Last Citadel - [World War II 03] by David L. Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

the airspace above enemy territory. The plane bumped, as if the tension coursing back and forth beneath it created its own turbulence.
     
    She put her hand hard on the stick and eased out the throttle. Vera said, ‘Climb,’ and Katya pulled back on the stick. This was to gain altitude over the approaching target, as well as get distance from the first small-arms fire from the ground, soldiers aiming up into the gloom hoping for a lucky shot, recognizing the sound of the approaching U-2s, the popping engines, the slow and low flight of the woman bomber pilots they’d come to call Night Witches.
     
    Katya took the U-2 up to four thousand feet and leveled. She waited for Vera’s voice, they were over the German lines now. The engine thrummed and the slipstream whistled through the struts. Katya fixed on a star low on the horizon and flew straight to it. The star made her think about her Papa. Papa and her brother, jammed like kippers inside a tank. Slow, heavy, and ponderous creatures, the tanks. No wind in the face. She smiled; if anyone can make a tank gallop, it’s Papa. She sent Valentin letters about her flying; he answered about what life was like trapped inside a can with their father. Her whole family was at war. This was the first time they’d shared the same battlefield; her regiment had spent the winter in the Crimea, Papa and Valya were at Stalingrad. Now she flew at night over their heads. Cossack families always go to war together.
     
    Vera intoned, ‘Steady’ the way she always did in the last approach to the target, her calculations almost complete, and Katya pulled her gaze from the star. She felt needles in her stomach; she’d learned over more than three hundred sorties to ignore them. Another minute of engine and wind whipped by. Inside her goggles, a bead of sweat itched beside her nose. Every new second flew alongside, silver and anxious.
     
    Then Vera gave the order. ‘Cut engine.’
     
    Katya shoved in the throttle, the engine coughed and died. The propeller blades slowed to a powerless windmill. Now the plane sailed only on its wings. In an instant the feel of the stick and rudders was different; without the propulsion of the motor Katya rode the night air, not demanding but asking for flight, tickling the air for what lift she could draw from it to keep her plane and her mission in the sky. The U-2 was much more alive in her hands; the night was full of invisible gifts and traps and Katya had to find them.
     
    In the rear cockpit, Vera lit two parachute flares and cast them out. Katya banked left to watch the flares drift and lend their incandescence to the moon. The U-2 was down to thirty-five hundred feet now, low and mute enough for her to hear sirens blare below. She saw men run. Some dropped to their knees and fired, muzzles flashed on the ground, jittering under the swaying chutes. A spark struck against the engine cowling. Through the wind she heard a
ping
. A round had glanced off the motor.
     
    ‘There it is!’ Vera shouted in the headset. ‘Ten o’clock!’
     
    Katya stomped on the right rudder to skid the tail to starboard, snapped the stick left, and snatched the nose around to the direction Vera wanted. Looking over her wings she saw no holes ripped in the fabric, the gunners hadn’t caught up with the U-2 yet. Ahead, a large, fenced compound filled the center of the German encampment. Camouflage netting covered high stacks of crates. This was their target, the ammunition dump.
     
    She dipped the nose and picked up speed, dropping five hundred feet to their bombing altitude of three thousand. The rush of wind grew in the struts. She leaned forward in the cockpit as though across the mane of a sprinting Arabian. Gunfire clapped from the ground.
     
    The ammo dump was thirty seconds away. Katya nudged the stick forward and the U-2 plummeted another five hundred feet through the shreds of darkness left to her. Vera shouted, ‘Hold altitude!’ but now Katya took over.