Robert E Townsend

The Executioner's Son Robert E Townsend

The Executioner's 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, Russia's 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 Stalin's 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 father's 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 Terrible's Oprichnina; Danton had switched tribes, changed loyalty from the security services to the Army. Danton Larionov becomes the master's 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 Stalin's Soviet Union, is complicated and he must tread with care, but doesn't. 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.