“Do the best you can,” she told him, and left the shelter of the U-2’s enclosure. It had been cold in there. Away from the heaped banks of earth that shielded from blast, away from the roof of camouflage netting covered over with dead grass, the wind bit with full force, driving sleet into her face. She was glad for her flying clothes of fur and leather and thick cotton padding, for the oversized felt valenki that kept her feet from freezing. Now that winter was here, she seldom took anything off.
The valenki acted almost like snowshoes, spreading her weight as she squelched along the muddy edge of the equally muddy landing strip. Only the slush-filled ruts from her plane and others distinguished the runway from any other part of the steppe. Even more than most Soviet aircraft, the Kukuruznik was made to operate from landing fields that were fields in truth.
Her head came up; her right hand went to the pistol she wore on her hip. Someone not part of the battered Red Air Force detachment was trudging across the airstrip, very likely without realizing it was one. A Red Army man, maybe-he had a rifle slung across his back.
No, not a Red Army man: he wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and the cut of his clothes was wrong. Ludmila needed only a moment to recognize the nature of the wrongness; she’d seen it enough. “Germanski!” she yelled, half to call to the fellow, half to warn the rest of the Russians on the little base.
The German spun, grabbed for his rifle, flopped down on his belly in the mud. A combat veteran, Ludmila thought, unsurprised: most of the German soldiers still alive in the Soviet Union were the ones with reactions honed by battle. This one was also smart enough not to start blazing away before he knew what he’d walked into, even if his thick red whiskers gave him the look of a bandit.
Ludmila frowned. she’d seen whiskers like those before. On the kolkhoz, that’s right, she thought What had the fellow’s name been. “Schultz,” she murmured to herself. Then she shouted it, going on in German, “Is that you?”
“Ja. Who are you?” the red-bearded man yelled back: like her, he needed a few seconds to make the connection. When he did, he exclaimed, “You’re the pilot, right?” As it had back at the collective farm, the word sounded exotic with a feminine ending tacked onto it.
She waved for him to approach. He got to his feet; though he didn’t resling his rifle, he didn’t point it at her, either. He was grimy and ragged and looked cold: if not quite the pathetic Winter Fritz of Soviet propaganda, still a long way from the deadly-dangerous figure he’d seemed back in the summer. she’d forgotten how tall he was. He was skinnier than he had been, too, which further exaggerated his height.”
He asked, “What are you doing here, out in the middle of nowhere?”
“This isn’t nowhere. This is an airfield,” she answered.
He looked around. There wasn’t much to see. He grinned impudently. “You Ivans really know how to camouflage things.”
She let that pass; she wasn’t sure whether it was a compliment or he was saying there wasn’t anything here worth hiding. She said, “I didn’t expect to see you again. I thought you and your major were on your way to Moscow.” As she spoke, she saw out of the corner of her eye that several pilots and mechanics had come out of their shelters and were watching her talk with the German. They all carried guns. No one who had fought the Nazis was inclined to trust them, not even now when the Soviet Union and Germany both faced the same foe.
“We were there,” Schultz agreed. He saw the Russians, too. His eyes were never still, not even for a second; he scanned everything around him, all the time. He unobtrusively shifted, his feet so Ludmila stood between him and most of her countrymen. With a wry smile, he went on, “Your people decided they’d rather have us go out and work for a living than sit around eating their kasha and borscht. So we did-and here I am.”
“Here you are,” she said, nodding. “Where is the major?”
“He was alive last I saw him,” Schultz answered. “We got separated; it was part of the operation. I hope he’s all right.”
“Yes,” Ludmila said. She still kept the letter Jager had sent her. she’d thought about answering, but hadn’t done it. Not only did she have no idea how to address a reply, but writing to a German would make another suspicious mark go down in her dossier. she’d never seen that dossier-she never would, unless charges were brought against her-but it felt as real as the sheepskin collar of her flying jacket.
Schultz said, “Anything to eat here? After what I’ve been stealing lately, even kasha and borscht would seem mighty fine.”
“We haven’t much for ourselves,” Ludmila answered. she didn’t mind feeding Schultz once or twice, but she didn’t want to turn him into a parasite, either. Then she had a new thought. “How good a mechanic are you?”
“Pretty good,” he said, not arrogant but confident enough. “I had to help keep my panzer running, after all.”
“Do you think you could work on an aircraft engine?”
He pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you have the manuals for it?”
“Yes. They’re in Russian, though.” Ludmila switched to her own language: “You didn’t know any back at the kolkhoz. Do you understand it better now?”
“Da, a little,” Schultz answered in Russian, his accent not too scurrilous. But he dropped back into German with every sign of relief: “I still can’t read it worth a damn, though. But numbers don’t change, and I can make sense out of pictures. Let me see what you have.”
“All right.” Ludmila led him back toward the U-2 she’d just left. Members of the ground crew watched with hard, mistrustful stares as she approached. Some of that mistrust was aimed at Ludmila, for having anything to do with a German. She thought about her dossier again. But she said, “I think he can help us. He knows engines.”
“Ah,” everyone said, almost in unison. Ludmila didn’t care for that much more than she liked the mistrustful stares. Along with hating and fearing Germans, too many Russians were in the habit of attributing nearly magical abilities to them just because they came from the west. She hoped she knew better. They were good soldiers, yes, but they weren’t supermen.
When Georg Schultz saw the Kukuruznik, he rocked back on his heels and started to laugh. “You’re still flying these little bastards, are you?”
“What about it?” Ludmila said hotly. He’d have done better to insult her family than her beloved U-2.
But the panzer man answered, “We hated these stupid things. Every time I had to go out and take a dump, I figured one of ’em would fly by and shoot my ass off. I swear they could stand on tiptoe and peek in through a window, and I bet the Lizards don’t like ’em one bit better’n we did.”
Ludmila translated that into Russian. As if by magic, the ground crew’s hostility melted. Hands fell away from weapons. Somebody dug out a pouch of makhorka and passed it to Schultz. He had some old newspaper in an inside pocket that hadn’t got wet. When he’d rolled himself a cigarette, a Russian gave him a light.
He shielded it with one hand from the drips that splattered down off the camouflage netting, walked around so he could get a good look at the engine and two-bladed wooden prop on the nose of the Wheatcutter. When he turned around, he wore a disbelieving grin. “It really flies?”
“It really flies,” Ludmila agreed gravely, hiding her own smile. She said it again in her own language. A couple of the mechanics laughed out loud. She returned to German: “Do you think you can help keep it flying?”