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The night had settled over the airfield like a lid.
Beyond the barn walls the world was mostly sound: the distant whine of an engine turning over, coughing to a stop; the clank of a dropped tool on concrete; an officer’s voice barked short and sharp in the dark, flattened by distance into meaningless syllables. Somewhere farther out, artillery rumbled low and continuous, like a storm that refused to break.
Inside the barn, the women sat in a layered, watchful silence.
The makeshift barracks had started life as a livestock shed. The smell still clung to the rough boards—old hay, animal musk, something sour soaked long ago into wood. Over it, newer smells: aviation fuel, damp wool, paraffin, tobacco smoke sneaking under the door from the men’s hut next to theirs.
Thin iron beds were lined in two uneven rows, as if someone had measured with their eyes instead of a tape. Each bed had a wire mesh base that groaned whenever anyone shifted. The mattresses were no more than stuffed ticking—straw and rags that rustled when they turned over, sending up faint dust motes that danced in the light from the single bare bulb.
The bulb buzzed faintly, a constant insect whine, as if it were nervous too.
Anya sat on the edge of her bed, elbows resting on her knees, hands clasped around a chipped enamel mug gone cold an hour ago. Her flight jacket lay unbuttoned over her shoulders. The collar brushed her jaw when she breathed. Her flying helmet and goggles sat next to her on the bed, the leather still faintly warm from where she’d carried them in earlier, hoping, expecting.
She listened to the night more than she looked at the room.
A gust of wind hit the boards and slipped through the gaps. It tugged at the edges of a newspaper nailed up over a knothole, making it crackle. Snow—wet, half-melted—tapped against the windowpane near her bunk, a faint irregular patter.
On the bunk opposite, Katya lay on her back, boots still on, one ankle crossed over the other. Her hands were folded on her stomach, fingers laced, the posture of someone pretending to rest. Her eyes tracked the shadows on the rafters. Every time a truck passed outside, its headlights briefly glowed through a seam in the boards, and the moving light carved new shapes overhead.
Masha sat cross-legged on the floor between them, back against a bedpost, a cigarette burning between her fingers. She smoked it down slowly, barely moving her hand, so the ash grew long and precarious before she tapped it into a dented tin. The end glowed orange in the dimness, shrinking with every shallow drag.
The fourth woman, Irina, perched on her own bunk with her legs folded beneath her, a letter open on her lap. She wasn’t reading. The paper had soft creases in it from being opened and folded too many times. Now she held it with one thumb pressed to the top corner, as if she were keeping it from blowing away in a wind that wasn’t there.
From outside came laughter—male voices, a chorus of it, punctured by a hacking cough. Boots thudded by the barn wall. Someone spat; the wet slap of it on trampled snow was clear even through the boards.
“—let the girls sleep tonight!” a man’s voice called, just loud enough to carry. The word *girls* stretched, drawn out. “Too dark for them to find the airfield, eh?”
A ripple of laughter chased the joke past, voices receding.
Masha’s lips curled without quite becoming a smile. “Idiots,” she muttered, the word more breath than sound.
Anya didn’t answer. She watched the way the cigarette coal brightened and dimmed, a tiny heartbeat in the gloom.
A few hours earlier, around the time the sky had turned from gray to black, they’d all been in the mess hall. The men from the regular bomber regiment had sprawled on benches, shoulders pressed together in warm, loud clusters. The women had claimed the end of a table near the door, close to the draft. Their bowls of barley soup had cooled fast.
“Third night in a row and they’ve sat us down,” one of the men had said then, slapping his spoon against the table to punctuate his annoyance. “Maybe the little witches scared the Germans so badly, there’s no one left to bomb.”
That had gotten a laugh too. Their commander—Major Kravchenko, thick-shouldered, with a permanent crease between his brows—hadn’t laughed, but he hadn’t said anything either. His silence had weighted the air as surely as any comment, but the men preferred to hear what they wanted to hear.
Now, hours later, the hall was quiet. The only food in the barn was the faint ghost of supper—cabbage clinging to the hem of Anya’s coat, the sourness lingering in her nose.
She shifted a little, the mattress wires squeaking a protest.
“Stop moving,” Katya said softly from her bed, her voice flat. “You’re rattling the entire village.”
“This is not a village,” Anya replied, without heat.
“Feels like one,” Katya said. “A very small, very cold village where nobody sleeps and everyone smells like kerosene.”
Outside, an engine coughed again, then caught, idling low and rough. The familiar rhythm shuddered through the thin walls. A Po-2, Anya thought automatically—their plane, bone-simple and stubborn as a mule. She could recognize the vibration of it in her teeth.
The headlight glow slid across the ceiling again, paler this time, then vanished.
“Listen,” Irina murmured.
They fell quiet, listening harder than before. A second engine coughed and came alive, higher pitched. Then, beneath it, the shouting of mechanics, muffled but urgent. Orders. A bark of laughter that sounded forced.
“Not ours,” Masha said, exhaling smoke in a thin, slow stream. “Men’s planes. We’d hear Polikarpov if they were rolling ours out.”
“Maybe they changed their minds,” Irina said. “Maybe headquarters decided to let us sleep.” Her joke was gentle and thin, as if she didn’t quite care whether anyone laughed.
Anya sipped from the mug out of habit, then remembered it was cold and set it aside with a tiny clink that sounded too loud.
The stove at the far end of the barn ticked as it cooled. It was a low iron cylinder, patched in two places, wrapped with wire. Earlier it had glowed dull red near the base. Now only a faint warmth seeped out, enough to keep their breath from fogging in front of their faces, nothing more. Somewhere inside it, a coal collapsed into ash with a soft shush.
Anya could feel the weight of her tiredness like extra gravity in her bones. They had flown every night for a week and a half—short sorties over the front, skimming low, engine cut, sliding quiet as ghosts until the last moment when they dropped their bombs and then gunned the throttle. The Germans had started calling them *Nachthexen*, Night Witches, and the name had stuck, taken up by their own people with a fierce, grim pride.
Tonight, so far, they were grounded.
She was not sure if she was grateful.
Her hands, resting on her knees, twitched occasionally, memory firing in her fingers. The feel of the controls, the shudder of the stick in a dive, the way the plane trembled when the wind buffeted it near the treetops. The strange clean emptiness in her chest between the whistle of the drop and the bloom of light on the ground below.
The door at the far end of the barn opened abruptly with a plaintive creak and a rush of cold air.
Wind flapped the canvas blackout curtain they’d nailed over the doorway. Snowflakes swirled in, sparkling briefly in the bulb’s weak light before melting into the packed earth floor. The door slammed against the wall, then settled.
Bootsteps.
Everyone’s heads turned, all at once. The swing of gazes made no sound, but Anya felt it like a physical thing.
Major Kravchenko stepped inside, ducking his head out of reflex though he didn’t need to. His greatcoat was dusted with snow on the shoulders. He carried his hat in one hand, fingers wrapped round the brim. Behind him, in the dark outside, Anya saw the silhouette of another man—one of the mechanics—hovering, then moving away.
For a second, nobody spoke. Snow hissed on the stove as a flake found its way to the metal.
Then the Major shut the door with careful precision, easing it closed so it did not slam.
“Comrades,” he said.
