Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(75)

We wasted a few minutes helping her complete the list.

‘Ró?yczka, we want you to climb out the transom window.’

‘Oh yes, I’ll run to Berlin and get a job as a showgirl,’ she said. We’d finished the list, but she’d started again, slapping paint on the shelves and counters, which would be a darn sight harder for anyone to scrape clean than the walls.

‘Be sensible. We want you to find a way to get us out. Find some wire-cutters, a screwdriver, a crowbar – hand us in some tools and maybe we can break out of here.’

‘I’ll get eaten by dogs!’

‘If we see them coming, we’ll throw paint pots at them. Come on, Rabbit, earn your keep! Get up there and get out of here.’

We hoisted her up to the transom. She stood on Irina’s shoulders and clung to the window frame, and then somehow the three of us managed to push her feet first through the narrow opening. She giggled maniacally, leaning over the transom back into the room, looking down at us from above.

‘Oh hell, it’s cold out here, this is SO UNFAIR –’ Ró?a wriggled her way out and lowered herself down. We watched her collapse in a heap of bones and threadbare wool on the concrete wasteland just outside the window. At least the snow wasn’t sticking, except on the plane.

Ró?a pulled herself to her feet and banged on the glass.

‘Keep painting!’

Then she scuttled off in her lopsided, lurching bunny-hop, supporting herself against the side of the building.

There wasn’t anything else useful for us to do while we waited, so we obeyed Ró?a’s last order. We covered the windows with names. And the steel door. And the floor. We’d begun on the ceiling when the bolts in the lock on the door started to click.

I froze. Irina leaped down from the counter and positioned herself beside the door, armed with a paintbrush.

But it was only Ró?a coming back. Irina let out a soft whistle.

‘They left the key in the door!’ Ró?a said. ‘To make it easy for whoever they send for us. We’re dead anyway. We’ll never get through the fence – it’s all patrolled and they’ve shut the gate. The only thing we can do is hide, and that’ll just make them madder when they find us. Actually, it’ll make them use the dogs to find us.’ Suddenly she sounded defeated. ‘I’m not going to hide.’

‘Neither are we,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

‘Dogs!’ Ró?a protested.

‘Just come on.’

We locked the door behind us, to confuse things and maybe buy us a minute or two of extra time. The Stork wasn’t guarded. There wasn’t any reason for it to be guarded. It never occurred to anyone we might try to steal a plane. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone on that airfield, in a million years, that two of us were pilots. Probably, when I got out of that Stork six months ago, it didn’t occur to anyone on that airfield that I was a pilot.

In the back of my mind I began thinking about Karl Womelsdorff – I wondered if he were still alive, or shot down by enemy aircraft – our aircraft. Or if, like me, he’d been taken prisoner.

‘No no no no no no, I won’t –’

Ró?a fought like a little kid as we scuttled across the apron in the gloom, dragging her with us and trying to stay low. She tried to scratch and bite and we had to hold her arms behind her back.

‘I won’t I won’t I won’t –’

‘Darn it, Ró?a, keep it down!’ I growled.

‘I won’t get in that thing!’

‘Then we will leave you for the dogs and the gas chambers!’ Irina said brutally. ‘I will drop you right here if you don’t stop fighting!’

Ró?a stopped fighting, but she began to weep.

‘What the hell is wrong with her?’ Irina demanded, because Ró?a never cried. We were both gasping with the effort of manhandling her. The ground was slippery with hidden patches of ice, and the snow flurries were beginning to stick. The longer we were there in the open, the more likely we’d be noticed. Although I don’t think it looked like we were protecting Ró?a – more like we were hauling her away to be punished somewhere. Maybe I did look like an SS secretary – a skinny, miserable, worn-out drudge, somebody who’d had to drop everything and run out after this little creep who’d stolen a pen or something, and I’d left my office so fast I hadn’t even bothered to put on a coat.

‘I think she’s afraid of flying,’ I said.

Actually, I was sure she was afraid of flying, because that is exactly how Polly acted last year before I left for England, when I tried to bully her into flying with me. But Ró?a wasn’t going to get a choice.

We dragged her beneath the Stork’s wings. We crouched by the fuselage, hiding between the ridiculous long front wheels, lying on the ground just the way we’d lain beneath the military trucks earlier. Irina gave Ró?a a quick, harsh lecture in Russian, I think, which I know that Ró?a understood. Ró?a spat venom back at her in Russian the way she’d done on the night last October when Irina invaded our row for the first time.

‘Enough of this.’

Irina stood up close to the plane, under the high wing. She tried the door. Ró?a and I heard the latch click.

‘Get up,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get in first, in the front. You get in the back after me and wait for Irina. When she jumps in, get out of her way as fast as you can. You’ll have to sit on her lap.’