The Executioner's Son: Book three in the Long War series.: 3

The Executioners Son the third book in a five-book series The Long War is set against a background of ruse and stratagem between the Soviet Union and the United States. The novel opens in 1953 in Suzdal Russias medieval religious center and ancient capital now a GULAG. Its former monasteries nunneries and fortresses are NKVD prisons. Screams punctuate the night. The spring thaw the Rasputitsa extrudes the murdered from the earth. On a spring day the youthful Danton Larionov son of NKVD officer Captain Volk Larionov encounters thirteen-year-old Ekaterina Soroka the Ukrainian on the meadow beneath the Suzdal Kremlin. He forces himself upon her but she pauses him with a fairy tale. Through the summer as Stalins death convulses the Soviet Union she tells him Russian tales holding him at bay. In the fall she disappears. Danton stunned had fallen in love. A decade later Danton rejecting his fathers trade and connections now a Soviet Army engineer receives a coveted assignment to the Kuibyshev School of Combat Engineering Moscow. The Director of Deception Studies is one Colonel Alexander Soroka the sorcerer whose WWII exploits in the arts of misdirection are legendary. Could the storyteller Ekaterina--the name Soroka is as common in the western Soviet Union as Williams or Smith is in Middle America--have had some connection with the magician? The Russian and Soviet states struggled against tribal loyalty since Ivan the Terribles Oprichnina; Danton had switched tribes changed loyalty from the security services to the Army. Danton Larionov becomes the masters student to ply this art against the main enemy. It is she. His rekindled love cripples him. He has fallen in love with the daughter of a powerful Communist with influence at the highest levels of the Soviet State. Ekaterina belongs to a powerful Soviet family but yearns for the kingdom beyond the seventh sea. Her imagination lies in Western Europe France or England or hope beyond hope America. Danton the bully conflicted in loyalties the bully seeks the love of the Ekaterina the storyteller. Love in Stalins Soviet Union is complicated and he must tread with care but doesnt. He is exiled to a distant land where on a flooded Laotian river crossing the American sniper SP-4 Richard Belisle frames him within crosshairs.