His voice was not loud, but it cut through the barn. The bulb hummed. The stove ticked. Somewhere under the beds a mouse scrabbled along the wall, unseen.
Masha stubbed out her cigarette. Katya swung her legs off the bed, boots thumping softly. Irina folded her letter once, twice, three times with quick, neat motions and tucked it under her pillow.
Anya stood.
“Orders?” she asked.
The Major’s eyes passed over each of them in turn, counting, maybe, or confirming. He had a pilot’s manner—nothing extraneous in his movements, no nervous fidgets. Only the tightness at the edge of his jaw betrayed anything like concern.
“Orders,” he confirmed. “You’re flying.”
Outside, another shout rose, closer this time, followed by the metallic screech of a hangar door being dragged open.
Katya blew out a slow breath. “So the little witches have not been forgotten after all,” she said, half under her breath, but loud enough that the word *witches* floated clearly.
The Major heard it. The corner of his mouth twitched.
“Headquarters wants another visit to the same sector,” he said. “Supply lines along the river. They moved some of their flak guns since last night. You’ll have updated maps in the briefing. Wheels up in…” He glanced at the watch on his wrist, then shrugged the coat back a little so he could see it. The faint metallic click of the strap adjusting was audible. “…forty minutes.”
Anya felt her heart pick up speed. It wasn’t a leap or a lurch, just a steady acceleration, like a propeller moving from idle to takeoff.
“Visibility?” she asked.
“Cloud cover improving. Wind from the north. Cold, but stable.” He hesitated, then added, “Some of the men have, ah, expressed concerns about night flying in these conditions.”
The word *men* had a faint irony in it that didn’t reach his face.
Masha barked a quiet laugh.
“Of course they have,” she said. “It’s very dark at night, Major. Terrible for their nerves.”
“Oh, be respectful,” Irina murmured. “It’s not easy for them. No broomsticks in their hangar.”
That got a handful of smiles, small but real.
The Major didn’t smile, but his shoulders seemed to loosen by a fraction.
“The only thing I care about,” he said evenly, “is that you come back. All of you. The rest… talk all you like once you’ve landed.”
He stepped aside as if to leave, then paused.
“Dress warm,” he added, a quiet, unnecessary piece of advice. “Meteorology says it will be five degrees colder over the river than here. And, Anya—”
She straightened a bit.
“Yes, Major?”
“Make the first run tight and low. They’ll be listening for you now. Don’t give them an easy shot.”
She nodded once, sharp enough to feel in her neck.
“We never do.”
He gave the barest hint of a nod back, then turned and opened the door again. Cold air poured in, swirling snow, the sound of the engines suddenly louder.
The door closed. Silence, thick and immediate, rushed into the space he’d left behind—silence threaded with the heartbeat of the airfield.
The coals in the stove shifted, a soft crackle. Outside, someone shouted, “Fuel truck! Move it!” The wheels of the truck crunched over frozen mud, the sound grinding low.
Katya rubbed her hands together briskly, the rasp of wool on wool.
“Well,” she said. “If I freeze to death, it will be on this mattress, not in the air. I am not dying on straw. That would be embarrassing.”
Masha snorted. “Then move,” she said. “Come on, up. We’ll be queens of the sky in twenty minutes.”
“Witches,” Irina corrected gently, sliding from her bunk to stand, her feet landing in a soft thud. “No one ever writes songs about queens of the sky. Witches, yes.”
Anya bent and grabbed her helmet, the leather cool and familiar. The goggles clinked softly against the buckle of her jacket. She shrugged the coat fully onto her shoulders and fastened the top button, the tiny metallic ping of it slipping into the hole sharp in the barn’s acoustics.
As they pulled on gloves and checked scarves, the sounds outside threaded through every gesture.
The distant rumble of artillery rolled a little louder, a reminder that somewhere, beyond the black horizon, men were dying by the hundreds. The morse of a radio inside the command post clicked and chattered in staccato bursts. A dog barked once, answered by another farther away.
They stepped into their boots properly now, lacing them tight. Leather creaked. Laces hissed through eyelets.
Anya picked up her parachute harness from the end of the bed where she’d laid it. The webbing was stiff against her fingers, the metal rings cold. When she lifted it, the buckles chimed together, a dull clink like cutlery in a drawer.
For a second she paused, eyes on the doorway.
The bulb above them flickered, dimmed for a heartbeat, then steadied. The tiny buzz returned.
“Superstition time?” Masha asked quietly, slinging her own harness over her shoulder. “Touch the doorframe for luck, spit over the left shoulder, curse a German, praise a German, choose your favorite.”
“I’m not superstitious,” Anya said automatically.
“Everyone who says that,” Katya replied, “has a favorite pair of socks.”
The argument was old. They let it rest, comfortable in its familiarity. Routine was as much armor as leather and steel.
Anya walked to the door first. Her boots thudded softly on the packed dirt. When she reached the frame, she didn’t touch it—not really—but her gloved fingers hovered for an instant over the scarred wood, tracing the air. The gesture was only barely there, a ghost of contact.
She could feel the rough grain of the timber under her palm anyway, imagined or remembered. That was enough.
Outside, the engines of the Po-2s—*their* Po-2s now, she could tell—were roaring up from idle, the vibration becoming a physical tremor beneath her feet. The barn quivered. Dust sifted from the rafters in a faint, dry whisper.
Anya pulled the door open.
Night flooded in: cold, sharp, smelling of snow and fuel and smoke. The sky was a heavy quilt of low cloud, no moon, no stars, only a faint lighter smear to the west where some distant fires glowed beyond the horizon.
The airfield sprawled around them in silhouettes and noises. Trucks crawled along the perimeter road, their engines grumbling. Ground crew men moved like hunched shadows between planes, shouting to each other. Floodlights near the hangars shone up into the low ceiling of clouds, making a haloed bruise of light in the dark.
Behind her, the other women filed out, their footsteps overlapping in a soft drumbeat.
To their right, near the men’s barracks, stood a loose knot of male pilots in greatcoats, smoking. Their faces turned as the women emerged, pale smudges in the gloom.
Anya heard a low whistle. Then a voice, not loud but cutting: “Look, the witches crawl from their nest.”
Another man added something in German-accented Russian, a joke that landed with a mutter of laughter. She caught only the last word: “*devushki*,” the “girls” again, drawn out.
Beside Anya, Katya’s jaw clenched. Irina’s shoulders lifted a fraction higher.
Masha turned her head just enough that the cigarette glow at the edge of the men’s circle reflected in her eyes.
“You should be sleeping,” she called back mildly. “Big boys need their rest. Especially when we’re working.”
One of the men started to reply, but another elbowed him, a clipped hiss cutting him off. “Enough. Command is listening,” the second murmured, too low to make more of it out.
The murmur of their voices swelled and dropped again. The ember of a cigarette flared. One of the men looked away first.
The wind picked that moment to gust hard across the field. It flapped the tails of coats, tugged scarves, sent a metal sign clanking against its pole in a hollow, ringing rhythm.
Anya didn’t answer them. She had nothing to say to men who didn’t believe in the work she did. The altimeter, the compass, the map, the plane—that was who she spoke to.
She tilted her head, listening.
