David Robbins - Last Citadel

‘I heard you flapping in, you sounded like a pigeon.’ Masha laughed, shaking her head at the plane. At least you managed not to ruin my engine.’ She wiped a stained and knobby hand along the wing, leaving a trace in the soot. The mechanic’s days and nights were spent with a wrench and a flashlight, contorted into small, scalding spaces, rapping her knuckles against sharp metal, taping, sewing, and ironing patches over the wounded wings and bodies of planes brought back in wretched shape. Masha was no pilot, she could not fly and did not want to. She was a lover of machines and tools. When one of her wounded pigeons climbed back into the air, she waved her arms like a mother bird. When they did not come home, and the weeping pilots and navigators of the regiment swore revenge, Masha took to her tools to help those crews do just that.

Katya lowered herself to the ground. Her legs were achy and cramped. She tugged off her cloth helmet and tossed it into the cockpit. ‘Mashinka.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the count so far?’

‘Thirty-two out. Twenty-two in.’

For the next twenty minutes, Katya stood by her plane, watching more planes from her division land and taxi. One by one, ten more U-2s made it to the landing strip. Some engines popped, some skipped and struggled, but all ten landed and taxied. Only then did she turn from the field and trudge for the tent. She fell face-first on her cot. Vera was already snoring.

Katya dreamed of smoke and fried flesh. She reared on the cot from her stomach, up through flames the way her plane had catapulted out of them, scorched and in peril. Her ear just missed the side of a tray.

‘Ho, ho, calm down, Lieutenant!’

Katya waggled her head, rolling to her side. A plate of steaming eggs and sausage was held by her bedside. Leonid Petrovich Lumanov, Lieutenant, 291st Air Assault Division, sat on a stool, knees together, the tray on his lap.

‘Good morning, wing-walker.’

Katya licked her lips. They still tasted of sparks and exhaust.

‘Shut up,’ she growled. ‘I’m going to kill Vera.’

Leonid, a fighter pilot whose squadron was based at Kalinovka alongside the Night Witches, offered the tray. Katya sat up and took it on her own knees. Leonid was her best friend.

‘Kill Vera? Not after she saved your life.’

‘She saved my life? Vera told you…?’

Leonid broke into a laugh and Katya felt illused. She rang her fork down on the plate.

‘Get out!’

‘No. Finish your breakfast.’

Katya crossed her hands in her lap to show her displeasure; her courage and danger had been reduced to an anecdote and a stupid nickname. Yes, Vera had acted quickly and well, but it was Katya on the seared wing, staring at the ground over the flying precipice, Katya who almost fell off the back and the front of the wing. But the eggs before her still steamed and the sausage glistened. She took up the fork. You’d best laugh at life, Papa always said, because it’s laughing at you. Leonid nodded approval.

She glared while she chewed breakfast. This was her way of punishing him, because talking was their favorite thing to do. Leonid flew the plane Katya wanted when she joined the Red Army’s Air Force, the sleek new Yak-9. Every day he got to fly high and fast, dueling with German Me-109 fighters and Heinkel bombers at 350 miles per hour, at six miles up, he soared leaving contrails of mist, while Katya popped and poked a few thousand feet up, always at night where her passion for flying was dimmed and lost in risk and tension. She had four little bombs, Leonid had cannons that could tear a hole in anything that got in his way. She was a Night Witch, he was a Fighter Pilot.

Katya was qualified for the fighters. When she graduated from the paramilitary Osoaviakihm in Krasnodar eight years ago, she was tops in the class, of both girls and boys. A year later, when only twenty, she trained at the Khar’kov Flying School and in her first year became an instructor. Then she attended the Tula Advanced Flying School and graduated with colors. When the war broke out, she’d answered a nationwide call for the formation of women’s aviation regiments. She went to Moscow, was trained and tested more, and was certain of being assigned to a fighter assault division. Instead, she was made a night bomber, and there was no appeal.

She’d met Leonid the previous winter, in the fighting around Voroshilovgrad and the Terek River. He saw her standing by the airstrip during the day watching the Yaks come and go, made pleasant conversation in passing, then asked one day if she’d like to go up with him. He snuck her into the cockpit on an early morning and put her in his lap, sharing the safety harness. From that position she flew, blasting through the cold Crimean sky, spinning the Yak like a dervish until Leonid reached around and took the stick from her, shouting in her ear that he had to stop her, anyone watching would know it was not Leonid Lumanov flying, he couldn’t do some of those tricks.

Leonid was a city boy, from Leningrad. He was educated and traveled, he’d been to England. He’d never known a Cossack, never been on a horse. In her U-2, Katya flew Leonid to a cavalry company resting in the rear. She put him in the saddle. The horse knew a beginner and took off like a shot. Leonid came out of the stirrups, hollering, What do I do? Katya controlled her laughter enough to shout back an old Kuban wisdom, the first thing her Papa taught her about riding: Don’t fall off! A cavalry officer galloped after the fighter pilot and brought him back unharmed and pale as steam.

When their divisions were separated to different fronts, they wrote. With the erratic deliveries of wartime, the letters sometimes arrived to Katya in bunches of twos and threes. It didn’t matter if she read them out of sequence, it was good to know that Leonid was well and fighting. The letters had no envelopes; they were simply sheets of paper folded neatly and tucked in, after being read by the military censors. Neither of them ever scribbled of love. Katya had made it clear, she would not fall into a romance during the war. There was no room for that kind of attachment, there was already enough turmoil and grief to fill a heart.

Her 208th Night Bombers had been in combat now for nine months without stop, chasing the Germans westward after the massive Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February of that year. Their division had flown thousands of sorties, against hundreds of targets, in their cloth and wood trainers, in biting winter weather and broiling steppe heat, in open cockpits. Leonid had never been one of the scoffing male pilots, those who thought women had no place in the sky during combat. Katya and the Night Witches had nothing to prove to Leonid. He’d stood beside the runway enough times himself, counting the returning U-2s, watching for Katya, and done the sad math. One missing, two, sometimes three or more, smiling for Katya when there were none. He told her many times the male pilots had to peacock on the ground because they were no more brave than the women in the air, and they knew it.

‘If sacrifice is courage,’ he said, ‘trust me, they know.’

Katya finished off the eggs and sausage. She handed the tray back to Leonid, who took it with the comic attitude of a servant.

‘Yes, your highness. What else can I do for you this morning?’

‘Come on.’

She unraveled her long legs from the cot, she’d not even removed her boots when she’d fallen into it at dawn. Leonid followed, carrying the tray out of the tent. Scattered around the base were over a hundred planes, U-2s, Yaks, and IL-2 Sturmovik ground fighters. The aircraft received service, fuel, oil, or armaments under camouflage nets and corrugated metal hangars. Propellers fanned in low idle while mechanics checked gauges, fuel trucks skittered every which way, grimy men and women worked side by side; the chauvinism of the skies had not yet taken hold among the tools and ladders. Leonid set the breakfast tray on someone’s wing. A mechanic shouted at him, but he and Katya kept walking.