FLIGHT: NIGHT WITCHES OVER OSTROŁĘKA

AUGUST 25th 1944 

HALF A MILE OVER OCCUPIED POLAND 

The world from half a mile up was almost laughable. 

The houses below Tatyana were little more than miniscule dollhouses left scattered by a toddler, almost indistinguishable from the fields stretching into the dark horizon, but for the silver light of the moon, hanging now just above the right wing of the craft. 

“Fifteen degrees north,” came the lilting call of her navigator. Tatyana nodded briskly, and adjusted. On either side, the two small planes adjusted too. She felt Vera lean forward, her stray hairs a light whisper against Tatyana’s ear. “You’re not still upset with me, are you?” 

“I may just be. You asked to be demoted just so you could become a navigator.” Tatyana checked the horizon. They were closing in on the mark. “Eyes on the skies, Vera Lukianovna.” 

Vera’s barking laugh brushed her cheek. “Stop with the formalities, Tanyusha, only the moon will hear us.” 

Tatyana chanced a look over her shoulder. Vera grinned from ear-to-ear, moonlight pooling in her dark eyes, splashing liquid silver against her cheeks. She looked like the child she was, barely twenty-three, and Tatyana not a year older. Two girls playing pilots in a matchbox of a plane with no working radio and no parachutes. Exhilaratingly reckless. Tatyana barely hid her laugh. “Careful, Mr Moon may report on us.” 

Vera’s reply was lost in the wind. Tatyana pushed on upwards, slicing directly through a cloud. Their two accompanying planes vanished below. Just as every other night. A second of suffocating grey, threatening to drown, before the craft shot into the clear open forever. 

If Heaven existed, it would look like this, Tatyana thought. In the brief weightless arc of the ascent, the few seconds where the tatty PO-2 would glide as she turned off the engines, they skimmed like a silent pebble across puddles of wispy grey, beneath the never-ending inky carpet. 

It was that brief moment, the space between one heartbeat and the next, Tatyana thought, was true flight. But gravity would take what it was owed, and Tatyana would have to wait for the next sortie to see true flight again. As the plane’s nose dipped below the horizon, the wind rushed up to meet them, engulfing the silent craft in biting cold. The clouds tore away, and the night burst into life. 

The chaos had already begun. 

The other two planes lashed about like drunkards, rapid fire from the ground in bright assault on their tails. Lit by their own bullets, the encampment below was now illuminated, and directly below Tatyana. You know why the Nazis call us the Night Witches, Major Raskova had once, what felt like years ago, smirked, because to them we are the silent monsters that appear out of the shadows, without warning, without fear.

Tatyana brought a line of barracks into her aim, gloved hands tightening around the controls – “Pull up!” Vera’s scream pierced the riptide of wind, no sooner followed by a burst of tak-tak-tak that shoved the wing off course. 

Tatyana forced the engines back on, propellers spluttering back to life. The craft groaned like a pained beast as she forced the craft straight up – 

Tak tak tak! 

The world revolved, a violently twisting kaleidoscope. Sky – fire – field – spitfire – moon – Vera – broken wing – fire – field – Vera– 

Vera. 

Vera. 

The name pushed Tatyana’s limbs into motion. She forced the plane to level, or rather stop spinning – it didn’t take a pilot to know that the ablaze propeller was irretrievable. 

The navigator clung desperately to the plane’s tattered skeleton, shouting at the burning engine, at the stars, at— 

“Tatyana!” Vera grasped Tatyana’s uniform, eyes wide with something she had never seen before. Fear? “What do we do?” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t.” Vera’s grasp only tightened, and in an instant she buried herself in Tatyana’s collar. If only I could shield you from what comes next. 

Tatyana felt the roar of the right propeller splutter and take one last heave before succumbing to the fire. “You shouldn’t have followed me.” 

There it was again, the weightlessness of true flight. Tightening her arms around Vera, Tatyana coveted one last glance at the pale moon. No clouds dared to cover it, and the dark untainted, unending sky seemed closer than ever. 

The aircraft finally began its last descent downwards. Vera’s hushed whisper was clear in the roar of the wind. “I’d follow you anywhere.” 

Somewhere in the fields far below, a shepherd tending to lambs in the summer pastures thought he saw a shooting star, and wished for the end of the war.