She tensed with arousal, or was it at the sight of the rifle sliding ever farther out of the tower vent? The marksman would be fully visible again any second.

“Feel me, darling. Feel my kiss on you.” Mia whispered into the air.

Two shots rang out, and an iron-hot blow crashed through her shoulder. She gasped, unable to catch her breath.

Swooning, she sensed a wet warmth spreading over her chest, then someone’s hands grasping her under her arms and pulling her farther into the brush. Pain struck in fierce radiations, like fire through her back and chest, and she suddenly could not get enough air. More shots, it seemed from all directions, but her pain-seared and oxygen-starved brain made no sense of it. She fainted, then came to as she was dragged along the ground. Finally, she was lifted onto a stretcher, and she passed out again.

* * *

She came to in the medical tent as someone cut up through the center of her tunic. She recognized Galina. “What happened?” she wheezed, glancing down at her blood-soaked undershirt. Alexia stood on the other side of the cot holding her hand, but breathing took up more of Mia’s attention. She could feel her chest rise and fall, but each breath took in only part of the air she needed.

Galina poked around the wound, causing Mia to scream with pain. “Looks like a broken clavicle and maybe a fractured scapula. Your shortness of breath means you’ve also got a collapsed lung. You’re lucky, though. The bullet exited again, so we don’t have to dig for it. Unfortunately, the pneumothorax means we can’t give you any morphine for the ambulance ride tomorrow morning. All I can do in the meantime is immobilize your shoulder.”

“Ambulance ride?” She gasped and took another shallow breath. “Where?”

“The hospital at Novgorod. It’s a long trip, but they have an X-ray machine and can see if they need to intervene surgically. They’ll tube you to help the pneumothorax, too. You just have to hang on.”

Galina cut away the undershirt, washed the area around the wound, and wrapped the shoulder in gauze, though every touch was excruciating. A dozen other wounded men called out to her, so she gently squeezed Mia’s good arm as a brief comfort, then turned away to the next soldier.

Alexia knelt on the ground next to her cot holding her hand. “It’s best if you try to sleep.”

“They’re going… to send… me back to Moscow,” she said, taking a shallow breath after every few words.

“They can’t hurt you, darling.” She held Mia’s hand up to her lips. “You have another identity. And when you get well, tell them who you are so you can contact your embassy.”

“But you… I’ll lose you.” Pain was clouding her mind and reducing her to the most primitive of needs.

“The army’s moving fast, and in a few months the war should be over. I’ll find you through the embassy. I’ll find you no matter what, I promise. And tomorrow, I’ll come back here before they send me out on duty.”

“I love you, Alexia.” Mia tried to lift Alexia’s hand to her chest, but every movement was agony.

“Believe me, I—”

“Senior Corporal Mazarova!” The commissar and two other officers in NKVD uniforms marched toward them. “You are under arrest for deserting your post.”

Chapter Twenty

Ferocious pain from her ruined shoulder, despair for Alexia, and shortness of air kept Mia awake all night. She kept trying to recall what had happened to bring down such multiple disasters but couldn’t piece together the fragments. At the first glimmer of morning, the nurse came to help her to the toilet, then left her to tend to the ones more gravely injured.

She lay in a stupor, concentrating on taking each breath, trying to shut out the pain and the questions, until a figure loomed over her.

“Kalya. Thank God… Tell me… what happened. Alexia, desertion? Not possible. Must be… mistake.”

“Klavdia and I couldn’t really tell what was going on. We got our targets on tower two right away and came to back you up at tower one. It took us a while to crawl close to your position because we could see a hand with a mirror and were afraid he might spot us in it.”

“The mirror… yes.”

“From what we could see, you exchanged fire with the German, and you were hit. Alexia dragged you out of range, and that was the problem. We got the sniper, but it should have been Alexia. That tower was her job.”

“But… who… reported it? Not you!” The thought of their betrayal horrified her.

“Of course not. How can you ask? No, Commissar Semenova was watching, to see if we carried out the order.”

“Semenova. Bitch… And I saved her life. So… what’s… the punishment?”

Ominously, Kalya did not answer.

