The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  The quarter moon was still rising over the auxiliary airfield, the pilots awaiting the order to fly. Nina stood in the squelching Polish mud, sealskin cap dangling from one hand and knapsack from the other, a lump in her throat like a stone.

  This cannot be happening, she thought.

  The song trailed away.

  With a huge effort, Nina looked up. Her fellow pilots had moved closer as they sang, as she stood head bowed denying the inevitable. They clustered tight around her, instinctively hiding the regiment’s distress from any outside eyes who might have been watching. Many cried silently, faces turned to her like flowers: dark eyes and blue eyes, red-haired and brown-haired and fair-haired. Nina took a shaky breath, inhaling the scent of engine grease and clean sweat, mud and navigation pencils. The perfume that belonged to women who lived for the sky. She couldn’t see Yelena, but in her mind she heard Yelena’s voice. Not the implacable voice of an hour ago, crying out You’re asking too much! The laughing voice of almost three years ago, as she grasped Nina’s arm and said Welcome, sestra!

  Then the memory was blotted out by Bershanskaia’s quiet words. “To your planes, ladies.”

  Nina swallowed, pushed one foot forward and then the other. A wordless rustle rose through the throng, and for a moment all the Night Witches pressed closer. Silent fingers touched Nina’s shoulder, her back, her hair as she moved through her sisters. Someone gave her hand a brief, fierce squeeze—she didn’t know who.

  “Tell Galya to keep a lighter hand on the stick,” Nina said not too distinctly and set off across the airfield for her plane, first walking, then running. From the corner of her eye she saw Yelena for the last time, face contorted, bent almost double in red-haired Zoya’s comforting arms, then the regiment lapped around her, hiding her from view before the wrong eyes could take notice of her grief, pulling her along in the mass of boots and overalls jogging for the line of U-2s. Nina’s heart kicked, but she didn’t look back. She was never going to look back, look east, look in the direction of the Old Man. To look back was to drown. To look forward was to fly.

  She found herself stepping up onto the wing of the Rusalka. She hadn’t consciously decided to take her old plane, but she should leave her own U-2 for her navigator—Galya was going to need every advantage a familiar plane could give her, now that she’d become pilot. Yelena wouldn’t be fazed by an unfamiliar new plane, Yelena could fly anything . . . no protest rose behind her, so Nina dropped down into the Rusalka’s cockpit. It smelled like Yelena’s soft hair, and Nina bit her lip until she tasted blood. She brought the engine to life, and agony subsided a little in that familiar thrum.

  All around her, the other U-2s were awakening. No outsider would be able to say tomorrow that the regiment had deviated from routine: often they sang on the airfield, always they ran to their planes, and now the preflight checks proceeded exactly as usual. If someone asked questions later about tears and sad faces, Nina had no doubt Bershanskaia would bring forth a plausible story about the regiment being downcast because of recent losses outside Ostrołęka. The Night Witches would keep the secret.

  Ground crew ran to light the runway, just a flicker to mark the point of liftoff. Nina remembered Yelena groaning last month, Soon they’ll be expecting us to land by the light of Bershanskaia’s cigarette!

  Enough, Nina thought as the Rusalka was waved forward. Enough.

  Stick forward. Speed gathering under the wheels. Nina took the air, feeling her arms disappear into the wings, her blood into the fuel line. Behind her the Night Witches followed, an arrow-straight line into the rising moon. Nina knew Yelena would be flying second right behind her.

  Six hundred and sixteenth flight. The last flight.

  Last time rising away from the airfield. Last time leveling off at altitude, skimming through silvery wisps of cloud. Last time descending toward the target. Last time cutting the engine, sinking down in a silent death glide. Nina took a deep breath, held it. Keyed the engines back up in a roar, felt the nose rise, and as the blinding white fingers of the searchlights stabbed the sky, triggered her bombs off the rack. She flung her U-2 on its wingtip and sailed on past the target, luring the ground fire and the lights to follow her and leave the ground dark in her wake, perfectly set for Yelena to ghost through with her own load of death. Nina felt the familiar blindness of the lights pinning her against the vault of the sky, heard the chain of explosions below, and saw shells blooming into red and green and white bursts.

