CHAPTER 8
The Carpathians
Above Yaremche
JULY 1944
It was better not to pay too much attention to the machine or the men flying it. After all, what difference did it make? Knowing the pilot’s name and what he called his airplane didn’t matter. The airplane would get her there or not, depending on a thousand factors over which she had no control. The Germans would shoot it down or they would not; they would have already taken the landing site or they would not have; the pilot found the right site or he did not. None of it had anything to do with her. She could not let herself invest emotion in the idea of this preposterous little kite being night-navigated to a tiny landing field on a mountain plateau surrounded on all sides by peaks and lit only by torchlight. She could not concentrate on the delicacy of the touch it took to set down, the play of the wind, how far the sound of the motors would carry, the whimsy of German patrols high in these mountains. For now she could only sit and feel the vibrations of the engines beat through the frame of the machine and into her bones.
The pilots were children, cheery teenagers, full of bravado. Her NKVD handler, the lieutenant colonel named Dinosovich, had been her companion, though he was neither loquacious nor warm and gave her no support and sat there like a piece of New Soviet statuary. It was known that he represented the special will of The Boss, so everywhere, doors were opened, men jumped to, the best meals were served, obeisance was paid. That was his only value.
Now the Yak-6 was airborne. It was a two-engined transport plane hurriedly designed under wartime conditions to provide the army with a light utility aircraft. It was not designed for comfort. Mostly linen and wood, it seemed more toylike than the heavy fighter her poor husband, the always witty, never depressed Dimitri, had flown.
Occasionally, finding a downdraft, the plane would fall a few dozen feet, leaving her stomach at the previous altitude. In the plunge from gravity, she felt giddy terror and clutched to the airframe, knowing it was a fool’s gesture. The airframe would shatter like a vase if hit. Then there’d be fire, and so she prayed for death by concussion rather than by flame. She’d seen enough men on fire to know it was no way to end. She hated death by fire.
The fall, the fear, the cold of the unheated cabin, all made her stomach roil. She had an urge to vomit but knew it would annoy the annoying Dinosovich, and she didn’t want to do that, because the less to do with him, the better. He sat facing her, a ramrod of rectitude without emotion on his flat, plain face, aware that he represented The Boss’s full authority and determined to carry that responsibility with dignity. No smile would curl his lips, no warmth would leak from his eyes. It was the way all The Boss’s boys were, especially the ones who had arrested her father.
The beating of the engines was too loud for talk, the quarters in the cabin too full of the nauseating stench of fuel, and beyond the smeared Perspex of the window it was too dark to see, except for the occasional illumination of a nearby flash as something blew up, men died, buildings turned into craters, towns into ruins. The war was hungry tonight, and destruction’s greed pawed at this part of the world. Meanwhile, the plane’s grip on the air was tentative, slippery; the machine seemed to slither and squirt ahead, just barely under control.
The cabin door—more a hatch, actually—opened, and one of the pilots, head capped in leather, leaned in. His human eyes were tiny beneath the gigantic insect-lenses of his goggles, which were held above his eyes by straps.
“Made radio contact, have a visual on the landing field, we’re vectored in,” he yelled over the engines. “The bump may be a bit hard when we touch down, but we’ll be fine. We’ll put the crate down, you can join your pals, and the whole thing will be over in minutes.”
Petrova nodded.
She had Tata Fyodor with her, as she called her rifle. It was a yard of Mosin-Nagant 91, in the caliber called 7.62mm x 54, with its PU scope held by a steel frame atop the receiver. The tsar’s troops had lost to the Japanese with it in ’05, and then to the Germans in ’17 and basically the Finns in ’39. It seemed like it was about to win its first war, but there was a lot of killing left to do. This one, built in 1940, was much blooded, as it had been used by Tatanya Morova and Luda Borov. Both were fine girls, both were dead, but the rifle had been a treasure for its unusual accuracy, particularly with Tula Lot 443-A ammunition, which Petrova hoarded. She’d used it over a hundred times, in snow and summer, in mud and dust, in ruins and mansions, in light or dark, in bright wheat fields amid tanks, in Stalingrad, at Kursk. It never let her down, and when it settled back out of recoil, always what she had held in its heavily etched sighting apparatus—three point-tipped bars, two horizontal, one vertical, defining a kill zone—was still. The rifle was wrapped in cloth and secured against her leg. She herself wore a one-piece issue camouflage sniper suit over a peasant’s loose dress over the crude cotton undergarments of the rural proletariat. She wore generic Russian boots.