Dangerous Women

“What do you think?” Raisa answered. “We stop them!”

“With you!”

Raisa throttled up and pushed forward on the stick. The engine rumbled and shook the canopy around her. The Yak streaked forward, the sky a blur above her. A glance over her shoulder, and she saw Inna’s fighter right behind her.

She aimed at the middle of the German swarm. Individual bombers became very large very quickly, filling the sky in front of her. She kept on, like an arrow, until she and Inna came within range.

The bombers scattered, as if they’d been blown apart by a wind. Planes at the edges of the formation peeled off, and ones in the middle climbed and dived at random. Clearly, they hadn’t expected a couple of Russian fighters to shoot at them from nowhere.

She picked one that had the misfortune to evade right into her path, and focused her sights on it. She fired a series of rounds from the 20mm cannon, missed when the bomber juked out of range. She cursed.

Rounds blazed above her canopy; a gunner, shooting back. She banked hard, right and up, keeping a watch out for collisions. Dicey, maneuvering with all this traffic. The Yak was fast—she could fly circles around the Junkers and wasn’t terribly worried about getting shot. But she could easily crash into one of them by not paying close enough attention. All she and Inna really had to do was stop the group from reaching its target, but if she could bring down one or two of them in the meantime … One second at a time, that was the only way to handle the situation. Stay alive so she could do some good.

The enemy gunner fired at her again, then Raisa recognized the sound of another cannon firing. A fireball expanded and burned out at the corner of her vision—a Junker, one of its engines breaking apart. The plane lurched, off balance until it fell in an arc, trailing smoke. It waggled once or twice, the pilot trying to regain control, but then the bomber started spinning and it was all over.

Inna cried over the radio, “Raisa! I got him, I got him!” It was her first kill in battle.

“Excellent! Only fifteen more to go!”

“Raisa Ivanovna, you’re terrible.”

The battle seemed to drag, but surely only seconds had passed since they scattered the formation. They couldn’t engage for much longer before they’d run out of ammunition, not to mention fuel. The last few shots had to count, then she and Inna ought to run. After those last few shots, of course.

Raisa caught another target and banked hard to follow it. The bomber climbed, but it was slow, and she was right on it. By now her nerves were singing and instinct guided her more than reason. She squeezed hard on the trigger before the enemy was fully in her crosshairs, but it worked, because the Junker slid into the line of fire just as her shots reached it. She put holes across its wings and across its engine, which sparked and began pouring smoke. The plane could not survive, and sure enough, the nose tipped forward, the whole thing falling out of control.

Inna cheered for her over the radio, but Raisa was already hunting her next target. So many to choose from. The two fighters were surrounded, and Raisa should have been frightened, but she could only think about shooting the next bomber. And the next.

The Junkers struggled to return to formation. The loose, straggling collection had dropped five hundred meters from its original altitude. If the fighters could force down the entire squadron, what a prize that would be! But no, they were running, veering hard from the fighters, struggling to escape.

Bombs fell from the lead plane’s belly, and the others followed suit. The bombs detonated on empty forest, their balloons of smoke rising harmlessly. They’d scared the bombers into dropping their loads early.

Raisa smiled at the image.

With nothing left in their bomb bays and no reason to continue, the Junkers peeled off and circled back to the west. Lighter and faster now, they’d be more difficult for the fighters to catch. But they wouldn’t be killing any Russians today, either.

Raisa radioed, “Inna, let’s get out of here.”

“Got it.”

With Inna back on her wing, she turned her Yak to the east, and home.

“That makes three confirmed kills total, Stepanova. Two more, and you’ll be an ace.”

Raisa was grinning so hard, she squinted. “We could hardly miss, with so many targets to pick from,” she said. Inna rolled her eyes a little, but was also beaming. She’d bagged her first kill, and though she was doing a very good job of trying to act humble and dignified now, right after they’d landed and parked she’d run screaming up to Raisa and knocked her over with a big hug. Lots of dead Germans and they’d both walked away from the battle. They couldn’t have been much more successful than that.