  Nina released her long breath, sinking down and down and down so the pilots behind her could truthfully witness that their lead pilot had failed to pull up and vanished on the descent. Twisting, she could see Yelena slip out of the lights, turning back. Nina leveled the Rusalka and kept flying low and straight into the blackness. What lies west? a little girl had wondered on the frozen shore of a vast lake. What lies all the way west?

  Like it or not, Nina was now going to find out.

  As she climbed back above the clouds and dim moonlight filled the cockpit again, she saw the dried rose wedged into the instrument panel. The rose she’d plucked from one of Marina Raskova’s funeral wreaths and brought back for Yelena, carefully dried out and tucked beside the altimeter. My Moscow rose.

  The first choked sob burst out of Nina. She tore the rose away and pulverized it, raising her hand and letting the rigid wind stream carry away the shredded petals. She wept alone in her cockpit on her six hundred and sixteenth flight, soaring west, never looking back.

  BY DAWN, wolf packs of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs would be roaming this airspace. Until then, Nina had the advantage. I am still a Night Witch. As long as the dark lasted, she could hide from the whole world.

  How long would it take to cross Poland? Beyond was Germany, the belly of the beast—would it be safer to turn south, aim for Czechoslovakia? Wherever she touched down, how was she going to find safety speaking no language but Russian, with no money to her name? She flew through a war-torn world filled with blood and barbed wire, and as soon as the fuel gave out and she had to put foot on the ground, she was quite probably dead. That conviction had shone in the tear-filled eyes of her fellow pilots: here was trouble even their crazy little Siberian couldn’t fly free of.

  On and on she flew in the murk of cloud, hunched over her controls. West and west and west. Below somewhere would be Warsaw in its dying spasms—then Warsaw was behind her, or she assumed it was. A malicious headwind kicked up, and the Rusalka labored. Nina eyed the fuel gauge. The altitude and the speed were already eating through her tank. The wind grew rougher, and her heart fell. A U-2 could cover more than six hundred kilometers on a full tank in good flying conditions, but in this spiteful headwind Nina wouldn’t make four hundred.

  “Fuck your mother,” she muttered, but rage wouldn’t get her farther west; nothing would but fuel, and she was nearly out. The night was far from over and the needle on the gauge scraping near empty when Nina brought the Rusalka down out of the clouds. No lights below of cities or towns, not even any scattered farmhouses. Nothing but a dark swath of forest, stretching as far as Nina’s night-trained eyes could see. She brought her plane down until she was sailing along the treetops, looking for a clearing. A U-2 could land on a dinner plate, the saying went, but you still needed a dinner plate. She supposed remotely that if she couldn’t find one, she’d crash among the pines and die spiked by branches or burning in her cockpit.

  The engine quit. The fuel gauge stood at empty. The U-2 began to drop.

  Nina glided down silently in her last bombing run, only this time there were no bombs to drop, no engine roar propelling her back up into the clouds. Just down and down and down between the treetops.

  There—a clearing. Part of Nina was disappointed. The siren croon of oblivion hadn’t entirely gone away; in the back of her mind it kept up its seductive whisper. But she couldn’t take the coward’s way out when a runway stretched in front of her. She lined up the Rusalka and brought her down in a perfect three-point landing, branches crac
king as her wings brushed past walls of trees. Flying wires snapped. Something else broke with a judder like a spine cracking. Then at last they were still, and Nina sat in the cockpit with her breath coming in short gasps. She heard the rustle of leaves, smelled leaf rot and bark. Her nose had grown accustomed to harsher smells, gasoline and engine grease, but one breath of this tree-laced night and she was back in the vast woods around the Old Man, trailing after her father as he taught her to track through the taiga.

  Nina climbed stiffly out of her cockpit and jumped to the ground. A little moonlight filtered down, enough to show that a blade of her propeller was gone. “That’s it, then,” she said aloud. Her half-formed hope of stealing some cans of gasoline from somewhere and fueling up the Rusalka again spun away. Without a machine shop there was no fixing a halved propeller. Nina had spent most of her waking hours in the sky since she was nineteen and had first slid into a cockpit, but now she’d have to content herself with this rickety human shape and its inadequate feet: the Rusalka would never fly again.

