The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 23: The Daredevil

It was a sobering thought, but Jack didn't really believe it. If he ever wanted to get back to the United States, he assured himself, he'd find a way. And signs or no signs, Bobby was a smart son of a bitch. He had that photographic memory of his. He'd remember how they came. In the meantime, Jack was perfectly content to be flying for Russia.

They were hopping from airfield to airfield, now, travelling long hours in the air and landing only to re-fuel and rest. Their planes were fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks under the wings, extending the planes' range, and Jack marveled at the scenery below: giant pine forests cut with crystal blue rivers. Here and there smoke rose into the sky from isolated settlements. Most were logging camps, where the thick forest was scarred with stumps. But some were pit mines, terraced craters cut into the earth like festering wounds, descending into muddy red lakes of standing water that looked like blood. At first Jack wondered how these isolated camps even came into existence – there were no roads emanating from them, no rails for trains, no runways for planes. But then he caught sight of the workers themselves. They wore threadbare prison uniforms and Jack realized with horror that these were labor camps for the condemned. Whatever they cut or mined was stockpiled until winter, at which time they could be sent on sledges down frozen rivers that would be, by then, frozen into solid ice roads.

The third runway they landed at was built more like a prison than an airbase. It was surrounded by barbed wire and wooden lattice-work watch towers. It wasn't designed to keep prisoners inside, however. It was designed to keep them out. The vast wilderness was a far more secure prison than any man-made structure, and the only real chance a prisoner had of escape from a labor camp was to hijack a truck or a plane. So, this airfield was protected from that eventuality and manned with NKVD guards armed with rifles and machineguns.

It was here that Jack, for the first time in days, had trouble sleeping. The airbase reminded him too much of the prison from which he and Bobby had so recently been released. The next morning, as he marched out to his plane, he noticed that the auxiliary fuel tanks had been removed.

Now they landed twice a day to refuel. And those days grew shorter as they continued to fly south. First there had been only a few hours of genuine darkness, but now the nights began to feel familiar to Jack, just like the ones he'd grown up with in the American Midwest. The scenery began to change, too, from giant virgin forests to a patchwork quilt of rolling grain. Even the airfields reminded Jack of home. No longer were they remote police or military installations. Jack began to see civilian aircraft, old World War I surplus biplanes converted to use as crop dusters and mail haulers.

* * *

The morning of October 20 was, Jack knew, the last leg of his journey. Wherever the Soviets were taking him, they would arrive in a few hours. Jack knew this because he knew his plane. He could feel its weight under him, and he could feel that it was heavier. That meant his guns had finally been loaded; the extra weight he felt was the belts of coiled ammunition. And that, in turn, meant they were nearing the front.

They saw the smoke long before they reached their destination. At first Jack thought the smoke was coming from Stalingrad, the skeletal city that sat under a haze of destruction, tiny in the distance, across the wide black ribbon of the Volga.

But as their aircraft flew in from the North-east, the new cloud of smoke emerged in the foreground. It rose from a collection of squat buildings and hangars in the middle of the fertile floodplain formed where the Akhtuba River branched off the Volga.

Occasional flashes of lightning crackled under the cloud, but this lightning was moving up instead of down. The flashes were tracer bullets thrown into the sky by anti-aircraft machineguns. Tiny little shadows danced in the air beneath the cloud: warplanes diving and twisting and climbing.