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...
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❦ SCREAM, NIGHTINGALE, SCREAM III. the horse is under us and god above ——————————————————
The territory patrolled by the UPA was nothing short of picturesque.
Taras and Vika had been winding through its hay pastures and pine dotted upland for hours. They rode up through the wild feather grass and down into the granite ravines with the Volhynian sky free as the Dnipro river stretched above their heads.
But, like anything beautiful, the region had its dangers. Since the territory straddled the borders of Volhynia and Polisia, it was brimming with directional threats. To the west lay the retreating German Army. To the uncomfortably near east was Stalin's Red Army.
Caught between the warring states were civilians who feared starvation as much as they did reprisals. The peasants had to worry about battalions of nationalists fighting for an independent Ukraine, Polish resistance scrambling for equal citizenship in whichever state became legitimate, and communists resisting the German occupation in hopes they could transfer the land back into Soviet fists.
To say everyone was fighting everyone was an understatement.
"Captain Savaryn?"
Taras turned from the unguarded horizon to see Vika guide Solovey up beside him at a trot.
"You said you'd brief me about the Soviet infiltrators back in camp?"
"Yes," he said, squinting to gauge how close they were to the approaching blur of green. "The NKVD has sent agents from Rivne to infiltrate and pose as UPA units."
"That's all?"
"That sentence doesn't require further explanation, does it?"
"I'd just like to know the details you do. Or at least get some analysis. We're going to the city where the Soviets' counter-intelligence units are headquartered. Does that change our plan?"
"Details?" asked Taras, still refusing to shift his focus from the materializing grove. "You're not an officer."
"So?"
"So stop asking questions."
Before she could protest, Taras slid down Lastivka's flank into a sheet of cool shade. Up ahead, poplars from neighboring windbreaks had sprouted around a brook-fed pond, giving way to an oasis where juvenile sunlight poured in, warm and weak.
From the shore, Vika's ridiculously blithe whistles drew out a quartet of nightingales from the crowds of lungwort. The songbirds improvised on her delicate solo before composing their own. Yet cheeriness shifted to alarm moments into their concerto. The four streaked overhead in a blur of stone-gray and tan upon the realization they were singing to an impostor.
"You should stick to horses," Taras joked from Lastivka's side.
