Daughters of the Night Sky

Dusk descended, and it would soon be time to test realigning the maintenance crews and to see how our proposed new techniques worked. The next night we would work on the systems we had in place for loading the bombs and overhaul those. The work was dangerous and backbreaking, but if there was the chance we could shave minutes off the process without harming the armorers or the flight crews, it was worth examining.

Polina, while never officially titled chief mechanic, now held the role without equivocation. The swarm of mechanics strained to hear every syllable from her lips as she tutored them on the new procedures. They knew that one missed step could mean disaster for their flight crew. The Germans offered enough opportunities for that without mechanical failure helping them along.

I stood back with Taisiya and the other pilots and navigators. We felt helpless, but this was not our domain. The mechanics were in their milieu, and any interference from us would be listened to with respectful attention because we were superior officers, but they would resent our interference unless we were specifically asked for input. If one of us saw something catastrophically wrong—doubtful—she would speak up respectfully. If she had a less urgent suggestion, she would offer it to Polina in private with the order to present the idea as her own if Polina wished to implement it.

“Your ‘kites’ are ready for flight,” Polina pronounced at last, hands clasped behind her back, her chest puffed out. “And a full hour faster.”

“You just bought us another ten sorties, if not more,” Sofia said, her lips a thin line as she patted Polina’s shoulder. “Brilliant work, Vasilyeva.”

The pilots took to their planes, we navigators behind them. In minutes the first team took off, followed by the rest of us, spaced no more than three minutes apart. Our target tonight was an outpost that had crept too close to a bridge of significant tactical importance. Destroying the bridge had to be the Germans’ objective, and they would achieve it with little resistance in the next day if we didn’t cripple them while they slept.

The wind that whipped my face was cruel enough in summer but was nearly unendurable now that the November chill had seeped into the air like noxious frozen gas.

“Sleep,” Taisiya commanded over the interphone. We were running on no sleep since our last mission—closing in on forty-eight hours with only short bouts of rest. We’d decided I would sleep on the way to the target and she would sleep on the way back to base, with me controlling the plane from the rear. The logic behind her order was unassailable, yet in practice the idea of sleeping in the air seemed preposterous. The frigid temperatures notwithstanding, sitting in a plane awoke in me an alertness I simply didn’t have on the ground. I was trained to scan the sky for enemy craft and to check our course at regular intervals. I didn’t think my brain would stop whirring or that my muscles would uncoil long enough to catch any real rest, but Taisiya, as usual, was right. I had to try.

What seemed like seconds later, Taisiya’s voice crooned over the interphone, her tone calm but insistent. “It’s time to wake up, Katya. We’re three minutes from target.”

The puddle of drool that had dribbled down my chin and into my scarf betrayed my exhaustion and my ability to sleep anywhere, even with the constant drone of the engines and the vicious gnawing of winter at my face.

I grabbed my map and oriented myself, knowing I had only minutes to get my bearings if we were to make our mark. I called a minor course correction to her—she’d done a remarkable job navigating without me—and we dropped the payload on the ranks of trucks they had parked in such neat lines that it seemed impossible they had been driven by human operators. Had the Germans scattered them throughout the camp, they might not have lost the bulk of their convoy. The insistent whirr from behind us told me that Nika and Svetlana were on our heels and ready to finish off the trucks we’d left in working order.

I took the controls and allowed Taisiya to get her twenty minutes of sleep. I hadn’t had the chance to fly without another fully conscious person in the plane before, and—no doubt especially because I was operating on so little sleep—the prospect of taking the stick was a heady one. It was just as well that the plane was slow and incapable of any real acrobatics, or I might have been tempted to test her limits just a tad on the way back to base. She was slower than the trainers I’d flown at the academy, but responsive enough that I understood why the army hadn’t discounted her usefulness.

When we landed—Taisiya stirring as I made my approach—the mechanics swarmed the plane, doing their safety checks, refueling, and checking the linen for any weakness. The process took a full hour before, including loading the bombs. Now it took fifteen minutes. Polina hoped to get it down to ten or less.