On the far edge of the strip, her aircraft idled—a little two-seat biplane with fabric wings and a wood frame. The engine noise was higher and thinner than the big bombers’, a nervous buzz against their deeper roar. But together, the sounds wove a pattern in the dark: a language she understood better than the mutters from the men’s circle.
“Come on,” she said, and her voice was quiet but steady. “Briefing first. Then we fly.”
The four of them walked toward the dimly lit shack that served as operations. Their boots scraped on frozen ground, crunching occasional patches of snow and ice. Somewhere overhead a raven called once, a harsh croak, then fell silent again.
Inside the barn, behind them, the bulb shone on the empty beds, the thin blankets neatly folded, the straw mattresses holding the shallow, recent dents of their bodies. The stove ticked as it cooled, the last of the heat bleeding away. Somewhere in the rafters, the mouse resumed its furtive scurry.
The beds waited, still and narrow, for whoever came back to fill them.
Outside, the engines grew louder.
Anya adjusted the strap of her parachute harness on her shoulder and started across the packed-earth lot toward the row of Po-2s.
The ground was uneven beneath the glaze of frost. Frozen ruts from trucks and fuel bowsers turned each step into a careful negotiation. The night smelled of oil and gasoline and smoke, a heavy industrial tang that clung to the back of her throat. Somewhere to the left, someone revved an engine too hard; it snarled briefly before settling back into a throaty growl.
The four women formed a loose line: Anya in front, Katya and Masha a step behind, Irina slightly to the side, clutching her map case to her chest. Their boots crunched in a slow, in-sync rhythm.
Ahead, under the stark glare of a single floodlight, a small group of male pilots lingered near one of the larger bombers, cigarettes glowing like fireflies. Their voices floated thin on the cold air, cutting in and out beneath the engines’ rumble.
“…another mission. At this rate the fuel will run out before we do,” one said.
“And they still send the girls up,” another replied, tone dry. “Maybe the Germans will be too busy laughing to shoot straight.”
Muted chuckles followed.
Anya heard every word. The airfield was a world of half-heard sentences and full-volume contempt; she had grown used to distinguishing both. But tonight something inside her felt too taut, too coiled, to let it slide past unnoticed.
She felt the eyes on their backs: some curious, some dismissive, some measuring. The men’s presence pressed around them like a weight they refused to buckle under.
The Po-2s waited near the edge of the strip—small biplanes, sparse and skeletal against the gloom, their fabric wings stirring faintly in the wind. Ground crew moved quietly around them, shapes in heavy coats, faces mostly hidden under caps and scarves. The lights here were weaker, laid low to avoid drawing attention from above.
Anya’s chest brimmed with the familiar mix of fear and purpose. The map in her mind aligned with the line of their route. The distant rumble of artillery over the front knitted all of it together.
She drew a breath that stung her lungs with cold.
And before she could second-guess it, she lifted her chin and shouted into the night:
“To the skies!”
The words shot out of her, sharp and bright. They carried across the lot, bouncing off corrugated metal and wooden walls, slicing through the engine noise for a heartbeat before the roar closed around them again.
Her voice surprised her with its clarity. It sounded bigger than her.
For a fraction of a second, there was a strange, suspended silence—no quieter than before, but suddenly focused. Heads turned. A mechanic mid-step paused, wrench in hand, his eyes flicking toward her. A dog near the perimeter road gave a startled bark and then fell quiet again.
Behind her, something shifted in the women.
Masha straightened, a grin flashing quick and feral, like a match struck in the dark. She punched her fist lightly into the air once, not high, just enough.
“To the skies!” she echoed, not as loud but with equal conviction.
Katya huffed out a breath that might have been half laugh, half war cry, and shook her head.
“You and your speeches,” she muttered. But then she added, more audibly, “To the skies,” her tone mock-solemn but her eyes flashing.
Irina’s mouth softened into a small, radiant smile. She didn’t shout—her voice was always softer by nature—but she murmured the words under her breath, as if blessing them. “To the skies,” she whispered, and the condensation of her breath wreathed the phrase in a brief cloud.
The call seemed to ripple outward.
One of the younger mechanics, cheeks red with cold, lifted his head from where he was checking a wheel strut and gave a short, sharp nod in their direction. Another, older, spat to the side, but there was no malice in it—just habit, clearing his throat.
A few of the men by the bomber, though, were already bending the moment into something else.
“To the skies!” one mimicked in a falsetto, drawing out the last word like a sing-song. “Listen to the witches preach.”
He smirked, flicking ash onto the frozen ground. Another leaned closer, shoulder brushing his, and murmured a joke low enough that the words couldn’t be made out—but the tone was unmistakable. The burst of laughter that followed was short and ugly.
“Make sure they remember to come back down,” one called, voice pitched just loud enough to carry. “It’s not like a fairground ride!”
The others snorted.
Anya felt heat rush up the back of her neck, beneath her scarf. Not shame—she refused that—but a flare of anger so sharp it might as well have been.
She did not turn around. Their voices might as well have been artillery in the far distance: dangerous, yes, but irrelevant to her course unless she let herself look.
Beside her, Masha muttered, “Chickens clucking in the mud. Let them.”
Katya’s jaw was tight, but when she spoke, her tone was level. “If they are laughing loud, they are afraid. That’s what my father used to say.”
“Your father laughed when he was drunk,” Masha said. “He was afraid of the floor.”
Katya’s shoulders shook once in a suppressed giggle. The tension around her eyes eased by a fraction.
Anya’s heart slowed from its brief gallop. The echo of her own shout still hummed in her chest. It felt…right. Embarrassing, maybe, but right. She had not meant to say anything poetic or brave. She had just said what she wanted: to be up there, working, doing the job they had taken on when everyone else thought they would fail.
“To the skies,” Irina said again, softer now, as if tucking the words into her coat with the rest of her gear. “Better than ‘to the mud,’ anyway.”
The nearest Po-2 loomed out of the darkness—a compact beast, its upper wing a flat shadow against the faint, lighter smear of sky. The propeller idled slowly, each blade a blur. The engine’s staccato rattle sent a steady vibration through the earth and up into their feet.
Their mechanic, Sergei, was already there, hunched in his heavy coat. His nose was red with cold; his breath steamed in the air as he worked. A wrench hung from his belt, clinking softly against the metal bomb rack whenever he shifted.
He glanced up at their approach, expression quick to readjust itself back to gruff neutrality.
“About time,” he said, though he’d heard the briefing schedule as well as they had. “I was starting to think I’d fueled this one for nothing.”
Anya caught the ghost of a smile twitch at the corner of his mouth and gave him a short one back.
“You know we like to make an entrance,” Masha said, stepping past Anya to clap Sergei lightly on the shoulder.
“You made an entrance, all right,” he replied, but his tone was different from the men by the bomber. There was no contempt in it. Only weary familiarity, an undercurrent of worry he hid by sounding stern. “The whole east side of the strip heard you.”
“The Germans in Poland heard her,” Katya added.
“That’s the idea,” Anya said quietly.
Sergei glanced at her properly now, eyes searching her face for something—fear, doubt, hesitation. Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him.
“Good,” he said. “Then shout again when you come back. I’ll listen for it.”
He turned and slapped the side of the fuselage with a gloved palm.
“Bombs are loaded. Fuel topped. She’s in a better mood than last night. Try not to break her.”
