Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(74)

We fell on this unexpected feast like turkey buzzards. My gosh, food – or lack of it – makes you stupid. We couldn’t do a thing until we finished eating, and it never occurred to us to save any of it.

Afterwards Ró?a stood staring out the window across the acres of Luftwaffe concrete and wire that surrounded us again. After a moment, she said matter-of-factly, ‘We’re f*cked.’

Irina and I glanced at each other. Irina nodded once in grim agreement.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ró?a said.

We went and stood next to her at the window. Ró?a licked a smear of leftover margarine from the back of her hand and repeated sadly, ‘We’ve had it. I really thought we might win. I’m sorry.’

I thought so too. I think we all did.

We stood quietly staring across the airfield with her.

Standing on the apron, only about thirty yards away and gathering a crown of snow like icing sugar, stood a familiar, ungainly Luftwaffe plane with a black iron cross painted on its side and a black swastika painted on its tail.

‘That is a Storch,’ Irina murmured.

‘A stork!’ Ró?a translated, and let out one of her mirthless giggles. ‘A sign of spring, right? Of new life! Good luck in the coming year! We had one nesting on our chimney the year I was arrested.’

‘It’s a German liaison aircraft,’ I said. ‘Um, for communications. And they use it for ambulance work.’

‘Pffff.’ Ró?a gave a dismissive snort and turned away.

‘Controls for two pilots? Room for three?’ Irina asked quietly.

We were both forming the same desperate, insane idea.

We knew Ró?a was right. We knew we’d had it. We were locked in a building inside an electrified perimeter fence with dogs patrolling it – a more comfortable prison than the one we’d just come from, but nearly as secure, and in maybe less than an hour they’d send someone to collect us. And if they didn’t shoot us on the spot, they’d haul us back where we’d come from like they did with the Gypsy girl who tried to escape, and after they were done with the dogs and the beating, we’d probably be too dead to execute.

So Irina and I had a quiet little discussion about the plane, without speaking our crazy idea out loud, because we didn’t want to get Ró?a excited. She’d already decided we didn’t stand a chance and was dealing with it in her own way. She wasn’t listening to us any more; she was making her own last desperate statement. She’d begun ransacking the shelves and paint tins and was leaving behind her a good-sized trail of destruction.

‘Flight controls front and back,’ I told Irina. ‘But you can only control the flaps and throttle from the front seat.’

She gave me a funny look. ‘Have you flown a Stork?’

‘I’ve flown that Stork,’ I whispered.

Her white eyebrows soared into her hairline. She grinned. ‘Rosie, you are full of surprises.’

‘That’s the plane I came in on. But of course I haven’t flown for six months.’

‘Who gives a damn?’

I shrugged. I didn’t think I could do it – I didn’t think I was strong enough to do it, but I didn’t like to say so. We’d no other chance. Irina hadn’t flown for two years.

‘I haven’t flown in the dark. Or in snow, much.’

‘Controls for two, I can help you. You have flown this plane, and I have flown at night in snow. We can do it together. If we go down burning, we will take another Fascist aircraft with us, yes, Rose Justice? Taran!’

‘Taran!’

We didn’t need to say another word. We both began to assess the window. There was iron mesh pressed between the glass, not prison bars but like chicken wire, and even if we smashed the glass, we’d still have to cut the wire somehow – Irina’s wire-cutters had not gone with her to the Punishment Block. The main window was just a sheet of plate glass like a shop window, but there was a narrow transom at the top which slotted open with a lever to let in air.

‘Little Ró?yczka will fit,’ Irina said.

‘And then?’

Irina shrugged. ‘She can take the hinges off the door.’

‘Break it down,’ I improved.

It was just as likely. Ró?a’s starved hands would never be strong enough to unscrew the steel door that shut us in, even if she had the right tools.

‘Give her a hammer and she will break the lock –’

‘– She’ll find a blowtorch!’

We laughed together mirthlessly and turned away from the window to look at our pet Rabbit.

This is what Ró?a was doing: she’d found an open bucket of black paint, and she was covering the walls with graffiti, just like me and my doomed French work team had done last November. Ró?a hadn’t wasted any time. In letters six inches high she was writing out the list of Rabbits’ names, as far up as she could reach, all seventy-four of them, dead and alive. She was covering the walls with names in black paint beneath a thick black heading in German which said something complicated and accusing like, ‘Polish women used illegally as medical specimens in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp at Fürstenberg’ – a great big shout of defiant witness which they’d have to scrape off the walls with a razor blade if they wanted to hide it – or paint over it, of course.