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 II. walk straight, look boldly ——————————————————
Like always, Vika wasn't in camp.
Nor was she tucked above it in the forest's matted canopy of nooks and limbs, her shashka forged in the Don Cossack style across her legs, a hand-rolled cigarette balanced on her lips as she sharpened its half-curved blade.
That morning, she had selected a fir tree to roost in and hide from Lieutenant Bondarev's remarks about trying her for desertion. Warnings of a schism within the company and Taras's dissent were the only forces keeping her alive and instated, and she knew it.
Why else would she continue to vanish and therefore feed Bondarev's suspicions? Because she was a petty fool? Nobody could live like that. Not when Ukrainians were fighting themselves in factions. It'd be suicidal and stupid, and Vika was neither.
She was smart enough to sense she was a target and therefore had rigged a sound alarm at the base of her fir. If some careless soldier stepped into its wire perimeter, it would release a handful of brass bullet casings onto a well-placed stone. Metallic chimes would startle her horse, Solovey, into snorting or squealing, and she'd have the trespasser in her rifle sights before they took another breath.
Taras caught the wire's glimmer with the help of an eye that always seemed to fail him when it came to mine tripwires. He slid down Lastivka's flank at once to disarm it with nimble fingers and his scout's knife.
A slight silhouette observed him from a limb forked like a snake's tongue. It could have belonged to a rusalka if it didn't bear a headscarf of red and black drawn over corn-silk blonde braids. That detail alone confirmed it was Vika. She never went anywhere without the colors of Ukrainian blood and rich chernozem soil.
With a burst of dead leaves and the squelch of quenched ground, Vika landed before him on uneven feet. Solovey flinched at the movement. For such an intimidating creature, he was jittery. He shouldn't have been, not with his traits that conformed perfectly to the Don standard: muscular withers, broad joints, strong tendons. A white star on the crest of his chiseled head signified his status as Vika's most valuable asset.
"Comrade Captain," she said, mocking the generic Soviet form of address. "I overheard from a patrol that your dear friend Kovalenko paid you a visit."
Dear friend? Was that the rumor that was flying around? That he could tolerate a conversation with an apparatchik as slippery as Kovalenko?
"He did. Zarubin needs someone for an assignment," Taras said, relegating himself to her equal for the sake of progress. "Delirious as I was, I made the mistake of letting him convince me to volunteer for it."
"It's not a mistake if Ukraine needs you," Vika corrected in the only way she knew how: direct and without regard for authority. "But what exactly does it need you for?"
