She’d met Leonid the previous winter, in the fighting around Voroshilovgrad and the Terek River. He saw her standing by the airstrip during the day watching the Yaks come and go, made pleasant conversation in passing, then asked one day if she’d like to go up with him. He snuck her into the cockpit on an early morning and put her in his lap, sharing the safety harness. From that position she flew, blasting through the cold Crimean sky, spinning the Yak like a dervish until Leonid reached around and took the stick from her, shouting in her ear that he had to stop her, anyone watching would know it was not Leonid Lumanov flying, he couldn’t do some of those tricks.
Leonid was a city boy, from Leningrad. He was educated and traveled, he’d been to England. He’d never known a Cossack, never been on a horse. In her U-2, Katya flew Leonid to a cavalry company resting in the rear. She put him in the saddle. The horse knew a beginner and took off like a shot. Leonid came out of the stirrups, hollering, What do I do? Katya controlled her laughter enough to shout back an old Kuban wisdom, the first thing her Papa taught her about riding: Don’t fall off! A cavalry officer galloped after the fighter pilot and brought him back unharmed and pale as steam.
When their divisions were separated to different fronts, they wrote. With the erratic deliveries of wartime, the letters sometimes arrived to Katya in bunches of twos and threes. It didn’t matter if she read them out of sequence, it was good to know that Leonid was well and fighting. The letters had no envelopes; they were simply sheets of paper folded neatly and tucked in, after being read by the military censors. Neither of them ever scribbled of love. Katya had made it clear, she would not fall into a romance during the war. There was no room for that kind of attachment, there was already enough turmoil and grief to fill a heart.
Her 208th Night Bombers had been in combat now for nine months without stop, chasing the Germans westward after the massive Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February of that year. Their division had flown thousands of sorties, against hundreds of targets, in their cloth and wood trainers, in biting winter weather and broiling steppe heat, in open cockpits. Leonid had never been one of the scoffing male pilots, those who thought women had no place in the sky during combat. Katya and the Night Witches had nothing to prove to Leonid. He’d stood beside the runway enough times himself, counting the returning U-2s, watching for Katya, and done the sad math. One missing, two, sometimes three or more, smiling for Katya when there were none. He told her many times the male pilots had to peacock on the ground because they were no more brave than the women in the air, and they knew it.
‘If sacrifice is courage,’ he said, ‘trust me, they know.’
Katya finished off the eggs and sausage. She handed the tray back to Leonid, who took it with the comic attitude of a servant.
‘Yes, your highness. What else can I do for you this morning?’
‘Come on.’
She unraveled her long legs from the cot, she’d not even removed her boots when she’d fallen into it at dawn. Leonid followed, carrying the tray out of the tent. Scattered around the base were over a hundred planes, U-2s, Yaks, and IL-2 Sturmovik ground fighters. The aircraft received service, fuel, oil, or armaments under camouflage nets and corrugated metal hangars. Propellers fanned in low idle while mechanics checked gauges, fuel trucks skittered every which way, grimy men and women worked side by side; the chauvinism of the skies had not yet taken hold among the tools and ladders. Leonid set the breakfast tray on someone’s wing. A mechanic shouted at him, but he and Katya kept walking.
‘Grab that bucket.’ She pointed to Leonid.
Katya waved to Masha, elbow-deep in another U-2 from their squadron. She stepped up on trig wing root of her own plane and paused to admire the patchwork Masha had done. The squares of cotton had even been blotched brown and green to match the rest of the wings. Leonid came behind her and whistled at the number of holes she’d brought back from last night’s mission.
Katya climbed into her cockpit. She called down to Leonid, ‘Set the prop.’
He dropped the bucket and did as he was told, shoving the propeller into ready position, where the starter could grab it and heave it into rotation. Katya shouted behind her, ‘Clear!’ and nodded at Leonid. He shoved down on the propeller. The magnetos whirred. The propeller flung itself over once, twice, then the engine caught with a spitting sigh of smoke. Katya sat in the jouncing cockpit, smiling down at Leonid, who stood hands on hips, a handsome, admiring young man.
