Sapphire Skies

by Belinda Alexandra

  They taxied to the runway and turned into the wind. Natalya positioned herself behind him, slightly to the right. He opened his throttle and then raised his hand and lowered it: the signal to take off. The two pilots accelerated down the runway, their wheels coming up, and took to the air like two birds in flight. Orlov checked around him for enemy planes. The smoke from Stalingrad had eased and the only cloud cover was high in the sky. At least their view was good.

  He levelled off and kept a steady course, hoping to lull Natalya into complacency and get her distracted by the terrain. Maybe he could leave her behind first go and that would be the end of this silly game? When out on a mission, a pilot had many things to fear. Apart from being killed outright, there was the chance of being wounded, set on fire, running out of fuel or ammunition, or suffering a mechanical failure. Orlov had enough to think about without worrying about a woman being up in the air with him. He’d always managed to take care of his wingmen in the air but, if attacked, he’d trusted them to be able to fight back. He realised that that was what he’d been trying to express to the women pilots the previous night: it was a man’s natural instinct to protect a woman and that would jeopardise the new strategy of offensive action.

  Without any radio instruction, Orlov swerved right. He checked behind him. Natalya was on his tail. So she wasn’t a daydreamer. He grabbed the stick and performed a roll and then a spin. Natalya stayed behind him like a persistent mosquito. He threw everything he could at her: tight turns, fast rolls and dives. Yet each time he checked, she was holding her position. A lesser pilot would have spun out of control.

  ‘All right then,’ Orlov said. He stroked the stick forward, diving down hard. His eyes bulged and his head banged against the canopy as the negative Gs pressed him against his harness. He plummeted down at full power. Natalya tore right after him. Orlov imagined that she was the enemy and did everything he could to shake her off. She’s better than I expected, he thought with dismay. He pitched the plane’s nose forward and flew upwards so fast he was pressed back against his seat. He glanced back hopefully. No, she was still there. He levelled and thought about what to do next.

  Natalya’s small voice came over the radio transmitter. ‘Comrade Captain.’

  Ah, at last, thought Orlov, she’s ready to give in.

  ‘Comrade Captain! Nine o’clock high.’

  Orlov strained his eyes to look into the sun. A black shape — no, two — were speeding towards them from that direction. Messerschmitts! Orlov wondered how Natalya had seen them before he did.

  The Germans approached so fast they overshot the pair, giving Orlov the second he needed to think.

  ‘Follow me!’ he shouted into the receiver. ‘We’ll break them up, then you take one and I’ll take the other.’

  The Germans turned and came in for attack.

  Orlov didn’t have time to worry about protecting Natalya now. She was either with him or she was dead. He swallowed hard and switched his gun control to fire. Using a technique he had practised with Colonel Smirnov, he approached the Messerschmitts head on, like a knight charging forward on his horse in a joust. He hoped Natalya’s nerve would hold out.

  The aircraft raced towards each other, their engines screaming. The Messerschmitts filled Orlov’s windscreen, but at the last moment they split. Orlov yanked his plane into a turn and pursued his prey. He had to trust that Natalya, even if she couldn’t take down the other plane, would at least prevent the pilot from attacking him. Orlov managed to pull up on the port side of the Messerschmitt and sent a burst of fire into its armour. He saw the hits run along the side of the plane and was pleased when black smoke poured from it. The plane lost height. The pilot bailed out, but his parachute caught on the tail and he went down with the aircraft, his limbs flailing in his efforts to escape. At the beginning of the war such a death would have horrified Orlov, but he had steeled himself against human suffering. It was another German gone as far as he was concerned, and many Russian women and children had died worse deaths.

  He whipped his head around, searching for Natalya and spotted her. She was sitting on the other Messerschmitt’s tail as doggedly as she had been on his a few minutes before. Then Orlov saw the skulls and crossbones painted on the German’s fuselage. More than thirty! They represented the Soviet planes that the pilot had shot down. Natalya was pursuing an ace! He was flinging himself about, trying to shake Natalya off and evade her gunfire. Orlov could predict what would happen next: she’d run out of ammunition and the ace would turn on her. Sure enough, the Messerschmitt’s pilot wrenched the plane into an aerobatic turn. In a few seconds he’d be behind Natalya and giving her a dose of her own treatment.

