WHAT'S MORE COMMON IN WAR: LOYALTY OR BETRAYAL?
April 1944. After so-called liberation from both the Nazis and the Soviets, Ukraine remains a battleground between resistance fighters and the ruthless Soviet secret police working to break them at all...
Taras had learned to expect such unorthodoxy from her, yet her subversions of military tradition still jarred him. As did the pair of wedding bands on her left hand. They made the company assume she had someone waiting back home for her—wherever that was.
Vika wasn't like the rest of the unit. Most of the men were nationalists' sons born in Volhynia or Galicia and raised in the swoop of a stallion's back, a revolver at their side. But Vika? She was a shadow from the steppe surrounding Novocherkassk, the Cossacks' capital city turned Soviet industrial stronghold.
"A morphine run," Taras answered.
"Why tell me?"
"Because you'd figure it out anyway and I need you, your mount, and your kit prepared to leave by dawn."
Vika snapped her head up and disturbed Solovey into doing the same. "You've got men with more experience, with better marksmanship. Take one of them instead. Don't pity me for having to stay here with Lieutenant Bondarev."
"Better marksmanship? The UPA doesn't have very many men who can shoot Soviets dead from half a kilometer. That's why we have you," said Taras. "Don't make me flatter you further and don't try feeding me more lies. You're qualified. But you're also unnerved by the way Bondarev leers at you."
"All the men do that," she said, rounding the tree to collect her tse-shaped pack. Like all of her meager possessions, it came from the east. From the Soviets, who she was rumored to have deserted from. "Do you think I'm stupid and don't notice?"
"Well, you're paranoid about it to the point you ignored an order. Have your pack and horse ready by dawn tomorrow, and don't drink with your platoon."
"Anything for a free Ukraine."
Taras broke the tension with a laugh. He knew damn well her sobriety wouldn't last.
In his only private conversation with Zarubin, the one that had left him craving another, the Major had advised him to drink not for the temporary euphoria, but because it helped. It could fill the time between stretches of mind-numbing boredom and worked to calm a frantic mind when deep breaths couldn't.
Most of all, drinking blurred the recollections of the dead's glazed eyes and the walls splattered scarlet like an abstract painting.
"Take a cigarette before you go."
A snap and hiss accompanied the matchstick's flame. Both danced towards Vika's heavy cheekbones as she leaned close to Taras's cupped hands.
She finished the cigarette in haste and left it to smolder among frost-bitten leaves. Whorls of mist swallowed her and Solovey's figures whole as they abandoned him beneath the fir in a haze of rustic tobacco.
"Good little nationalist," Taras muttered to himself. He tipped his head back to scan an overcast sky absent of bombers and sparrows. "Always rallying your comrades for the cause."
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