Commander Gridnev, a serious young man with a face like a bear, was reviewing a typed piece of paper at his desk in the largest dugout at the 101st Division’s airfield. “The squadron’s target was a rail station. A battalion of infantry was there, waiting for transport. They’d have been killed. You saved a lot of lives.”

Even better. Tremendous. Maybe Davidya had been there and she’d saved him. She could brag about it in her next letter.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Good work, girls. Dismissed.”

Out of the commander’s office, they ran back home, stumbling in their oversized men’s flight suits and jackets and laughing.

A dozen women shared the dugout, which if you squinted in dim light seemed almost homelike, with wrought iron cots, wool bedding, whitewashed walls, and wooden tables with a few vases of wildflowers someone had picked for decorations. The things always wilted quickly—no sunlight reached inside. After a year of this—moving from base to base, from better conditions to worse and back again—they’d gotten used to the bugs and rats and rattling of distant bombing. You learned to pay attention to and enjoy the wilted wildflowers, or you went mad.

Though that happened sometimes, too.

The second best thing about being a pilot (the first being the flying itself) was the better housing and rations. And the vodka allotment for flying combat missions. Inna and Raisa pulled chairs up close to the stove to drive away the last of the chill from flying at altitude and tapped their glasses together in a toast.

“To victory,” Inna said, because it was tradition and brought luck.

“To flying,” Raisa said, because she meant it.

At dinner—runny stew and stale bread cooked over the stove—Raisa awaited the praise of her comrades and was ready to bask in their admiration—two more kills and she’d be an ace; who was a better fighter pilot, or a better shot, than she? But it didn’t happen quite like that.

Katya and Tamara stumbled through the doorway, almost crashing into the table and tipping over the vase of flowers. They were flushed, gasping for breath as if they’d been running.

“You’ll never guess what’s happened!” Katya said.

Tamara talked over her: “We’ve just come from the radio operator; he told us the news!”

Raisa’s eyes went round and she almost dropped the plate of bread she was holding. “We’ve pushed them back? They’re retreating?”

“No, not that,” Katya said, indignant, as if wondering how anyone could be so stupid.

“Liliia scored two kills today!” Tamara said. “She’s got five now. She’s an ace!”

Liliia Litviak. Beautiful, wonderful Liliia, who could do no wrong. Raisa remembered their first day with the battalion, and Liliia showed up, this tiny woman with the perfect face and bleached blond hair. After weeks of living in the dugouts, she still had a perfect face and bleached blond hair, looking like some American film star. She was so small, they thought she couldn’t possibly pilot a Yak, she couldn’t possibly serve on the front. Then she got in her plane and she flew. Better than any of them. Even Raisa had to admit that, but not out loud.

Liliia painted flowers on the nose of her fighter, and instead of making fun of her, everyone thought she was so sweet.

And now she was a fighter ace. Raisa stared. “Five kills. Really?”

“Indisputable! She had witnesses; the news is going out everywhere. Isn’t it wonderful?”

It was wonderful, and Raisa did her best to act like it, smiling and raising a toast to Liliia and cursing the Fascists. They ate dinner and wondered when the weather would change, if winter had a last gasp of frigid cold for them or if they were well into the merely chilly damp of spring. No one talked about when, if ever, the war might be done. Two years now since the Germans invaded. They’d not gotten any farther in the last few months, and the Soviets had made progress—recapturing Voronezh for one, and moving forward operations there. That was something.

But Inna knew her too well to let her go. “You were frowning all the way through dinner,” she said, when they were washing up outside, in darkness, before bed. “You didn’t hide it very well.”

Raisa sighed. “If I’d been sent to Stalingrad, I’d have just as many kills as she does. I’d have more. I’d have been an ace months ago.”

“If you’d been sent to Stalingrad, you’d be dead,” Inna said. “I’d rather have you here and alive.”

Frowning, she bit off her words. “We’re all dead. All of us on the front, we’re all here to die; it’s just a matter of when.”

Inna wore a knit cap over her short hair, which curled up over the edges. This, along with the freckles dotting her cheeks, made her look elfin. Her eyes were dark, her lips in a grim line. She was always solemn, serious. Always telling Raisa when her jokes had gone too far. Inna would never say a bad word about anyone.