Captain Ukraine

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HE HAS BEEN HIDING FOR THIRTY-SIX YEARS. AT 4 A.M. ON THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF FEBRUARY, HE STOPS.

Andriy Kovalenko was born two days after Chernobyl in a hospital in Kyiv his mother almost did not survive reaching. His parents fled west that autumn — to a third-floor apartment on Chicago Avenue, to a Greek Catholic cathedral, to a quiet life as a paramedic on Box 14, to the small careful invisibility of a man who can lift a Toyota off a woman's femur and would rather his partner not have to look.

Then Russian armor crosses the Ukrainian border, and Andriy decides he is, at last, going home.

In a town called Berestovo on the morning of April 14, 2022, a journalist with a phone records sixty-two seconds of footage that ends Andriy's life as a secret. Within hours he is on every screen on Earth — the man in the sunflower-yellow suit and the deep-blue cape, the Ukrainian flag on his chest, walking out of the smoke of a tank shell as if he had taken nothing more than a step. A Twitter account in Kyiv gives him a name. He embraces it before the smoke has cleared.

But the war is bigger than a video, and invulnerability, Andriy will learn, is not a power. It is a debt — paid by the people standing on his left and his right when he moves. By a Ukrainian sergeant who was a baker in February. By a paramedic in Chicago who has been watering his houseplant for fourteen days. By a woman in Lviv whose mother was a music teacher in Mariupol and who cannot, yet, fall in love with a flag.

And four kilometers from the agricultural complex outside Pidlissya, on a barn roof, a Russian major in an unmarked dark uniform watches everything through a thermal scope, files a report to a man in Moscow named Reznik, and writes one line at the bottom: He is real. We will have to be ready.

The making of a hero in a war that is still being fought. The first volume of the Captain Ukraine saga.

For readers of Brandon Sanderson's Reckoners, Marcus Sakey's Brilliance Saga, and the modern war thriller. Hopeful core, gritty edges.

Slava Ukrayini.