Dancing with Wolves

Unexplained paranormal phenomena and mysterious incidents witnessed by our soldiers during the Great Patriotic War— retold by the incomparable Alexander Bushkov!

Western Ukraine, 1944. A small town, Kosachi, has only just been liberated from the Nazis. The senior operative-search group of SMERSH is tasked with Operation “Teacher”: Captain Sergey Chugunetsov. The counterintelligence squad’s main target is Object 371/C, the Abwehr’s intelligence school for local boys—where they were taught espionage and sabotage. The Germans, retreating, evacuated all the cadets, but the archive— they didn’t manage to take it— and hid it somewhere nearby.

SMERSH finally has a chance, for the first time in the entire war, to obtain the archive from the Abwehr intelligence school! They put a local abandoned Polish castle under surveillance. They posted a guard nearby. And deep at night, a shot rang out at the castle.

When the SMERSH men arrived, they found the body of a completely naked man and a shocked guard. The fighter claimed that at night he was attacked by a pack of wolves; but when he shot the leader, the predators instantly vanished—and instead, a man bleeding out lay on the ground…

When the author was still a child, he often listened to stories from his father, Alexander Bushkov the elder, who had taken part in the Great Patriotic War—and the boy’s imagination carried him into strange, unexplored worlds full of wonders, sorcerers, and all sorts of devilry. And much of what he heard—what fascinated him and astonished him beyond measure—later became the basis of his books in the series “The Unknown.”