The Huntress

Nina felt her wings lift. “What else is at the academy?”

“Aviation Group 122.” Raskova pressed the pass into Nina’s outstretched hand with one of her knee-buckling smiles. “Your sisters-in-arms.”

NINA STOOD A MOMENT gaping at the academy’s palatial redbrick facade and imposing gates before braving the steps. Inside she found a rushing mass of trainee pilots dashing everywhere: women in flying caps and overalls, girls with curled hair and heels as though they were going dancing, female officers with cigarettes and taut faces shouting orders. Nina showed her pass and identification to the nearest officer and received a grunt. “We leave for training in a few days. You’ll be issued a uniform—”

“Where do I sleep?” Nina asked, but the officer had already turned away. Nina wandered for a while, having no idea where to go, still dazed with her triumph. She had done it; she was here. A bone-cracking yawn overtook her as she meandered down a vacant corridor; after sleeping four nights in a chair, she was desperate for a nap. Throwing her coat down beside an unlit heating stove, Nina curled up on it and dropped into sleep like falling into a black pit. It seemed only seconds later when a girl’s laughing voice said, “You look lost, sleepyhead!”

Nina pried open her eyelids. She’d been having some hazy dream of dogfighting through piled clouds as Marina Raskova’s voice whispered encouragement in her ear, and she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Are you my sister?”

“What?” The voice sounded even more amused.

Nina rubbed her eyes. The figure bent over her was a blur against the harsh corridor lights. “She said my sisters-in-arms were here.”

“Comrade Raskova said the same to me.” A hand grasped Nina’s elbow. “Welcome, sestra.”

It was the same word for “sister” that Nina had grown up speaking, but the Moscow tang in the girl’s voice made it different, a new kind of sister. That’s good, Nina reflected, since I didn’t like any of my blood sisters. She let herself be helped up, and the shadow resolved itself into a girl a year or two younger than Nina but half a head taller, porcelain skinned and smiling, ink-dark hair in a plait past her waist. “Yelena Vassilovna Vetsina,” she said. “From Ukraine, but I came to Moscow at twelve. Glider school when I was sixteen, then air club. I was studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute when the call went up for the regiments.” She rattled off a very impressive number of flying hours.

A pedigreed candidate, Nina thought. Educated, polished, impeccable record, probably a model Komsomol member. The kind whose application would have been stamped and moved to the top of the pile. A little warily, Nina nodded back. “Nina Borisovna Markova, from Baikal. Flight instructor at the Irkutsk air club.”

A dimple appeared in Yelena’s chin. “How many flying hours did you tell Raskova you had?”

“Three hundred more than I actually do.”

“I improved mine by two hundred. I felt so guilty, but then I met the other girls here and realized we all embellished our records. A regiment of liars, that’s what Raskova’s getting. Good thing we can all fly like eagles.” The dimple blossomed into an outright grin. “Did you faint, meeting Raskova? I swear I nearly swooned. She’s been my hero since I was seventeen.”

Nina couldn’t help smiling back. “Mine too.”

“Where are you classed for training, pilot, navigator, mechanic, or armorer?”

“Navigator.” Nina had hoped for a pilot classification, but Raskova had explained that there were enough pilots already. Nina was disappointed, but she wasn’t going to quibble. It was enough just to be here.

“Pilot for me. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new Pe-2s.” Yelena looked at Nina’s old coat. “Have you got your uniform yet?”

“No—”

“I’ll show you where. It’s horrible, the same standard issue they give the men. The bigger girls are all right, but little ones like you are swimming. And we’re all clumping around in the boots, even my new roommate who has feet like pontoons.”

Nina’s uniform came in a bulky packet, and she began to swear the minute she unfolded it. “Even men’s underwear?” Unfolding a pair of vast blue briefs.

“Even men’s underwear.” Yelena laughed. “Wait till you’ve worn it for a few hours—”

“Or walked a runway in it in zero degrees,” grumped another woman’s voice. “You would not believe the chafing.” Several more trainee pilots had gathered, looking interested. To a chorus of “Go on, get suited up!” Nina went into an empty storeroom and shuffled out shortly afterward. Even more girls had clustered in her absence, and they all went into a unison gale of laughter at the sight of Nina’s massive trousers puddling over huge clumping boots.