Anya stepped closer to the aircraft.
The fabric skin of the Po-2 sighed faintly in the wind, flexing over wooden ribs. Frost crusted the leading edges of the wings in a delicate lace. She ran her gloved hand briefly along the side, feeling the slight give of canvas. The gesture was automatic, almost affectionate.
Her breath fogged the metal cowling around the engine. The prop wash tossed loose strands of her hair around her face, tugging at the straps of her helmet.
“Katya,” she said, turning slightly. “Maps?”
“In my head, in my case, in my soul,” Katya replied. She tapped the leather satchel at her hip. “And if I am knocked unconscious mid-flight, they are also written clearly enough that even you can follow them.”
Anya snorted once, an involuntary laugh that lifted a little of the heaviness from her shoulders.
Irina moved toward her own assigned aircraft a few meters down, the other Po-2 waiting like a sibling in the shadows. Its propeller was still; its mechanic was just finishing up with the fuel line, disconnecting it with a wet metallic click.
Masha jogged after her, scarf tails flapping.
“Remember,” Masha called over her shoulder to Anya, voice raised above the engine. “If you see flak on the left, jink right. If you see it on the right, jink left. If you see it in front of you, pray it’s aimed at the men.”
“Very funny,” Irina said, but she was smiling as she hauled herself up onto the wing root.
The ground crew moved faster now. Chocks were checked. Bomb racks were inspected. A man crouched under the wing with a flashlight, the beam a narrow cone that slid over struts and wires, every small metal piece flashing briefly as it passed.
Somewhere back by the larger aircraft, the men were still talking, but their voices had thinned into background noise. They were distant birds now, fussing in a tree far away. Anya tuned them out.
She crossed in front of the Po-2, careful not to step into the disc of the prop, and climbed onto the lower wing, the fabric flexing minutely under her weight. The metal leading edge was slick with frost; she gripped the struts tightly, feeling cold seep through her gloves.
Sergei steadied the fuselage with one broad palm.
“Careful,” he said.
“I’m always careful,” Anya replied.
“That’s what pilots say right before they are not careful,” he muttered, but his eyes were fond. “Harness first. Then we’ll pull the chocks.”
She moved with practiced economy.
Seat. Harness straps over shoulders. Buckles clicked, one after the other, the small metallic sounds nearly lost under the engine’s drone. She cinched the lap belt tight, then tightened the shoulder straps until they pressed reassuringly against her chest.
Katya clambered up behind her into the rear cockpit, map case bumping against the side. The top of Katya’s helmet knocked lightly against the canopy frame.
“Watch your head,” Anya said.
“I have already watched it,” Katya replied dryly. “It is very round. No sharp corners to damage.”
She settled in, rustling paper. The small, intimate sounds of her adjusting—boots scuffing, leather creaking, the faint crackle of folded maps—felt suddenly louder than the engines, closer.
Anya pulled her goggles down around her neck for now, letting them rest there like a promise.
Out beyond the nose of the aircraft, the runway stretched in a dark strip, barely distinguishable from the surrounding ground except for the faint glimmer where frost had been crushed by tires. Tiny blue lamps marked its edges, dimmed to keep from drawing too much attention from above.
The signal from the ground crew would come any moment.
She could feel the night pressing around them, not hostile exactly, but vast and indifferent. Up there, once they left the ground, they would be a small moving dot in a sky full of dangers. Down here, they were just another shape on a cluttered field.
The men near the bomber watched them still. One, perhaps older than the rest, looked away first, taking a long drag on his cigarette, then dropping it and grinding it out under his boot.
Another cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Try to keep it straight, little sister! The runway is narrow!”
Anya didn’t bother replying. The engine’s drone would have swallowed her words anyway.
Masha, perched in the front seat of the second Po-2, did return fire, though. She threw up a gloved hand without turning and extended a single, unmistakable gesture into the dark. The men hooted; one of them clapped, delighted.
Irina rolled her eyes and shook her head, but Anya could see her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter even from a distance.
A figure stepped onto the strip, carrying the light baton used for taxi signals. The beam flashed briefly, cutting a bright line in the dark. He raised it, gave the circling motion: prepare to move.
Sergei leaned close to Anya’s cockpit.
“Throttle gentle,” he shouted over the engine, his breath forming clouds that whipped away in the prop wash. “The ground is rough. If you bounce her too hard, she’ll sulk.”
“She likes me,” Anya shouted back. “She only sulks for you.”
He snorted, thumped the side of the fuselage again, then stepped away and bent to yank the wooden chocks away from the wheels.
The block of wood scraped against the frozen dirt with a rough, grating sound. Anya felt the aircraft shift, a subtle release as the wheels were freed.
She put her hand on the throttle lever. It felt solid, familiar, a straight metal rod under her glove. For a heartbeat she held it there, feeling the engine’s vibration through her arm.
Then she eased it forward.
The Po-2 responded with a forward lurch, mild at first, wheels beginning to roll. The rudder pedals nudged under her boots as she steered, keeping them aligned along the rough track leading from the stand to the main strip.
The crunch of the wheels over frozen ruts thrummed up the frame. The whole aircraft creaked and rattled like an old cart, as if protesting being asked to move again on such a night. But she moved.
Behind them, Katya braced a hand on the cockpit rim and looked over the side at the ground slipping slowly past.
“Straight, Anya,” she called, though there was no real worry in it. “Let’s stay on the ground until it’s time not to.”
“Working on it,” Anya replied.
The signalman ahead walked backward at a steady pace, baton raised, guiding them toward the strip. His boots scuffed dim lines into the frost. His breath came in puffs as he turned his head periodically to check for obstacles.
To the side, the second Po-2 began to roll as well. Masha’s plane jounced a little as it hit a deeper rut. Even at this distance Anya could see Sergei’s counterpart waving his arms in theatrical despair.
“Your broom is drunk!” Masha shouted across, laughter in her voice.
“Tell her to share,” Katya called back.
The loose banter hung in the air like small, defiant flags.
Anya kept her eyes ahead, following the bobbing baton, feeling the way the plane wanted to veer with every bump and correcting for it with light pressure on the pedals. She was aware, in the corners of her mind, of the watching men, of the rumble of the big bombers’ engines spooling up, of the distant, constant thunder on the horizon.
Mostly, though, it was the texture of the ground, the vibration under her, the alignment of nose to runway that filled her attention.
They reached the threshold of the strip.
The signalman stepped aside and swung the baton in a clear, sharp gesture: hold.
Anya drew the throttle back a fraction. The Po-2 slowed, then came to a shuddering halt. The engine idled, the propeller a spinning blur, the sound a coarse, steady buzz that seemed to stitch her and the aircraft into a single vibrating line.
Masha’s plane came up alongside, slightly behind, its engine note harmonizing with theirs in an odd, rattling duet.
Farther back, in the gloom, the men’s chatter had thinned to a low murmur. The bombers loomed like fat shadows, waiting their turn. Somewhere a siren wailed briefly—a test, a check—and then cut off.
Anya could feel Katya’s breath warm on the back of her neck despite the layers, hear the faint rustle as Katya unfolded one of the maps and clipped it into place on the small board in her lap. She smelled petrol, cold metal, the smoke from cigarettes carried on the wind.
