eased the window shut and they descended the stairs, freezing out of sight on the landing as Frau Vogt ushered Tony toward the front door.

  “Kind of you to hear an old woman ramble, Herr Krauss,” the voice floated out, definitely tipsy. “I do get very lonely.” Ian and Nina crossed the back hall toward the window. Ian’s heart hadn’t pounded so hard since he’d parachuted out of that bomber in ’45. Standing over the void, waiting to jump . . .

  The front door shut. Tony was out of the house; Frau Vogt might be walking back. Nina was wriggling through the open window. Ian hoisted himself after her, feeling his shoes touch grass. The back of his shirt hooked on the casement.

  “Tvoyu mat, hurry up,” Nina hissed.

  “Stop your goddamned swearing,” Ian said, and ripped loose. Nina eased the casement down. Ian yanked her around the side of the house, where they banged into Tony.

  “What the hell, you two? Never mind, let’s get out—” They all set off at a clip considerably quicker than a meander.

  “Nina,” Ian said when they reached the river again and collapsed gratefully against its railing, “tell me you found something.”

  Nina’s eyes had a wicked gleam. “The Frau may have burned the letters and most pictures, but she kept one album.”

  “Did you get—”

  “Is not a recent picture, she throws those away. This is most recent one I see.” From inside her jacket Nina produced a photograph clearly pried off an album page: Frau Vogt and a cluster of friends or relatives before church steps, dressed in their best. “Far right.”

  Ian’s breath caught. The young woman on the right wore a floral print dress, standing with gloved hands folded. Hardly more than a girl, childhood plumpness clinging to her face and figure, a self-conscious smile. Serious, young, on the verge of beauty and adulthood. But already watchful, her gaze meeting the camera steady and distant. “Die Jägerin?”

  Nina made a small sound like a cat pouncing. There was something disturbingly sensual about it, Ian thought, like the cat wasn’t just relishing the pounce, but the rending and tearing that would follow. “Lorelei Vogt,” Nina said.

  “At least fifteen years younger than she is now.” Tony frowned.

  “Was thinner when I saw her than here,” Nina agreed, tapping the picture. “Darker hair too.”

  “So how much help will this photograph be, identifying the real thing if we run across her? This girl could grow up to look like anyone.”

  “I know her,” Nina stated. “I know that face till I die, however old it gets. Is the eyes.”

  Ian stared at Lorelei Vogt’s eyes. Just eyes. It was pointless trying to find evil in a face. So often, evil sat invisible behind perfectly ordinary features. But still . . .

  “Hunter eyes.” Nina summed it up, giving the sweet serious face of their target a tap. “Calm and cold.”

  Chapter 15

  Nina

  October 1941

  Moscow

  The cold slapped Nina like an open hand. It was well below zero, the air so frozen in the dark night that it felt like winter lake water, but the women of Aviation Group 122 were bright-eyed with excitement as they made their way down the tracks. There might be panic all through Moscow that the Germans would be spilling into the city at any moment—but Nina and her sisters were on their way at last.

  “Where are they sending us to train?” Yelena wondered, tripping over her oversize boots.

  “Who knows?” Nina gave a hop, trying to see over the girls ahead. The railcars stood open; the first ranks were climbing in.

  “It had better be warmer than it is in Moscow.” Yelena’s dark lashes glittered with ice; her eyes were watering and the tears had frosted to her eyelashes. “How can it be this cold in October?”

  “This isn’t cold,” Nina lied, trying not to shiver. No Siberian was ever going to admit to a Muscovite that she was cold.

  “Liar.” Yelena’s eyes laughed. “Your lips are blue.”

  “Well, it’s still nothing compared to winter on the Old Man. The cold there comes rolling out over the lake and there’s nothing to stop her, the icy bitch.” Yelena wrinkled her nose. “What?”

  “You’ll think I’m a terrible prude.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t hear anyone swear.” Yelena blushed. “My father wouldn’t let anyone curse—he’d flick you on the nose hard enough to make your eyes water. Not just the one who said it, but any of us in earshot. So whenever I hear a bad word, I cringe and wait to get hit on the nose.”

