The engine abruptly roared into life. Gretskaya pulled the stick back, climbed to a thousand feet, and began to circle.
‘Trouble?’ said Lom.
Gretskaya shook her head, but she looked grim.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not immediately. There’s forty-five minutes left in the tank, and we’re not that far off Slensk. But I need to see where we are and the cloud’s too low. We can’t stay circling up here.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Go down and wait for the weather to clear,’ she said. ‘Only I don’t know what’s down there, and I daren’t go any lower to find out. Could be sea. Could be land. Trees. Hills. Hills would be bad.’
‘It’s water,’ said Lom. ‘Open sea.’
Gretskaya looked at him sceptically.
‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘There was nothing to see.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Absolutely. I know.’
Gretskaya went quiet, thinking. Minutes passed.
‘You can’t know,’ she said at last. ‘But the odds are on your side, and if we stay up here we start to run out of options.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’ll go a little further west, just to be sure, then drop down and take a closer look.’ She opened the throttle, pushing the airspeed indicator up till it was nudging a hundred, and let it run. Ten minutes later she cut it again. Gliding into a shallow descent, she pulled on her goggles and hauled open the cockpit lid. The icy rain in their faces. The noise of the wind.
The altimeter counted down: 500–400–300. Lom wiped the rain out of his eyes and held his breath. Still there was nothing to see but rain and fog. Gretskaya was leaning out of the cockpit, staring down.
A dark indistinct mass loomed up beneath them. The engine roared and Gretskaya snatched the stick and held it level. The aircraft flattened out and the dark mass disappeared in mist. Then it was back, ink-black and flecked with straggles of foam. Gretskaya hauled the stick right back into her stomach and the Kotik lurched and fell out of the sky. It smacked heavily into the sea, bounced and came down again, throwing up walls of spray. It seemed impossible to Lom that it wouldn’t tear itself apart or tip tail over nose into the wall of water.
For thirty seconds the machine forged on, then it slowed and came to rest. Gretskaya flicked off the ignition switch and pulled the cabin cover shut against the rain. The propeller stopped its rhythmic ticking and silence fell.
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Fuck.’
The plane had become a boat, rising and falling on the long, queasy swell. They were in a circle of mist. Rain pitted and rebounded from the dark green striated skin of the sea.
‘OK,’ said Gretskaya. ‘So now we wait.’
Lom twisted in his seat as Florian clambered up from the cabin and stuck his head into the cockpit. He looked tired, haggard and slightly green. He contemplated the scene beyond the windscreen for a moment–the rain, the mist, the narrow circle of purple-green sea–and grunted.
‘Not Slensk then,’ he said.
‘Letting the weather clear,’ said Gretskaya.
‘So where are we?’
Gretskaya shrugged.
‘The Gulf of Burmahnsk. At a guess, somewhere between twenty and fifty miles offshore. At a guess.’
Florian grunted again in disgust and disappeared back into the cabin. Lom wondered what he was doing in there. Most likely strapped in a cot trying to sleep. Travelling evidently wasn’t his thing. Gretskaya settled back into her seat and closed her eyes and Lom stared out of the window, watching the sea. The Kotik lifted and fell with the swell, dipping one float then the other in the water. In the cockpit it was bitterly cold. Lom’s heart sank. Fifty miles of deep dark fogbound icy ocean.
65
Elena Cornelius, crouching knee-deep in an anti-tank ditch, hacked at the solid black earth with a gardening trowel. The wooden handle had split and fallen away, but she gripped the tang in her blistered palm. She was lucky: many women of the conscript artel scrabbled at the ground with their fingers, numbed and bleeding, tearing their fingernails and the skin off their hands. Fresh snow had fallen in the night and the churned mud bottom of the tank trap was frozen iron-hard, sharp-ridged and treacherous, but her cotton gabardine kept out the worst of the wind and the digging was warm work.
Black earth rolled away from her in all directions, level to the distant horizon, skimmed with a thin scraping of snow. In front of her the rim of grey sky was broken only by sparse hedges and clumps of hazel, a line of telegraph poles, the chimneys of the brickworks where they slept. Between her and the sky rolled a wide slow river, crossed by a bridge: steel girders laid across pillars of brick, a surface of gravel and tar. The bridge was why they were there. The retreating defenders would cross it and then it would be blown. But for a while the bridge would have to be held.
At her back the sound of distant explosions rumbled. Every so often she straightened and turned to watch the flickering detonations and the thick columns of oily smoke rolling into the air. The bombers were over Mirgorod again.
The ground they were working was potato fields, harvested months before, but from time to time the diggers turned up an overlooked potato. Most were soft and black with rot, but some were good. Elena stuffed what she found into her pockets and underclothes for later, for Yeva and Galina and Aunt Lyudmila. She ate handfuls of snow against the thirst. It was OK. Survivable.
‘Here they come again!’ Valeriya shouted.
Elena looked up. Three aircraft rose out of the horizon in a line and swept towards her, engine-clatter echoing. They were fat-nosed, like flying brown thumbs suspended between short, stubby wings.
Bullets spattered the earth and snow in front of her, and three yards to her left the top of a woman’s head came off. Elena had known her slightly. She had been a teacher of music at the Marinsky Girls Academy.
While the planes circled low to make another pass, Elena and the others ran for the river. Breaking the thin ice at the water’s edge they waded waist-high into the current, feet slipping and sinking in the silt, and waited, bent forward under the low bridge, for the planes to drift away elsewhere. Oilskin-wrapped packages of explosives clustered under the bridge, strung together on twisted cables that wrapped and hung like bindweed.
Elena saw something in the water out near the middle of the river: a sudden smooth coil of movement against the direction of the current. It came again, and again, slicker and more sure than the wavelets chopping and jostling. She glimpsed a solid steely-grey oil-sleeked gun barrel of flesh. Blackish flukes broke the surface without a splash. A face rose out of the water and looked at her A human face. Almost human. A soft chalky white, the white of flesh too long in the water, with hollow eye sockets and deep dark eyes. The nose was set higher and sharper than a human nose, the mouth a straight lipless gash. The creature raised its torso higher and higher out of the water. An underbelly the same subaqueous white as the face. Heavy white breasts, nipples large and bruise-coloured, bluish black. Below the torso, a dark tube of fluke-tailed muscle was working away.
While she rested upright on her tail, the rusalka was using her arms to scoop water up onto her body. She rubbed herself down constantly, smoothing her sides and front and breasts as if she were washing them, except it was more like lubrication. She smoothed her hair also, though it wasn’t hair but flat wet ribbons of green-black stuff hanging from the top of her head across her back and shoulders. While she washed herself, the creature’s face watched Elena continuously. There was no expression on her face at all. None whatsoever. Elena gripped the arm of the woman next to her.
‘Valeriya!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Do you see it? Out there! A rusalka!’ But when she looked again there was nothing but a swirl on the surface of the water.