The events unfolding around the mysterious metal figurine of the Armadillo are spinning out of control not only in space but also in time. The heroes are transported from the biology department building of Moscow State University to a Congolese guerrilla detachment under the command of Che Guevara; riding horseback, they travel from the middle of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first… Yulka Gumilyova escapes from a secret CIA base only to lose her freedom again, this time in a mysterious monastery lost in the jungles of Bolivia, where nuns worship the unknown and sinister Saint Chimorte; and a young trapper of Russian origin receives a strange book by a Soviet science fiction writer, only to unravel its secret many decades later.