  Orlov’s blood froze, even though he knew he had to act quickly. But in the blink of an eye it was over. Natalya had fired a shot into the cockpit at the exact moment when the ace was most vulnerable. The noise was deafening as the plane went into a vertical dive.

  Orlov couldn’t believe what he’d just witnessed. He moved astern of Natalya’s plane. Her eyes were visible over the top of her mask. He couldn’t see her mouth but he was sure she was smiling. She waggled her wings at him and Orlov was so relieved they were both alive that he was almost tempted to waggle his wings in return. Instead, he circled the area where the planes had gone down to confirm their kills before heading back to the airfield. They had taken down two enemy aircraft on the first sortie of the day. Normally, after such a triumph, Orlov would have performed a victory roll over the airfield before landing. But he wasn’t in the mood for messing about and went straight down. When he climbed out of the cockpit his legs felt unsteady. His uniform was saturated with perspiration.

  ‘Well, that was a nasty surprise,’ said Captain Panchenko, approaching him. ‘We saw some of what went on up there. Glad to have you back.’

  Sharavin slapped Orlov on the shoulder and nodded at Natalya’s plane approaching the airfield. She came down smoothly and gunned her engine over the uneven patches on the runway so that she landed with the grace of a dancer. When she came to a stop, her mechanic leaped on the wing and opened the cockpit. She unhooked Natalya’s harness and lifted her under the arms out of the cockpit. The other female pilots and crew rushed to Natalya to congratulate her. Orlov watched her relating the details of the fight to her comrades. You wouldn’t think from looking at her animated face that a short while ago she had killed a man. She reminded him of a child who had just ridden on a Ferris wheel and was begging to go again.

  He walked towards Colonel Smirnov. There must be a way out of this tricky situation. Natalya was an excellent pilot but she couldn’t possibly stay in the regiment. Orlov didn’t like to speak to anyone after a mission until he refocused his mind. He didn’t need some female wingman gabbling to him each time they landed.

  ‘Comrade Colonel, what do you say to that?’ he asked his friend.

  The colonel cocked his eyebrow. ‘What I have to say, Comrade Captain, is that it seems you have a new wingman. Like it or not, we could use a pilot like that. Now let’s test the others.’

  Orlov and Colonel Smirnov hadn’t wanted the women pilots, but in the end they were glad they had come. The other flyers and ground crew from the 586th proved themselves to be as worthy of an elite regiment as Natalya, and the colonel had them all promoted to junior lieutenants.

  The Georgian pilot was named Alisa Khipani. She had earned the Order of the Red Star after she and her leader were called out to engage a pair of fighters and found themselves facing a squadron. The fighters were protecting bombers that were headed to a railway station. The junction was crowded with Soviet troops and if the bombers reached their target it would result in a massacre. Rather than turn back, the women split the squadron and frightened off the bombers. The feat cost Alisa’s leader her life and left the Georgian pilot with burns to her legs that put her in hospital for two months.

  The third pilot, Margarita Filippova, was from Leningrad. The regiment had been depleted and demoralised but Margarita’s energy mad
e up for ten men. ‘Of course we are going to beat the Germans!’ she would say with conviction. ‘We just have to figure out how to do it!’

  Dominika Bukova, who was the mechanic for both Alisa and Margarita, was also a morale booster. In only a few days she learned the names of everybody in the regiment along with those of their wives and children. ‘Come on, let’s get to it,’ she would say when she saw the ground crew first thing in the morning. ‘Let’s get this war finished so we can go home to our families.’

  Natalya’s mechanic, Svetlana Novikova, was more sensible than her pilot. Orlov discovered that she had studied at the Moscow Aviation Institute and there was little that she didn’t know about planes. He would have swapped Sharavin for her gladly.