Her own words from a minute ago came back to her, like an echo that had looped through the airfield and returned—To the skies.
She didn’t say them again. She didn’t need to. They were here now, sitting in engines and fuel lines and beating hearts, lodged somewhere deep in each of the women around her.
Ahead, down the strip, the darkness waited.
The signalman raised his baton one more time, the end a tiny flame of light against the black, ready for the next motion that would send them rolling—slow at first, then faster—down the runway and into the night.
The Po-2 bucked once as it left the ground, then steadied, wheels drawing up into nothing as the runway fell away beneath them.
Anya felt the shift in her stomach—the small, familiar weightlessness as the earth let go—and then the comforting bite of lift in the wings. The aircraft climbed into the thick blackness, its engine a coarse, insistent roar in her bones.
Cold slammed into her.
The cockpit was a box of wind and noise. Air knifed past her cheeks, threading through every loose seam in her clothing. Her breath turned immediately to vapor, whisked away by the slipstream. The leather edges of her helmet pressed hard against her temples; the strap under her chin tugged with the vibration.
Below, the airfield shrank to a scatter of dim lights. The rows of buildings became vague smudges, the runway a pale stripe in the dark. The larger bombers lumbered into motion farther down, their outlines fat and deliberate, but the Po-2 climbed light and quick in comparison, an overworked dragonfly clawing into the sky.
“Altitude steady,” Katya’s voice crackled in Anya’s ear, carried through the short, temperamental intercom wire that linked their headsets. “Heading zero-eight-five. River in…” There was a rustle of paper, a brief pause. “Eight minutes.”
“Copy,” Anya replied, eyes on the pale glow of the instruments. The altimeter needle crept upward; the compass card wobbled as the aircraft bumped through a pocket of rough air, then settled.
The second Po-2 slid into place off their port wing, a slightly darker shadow against the dark, its navigation light hooded to a pinprick. Anya could just make out Masha’s profile in the front cockpit, goggles reflecting a faint ghost of light from the instrument panel. Irina sat behind her, hunched over her own maps, scarf trailing like a little flag.
They flew low by bomber standards, but high enough to clear the ragged forest and broken fields beneath them. The land below was a patchwork of deeper and lighter blacks, occasionally cut by the glint of a river bend or the ghostly gray of snow-covered patches.
Far ahead, the horizon flickered with distant fire—brief orange pulses where artillery shells bloomed, then died. The sound arrived delayed, a slow, continuous rumble, like someone rolling heavy barrels in a cellar very far away.
Anya’s hands settled into the subtle dance on the control stick: small corrections, gentle inputs, letting the plane ride the air instead of fighting it. Her breath fell into rhythm with the engine’s throbbing. Above the nose, the sky was a thick, starless lid.
The minutes stretched into a thin, taut band.
They crossed over a cluster of dark shapes that resolved into a sleeping village: a few pale rectangles of houses, a ribbon of road, one dim lantern burning somewhere in a yard. A dog barked again—an oddly domestic sound drifting faintly upward. Anya wondered, briefly and uselessly, if the people down there could hear them, if they rolled over in their sleep when the engine passed overhead, or if war had made the roar of planes as ordinary as rain.
“Two minutes,” Katya said, voice quieter now, concentration thinning the edges of her usual sarcasm. “River ahead. Rail line runs parallel. Target convoy dispersed along the east bank. Flak likely clustered near the bridge.”
Anya nodded, even though Katya couldn’t see it.
“Engine cut in sixty seconds,” she said.
Masha’s voice crackled faintly in the line as their planes’ proximity brought their primitive radios into grudging cooperation.
“Copy,” Masha said. “I live to be silent.”
“Then stop talking,” Irina added into Masha’s channel, dry and soft.
Despite herself, Anya smiled.
The river appeared as an abrupt, twisting absence of land—its faint gleam a paler thread woven through the darkness. The bridge was a thicker shadow straddling it, angular and stark. On either side, parked along the riverbank and clustered near the approach roads, were the targets: trucks, fuel tankers, wagons, hard to distinguish individually but clearly not random.
Specks of light moved among them—lanterns, cigarettes, torches. Men on the ground. German uniforms. Voices floated up, muffled, not clear enough to make out words but unmistakable in their cadence.
“Almost in position,” Katya murmured. “We go in from the north, drop two each on the bridgehead. Then adjust.”
Anya’s gloved fingers tightened on the throttle.
She felt the plane’s eagerness in the vibration—a lie, she knew, machinery didn’t feel—but tonight she chose to believe. The air rushing past the struts seemed to hiss: Now. Now.
“Cutting engine,” she said.
She pulled the throttle back.
The engine’s roar choked, stumbled, and then faded into a low, reluctant mutter before dying entirely. The propeller spun a moment longer on momentum, then slowed to a faint flicker, then to visible blades slicing the dark.
Silence flooded in.
Not true silence—never that—but the sudden absence of the engine uncovered every other sound. Wind tore at the wings with a thinner, sharper whistle. The faint clink of a loose buckle somewhere on her harness became audible, tapping lightly against metal. The creak of the wooden frame, the rustle of maps behind her, the small involuntary swallow in her own throat—all rose into awareness.
Below, the night came closer.
Without the engine’s roar, she could hear the world under them: the river’s muted rush, the distant call of some nocturnal bird, the isolated shout of a German officer near the bridge. The words were still indistinct, but the tone was brisk, irritated. Somebody laughed—a short, harsh burst, quickly cut off.
The plane glided forward, carried by momentum and the cold, dense air. Anya adjusted the stick delicately, keeping their descent shallow, letting gravity and airflow do the work.
Off the port side, Masha’s Po-2 slid into parallel glide, their edges almost level, both aircraft sinking like slow, deliberate ghosts.
Anya felt her heartbeat thudding in her ears, oddly loud in the quiet.
Now.
It came over her in a wave—not a thought so much as a surge. Her chest filled; something clawed its way up from her ribs into her throat. She could have kept it there, swallowed it back down. Instead she opened her mouth.
“ATTACK!”
The word ripped out of her, raw and fierce, more a shriek than a call. It tore at her throat on the way out, riding the slipstream.
With the engine silent, her voice flung itself into the night unchallenged. It carried across the thin distance between the aircraft, bounced off the wings, slammed downward toward the ground.
Smoke rolled over the river like a low, black tide.
— I —
Unteroffizier Ernst Keller stood at the eastern bridgehead with his hands jammed under his greatcoat, boots numb from hours on frozen ground. The convoy stretched along the bank behind him—rows of trucks and fuel tankers crouched in the dark, their silhouettes only slightly lighter than the fields beyond.
The night was thick and moonless. The only real light came from a few shielded lanterns near the command post and the dull orange glow of artillery flickering on the horizon. The river below the bridge murmured steadily, unseen but not unheard, a cold, moving presence cutting the landscape in two.
Near the sandbagged flak position, two crewmen shared a cigarette cupped in their hands, the ember a small, conspiratorial star between their fingers.
“Wenn wir noch eine Nacht hier stehen, wachse ich fest in den Boden,” one muttered, smoke spilling from his mouth.
“Beschwer dich nicht,” the other replied. “Solange die Russen sich mit den anderen Linien beschäftigen, lässt man uns in Ruhe.”
