Daughters of the Night Sky(7)
“Taisiyushka. Enough with the past tense.” She was the last woman I expected to let her life revolve around a man. I knew she loved Matvei dearly, but I had expected a well-reasoned anger or worry—not this despair. “And even if . . . the worst should happen, you won’t be lost. You have me,” I said, tightening my embrace. “Don’t cry. Matvei wouldn’t want it.”
“I have you until the war claims you or you run off with a husband and have a gaggle of babies. Who else would want to marry a woman like me? Men don’t want to marry pilots.”
“Well then, there’s no worry about me running off with a husband to make babies. I’m a pilot, too, in case that slipped your notice.”
A quiet laugh shattered Taisiya’s gloom, just for a moment. “I don’t know how women have done this since the dawn of time. Waiting for men to come home from war. He hasn’t even gone yet, and it’s killing me.”
“Just be grateful. You’ll be able to help him more than most girlfriends would be able to. And not just by knitting socks. It will be different for us.”
“God, I hope you’re right, Katinka. I hope you’re right.”
CHAPTER 3
“Where is Tokarev, Ivanova?” Karlov barked as he noticed the cadet’s absence.
“I wouldn’t know, Captain,” I answered, staring straight ahead into the airfield rather than making eye contact. Unless Tokarev was at death’s door, he would face weeks on the ground for missing his training. “He was in class this morning and in the mess hall at lunch. I can’t say what happened to him in the quarter hour since.”
“A good navigator keeps tabs on his pilot, Ivanova. And vice versa,” Karlov pontificated for the assembled cadets as we awaited our rotation. “There is no excuse for your carelessness.”
“Only lack of access to the men’s barracks, Captain.” I wanted to regret saying those words, but they tasted sweeter on my tongue than raspberry jam.
“He twisted his ankle, Captain,” Solonev called from the back of the crowd, clearly having jogged to join the group. “I helped him to the infirmary just now.”
Karlov rolled his eyes but nodded at Solonev. “Very well,” he said, looking over his roster. “Ivanova can observe this afternoon.”
“Begging your pardon, Captain,” Solonev said. “I can make a second run. Ivanova could use the hours, and so can I.”
The group of pilots and navigators turned their eyes to Solonev, then back to Karlov.
“Very well, Solonev,” Karlov said after a pause. He had sought an excuse and found none. He ordered us to go first in rotation. Presumably he didn’t want me to have the advantage of watching any of the others fly the pattern first, and he wanted my nerves raw. He assumed I would be rattled at the prospect of going up with a new pilot on a moment’s notice. He wasn’t as misguided in this as I would have hoped, but I was happy to get up in the air and have my turn rather than stand about and stew over it.
We trained on Yak UT-2 trainers. A low-winged, open-cockpit aircraft with basic controls and a low cruising speed. Designed so that even rookies like Tokarev could learn on them without disaster, though he had tried often enough to test that. Though modern, it was simple and small compared to the monsters needed for the long-distance, record-setting missions Stalin loved so much.
Solonev took his place first, stepping onto a reinforced section of wing and swinging himself into the front cockpit. I followed into the rear. When given the signal, Solonev fired up the engine and ascended as high as he dared, not descending until we were within a few hundred meters of the target. This would keep us out of sight of ground troops for as long as possible, giving us a few seconds’ advantage. It was all we would need.
He had to bank fairly hard to the right or left to be able to see the target below, so we had to circle our target like a vulture long enough for me to mark the target with a flare and for Solonev to make a direct pass to drop his dummy bomb.
“Five seconds to target,” I called over the radio as the hand ticked away on my chronometer.
“Banking,” he replied, tipping the plane hard left so I could get a clear view of the painted grass below.
“Steady,” I replied. I opened the flare and aimed. The flare was outfitted with a small white parachute that, when winds were calm, helped it to stay the course as it fell. It would be invaluable in a combat situation where he had to distinguish a strategic building from an unimportant one. When I released this one, it fell true, landing right in the center of the target, leaving a bright-red flame for Solonev. “Marked!”
Without a twitch, he dropped the dummy bomb right on top of my flare.
“Well done,” he acknowledged over the radio.
Two simple words that I’d yet to hear from a pilot or instructor.
Solonev signaled from the front cockpit to acknowledge we’d completed the pass to his satisfaction and were heading back to base. A flawless run with a more-than-capable pilot. I felt tingling in my fingertips and the bottoms of my heels, as though they were preparing to fly of their own accord. Too long since I had felt the joy of being in the cockpit. Karlov waved off another crew as we disembarked our plane. He was never one to waste daylight.
“Excellent, Solonev,” Karlov said with a nod as we rejoined our classmates. It might as well have been an ode in Solonev’s honor, stingy as the captain was with his praise.