before her fingers stopped working altogether? Nina yanked at the unseen rack, more imagining the bomb’s release than feeling it, the wing shuddering beneath her. If they hit a mountain updraft while she was clinging here one-handed, she’d get flung off like a fishing line sailing into a lake . . .
Something pinched her fingers and gave way. Nina saw the bomb drop silently into the dark. Pity to waste it on what was probably a barren hillside. She slid back along the wing, then levered herself upright and tipped almost headfirst into her own cockpit. The wind seemed to give a spiteful, cheated hiss when she dropped out of reach. Yelena’s voice squawked out of the interphones, and Nina clawed hers back in place.
“We can turn around,” she told her pilot through chattering teeth, and then, “D-dammit.”
“What?” Yelena shouted.
“I dropped my glove.”
“Is that all you have to say? Climb out on my wing again and I will tip you fucking off, you little Siberian lunatic!”
“You s-swore.”
“What?” Yelena was bringing the plane around now.
“You swore, Miss Moscow Goody.” Nina tucked her ungloved hand under her armpit. Her teeth were clacking, but she still managed a grin. “Yelena Vassilovna, you swore!”
“Go to hell,” Yelena said. A second later, through the interphones, a stifled laugh.
Nina leaned back, sleep already cooing in her ear again, telling her to close her eyes. “Where are we?”
“South of target.”
“Right.” The sky was already lightening; it was nearly dawn. “Adjust north-northeast and we—”
The shots came from nowhere, ripping down through the U-2’s wing with a flat brutal sound like steel punching cardboard. The dark shape zipped overhead even as Yelena yelled “Messerschmitt—” and hurled the plane down. Nina twisted in the cockpit, staring wildly past the Rusalka’s tail, mouth paper dry. They had never tangled with German fighters, only antiaircraft guns. It had disappeared into the dark, but the Messers were so fast—too fast to match a U-2, which sailed along so slowly that any fighter would stall out trying to match speed. It would have to keep making strafing runs.
Another screaming pass, another line of fire tearing down one wing. If Nina had still been lying along that wing trying to pry a bomb off the rack, she realized, she would have been stitched the length of her spine.
The Rusalka lurched as Yelena took her into a straight dive. Not enough cloud to hide in, Nina knew, and evasive maneuvering took fuel—at this point they’d burned too much while circling to drop the final bomb. Land and scatter, those were Bershanskaia’s orders for such occasions. Land and scatter, ladies; they won’t pursue you on the ground. Already the Rusalka was careening downward at two hundred meters.
Shot down, Nina thought with curious clarity, we are being shot down. Better than burning in the air as the fuel line ignited—better than crashing with so many broken bones that it was nothing but a slow death hanging in your cockpit. Having to land and scatter left you a chance. “Field,” Nina heard herself shouting into the interphones. Where was the Messer? “Field, thirty degrees right—”
Yelena saw it and brought the nose around. Shot down. The others would set Nina’s and Yelena’s breakfast dishes out at their usual places, waiting for their return. It was what the 588th always did when a U-2 failed to come back. Two days, maybe three, and only then did the plates stop being set, when no one could pretend it was still likely you’d come limping in alive . . .
The Messer swept overhead like a dark kite, firing another burst. Yelena dropped the U-2 from two hundred meters to a hundred to fifty, the fastest, roughest landing Nina had ever seen her pull off. Another heartbeat and wheels bounced on frozen winter earth.
“OUT,” Nina bellowed, kicking free of her safety harness for the second time this flight. Yelena was already clawing free of her cockpit, cheeks burning crimson; their boots hit the earth at the same time. Some kind of rough field, shadowed scrub all around. The day was coming cruelly fast, pale light flinging their shadows in front of them. A flat chopping sound rose and the Messerschmitt came back around, painted swastikas flashing like spiders.
They reversed and bolted for the scrub, Nina never feeling more like a rabbit sprinting for cover. Lines of bullets crossed the field, and Nina wasn’t even aware she’d flung herself flat—she just found herself on the ground, arms clamped around her head as puffs of soil