Not even one night active, Nina thought with a painful twist in her stomach, and the regiment had its first two losses.
Bershanskaia looked from pilot to pilot, finding the white-faced deputy commander of the second squadron. “The squadron is now yours, Mariya Smirnova.” A silent nod. “Get some rest, ladies. Tomorrow you all take the air.”
MOST OF THE GIRLS trailed back to their quarters, some pale and stunned, some crying. Yelena headed the opposite direction, toward the flat field where the rest of the U-2s waited. Nina fell in at her side, shock still rolling sickly inside her. Two women dead, two women she had known . . .
“You should go to bed,” Yelena said.
“I’m not leaving my pilot.” That surge of protectiveness overcame Nina again, laced this time with tenderness. “Navigator’s first job.”
She caught up, taking Yelena’s hand, and the long fingers tangled through hers. Nina’s throat caught. They made their way to their U-2, staring up at it silently. Just a black shape against the stars. No proper airdromes so close to the front; on a fine summer night like this the planes sat in silent camouflaged rows in the flattened grass. Where will we be flying by winter? Nina wondered. If the German army was still in full advance by then, would it mean Moscow had fallen? Probably Leningrad too, starving and encircled, and Stalingrad . . .
“What do you think tomorrow’s targets will be?” Yelena’s voice was soft in the dark.
“German depots or ammunition supplies,” Nina guessed.
Yelena ran her hand along the bombing rack under the lower wing of their plane. “Not much firepower on a U-2.”
“Enough to disrupt, pester. Like a mosquito—you know that.”
“But we’re just one mosquito in a big war.”
“One mosquito in a cloud of mosquitoes,” Nina corrected. “And a cloud of mosquitoes can drive a man or even a horse so mad with pain, it’ll plunge into the lake and drown itself.”
Yelena noticed Nina’s involuntary shudder at her own words. “What?”
“Drowning. The one thing I’m afraid of.” She took a steadying breath, for a moment tasting the iron tang of the lake, feeling her father’s hand shoving her head under the ice. “What do you fear, Yelenushka?”
“Getting captured and tortured. Crashing . . .” Yelena shivered. “What if it’s us tomorrow?”
Nina was silent. There was only faint starlight, but she had no trouble seeing Yelena’s pale face. She saw it clear as day: the wide-set long-lashed eyes, the firm lips pressed into a line to keep from trembling, the dark hair that had grown from its training-day chop into short dark curls around her long neck. Nina reached up, taking hold of Yelena’s flying scarf with its half-stitched blue stars, and tugged her down so they could see eye to eye. “It won’t be us,” she said, and she fit her mouth over Yelena’s. Soft lips, soft cheeks, fingers sliding into Yelena’s soft hair. A moment’s stiffening, a surprised little sound like a startled cygnet disappearing into the warmth between them. Then there was a tentative parting of lips. A slender hand alighted on Nina’s cheek, and her blood turned to quicksilver.
Yelena’s eyes were wide when they pulled apart. Nina wanted to soar. She didn’t need the U-2 to take flight, she could take a running leap and fling herself up among the stars. With one hand she patted the plane, and with the other she seized Yelena by the wrist. “This bird needs a name,” she said. “Come on.”
They rummaged in the temporary mechanic headquarters, begging a can of red paint and some brushes from the few mechanics still prowling among their planes, and carried it all back to their U-2, pulling aside just enough of the camouflage to get to work. Yelena did the painting while Nina and her sharper nighttime eyes directed the placement of the letters. “That last word is wandering up—down, stick down! Does Raskova know she picked a pilot who doesn’t know up from down?”
“Does Raskova know she picked a navigator who can’t give the simplest of directions?” Yelena swiped Nina with the paintbrush.
Dawn was perhaps an hour away by the time they finished. The last mechanics had gone; Nina and Yelena were surely the only two not asleep in their quarters. They surveyed their work, Nina sitting on the U-2’s lower wing feet swinging, Yelena standing at her side head tilted. Along the fuselage, neat red letters read To Avenge Our Comrades with the names of the regiment’s first two losses. On the other side