For a moment Nina bristled. Normally when she heard female laughter it was unkind or it was uncomprehending: girls like Tania mocking her flyaway hair or provincial accent. But this laughter was merry, and looking around, Nina saw that a good many of the girls looked every bit as ridiculous in their own enormous uniforms.

“We can cuff and stitch the hems, but you are out of luck on the boots.” Yelena shook her head. “Have you got some cloth to stuff into the toes?” Nina’s scarf went into the right boot, as Yelena unwound her own.

“I can’t take yours.”

“Nonsense! What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine, Ninochka.”

Another reflexive bristle—Nina never heard fond nicknames except from men trying to get her into bed. But Yelena had finished stuffing Nina’s boots and was making introductions, and everyone seemed to be on a first name basis. “Lidia Litvyak, we call her Lilia … Serafima here is from Siberia like you—”

“Not as far off as the Old Man, though!” came the friendly reply. Cautiously, Nina smiled back. Yelena kept rattling off names, and Nina knew she would hardly remember any of them, but there was a similar look to these women Raskova had recruited, no matter how different they seemed on the surface. Some looked barely eighteen and some approached thirty; some were little like Nina, others tall and strapping; some had city accents and some had provincial burrs … But they all looked like they were used to the feel of engine grease under their nails, Nina thought as they crowded around her bright-eyed and friendly, welcoming her to the ranks.

Questions were pelting now, as they asked Nina how she had come to flying. “I saw my first plane, and I fell in love with it.” Heads nodded.

“My father was furious when I went to pilot school in Kherson,” one girl said. “The women in our family all work in the steel factory—”

“I told my mother I’d fly someday,” another said. “She asked me ‘Where, from the kitchen stove to the floor?’”

Something in Nina’s chest expanded. Sestra, she thought, giving the plain word the twist that had made it something unique when she heard it in Yelena’s voice. Nina had not felt this burgeoning warmth since the day she walked singing with Vladimir and the other pilots to enlist—the warm feeling of belonging. Only these women would not leave her behind.

Nina’s fellow pilots hauled her off to find a meal then, talking away, and they were still talking three days later on the train platform, on their way out of Moscow. To some unknown airdrome for training, where the first female pilots of the Red Air Force would learn to be lethal.

Chapter 13

JORDAN

October 1946

Selkie Lake

The end of October meant autumn leaves and duck-hunting season, and Anneliese seemed enthusiastic when Jordan’s father proposed a day at the cabin. Now Jordan watched her stepmother look at the red and gold trees reflecting in the surface of Selkie Lake, exclaiming, “Beautiful!”

“Our first time here as a family.” Dan McBride fished out the big square key that locked the cabin. “I thought you’d like it.”

“Don’t count on me to bag anything,” Anneliese warned. “I can’t hit a target to save my life.”

“Now, I don’t believe that—”

“Would I lie?” She made a rueful face. “Kurt tried over and over to teach me, but I’m hopeless. You’ll get far more ducks without me.”

“Ducks?” Ruth’s brows furrowed as she climbed out of the car after Taro. “Dead ducks?”

“You don’t need to see them, Ruthie,” Jordan reassured. “They can take the guns out to the far side of the lake, and you’ll stay with me. The only thing we’ll shoot is pictures.”

Ruth looked relieved. Still too quiet for a little girl, Jordan thought, but after a summer’s worth of diner sundaes and trips to the movies, at least she was talking and smiling at the dinner table.

“How lovely!” Anneliese was enthusing as her husband unlocked the hunting cabin his father had built on the shore. She went inside, looking at the stock of firewood, the narrow cots and blankets, the kerosene lamps. “Everything necessary if one needed to hide.”

“Who needs to hide?” Jordan asked, following her inside.

A shrug. “It’s the way someone who has been a refugee continues to think, even when danger is over. Wanting a place with a door that locks and something to protect oneself with.” Nodding at the rack of hunting rifles on the wall. “I suppose those will need cleaning after a season on the wall. That’s what Manfred always used to say.”

“You mean Kurt?” Jordan said.

Pause. “Yes. My father was Manfred; he first took me out on the occasional hunt, before I ever met Kurt.”

You call your father by his first name? Jordan wondered. Or did you just make a slip?