  Nina laughed, as they pushed their way along to the next railcar. “Fuck your mother, Yelena Vassilovna!” Just to see that nose wrinkle again.

  “Laugh away.” Yelena sighed. “I’m a little Moscow goody, and I know it.”

  Nina grabbed the handle beside the railcar’s open door, swinging herself up. “Little Moscow goodies don’t have as many flying hours as you. Here, jump up!”

  Yelena took Nina’s outstretched hand. A freight car, not a passenger car, and so cold inside their breath came in white clouds. Nina tugged her sealskin hat farther over her ears as more girls piled in. “I won’t swear,” she heard herself saying to Yelena, “if you don’t like it.” It had never occurred to her to care what her fellow pilots thought of her, because she’d always flown alone. But she’d be navigator to one of these girls in the pilot class, responsible for keeping her safe and on course. They had to trust her; she had to trust them. Trust may have been simple for Yelena with her warm, easy ways, but for Nina it felt like flexing a muscle she had never used.

  “Swear all you want, Ninochka!” Yelena laughed. “I have to toughen up. If I’m going to kill fascists, I can’t wrinkle my nose at bad words.”

  Nina grinned, feeling that muscle flex a little easier. “So say, it’s fucking cold in here.”

  “It’s—” Yelena screwed up her face.

  “Say it, say it!” Little Lilia Litvyak laughed from Nina’s other side, overhearing.

  “It really is exceptionally cold in here,” Yelena said primly, red as a beet, and they nearly fell over laughing as the railcar shuddered into motion. Then the news passed back like a ripple over a field of grain: “Engels, we’re going to Engels—”

  “—the training airdrome on the Volga—”

  “—Engels!”

  NINE DAYS TO ENGELS. Nine slow, cold days: braced and swaying with the movement of the cars, gnawing on rations of bread and herring and swallowing bitter sugarless tea, standing on railway sidings stamping their feet to keep warm as the track was cleared for more urgent supply trains to push through. Talking, always talking, and it was Nina’s turn to be astonished. They know so much more than me. A tall brunette from Leningrad had work calluses from digging tank traps and hauling sandbags, but she had a university degree and spoke four languages. A pink-cheeked girl two years younger than Nina studied children’s education—“Very important to give children a system of structured play that will develop their cooperative instincts.” Marina Raskova herself spent a morning traveling in their railcar, and when they begged her to talk of her record-setting flight on the Rodina, she said that was old news and told them instead how she had wanted to be an opera singer growing up, singing a bit of the chorus from Eugene Onegin. Voices joined in throughout the railcar, and Nina stared uncomprehendingly. She couldn’t hum a note of Tchaikovsky; spoke no language but her native Russia
n; had never been herded along in structured play or honed a cooperative instinct in her life.

  She’d felt a similar disconnect when she first came to Irkutsk at nineteen, but then she had been so focused on learning to fly that she had adopted Komsomol meetings and the other trappings of civilized life without ever giving them the slightest thought. Now she sat surrounded by hundreds of women for whom such things weren’t trappings to be shrugged into as a grown woman, but truths they’d imbibed with their mothers’ milk. They talked of Marxist lectures and hikes with the Young Pioneers, of trying to find shoes during the famine years that didn’t fall apart after one wearing. They even talked in whispers of the black vans that might take you away if you were denounced. Yelena had a neighbor in Moscow who had been taken: “He’d been allotted a bigger room than his apartment mates, and they wanted it, so they reported him as a wrecker,” she said matter-of-factly. “When he was taken, his parents denounced him too so they wouldn’t be sent with him.” No one asked where. They knew not to ask, just as they knew about shoe shortages and lectures, Tchaikovsky and Party songs. It was more than the difference between the country girls and the city girls, Nina thought, because there were both kinds here. This was the difference between growing up civilized, and growing up wild.

  “You don’t talk much, Ninochka,” Yelena said at some point, stitching away at her uniform. They’d been passing needles and thread back and forth for days, cuffing up hems as they talked. “How did you grow up, out there on Baikal?”