  As for Natalya, who insisted everyone call her Natasha when they weren’t on duty, Orlov thought that Captain Panchenko summed her up perfectly when he said, ‘She has everything to excess: skill, talent and charm. She’s also a pest who is used to getting her own way. She belongs on the stage, not in the air force.’

  Colonel Smirnov disagreed. ‘In my experience, the best fighter pilots aren’t the measured and calm personalities but the unpredictable ones.’

  For all her flamboyance, Orlov noticed that there was a serious side to Natasha too. While she sang and played the piano for her comrades, she wasn’t gregarious in the same way Margarita and Dominika were. She was friendly but she wasn’t intimate with any of the other women except Svetlana. Natasha spent her free time writing letters or taking solitary walks around the airfield. Contrary to what Orlov had feared, she wasn’t loquacious after a mission either. Like Orlov, she hurried to get her reports out of the way so she could throw herself onto her bunk for whatever sleep she could snatch before the next sortie. Natasha was a paradox: attractive to others but essentially a loner.

  Her behaviour gave Orlov the impression she had something to hide. So what? he countered. Didn’t he have secrets of his own? He certainly never made his noble origins known, nor his disdain for Stalin.

  The women stayed in a dugout bunker, to which the colonel appointed a sentry. He’d made it clear that the female personnel were off limits for amorous advances. ‘They are professional airwomen and crew. If you want any funny business, go somewhere else,’ he’d told the regiment. The only male permitted to visit the bunker was Orlov himself, because he had to discuss missions with his wingman. Alisa and Margarita flew together.

  He was respectful of the women’s privacy and spoke to Natasha in the doorway, never going inside. Yet he started to notice aspects about his behaviour that disconcerted him. Why was it that before going to see Natasha he felt compelled to check whether he was closely shaved and his uniform was straight? Stalingrad wasn’t a place for airs and graces. Even Colonel Smirnov, usually a stickler for appearance, stomped around in dusty boots and pants with mud-stained cuffs. When Orlov had told the women that their presence would cause problems for the men, he had meant the other men in the regiment. Even after Natasha had downed the German ace and the women had been welcomed into the regiment, he had considered himself impervious to her charms. But whenever the pilots and crews were called together for a meeting, he was conscious of where Natasha was sitting. He realised he was becoming infatuated with her, but couldn’t understand why. In Moscow he’d had affairs with renowned beauties and none had affected him the way Natasha did.

  Then something happened that he was certain would cure his attraction. It was pouring with rain one day when Orlov went to see his wingman. Margarita opened the door to the bunker. ‘You’re not standing outside to catch your death in the wet, Comrade Captain. Come in! We have a fire going here and I will make you a cup of tea.’

  Although the bunker was fashioned out of the same wood and earth as the men’s bunkers, the women had made theirs homely. A portable stove stood in the centre and rugs covered the floor. They’d hung pine branches from the ceiling to freshen the air, and a jar of wildflowers was set on an upended box. Natasha and Alisa — the only others in the bunker at the time — were sitting on their beds: Alisa attending to some needlework and Natasha writing a letter. Alisa’s bed was covered with an embroidered quilt, while Natasha had a pair of silver dance shoes next to hers. They stood to attention when they saw Orlov.

  It was the first time Orlov had seen Natasha without makeup and he was struck by how young she looked. Then he caught sight of the portrait of Stalin that hung above her bed. He pursed his lips, filled with a rage that he found hard to contain. How could she be so stupid? Natasha presented as an independent thinker and yet she worshipped the monster like the rest of the masses. The hell the Russian people now found themselves in was Stalin’s fault. Colonel Smirnov, who had friends in high places, had confided in Orlov that Stalin had been so adamant that the Germans would never attack the Soviet Union he had forbidden his generals from taking the most basic precautions. The generals, terrified of purges that would see them and their families sent to labour camps, had no choice but to obey. As a result the aircraft at over sixty bases were destroyed within hours of the Germans attacking. Without air cover, the ground troops, when finally mobilised, were annihilated. Stalin, looking for someone to blame other than himself, had the commander of the Western Army, who had repeatedly warned of an impending German attack, tried for treason and shot. That was the kind of hero Stalin was!

