harvested and saw flames leap along the golden rows instead of scythes as billows of wheat were converted into billows of fire rather than be left to feed a single German soldier. Black clouds roiled into the sky, and the regiment’s U-2s touched down with smoke-blackened wings and red-eyed pilots to the news that the Fritzes had seized another town, another river, another city, one after another gone under the swastika. Hearing Major Bershanskaia’s grim voice reading aloud from Order No. 227, direct from Moscow: “‘It is time to finish retreating. Not one step back.’”
Not one step back? Nina thought, weighed down by exhaustion as heavy as a lead blanket. Try that for yourself, Comrade Stalin. See how much you feel like advancing through those fields of burning grain. Or through those piercing searchlights surrounding the antiaircraft guns, that feeling of being pinned and exposed like a butterfly tacked to a board. The first time they had been caught in a searchlight the Rusalka had sheared sideways, falling into a stall, and for a dizzying moment Nina had not known where the horizon was, only that she was blind and shells were exploding all around them. When her internal compass righted itself, she found herself screaming, Flip, Yelena, we’re inverted, FLIP—and blindly Yelena rolled them right side up and they were out of the searchlights and lurching toward home. Nina hadn’t been able to get out of the cockpit when they landed. Her legs simply refused to work. She sat there until they worked again, not really knowing what else to do, and then dropped out of the cockpit like a sack of turnips to stagger out, vomit matter-of-factly beside the runway, then make her report.
Face a barrage of antiaircraft guns, Comrade Stalin, Nina had thought when she heard Order No. 227, when it was read out that soldiers caught retreating were to be shot. Then we’ll talk about not one step back.
Yes, it felt like a great deal longer than three months. Every night you came back, you thought of the ones who hadn’t, like the three who had died last week when their U-2s collided in a muffling mist and two planes had shredded apart and spiraled to earth in pieces. Petals of burning flowers drifting through the air.
And yet, Nina thought. And yet . . . Every twilight the pilots and navigators gathered bright-eyed, bouncing on their toes as they waited to take to their planes. All of them tugging for the sky.
By the time the Rusalka returned from its tenth run, pink streaks of dawn showed and Major Bershanskaia called the halt. “Back to base airdrome, ladies.” The U-2s lifted off again in a tired line, wagging wingtips at one another, heading like a row of geese for home.
Annisovskaia was home for now: a tiny Caucasus village in the Grozny region where the local secondary school had been commandeered and crammed with foldout cots. The local village women looked at them warily at first, but they were used to female pilots now, and a squat babushka lifted her gnarled hand as Nina and the rest trudged past. “Kill many Germans, dousha?” she asked Nina as she did every night, showing near-toothless gums in a merciless grin, and Nina called back, “Almost enough, Grandmother.”
They trooped into the canteen, groaning at the sight of breakfast. “Stale biscuits and beets,” Yelena said with a sigh, grabbing a plate. “Someday they’ll feed us something different and we’ll all fall over dead from shock before we get a mouthful.”
“Hot kasha with mushrooms,” Dusia said mournfully. “That’s what I miss most.”
“Borscht absolutely heaped with sour cream . . .”
“Raw cabbage,” Nina said, making little nibbling noises like a rabbit, and they all laughed. “Someone wake up Zoya, she’s facedown in her beets again.”
No one, Nina had observed, was able to fall asleep right away after a night of bombing runs. It didn’t matter if you were so tired that you’d been dozing off over the stick on your last run—as soon as you returned from the canteen to your cot, eyelids that had been stone-heavy flew up like untied window shades, and girls who had trudged off the airfield in yawning silence were chattering like magpies.
“—fell into a stall, I swear my wing clipped a shrub before I pulled up—”
“—updraft tossed us halfway to Stalingrad before Irushka got us leveled out—”
Nina skinned out of her overalls, flinging herself down on her cot. “Boots, rabbit,” she called to Yelena, sticking her feet out.