Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(77)

I tried to fly parallel, but further north, to my original course. I did a pretty good job because we ended up somewhere in Belgium before we ran out of fuel. You could see every single place they were bombing – all of Germany on fire, the sky stained red in the distance. And we knew when we came to the front, because we could see it. Fire and tracer and searchlights in one long line that just stretched on and on and on like a wall of shifting, glittering light in front of us.

It was beautiful really, fireworks and bonfires, but terrifying. And we’d been flying for what, three or four hours through the burning night before we got there? If my flight into Germany made me wonder if I was in purgatory, the flight out of Germany was pure hell. We’d left one of the prisons in hell, we’d flown all night through hell, and now there on the horizon ahead of us was the boundary – the gates of hell.

Irina said so, looking at it as we approached the front.

‘L’enfer.’

She said it in French, so she wasn’t even cursing, just stating the facts. We’re in hell.

I must have pulled back the control column instinctively, trying to go higher, to get away from the guns. Irina pushed the plane nose forward again from her controls in the rear seat, keeping us level.

‘I will fly,’ she told me. Because even if she counted my flying bomb as a taran, she knew I wasn’t a combat pilot. And she knew we were about to get guns fired at us.

We didn’t get hit and I’m not sure they shot at us on purpose, or even which side was doing the shooting. Irina just kept smoothly on course, steady as – well, steady as a fighter pilot, I guess; as steady as Daddy – straight across one of the darkest stretches of the line of fire, until the noise was behind us, though we never really lost the orange light on the horizon.

We didn’t even wake the sleeping Rabbit.

‘Now you can land in one piece!’ Irina said cheerfully.

Oh well. I did my best. I didn’t break any of us anyway. We landed in a field in the dark. It was not my best landing ever, for many reasons – exhaustion and inexperience being the main reasons, I guess – but the plane came down the right way up, if not entirely in one piece (I smashed the wheel struts and the prop). We all got violently bounced around – none of us were strapped in (only my feet!) – and when everything had become quiet and still in the dark, Ró?a untangled herself from Irina and hurled herself at me like a rabid squirrel.

‘I hate you, Rose Justice, I hate you, and I am never getting in another airplane as long –’

Irina grabbed hold of her by the back of her neck, hauled her away from me and gave her a wallop across the face that was as brutal as anything she’d ever got from an SS guard.

‘You Russian BITCH!’ Ró?a screeched.

Irina slapped her again, not quite as hard. Irina said in fury, ‘You are alive. You are over the front. You and your skinny Rabbit legs are safe with the Allies.’

She switched to Russian for the rest of the lecture, and Ró?a screeched back at her in Russian, and then I began to cry. Irina heaved an impossible sigh, probably remembering her last crash-landing, when she’d been captured. Ró?a scrambled around trying to open the door of the plane and discovered a thick woollen Luftwaffe overcoat which had been jammed behind the back seat until the heavy landing.

‘You want to get out?’ Irina said neutrally. ‘Or we could just sleep here, where it is warm –’

Ró?a laughed until she broke off choking. ‘Oh, so now that I’ve got a decent coat I’m supposed to stay in the plane with the crazy taran pilots!’

‘Oh, Ró?yczka.’ I sighed too. I didn’t know how to explain to her that she could stop fighting now. Or stop fighting us anyway. ‘This plane isn’t going anywhere else tonight.’

So all three of us jammed into the back in a pile, sharing the luxury of the Luftwaffe overcoat. I was asleep in about thirty seconds, and didn’t wake up until the local truants found us there after it got light the next morning. Not their fault they were truants, I guess. Their school gym was full of refugees.

Trust small boys to be the first people to turn up at a crash site!

That was near the end of March. I think it was a little more than two weeks between when we left and when I got to Paris in the middle of April, and it is early May now. I have been here for three weeks – as utterly out of touch with the world as when I was in prison – maybe more out of touch. I know that President Roosevelt just died, because Fernande told me so. But I knew more about the Allied advance when Lisette was tuning in to clandestine radio broadcasts.

You know how sometimes you just keep going and going and then, when you get a chance to rest, you collapse with the flu or something like that? That’s what happened to me after we landed. I woke up in the back of the Stork with the scratchy beginnings of a sore throat, and by mid-morning I had a streaming cold, after waiting absolutely forever for the kids to go away and come back with someone’s big sister who could tell us for sure that we were in Belgium. We’d made it. The whole place was supposedly crawling with Americans because they kept sending weapons and soldiers to the front through the town, and bringing wounded soldiers back the same way.

When did it really sink in? Not that day – not that week. On our first day of freedom we spent a couple of hours sitting on someone’s doorstep drinking fake coffee and eating minuscule slices of bread with nothing on it – the people whose house it was wouldn’t let us further inside and I don’t blame them. Later that day we had to walk a mile or so to the school which the Americans had set up as a refugee centre. But there weren’t any Americans there that day. The middle of the town was nothing but one big dusty crater. The nearest working telephone was said to be twenty miles away. Everyone looked like ghosts and already we were letting ourselves be herded again.