Last Citadel

* * * *

June 29

2345 hours

thirteen hundred meters above no-man’s-land

Voronezh Front

High clouds had moved in late in the day and stuck. There had been some afternoon thunder but no rain. Only pieces of moonlight shoved through the thick cover and the Witches sailed through a darker, better world for their mission.

Katya cruised, the third plane in line. The target was a new supply depot discovered and reported by the partisans. The U-2s’ bombs would rip open crates of medicine and bandages, foodstuffs, clothes and blankets. No fireworks tonight, no fuel barrels or ammo stacks. Onions don’t blow up. That’s what Germans eat, Katya thought, their breath stinks of onion.

She watched the unlit earth slip by below, listening to the engine sounds muted through her quiet headset - Vera studied her maps and the ground in silence, the only times in the day she had her mouth closed - and wondered why she believed this. She had not ever met a German, though she’d bombed them for almost a year. Why was it necessary to hate them for what they ate, or what they looked and sounded like? This was Soviet thinking, Soviet propaganda playing in her head, the barking commissars always lumbering around giving out speeches and pamphlets. It was enough simply to despise the Germans because they were invaders on Russian soil, not for their difference. Katya grew up among men and women of every walk: farmers, riders, poets, brigands, musicians, there were Circassians, Tatars, Kalmuks, Khazars, Slavs, Russians, all came to the Kuban to become Cossacks, difference was the lifeblood. I’ll blow up the Germans’ onions tonight, she thought, and their breath will smell like mine, then we’ll kill as many of them as we can, not because they stink but because they are here where they don’t belong. And the commissars can lumber off to hell.

She glanced over her shoulder at Vera. Her navigator held a flashlight across her lap, a stopwatch rested in the folds of her map.

‘It’s quiet, don’t you think?’ she asked Vera.

‘Yes, it’s quiet. Leave me alone.’

Katya let moments of engine and wind and night fly past.

“I don’t like it. I’m thinking too much.’

‘So stop thinking. And while you’re at it, stop talking.’

Katya turned around. She surveyed the horizon ahead for the flashes that would be bombs and flak and the white sashes of searchlights. She scanned her gauges and indicators. Everything held trim and smooth, blue exhaust fires blinked and popped astride the motor. She felt edgy tonight, and a scan of herself did not reveal why. Was it the mission, destroying medicine and victuals, was it worth the risk taken by the women? Was her jumpiness merely fatigue and stress? If Vera were talking at the moment she would say it was Leonid. If Papa were here, he would tell his daughter to be careful tonight, a Cossack can feel events coming on the wind. Katya fidgeted in her seat, drumming her fingers on the stick.

‘Come about a little to port,’ Vera said into Katya’s headset.

Katya twitched the stick and rudder and the plane flicked left.

‘That’s enough.’

Moments later, dead off the nose about six miles ahead, a small globe of orange pierced the night. This was the first sortie over the target.

Within seconds, enemy searchlights like angry antennae began to wave in the air, looking for the gliding little plane somewhere over their heads, the Witch that had whisked down on them.

Katya held the U-2 steady on the explosions. She would be over the target in five more minutes. She stayed at four thousand feet. Looking over her shoulder again, she saw Vera putting away her maps; there was no need for navigation right now, the supply depot burned and the searchlights guided them in.

Above the target, no flak burst. The Germans must not have figured their vegetables and bandages were much of a target, Katya decided, they’ve left them bare without artillery. But why, then, are there searchlights?

The second Night Witch released her bombs; another corner of the depot erupted with four small detonations. Beacons rushed back and forth, probing for the Witch, until they found her.

‘That’s Zoya Petrovna,’ Vera whispered, as though the Germans might hear.

Katya watched the searchlights intersect over Zoya’s bi-plane. The beams were so strong she seemed to be walking on them, like giant white legs. She’s a good pilot, Katya thought, and her navigator Galina Fedotova, she’s clever, they’ll get out of the lights. Zoya switched on her engine, rolled on her back, and dove at the ground, accelerating, pulling up into an inside loop. Katya watched and admired the maneuver. One spotlight then another slipped off Zoya’s skin. Katya lost her in the darkness. Good for Zoya, she thought.

But where was the German flak?

‘Cut engine,’ Vera murmured. Katya pushed in the throttle and flicked the magnetos off. Vera’s voice had been soft, Katya noted. She sensed something, too.

The U-2. began to glide, the propeller spun idly. She bled off a thousand feet of altitude, gaining speed toward the target now one mile away. The rush of wind picked up and Katya leaned forward over her stick as she always did, her galloping position. Her cockpit was lit only by the yellow luminance of the dials. Vera would tell her when to let go the bombs.

‘Steady,’ Vera intoned. ‘Thirty seconds.’

Katya watched the airspeed climb, altitude slipped to twenty-five hundred. She kept her head tucked and her eyes on her gauges. She did not see what made Vera yell, ‘No!’

Katya raised her head and saw the tracers, a stream of red darts a half mile away on her port side. At the end of the bullets, being ripped to ribbons, was Zoya and Galina’s U-2. Katya jerked at the sight, stunned. She mouthed the same word, No.

‘Night fighter.’ Katya heard the same fear in her navigator’s voice that thrummed in her own breast.