Solovey held the machine gun with his left hand and opened his door. He got out, cradling the gun on his arm. They all got out. The road went on ahead between the poplars. It was hot there on the shoulder of the road. The sun was beating down hard and bright in a clear blue sky, the heat curling off the pavement in slick, greasy waves—and Tolya knew suddenly that he was going to die, here and now on the side of the road in the heat and the sunlight.
Solovey kicked the car door shut and said, “Tolya, come here.”
He wasn’t going to die with a bullet in his back, and he wasn’t going to be dragged to it. He went over on his own, holding his head up. His heart was lodged in a cold, tight lump at the base of his throat.
Solovey shouldered the machine gun. He held out the ammunition bag.
“You carry this. We’re on foot from here.”
Tolya took the bag numbly. He put the strap over his head, looking back over his shoulder. The others weren’t paying any attention to him or Solovey. Yakiv was taking a tool kit out of the trunk of the car. Andriy and Taras were lifting the hood, leaning over the engine.
“They’ll catch up,” Solovey said. “They’re wiring the car—a little surprise for our NKVD friends, if they come looking. Know what a tilt fuse is?”
“No,” Tolya said.
“I don’t really either,” Solovey said. “That’s why I’m not the one wiring it.”
* * *
They walked away from the road. Solovey walked ahead, bent a little under the weight of the machine gun. The ground sloped up and up to the foothills, and they walked in knee-high grass and tall, purple heather. For the first little while, they walked in silence, and Tolya could hear the murmur of the wind in the grass, and the snatches of birdsong in the poplars, and the beat of his heart in his throat.
“All right,” Solovey said, “switch—to the trees.” He slid the gun off his shoulder and held it out to Tolya. “Give me the bag.”
Tolya didn’t move. His heart was beating very loudly. “Shoot me if you’re going to shoot me. This is stupid.”
Solovey planted the butt of the gun on the ground between his feet. He crouched in the grass, leaning on the gun as though it were a walking stick. He looked up into Tolya’s face. “I’m not NKVD, Tolya. I’m not going to shoot you. This is a rescue—or an extraction, if you want to be technical.”
“On Comrade Colonel Volkov’s orders?”
“Not that he knows. That was a forgery.”
“That’s what you want me to think.”
“Well—yes.”
“I didn’t ask to be extracted.”
“No. Our source in the Front put in a request through channels, and my commander obliged. Sent his best man.” Solovey grinned winningly.
“Who’s your source in the Front?”
“Your guess is as good as mine—probably better, actually. I just follow orders and dodge bullets.”
“All right,” Tolya said. “You followed your orders. Now let me go.”
“Go where? There aren’t many options for a Red deserter—not in L’viv anyway.”
“I’ll take my own chances.”
“With the Poles? They’ll shoot you just for being Ukrainian, never mind what uniform you’re wearing. Repayment in kind.” Solovey smiled again, without humor.
Tolya’s stomach clenched. He knew what the UPA did to Poles. He’d heard it from the small, roving bands of Polish Resistance that had fought together with the Front for a while back in the spring, before Stalin had ordered them disarmed. Then he’d seen it himself, all the way across Galicia from Tarnopol to Lwów—all that stretch of chewed-up, exhausted, godforsaken black-earth country: farmhouses burned, Polish civilians tortured and raped and shot, their mutilated bodies marked traitor or collaborator or NKVD rat and hung up for examples. The UPA claimed Galicia and neighboring Volhynia as rightfully Ukrainian. Poles were a blight on the land, a cancer to be excised.
“The Germans might not shoot you,” Solovey said. “They might just take you for slave labor. Ostarbeit, they call it. Tidy and efficient—very German. But I doubt you’d make it that far. They’re in full retreat across the San. Your chances aren’t very good, Tolya.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve got to go back.”
Solovey’s smile disappeared. “You murdered a political officer. They’ll hang you on a meat hook.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“Sergei Ilyich Petrov,” Solovey recited, “thirty-six years old, from Ulyanovsk, just like dear Comrade Lenin. He’s been a party member since 1926 and political officer for the Hundredth Rifles since November of last year. You shot him once in the back and once in the head, possibly over differences left unsettled since Tarnopol—”
“You don’t know anything about Tarnopol,” Tolya said.
“—but definitely with deliberate intent,” Solovey finished, “whatever the reason. Anyway, if they don’t shoot you for treason, they’ll shoot you for desertion. You’re absent without leave and consorting with the enemy. Maybe you didn’t have a choice, but neither did Lieutenant Spirin, did he? Didn’t stop the NKVD from putting a bullet in his head—but I don’t know anything about that.”
“Shut up.”
“The point is you don’t want to go back. Trust me.”
“There are people close to me,” Tolya said.
Solovey’s chin snapped up.
“Our source said you were alone—no family.”
“Not family.” Tolya hesitated. He’d never had to explain Koval. She was just Koval—though sometimes, in the safety of his head, she was Nataliya. “A friend.”
Solovey scowled. “In the Front?”
“Yes.”
“Ukrainian?”
“Yes.”
Solovey was silent, leaning on the gun.
“You’ve got to let me go back,” Tolya said.
Solovey looked up. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ve got to let me go back.”
“I can’t,” Solovey said, “not now. I’m sorry. The problem—”
Tolya ran. He stumbled down the bare hillside, fighting through the long grass. There was a little copse of poplars at the foot of the hill, curving away from the road. If he could make it to the trees, he could make it away. Solovey was shouting after him. Tolya didn’t stop, and he didn’t look back. He was almost to the trees. He heard the crack of a pistol shot, and he ducked by instinct. The bullet tore through the trees ahead of him—a warning shot. There was a pause, then another crack. The bullet slammed into him, low in his left shoulder, pitching him forward onto his hands.
For a moment, he lay numbly still, breathless with the shock, holding the grass in fistfuls. Then there was pain, spreading out and searching him through with white-hot fingers, and the blood roaring in his ears, and the frantic thump, thump, thump of his heart on the grass.
Solovey’s footsteps were coming toward him down the hill.
Tolya staggered up and stumbled on, gasping, holding his shoulder.
“Stop, Tolya,” Solovey said. He’d broken into a run, his pistol in his hand.