  “Not like you,” honesty compelled Nina to say.

  “How?”

  “Living on the Old Man in a collection of huts too small to call a village . . .” Nina shrugged. “It’s the end of nowhere. No one sends you away to the wilds, because you already live in the wilds. No one queues for shoes; if it’s winter you go into the forest with a snare and you kill something and make shoes from the hide, and if it’s summer you make sandals out of birchbark. There’s no one to denounce your neighbors to if they have a bigger apartment. No one has an apartment. We barely have neighbors.” There was no one to hear if your father regularly informed the world that Comrade Stalin was a swindling Georgian bastard, but Nina knew better than to confess that. “Maybe once in a lifetime someone might get to a Marxist lecture,” she went on, “if they can get to the next town a hundred kilometers away, and then they talk about it until they’re a hundred. There are old women half convinced the tsar is still alive.” She looked at the curious eyes around her and flushed.

  “You’re not a savage,” Yelena said, reading Nina’s mind. “Rabbits aren’t savage—” and that made them all laugh, because it had been just yesterday afternoon that they had all been waiting on a railway siding, hugging their rumbling bellies because the bread and herring were late, and Lilia Litvyak had gone sidling round the edge of the station and returned with arms full of green globes—raw cabbages from a food cache awaiting transport. Nina and the rest had fallen on those cabbages like chomping rabbits. “Whether from Moscow or Leningrad, Kiev or Baikal,” Yelena had intoned, “we are all now rabbits.”

  It stuck.

  At last they piled off at Engels in freezing damp. The town was blacked out, the sky spitting icy rain. Nina shouldered her pack, shambling along with the rest of the girls. Yelena scratched under her cap. “I have nits, I just know it—”

  “Quit grousing, sestra,” came floating down the line. More milling in the dark as Marina Raskova went to find the officer on duty, and by the time they were herded off to bunk down, Nina had fallen asleep on her feet, swaying like a horse dozing in its stall. The gymnasium had been made over into a dormitory, rows of cots laid out hospital ward fashion. Nina flopped onto the nearest one without even pulling off her boots. “What’sat yelling?”

  “Raskova,” someone said, laughing. “The commander tried to give her a room of her own with a double bed, and she’s shouting she’s going to bunk down in shared quarters just like us.”

  “I would die for Raskova.” Nina yawned, eyelids sinking. “I would cut off my leg for her. Carve out a kidney.”

  “All of us would, malyshka . . .” Nina’s last sensation that night was someone pulling off her boots.

  A cold gray morning dawned, and the women of Aviation Group 122 were up with the pale sun, tumbling out of bed, pulling bedclothes tight. “When do we get our hands on the new fighters?” Men stared when the women trooped across the base in their uniforms. Nina returned the stares every bit as rudely, but the more well-bred girls hurried along with blushes rising in their cheeks. “I’m not used to being gawked at,” Yelena whispered. “Not like this.”

  Nina slowed her own steps to a swagger, staring down a mechanic smirking from the nearest aviation shed. “Get used to it.”

  The first order of the day was a mass visit to the garrison barbershop. “Those braids and curls are coming off, ladies! Raskova’s orders, line up for a chair,” an officer called as the women clustered rebelliously, fingering their long plaits and muttering. No one seemed eager to step forward; Lilia was already arguing with a barber. Nina tugged the razor out of her boot and unfolded it. She looked around, challenging, and when she had enough eyes, she gathered her hair up in one hand. It was tangled and dirty after ten days without a bath, and with one sawing swipe Nina sheared it off. She dropped the fistful of hair on the barbershop floor. “Come on, rabbits.”

  Yelena put her chin up, shaking her long dark braid over one shoulder, holding out a hand for Nina’s razor. Nina slapped it into her palm, even as the other girls began filing grimly toward the barbershop chairs, and that was the moment it all ceased to matter—the differences that had made Nina tongue-tied on the train. Hundreds of women from hundreds of different worlds had unloaded at Engels, country girls and city girls, those with degrees and those who knew nothing . . . And now they were simply the recruits of Aviation Group 122, identically shorn, and all their worlds combined into one.

