cursing herself for wasting her bullets driving off fever dreams, and went still behind a clump of underbrush. Held her breath, peering through.
Four men stood in the clearing. A fifth lay on the ground, thin arms outflung, drilled between the eyes by a bullet hole. His two companions stood behind him, hands raised, skinny as fence rails in uniforms Nina didn’t recognize. Two Germans held them frozen in place, neatly barbered and uniformed, the one nearest Nina still lifting his pistol away from the dead man, the other with his weapon leveled at the two prisoners. Everyone shouting in German and some other language Nina didn’t know, the younger dark-haired prisoner trying to plead, the larger towheaded one edging forward with some idea of attacking, the Fritzes clearly screaming at them to get back. Everyone shouting too loud to hear Nina emerge from the brush.
Her feet carried her forward before she even decided to move. She went straight for the nearest German, the one who had shot the man on the ground, and he didn’t notice until he saw the younger prisoner’s eyes spring wide at something behind him. The German whirled, and Nina caught a photographically clear flash of his face: young, dark haired, a well-fed throat pushing at his high collar. He backpedaled, bringing his pistol up, but it was too late, she was already on him like a wolf. For Nina he might as well have been every Hitlerite the Night Witches had ever faced. The night fighter who had shot eight women out of the sky, the Messerschmitt pilot who had chased the Rusalka down and holed her wings like a screen—this complacent German boy with the swastika clinging to his arm like a spider was all of them. Nina felt a rising howl tear out of her throat as she brought her razor around and laid his cheek open to the bone. Blood sprayed sudden and scarlet in the air. The German screamed, and a shot sounded somewhere as the second German lunged and the older prisoner went for his weapon, but Nina only saw flashes beyond the enemy in front of her. He went down, winnowed to the forest floor, and her arm never stopped swinging in wide scything cuts. By the time she looked up, he was a pulped mass on the pine needles and all was silent.
Slowly, Nina blinked blood out of her lashes. Her throat ached. The second German lay dead as well; the older prisoner, blond and bony, held his pistol. The young dark-haired prisoner had both palms clamped to his lower leg. Both stared at her with white around their eyes, and Nina realized the dripping razor still swung from one numbed hand. She tried to wipe it off on her sleeve and realized her overalls were drenched in blood. She leaned down, searching the German’s body and finding an astoundingly pristine handkerchief. Cleaning off her razor and her face, she dropped the resulting red rag on the ruin of his throat, feeling her soul float back into her own body from somewhere remote. “Lieutenant N. B. Markova of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment,” she heard herself say distantly. “Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star.”
The two men stared at her, and Nina’s remoteness disappeared under a wave of despair. Who knew if they were English or French, Dutch or American, but they didn’t understand her—they might as well have been rocks for all the legible conversation that was going to happen in this blood-laced clearing. Nina wondered bleakly if she was ever going to have another conversation with a human being again—if she’d die the next time she encountered a German, with the last exchange of words to ever leave her lips being that terrible night on a muddy airdrome where Yelena broke her heart.
Then the younger prisoner limped forward, still clutching his lower leg—dark haired, skinny as a railway spike, a long serious face. “Gunner Sebastian Graham, Sixth Battalion Royal West Kents, lately of Stalag XXI-D in Posen,” he said in slow, clear Russian. “Um . . . charmed to meet you.”
“BILL AND SAM AND I blitzed out this morning. We were carted out on a work detail, road repair—we did a bunk straight into the trees. We’ve been stumbling around in circles for hours, trying to find train tracks so we could hitch a railway car. The goons eventually picked up our trail.” Sebastian Graham