need to mention that you shouldn’t think of leaving Boston?” Ian asked instead.
“No,” Kolb said at once.
“Good. Innocent men don’t run. You run, I’ll come after you. And I won’t be so friendly next time.” Ian clapped his fedora over his hair. The rage was draining, leaving a sick feeling in the gut. Bloody hell, Graham, what did you almost do?
“Have a good day,” Ian managed to say, and fled.
Chapter 30
Nina
July 1943
Russian front near Taman Peninsula
Drink your Coca-Cola, rabbit.” Nina yawned, stepping up onto the wing and passing Yelena a pair of stimulant tablets. “It’ll be eight runs at least.”
Eight runs over the Blue Line, the stretch of German fortifications between Novorossiysk and the Sea of Azov, a razor-edge thicket of searchlights, antiaircraft batteries, enemy airdromes, fighters on alert . . . The Night Witches had been hammering at the same stretch since they’d been transferred here in the spring. They’d been so jubilant, sweeping into their new post flushed with pride because by now everyone knew that they were pushing the Fritzes back. The swastikas were falling back before the red stars, and the 588th had their part to play.
The Forty-Sixth, Nina reminded herself as the Rusalka was cleared to take off. The 588th had been renamed the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment in February. “Five other regiments of U-2 fliers in our next division, ladies,” Bershanskaia said with pride, “and not one has been named a Guards regiment.”
“The men don’t have our sortie numbers!” Nina had called from the back of the crowd, and even as Bershanskaia cut her hand downward to quell the resulting laughter, she smiled. Because they all knew it was true. The other regiments flew hard, but they didn’t push their planes and themselves to the absolute limit. They hadn’t fought to come to the front, only to be called little princesses.
It had been a very long time since anyone called a Night Witch a little princess, but Nina didn’t think any of them had forgotten.
Yelena was saying something, Nina realized, pointing at the U-2 lined up ahead of them. “. . . worried about her,” Yelena said, nodding at the other plane’s pilot who was staring blankly out of her cockpit. “Irina hasn’t been right since Dusia died.”
“Irina didn’t bring her pilot down alive,” Nina said. In April, Dusia had taken a shot through the floor of her cockpit from a Focke-Wulf—clipped through the skull, dead in an instant. Her navigator Irina had had to land, stiff with shock, but she’d gone back to flying the next night. “She thinks she should be dead too, not sitting in her pilot’s place.”
“Don’t tell me you think that!”
“No, but she does.” Promotion from the rear cockpit to the front happened over the body of another pilot. You lost a sestra, you had to slot another into her seat and keep flying. Nina shivered, touching her star-embroidered scarf for luck.
A smooth ascent into the cloudless sky—tonight they took off fourth. Nina felt her pills kick in, giving the world its slowed-down razor-edged clarity, the glass-clear alertness. She’d pay for it later, jittering and blinking and unable to sleep, but it was worth it to feel this awake and alive, sliding immortal through the sky.
“Searchlights,” Nina called through the interphones as they approached their target. Yelena had already seen those four searching columns, had already started her descent. Nina saw the lead plane in the cross-beams, a white spot bleached colorless—
And then it turned from white to red in a sudden burst of flame.
For a moment Nina thought her ears had burst, that she had gone deaf. The guns, she thought, where are they? There were no shells exploding in the air, the batteries below were silent, and yet a U-2 was falling out of the sky in a shower of glowing red-and-gold fragments.
“Drop!” Yelena was screaming to the next plane in line, but strange flashes were already arrowing in, straight through the dark rather than from the ground. The second plane exploded, falling apart midair, and two more girls were dead. Bile crawled up the back of Nina’s throat. “Night fighters,” she heard herself shouting through the interphones, “they’re lining us up with night fighters—” They had never been hit with that before; the tracer fire was setting the U-2s alight like dry kindling. The third U-2 in line should have been sideslipping, diving out of the line of flight, but it sailed straight into the lights, undeviating. Irina was in the cockpit, Nina