David Robbins - Last Citadel

She sped past the flashes; there was still time to get on the ground, collect Leonid, and get away. The flare was ten seconds ahead. She slipped in the throttle, easing her airspeed, then pulled on the stick to lift the nose and slow her approach, but instead of responding the stick surged on its own to the left. The plane dipped and banked. She lost a moment in surprise, then hauled back too late and not enough, now the plane’s descent was sideways and too steep.

‘Vera, let go!’ she screamed into the intercom. ‘You’ll make us crash! Let go!’

The stick did not free into Katya’s struggling hands. She shouted at Vera but no answer came into her ears or her straining grip.

Katya was afraid to take her eyes off the expanding ground but she had to see why Vera was gripping the stick. There were only a few seconds remaining in which to right the plane. She whirled at her navigator. The girl was slumped. Her head lolled against her chest. Vera’s body was crumpled in her harness and her leg lay across the stick, shoving it to the left. In the right wall of the fuselage, lit by the little green light of the dials, a diagonal line of holes was punched through the fuselage. Each was matched by a black rip in Vera’s flight suit.

Katya screamed again, ‘Vera!’ The feat that had lain only seconds away became a panic. She could not reach Vera’s body, could not take her hand off the stick even for a moment, the ground was too close, her speed still too great. Frantic, she shoved against Vera’s bent head. The dead girl would not lay back. She had no time to mourn; battling the stick and Vera’s weight against it, Katya fought her shock and the dread rising in her fast with the ground.

If she could level out and pull up, Vera would fall backward off the stick. Leonid would hear her fly off, he’d run from the Germans to another field. She could circle and come back.

If.

Katya looked at the rising dark earth. She yanked a final time on the dead stick. No, she thought. No. She went rigid in the cockpit against this fate.

The port wings grazed the ground first, cartwheeling the fuselage. The left wheel touched down, then bounded into the air. The tail leaped behind her, the propeller and engine smacked the earth, drilling into the soft loam and snapping to a halt. Her goggles went blank with dirt, her brain curtained black with concussion. One last thought streaked through the collapse of her life: Vera is dead, Leonid is lost, and I am dead; goodbye to Papa and Valentin. She felt dismay that it all could be summed up and done so quickly.

She opened her eyes. No sound or light told her she was alive until one of the U-2’s wire struts broke with a comic sproning . Her head was too heavy to lift. She faced the ground, which jumped with uneasy shadows. Katya turned her throbbing head enough to see a flare on the ground, and the curtain parted, memory pierced her. The U-2 had not been pulverized in the crash but somehow had come to rest standing on its engine like a dart flung into the earth. She was suspended in her harness. Vera was dead in the cockpit behind her. Ah, Vera.

Leonid’s flare hissed, she tasted its smoke blown at her. Where was he?

Katya’s chin hung against her chest. The number of her predicaments flooded in on her; riding this awareness came pain. She fumbled with her safety belts but could not muster the strength in either hand to pull the catches. Both shoulders felt wrenched out of joint; her head seemed ready to snap off her body from the ache rising through her neck.

The flare began to fizzle, its time almost done. Katya sensed the weight of Vera dangling at her back. She tried again to get out of the wreckage, pushing back her pain to work her hands on the buckles.

In the last sizzles of the flare, a knife appeared beneath her throat.

The German patrol! They’d come to finish off the Night Witch! No, no, Katya thrashed her head and arms, she kicked her feet in horror, the pain in her body forgotten. No!

‘Calm down, calm down,’ a male voice urged. The words were Russian. It was Leonid! ‘Sit still, damn it!’

The blade withdrew. A strong hand went into Katya’s hair and yanked up her head to see. The face that slid close to hers was dirty and unshaven, yellow teeth flickered in the dying flare.

‘I’m going to cut you out of here. Do you understand me?’

Katya tried to speak but her throat stayed clamped in hurt and the ebb of her terror. She tried to say Vera’s name.

The face issued an order to someone else. ‘Kick some dirt on that fucking flare, fast!’

Instantly, the white light went out. The hand that gripped her head by the hair let go. Katya heard a snipping sound, several hands pushed up on her in the cockpit and she was released into them past the shreds of the slashed belts.

‘Can you walk?’ The hands lowered her out of the cockpit. They tried to put her on her feet. Her knees buckled. Dark shapes did not let her hit the ground.

‘Her,’ she mumbled. ‘Get her.’

‘No time,’ the voice answered. ‘You two carry this one. Let’s go.’

Before she could protest, she was dragged away from her plane. The tops of her flight boots scraped over the ground. The three men smelled of wool, sweat, and grass. The sourness of gun oil rose from their backs, where their carbines were strapped.

‘Leonid. Where…?’

The man hurrying on her left, short and burly under her arm, answered. ‘He ran away before we could find him. We weren’t expecting you to swoop in like that.’

No, Katya thought. Leonid wouldn’t have done that. He would have run to the plane the moment it crashed, he would have gotten me out of the wreck. He would have gotten Vera out.

‘He…’ she forced the words out, to defend Leonid, ‘…wouldn’t run away’

She felt the partisan’s heavy shoulder shrug under her weight. ‘Then the Germans got him.’

A knock sounded on Luis’s compartment door. He snapped awake. His sleep was never deep anymore, this frail frame he despised needed only shallow rest.

‘Yes.’

‘A message for you from the engineer, sir.’

Luis pulled his heels off the bench across from him. He stood and arranged his uniform. No trooper would see him in disarray, he was a Waffen SS Captain. His father had always told him the power is in the performance.

He slid the cabin door all the way back. The soldier seemed surprised, expecting the door to be only cracked at this time in the morning, not to encounter such alertness.

‘Give it to me, Private.’

‘Yes, sir. Good morning, sir.’

Luis took the folded sheet without looking down, keeping his eyes glued to the young grenadier’s face. Was there any hint of surprise on the boy at the gaunt white form who’d opened the door? No. Good. Luis nodded and the soldier clicked his heels in attention. Bearing, thought Luis. Bearing. This soldier could snap me in half if he had a mind to, but I can make him jump off this moving train with a word.

Luis opened the page. The private waited.

He read the one-line message, then looked the soldier up and down. Strong boy, he thought, big blond lad. But the soldier was not German. The insignia on his collar and sleeve revealed he was Czech. He and Luis had this in common, they were non-Germans serving in the SS. Because of their massive losses, the SS was recruiting outside Germany. Standing here on this rattling train deep in Russia, blond and dark, were two samples of the reach of Hitler’s ambitions.

Luis patted the boy’s arm.