Keller shifted, listening more than watching. The field telephone in the small, makeshift shelter crackled occasionally with static and terse updates from somewhere behind the lines. Mostly, it was quiet. Too quiet for his liking.
From the command tent nearby, raised voices carried in short bursts—officers arguing over timetables, fuel allocations, schedules for crossing the bridge once the trains resumed. Oberleutnant Vogel’s clipped tone cut through now and again, all precision and irritation.
“Die Brücke ist der Schlüsselpunkt, Herr Oberstabsarzt, keine Diskussion,” Vogel snapped at someone on the other end of the line. “Wenn die Versorgung hier hängen bleibt, können Sie vorne keine Wunder erwarten.”
The flap fell closed again, muffling him.
Somewhere farther up the road, a truck coughed as a driver tried to coax its reluctant engine into life. The attempt failed; the motor sputtered and died. A curse floated faintly down the line: “Verdammter Mistkarren…”
Keller lifted his head.
Under the distant artillery rumble there was… something else. A faint, uneven growl, so low he almost dismissed it as imagination. He tipped his head, listening harder.
“Ruhe!” he barked toward the flak crew, sharper than he intended. “Hört ihr das?”
The two men froze, cigarette forgotten between them. All three listened.
The engine noise was there—thin and reedy, high up somewhere in the dark, not the deep thrum of the big bombers they knew so well. It wavered, as if the sound itself was unsure of its presence.
“Flieger?” one of the crewmen whispered.
Keller frowned into the black.
“Vielleicht nur Aufklärung,” he said, not convinced. “Ein einzelner. Oder es ist gar nichts. Im Osten ballert es ständig, die Geräusche… vermischen sich.”
He wanted to believe it. But the hairs at the back of his neck were already prickling.
Behind him, the river whispered past the bridge piers. Frost-crusted grass edged the embankment, brittle under the boots of the sentries pacing their slow patterns. A railway carriage sat idling on the far approach, dark and heavy, waiting for the all-clear to inch forward.
The faint engine note wavered again.
Then it cut out.
Not faded—stopped. An abrupt silence where a moment before there had been mechanical vibration. The change was so sudden it felt like someone had slammed a door on the sky.
Keller stared upward into the blackness.
“Wo sind sie?” one of the flak men murmured. “Ich sehe nichts…”
He didn’t see anything, either. No searchlights were running; the generator had been temperamental all week, and tonight, they’d left them off to conserve fuel. Without them, the sky was just a featureless lid, exactly the color of his fear.
The river kept talking to the stones.
Ernst Keller opened his mouth to shout an order—he wasn’t yet sure which one—when the night directly above the eastern bank seemed to split.
For a heartbeat there was nothing, just a shift in the dark and a thin, falling whine on the edge of hearing.
Then the first bomb hit.
Light erupted from the river’s edge in a brutal, white-orange burst. It swallowed everything nearest to it—the row of trucks beside the bridge approach, the sandbags stacked around the small checkpoint hut, the nearest figures on the ground—in a glare so sudden that Keller’s pupils slammed shut, his vision bleaching out.
The blast arrived a half-breath later.
It punched the air out of his lungs, a single, massive fist of pressure hammering into his chest. The ground seemed to jump under his boots. He felt the shock through his bones more than he heard it; for a moment all sound compressed into one thick, swallowing roar.
Something heavy slammed into him from the side.
He found himself on the ground without remembering how he’d got there, his cheek pressed to frozen dirt, gravel biting his skin. The world fragmented—shards of brightness, streaks of darkness, shapes flung sideways. His ears rang with a high, insistent tone.
Smoke rushed over him in a hot, choking wave.
He tasted burned rubber and fuel on his tongue, sharp and bitter. The river’s whisper had become a muffled roar where debris plunged into it. Above, the sky remained black.
The convoy was no longer quiet.
— II —
Sound returned in pieces.
First came the screaming—raw, torn-throat cries cutting through the ringing in Keller’s ears. Then the shouts: hoarse orders, names called into the dark, curses flung without direction.
“Sanitäter! Sanitäter! Hier drüben!”
“Feuer! Die Tankwagen, verdammt, die Tankwagen brennen!”
“Los, bewegt euch! Löschen, los!”
Keller pushed himself up on stiff arms. His gloves were wet; he didn’t want to think about with what. Smoke curled over the embankment, thick and ugly, stinging his eyes and lining his throat with soot.
Where the line of trucks had been neat and orderly a minute before, there was now a smoking crater licking with flame. A vehicle lay on its side, wheels spinning slowly, its canvas cover shredded, the metal frame twisted. Another truck farther down the line burned with a brighter, more violent flame—fuel storage, he guessed; the heat rolling off it was intense even from this distance.
Figures staggered through the chaos.
A man stumbled past with his greatcoat sleeve on fire, slapping at it frantically. Another crawled away from the crater, dragging one leg that didn’t respond. The near-side sentry post was simply gone—sandbags scattered, the little hut reduced to splintered wood and a roof tile lodged at a crooked angle in the dirt.
The field telephone line that had run neatly along the ground now lay in a tangled mess, partially buried under debris. One end still vanished into the smashed remains of the shelter; the other disappeared into smoke.
Someone grabbed Keller’s shoulder.
“Unteroffizier! Unteroffizier, die Flak!” It was Feldwebel Dietz, his face streaked with soot, a shallow cut across his cheek.
Keller blinked grit from his eyes, trying to force his thoughts into order.
The flak gun.
The crew.
He turned.
The sandbagged emplacements that housed the light anti-aircraft guns loomed out of the smoke, their outlines warped by heat shimmer. One gun was already active, its barrel pointed up into the black, barking shells into the void. Each shot sent a harsh, metallic vibration through the gun’s carriage. The loader worked as if in a trance, feeding rounds, hands moving with mechanical speed.
“Feuerfrequenz erhöhen! Los, los!” someone shouted from inside the pit.
Keller stumbled toward it, boots sliding in dirt that was no longer firm but churned and hot.
Every few seconds, the sky above the river flashed with the too-bright blossoms of anti-aircraft bursts. Tracer rounds scribbled desperate lines upward, revealing briefly the rough vector of the gunners’ guesses. But Keller still couldn’t see the attackers.
They were there—had to be. The explosions were too precise, too focused to be anything but an airstrike. Yet when he craned his neck back, eyes stinging, he saw only erratic tropical flowers of light blooming and dying against an invisible ceiling.
A second bomb detonated farther down the bank.
He felt this one through the soles of his boots first: a deep, subsonic thud that rolled along the ground. Flames jumped up around a fuel tanker near the water. The initial blast smashed it apart, and then the fuel inside caught.
Fire poured out like liquid.
A column of white-hot flame jetted into the air, transforming instantly into a writhing, thick-bellied torch. Black smoke billowed up, denser than before, carrying burning droplets that fell around the riverbank like oily rain. Reflected in the water, the flames turned the surface into a rippling sheet of molten copper.
“Die Russen… die Russen sind über uns!” somebody yelled, voice cracking. “Ich höre Motoren!”
Keller listened.
There—a thin, reedy buzzing, barely audible over the chaos. It passed overhead for a breath, then vanished again as the aircraft cut power to glide.
