Striking the Balance

Ignacy nodded again. “We will mark the field with four white lamps. I presume you will be flying back the same night?”

“Unless something goes wrong, yes,” Ludmila answered. That was a hair-raising business, but easier on the life expectancy than going airborne in broad daylight and letting any Lizard who spotted you take his potshots.

“Good enough,” Igancy said. “TheWehrmacht will expect you to arrive about 2330 tomorrow night, then.”

She glared at him. He’d made all the arrangements with the Nazis, then come to her. Better he should have had her permission before he went off and talked with the Germans. Well, too late to worry about that now. She also realized she was getting very used to operating on her own, as opposed to being merely a part of a larger military machine. She never would have had such resentments about obeying a superior in the Red Air Force: she would have done as she was told, and never thought twice about it.

Maybe it was that the Polish partisans didn’t strike her as being military enough to deserve her unquestioned obedience. Maybe it was that she felt she didn’t really belong here-if her U-2 hadn’t cracked up; if the idiot guerrillas near Lublin hadn’t forgotten an extremely basic rule about landing strips-

“Make sure there aren’t any trees in the middle of what’s going to be my runway,” she warned Ignacy. He blinked, then nodded for a third time.

She spent most of the next day making as sure as she could that theStorch

was mechanically sound. She was uneasily aware she’d never be a mechanic of Schultz’ class, and also uneasily aware of how unfamiliar the aircraft was. She tried to make up for ignorance and unfamiliarity with thoroughness and repetition. Before long, she’d learn how well she’d done.

After dark, the partisans took the netting away from one side of the enclosure concealing the light German plane. They pushed theStorch out into the open. Ludmila knew she didn’t have much room in which to take off. The Fieseler wasn’t supposed to need much. She hoped all the things she’d heard about it were true.

She climbed up into the cockpit. When her finger stabbed the starter button, the Argus engine came to life at once. The prop spun, blurred, and seemed to disappear. The guerrillas scattered. Ludmila released the brake, gave theStorch full throttle, and bounced toward two men holding candles who showed her where the trees started. They grew closer alarmingly fast, but when she pulled back on the stick, theStorch hopped into the air as readily as one of its feathered namesakes.

Her first reaction was relief at flying again at last. Then she realized that, compared to what she was used to, she had a hot plane on her hands now. That Argus engine generated more than twice the horsepower of a U-2’s Shvetsov radial, and theStorch didn’t weigh anywhere near twice as much as aKukuruznik. She felt like a fighter pilot.

“Don’t be stupid,” she muttered to herself, good advice for a pilot under any circumstances. In the Fieseler’s enclosed cabin, she could hear herself talk, which had been all but impossible while she was flyingKukuruzniks. She wasn’t used to being airborne without having the slipstream blast her in the face, either.

She stayed as low to the ground as she dared; human-built aircraft that got up much above a hundred meters had a way of reaching zero altitude much more rapidly than their pilots had intended. Flying behind the lines, that worked well. Flying over them, as she discovered now, was another matter. Several Lizards opened up on theStorch

with automatic weapons. The noise bullets made hitting aluminum was different from that which came when they penetrated fabric. But when theStorch didn’t tumble out of the sky, she took fresh hope that its designers had known what they were doing.

Then she passed the Lizards’ line and over into German-held Poland. A couple of Nazis took potshots at her, too. She felt like hauling out her pistol and shooting back.

Instead, she peered through the night for a square of four red lanterns. Sweat that had nothing to do with a warm spring night sprang out on her face. She was so low she might easily miss them. If she couldn’t spot them, she’d have to set down anywhere and then no guessing how long the Germans would take to move the ammunition from their storage point to her aircraft, or whether the Lizards would notice theStorch and smash it on the ground before the ammo got to it.

Now that she was flying over human-held terrain, she let herself gain a few more meters’ worth of altitude. There! Off to the left, not far. Her navigation hadn’t been so bad after all. She swung theStorch through a gentle bank and buzzed toward the marked strip.

As she got close to it, she realized it seemed about the size of a postage stamp. Would she really be able to set theStorch down in such a tiny space? She’d have to try, that was certain.