She let the motor run for three minutes, then shut it down. She climbed out of the cockpit, took the bucket off the ground, and held it under the radiator. Vera came running across the field, holding another empty bucket and a small packet.
‘Leonya,’ Vera said, shoving the bucket at him, ‘be a dear and go fill this with cool water.’
Leonid raised his eyes into his brows and turned to attend to this chore.
‘He’s nice,’ Katya said.
‘You own him,’ answered Vera.
The navigator unwrapped the paper packet and held up the new bar of soap she’d received in last week’s mail. Katya opened the cock on the radiator and filled the bucket with hot water. Big Masha came up, black from her shoulders to her knees.
‘You know you’re not supposed to keep doing this,’ she told Vera.
‘Yes,’ Vera said.
‘You know I have to refill that radiator.’
‘Yes, Mashinka.’
‘We’ll let you wash your hair, too,’ cajoled Katya.
‘But dear Masha, please, let us go first. There won’t be any soap left.’
‘This is the last time.’ Masha narrowed her eyes at Vera, always the jester.
‘Yes, Mashinka.’
‘I mean it.’
‘We know.’
‘Use cold water.’
Leonid returned with the bucket of well water. His boots were sloshed.
‘And you,’ Masha said to him, spinning on her black heels. Katya looked down, a greasy spot on the trampled grass marked where the mechanic had stood.
‘What did I do?’ the fighter pilot protested.
Vera took the bucket. She liked Leonid, and encouraged Katya in his direction. Vera had her own boyfriend, a navigator in a Boston A-20 – one of the Lend-Lease bombers from America – based on the northern shoulder of the Kursk pocket.
Katya mixed the hot and cold water in the empty bucket. She pulled off her tunic, down to her green undershirt. She bent over and Vera poured the warm water over her raven hair, cut short above her ears like that of all the Night Witches. Together, the two women washed each other’s hair, rubbing in the soap hard, while Leonid sat on the wing watching, saying nothing. Within minutes, several other women pilots were in the seats of their own cockpits, revving their engines, heating bathwater, and arguing with their mechanics. Katya and Vera were the ringleaders; Leonid chuckled at the influence they had in their squadron. Several male pilots walked by, probably, Katya thought, to get a look at the laughing girls in the wet undershirts. A few made snide comments, one said something to Leonid about him being the ‘Witches’ bath house boy,’ but he did not rise from his place on the wing nor even answer. Vera heaved a bucket of cold water in the jeering pilot’s direction, and Leonid had to go back to the well.
When the women had washed and rinsed their hair, they combed it flat against their heads and sat in the sun to dry it. Vera produced a small pocket mirror and the comb; the soap and these sundries were gifts from her bomber pilot. Gazing in the mirror, Katya noticed on her forehead and around her eyes her first scars from the war, the fine lines chiseled into her face from the constant strain and concentration of night flying, of wincing into the darkness to spot the smallest glimmers of targets and home, of sopping away tears on rough shirt sleeves. And though she would not admit it, she and every other Night Witch struggled and yearned to win the acceptance of the male pilots, so she flew sometimes harder and more recklessly than she otherwise might. Every one of her black, gliding missions, every friend who
didn’t reach the landing lights at dawn, every flak burst and averted crash, even the sneers from the male fighter pilots, was etched in her face. Looking at herself in the mirror for those seconds, she relived it all.
Leonid sat on a bucket, kicking out his ankles in a mimicry of the gopak, the Cossack dance. Masha rambled back and topped off the radiator without saying a word. The two women reclined in the sun. Around the base, planes fired up and shut down, some took off, bombers flew high overhead on some mission to worry the Germans before the coming battle. In the command hut, the next mission for the Witches was planned, the objectives often were arrived at by information from the partisans. After an hour of leisure, Leonid left them, then Vera went to write a letter. Katya stood beside her bi-plane, watching Leonid walk to his Yak-9 in his flight suit, watched him take off to fly his shift of patrol duty over the aerodrome. He waggled his wings as he rose, and she knew that was for her.
