Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(46)

And I dropped my right hand like a falling bomb.

‘Again,’ Irina said. ‘There was no touch – no contact?’

I showed her how I’d made the other aircraft stall, filling in English words when I didn’t know the French. Lisette helped in Russian.

Ró?a suddenly interrupted in a hiss of a whisper, ‘51498! You told us they arrested you because you landed in the wrong place! Now you’re saying it was because you knocked down a Luftwaffe plane in a taran attack?’

‘Well – I got caught because I was lost. And I got lost because I went chasing after a flying bomb.’

‘You knocked down a flying bomb and you landed in one piece on a runway afterwards?’

‘Well –’ I held my hands up against the sky. ‘It was the wrong runway.’

‘Think she’s a liar?’ Ró?a asked of no one in particular.

‘A good one, if she is,’ Irina said mildly. ‘The hands know what they are talking about.’

‘Maybe you’re a liar too, Russian Bat Girl.’

‘Maybe I am, Polish Rabbit. What do you care? I think I have met another taran pilot.’

Two things happened – another wave of American bombers began to whine past overhead, and one of the watchtowers on the concrete walls exploded with machine gun fire, followed by distant screams.

The guns were aimed at us. Or – not at us personally – at some of the other prisoners. ‘Karolina!’ Lisette gasped in horror.

Instinctively I snatched my hands out of the air and held them tight against my chest. Instinctively Ró?a grabbed me. Instinctively, on the other side of me, Irina gripped my other hand.

‘It’s not Karolina,’ Ró?a insisted, fiercely reassuring. ‘They’re screaming on the Appelplatz, not in the ditches.’ The Appelplatz was the big open square where the camp gathered for work details. I don’t know what the prisoners there had done to deserve getting fired at with machine guns. We clung to one another, cowering beneath the invading aircraft and the guns and the sounds of agony on the Appelplatz.

Then Irina let go of my hand and held her spread fingers a little bit over our faces, the silhouette of a plane in the dark, and rocked her hand as though she were rocking the wings of an aircraft at me. ‘Taran,’ she whispered.

Like Elodie whispering, ‘La victoire!’ A secret sign of hope, of the slow inevitable end to this NEVER-ENDING WAR.

I rocked my own hand above our faces in the dark for a silent reply.

‘Taran,’ I whispered back.

Irina invaded our bunk. There wasn’t even much of a fight. Some of the Russian prisoners had been put on night work and it was less crowded in the bunks than it had been – at least, in ours there were only me and Lisette and Ró?a before Irina turned up.

‘What’s the ugly Russian Bat Girl doing here?’ Karolina asked, crawling back in exhausted ten minutes after the rest of us. (She asked it in Polish, but I know that’s more or less what she said.)

‘She’s Rose’s friend,’ said Ró?a. ‘They’re both aerial combat Aces. And I am the prima ballerina of the Warsaw Ballet. Let her stay – she’ll protect you from the other Russian pigs.’

Do you know what I ended up with stuck in my head?

Make new friends

But keep the old,

One is silver

And the other gold.





*



Six hours later the clear sky was gone, and I stood for roll call in the pouring rain, eaten up with anxiety over the thought of all those young American bomber pilots having to fly home through such spectacularly horrible weather. I wasn’t paying any attention to the SS guard screaming incomprehensible numbers in German.

‘Franz?sisch politischer H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig! Die Verfügbar!’ she yelled. She advanced on our row like a turkey buzzard, red in the face with rain streaming from her black cape. Her awful dog tried unsuccessfully to shake itself dry all over our entire row.

‘That’s you, my dear,’ Lisette whispered from the other side of Irina. ‘She wants an “Available”. Verfügbar.’

No one else looked up. No one else even said anything, not daring to risk the narrowest chance of punishment with the dog standing there grinning savagely at us.

‘Verfügbar!’ the buzzard-woman screeched again. ‘H?ftling Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’

Ró?a gave me a little push. ‘Available 51498.’ I stepped out of line feeling like I was going to my doom. Ró?a’s words from my first day in Block 32 rattled in my head: ‘You have to line up in the morning and go wherever they send you. Shovelling shit, maybe, or burning corpses. Anything. Usually things nobody else wants to do.’

The guard looked me over, then glanced at Irina standing there next to my empty place in line, her gaunt six-foot frame towering over tiny Ró?a. The guard beckoned to Irina with a regal shake of her head. Irina tried to protest – she wasn’t an Available. She was supposed to work in the power plant with a bunch of other Russian girls.

The guard couldn’t have cared less what Irina was supposed to be doing. She slapped Irina in the face for protesting and herded her out of line to join me. Then she drove us both ahead of her through the gate in the chain-link fence that separated our block from the rest of the camp. Standing woefully soaked and miserable out there was a group of a dozen other Availables, waiting for me and Irina to join them in some unknown back-breaking and nasty work assignment.