Kate Quinn - The Huntress

Not anymore. As Nina and the others joined the line outside the recruitment office, which already stretched down the street, she could feel that sense of distance draining away. The four of them talked eagerly about the new planes coming, the fighters that would put Hitler’s Messerschmitts and Fokkers into the ground, and Nina belonged . She couldn’t stop smiling.

But when the four of them emerged from their turn in the office, her smile was gone. Vladimir put a hand on her arm. “You can still do your part—”

“Not as a pilot!” The officer who had taken their applications had been brusque: no women to be taken in aviation units. “I have more flight hours than any of them!” Nina had protested, waving at Vladimir and the others.

“Your enthusiasm to serve the state will not go unassuaged. We have need of nurses, communications operators, antiaircraft gunners—”

“Why can’t I be a pilot ?” Fumbling for arguments, Nina fell back on Stalin. No one argued with the Boss. “Comrade Stalin himself has commended the drive of women pilots. I have been a flight instructor for—”

“Then do your job, girl,” the officer said sternly. “There will be plenty of training work for you.” And he moved to the next in line.

Vladimir tried now to sneak an arm around Nina’s waist. “Don’t be sour, dousha . Come celebrate with us!” Nina just glowered, slipping back to her shared room where she had taped a single three-year-old newspaper clipping to the mirror: Marina Raskova, Polina Osipenko, and Valentina Grizodubova standing in front of their twin-engine Tupolev ANT-37, grinning like fiends because they had just set the distance record. Nearly six thousand five hundred kilometers in twenty-six hours and twenty-nine minutes. Nina’s heroines, everyone’s heroines—even Comrade Stalin’s, because he’d bestowed the Hero of the Soviet Union award on them all and said “today these women have avenged the heavy centuries of the oppression of women.”

I’m not avenging the heavy centuries of anything by being a damn nurse , Nina thought. But none of the other girls who flew at the air club were taken as pilots either, even as the men were snapped up down to the last spotty boy.

“What did you expect, Ninochka?” Vladimir shrugged. “Only one in four flying at the club is a girl anyway.”

“But I’m better than any of the men they took,” Nina said bluntly. “I’m better than you.”

She said it as a simple statement of fact, not an insult, but he looked offended. “Keep talking like that, dousha , and I won’t offer to marry you before I go.”

Nina blinked. “Since when do you want to marry me?”

“Every man wants a woman to wave good-bye when he goes to war. We could go down to the office, it would be easy.” He flung a careless arm around her waist. “Don’t you love me?”

“You’re a great lay, Vlodya, and you’re a good pilot but you’re not better than me,” Nina said. “I’d only fall in love with someone who can fly better than me.”

“Bitch,” he said, and stamped off to spend his last few nights in some other bed than Nina’s.

All through the summer, the ranks at the air club thinned. The days marched toward fall and newspapers reported Hitler’s barbaric swastika-clad army murdering babies and torturing Soviet women on the western front. Even as far east as Irkutsk the tide of patriotism swelled, war news traded with relish if it was a Soviet victory or fury if it was a treacherous German advance, and Nina’s frustration ate her alive. There wasn’t an aviation unit that would have her; there wasn’t a commanding officer who would give her a plane; there wasn’t a use for what Nina did best—she spent her days training seventeen-year-old boys who barely listened long enough to get a handful of flight hours before they were off to enlist. All the fine talk on the radio and in Comrade Stalin’s speeches about the women of the Motherland proving their worth—what did it come down to? Be a nurse, or train the men.

And then it was September; Hitler’s forces still advancing implacably east, and Nina walked the Angara River, looking over the railings across that swift blue ribbon that threaded the city. Mentally she was flying high in one of the new fighters, screaming through the clouds at a speed to make her ears bleed … All at once the skin between her shoulder blades twitched, and she knew she was being tracked. She stopped to fiddle with her boot, slipping her razor up into her hand, and unfolding it inside her sleeve before turning with a mild expression, ready for anything. Anything, that is, but the knife-edged smile that greeted her.

“Careless, little huntress,” her father said. “I tracked you all the way from the air club.”

THEY STOOD LEANINGagainst the railing with their backs to the river, regarding each other. Nina left enough space between them to dodge, though his eyes didn’t have the lunatic gleam they’d had the last time he tried to kill her. Still, she kept the razor between her fingers. Her father smiled again when he saw it.

“Mine,” he said.

“Mine now. What are you doing in Irkutsk?”

He indicated a bundle at his feet. “A good hunting year. Prize pelts fetch more in the city.”

“How did you find me?”

“I can track wolverines, girl. You think I can’t track my lake witch of a daughter?”

“Sky witch now,” Nina retorted.

“I heard. They let girls fly?”

“Three girls set the long-distance record.” Nina studied her father, who seemed steady on his feet. “I thought you might be dead by now. Pickled in your own vodka.”

A shrug. “It was easier letting you fill the stewpot when you were home—girls are supposed to look after their fathers. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do it myself.”

“I’m not sorry for leaving.”

A wintry smile. “You stole every kopeck I had on your way out. Are you sorry for that?”

“No.”

“Thieving little bitch.” He said it with a kind of grim amusement, and Nina grinned. So strange to see him here; he looked as out of place as a wolf would have looked sauntering under the streetlamps.

“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Nina said, surprised to find she meant it. She could easily hate the man who tried to drown her. But she rather liked the man who had taught her to hunt and told her stories, and she felt a wary respect for the man seemingly too iron-hard to die. The feelings bobbed alongside each other separate and comfortable, no need to rank one over the other. If any feeling about her father came first, it was the urge not to turn her back on him.

Her father was saying something about the war now, regretting that he was too old to join up and kill fascists. “Wonder if they die easier than tsarists,” he mused. “Did I ever tell you about that Muscovite son of a bitch whose liver I prised out with a spade?”

“Many times, Papa.”

“You always liked that story.” He looked at her from under shaggy brows. “I should have at least one child in this war killing Germans. Your brothers are all in prisons or gangs, and your sisters are all whores. Will you go?”

“They won’t put women in aviation units.”

“Do they think you’re too soft?” He barked a laugh. “I saw women in the revolution who could saw a man’s head off without batting an eye.”

“Revolutions talk big about women being the same as men,” Nina said. “Now when you ask permission to join up, they tell you to go be a nurse.”

“There’s your trouble. Asking.” Her father leaned toward her, and Nina smelled the feral reek of his breath. “There’ll be a chance, Nina Borisovna. Don’t ask, when you see it. Just fucking take it .”