June 29
2345 hours
thirteen hundred meters above no-man’s-land
Voronezh Front
High clouds had moved in late in the day and stuck. There had been some afternoon thunder but no rain. Only pieces of moonlight shoved through the thick cover and the Witches sailed through a darker, better world for their mission.
Katya cruised, the third plane in line. The target was a new supply depot discovered and reported by the partisans. The U-2s’ bombs would rip open crates of medicine and bandages, foodstuffs, clothes and blankets. No fireworks tonight, no fuel barrels or ammo stacks. Onions don’t blow up. That’s what Germans eat, Katya thought, their breath stinks of onion.
She watched the unlit earth slip by below, listening to the engine sounds muted through her quiet headset – Vera studied her maps and the ground in silence, the only times in the day she had her mouth closed – and wondered why she believed this. She had not ever met a German, though she’d bombed them for almost a year. Why was it necessary to hate them for what they ate, or what they looked and sounded like? This was Soviet thinking, Soviet propaganda playing in her head, the barking commissars always lumbering around giving out speeches and pamphlets. It was enough simply to despise the Germans because they were invaders on Russian soil, not for their difference. Katya grew up among men and women of every walk: farmers, riders, poets, brigands, musicians, there were Circassians, Tatars, Kalmuks, Khazars, Slavs, Russians, all came to the Kuban to become Cossacks, difference was the lifeblood. I’ll blow up the Germans’ onions tonight, she thought, and their breath will smell like mine, then we’ll kill as many of them as we can, not because they stink but because they are here where they don’t belong. And the commissars can lumber off to hell.
She glanced over her shoulder at Vera. Her navigator held a flashlight across her lap, a stopwatch rested in the folds of her map.
‘It’s quiet, don’t you think?’ she asked Vera.
‘Yes, it’s quiet. Leave me alone.’
Katya let moments of engine and wind and night fly past.
“I don’t like it. I’m thinking too much.’
‘So stop thinking. And while you’re at it, stop talking.’
Katya turned around. She surveyed the horizon ahead for the flashes that would be bombs and flak and the white sashes of searchlights. She scanned her gauges and indicators. Everything held trim and smooth, blue exhaust fires blinked and popped astride the motor. She felt edgy tonight, and a scan of herself did not reveal why. Was it the mission, destroying medicine and victuals, was it worth the risk taken by the women? Was her jumpiness merely fatigue and stress? If Vera were talking at the moment she would say it was Leonid. If Papa were here, he would tell his daughter to be careful tonight, a Cossack can feel events coming on the wind. Katya fidgeted in her seat, drumming her fingers on the stick.
‘Come about a little to port,’ Vera said into Katya’s headset.
Katya twitched the stick and rudder and the plane flicked left.
‘That’s enough.’
Moments later, dead off the nose about six miles ahead, a small globe of orange pierced the night. This was the first sortie over the target. Within seconds, enemy searchlights like angry antennae began to wave in the air, looking for the gliding little plane somewhere over their heads, the Witch that had whisked down on them.
Katya held the U-2 steady on the explosions. She would be over the target in five more minutes. She stayed at four thousand feet. Looking over her shoulder again, she saw Vera putting away her maps; there was no need for navigation right now, the supply depot burned and the searchlights guided them in.
Above the target, no flak burst. The Germans must not have figured their vegetables and bandages were much of a target, Katya decided, they’ve left them bare without artillery. But why, then, are there searchlights?
The second Night Witch released her bombs; another corner of the depot erupted with four small detonations. Beacons rushed back and forth, probing for the Witch, until they found her.
‘That’s Zoya Petrovna,’ Vera whispered, as though the Germans might hear.
Katya watched the searchlights intersect over Zoya’s bi-plane. The beams were so strong she seemed to be walking on them, like giant white legs. She’s a good pilot, Katya thought, and her navigator Galina Fedotova, she’s clever, they’ll get out of the lights. Zoya switched on her engine, rolled on her back, and dove at the ground, accelerating, pulling up into an inside loop. Katya watched and admired the maneuver. One spotlight then another slipped off Zoya’s skin. Katya lost her in the darkness. Good for Zoya, she thought.
