Recoil from the heavy automatic cannon made the Yak-1 shudder underneath her. An instant later, Bel saw the JU-88 Stuka dive-bomber burst into flames. She knew there was a pilot inside that German aircraft, a dead man possibly leaving behind a widow, or orphans, or a grieving mother and father. Bel knew it, but she didn't feel it. She felt joy. It wasn't the joy of victory, it wasn't the joy of scoring her first combat kill, it wasn't the joy of success. It was the joy of fighting back, of helping to protect the lone man with the rifle on the rooftop, and protecting the other brave men defending the ruined apartment building below. They were Russian soldiers, defending Russian land. Until today they had been defending her. And now, finally, she was returning the favor.
Another Stuka dive bomber was hit, and it spun out of control. To her right a third lost its wing, shorn off by high-explosive shells from Lenka's cannon, and Bel saw a parachute bloom as the pilot ejected. Then the remaining bombers were past them, their number already cut in half, hopelessly outmatched against the Russian pilots' agile Yak-1 fighters.
Bel, Lenka and Katia had arrived across the river from Stalingrad more than two weeks ago, on October 10. They'd been re-assigned to 437th Fighter Regiment, a unit that had, until that day, been all male. But so many Russian men had already died in the skies over Stalingrad that Stavka had become desperate for pilots. They decided that since the Army was already integrated, the Airforce should be, too.
The male pilots hadn't been welcoming to the women. They gave the girls the cold shoulder, barely acknowledging their presence. At first the chill reception angered Bel. She took it for sexism and vowed with Lenka that the two of them would prove they were the equal of any man. But as they began to settle in, they realized it was not misogyny that had motivated the unfriendliness, but pessimism. The few pilots that remained in 437th were haunted survivors of a terrible defeat. They, alone, had managed to live when most of their comrades had died. They'd seen new recruits join their regiment, and they'd seen those new recruits murdered as they flew sortie after sortie against dwindling odds. The veteran pilots didn't ignore Bel and her friends because they were women, they ignored them because they were green. They were fresh meat about to be thrown to the German wolves. They were unlikely to survive. The veteran pilots had learned that befriending new recruits only made the pain of their deaths that much more difficult to bear. That realization made Bel renew her vow with Lenka. Together they may not survive, but they promised each other that they would none the less find a way to help turn back the German assault.
Now, more than two weeks later, they'd fulfilled that vow. They'd each downed a Stuka dive-bomber, probably saving the men defending that apartment building. Now, no matter what else happened, they could die with the satisfying knowledge that their lives had had meaning.
The remaining Stuka pilots knew they were outmatched and began a laborious turn to escape. Bel's little patrol of six Yaks could easily run them down and destroy them, but the voice of her male commander, Major Volkov, squawked over the radio in warning. "Messerschmitt," he announced, "ten o'clock high."
Bel looked up and to her left. Sure enough, six black shadows dotted the gray sky. She couldn't tell what they were at this distance, she couldn't even tell that they were planes. But she trusted Volkov's experienced eye, and it made sense that that they would be Messershmitt, anyway. Messershmitt was the nickname given to the infamous Bf-109, German's famed fighter that ruled the skies from Paris to Stalingrad. Unlike the Stukas, which were designed for ground attack, Messershmitt were dog-fighting specialists, at least the equal of Russia's agile Yak-1s. They were coming to protect the dive-bombers and re-establish German air superiority.
At Major Volkov's command the Yak-1s snapped into formation and began to climb. Height had been a tactical advantage since before the time of the ancient Pharoahs, and modern air combat was no different. As fast as a Yak could fly, it could fly faster in a dive with the hand of gravity pushing at its back.
And the Messershmitt could dive even faster. If the Yaks couldn't climb and match the Germans' altitude, the Messershmitt's first pass would be a devastating dive that would cut the Russians to pieces, just like Bel and Lenka had just done to the Stukas.
This time, however, fortune favored the Russians. It was still morning, the sun was rising in the east, directly behind Bel and her comrades. For the moment it blinded the German pilots. Major Volkov had spotted the Messershmitt before they had spotted him. Those precious moments of awareness gave the Russians just enough time to match the German warplanes' altitude.
Now they were flying right at each other, on equal footing. There was no point to either side continuing to climb; they could match each other's ascent foot for foot. All that was left was to hold formation and fly directly toward each other like medieval knights in a jousting tournament. Bel remembered Jack referring to the pilots of World War 1 as "Knights of the sky", and now she understood why.
Bel saw fire lick the nose of her adversary before she heard its cannon. Tracer rounds flashed in a stream toward her, not just the high explosive cannon shells that belched from behind the Messerschmitt's propeller, but also machine gun slugs tearing out from either wing. Bell rolled her Yak sideways so that the stream of machine gun bullets passed harmlessly to either side. But she heard and felt the impact of cannon shells, punching into her plywood fuselage and blasting splinters into the sky around her. They missed the Yak's metal struts, and the damage was mostly superficial.
Bel triggered her own cannon and once more felt it's comforting reverberation through her chair and cockpit. But she immediately saw her own tracer rounds bending and corkscrewing, down and to the right of the charging Messerschmitt. Self-preservation had betrayed her. Instead of holding her course she had subconsciously twisted the stick to the right to avoid the Messerschmitt's fire. An instant later the German warplane roared passed her, flashing by like lightning at a relative speed of almost 800 miles per hour.
Bel immediately turned. She knew the German pilot was doing the same thing. Both planes could twist completely around in less than seventeen seconds. She felt the centrifugal force of the turn slam her body against her restraining straps. She fought that force, many times stronger than earth's own gravity, straining her neck muscles, peeling her cheek from the cushioned chair so she could search through the bubble canopy for her opponent. She spotted him and pulled the trigger.