They were playing games with sound, these Russian pilots. Using the dark and the silence like weapons.
“Suchscheinwerfer! Wo bleiben die verdammten Scheinwerfer?” Vogel’s voice rasped from somewhere to Keller’s right, furious and disbelieving.
“Generator ausgefallen, Herr Oberleutnant!” another voice threw back. “Er springt nicht an!”
A string of curses followed, ripped from Vogel’s throat with such venom that even in this chaos, heads turned.
Keller scrambled into the flak pit.
The crew’s faces were chalk-white except for soot streaks and sweat. The gun’s recoil had carved a rhythmic pattern into the sandbags, each shot kicking back with brutal force. Shell casings lay scattered underfoot, rolling as the men shifted their weight. The stink of propellant and oil wrapped around them, heavy and cloying.
“Ziel?” Keller shouted, painfully aware of how pointless the question was.
“Keine Sicht!” the gunner yelled back, eyes squeezed nearly shut against the smoke. “Nur Geräusche! Wir schießen, wo sie sein könnten!”
He squeezed the trigger again. The barrel spat another angry burst of fire. The recoil slammed into his shoulder. The loader shoved fresh rounds into place, fingers fumbling only slightly.
Above, yet another shell burst bloomed in the dark, this one higher, its orange core surrounded by a ring of fainter sparks. For an instant, in the blink of that light, Keller saw a tiny shape cross the sky at a diagonal—wings stacked atop one another, thin and fragile-looking, more kite than plane.
Then it was gone, swallowed by darkness once more.
“Da!” someone yelled, arm stabbing upward. “Ein kleiner Doppeldecker! Winzig! Die Russen fliegen… was ist das überhaupt?”
His voice cut off as a fresh explosion at the far end of the convoy blew him backward, the shock wave tossing men and debris alike.
Keller felt the ground buck again. A second fuel tanker went up in a roaring blossom of fire. Flames reached sideways this time, sweeping across a row of parked trucks and turning them into glowing, skeletal frames in seconds.
The heat clawed at the flak position, making the air itself feel thick and heavy.
“Munition!” the loader screamed, voice ragged. “Wir brauchen mehr Kisten! Die sind fast leer!”
A young soldier scrambled up from outside the pit, lugging an ammunition crate that looked too heavy for him. His boots slid in the churned mud and scattered glass. He stumbled, went to one knee, grunted, then forced himself up again. His breath came in sharp, frightened gasps.
“Hier!” he shouted, dropping the crate beside the gun. “Hier, Unteroffizier!”
Keller barely glanced at him. His eyes stayed fixed on the sky—on the shifting pattern of flak bursts, the rare, fleeting silhouette of a small, two-winged aircraft darting between the explosions.
The Russians came in low, then climbed, then dropped again.
He could hear the faint changes in engine pitch when they restarted their motors, the sudden roar that followed a moment of gliding silence as they clawed for altitude again. Each brief surge of sound sparked a new flurry of fire from the ground, but the tracers laced empty air more often than not.
The searchlights stayed dead.
Somewhere in the smoke-choked dark, engineers cursed over the generator. Metal clanged; a motor coughed, caught for half a second, and died again. A frustrated kick sent something ringing across the ground.
Without those beams, they were blind.
Radio messages fought to cut through the chaos. The set in the command tent spat fragments.
“—Brücke getroffen—”
“—Feuer überall, wir—”
“—Luftabwehr… koordinieren… nicht—”
Static swallowed half the words. The rest were nearly drowned in the crash of another detonation, this one on the far bank. The railway carriage shuddered, its wagons rocking on the rails as a bomb landed near the track. One end of the train tipped into a shallow crater, wheels biting uselessly at the air.
Keller’s world shrank to the circle of the flak sight and the ragged sky inside its frame.
His shoulder burned with the recoil, his teeth clenched against the gun’s hammering rhythm. Each shot felt like an attempt to punch a hole in the darkness large enough to see through.
The night refused.
Smoke boiled higher from the river’s edge. It thickened into a ceiling that seemed to descend on them, swallowing light, muffling sound. Fires burned below it in scattered clusters, throwing warped illumination upward, painting the undersides of the smoke clouds a restless, angry orange.
Through that turbulent veil, the Russians made their passes.
They were only rarely visible—ghostlike images caught in the corner of an eye, a fleeting outline of wings against the darker patches of cloud, the suggestion of a fuselage sliding across a gap of firelit sky. By the time the gun swung around, the targets were already somewhere else.
Another bomb fell, its descent marked only by a rising hiss that cut through the flak’s bark for a half-instant.
A warehouse near the riverbank—more a large shed than a proper building—exploded outward, its roof lifted and flung in pieces into the night. Splinters of wood rained down around the remaining vehicles. Flames poured from within, climbing fast.
The heat at Keller’s back intensified. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades despite the freezing air.
The Russians were tearing the position apart, and they could do little but fire into the dark and hope.
— III —
By the time the last of the ammunition crates were cracked open, the convoy was no longer a convoy.
It was a ruin.
The riverbank burned in broken segments: here a collapsed tanker turned into a kind of obscene bonfire, there a shattered truck bleeding fuel and flame into the soil, farther along a heap of twisted metal that had once been a trailer now tangled with the remains of a field kitchen. Fires ebbed and surged, some flaring bright, others collapsing into glowering piles of embers.
The bridge itself sagged at the center, one main span buckled and drooping toward the water. Sections of railing were simply gone. Smoke wrapped the structure, making it look like something half-devoured.
Keller’s flak gun had jammed three times. Each time the loader had clawed at the mechanism with numb fingers, cursing, clearing shells, slamming new ones in. Each time the weapon had coughed back to life, spitting its impotent arcs into the sky.
Now, as he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.
He tried again. The gun stayed stubbornly still.
“Ladehemmung!” the gunner shouted, voice hoarse. “Verdammt, sie klemmt schon wieder!”
The loader yanked the breach open. A deformed shell casing glowed a faint, ugly red where it had wedged itself; the smell of burnt propellant clung to it. He jerked his hand back before touching it, shaking his fingers as if burned.
“Wir haben kaum noch brauchbare Munition,” he rasped. “Die Kisten sind fast leer.”
For the first time since the raid began, Keller took a step back from the gun.
His ears rang continuously now. The flak’s pounding, the artillery’s far-off thunder, the thunderclaps of their own destruction along the river—all of it had piled up into a single unbroken noise inside his skull. Every shout, every explosion layered over the last, leaving him trapped in a sound that felt more like pressure than anything else.
He pulled in a breath thick with smoke.
On the near side of the bridge, a row of men crouched behind what cover they could find—low walls, overturned crates, the skeletal remains of vehicles. Some clutched rifles they hadn’t fired once, their weapons meaningless against unseen aircraft. Others held bandages to their own arms or heads, soaking the cloth dark. Faces were smeared black, lips cracked, eyes wide and blown.
“Wo sind unsere Jäger?” one of them gasped into the smoke, not to Keller in particular. “Warum kommt niemand?”
No one answered him.
The Russians had not stopped.
Engine noise rose and fell as the planes powered away after each run, then cut out again to glide back in from another angle. The pattern had become maddeningly familiar: a faint buzz, sudden silence, an uneasy, suspended interval, then the violent punctuation of bombs impacting somewhere along the embankment or near the shattered bridge.
