Daughters of the Night Sky(36)
“Taisiya!” I yelled into the archaic interphone, longing for a modern radio and decent instrumentation. The trainers from Engels were infinitely more sophisticated than this. I looked down at my chronometer as we neared the coordinates. “Five . . .” I opened the flare. “. . . three . . . marked! ”
She swooped back around, releasing the dummy bomb on the next pass. We both peered over to see the bomb fall to the earth about a hundred meters from the target.
“Dammit,” she growled a moment later, loud enough for me to hear.
Even with a map, I wasn’t sure how well I would have been able to mark the target. A smooth flight in a modern trainer plane in broad daylight was a different proposition altogether from a training flight in pitch dark in the middle of March.
As we taxied our plane to the hangar, Polina and Renata rushed out to prepare the plane for the next run. We had three more runs to make before dinner, after a grueling morning of tactical training. The rigors of our last months at the academy were nothing compared to this, and I found myself cursing Karlov for every run he’d held me behind. Each one of those hours would have made me more valuable to the war effort. I didn’t have experience navigating for anyone other than Vanya and Tokarev, while Taisiya had flown with a half dozen other navigators.
I would have to learn Taisiya’s style, but it took only minutes in the air to see she was nothing short of exceptional. She didn’t have Vanya’s swagger, but she had all of his confidence. It made concentrating on maps and targets much easier when I didn’t have to worry about the competence of the pilot. I thought of poor Tokarev from the academy and felt pity for whoever was navigating for him now.
“Come sit and rest where it’s warm while they get the plane ready,” Taisiya prodded me when my eyes remained locked on the gray sky, watching the flimsy wood and canvas contraptions putter about the horizon. That sleek metal fighters could take flight was a marvel; that these dilapidated machines managed it was a miracle.
“I’m going to watch the next run,” I said. “You go.”
“You have to learn to conserve your strength, Katya,” Taisiya chastised. “I need you on form.”
“I’m fine. You can bring me some water when you come back.”
Taisiya shook her head and walked back to the mess hall, but my eyes never diverted. From the deft handling, I could tell the pilot was Sofia. I could see Oksana hurl the flare overboard and Sofia make her mark without a single meter of error. I wished I could sit behind Sofia and watch the movements of her hands, to get a sense of how she melded with her machine, but that was Oksana’s place. I could learn much from watching Taisiya as well, but nothing would serve as well as hours in the front cockpit.
Sofia landed the plane, the wheels touching the ground as lightly as a robin on a spindly branch.
Both pilot and navigator seemed surprised to see me watching when we weren’t next in the rotation.
“Just trying to learn what I can,” I explained. “Your run was right out of a textbook.”
“You’re a fine navigator, Soloneva,” Oksana said, reprising my surname, as was Sofia’s custom when we were in training. Sofia patted my arm in approval before walking over to the crews waiting for instructions.
“I want to be a fine pilot,” I countered. I hadn’t voiced my disappointment to her about being named navigator, but I’d felt it all the same.
“You’ll have your chance, I’m certain of it,” Oksana said, looking over at Taisiya, who reemerged from the mess hall. “But as a fellow navigator, I’ll be content to stay in my current role for the duration of the war, as I hope you do.”
I blinked a few times. Oksana was a mystery, but there was always an ambition she couldn’t quite conceal. “Really?” I finally sputtered.
“It shouldn’t surprise you. So long as you’re a navigator, it means your pilot is still alive.”
As March progressed, the temperatures rose slightly, but the snows gave way to bone-chilling rains. If they were confident it was warm enough that we weren’t at risk of the rain turning into ice at altitude, we flew. There was no suit in existence that could keep the rain from soaking through to our skin, but we went up anyway. Such conditions would have canceled practicals at the academy, but the commanders looked at this foul weather as the best sort of opportunity for us.
Battles were not delayed on account of rain.
Renata had refitted the plane with the dummy bomb, and Polina had done her customary system check. Now they sat near the heater with Taisiya and some of the other pilots. I decided that with the miserable drizzle I would do just as well to absorb the heat and rest with the others until it was our turn to go up.
“The rain was bad enough you had to give up sentry duty?” Taisiya chided. I rarely took the time to regroup after runs anymore, watching the others, hoping to learn some maneuver or trick by observation.
I nodded, accepting a cup of coffee from Renata. “You should rest in between runs,” she admonished. “You need to save your strength instead of watching all the time.”
Lifting bombs, some as heavy as fifty kilos, into position on the aircraft was physically strenuous, but as it wasn’t particularly complicated work, Renata had taken it upon herself to look after Taisiya and me, fetching food and drink at every turn. Taisiya and I had both tried to disabuse her of the notion that she was any less valued than we were, but she insisted on tending to us like a doting grandmother.