Galina appeared behind her. “Sorry, Kalya. You’ll have to leave. The ambulances are here.”

* * *

The vehicle rocked along the pitted roads toward Novgorod, and she recalled her first ambulance ride with Marina. This time German Stukas were not going to save her. She stared at the metal roof, body and soul in purgatory. The lack of morphine meant ferocious pain rushed through her at every jolt in the road. In moments of lucidity, all she could think of was that she’d found Alexia and lost her again, perhaps to execution. And she was the cause of it.

Injustice rang through her pounding brain. Her torment, the moaning of the others in the ambulance, Alexia’s condemnation, Sasha’s death, Marina’s death, the countless other deaths along the Soviet advance. This, surely, was purgatory. Ivan’s words came back to her. “It’s not God that I don’t accept. Only I most respectfully return him the ticket.”

It made no difference now whether she got home or Molotov found her and finished her off. In the middle of the Eastern Front, she had found the love of her life, and all was taken away.

She longed suddenly to talk to Harry Hopkins, or Lorena, or even the First Lady. They seemed so wise. Abruptly, she recalled the happy Christmas celebration at the White House and the pious little speech the visiting pastor had given. What was his name? Pastor Bain… something. It made no difference. The man was a fool.

He’d insisted that free will was the cause of suffering, that people inevitably made bad choices. How facile that was. People didn’t choose war; their leaders did. The Christmas lesson, he’d said, was to love one another, to counter argument with a kiss.

If every movement and breath didn’t hurt, she would have laughed out loud. A kiss, the mere talk of a kiss, had gotten her shot and Alexia, possibly, condemned to death.

She fell into a haze as close to sleep as she would experience for the next several bleak days.

* * *

The diagnosis at the hospital in Novgorod was no surprise: pneumothorax caused by penetration at the shoulder. Air entering the thoracic cavity caused a partial collapse of the top right lobe. The Moscow surgeon inserted a tube between the second and third ribs to draw out the air that prevented the full inflation of the right lung.

The surgeon, a gray-haired woman, came to visit her briefly when she regained consciousness. “How do you feel?”

“Breathing’s a little better, but not a lot. I still can’t take a deep breath. Will it ever get any better?”

“It should. We’ve relieved some of the pressure.” She indicated the loop of clear plastic that rose from a hole over Mia’s right breast. “But it will take a while for the lung to reattach itself, and in this case, you have other damage from the bullet to that area, so it will go very slowly.”

“Other damage? It feels like someone’s hammering on an anvil inside my shoulder.”

“We had to clean out a lot of debris from the wound—bits of bone from the broken clavicle, fibers from your uniform, a little dirt as well. Any of those can cause an infection. The X-ray also revealed that your shoulder blade is fractured, so we’ve bandaged you tight to keep the shoulder immobilized. As soon as the pneumothorax begins to heal, we’ll put you in a cast and move you back to a facility near Moscow. Your pay book shows that Moscow’s your home, so you should be glad.”

“Home? Uh, yes. Moscow. Right. So how long before that happens?”

“A week, ten days? Depends on you. Sorry. I’ve got to leave now. Call the nurse if you need anything.” With a reassuring tap on her good shoulder, the doctor strode away.

* * *

Having at least a slight improvement of air intake, and the knowledge that her broken bones would eventually heal, Mia could move on to the next source of anxiety, Alexia.

Desperate to find out what had happened to her, Mia sought any source of information about events at the front, even asking the nurse for a copy of The Red Star.

But the Red Army newspaper held only propaganda and news of advances, medals awarded for heroism, and an endless stream of victories. No mention of courts-martial, desertions, or executions. Of course not. What was she thinking?

She sent a field post to Kalya asking what had happened to Alexia but never received an answer. The following week a letter to Klavdia met the same silence. If Alexia had been executed, would they even have dared to contact her?

For lack of news about Alexia, she concentrated on being Marina Zhurova. From Marina’s pay book, she’d long ago learned the details of her life. She reviewed every entry, built up a life from it, and could almost imagine Marina’s childhood. It was probably not much different from her own, although Marina had joined the Young Pioneers at the age of twelve, while Mia was on her way to America.