The Hot White Sea

A secret mission in the Arctic: the fate of 55,000 people depends on two detectives.

Summer 1916. After a closed operation by counterintelligence in the Black Sea, the detectives Lykov and Azvestopulo receive a new assignment—north. From Arkhangelsk, by sea to France, brigades of the Russian Expeditionary Corps must be sent out. German U-boats have already taken up positions to intercept and send the troop convoys to the bottom. In the very port of Arkhangelsk, a powerful German agent network is operating: it obtains the ships’ departure schedule in advance and passes the information to Berlin. The police’s task is to identify the residents of the network and plant a false timetable, while the real convoys are to be dispatched at other times and along different routes. The price of success is the lives of fifty-five thousand people.

To help Lykov, his son Pavel is assigned to him. Under the name of the German Oberleutnant Mateus, together with other prisoners of war, he ends up building the Murmansk railway. And then he stages an escape—together with Kaiser’s intelligence agents, who carry off disinformation about the convoys…