Daughters of the Night Sky(51)
Taisiya and I had not been among those questioned earlier that morning when we were meant to be sleeping in preparation for the night’s sorties. Either Chernov considered our actions sheer stupidity, which wasn’t an offense that merited a court-martial, or Sofia had spoken for us.
Sofia came to the barracks with us and made no attempt to hide her ire. “He’s gone mad,” she muttered as we all changed into whatever we had that would pass for sleepwear. “Sentenced to hard labor for repurposing a few scraps of nylon.”
“Perhaps things are going worse than we know?” I suggested. “If he thinks the Germans have the upper hand, it seems like the sort of irrational behavior we’d see when they know we’re backed into a corner.”
“I don’t think things are any worse than they have been,” Sofia answered, her tone earnest. “He is privy to a lot more information than I am, but I haven’t seen one thing to think we’re in any more risk of being overrun than in the past six months.”
“With all due respect,” Oksana said, “the punishment was severe, but the misdemeanors needed to be addressed. If we enforce some rules, but not all, when will our crews know which lines they can cross and which we intend to respect? We have no room for error in an aviation unit. I don’t think Chernov was out of line.”
“Well said, Tymoshenko,” Sofia said, her mind clearly still back in the hangar.
“But why all the foaming at the mouth?” Taisiya asked, pacing by her bunk, arms akimbo. “It doesn’t seem rational. It’s not as if we’re performing poorly. In fact, we could hardly be more effective than we’ve been.”
“Precisely what’s making him angry,” I answered, remembering the biting comments from the schoolmaster, Comrade Dokorov, when I outperformed the boys in mathematics or the indifference from Captain Karlov when I navigated the aircraft without fault. “We’re doing well enough that he can’t discipline us for genuine infractions, so he’s making capital offenses out of the least missteps.”
“God, I think you’re right, Katya,” Sofia chimed in. “I didn’t take him for being so petty, but it fits.”
“It’s nonsense,” Taisiya said. “If the men in a regiment took the parachutes off their flares, he would say they’re just doing what was necessary to complete the mission. He wouldn’t care what they did with the scrap fabric. He wouldn’t berate them for drinking on a sanctioned holiday. They get their daily measures of vodka, and we never touch the stuff.”
“We have to leave him with no choice,” I said. “We have to fly so well, so clean, that no one would hear a word against us.”
“How do we do more than what we’re doing?” Taisiya asked. “We fly constantly as it is.”
“We have to be the best. Not just good,” I said, steel filling my bones. “We need to fly more missions than the men. We have to be more efficient than they are. We can’t be excellent. We have to be exemplary.”
“Katya’s right,” Sofia said. “Winter is upon us. They expect us to balk at the long nights and the cold weather. We have to show them how wrong they are. I want all of us to think of what we can do to streamline each sortie. I want to turn around planes after their sorties in half the time. I want to send up groups in a tighter formation—each plane with a gap of three minutes, not six. Speak to your teams. Your mechanics know your planes better than you do. I want every maintenance procedure scrutinized.”
We summoned Renata and Polina to the conversation, who in turn called over a few other mechanics and armorers who had shown considerable skill. We didn’t sleep, relying on coffee to fuel us through the cruel brightness of the winter day. Before the night’s missions and between each subsequent sortie, we began looking at the standard procedures for preparing a plane for flight. Polina scribbled furiously in a notebook as she considered each of the tasks she performed on the aircraft as devoutly as prayer each day.
“You only cut the engine once per sortie, right?” Polina asked, looking down at her notebook instead of up at us.
“Yes,” Taisiya answered, then, arms crossed over her chest, went on staring at the simple engine as though it contained the answer to a complex riddle. “Once we lose the element of surprise, there’s not a lot of use in cutting it again.”
“Don’t charge the starter in between each sortie,” Polina said, scribbling. “You get five starts of each charge. Charge when you have one left. That will shave several minutes off right there.”
“Brilliant,” Sofia said, clapping Polina on the shoulder. “What else?”
“Well, I understand why they want one mechanic per plane—it allows us to learn the plane and all of its quirks—but it would be faster if we worked in teams. Each of us would still be the chief mechanic for her plane, but the others can help refuel and see to basic maintenance in between sorties instead of waiting for their own planes to come back.”
A crowd of mechanics had gathered around, humming in approval as though they’d been thinking this for months and never been bold enough to suggest it.
“That makes good sense,” Sofia agreed. “Though I’m afraid you’ll exhaust yourselves.”
“It’s better to exhaust ourselves working than waiting,” Polina replied, earning approving cheers from the other mechanics.