  Orlov was so infuriated by the picture that he made up the ploy of remembering something he had to do and left. Afterwards, he behaved coldly towards Natasha. He sent her to the guardhouse three times for breaches of uniform, and in her absence flew with a male pilot who wasn’t half as good. He knew he was being irrational and he hated it. Why did he despise Natasha’s adoration of Stalin so much when he’d endured in silence the whole country’s delusions until then?

  The next time he flew with her and they downed two enemy planes together, his feelings towards her softened again. She’s been indoctrinated to worship Stalin like everyone else, he reasoned. He remembered his days at the orphanage when the children had to salute the portrait of Stalin in the dining room. Hadn’t he been one of them? Then there was the oath he’d sworn to ‘the Great Leader’ when he’d joined the air force. He wondered if it was his own duplicity that had made him react so violently to Natasha’s view of Stalin; and also perhaps because he expected so much of her now.

  Orlov was dismayed to discover that his feelings for Natasha had returned with a greater intensity. They were like a fever one thinks has been overcome but which flares up again. It seemed to him that his heart, accustomed as it was now to constant danger and cold-blooded killing, beat faster whenever Natasha was near. A simple glimpse of her smile sent waves of warmth rippling through him. Don’t be stupid! he wanted to shout at himself. The only time he could remain indifferent to her effect on him was when he was in the air. By a supreme force of will, he had trained himself to think of Natasha as another man when they went into combat. He’d learned to trust her like one.

  One day, when they were returning from a mission and walking across the airfield together, the sound of planes approaching sent a chill through Orlov. He could tell by the pitch of the engines that these planes weren’t their own. He and Natasha looked back in the direction of Stalingrad to see German fighters coming in to attack. Orlov managed to push Natasha into one of the mechanics’ trenches and cover her with his body before bullets sprayed the ground where they had been walking moments before. They were showered with pieces of dirt. The raid damaged a hangar and set fire to two planes which had landed after Orlov and Natasha and which the ground crew hadn’t managed to move in time.

  The enemy planes passed and didn’t return. Orlov stood up and dusted himself off. Natasha sprang to her feet. When she saw Svetlana emerge from the hangar unhurt, along with the other mechanics, she was noticeably relieved.

  She turned to Orlov. ‘That attack was more terrifying than any I’ve experienced in the air! In the sky I feel like a powerful eagle, but down here on the ground I was like a h
elpless ant. We pilots are much better off than the artillery. What those poor souls suffer!’

  Her face crumpled and Orlov feared that she was going to cry. He hovered near her awkwardly. If she had been an ordinary woman, he’d have taken her in his arms. But what did one do with a fellow pilot?

  One of the planes that had been hit exploded, sending flames and pieces of metal into the air. Orlov realised that he should be with the others, helping to stop the blaze spreading, but he didn’t want to leave Natasha there alone. He tried to think of something to comfort her.

  ‘When these things happen,’ he said gravely, ‘the important thing is to stay calm.’

  Natasha lifted her beautiful eyes to meet his. Her mouth twitched and she bit her lip before covering her face with her hands. Orlov was horrified that somehow he’d made things worse. Her shoulders were shaking and she was making a strange muffled sound. He kneeled down next to her.

  ‘Do you need a medic?’ he asked her. ‘Were you hit by debris?’

  Natasha took her hands away from her face. Her cheeks were tear-stained but she wasn’t crying. She threw her head back and laughed. ‘The important thing is to stay calm!’ she repeated, slapping her legs with mirth. ‘Comrade Captain, sometimes I don’t know what to make of you!’

  She tried to keep a straight face, but burst into peals of laughter again. Her laugh was musical and infectious. Orlov chuckled without understanding why what he’d said was so amusing, but the harder she laughed, the more he laughed too. They sat together amid the destruction, laughing like two drunks on New Year’s Eve. Natasha’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled. It was then Orlov realised that his infatuation had changed and that he loved Natasha even without quite knowing her.