She wanted to follow her dad and Anneliese, but there was no way to do it with Ruth in tow. They went off with their guns broken over their arms, and Jordan took her sister out to the dock where they sat with their feet swinging above the water, watching Taro bark at the ducks. “You know you’re going to be my real sister, cricket? Dad is going to adopt you. You’ll have our name.” Jordan had helped her father lay out the paperwork that would make it official: Ruth’s birth certificate, and the various visas and other bits of paper that had allowed her into the country. “You’ll be Ruth McBride.” Ruth’s broad smile was somehow breathless. How can I love you so much, Jordan wondered, when I’m watching your mother like she’s a criminal?

In a few hours Jordan’s father and Anneliese were back, cheeks red from cold. “I’ve been thoroughly outclassed,” Anneliese said, laughing as Jordan and Ruth came down the dock. “I warned you all I was a terrible shot.” How natural she looked here in the woods, Jordan thought. The dry leaves didn’t even seem to crunch under her feet. “Did you have a nice time, Mäuschen?” Anneliese said to Ruth, stretching out a hand.

She had duck blood in a smear across her palm, not quite dry. Very clearly, Jordan saw Ruth’s blind recoil.

“Mama,” she said, but turned away from Anneliese, back toward Jordan.

“Ruth—” But Ruth was shivering, not listening to her mother. She just clung to Jordan, who stroked the smooth blond hair.

“The blood must have scared her.” Jordan’s dad swung the game bag over one arm. “I’ll get this stowed away so she doesn’t see any dead ducks, poor little missy.” He went to the car, and Jordan looked up from Ruth’s shaking shoulders to Anneliese. She didn’t have the Leica to record it this time, but she heard the click very clearly in her mind as she snapped an image of her stepmother’s expression. Not a mother’s concern as she looked at her crying child, but eyes full of hard, cool consideration. Like a fisherman deciding whether an inferior catch should just be tossed back in the lake.

Then her usual warm smile came back, and she bent down to tug Ruth gently but firmly into her arms. “Poor Mäuschen. Mutti ist hier—” She went on murmuring in German, and gradually Ruth calmed, arms stealing about her mother again.

“What is she remembering?” Jordan asked quietly. “The refugee woman who tried to rob you in Altaussee?”

It was a shot in the dark, but Anneliese nodded. “Very upsetting,” she said, clearly done with the subject. “Take Ruth to the car? We should be on our way.”

Jordan acquiesced, settling Ruth in the backseat. “Here’s your book, cricket. We’ll just be a minute.” Jordan’s father was in the cabin stowing the rifles, as Anneliese scraped mud off her boots. Her face was placid, and Jordan saw in her mind’s eye that other expression. Cool, considering, hard.

She had not imagined it.

“What happened at Altaussee?” Jordan spoke low and bluntly at her stepmother’s side, persisting when Anneliese made a little retiring gesture. “I’m sorry to ask about something unpleasant, but I don’t ever want to accidentally upset Ruth as happened today.”

It was the first time she’d pushed so forthrightly, but watching and waiting hadn’t worked. Jordan raised her eyebrows, making it clear she expected an answer.

“A woman attacked Ruth and me,” Anneliese said at last. “We were sitting by the lake, passing time until our train that afternoon. A refugee woman struck up a conversation, and then she made a grab for our papers and train tickets. Ruth was knocked over, her nose bled everywhere. She hit her head very hard.”

“Ruth said there was a knife.” Ruth hadn’t said any such thing, but Jordan wanted to know if Anneliese would agree with her. If she does, I’ll know she’s lying.

But Anneliese just shrugged. “I don’t remember, it all happened so fast. The woman saw the blood from Ruth’s nose and ran away. I suppose she was desperate. So many people were.”

“You don’t sound very concerned,” Jordan probed.

“It was quite some time ago. I told Ruth to forget about it. Someday she will. Much better for her.” Anneliese shaded her eyes, looking across the lake. “So beautiful here. Why is it called Selkie Lake?”

Not your best deflection, Jordan thought. For once I surprised you. Or Ruth did. She filed that away for later. “The name came from Scottish settlers. A selkie is some kind of Scottish water nymph. Like a mermaid, or—”

“A rusalka?”

Jordan tilted her head. Her stepmother, she noticed, had almost seemed to flinch. I’ve never seen you flinch before, not once. Of all the things to rattle Anneliese, why this? “What’s a rusalka?”

“A lake spirit. A night witch that comes out of the water looking for blood.” Anneliese waved a dismissive hand, but the gesture looked jerky. “A horrid old fairy tale, I can’t imagine why I thought of it. Don’t tell Ruth, or she’ll never sleep again.”

“… I won’t.”

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