  “THIS WAR WILL be over before we’re declared ready.” Outside Engels the fight was passing them by—Nina chafed whenever she thought of the Fritzes rolling unopposed over all those carefully dug tank traps; thought of the barrage balloons hung in the air all over the Motherland and the trainloads of crying children being evacuated out of cities, half the time heading straight into the advancing German lines. Leningrad was slowly starving to death that winter, people murdering each other for ration cards and bread . . . But in Engels, the training was never-ending.

  “You girls are lucky,” Marina Raskova scolded them. “There are boys being rushed out to the male regiments with only sixty-five flying hours, no better than machine-gun fodder. I didn’t bring you here to be machine-gun fodder.”

  “But we’ve got better records walking through the door than those boys being rushed out through it,” Nina objected. “Why are we the ones still sitting in Engels?”

  “We can’t afford to fail,” replied sober-eyed Yevdokia Bershanskaia. She was older than most of them at nearly thirty, already tipped for command. Not that she wanted to lead; she wanted to fly fighters. But everyone wants to fly fighters, Nina thought, so someone’s going to be disappointed. “We’re the only female pilots going to the front. There are plenty saying it’s foolish giving planes to little girls when there are more than enough male pilots to fly them. To keep our planes, we’ll have to be perfect.”

  Perfection meant ten separate courses of study per day, plus another two hours of drilling, from classroom to airfield and back. At night they were rousted out of bed by the blare of a Klaxon to form up on the icy parade ground; Nina tried putting her coat over her nightshirt once to save time, but Raskova—always neat and bright-eyed no matter the hour—spotted the hem flapping above her boots and made her do laps about the airfield with the icy wind blowing through her bare legs. She tumbled back into bed, teeth chattering and the skin over her thighs marbled blue, and seemingly seconds later the Klaxon was sounding the dawn, calling the women of Aviation Group 122 to rise and take the old U-2s up fo
r practice bombing runs over the treeless plain where the Engels airfield stretched flat and barren, catching every implacable puff of wind that blew off the Volga.

  “Did you hear the men laughing at us this morning?” Yelena came back to the makeshift dormitory, sweat freezing to the shorn ends of her hair so it spiked in all directions. “They think we’re a joke in these uniforms, they make fun of our marching—”

  “They’re just jealous because we’re getting new planes and not the old crates.” Nina sat stitching up a hole in her glove with thread borrowed from Yelena. They had cots side by side; they shared everything from socks to sewing needles. What’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine, as Yelena had said the first day in Moscow, and they all lived by it—on Nina’s other side, Lilia was using Nina’s razor to slice fraying edges off her coat sleeve. “Did you hear Raskova’s trying for Pe-2s?” Nina said.

  “I heard the Pe-2s are a bear to get off the ground,” Lilia volunteered.

  “Better than those Su-2s they have the pilot group in now. Those are a joke.” Yelena stripped off her gloves, flexing stiff cold hands. “They smoke, they leak, they’re slower than a cow on ice—”

  “They’re putting the navigators in TB-3s and R-5 trainers in the new year,” Nina said. “After we take the oath. Lilia, you put a nick in my razor, I’m kicking you all the way back to Moscow . . .”

  “Try it, you little Siberian runt.”

  “Runt, yourself!”

  The military oath was taken in November, and Marina Raskova made one of her easy speeches in that intimate voice like she was talking to you alone in the whole crowd. “In our constitution, it is written that women have equal rights in all fields of activity. Today you took the military oath. So let’s vow once more, together, to stand to our last breath in defense of our beloved homeland.” They all cheered themselves hoarse, and Raskova pressed every hand that stretched toward hers, kissed every cold-flushed cheek within reach. As hard as they all worked, Raskova pushed harder. Nina came to make a report one afternoon in December and found her commander fast asleep across a table heaped with papers. “I’m awake,” she said, when Nina tried to tiptoe out again, though her eyes were still closed. “Make your report.”