  Get out, Nina thought, get out of here. Anyone—German patrols, Poles looking for enemies, fugitives sniffing out travelers to rob—could have heard the U-2 land; anyone could decide to investigate, and until proved wrong, Nina was going to assume everyone she met was an enemy. Get out of here before anyone finds you. But she couldn’t move. Nina thought she’d already left everything behind that there was to leave—her regiment, her sisters, her lover—but there was one more thing, after all: her gallant Rusalka with its painted fuselage and assertive little engine, whose wings had carried her through so many missions, whose shadow had embraced her and Yelena in the grass on long summer days. The Rusalka, so alive to Nina’s touch that she practically sang. Nina had thought there was no more pain left to feel tonight, but she embraced her plane, as much of its body as her arms could hold, and she wailed her agony into its frame.

  Then she swiped at her burning eyes and began tearing at the U-2 with her bare hands, stripping cockpit and fuselage as if she were stripping flesh from bones, cannibalizing it of anything that might be useful. She stuffed her knapsack full to bulging, then went to the underbrush and filled her arms with dead leaves and twigs. The woods were damp and muddy from a recent rain, but even if they weren’t, she didn’t care about the risk of setting the trees alight. Grief was draining away to be replaced by white-hot Markov rage, her father’s all-destroying fury that cared nothing for sense or self-preservation. Nina didn’t care if she burned half of Poland and crisped her own bones to ash; she wasn’t leaving the Rusalka to rot. Filling the cockpit with brush, she struck a match from her supplies and flung it into the tinder. The fire caught, kindled, leaped up. Nina stood back, watching the smoke boil. Only when the Rusalka was engulfed in flame, stiffened fabric curling away to reveal the skeletal wooden bones, did Nina turn away. She shouldered her knapsack and followed her own long leaping shadow west into the trees, as the Rusalka writhed and died on her funeral pyre.

  A COMPASS. A loaded pistol. Matches. A sack of emergency supplies—sugared milk, a chocolate bar, the extra food she’d snatched from the barracks. The scarf embroidered with blue stars. A roll of stiffened cloth, struts, and wiring stripped from the Rusalka. The razor.

  That was all.

  Nina exhaled a shaky breath. “Not all,” she said aloud. She had good boots and heavy overalls, her sealskin cap. She had warm summer weather. And she had everything learned growing up on the shores of the Old Man.

  Nina walked until she heard the trickle of a stream, drank from her cupped hands, ate half a chocolate bar, then rigged a shelter from the Rusalka’s scavenged cloth and struts. She collapsed under it with the razor in one fist, sleep falling like an avalanche, only to wake in the night bathed in clammy sweat, agonizing cramps racking her legs, teeth chattering as though it were midwinter. Nina had never been ill a day in her life but she was ill now, nose and eyes watering, hands shaking too badly to light a campfire. She huddled under her shelter, trying to rub the cramps out of her thighs, smelling her own rank sweat, and when she looked up she saw her father gazing down at her with yellowed eyes.

  “You’re not here,” she said through clattering teeth. “I’m dreaming.”

  He squatted down. “How long has it been since you had a Coca-Cola pill, little huntress?”

  Two days—or more? Somehow another day had come and gone. Nina could have sworn it had only been an hour since the shakes woke her in the night, yet between one set of shivers and the next, she’d somehow lost a day. That made it at least three days since she’d swallowed one of those tablets that flooded her veins with quicksilver—and for months and months, she hadn’t gone a day without them.

  Her father snorted, scornful.

  “Go away.” Why did she have to hallucinate him of all people? “I don’t want you. I want Yelena.” She wanted Yelena so badly, her sparkling eyes and fierce kisses.

  “You’re stuck with me, rusalka,” her father said. “That lily-livered bitch didn’t want you.”

  “Go away,” Nina cried, then cried out again from the pain of her muscle cramps. She closed her eyes for an instant, and when she opened them again it was bright midday. She’d never been so hungry in her life; she drank all the sugared milk and shivered to see how her food stores were all but gone. She managed to stagger downwind of her little shelter to lay a few game traps, hands shaking too much to fashion more than the simplest of snares out of plane wiring.

