a nightmare, we hate it, but if war ends, soldiers go home while we need a new hunt.”
Ian looked at her. “That does not make sense.”
“Does.” Calmly. “Soldiers get made. Hunters get born. You either need to track danger, or you don’t.”
“I don’t need to track danger, Nina. Not all Englishmen go pounding over fields blasting shotguns.”
Nina sighed, impatient. “Those boys you wrote about, GIs, airmen—what did they want?”
“They talked about home, like all soldiers. Films, backyard barbecues, going out for girls—”
“Then the war ends and they go back to that, yes?”
“The lucky ones.” The unlucky ones ended up like Private Luncey. Like Seb.
“But some don’t. Like Tony; he doesn’t go home to get married, find work. He stays, finds a hunt. You don’t go home either. Your war ends, you start tracking Hitlerites.” Nina licked ketchup off her thumb. “The girls I fly with, they’re mostly like your GIs. They dream of peace, babies, all the borscht they can eat. Their war ends, they get peace, they’re happy. But me?” A grimace. “During the war, I have my bad nights, I dream the lake, but it never makes me want borscht and babies. My war finishes, you get me to England, I end up at the airfield in Manchester. Loops on old biplanes, no target, going crazy. Until I get the message about die Jägerin. Is good then; because I have target again.” Nina pointed at Ian, then at Kolb’s door. “You—in war you hunt stories, in peace you hunt men like him.” Pointing at herself, then at Kolb’s door. “Me—in war I hunt Nazis to bomb, in peace I hunt Nazis to make pay.”
Ian shook his head. “If you and I are hunters, if we have the urge to chase down prey and we give in to it, that makes us no better than die Jägerin. And if that is the truth, then I will go home and put a bullet in my own brain.”
“Nyet.” Nina was very certain. “Die Jägerin, she’s different kind of hunter. A killer who hunts things because she likes it. Maybe she has excuses—is orders from her Reich, is because her mudak of a lover tells her to—but is just excuses. She kills because she likes it, and she hunts what she thinks are easy targets—children, people on the run, those who can’t fight her. Would you do that?”
“Bloody hell, Nina, no!”
“I don’t either. We don’t hunt the helpless, luchik. We hunt the killers. Is like villagers going after a wolf gone mad. Only when the wolf is dead, villagers go home and we find the next mad wolf. Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just—” She mimed an explosion. “Is too much for them; they come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop, not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. Is a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die.”
It was the most thoughtful thing he’d ever heard her say. Ian sat back, looking her over. “I had no idea my wife was a philosopher.”
“Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”
“Hunters chasing a huntress . . .” Ian rotated his cup of now-cold coffee. “This is your first chase, Nina—normally, our targets aren’t terribly impressive. They may have done terrible things, but in the flesh they are pathetic men full of excuses, not unlike Kolb in there. Die Jägerin isn’t. She had the nerve to hide in plain sight in Altaussee, even while it was being combed for Nazis. She managed to come to America on a new identity. She covered her tracks.”
“And now she is target,” Nina said.
“She’s a very clever target,” Ian stated bluntly. “It will not be easy to catch her.”
“Hunters tracking a huntress?” Nina reached across the table, hooking what would be her trigger finger through his trigger finger. “I like our odds.”
It was the first time she’d ever touched him outside a bedroom—normally Nina was prickly as a thornbush when it came to giving or receiving any sign of affection. Ian smiled. Fingers still linked, he fell into silence, watching Herr Kolb’s unmoving doors. The moon was higher up the sky; they’d been sitting a long time in this diner.
“I think Kolb stays where he is tonight,” Nina said, also watching the doors.