the commanders it’s going to be all paperwork from here on out. She should have the honor of flying the first mission.”
“Don’t be so everlastingly generous,” Nina groaned. “Just admit that you’d walk over your own mother to get into a cockpit by now.”
“I’d walk over my own mother to get into a cockpit by now,” Yelena said immediately. “Just not a sestra.”
A fine summer evening, warm and breezy. Impossible to think that the front was just kilometers away from this prosaic stretch of flat fields and hastily erected bunkers, torn-up roads dotted with trucks and ground personnel in overalls. The horizon showed plumes of smoke rising kilometers away—coal deposits on fire, someone whispered. There was still a little daylight left when the regiment gathered on the makeshift runway to watch Bershanskaia and the squadron commanders make their way to their planes. “They’ll fly to the auxiliary airfield at the front lines,” the whisper went around. “Arm there, fly their run, then back here.”
Three planes took off into a darkening sky. Nina watched, hands stuffed in her pockets, physically aching. Tomorrow, she thought. From the taut, yearning faces all around her, the others were all thinking the same thing.
“Well,” Yelena announced, “I’m not going to bed until they’ve come back. Let’s have some music!”
A girl from Kiev began an ancient folk song, her voice hushed and lilting, and a few of the others took it up, braiding harmony around her soft alto. A Party march followed, brisk and tuneful, and more voices joined in as the stars came out in their thousands. The sky turned to black velvet, and Nina surprised herself by lifting her own voice in an ancient cradle song from the shores of the Old Man. She hadn’t even known she remembered it, all those verses in the lake dialect so old it was barely Russian. The other girls listened raptly. “What was that?” Yelena asked. She sat with her back against the nearest shed, fiddling with a length of cloth across her lap.
“A song about the lake,” Nina said. “All songs from Baikal are about the lake. Waves that rock the boats and the cradles, and the rusalka’s hand setting both into motion. Then something with the moon . . . It doesn’t make a lot of sense, really.”
“Nothing makes sense,” Yelena said. “We’re in the middle of a war, and a few short kilometers from here people are dying. But us—we’ve never been so happy.”
“Yes,” Nina agreed, watching the moon shine on Yelena’s hair.
Dusia was singing now, her sad face smiling for once, and two of the other girls began to dance, swinging about arm in arm, laughter rising through the night. Someone beckoned Nina, but she flopped down by Yelena, tilting her head at the cloth in her pilot’s lap. “Are you sewing?”
“Embroidering my flying scarf. Blue stars on white, what do you think?” Yelena tilted the cloth under the starlight for Nina’s eyes.
“Where’d you get blue thread?”
“Unpicked it from those horrible men’s briefs!” Yelena grinned, and Nina laughed. They were already flying high at the thought of being in the air tomorrow. The anticipation was so sweet it cut the mouth, like winter-cold water from the icy shore of the Old Man.
They were making plans for how they’d celebrate once they flew five hundred missions and were made Heroes of the Soviet Union—“Gold stars on our chests, just like Raskova!” “When you get a medal, I hear you have to drop it in a crystal glass, fill the glass with vodka, and drink a toast!”—when a sawing, droning buzz rose in the distance: the sound of a U-2’s noisy little radial engine. As one, the girls of the 588th sprinted toward the runway.
One plane touched down, then a second. The tails descended to the grass, dragging both U-2s to a halt, and the ground crew on duty went running out to make postflight checks and tie down the wings. Nina saw Bershanskaia’s compact form climbing out of her cockpit, stepping from the wing to the ground. The first squadron commander came after, stripping off her goggles. The regiment was already swarming around them, pouring laughter and congratulations, but Nina’s feet slowed. The returning pilots had blank, stony faces. Nina tilted her face to the rush of stars overhead.
There was no chopping buzz in the air signaling a third plane.
“Where is Squadron Commander—” someone began, but Bershanskaia cut her off. She didn’t say anything. She just shook her head.