Daughters of the Night Sky(45)
“Darya and Eva?” Sofia asked quietly when no one else could find their voice. She’d been at the head of the formation, unable to see for certain what had happened.
“Gone,” I replied. “We saw them going down. If they manage to land, they’re only a few meters from the German camp. There is no way they won’t be found.”
“They did their duty,” Chernov said, emerging from the darkness to join us. “And the mission was a success. You’ll all be up tomorrow night.”
We nodded as the general retreated to his quarters. This was what success would look like. This was why we couldn’t contemplate failure.
CHAPTER 14
Early August 1942, Sorties: 27
The evening of our first mission rehashed itself in my mind like a newsreel played too slow on the projector—the first glimpse of the enemy base, watching our bombs turn their munitions into useless piles of rubble, our haphazard escape on shredded wings—forever etched in my brain. It was the sight of Darya and Eva’s plane, the engine enshrouded in flames, that was the most prominent memory. I could not look at our campfires or even the flame of a gas stove without remembering the terrifying screech as their plane went down.
Now the missions blurred together. Five to eight sorties in a single evening. Bridges, ammunition, hoards of supplies—all destroyed. Better, we kept the Germans awake, and they had to hate us for it.
“Congratulations, ladies,” Sofia said as we sat down to an early supper before dusk gave us the cover our missions required. “According to the latest intel, you’re considered a priority target.”
“That’s a comfort,” Taisiya said with a wry smile.
“Isn’t it, though? They’ve given us a charming nickname to go along with it, too.”
“Oh, don’t keep us in suspense,” a pilot named Zoya said with a giggle as she cut into her potatoes.
“Die Nachthexen,” Sofia replied with an admirable German accent.
“The Night Witches?” I said, remembering the German vocabulary from my language classes before the academy. I was unable to control my giggles as the peals of laughter from my comrades floated up to the trees. “How fitting. I think it suits us.”
Even Oksana, usually so solemn and quiet, smiled with the rest of us. They meant the nickname to be demeaning. They sought to make us sound like something inhuman with their taunt, likely so they would feel less remorse about opening fire on women. We knew the truth, though. If they went to this trouble, we were affecting them. It was exactly what we wanted.
“We also have a new order from Comrade Stalin,” Sofia announced. She kept her voice steady as she read the decree:
Form within the limits of each army 3 to 5 well-armed defensive squads (up to 200 persons in each), and put them directly behind unstable divisions. Require them, in case of panic and scattered withdrawals of elements of the divisions, to shoot in place panic-mongers and cowards and thus help the honest soldiers of the division execute their duty to the motherland.
Panic. Cowards . Easy words for advisers to bandy about in boardrooms and safe houses hundreds of kilometers from the rain of mortar shells and bullets from German guns. Harder to stomach when it was you who had to constantly fight against your gut instinct to flee from the inferno of hate that sprawled to the west. That the generals didn’t want troops to flee made sense, but to ban retreat was tactically questionable—and to assign troops to shoot anyone who even appeared to withdraw was worse than cruelty. It was madness.
“Can he mean such a thing?” Svetlana, now promoted to navigator, asked after a long moment of stunned silence.
“Comrade Stalin rarely speaks a word he doesn’t mean,” Sofia answered matter-of-factly. “But don’t let the directive make you uneasy. You’re all volunteers. There won’t be gunmen behind us to keep us in line.”
Renata spoke up from the back of the formation, where the armorers stood. “But what about our husbands and brothers on the ground?”
Sofia’s serene countenance faltered as she considered the question. It wasn’t our own necks we worried about. It was never about that—at least, never entirely.
“We have trained and flown together for months now, ladies. If your men possess a fraction of the bravery you have shown, I wouldn’t fear for them.” I could see the truth in Sofia’s blue eyes. She believed what she said, which counted for something.
We were dismissed, but none of us were quick to scatter back to our huts and farms for a bit of rest. Stalin’s words had shaken us too badly for real rest; what we wanted was the camaraderie of our sisters.
It was no afternoon for tunes on my creaky violin or for songs no one wanted to sing. It was no time for poetry or literature, either. I thought of the tools in my arsenal and found the sack where I kept my personal supplies. I removed my comb, pins, and the bright-red pencil that navigators used to mark their maps.
My hair had grown a few centimeters since they cropped it in Engels, and it now fell nearly to my collar, past the awkward length when it grew past the ear but too short to pull back properly.
I poured a cup of water and took small sections of my hair with a wetted comb, pinning them up all over my head.
“What on earth are you doing?” Polina asked.
“What does it look like?” I responded, pinning the last tendril up on top of my head to curl. I looked at my reflection in the mirror and traced the contour of my lips with the red, waxy navigator’s pencil, then filled them in with color. I hadn’t bothered with lipstick since the war broke out, and not often before, but Mama had always said that bad times were easier to endure with a pretty face and nice clothes. I couldn’t do anything about my uniform, but I could do the best with what I had.