It was sheer luck North Korean troops reached him before the Americans, and only his extraordinary haul of victories that kept him out of the labor camps. He was stripped of his honours, no longer a bearer of the Order of Lenin, no longer a Hero of the Soviet Union. But the widow wept with relief. She sought permission to see him. Pilipenko asked why. She lied, “Because we’re engaged to be married.” She travelled to the Korean northwest, where she found him in a stinking field hospital overrun with military and civilian casualties. He lay immobilized by the fractured lumbar vertebra with a blood-caked dressing on his leg wound that hadn’t been changed in days. The widow kissed him on the cheek. His only other visitors had been Soviet intelligence officers who’d debriefed him with brutal questions coloured by threats of reprisals. No wonder his smile for her was wide, his eyes beaming. “You wanted to live,”
What do You think about Ascent By Jed Mercurio (2014)?