  Time kept bending and melding. Her waking hours were full of cramping muscles and watery bowels, heading to the stream to drink and then back to her shelter to curl around her jittering limbs. Her sleeping hours were full of nightmares. Over and over she lost control of the Rusalka over the surface of the lake, sinking through aquamarine water with lungs bursting. She imagined footsteps outside the shelter and erupted screaming, squeezing the trigger of her pistol over and over as she aimed it into the darkness. Too late she realized no one was there, and she’d just wasted all her ammunition. She could have wept, but tears were no good; she crawled back into the shelter only to dream of Yelena dying, going down in a blossom of flame. If she dies, you will never know it. Yelena was gone; Nina was never going to know if she lived or died or fell in love with another. She succumbed to tears then, sobbing in the haunted night.

  She had no idea how long she was ill—the days and nights seemed to flash past in cycles. At some point her father disappeared, and Nina’s lethargy abated enough to strip off and wash her filthy overalls. Sitting naked on the stream bank waiting for her clothes to dry, she flexed her fingers in the sunlight. Grown thin, but they weren’t shaking anymore. That damned Coca-Cola, she thought. Her dreams were still terrible, she was still racked with sudden illogical convictions that someone was sneaking up behind her, but the muscle cramps had mostly disappeared, and she was strong enough to set a fire and cook the rabbit she found in her snare.

  “Time to move,” she said aloud, because Nina Markova might want to die, but she was too stubborn to starve in a Polish forest. She climbed into her damp overalls, took down her shelter, began trekking west again.

  And in the second week, she met Sebastian.

  Chapter 39

  Jordan

  July 1950

  Boston

  Dancers mirrored endlessly across a battered barre—click. Pointe shoes rubbing through the resin box—click. Quietly Jordan moved around the fringes of the Copley Dance Academy’s advanced class. A taut-pulled bun coming loose midplié, a forehead leaned wearily against an arched foot. Click. Click.

  “Did you get what you wanted?” Tony asked as they left the studio.

  “I think so. I won’t know for certain until I look at the negatives.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over her shoulder. “You were very helpful.”

  It surprised her just how helpful. Shooting pictures with Garrett had often left her annoyed; he kept sneaking kisses or else talking when she trying to concentrate. Tony had been different. He’d flirted outrageously, not
with the dancers but with Madame Tamara, the eighty-year-old instructor who called him a naughty boy in Russian and ended up letting Jordan stay the entire class rather than shooing her out after ten minutes. Tony had gravely aped the dancers’ pliés as they began, and they laughed so much they forgot Jordan was there; she’d been able to start clicking away without waiting for her subjects to relax. Tony had then faded quietly back against the wall, handing her film before she needed to ask for it. “You were an excellent assistant,” Jordan said as they swung around the corner into Copley Square.

  He smiled, lazing along hatless in the summer sunshine. Heat shimmered above the pavement, and through the square women blotted their palms inside sweaty gloves and men tugged at collars whose starch had gone limp. “Can we discuss my fee for the morning’s work?”

  “Oh, there’s a fee, now?” Jordan adjusted her broad-brimmed summer straw. “What are you going to cost me?”

  “A swan boat ride.”

  “No Bostonian would ever be caught dead on a swan boat unless you’re being dragged by your little sister. It’s for tourists.”

  “I’m a tourist, and my fee for hauling your bag and buttering up that old dame who claimed she was a White Russian countess who fled the Bolsheviks is a swan boat ride.”

  Jordan took his arm, turning toward the Public Garden a few blocks away. “White Russian countess?”

  “Her accent was Ukrainian, but I was too much of a gentleman to call her a fibber.”

  “So you spoke Russian just now to Madame Tamara, and French to those Parisian tourists who came into the shop three weeks ago.” Jordan tilted her head. “And I’m sure I’ve heard you speak German to Mr. Kolb . . .”

  “He didn’t like that much. Odd duck, that one. How did your father come across him?”

  “He was coming overseas and needed a sponsor. He’s twitchy,” Jordan admitted, “but he had a bad war, or so Anna said.”