that spring to mind when I look at you, you little anarchist.”
“I was good navigator!” Nettled into reacting, as he hoped, she peeled off his socks, showing the tattoos on the soles of her feet—a red star across the arch of one, spiky lettering across the arch of the other. Ian had asked about them before, but received only a shrug. Now, she stretched out her left foot, placing it in his hands as he came closer, and translating the letters: шестьсот шестнадцать. “‘Six hundred sixteen,’” Nina said. “Is how many bombing runs I flew in the war.”
“You cannot be serious.” English bomber pilots were considered lucky if they survived twenty runs.
“Six hundred sixteen.” Nina smirked. “Us little Soviet girls worked harder than your English flyboys.” Ian meditated a cutting retort—he’d devoted much newsprint ink to those English flyboys—but Nina pulled her foot out of his hands, replacing it with the foot that had the red star. “Order of the Red Star, awarded January ’43.”
Ian looked from his wife’s tattooed foot up to her amused, knowing eyes. “I’m . . . impressed, comrade.”
“The Hitlerites said a squadron of U-2s at night sounded like witches on broomsticks.” Her sharp teeth showed in a smile as she pulled her foot out of his hands. “So they called us the Nachthexen.”
“Night Witches? That sounds rather grandiose to have come from pragmatic German imaginations.”
“We scared the piss out of them.” She pretzeled her feet under her on the rooftop ledge, propping her elbows on her knees. She had a scar on her forearm, a knot of old scar tissue, like something had pierced all the way through her arm. Ian knew how to make her back arch if he ran his lips along that scar, but nothing else about it. “What about that?” he asked. “Since we’re telling stories.”
“Are we?”
“I certainly hope so, Scheherazade.”
“Who’s that?”
“The fascinating tale-telling wife of another fellow who didn’t know what he was getting into when he married her.”
Nina snorted, but inspected the scar. “Just a flying accident. Two weeks I wasn’t allowed to fly. Also,” she added, “the reason I met Comrade Stalin.”
Chapter 27
Nina
January 1943
Moscow
They had all cried, weeping into one another’s shoulders at the airdrome on the North Caucasus front. From Major Bershanskaia to the newest little mechanic, they wept.
“To Marina Mikhailovna Raskova,” Bershanskaia said at last.
Wrung with grief, the regiment she had founded echoed the toast. “Marina Mikhailovna Raskova.”
Dead at thirty-three, her Pe-2 crashing on its way to an airfield near Stalingrad. Surviving so much, only to die in a common aviation accident on the banks of the Volga.
“She will be buried in two days’ time,” Bershanskaia said later. “Full military honors in Red Square. The first state funeral of the war to be held in Moscow, awarded to our commander.”
Three fierce nods answered her. Nina and two other regiment pilots grounded by injury had been summoned to Bershanskaia’s office, and she was scribbling a set of passes. The Night Witches had flown off for tonight’s target; a mission couldn’t be put off just because their founder was dead. Raskova herself would have been outraged at the thought. Bershanskaia had no tears in her eyes now when she addressed Nina and the other two.
“An honor guard will stand watch over her remains during the vigil,” Bershanskaia went on. “It is unthinkable that her regiments will not be represented. I will not pull active fliers from their duty, but the three injured officers with the best records are to be sent from each regiment. You three will depart tomorrow.”
A new dress uniform landed on Nina’s bed by dawn. She unfolded it and stared in horror. “Fuck your mother . . .” She was struggling into it, yanking at the stiff buttons, when the Night Witches trailed in exhausted and frost rimed. “What’s this?” Yelena walked around Nina. “Are they finally giving us uniforms designed for women?” Smiles came out over tear-smudged faces as a dozen women in bulky overalls contemplated Nina in her dress uniform, complete with skirt and heels. Nina stared back at them in utter panic.
“I’ve never owned a pair of heels in my life,” she wailed. “I’m going to fall on my face in the middle of Red Square!”
It brought the laugh they all needed so sorely. A watery laugh, but still a laugh. “Ninochka needs us, rabbits,” Yelena announced, rummaging for her sewing needles. “It’s time for the Night Witches to work some magic.”