He broke off his turn and dove, the burst of speed saving him from the stream of Bel's high explosive shells.
The maneuver had saved the German pilot...for the moment...but it also presented Bel with the tactical advantage. She rolled out of her turn and dove right behind the German.
Bel felt her stomach rise into her throat as the sensation of zero-G overtook her. She moved back and forth while she dove, triggering her autocannon in short bursts, but the skilled German pilot wove his aircraft just beyond the crosshairs of her steel sight.
The ground was coming up fast. The crumbling brick walls of a gigantic factory complex were growing at an incredible rate, soon enveloping her entire field of vision. The German pilot pulled out of his dive and Bel felt the pressure of gravity slam her back as she matched his course.
The factory walls rushed toward her and then under her. Then she was diving again, under a steel gantry, no more than twenty feet from the factory floor. She pulled up and over another wall, seeing out of the corner of her eye Russian soldiers staring at her in shock and amazement.
The factory disappeared behind her. The German pilot led her into a forest of tall brick chimneys – all that remained of a worker's suburb that had been destroyed by German firebombing weeks earlier. She wove in between the chimneys, like a slalom skier but at four hundred miles an hour.
Suddenly the German pulled up, hard. Bel yanked her stick back to follow. Once more she felt the hand of gravity force her down. It pushed against her face and bladder and chest. She knew what the German was trying to do. He had failed to lose her in the dive, failed to shake her in the daredevil acrobatics through the factory and chimneys. Now he was trying to knock her unconscious with the simple hammer of G-force. Bel could feel her sight begin to dim, feel her brain grow weary. She fought against the urge to pass out, focusing her narrowing vision on the tail markings of the Messerschmitt. Suddenly she saw it hesitate.
Bel pulled the trigger. The roar and shudder of the autocannon startled her back to alertness. The Messerschmitt's tail disintegrated into splinters, and she saw the rest of the plane flip as it fell below and behind her.
Bel straightened and corkscrewed into a dive, her head on a swivel, looking for any sign of the damaged plane. She spotted it in free fall. A parachute ballooned and she saw the pilot begin to float peacefully as his plane tumbled and then exploded into the ground below him.
Bel tried to radio her position so that Russian soldiers could capture the downed German pilot. But Russian radios were very short range. And the wild aerobatic race had separated her from her squadron. So, she made a mental note of the German's position, and turned her plane back to Akhtuba Airfield, across the river to the other side of the Volga.
* * *
The women of the 437th fighter regiment celebrated their victory with moonshine vodka. Katia had ditched her plane when she was hit in the first pass, but she parachuted into the factory held by the Russian 37th Guards and returned safely to Akhtuba Airfield via ferry.
Lenka had scored a kill against her adversary on that same pass, and so had Major Volkov, though the Major's plane was so crippled from incoming fire that he had to disengage and limp home.
That left only Lenka and Major Volkov's wingman, Captain Beliov, against the two remaining Messerschmitt. Lenka proved to be the deciding factor in the ensuing dogfight, shooting one of the German planes off Beliov's tail and causing the other to flee back to German lines. The sortie had been an amazing success. Lenka had scored three kills, including the Stuka, and Bel two. The male pilots had now fully accepted them into their fraternity.
But the celebration wasn't exactly festive. Bel's hand shook when she lifted the glass of vodka, and it continued to shake even after she and Lenka had finished the bottle together.
"Don't worry, that just means you're human," said Captain Beliov.
"The funny thing is," Bel confessed. "I don't even remember being scared." She wrapped her arms around her shoulders to stop them shivering.
Beliov nodded sagely. "Sometimes the fear comes like this, afterwards."
Then Major Volkov's aide appeared, interrupting the morose party with a squeak of the canteen door. "Bel, the Major wants to see you," he announced.
"What for?" asked Bel, surprised.
"He wants you to meet someone."
"Who?"
"A German prisoner."
* * *
The German pilot was handcuffed to a metal table. His face was bruised, injuries sustained, no doubt, at the hands of his Red Army captors. He was clean shaven, in his early thirties, and despite his circumstances he maintained an aristocratic, almost superior, bearing.
Major Volkov, sitting across from the German in his wrinkled and dirty flight suit, looked more like the prisoner than his captor. He turned to greet Bel as she entered the little tent-turned-interrogation room. "Welcome Lieutenant, please pull up a chair.
As Bel did so, Volkov introduced her to the prisoner. "This is Erwin Mayer. He's a German fighter ace with over twenty-six confirmed kills."
Bel frowned in disgust. "Russian kills?"
"Some Russian, yes," Mayer responded proudly. "Some French, some English."
Bel ignored him and addressed Volkov, instead. "Why am I here?"
"He wanted to meet you."
"I wanted no such thing," Mayer interrupted in denial.
"You said you wanted to meet the pilot who shot you down. This is the pilot who shot you down." Volkov gestured toward Bel.
"You are mocking me," Mayer concluded.
"I am doing nothing of the sort."
"You really expect me to believe that? A woman?"
"Prove it to him," Volkov said to Bel.
"Why should I?" she sneered.
"Because I am your commanding officer."
Bel sighed. "Very well." She looked directly in Mayer's eyes. "On our first pass you hit me, but only caused superficial damage. I beat you on the turn, but you avoided my fire by diving into a factory. You tried to lose me between the chimneys of a burned-out suburb, and then you pulled a high-g maneuver to make me black out. I didn't black out. Instead, I shot you down."
Mayer stared at Bel wide-eyed. "Where did you learn to fly like that?" he asked in awe.
"Chasing trains in Alaska," Bel replied truthfully.
Mayer stood up, as tall as he could with his hands still cuffed to the table. "I salute you," he said, clicking his heels together.
Bel spat in his face.