“Oh, god!” Kalina heard him exclaim. She didn’t know if it was for the beauty of this woman with a major’s star on her shoulder, or for the terrible sight of her bloody, dirty face; maybe it was both. He reached a hand to unfasten her collar. Goose bumps rose all over Kalina, and she nudged her hand a few centimeters closer to the pistol in her belt, but the American only tugged the dog tag from her neck.

They had to wait longer than expected. Enemy tanks and armored convoys thundered endlessly past them. Kalina could feel her body freezing almost solid on the snowy ground. It made her think of a couplet from an old army song, of all things. She’d read the words in an old book on Matrosov: “A soldier lies on the snowy ground / like they lie on white swan down.” The day she received her Ph.D., she’d written the lines in her diary. That had been a snowy night, too. She’d stood in front of the window on the top floor of Moscow State University’s Main Building; that night, the snow really did look like swan down, and through the haze of snow flickered the lights from the thousands of homes of the capital. She’d joined the army the next day.

A jeep stopped not far from them, three NATO officers smoking and conversing inside. But the area around Kalina and the lieutenant was clearing. The two finally rose. They jumped in their own jeep, the lieutenant turned the ignition, and they hurtled along the route planned out earlier. Submachine guns sounded behind them; bullets flew overhead, one shattering a rearview mirror. The jeep whipped into a turn, entering a burning residential area. The enemy hadn’t pursued.

“Major, you have a doctorate, right?” the lieutenant said as he drove.

“Where do you know me from?”

“I’ve seen you with Marshal Levchenko’s son.”

After a silence, the lieutenant said, “Right now, his son is farther from the war than anyone else in the world.”

“What are you implying? You know that—”

“Nothing, I was just saying,” the lieutenant said neutrally. Neither of them had their mind on the conversation. They were still lingering on that last thread of hope.

Of the entire battlefront, this might be the only breach.

JANUARY 5TH, NEAR-SUN ORBIT,
ABOARD THE VECHNYY BURAN

Misha was experiencing the solitude of a lone inhabitant in an empty city.