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The Executioner's Son

Book three in the Long War series.

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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.

Weniger Details

Townsend comes from a long line--father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers--of soldiers, American and pre-American. Slavic on his mother's, deep-south redneck on the father's side, his parents managed money poorly and told stories well. Spare, pithy, lasting the duration of a Pall Mall cigarette, the tales were to entertain while teaching. No one is completely useless, he was told. He can always serve as a bad example. He learned this lesson--storytellers are treasured, liars are vexing and both are so often one and the same. The craft is shared; the objectives differ. However, when the skilled liar is armed, crazed and planning Armageddon, ambiguity in matters of war and peace and life and death have vexed the earth. His stories and novels arise from family history, fables and stories told around the kitchen table as well as his own experiences in America's late 20th century ambiguous wars, deceptions and counter-deceptions. Fluent in Russian and German with a combat vocabulary in French, Townsend is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin (BA), studied at Freies Universitat Berlin (Certifikat), and received and MA from Georgetown University. Since leaving the intelligence business, he has turned his attention to writing stories and essays, an early passion waylaid by life and work. The Long War is a novel series addressing deception, war and peace in the 20th century world of both contrived and actual moral ambiguity. In 1947, the Soviet security services named the United States as 'the main enemy.' The Cold War was joined. Four teens, born half-worlds apart, children of their nations' greatest generation, come of age in the 1950s, each in their small-town Eden, cast out to encounter one another on the front lines in the war for control of the imagination. He follows four main characters: Two Russians; Danton Larionov and Ekaterina Soroka, one American; Richard Belisle, and a Canadian; Marie Jeanne Charbonneau. These four cross paths, destinies, and swords as they stalk, deceive and love across the world. They trust and double-cross one another, fast friends and bitter enemies, give faith and deceive while striving to live in accordance within their moral codes in an amoral world. Townsend and his wife, Patrice Naparstek,live comfortably most anywhere--Rovinj, Croatia; Dresden, Germany; Dubai, UAE; Boulder, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin--returning periodically to his family farm in northern Wisconsin to breathe deeply.