But where was the German flak?
‘Cut engine,’ Vera murmured. Katya pushed in the throttle and flicked the magnetos off. Vera’s voice had been soft, Katya noted. She sensed something, too.
The U-2. began to glide, the propeller spun idly. She bled off a thousand feet of altitude, gaining speed toward the target now one mile away. The rush of wind picked up and Katya leaned forward over her stick as she always did, her galloping position. Her cockpit was lit only by the yellow luminance of the dials. Vera would tell her when to let go the bombs.
‘Steady,’ Vera intoned. ‘Thirty seconds.’
Katya watched the airspeed climb, altitude slipped to twenty-five hundred. She kept her head tucked and her eyes on her gauges. She did not see what made Vera yell, ‘No!’
Katya raised her head and saw the tracers, a stream of red darts a half mile away on her port side. At the end of the bullets, being ripped to ribbons, was Zoya and Galina’s U-2. Katya jerked at the sight, stunned. She mouthed the same word, No.
‘Night fighter.’ Katya heard the same fear in her navigator’s voice that thrummed in her own breast.
The Germans had a black-painted, night-flying Messerschmidt in the air. They’d never done this before. That’s why there was no flak.
Zoya began to burn. A searchlight followed her. She sideslipped, turning the fuselage sideways trying to keep the fire from the plane’s engine. Somewhere in the dark the night fighter banked and zeroed in again. Another pounding trail of tracers cut through Zoya like crimson scissors and then was done. Zoya’s plane was aflame, green and red signal rockets spurted out of the cockpits, a crazy light show. The plane did not explode but fell, torched. The searchlights abandoned Zoya and Galina and began their quest for Katya, who looked away before the dead plane hit the ground.
‘Vera.’
‘Damn it!’ the navigator cried. ‘Damn it!’
‘Where are we? Focus!’
Over the intercom, she heard Vera’s lungs work, the girl huffed hard to control herself. Katya kept tight reins on her own breathing.
‘Vera, stay with me.’
‘Yes, yes, shut up! Wait! Alright, stay steady. Damn it. Steady.’ The intercom went silent for several wind-whipping moments. Vera’s voice returned.
‘Alright. Get ready. Five, four, three, two…’
Katya gripped the bomb release.
‘Now!’”
She pulled on the wire and thrust
her free hand at the magneto switches, then the throttle. The milling propeller caught and Katya blessed Masha. She looked up out of the cockpit and saw something whisk past, straight up in front of her, a blacker piece of the night moving at five times her own speed. She cringed. She heard the roar of the German engine and felt the turbulence of his wash in her own wings. The night fighter had barely missed running into them.
Katya banked left and dove hard for the ground. A searchlight brushed her starboard wings and that was enough for the night fighter. Above her own engine Katya caught the howl of the Messerschmidt zooming down. The searchlight was gone from her plane but the German pilot had a read now on the slow-moving U-2. Red tracers ripped beneath her, she pulled up from her dive, just missing driving straight into the bullets’ course. The hammer blows of the night fighter’s machine-guns cut through every other sound of the night, the engine, the wind, Vera’s curses, Katya’s pummeling heart. Then she heard the slower thumps of cannon fire, and she thought this was ridiculous, that the night fighter needed his 20 mm cannons to stop a plywood bi-plane. The Germans are serious; they want the Night Witches cleared from the sky. And the Russian women made it easy for them tonight, sailing in from one direction, at one altitude. The night fighter was feeding on them like a black shark.
Katya banked hard right, plunging again to avoid the bright tower of another searchlight. The Messerschmidt screamed past. The U-2 rocked in the wake of his wailing engine. The German pulled up and away so fast, he vanished in an instant. Katya aimed at the ground, glued to her altimeter. At four hundred feet she leveled the plane out. The U-2 could fly slow enough to hug the ground and blend in with the earth.
‘He’s gone,’ Vera said. ‘Son of a bitch.’
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