Katya remembered stopping at the stream. Swinging her leg out of the saddle. The burst of stars.
‘I…’
‘You passed out. They brought you in across your saddle.’ The man pointed at three men standing behind him. ‘You’re a sound sleeper, Night Witch. What’s your name?’
The three came to loom over the kneeling partisan. She recognized them through the haze of her recollection; last night’s leader was an old one very like the man beside her, hardened, something vicious under the skin.
The other two were younger, probably soldiers found behind enemy lines.
One was thin, the other heavy. The skinny one was cold-eyed, not much more than twenty yet he looked wicked, a killer. The heavy one might have been her age, twenty-eight, with a blushed, full face like a red rising sun.
This one’s manner was mercurial, with fleet eyes and a nervous, jiggling neck. Katya knew either of them, any of them gathered under these trees, would stick a dirk in her heart if they believed she was a threat to their unit.
‘Is there any water?’ she asked, holding her voice steady.
The heavy one handed down his canteen. He smiled with the gesture, then like a fish the smile darted from his lips.
She drank, then answered the kneeling man’s question. ‘Katerina Dimitriyevna Berkovna. Lieutenant, 208th Night Bomber Division.’
Katya tried to stand. The kneeling man stood and helped her. The fat one lent a hand, too. The other two held their ground and watched her struggle upright.
Once she was erect, before speaking, she made her peace with the wracking in her body. No bones were broken, but she knew beneath her flight suit she was a storm cloud of bruises.
She addressed the three partisans who’d saved her from the plane and the German patrol. ‘Thank you.’ They nodded, and the unspoken clung on their faces, a show of their dismay that it was Katya they had rescued and not the fighter pilot they’d been seeking at Tomarovka.
The deep-eyed man spoke for them. ‘I’m Colonel Plokhoi.’ This partisan called himself
‘Leonid Lumanov.’ Katya said the name so Leonid would not be known as ‘him.’ These partisans were like untamed bits of the earth itself, gloomy and weathered. She hurt a great deal standing here but not so much that she would drop her defiance and become the disappointing woman these four believed they’d lugged back. She was a pilot, like Leonid.
‘Lumanov,’ the colonel allowed her, nodding. ‘Well, when Lumanov struck his flare for you to land, the Germans saw him. As a result, you got shot down. Your pilot friend disappeared. And your navigator got killed.’
Katya winced. She wanted to say Vera’s name, too, to lay a grave marker on the cool words of this partisan. But Plokhoi was right. If she had stayed away, Leonid would be safe. Vera would be alive.
Katya fought the urge to hang her head in grief. Instead she kept her chin and her gaze firm; neither Vera nor Leonid would want her to show regret to these men. Vera had encouraged the rescue, her last words were
‘Go get him, Katya.’ And Leonid had lit the flare, preferring to be rescued by Katya and her little U-2 instead of the partisans. Yes, she was sorry for what happened, the loss and death, but for nothing more, not her own effort, not the bravery of Vera, not the faith of Leonid.
The three partisans who’d brought her back turned away now that she was awake and standing. The heavy- set one allowed a sympathetic smile before walking off. His thinner mate went to sit with some comrades, men who made no noise other than the sound of several whetstones under swirling blades, a hiss that blended with the patter of the rain.
Plokhoi jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his platoon. ‘They’ll be fine. Actually, they’ve got plenty to thank you for. We get a lot of supplies dropped to us by you Night Witches. By the way, were you in on bombing the station at Oktabrskaya last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, you’ll be glad to know your part of the mission went well. The station and the tracks were wrecked, and the German garrison was hit hard.’
What did Plokhoi mean, ‘your part of the mission’? Then she understood. Plokhoi’s
Something had gone wrong.
‘Last night,’ Plokhoi said, ‘I had seventy-two men. I sent fifty of them after the train. Today I’ve got thirty-one left. The Germans were ready for us. The train got through to the station. It’ll reach Belgorod by tonight after the rails are fixed. And I don’t have enough men to go after it again.’
Katya rammed her thoughts through the crash, back to the mission over the Oktabrskaya train station. The night fighter had been waiting. As it had been three nights before that, at the sortie above the enemy supply depot. Again, the Germans had known the Night Witches were coming, where and when; the night fighter was there, too. Her Night Bomber squadron received its targets from intelligence gathered by the partisans.
And what about last night’s attempt to rescue Leonid? A German patrol had been closing in at the same time Katya and Vera and the partisans reached him. Now Plokhoi said his partisans had been anticipated last night by the tank train. Their ambush was damned before it started.
She said nothing to Plokhoi about these facts, or her sudden suspicion that there might be a traitor in their number. Plokhoi must be aware, if he himself was not the traitor. She didn’t know the man from a stranger before waking up to him five minutes ago. A cold feeling seeped down her spine, as though raindrops had dripped into her flight suit. She cast her eyes over the surviving partisans. Which one was it?
Outside the copse of trees, the day was leaden. These partisans huddled like trolls from the daytime. The steppe must be a poor landscape for guerilla fighters, not like a mountain wood or a swamp, where it would be
