‘Cut engine,’ Vera said.
Katya pushed in the throttle and switched off the magnetos. The plane began to sail, and under her gaze the two Olgas disappeared, their motor shut down, too. Katya began to drop altitude, gliding and accelerating to the target. The Olgas would hold up here at four thousand for a count of ten, then begin their muffled dive. Katya looked out through the flipping propeller, the whoosh of wind mounted, and she thought, Leonid, I must leave you for a few moments, please hang on.
‘Steady,’ Vera intoned. Katya grabbed a flare and readied it. No searchlights lashed out yet, their approach was fast and unspoiled. The air she slid down was silken and beneath the rushing wind everything was hushed. The ground below slipped by, wary and dangerous.
Then, high over her head, she heard a snarling deep and unseen in the dark.
The night fighter circled. The Germans had success with this countermove once, so they tried it again. There would be no artillery tonight, just lights and the game of hunter and quarry.
Katya licked dry lips. It was time to find out if the quarry’s new tactic would work.
Her altimeter read twenty-five hundred feet. Vera whispered -she’d heard the howl of the night fighter, too - ‘Drop it.’
Katya struck the flare and tossed it out of the cockpit. For a second, the bottom of her upper wing jittered white from the bursting flare, then she banked away. The train station of Oktabrskaya was made garish by the sparks floating down under the tiny parachute. The flare glittered against the roof tiles and the vacant steel rails. In the next instant, everything was punched out of Katya’s sight by a hard white fist of light.
A searchlight beam drove straight into her face. Katya slammed her eyes shut and whipped the stick to the left, ramming hard on the left rudder to swing the U-2’s nose around in a snap turn. Behind her eyelids the blackness was alive with a starburst of electric swirls and hues.
‘Level out, level out!’ Vera shouted in the intercom.
‘I can’t see!’
Katya felt Vera’s hands on the stick, but the girl was not a pilot, the stick waggled directionless and panicky.
‘We’re in the lights! Katya, come on!’
Katya tried to open her eyes but the world was a morass. She shut them again.
‘Vera, let go!’
‘What! We have to…’
‘Let go!’
Katya felt Vera release the U-2. She laid her own hand on the stick and sensed her plane, the speed and gravity of her flight. A thousand times she’d ridden in the saddle with eyes closed, wearing blindfolds to do tricks, as a child she could do a handstand and canter in the ring with Papa at the center, her horse on his long lead. She lifted her chin, tilted her head, and knew she was rolling left. She twitched the stick back and to the right and the nose came up, the starboard wings dropped and trimmed out. She ducked her head into the well of the open cockpit, out of the searchlights, and opened her eyes. Her vision was stained but the gauges reappeared.
She was flying level, at nineteen hundred feet.
Without hesitating, Katya whipped the plane into a steep corkscrew left, diving and twisting away from the powerful beams. In that instant, scorching red tracers flashed in her wake. The roar of the black Me-109
blasted behind her tail, the German’s engine screaming to pull the fighter out of its dive. Katya followed the sound in a swooping power arch behind, then beneath, then in front and above her, cleaving through the air like a scythe. The noise was wicked and mesmerizing, fusing every bit of Katya to it so that she didn’t notice she’d slipped out of the searchlights. She turned to look back at the station and every search beam was trained in her direction, away from the two Olgas. Katya blew out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Her strategy was working, even though the night fighter had missed her and Vera by inches!
Katya’s altitude was down to twelve hundred feet. Her vision cleared.
She glided into a slow wide turn in time to see the bombs hit the station.
The little building erupted and even sailing a half mile past the target Katya saw brick and tile shards and burning timbers flung in the air, lit by the explosions. She flicked the magnetos and the propeller caught. She throttled power to gain more height for her bombing run. High above, the deadly night fighter skulked in circles. Behind her, the Olgas switched on their motor and together the planes gained altitude in a tight spiral. At three thousand feet the two Olgas cut power and glided away. Katya held back until she saw the searchlights sweep the night, watched them miss the dancing Night Witch, glance her, then lose their dazzling grip. The night fighter was too fast for its own good; it couldn’t spot the slow and mobile U-2s as long as they stayed out of the light. The German would have no prey. The two Olgas swung left and right, riding the creases of darkness between the swaying beams. Katya followed them in. She put her nose dead on the burning train station, cut power, and one minute later blew the Oktabrskaya tracks into scrap.
* * * *
July 2
0055 hours
‘Vera.’
The navigator did not answer right away. Moments later, Katya said again, ‘Vera.’
‘Just a second.’
Katya turned to look in the cockpit behind her. Vera’s flashlight swept over her lap, across a flapping topographical map. Vera made notes on a pad strapped to her leg. She leaned her head out over the fuselage and took some mental snapshot of a landmark below, then entered it on her notepad. She trained the flashlight on her stopwatch.
Off the tail, three miles behind Vera’s bent head, the second flight of night bombers was over the target. The searchlights sliced back and forth, a good sign, they could not find the Witches working in tandem. The burning station made an easy bull’s-eye.
Katya pivoted to face forward. Off the port wing flew the Olgas, their U-2’s signature blue flames a halo around their engine.
‘Any time, Vera.’ Katya noticed her own tone was impatient.
‘Now’
Katya drew out the fuel mixture knob slowly to lean out the gasoline and increase the air flowing to the engine. She teased the motor just to the point of choking, then goosed the mixture. The plane coughed and sputtered, dipping in altitude. Katya rode the control to make the plane spit as loudly as it could.
The two Olgas swung alongside. Vera waved her flashlight at them to signal distress. When the other plane was close enough, Katya pushed in the control to smooth the engine. Her little U-2 caught and rose. Vera lowered the flashlight, and Katya slid out the knob once more. The engine hacked. Katya let the plane stumble in the air. The Olgas stayed by her side, matching her rise and fall. She reached for the flashlight. She shined it on herself, to make a signal to the Olgas that she was having engine trouble but she would be okay. At that moment, she pulled out the throttle all the way to shut off the fuel, flicked off the magnetos, and let the engine quit.
She cut off the flashlight, banked hard beneath the two Olgas, and vanished from their sight.
Vera guided her. ‘Come to port a little more.’ Katya tweaked the gliding plane to the northwest. She felt a twinge that her fellow Night Witches were surely flying mad circles behind them, looking for a struggling plane or a crash landing. After a minute of silent running, having spent only a thousand feet of altitude, she struck up the propeller and powered the U-2