Each fresh blast erased what little organization remained.
An entire cluster of vehicles that Keller had been vaguely aware of to his left disappeared in one such burst, replaced by a crater rimmed in burning metal and bodies flung in unnatural postures. He turned his face away, eyes narrowing against the blast of heat and debris.
Behind him, the skeleton of a rail carriage still clung stubbornly to derailed tracks. A second bomb landing near the rails had twisted them into loops; the train lay at an angle, its couplings snapped, one wagon half-hanging over the edge of the embankment.
Inside the command tent, the radio sputtered in short, failing bursts.
“—schwerer Schaden—Brücke teilweise—”
“—Luftangriff… klein… mehrere Maschinen—”
“—Verluste… Kolonne praktisch—”
The rest dissolved into static.
The field telephone lay dead at Keller’s feet, its wire severed.
He stooped out of reflex and lifted the receiver anyway, pressing it to his ear. Only hiss met him. No human voice bridged the line between this burning stretch of river and whatever safe, warm room lay far behind the front.
He set it down again. The rubber handle slipped slightly in his smoke-slicked glove.
Nearby, Oberleutnant Vogel stood rigidly erect, as if the sheer force of his posture could hold the structure of the situation together. His cap was gone, hair dusted gray with ash. His greatcoat hung open, one button missing, the fabric singed at the collar.
“Stellung halten!” he shouted, though no one was running anywhere. “Luftabwehr weiter feuern, bis der letzte Schuss verschossen ist! Niemand gibt hier auf, verstanden?”
His voice cracked on the last word. Whether anyone heard him clearly through the roar, Keller couldn’t tell.
A fresh wave of tracer rounds clawed up from another flak position closer to the railhead. Their path curved erratically, like bright threads stitched by a drunken hand. The bursts blossomed high, then higher still as the gunners overcompensated, chasing a target they could barely glimpse.
For a brief second, through a gap in the smoke, Keller saw one of the Russian planes again.
It was smaller than he’d imagined—little more than a flimsy outline against the firelit clouds, a double-winged insect flickering across the sky. It glided at an angle that made his stomach clench in vicarious vertigo, then vanished as another burst of flak painted the darkness.
He realized with a dull sense of futility how inefficient their efforts were.
They were throwing iron and flame at ghosts.
Another bomb whistled down.
It struck near the remaining fuel depot. The explosion that followed was larger than the others—a brutal, all-consuming roar that sucked air in and hurled it back out, flattening men to the ground, tearing canvas, snapping beams. Fire leapt hungrily from tank to tank, joining the other blazes already consuming the riverbank. The heat washed over Keller’s face, searing the exposed skin along his cheekbones.
He dropped into a crouch without thinking.
Ash and embers drifted down like blackened snow.
In the uncertain light, he could see men’s mouths moving, shouting, calling for medics, for water, for ammunition. He could not hear most of the words over the dull roar in his ears and the endless crackle of fire.
A shape stumbled into view at the edge of his vision—a young soldier with a bandage wrapped crookedly around his head, tunic dark at one shoulder. He looked at Keller, lips moving.
“Was?” Keller shouted, realizing too late that his own voice came out as a croak.
The soldier leaned closer, yelling into his ear.
“Die Munition—sie ist alle! Bei der anderen Stellung auch! Sie haben nichts mehr!”
Keller stared at him for a second, then past him at the distant, still-barking flak gun near the railhead. Even at this remove, he could see the falter in its rhythm, the occasional pause where no shells fired, the desperate scrambling of men around it as they searched for supplies that weren’t there.
His own gun crew crouched around the jammed weapon, awaiting orders. Their faces were tight with a kind of dazed expectation.
He looked up into the darkness.
The Russians were still up there.
They weren’t attacking in the way he had imagined—no screaming dive-bombers, no sleek, fast fighters roaring low between the hills. Instead there were these small, almost ridiculous silhouettes, cutting their engines to slip across the river in near-silence, then lighting the world on fire with the bombs they dropped with unnerving precision.
He realized, with a cold, sinking certainty, that they still had no real fix on how many there were. Three? Four? A dozen? The sky gave them nothing.
Another pass.
The engine buzz grew, then muted itself. A slicing quiet fell for a heartbeat. Keller’s muscles tensed with the practiced anticipation of the next impact.
The bomb landed somewhere in the tangle of wrecked trucks beyond his line of sight. He saw only the reflected flash on the low-hanging smoke and the sudden, brief brightening of the flames already there. The shock wave rolled across the ground slower this time, its edges blunted by distance.
The convoy—what remained of it—was beyond saving. He knew it the way he knew his own name.
Wagons burned to the axles. Fuel bled into the river, igniting in places, leaving slick patterns of fire sliding along the current. The bridge, so vital an hour ago, now stood half-crippled, its value already halved before anyone at higher headquarters had even heard the full report.
He thought of the map in the command tent, of neat lines connecting supply depots and front-line positions. Here, on this shredded patch of riverbank, those lines had been turned into a smear.
The Russians circled like unseen predators.
They dictated the rhythm; they chose when to appear and when to vanish. German hands clutched empty magazines and useless rifles, backs pressed against walls and embankments that offered little protection against bombs falling from directly above.
“Deckung halten!” Vogel shouted again, more out of refusal to be silent than any tactical necessity. “Alle bleiben auf ihren Posten! Wir bekommen neue Befehle, sobald—”
The rest of his sentence dissolved in coughing as smoke wrapped around him, wringing water from his eyes.
Somewhere to Keller’s left, a man slumped against the shattered husk of a truck began to laugh. It was an ugly, broken sound that had nothing of humor in it.
“Die Russen spielen mit uns,” the man rasped between spasms. “Wie Katzen. Wir schießen ins Nichts, und sie werfen Bomben, wann es ihnen passt…”
No one told him to be quiet.
Above the river, the fires flickered higher, then lower, their light reflected in the rolling smoke. The tracers from the last functioning flak gun grew sporadic, then stopped altogether when its breech finally seized up completely. The sudden lack of its pounding stutter left a strange hollow in the noise.
For the first time since the attack started, there was no German fire reaching into the sky.
Only the Russians remained: the faint, intermittent drone of their engines, the whisper of their glides, the occasional hollow boom of a bomb that found some last, unlucky target along the devastated bank.
Keller stood there, shoulders hunched, eyes tracking movement he could not really see.
He felt very small.
The river moved past, indifferent, carrying flecks of burning debris and smears of fuel downstream. Smoke lay over the water in thick, dark layers. Somewhere beyond the bend, artillery still spoke its monotonous language of distant destruction.
Here, on this ruined stretch of shore, the men could do nothing more.
No searchlights. No ammunition worth mentioning. One gun a twisted wreck, another silent, its barrel drooping slightly where heat and stress had bent it. The field telephone dead, the radio coughing out only partial phrases and static.
The Russians owned the night.
Another engine sound rose, then fell, slipping toward silence once again. The men on the ground tensed for the impact they knew was coming, braced themselves as best they could against forces far beyond their control.
Fire crackled. Smoke poured out. The convoy burned.
Devastation, for the moment, was complete, and the ones beneath it could only watch the black sky and wait for the next unseen approach.