The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 34: The Bell Over Stalingrad

Bel threw her control stick left and right, anticipating and bracing against each buck of her plane as she attempted to evade her pursuer's machinegun fire. Tracer bullets flashed all around her and she risked a quick dive, but she pulled out of it quickly from fear of losing too much altitude.

She also feared her movements might become too predictable so she did her best to jerk the flight stick erratically and prevent the German pilot from anticipating her next move.

Then, suddenly, she sensed, rather than saw, her enemy bank hard to the right. She didn't question the motivation behind his maneuver; she just instinctively veered hard to her left, instead, trying to put as much distance as possible between her Yak and the deadly Messerschmitt.

That's when she flew into a stream of cannon fire that hadn't been there an instant before – the same cannon fire her enemy had banked right in an effort to avoid.

Bel felt the shuddering impact of cannon shells as she passed through the deadly curtain. Splintered wood erupted around her, ripped from the wings and fuselage of her Yak. But her cockpit was still intact. She offered a wordless and exhilarated prayer of thanks for her good fortune.

But then she lost control. Her flight stick had no tension to it at all; it moved limply in the grip of both of her hands. And the Yak began to spin. Bel's guts were tied in knots with the violence of the motion. She began to scream, not in terror, but in an effort to tighten her stomach and chest muscles against the painful nausea that gripped her.

Still screaming, she let go of the useless control stick and lifted her hands toward the cockpit canopy. The spin caused her arms to shake like noodles, but she braced them against the glass and walked them toward the latches.

She worked her fingers against the cockpit latch but her gloves and the spin made her clumsy. The ground had to be coming up fast but she couldn't afford to think about that – fighting the plane's spin required all her concentration. Finally she got her fingers under the mechanism, the latch released, and she slid the cockpit back. The slip stream blasted her face like wind from a hurricane. Then Bel released her flight harness.

The spin ejected her like a bullet into the sky. She was flailing and tumbling, catching glimpses of clouds and snow and war planes and smoke and fire. She tried to straighten and fight the force of her movement, splaying her arms and arching her back, but it barely reduced her tumble. She ran out of breath, which is when she realized she was still screaming, and quickly inhaled. Then she yanked her ripcord.

Silk billowed behind her and her brain flashed fireworks in front of her eyes as the parachute whiplashed her head nearly off her neck. She swung like a pendulum beneath the mushroom of cloth while she regained her senses. Remembering where she was, she looked down and saw the snow-crusted steppe rushing up and past her. The wind was howling, and it had her parachute firmly in its grasp.

When she hit the ground the wind refused to let go. It dragged her over the cold steppe, and she felt snow push up into her flight suit, tearing at her skin like icy sandpaper. She tumbled painfully until the wind finally let go, and then she crawled to her knees, gasping and coughing.

She glanced left and right to discover she'd landed in the no-man's land right between the Romanian trench works and the oncoming Russian tanks.

The tanks, which had looked like slow little toys from the warped perspective of flight, now looked like huge monsters rushing toward her at impossible speed. They were bouncing over the snow, their forward flung turrets thrusting in front of them like the heads of white stallions. Soldiers were riding them, hanging on the engine decks and fenders for dear life.